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The Nation
A WEEKLY JOURNAL DEVOTED TO
POLITICS, LITERATURE, SCIENCE

DRAMA, MUSIC, ART
FINANCE
FOUNDED 1865
CXII
VOLUME
FROM JANUARY 1, 1921, TO JUNE 30, 1921
"...
-
*:
*
THE NATION, Inc.
STREET, NEw York, N.Y.

-*- a vesEY
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|
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INDEX
TO
VOLUME
CXII
JANUARY 1, 1921, TO JUNE 30, 1921

(Nos. 2896-2921)
American federation of labor :
Has little philosophy or power; EdP
861
Meeting of union chiefs in Washington ;
EdP
861
American federation of teachers :
Fifth annual convention: EdP
279
American fiction :
Contemporary American novelists. C. Van
Doren; SA 40; 233; 400; 619; 741; 914
American Legion :
American Legion. I. Berkowitz; Cr..
626
International controversies not its province ;
EdP
496
New York Co. chapter expels A. E. An
derson ; EdP
496
Not opponents of the Non-partisan league
in Kansas; EdP
420
Opposes Non-partisan league in Kansas
and Nebraska; EdP
106
Unnecessary criticism of the Legion to be
avoided; EdP
420
American literature:
Literary sterility of the South according
A
to H. L. Mencken; EdP
467
'AE," pseud. See Russell, George William.
New
literature in America. L. Lewisohn ;
Academic freedom :
SA
429
Academic freedom in the University of
telephone and telegraph company:
Minnesota ; EdA
6 American
Nine
per
cent
dividend
increase
after
raise
Beating with a single thought; EdA
907
in rates; EdP
626
Gopher Prairie college. C. G. J.: Cr
405
:
Originality rather than safety. A. B. ; Cr. . 748 Americanism
What
is
Americanism
anyway?;
EdA
729
Scholars and their bosses; EdA
199 Americanization :
Ickerman, Phyllis :
Resolutions
passed
by
American
federation
Aesthetic blind spots; A
798
of teachers; EdP
279
Acquaintance. D. Morton; P
477 Americans
:
Conduct of Americans abroad. J. C. Gil :
Adams, Faith :
Cr
876
Honorable mention for Jersey City. Reply
Amerindian air. H. Alexander; P
265
to F. Adams's Question to democracy by
Amoureuse.
See
Tyranny
of
love.
A. Craig; Cr
17 Anderson. Alexander E. :
Advertising :
American Legion. I. Berkowitz; Cr
625
Advertising and freedom of the press. E. S.
Expelled from American Legion ; EdP
496
Martin; Cr
267 Andrews,
Charles
M.
:
Advertising control influences news of
Irish and American independence. Reply
newspapers; EdP
640
to L. Colcord, with Mr. Colcord's re
Aerial postal service. See Postal service. Aerial.
joinder; Cr
538
Afghanistan :
Extraordinary
parallel between American
Treaty between Russia and Afghanistan ;
revolution and Ireland today; Cr
377
IRD
698
Reply to his Irish and American indepen
Agriculture :
by J. Viner; Cr
626
Farmer's testimony. B. W. S. ; Cr
919 Anglin.dence
Margaret:
Suggestions of B. M. Baruch to put farm
Margaret Anglin (as Joan of Arc). L.
ing on a more businesslike and profitable
Lewisohn ; D
631
basis; EdP
278 Annunzio.
Gabriele d' :
AgricultureEconomic aspects :
Reached the anticlimax: EdP
1
Farmers and congress. H. R, Mussey ; SA. 12 Anti-semitism.
See JewsPolitical and social
Why is a farmer? F. Sper; SA
116
conditions.
Agricultural colonization :
Aran islands :
Army manifestos, issued by soldiers and
Inishmore, Inishmaan. Inisheer: EdA
7
officers desirous of forming cooperative
and conciliation, industrial :
agricultural colonies; IRD
634 Arbitration
Plan for settling industrial disputes. Coun
Albanystrikes :
cil on industrial relations for the electri
Maintaining law and order in Albany ; EdA 893
cal construction industry. L. ; Cr
664
Alexander, Ed. F. :
Archeology
:
- Quaker's challenge; Cr
919
Archives of the municipality from 1624
Alexander, Hartley :
in Mexico City; EdP
807
Amerindian air; P
265 Archer,discovered
William:
Mien land laws :
Green
goddess.
Criticism
by
L.
Lewisohn
;
Facts and fancies on the coast
183
D
250
Mien property. See Enemy property.
Archipenko, Alexandre :
Aliens :
Archipenko, P. Loving; A
666
Census bureau statistics on foreign born
:
population; EdP
640 Argentina
Stand on German export of war materials ;
Sacco and Vanzetti case. E. G. Evans :
360
SA
842 ArizonaEdP
Cotton Growers' association :
See also Immigrants in the United States.
Poor
treatment
of
its
imported
Mexican
United States- -Foreign population.
laborers; EdP
497
Msace :
Armament:
Alsatian Alsace. By L. S. Gannett :
Amount
of
British
war
budget;
EdP
28
Alsace and Lorraine
811
Cost of U. S. Armament equals German
Bit of history
811
reparations:
EdP.,
862
Germans, The
873
General Bullard's. -monkey argument for
Grievances
812
armament^ Dtt. .f
433
Language question
840 Armament;
'See^'also
Disarmament.
Journalist's litany on return from Alsace
.
Armenia*:
*
*
"
and Germany; Dft

8H>
Soviet ^to -abolish private ownership and
Msace and Lorraine. See Alsace. # , *
I 4>-j
. \ m all* foreign loans; EdP
2
&lsberg, Henry G. :
. * ** *
Art:
Russia: Smoked glass "vs. "xoaeMt>t< S^... 844
Propitiation
and
art;
EdA
810
Âmerican civil Liberties union - >
:
Items from 2 .."... '
.*
609 ArtAppreciation
Aesthetic blind spots. P. Ackerman : A.. 798
{Amalgamated clothing,* workers of America:
Art
dealers
:
Clothing manufacturers' association ask for
Piiblic, painter, and dealer. J. N. Rosen
dissolution in New York; EdP
196
berg; A
922
Good union or bad? G. Soule; SA
813 Asia Minor:
\merican academy of arts and letters :
Double
dealing
of
the
Allies
since
the
armis
Uses of the American academy; EdA
394
tice ; EdP
805
American committee for relief in Ireland :
France buys the Turks but they will not
Organized; EdP
28
stay houcht; EdP
805
Drive for funds: EdP
42
Greeks have set back; EdP
626
Hard at work for Ireland; EdP
162 Associated
press :
American commission on conditions in Ireland.
Publishes
interviews
with
Von
Tirpitz
on
Public hearings concluded; EdP
162
armament; EdP
325
Commission on Ireland reports ; EdA
498 Athletics,
Yale:
Criticisms of the report; EdP
626
Besoiled
athletes:
EdA
584
London Nation's comment on the report ;
rx-empress of Germany.
EdP
526 Augusff-Victoria,
Obituary; EdP
678
Report of the hearings. Vol. HI. 703; 747.
Austria
:
Vol. 112. 53; 309; 449
Reparations commission asks for delivery
Resumes meetings: EdP
104
of live stock: EdP
466
Vmerican DaQit Standard:
To be nut in the hands r>f a committee
Ceases publication; EdP
421
appointed by League of Nations: EdP.. 725
The following key is used to indicate the
type of article:
A
Art
BR Book Review
BRs Book Reviews (group of reviewfl under
one title)
Cr Correspondence
D
Drama
Dft Driftway
EdA Editorial Article
EdP Editorial Paragraph
IRD International Relations, Document
IRFP International Relations, Foreign Press
IRSA International Relations, Signed Article
M
Music
P
Poetry
SA Signed Article
Book reviews are indexed separately in a
Book Review Section.
287709
AustriaEconomic conditions :
Austria in collapse; EdA
107
Balance sheet of Austrian misery; IRD.. 127
AustriaFinance. See FinanceAustria.
Authority; Dft
874-6
Automobiles :
Animal deaths from automobiles; Dft
791
Aviation :
U. S. aviators stranded in North; EdP
70
B
B.. A.:
Originality rather than safety; Cr
748
Bakhmeteff and Co. :
Supported by U. S. loans to old Russian
government; EdP
251; 327
Baldwin, Charles B.:
Why soup kitchens T; Cr
216
Banks and bankingGreat Britain:
English super-banks; EdA
82
Banks and bankingUnited States:
Bank situation in North Dakota; EdP
100
Can relieve Europe by short time loans ;
EdP
678
Banks fail because farmers cannot pay
loans; EdP
278
North Dakota and the banks; EdA
880
North Dakota bond issue directly to the
people; EdP
640
North Dakota goes to the people : issue of
bonds directly to the people; EdA
580
Would the use of gold bring down the cost
of living? J. K. Mills; SA
785
See also ; Postal savings banks.
Barnhill, John Basil :
Plea for free credit; Cr
211
Why the Sherman anti-trust law failed.
Reply to G. Gardner; Cr
606
Barrie, James Matthew :
Mary rose. Criticism by L. Lewisohn; D.. 48
Baruch, Bernard M. :
Suggestions to put farming on a more
businesslike and profitable basis; EdP.. 278
Battleships. See Warships.
Baudelaire, Charles :
Centenary of birth; EdP
780
Beals, Carleton :
FascismoThe reaction in Italy; SA
666
Bean, Baron :
Curious delusion; SA
701
Beard, Charles A. :
Conservation; BRs
187
Beggar's opera (opera by J. Gay). Criticism
by L. Lewisohn; D
01
Bennett, Arnold :
Great adventure. Criticism by L. Lewisohn ;
D
410
Ben Trovato. E. A. Robinson; P
121
Bercovici, Konrad :
Orphans as guinea pigs; SA
911
Berger, Victor:
Supreme court sets aside conviction ; EdP. 195
Berkowitz, Isadore :
American Legion ; Cr
626
Berlin, Germany :
First pogrom in Berlin ; EdP
466
Berne manifesto; IRD
128
Bertel, A. G.:
Thinks the allies should pay; Cr
484
Betelgeuse; Dft
85
Professor Michelson measures its diameter;
EdP
29
Bethmann-Hollweg, Thebald von. Obituary ;
EdP
27
Better America Federation:
Good news from California. G. P. West;
SA
867
Bible :
Sermon on the Mount as propaganda; Dft. 340
Bim and Bom; Dft
48
Binder, Carrol:
,
Federated press. Reply to A. Warner's
Enter the labor press; Cr
919
Birth control :
Japanese study birth control as solution for
over-population ; EdP
609
Landlords not to be the keeper of the stork ;
EdP
626
Bishops :
Bishop for New York; EdA
166
William T. Manning consecrated bishop of
New York diocese ; EdP
720
Bison :
American Natural History museum's plac
ard ; ; EdP
679
Natural and unnatural history. Comment
on inscription on bison in Museum of
Natural History. S. T. Byington ; Cr. . 816
Blanton, Thomas Lindsay:
Wicked Blanton; EdA
881
Blind gentians. A. H. Evans; P
406
Bliven,
Bruce:
How not to Bettle the race problem. Reply
to his Japanese problem by G. H. War
wick ; Cr
S76
Japanese problem; SA
171
Blue eyes and blue beards; Dft
1*0
Boland.
Harry: campaign in the United States :
Anti-British
EdP
Bolivar, Simon :
Notables at the unveiling of the statue; ni
Dft
24
Nos. 2896-2921]
Index
Sattmam:
Boshevist snake stings ; Dft
624
Se&ifnsm. See also RussiaHistoryBolshe
vist revolution,
fetti state :
.Varth Dakota bond issue directly to the
people; EdP
640
North Dakota goes to the people. Issue of
530
fci reviews :
Bice of reviewers. The. H. S. Canby ; SA 886
APrices
: classics. Liber Alter ; Cr
inexpensive
86
So more Everyman's Library until costs bo
down; EdP
8
ka and reading :
Best sellers for December, 1920; EdP
253
Fit for boys ; EdA
76
Summer reading; EdA
866
What attacks American and English girls ;
EdP
29
omening. A. Kreymborg ; P
266
ton:
Oh, Boston 1 EdA
470
Brae, Francis, cardinal:
Cardinal Bourne and Ireland. P. D. Mur
phy ; SA
398
Vatican and Ireland. Reply to P. D. Mur
phy's Cardinal Bourne and Ireland, by
J. Hearley; Cr
480
bcique fantasque; D
801
sun. S. Miles:
Germany's dwindling radicalism : SA
657
Silcsian plebiscite; SA
871
Teaching the young idea how to gas. R. C.
White; Cr
748
hand, Aristide:
103
As Prime minister of France; EdP
Clash with Lloyd-George; EdP
725
Opposes the invasion of the Ruhr; EdP 805
nisei, Robert:
Admits he was deceived by propaganda of
English press during the war; EdP
827
rindell, Robert P.:
Convicted: EdP
263
ish labor commission to Ireland :
Beport; IRD
181
town, Harriet Connor:
Why our budget system will not reduce
taies; SA
789
Women to the rescue ; SA
261
ranch and the new child labor; EdA
426
not, Donald:
'Let's have done with Wiggle and Wob
584
TO ble";
Mawr:SA
Summer session for manual workers ; EdP 527
aer, Edna :
How Denmark is solving the housing prob, lem; SA
42
hdenz, Louis F. :
Keeping the cost of living high : SA
501
Street railways tangle; SA
202
WsrtGreat Britain:
British budget. A. Chamberlain; IRD
49
EdP.... 28
WertUnited States:
Why our budget
" _ systemSAwill not reduce 789
taxes. H. C.
mfldmir industry:
Labor unionists jailed, but employers fined ;
EdP
807
Legislative committee reveals why insurance
companies and savings banks did not
want investigation; EdP
834
Lockwood committee not allowed to investiftate banks and insurance companies ;
EdP
197
Horc evidence of graft and price fixing;
EdP
807
Samual Untermyer withdraws from inquiry :
EdP
77.
807
To introduce universal military service:
, EdPRobert Lee:
827
"Hard,
Monkey argument for armament ; Dft
438
nrm. William Garner:
Concerning the race commission ; Cr
849
"jjt, Mrs. Charles :
ini Japanese
poetry prize:; EdA
EdP
163
""ousts,
John. Appreciation
531
""J. Richard:
Charles Genung. Appreciation; Cr
798
I crisis; EdA
906
1 revives?
196
h business
a gameEdP
7 R. J. Walsh: BRs. . 239
.Prostrated j EdP
495
"ijew conditions:
Produce I Produce 1 G. Soule : SA
IS
Producer and consumer in the land of op
portunity.
Items
from
Capper's
Weekly.
790
nnjton. Steven T.:
Natural and unnatural history. Comment
{) inscription on bison in Museum of
Natural history: Cr
816
President's English. Reply to H. L.
Mencken's. Short view of Gamaliclese : Cr 793
"Hy to his. President's English, by H. L.
849
n"".Mencken:
Witter: Cr
"anderer ; P
87
C
lJ?01? "other alumnus of G. P. College ; Cr
fnes
Branch:
Lontemporary American novelists. C. Van
Doren; SA
*'submarine:
See United StatesCabinet,
Cabl
^.able control controversy. G. T. Odell ; SA
No%>Ty "I* England: Cables and canals:
A
77
611
914
169
782
Caddan, John Joseph :

Testimony before the American commission
on conditions in Ireland
814
Cahan, Abraham :
Prince Kropotkin, Revolutionist: SA
201
California alien land law. See Alien land law.
* CaliforniaEducation :
Better news from California ; EdA
866
Good news from California. G. P. West:
SA
867
CaliforniaForeign population :
California and the Japanese. K. K. Kawakami; SA
173
Fact and fancies on the coast
183
Japanese problem. B. Bliven ; SA
171
Laws hostile to aliens; EdP
836
Callaivet and Flers :
Transplanting Jean ; D
800
Cambridge history of American literature:
Christian Scientists criticize article on
Science and health: EdP
641
Camp Lewis. See Lewis, Camp.
Canals :
No war with England : Cables and canals ;
EdA
782
Canals. See Erie canal, Panama canal, etc.
Canby, Henry Seidel :
Race of reviewers, The; SA
886
Canopus ; Dft
610
C. Wood; P
887
Capital punishment:
Lethal gas chamber in Nevada : EdP
526
Capper's Weekly:
Items from
790
Caribbean islands :
Conduct of Americans abroad. J. C. Gil ;
Cr
876
Trade the Caribbean islands for the debt.
E. T. Huidekoper; Cr
876
Carlson. Aldena :
Misleading phraseology. Reply to No war
with England, Our world trade rivalry :
Cr
876
Carnegie, Andrew :
Andrew Carnegie in the homestead Btrike.
Comment on review of A. Carnegie's au
tobiography. U. Sinclair; Cr
798
Case for the miners. S. Sassoon : P
716
Casenave. Maurice:
French case for German indemnity; SA
Ill
Censorship :
Worcester censors marriage ; EdP
708
Censorship of the press. See Freedom of the
press.
Central America :
Federation of Central America formed ; EdP 639
Trouble in Panama and Costa-Rica : EdP. 390
Chadbourne, Thomas L. :
Face the labor issue 1 SA
84
Chafee. Zechariah, Jr. :
Milwaukee Leader case; SA
428
Chamberlain. Austen :
British budget ; IRD
49
States that Great Britain will make no
alliance in the Paeiflc in conflict with
the U. S. : EdP
908
Channing, Henrique :
Tail goes with the hide; Cr
666
Chapin, Harold :
New Morality: D
800
Charles I, emperor of Austria (abdicated 1918).
Failure of attempt to return; EdP
525
Secret negotiations for peace in 1917 : EdP 577
Chase. Stuart :
Challenge of waste to existing industrial
creeds; SA
284
Chemical foundation. Incorporated :
Teaching the young idea how to gas. R. C.
White; Cr
748
Chicago, Illinois :
Municipal reformA suggestion; EdA
780
Child welfare:
International conference of ch ild-welfare to
meet In Brussels; EdP
728
Children :
Bill in N. Y. legislature making it a mis
demeanor to refuse tenancy because of
children: EdP
526
ChildrenCare and hygiene:
Orphans as guinea pigs. K. Bercovici ; SA 911
ChildrenCharities and protection:
Orphans as guinea pigs. K. Bercovici: SA 911
Child renEurope :
Mr. Hoover begs for the children: EdP.. 161
Unexpended balance of United war relief
to feed children; EdP
106
Utter abomination. F. W. Reed: Cr.
267
Children's literature:
Fit for boys: EdA
-75
China :
China explains to the diplomats: IRD
193
ChinaFamines :
Famine increases: EdP
71
ChinaFinance See Chinese consortium.
ChinaForeign relationsRussia :
China and the Far Eastern Republic ; IRD 192
Chinese consortium :
China consortium agreement. Text: TRD. 828
I.Correspondence between American bunk
ers and the Dept. of State and the Brit
ish government: IRD
799
II.Inter-group conferenrp at Paris and
Japan's reservations : IRD
823
Choate. Joseph Hodges :
Life of J. H. Choate. by E. S. Martin. Re
view by T. R. Powell : BR
482
Christensen. Parley Parker :
Feels that. America is friend of Soviet Rus
sia : EdP
29
Christian
Science
: Reoly to editorial on Chris
Tools of
reason.
tian Science by F. E. Morgan with edi
torial rejoinder: Cr
793
Criticize article on Science and Health in
Cambridge history of American literature ;
EdP
641
[Vol. cxii
Church-bell. E. Wylie; P
264
Church and social problems :
Big business vs. the church. F. O. John
son ; Cr
876
Churchill, Winston :
Doren; SA
619
Circus :
"Magic ring": Dft
693
Citizens' Protective Housing league:
To protect rent-payers of New York city :
EdP
862
Civil liberty. See Liberty.
Clair de Lune; drama by M. Strange; D
672
Clark, Champ. Obituary; EdP
891
Clark, Evans:
Labor finds out for itself; SA
208
Clark. William A.:
Gives 8100,000 to the Corcoran gallery ; EdP 421
Classics :
N co-classic revival in France; EdP
906
Clothing industry :
Clothing manufacturers' association asks dis
solution of Amalgamated clothing work
ers in New York; EdP
196
Good union or bad. G. Soule; SA
813
Method of wage reduction; EdP
779
Coal mines and miningGreat Britain :
British coal crisis; IRFP
648
Coalprices :
Coal's black record. G. Soule; SA
78
Government officials profiteer; EdP
3
Coal strike (British) 1921:
British coal crisis; IRFP
648
British coal strike. H. J. Laski ; SA
617
Collapse of the Triple alliance. F. Morley;
SA
709
EdP
607
Ponies left in the mines by miners: Dft... 848
Responsibility rests with Lloyd-George's
Government; EdP
626
Struggle between private and public own
ership ; EdP
625
CoalSupply :
Calder bill for the regulation of the coal
supply; EdP
163
Coal's black record. G. Soule; SA
78
Cohoes, New York :
Unemployment and closed shop in Cohoes.
C. Long; SA
478
Colbert, Frank Overton :
American painter. P. Loving: A
125
Colcord, Lincoln -.
Condition of Soviet industrialism ; SA .... 396
Irish and American independence; SA.... 378
Reply to C. M. Andrews's Irish and Ameri
can independence; Cr
538
Reply to his. Condition of Soviet indus
trialism by C. F. Dole; Cr
481
Reply to his, Irish and American indepen
dence by C. M. Andrews; Cr
538
Reply to his, Irish and American indepen
dence by J. W. Pennypacker and others :
Cr
436
Cole, Nathan A.:
Should all laws be obeyed? Reply to H.
Reed: Cr
611
College of Physicians and Surgeons :
First women graduates take first places
in class; EdP
868
To unite with the Presbyterian hospital
in New York; EdP
727
College professors and instructors :
Originality rather than safety. A. B. ; Cr. 743
Poor professor; EdA
499
College presidents:
Professor and his president; EdA
864
Colleges and universities:
Professor and his president; EdA
864
Scholars and their bosses : EdA
199
Colleges for women :
Socialists' propaganda in girls' colleges ;
EdP
779
Collins. Peter W. :
Bigotry not one-sided. C. P. Sweeney; Cr. 17

Reply to G. J. Knapp's Concerning bigotry;
Cr
!7
Colum, Padraic:
Laburnums; P
656
ColumbiaTreaties :
U. S. anxious to ratify Columbian treaty ;
EdP of one hundred on Ireland. See 8
Committee
American commission on conditions in
Ireland.
Communism :
Communists and socialists split m Italy ;
EdP letter to the Italian socialists : 196
Lenin's
IRD
<42
Russia: Smoked glaBS or rose-tint. H. G.
Alsberg; SA
844
Serrati answers for his party: IRD
443
Communism in Germany:
Germany's dwindling radicalism. S. M.
Bouton: SA
657
Paris reports Communist uprising as spu
rious" ; EdP
*
Communist party (United States) :
Membership means forfeiture of public
office; EdP
:'"V' 162
Waste their funds for printing when the
State Department wUl do it; EdP
278
Conkling, Grace Hazard:
Different day; P
268
Conkling, Hilda :
Night is forgotten; P
266
Conscientious
objectors: E. F. Alexander; Cr. . 919
Quakers challenge.
Conservation. C. A. Beard; BRs
1ST
Constitutional
Proposed amendment:
amendment on proportional
representation; EdP
806
Vol. cxii]
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A
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lii
Cr
D
Di
E<
E<
JB
IE
IB
M
P
SJ
i
i
I
^cke
I
V.cqu
Vdai
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Doren :
Cabell, J. B
914
Churchill, Winston
619
Dreiser, Theodore
400
Hergesheimer, Joseph
741
Tarkington. Booth
238
Wharton, Edith
40
Conventions, Courage of; EdA
708
Coolidge, Calvin:
Ballad: EdP
90S
Writes in the Delineator of Socialism in
girls' college; EdP...,.
779
Cooper, James Fenimore:
Century of Fenimore Cooper; EdA
265
CooperationJugoslavia :
Peasant rule and cooperation. J. F. LupisVukich; Cr
610
Corcoran Gallery of art:
Announce gift of $100,000 from W. A.
Clark; EdP
421
Cordwainers' caseAfter a century. A. De
Silver; SA
412
Cork, Ireland:
For the library at Cork; IRD
864
Lloyd-George refuses to publish the Strick
land report on burning of Cork; EdP... 325
See also IrelandSinn Fein insurrection.
Cost of living:
High wages cut to meet the lower cost of
living; EdP
702
Keeping the cost of living high. L. F.
Budenz; SA
501
Reductions deceptive; EdP
608
of living T J. K. Mills: SA
786
Costa RicaForeign relationsPanama :
Border difficulties; EdP
890
Cotton :
Crop to be reduced one-quarter to onehalf; EdP
253
Courage of your conventions ; EdA
708
Cradle song; drama by G. Martinez; D
411
Craig, Archibald:
to F. Adams's, Question to democracy ;
Cr
1
Creative ideal. N. J. Ware: SA
874
Credit :
Plea for free credit. J. B. BarnhiU : Cr.. 215
Crime and criminals:
Crime waves and criminals. G. W. Kirchwey; SA
206
Meeting the crime wave : A comparison of
methods. J. Gollomb ; SA
80
Critic and the artist; EdA
683
Crowder, General :
Goes to Cuba; EdP
71
Crowley, Daniel Francis :
67
Crosier, Frank Percy:
Case of General Crozier; IRD
490
Reports Irish conditions as he sees them
as a civilian ; EdP
679
Resignation of General Crozier; EdP
860
Cuba:
General Crowder goes to Cuba : EdP
71
Curie, Marie :
Gift of radium by women of America ; EdP 609
Currency. See Money.
Customs. See Manners and customs.
Czechoslovak Republic :
Germans in the Republic; EdP
108
D
D., H.:
How war comes about; Cr
341
Dancing :
Brunch and the new child labor: EdA.... 425
Daniel. John. (Gorilla) dies: EdP
609
D'Annunzio. Gabriele. See Annunzio, Gabriele d'.
Dato, Premier:
Assassinated; EdP
420
Daylight saving:
In Connecticut; Dft
748
In Monticello, New York; Dft
743
Days, The. D. Rosenthal ; P
833
Dear me. L. Reed and H. Hamilton; D
801
Dearborn Independent:
For suppression. A. Libman, with re
joinder by the editor; Cr
639
Suppressed; EdP
466
Debs. Eugene :
Asks pardon for Wilson from the American
people; EdP
253
Votes polled in 1920 election; EdP
8
Receives further punishment because of
statements concerning Mr. Wilson ; EdP 861
Debts, Public:
Bad debts or bad blood; EdA
282
European imperialism vs. cancellation.
Reply to P. B. Noyes' Justice to Ger
many and France. G. E. Roadruck ; Cr . 377
Thinks the allies should pay. A. G. Bertel ;
Cr
434
Trade the Caribbean islands for the debt.
E. T. Huidekoper; Cr
376
Deburau ; drama by Sacha Guitry : D
800
Declaration of independence :
What is Americanism anyway?; EdA
729
De Haas, J. Anton :
Intellectual blockade of Germany. J. A.
De Haas; SA
38
Dell, Robert:
First congress of the league; SA
76
Franco-Swiss dissension; SA
209
Dempsey and the Carpentier, The; P
889
Denby, Edwin :
Denies charges in the Haitian memoir ;
EdP
727
Secretary's visit to Haiti; EdP
678
Index
DenmarkHousing. See HousingDenmark.
Deportation :
Marine strikers asked to leave Portland,
Maine; EdP
806
Report on, "The deportation cases of 19191920": EdP
70
De Silver, Albert:
Cordwainers' caseAfter a century; SA.. 432
Repealing the war laws; SA
587
Destruction and creation ; EdA
6
De Valera, Eamon. See Valera, Eamon de.
Dewey, Evelyn :
New educationIts trend and purpose ; SA 664
New educationThe modern school; SA. . 684
Dial. The:
$2,000 acknowledgment to the service to
letters; EdP
862
Different day. G. H. Conkling ; P
264
Diplomacy :
No open diplomacy between U. S. and
Japan and China; EdP
826
Disarmament :
Conference of Japan, Great Britain and
the U. S. to be called; EdP
777
Conversion of W. G. McAdoo and F. D.
Roosevelt; EdP
726
Cost of American armament equals Ger
man reparations ; EdP
862
Dillydallying disarmers ; EdA
280
Disarmament in 1898and now; IRD
272
Disarmament notes ; IRFP
886
Disarmament parade. E. S. Smith ; Cr
876
Disgraceful naval bill ; EdA
836
Federal council of churches of Christ in
America appeal for conference on dis
armament; EdP
703
General Assembly of the Presbyterian
church adopted disarmament resolution ;
EdP
806
Issue of the day: EdP
195
Lloyd George announces at Premiers' con
ference readiness to discuss disarmament ;
EdP
908
Meeting with many obstacles ; EdP
826
New York World takes stand for disarma
ment; EdP
2
No compromise on disarmament; EdA.... 80
taxes. H. C. Brown: SA
789
Naval conference proviso will be resisted
in the House; EdP
806
Woman's party appoint special disarma
ment committee ; EdP
726
Women to the rescue. H. C. Brown : SA . . 261
Workers in F. I. A. T. plant refuse to
make war material; EdP
826
DisarmamentGermany :
Germany must disarm; EdP
27
Dogs :
Dogs and suicide ; Dft
791-2
Dole, Charles :
Prime object of industry. Reply to L. Colcord's Condition of Soviet industrialism ;
Cr
481
Dole, Nathan Haskell:
Tariff comment ; Cr
405
Dominican Republic :
American atrocities in Santo Domingo ;
EdP
252
American forces to be withdrawn: EdP.. 2
Americanizing Santo Domingo. P. Doug
lass; Cr
663
Congressional inquiry called for Haiti and
Santo Domingo; EdP
162
Latin America protests on American occu
pation: EdP
103
"Liberating Santo Domingo" ; EdA
907
Makes appeal to King of Spain to inter
cede with the United States ; Dft
433
Santo Domingo's new freedom: IRD
851
Dorsey, Hugh M. :
Demands prosecution of mob violence and
crime toward Negroes; EdP
640
Guardians of Liberty to impeach : EdP . . 727
Issues pamphlet. The Negro in Georgia ;
EdP
727
Proposes laws to protect Negroes in
Georgia : EdP
727
Douglass, Philip :
Americanizing Santo Domingo; Cr
663
Drama :
Note on dramatic dialogue. L. Lewisohn ;
D
881
Russian drama dependent on the national
philosophy of life: EdP
891
DramasCriticisms, plots, etc. :
Boutique fantasque ; D
801
Clair de Lune. M. Strange: D
672
Cradle song. G. Martinez: D
411
Dear me. L. Reed and H. Hamilton ; D. . 801
Deburau. Sacha Guitry: D
300
Emperor Jones. E. O'Neill; D
189
Eyvind of the hills. J. Sigurjonsson : D. . 801
Gold. E. O'Neill; D
902
Great adventure. A. Bennett: D
410
Green goddess. W. Archer: D
260
Importance of being earnest O. Wilde; D. 801
Inheritors. S. Glaspell : D
615
John Hawthorne. D. Liebovitz; D
271
Lady Billy; D
21
Liliom. F. Molnar ; D
695
Love. E. Scott: D
411
Macbeth. W. Shakespeare: D
849
Mary Rose. J. M. Barrie ; D
48
Mary Stuart. J. Drinkwater ; D
564
Miss Lulu Bett. Z. Gale: D
189
Mr. Pirn passes by. A. A. Milne; D
411
Mixed marriage. St J. Ervine; D
21
Near Santa Barbara. W. Mack; D
801
Nemesis. A. Thomas ; D
698
New morality. H. Chapin ; D
300
Passing show of 1921; D
126
Sally; D
21
Transplanting Jean. Callaivet and Flers ;
D
800
[Jan.-June, 192
Trial of Joan of Arc. E. Moreau ; D
6!
Tyranny of love. G. de Porto-Riche; D. 4iWake up, Jonathan. H. Hughes and E. E.
Rice: D
11
Winter's tale. W. Shakespeare; D
8<
Dreiser, Theodore :
Doren; SA
4<
Drinkwater, John:
Mary Stuart. Criticism L. Lewisohn ; D . . 6
Dublin, Ireland :
Destruction of customs house : EdP
fa
Dyche, J. E. :
Appointed warden of federal penitentiary
at Atlanta ; EdP
7
Dye industry :
Dyes included in the emergency tariff : EdP 7
Earth will stay the same. F. E. Hill: P
Eating :
War taxes in automatic eatry : Dft
Where to eat when alone?: Dft
Economic conditions:
Tail goes with the hide. H. Channing ; Cr
EducationIreland :
School question
i
EducationMexico :
"Sovietizing" the schools in Mexico : IRD
EducationUnited States :
Beating with a single thought; EdA
Bryn Mawr*s summer session for manual
workers; EdP
New educationIts trend and purpose. E.

Dewey:
SA
N New educationThe modern school. E.
Dewey ; SA
President Lowell on needs of education . . S

Education of women :
Women graduates from College of Physi
cians and Surgeons take first place; EdP 8
it:
>t's position: Treaty representing
itian Nationalists' demands ; IRD ... 6
Footnote to Egyptian history. H. K. Moderwell; SA
6
Is Egypt a nation? Report of the Milner
mission; IRD
516: 540 : 6
Milner report liberal; EdP
8
Milner report published ; EdP
3
Nationalists opposed to home rule: EdP.. 8'
ElectionsFrance :
Senatorial election in France; EdP
ElectionsIreland :
Unionists victory in Ulster: EdP
8'
ElectionsItaly :
Election manifestos in Italy: IRD
8:
ElectionsNew York (city) :
Defeated candidate seated in spite of re
count; EdP
2
ElectionsSouth Africa:
Secession chief issue; EdP
1
Votes against secession ; EdP
2*
ElectionsUnited States :
Protest vote in presidential election : EdP .
Electric industries :
Plan of settling industrial disputes. L. :
Cr
6
Embassadors. See Russian embassy.
Emergency tariff bill. See TariffUnited States.
Emigration. See Immigration and emigration.
Emperor Jones : drama by E. O'Neill : D . . . . 1
Enemy property :
American property in Germany ; IRD .... 2
Bill to return German and Austrian pri
vate property ; EdP
8]
England and the United States. See No War
with England.
English language:
Back to American again. H. L. Mencken ;
Cr
8
President's English. S. T. Byington : Cr. . 71
Short view of Gamalielese. H. L. Mencken :
SA
6!
English poetry :
Progress of poetry : England. M. Van
Doren; SA
8
Erie canal; Dft
Ervine, St. John :
Mixed marriage. Criticism by L. Lewisohn :
D
Esch-Cummins law. See Railroads and state
United States.
Ettinger, William L. :
What is Americanism anyway? (defines
his conception of Americanism) ; EdA , , . 1
Europe :
Europe driftsnowhere ; EdA
\
European war :
Curious delusion. Baron Bean : SA
'
Friendless nations; EdA
European warBattlefields :
Baseless slander. W. T. Mills : Cr
European warReconstruction. See Recon
struction (European war).
Evans. Abbie Huston :
Blind gentians: P
Evans, Elizabeth Glendower:
Sacco and Vanzetti cases; SA
1
Exchange :
Foreign exchange. A. C. Whiraker : BR., !
Foreign exchange improves ; EdP
Movements of exchange rates : EdP
Export trade:
America needs foreign trade : EdP
1
Misleading phraseology. Reply to No war
with England : Our world trade rivalry.
A. Carlson ; Cr
t
Pacific coaBt to become fruit market for
Europe: EdP
i
Statistics for March show decrease of ex
ports : EdP
t
United States export trade; EdP
1
Eyvind of the hills. J. Sigurjonsson: D
t
Nos. 2896-2921]
Famines. See ChinaFamines.

Far Eastern Republic:
China and the Far Eastern Republic; IRD 192
New state in the Far East; IRD
51
Farmers :
Banks in the West fail because farmers do
not pay loans ; EdP
278
Farmers and congress. H. R. Mussey ; SA. 12
Farmer's testimony. B. W. S. ; Cr
919
Food taxesfor whom ? ; EdA
363
Why is a farmer? F. Sper ; SA
116
Farming. See Agriculture.
Farrer. Reginald. Obituary; EdP
703
Fascist! :
FascismoThe reaction in Italy. C. Beals :
SA
6S6
Fascisti tactics; IRFP
929
Nobility of violence; IRFP
928
Work of the Fascisti in Italy; EdP
420
Fsmntleroy, Cedric:
There is Poland ; Cr
916
Federal council of churches of Christ in Amer
ica:
Appeal for an international conference for
disarmament; EdP
703
"Deportation cases of 1919-1920"; EdP
70
Federal reserve system. See Banks and bank
ingUnited States.
Federal trade commission. See United States
Federal trade commission.
Federated Press :
Enter the labor press. A. Warner: SA... 788
Labor press. Reply to A. Warner's Enter
the labor press by C. Binder: Cr
919
Federation of Central America:
New nation comes into existence ; EdP . . . 689
Feisal, crown prince of the Hedjaz :
Feisal and the French: IRD
49
Felts. Albert C. :
Slayers acquitted; EdP
466
Fentrick, George:
Workers in the cabinet; Cr
695
FinanceAustria :
Allied holding company for Austria : IRD . . 388
FinanceChina. See Chinese consortium.
FinanceFrance :
European imperialism vs. cancellation.
Reply to P. B. Noyes's Justice to France
and Germany. G. E. Roadruck : Cr
877
Real crisis in France; EdA
808
FinanceGreat Britain :
England proposes to cancel international
indebtedness; EdP
262
FinanceInternational :
No war with England : The bearing of in
ternational finance; EdA
731
Mr. Warburg on international finance: EdP 679
See also Chinese consortium.
Fink. Reuben :
Visas, immigration, and official anti-Semi
tism; SA
870
Fishing :
California attempts to prevent aliens from
commercial fishing in the state; EdP.. 835
Flynn, Elizabeth Gurley:
Arrested for holding meeting of seditious
nature; EdP
419
Ford. Henry :
Jew-baiting campaign ; EdP
827
Fordnev emergency tariff bill. See Tariff
United States.
Forrester. Joseph :
League and enslaved nations. Reply to The
Nation's Constructive world league pro
gram : Cr
17
Forrester, Joseph. See also, Pennypacker.
J. W. and others.
France:
Attitude on German disarmament : EdP . . 27
FranceEconomic conditions :
Justice to Germany and France. P. B.
Noyes; IRSA
92
FranceForeign relationsGreat Britain :
Possibility of break on German policy ; EdP 725
FranceForeign RelationsGermany :
France's second Verdun. L. S. Gannett:
SA
686
Premier Briand opposed invasion of* the
Ruhr:
EdP
805
FranceForeign relationsPoland :
Pilsudski mission to Paris; EdP
360
FranceForeign relationsSwitzerland :
Franco-Swiss dissension on the question of
free zones. R. Dell; SA
209
Free zone question still unsettled; EdP.. 689
FranceLabor and laboring classes. See Labor
and laboringSeeclassesFrance.
FrancePoetry.
French poetry.
FrancePolitics and government :
Reeling from the blows of war : EdP
1
FranceTerritorial expansion :
French imperialists satisfied with Upper
Silicia and the Ruhr: EdP
701
French in Syria.
P. Hibben ; SA
287
FranceTreaties
:
Secret treaty between France and Eng
land charged after the London confer
ence; EdP
677
' ranee, Anatole, pseud. (Jacque Anatole Thibault) :
Becomes contributing editor of The Nation:
EdP
725
Butterfly
life'sCo.:
highest achievement; Dft.. 85
rranosco
Sugar
Attempt to evade income tax in New Jerv_
,8ey: Kuno:
EdP
885
'rancke,
New
German
liberal
monthly;
Cr
16
free ports:
Decree establishing free ports in Mexico:
DID
682
Index
Free speech :
American Legion expels A. E. Anderson
for objection to Negro troops in Ger
many; EdP
496
Court upholds ban on socialists in Mt. Ver
non ; EdP
838
Freedom of speech. Z. Chafee. Jr.; BR.. 377
Oases of freedom. N. Hapgood ; SA
211
Free trade and protection :
Free trade against selfishness ; EdA
582
Free voice. The :
New York post office declares it is non
mailable; EdP
726
Freedom. See Liberty.
Freedom of speech. See Free speech.
Freedom of the press :
Advertising and freedom of the press. E. S.
Martin; Cr
267
Dearborn Independent suppressed ; EdP . . . 466
For suppression of the Dearborn Indepen
dent, with rejoinder by the editor; Cr. . 639
Liberdtor, New York CoU and Milwaukee
Leader to have second class mail privi
leges; EdP
806
Milwaukee Leader case. Z. Chafee, Jr. ; SA 428
The Nation suppressed in Yokohama : EdP 162
Postmaster-general Hays favors stopping
censorship of the press; EdP
726
Supreme court decision in the Milwaukee
Leader case; EdP
391
Supreme court strikes at the press ; EdA . 422
Thought control in Japan. J. B. Wood ;
SA
290
French in Syria :
Feisal and the French ; IRD
49
French poetry :
Progress of poetry : France. L. Lewisohn :
SA
231
4
Friends, Society of :
Quaker's challenge. E. F. Alexander: Cr. . 919
Truest sect; EdA
839
Frink, H. W. :
Psychoanalysis : BR
236
Frontiers; Dft
296
Frost, Robert:
y
Pauper witch of Grafton ; P
649
Fruit:
Pacific coast to become fruit market for
Europe; EdP
497
G
G.. W.:
Equitable distribution of products: Cr
120
Gale, Zona :
Miss Lulu Bett: criticism by L. Lewisohn:
D
189
Galvin, Daniel :
315
Gambling :
Oregon man goes to law for a poker debt :
Dft
690
Gannett, Lewis S. :
Alsatian Alsace; SA
811; 840: 878
France's second Verdun ; SA
686
Those black troops on the RhineAnd the
white: SA
788
Those black troops on the Rhine. Reply
by F. P. Wilhelm, with rejoinder by the
Editor; Cr
815
Gardner, Gilson :
Why the Sherman anti-trust law has failed :
SA
408
reply by J. B. Barnhill ; Cr
695
Carman. Edward :
Additional sentence for organizing the
I. W. W. in jail; EdP
905
Garment workers. See International ladies'
garment workers union.
Gary, Elbert Henry :
Judge Gary on unionism; EdP
607
Gauss, H. C. :
Salem, Condita 1626; P
44
Gay, John :
Beggar's opera. See Beggar's opera.
Geary, James A. See Pennypacker, J. W. and
others.
General federation of labor (T'nly) :
Italian labor's policy; IRD
926
Genung, Charles. Appreciation. R. Burton : Cr 798
Georgia {Republic) :
Exit Georgia. P. Hibben; SA
475
Menshevik collapse in Georgia. Their ap
peal to the Socialist parties and labor
organizations of the world ; IRD
. 856
Revolutionary committee of Soviet Georgia
retorts; IRD
858
Russia's version of the overturn in Georgia ;
IRFP
858
German poetry :
Progress of poetry : German. L. Lewisohn :
SA
560
Germanic museum :
Harvard opens its Germanic museum : EdP 641
Germans in Alsace :
Alsatian Alsace: Germans. L. S. Gannett;
SA
873
Germany :
Final German opportunity; EdA
680
German crisis; EdA
643
Bouton; SA
667
Must disarm : EdP
27
Unconditional surrender; EdA
728
GermanyArmy :
New German army : EdP
105
GermanyEconomic conditions :
Noyes: IRSA
92
Sir Philip Gibbs finds Germany "braced
and energized by defeat": EdP
862
GermanyForeign relationsUnited States :
First move for real peace : Secretary
Hughes note to the Germans; EdA.... 528
[Vol. cxii
GermanyFrench occupation. See Germany
occupation by allies.
GermanyIndemnity. See, Peace treaty, 1919
Reparations.
GermanyIntellectual life :
Ending the intellectual .blockade: EdA
6
Intellectual blockade of Germany. J. A.
De Haas; SA
88
GermanyOccupation by Allies :
Allies' "reckless adventure" ; EdA
892
Black troops on the Rhine; EdA
365
Effect in Germany; EdP
419
Hymn of hate. Reply to L. S. Gannett's
Black troops on the Rhine, by F. P.
Wilhelm, with rejoinder by the Editor;
Cr
816
white. L. S. Gannett; SA
738
GermanyPoetry. See German poetry.
GermanyReparations. See Peace treaty, 1919
Reparations.
GermanyTaxation. See TaxationGermany.
Gertlin, Victor:
Let us be fair to Russia; Cr
816
Gibbons, James, cardinal :
American cardinal ; EdA
600
Gibbs, Sir Philip:
Finds Germany "braced and energized by
defeat"; EdP
862
Gil, Jaime C. :
Conduct of Americans abroad; Cr
376
Gilpin, Charles:
Our aliens and our arts ; EdA
830
Ginnell, Laurence :
Testimony before the American commis
sion on conditions in Ireland
449
Giolitti, Giovanni:
. _
Difficult time in Italy; EdP
195
Glaspell. Susan:
Inheritors. Criticism by L. Lewisohn: D.. 615
Glasshouse dialogue. H. Kellock ; SA
662
Gold: drama by K O'Neill; D
902
Gold (as money) :
of living? J. K. Mills; SA
736
Goldsmith, Lide Geilhard:
'White woman's burden"; Cr
841
Golf
Defeat of American golfers in England ;
EdP
807
Gollomb, Joseph :
Meeting the crime wave: A comparison of
methods: SA
80
Gopher Prairie College:
Gopher Prairie College. C. G. J.: Cr
405
College of solid thinkers. Reply to C. G. J.
by R. Kingery; Cr
624
From another alumnus of G. P. college.
N. C. ; Cr
511
Government ownership :
Railroads may go back to the government ;
EdP
421
Government regulation of industry :
Calder bill for regulation of coal supply ;
EdP
163
Graham, Savilla. Sabina ; P
264
Gray and gold. L. Lewisohn ; D
21
Great adventure ; drama by A. Bennett ; D . . . . 410
Great Britain :
Irish policy alienates the best men in Ire
land ; EdP
19
Great BritainColonies and dominions:
Future of the British empire; EdA
254
No war with England : Ireland and British
imperial policy; EdA
809
Great BritainCommerce :
No war with England: our world trade
rivalry; EdA
610
Great BritainEconomic conditions :
Strikes and business depression: EdP.... 861
Great BritainForeign relationsFrance :
Possibility of break on German policy : EdP 795
Great BritainForeign relationsGermany:
Lloyd-George German policy receives oppo
sition ; EdP
465
Great BritainForeign relationsPersia :
Russian-Persian treaty means Great Brit
ain must withdraw ; EdP
577
Great BritainForeign relationsRussia :
Recognizes Soviet government; EdP
778
Great BritainForeign relationsUnited States:
No war with England: Fact, fancy, myth
and rumor ; EdA
837
No war with England : Ireland and British
imperial policy; EdA
809
See also England and the United States.
Great BritainIntellectual life :
Manifesto from British intellectuals on the
Irish question; IRD
276
Great BritainNavy :
England ready for a navy talk: EdA
467
No war with England : Menace of naval
competition; EdA
681
Great BritainTreaties :
Secret treaty between France and England
charged after the London conference : EdP 677
Greece :
Affected by secret treaty between Italy and
Turks: EdP
639
Greece and the Turkish treaty: EdP
626
Green goddess : drama, by William Archer : D 250
Greenwich Village; Dft
918
Greenwood, Sir Hamar:
Encouragement of crime in Ireland: EdP. 161
Guardians of Liberty:
To impeach Governor Dorsey; EdP
727
Guilbert School:
Yvette Guilbert conducts school for the
arts of the theater: EdP
72
Guilfoil, P. J.:
65
Guiterman. Arthur:
Sex; P
666
mm:
47nr 53851
AL LJUJJ
12/96 53-005-00 I
[Jan.-June, 1921
Vol. cxii]
Guitry, Sacha :
aAA
Deburau; D
800
Gulick, Sidney L. :
For an immigration policy; SA
i'
GypBies; EdP
1
H
^jAgain under martial law; EdP
861
Congressional- inquiry called for Haiti and
Santo Domingo; EdP
162
Haiti speaks: Memoir outlining American
occupation of Haiti ; EdA
708
Haitian commission arrives in the U. S. ;
EdP
278
Haitian memoir; EdP

Haitian memoir cannot be reprinted in
Haiti; EdP
.- 861
Haitian memoir on the political, economic,
and financial conditions existing in the
Republic of Haiti under the American
occupation ... by the delegates of
the Union Patriotique d'Haiti ; IRD
761
Haitian newspapers on the American oc
cupation ; EdP
252
Harris Lifschitz, American, murdered in
Haiti; EdP
904
Our imperialist propagandaI. The "Na
tional Geographic's" anti-Haitian cam
paign
508
Secretary Denby's visit; EdP
678
Haldeman, Harry M. :
Good news from California. G. P. West ;
SA
867
Hamilton. Hale. See Reed, Luther.
Hanna, Paul :
Mexico1921; SA
471; 503; 632; 585; 614
Reply to F. R. Kellogg's Oil and Mexico;
Cr
816
Hapgood, Norman :
Oases of freedom ; SA
211
Hapgood, Powers :
Paternalism versus unionism in mining
camps ; SA
661
Harding, Warren Gamaliel:
Appoints commission to reorganize the gov
ernment at Washington; EdP
903
Discards League of Nations and asks for
peace with Germany; EdP
607
Foreign policy not yet announced ; EdP. . 903
Inaugural speech; EdP
889
Inaugural speech, pearls from; EdP
889
Legislative policy mapped ; EdP
495
Mr. Harding for simplicity; EdA
72
Dft. 213
Mr. Harding's cabinet; Ed A
862
More pearls from speeches ; EdP
835
Nation's suggestions for Mr. Harding's
cabinet: EdP
359
New York visit; EdP
777
President's English. S. T. Byington ; Cr. . 793
Short view of Gamalielese. H. L. Mencken ;
SA
621
Speech at anniversary of Odd Fellows :
EdP
677
Speech to the officers of the North Atlantic
fleet; EdP
677
Hardy. Thomas :
Will he ever receive the Nobel prize?; EdP 106
Hartley, Marsden :
Dissertation on modern painting; SA
235
Hartley-Rosenberg auction :
Public, painter, and dealer. J. N. Rosen
berg ; A
922
Harvard University:
Germanic museum opened ; EdP
641
"Harvard Credo"; Dft
815
Harvey. George :
Appointment as ambassador to England ;
EdP
527
HarveyShould be recalled. P. Warren ;
Cr
919
"Said Admiral Sims to Ambassador Har
vey" ; EdP
863
Speech at the Pilgrim dinner; EdP
777
Hatfield, "Sid":
Acquitted of murder of A. C. Felts; EdP. 466
Hawthorne, Nathaniel :
Hawthorne's Main Street. E. E. Leisy ; Cr 611
Hayes, Ellen :
Kansas and Howat. Reply to C. M. Reed's
The Kansas court of industrial relations ;
Cr
596
Hearley, John :
Vatican and Ireland. Reply to P. D.
Murphy's Cardinal Bourne and Ireland ;
Cr
480
Helton, Roy:
May Jones takes the air; P
223
Hennesy, J. A. :
Offspring of familiarity. Reply to O. G.
Villard's, Mr. Lansing lifts the veil :
Cr
625
Heresy :
Heresy to discuss railroads in school
houses in 1826; Dft
295
Hergesheimer, Joseph :
Doren; SA
741
Heroes :
Heroes and hero worship. R. Niebuhr ;
SA
293
Negro hero saves white man; Dft
593
Hibben. John Grier:
Delivers address in German to visiting
notable; EdP
728
Hibben. Paxton :
Exit Georgia; SA
475
French in Syria; SA
287
Russia at peace; SA
113
Hill. Frank Ernest:
Earth will stay the same ; P
920
Hobart, H. C. :
Correction of an advertisement of Upton
Sinclair; Cr
639
Hobson, J. A. :
_4
German indemnity: A British view; SA. . 870
Holland:
,
..
U S. note to Holland on the Djambi.
Sumatra oil-field; EdP
678
Holmes, John Haynes :
Denied use of school buildings for Com
munity Forum; EdP
640
Holmes, Oliver Wendell :
Collected legal papers, by O. W. Holmes.
Review by T. R. Powell; BR
237
Holt, Hamilton:
_
,
Insists on knowing President Harding s
foreign policy; EdP
908
Home :

...
Homeand highwaywomen ; EdA
lbT
Honeij, James A.:
How long will Poland last?; SA
259
Hoover, Herbert:
Begging for Europe s children; EdP
11
Favors high tariff: EdP
.
702
Mr. Hoover, feed Russia I ; EdA
266
Hours of labor:
_
Three-shift system steel industry. H. W.
Shelton; SA
115
HousingDenmark :
How Denmark is solving the housing prob
lem. E. Bryner; SA
42
HousingGreat Britain :
Solving housing in England. M. Sparkes ;
SA
IB
HousingUnited States :
_
Construction of houses still slow ; EdP . . 29
Mr. Hoover appoints committee of experts
to help solve the problem; EdP
777
Possibility of government program ; EdP . 29
Senator Calder's committee offers sugges
tions to meet the emergency ; EdP
497
Source of private corruption; EdP
253
Suggest Federal Reserve bank use savings
and long time loans for building; EdP.. 497
Housing. See also Rent laws,
Howat, Alexander :
Kansas and Howat. Reply to C. M. Reed's,
The Kansas court of industrial relations.
E. Hayes ; Cr
595
Pedestal of principle. H. Reed; Cr
406
Sentenced to year in jail : EdP
826
Should all laws be obeyed. N. A. Cole.
Reply to H. Reed; Cr
611
Hughes, Charles E. :
First move for real peace. Secretary Hughes
note to the Germans; EdA
528
Hughes. Hatcher and Elmer E. Rice:
Wake up. Jonathan. Criticism by L. Lewisohn; D
189
Huidekoper, Edward T. :
Trade the Caribbean islands for the debt;
Cr
376
Huneker, James Gibbons. Obituary ; EdP
279
Hungary:
Russia secures pardon for Hungarian com
missars ; EdP
104
I
Immigrants in the United States :
American emigres. L. Winner: SA
714
Immigration and emigrationJapan :
What Japan wants. A. Kinnosuke: SA.. 181
Immigration and emigrationUnited States :
American emigres. L. Winner; SA
714
Bill to restrict immigration for a year ;
EdP
71
For an immigration policy. S. L. Gulick ;
SA
178
New immigration law difficult to enforce ;
EdP
862
Restriction based on selection of nation
ality ; EdP
861
Senate rejects bill to admit political or
religious refugees; EdP
702
Visas, immigration and official anti-Semi
tism. R. Fink ; SA
870
Importance of being earnest. O. Wilde; D.... 301
Independent Order of Odd Fellows:
President Harding speaks at anniversary;
EdP
677
India :
Non-cooperationIndia's new weapon. Yogiraja; SA
118
Indians in art :
American painter. P. Loving; A
125
Indians of North America :
Indian citizenship bill; EdP
578
Should the Pueblo Indians be American
citizens. E. S. Sergeant; SA
588
Industrial arbitration. See Arbitration and
conciliation, industrial.
Industrial democracy :
Workers' control in Italy; IRD
492
Industrial disputes. See Labor disputes.
Industrial peace at Cleveland. W. J. Mack ;
SA
262
Industrial relations, court. See KansasIn
dustrial relations court.
Industrial workers of the world :
Edward Garman given additional sentence
for organizing L W. W. in jail: EdP.. 905
Supreme court refuses to review their con
victions ; EdP
608
Industry :
Condition of Soviet industrialism. L. Colcord ; SA
896
Creative ideal. N. J. Ware; SA
874
Prime object of industry. Reply to L.
Colcord's Condition of Soviet industrial
ism. C. F. Dole; Cr
481
Informing spirit. C. F. Maclntyre : P
623
Inheritors : drama by S. Glaspell ; D
515
Inishmore, Inishmaan, Inisheer ; EdA
7
Initiative, referendum and recall. See Refer
endum.
Institute for Public Service:
Announces that only 7 of 808 in Prince
ton class wish to teach; EdP
863
Intellectual life. See Name of country sub

head Intellectual life.
International, The :
Italian socialists and the International ;
IRD
447
International congress of trade unions :
International labor report at 1920 meeting:
IRD
26
International ladies' garment workers union :
Industrial peace in Cleveland; SA
262
International mercantile marine:
Agreement with British Admiralty not
known to the Shipping board; EdP.. 196-7
International Socialist conference:
Berne manifesto; IRD
128
Ireland :
American relief workers limited by Dub
lin castle; EdP
277
Anti-British campaign of Mr. Boland in
the U. S. ; EdP
69
Ireland. See also Aran islands ; Cork, Ire
land ; Dublin, Ireland.
IrelandEconomic conditions :
Economic conditions in Ireland
322
IrelandElections. See ElectionsIreland.
IrelandIndustries and resources :
Suppression of Irish industry
821
IrelandRelief work. See Relief work.
IrelandSinn Fein insurrection :
Cardinal Bourne and Ireland. P. D.
Murphy; SA
398
Colonel Moore exposed to ward off attack ;
EdP
252
Death of Limerick's mayor. K. O'Callaghan ; SA
592
Destruction of Dublin customs house ; EdP 805
Evolution of Sinn Fein. R. M. Henry; BR 845
Extraordinary parallel between American
revolution and Ireland today. C. M. An
drews; Cr
877
General Crozier's report, as a civilian, on
Ireland; EdP
679
Historical analogies. P. Warren; Cr
748
Ireland, England and the United States.
Reply to C. Noonan by F. F. Vane: Cr. 792
Ireland todaySir Horace Plunkett's plan.
Sir H. Plunkett; SA
788
Irish and American independence. L. Colcord : SA
878
joinder. C. M. Andrews; Cr
588
to L. Colcord, J. W. Pennypacker and
others; Cr
485
Irish women and the republican army ;
IRD
868
Liberal England opposes Government's
policy; EdP
360
Lloyd-George refuses to publish Strickland
report on the burning of Cork : EdP . . 325
London Times quoted on conditions ; EdP. 1
Lord Charles Parmoor asks for inquiry
on invasion of Shannon View hotel ;
EdP
679
Manifesto from British intellectuals ; IRD 275
Martial law in Ireland ; IRD
49
Mayor and ex-mayor of Limerick killed ;
EdP
891
Mr. Asquith condemns British policy ; EdP 1
More British condemnation of Government's
Irish policy; EdP
252
New destiny for Ireland (annexation to
the U. S.) ; Cr
624
Religious phase of the Irish question
817
Religious, political and economic issues. . 820
Sir Horace Plunkett's plan; EdP
726
Vatican suggests referring question to com
mittee appointed by Ireland; EdP
778
Week of St. Patrick's day bloodiest yet ;
EdP
465
IrelandSinn Fein insurrectionAmerican pub
lic opinion :
Ireland. England and the United States.
C. Noonan ; Cr
266
No war with England : Ireland and Brit
ish imperial policy; EdA
809
IrelandSinn Fein insurrectionBritish labor's
attitude :
British labor on Ireland: EdA
81
Report of the British labor commission to
Ireland; IRD
181
IrelandSinn Fein insurrectionPolice re
prisals :
British action similar to that of Ger
mans in Belgium; EdP
161
Desecration. H. W. Nevinson ; SA
84
England alienates best men in Ireland :
EdP
196
Protest from "AE" ; IR
221
EdP
196
IrelandSinn Fein insurrection. See also
American commission on conditions in
Ireland.
Irish civil war. See IrelandSinn Fein insur
rection.
I should like to live in a ballad world. E. L.
Walton; P
626
Italians in the United States :
Italian contributions to American democ
racy. J. H. Mariano; BR
744
Italy:
Everybody wins in Leghorn. E. Lyons ;
SA
480
Socialist, and communists split; EdP
196
Work of the Fascisti : EdP
420
ItalyIndustrial revolt, 1920 :
Workers gain supervision not control ; EdP 196
ItalyLand tenure. See Land tenureItaly.
ItalyMusic. See MusicItaly.
ItalyTreaties :
Secret treaty between Italy and Turkish
nationalists; EdP
689
Italy. See also Fascisti ; Socialism in Italy.
Index
Xos. 2896-2921]
j
J., C.Gopher
G.: Prairie college: Cr
405
Jackson,
H : ot experience: Cr
Diplomat
16
JapanMust
: we fight Japan ? D. S. Jordan : BR 626
Studies birth-control as solution for over
population:
EdPin Japan. J. B. Wood : 609
Thought
control
SA
290
JapanForeign
Two Japans. relations
T. W. : Lamont ; SA
172
JapanForeign relationsUnited States :
Japan and ourselves;
JapanImmigration.
See EdA
Immigration and 166
emigrationJapan.
JapanNavy
:
Our armament
with Japan. H. R. Mussey :
SA
179
JapanTerritorial
expansion
Japanese expansion.
M. :M. Sherower; SA 175
Japanese in the United States :
California and the Japanese. K. K. Kawakami; SA
17S
California laws hostile to Japanese and
Chinese:
EdP
835
Facts and fancies on the coast
183
How not to settle the race problem. Re
ply to B. BJiven's, Japanese problem. G.
H. Warwick; Cr
376
Japanese problem. B. Bliven ; SA
171
Wanted : More tolerance and understand
ing. W. Ryder; SA
180
Japanese
Poetrypoetry
priie; won by Mrs. C. Burnett:
EdP
163
JewsPolitical
and social conditions :
Ford's Jew-baiting campaign; EdP
827
Jewry at the end of the war: A review.
J. L.immigration,
Magnes; SAand official anti-Semi 647
Visas,
tism. R. Fink ; SA
870
JewsBerlin
in Germany:
has its first pogrom ; EdP
466
JewsJew
in the
United
among
the States
Fords.: L. Weitzenkorn :
SA Joan. See Trial of Joan of Arc.
652
Joan of
John Hawthorne : drama by D. Liebovitz : D . . 271
Johnson.
F. Orr : vs. the church ; Cr
Big business
875
Johnson,
Palmer
:
Summarizes hisW. term
as mayor of Marion.
S. C. : Dft
693
Jordan, David Starr:
On fighting Japan : BR
626
Jouhaux, Leon: EdP
108
Journalism:. Prison journalism: Dft
624
Jugoslav
peasants'
league
:
Peasant rule and cooperation. J. F. LupisVukich: Cr
610
JusticeAdministration
of :
In the court of press-made
opinion. W.
Nelles:
SA
711
Sacco
and Vanzetti
case. E. G. Evans: SA 842
Juvenile literature. See Children's literature.
K
KansasIndustrial relations court:
Kansas and Howat. Reply to C. M. Reed's
Kansas court of industrial relations. E.
Hayes court
; Cr of industrial relations. C. M. 696
Kansas
Reed;
SA of industrial relations, Reply 605
Kansas court
to C. M. Reed; Cr
626
Kawaknmi. K. K. :
California and the Japanese; SA
173
Keats, John:
John Keats, 1821-1921. M. Van Doren : SA. 292
KeHoclc. Harold:
Glasshouse dialogue; SA
662
Ktuoro, Frederic R. :
Oil and Mexico. Reply to P. Hanna's,
Mexico's Relations with the United
States, with rejoinder by Mr. Hanna : Cr. 816
Kerlin, Robert T. :
Open letter to the governor of Arkansas :
Cr
847
Kicking :
_ Results of kicking; Dft
875
Kmgery. Robert:
College of solid thinkers ; Cr
624
Kings:
Kings of old and of today; Dft
840
Kinnosuke, Adachi :
What Japan wants; SA
181
Sirchwey, Freda :
Alice Paul pulls the strings: SA
882
Reply to her, Alice Paul pulls the strings,
_ by S. S. White and E. R. Murray; Cr. . 434
Mrchwey, George W. :
Crime waves and remedies ; SA
206
Kirkpatrick. J. E. :
Report on dismissal from Washburn col lege; EdP
467
Hausner, Oscar :
Origin of "A scrap of paper" ; Cr
120
"app, G. J.:
Bigotry not one-sided. C. P. Sweeney ; Cr. 17
Reply to G. J. Knapp's. Concerning bigotry,
. by P. W. Collins; Cr
17
is-hts of Columbus:
Bigotry not one-sided. C. P. Sweeney; Cr. 17
wfkov, Phineas :
Killed by bandits in Brooklyn; EdP
890
"reymborg. Alfred :
,,Krapotkin,
Boomerang
:
P
266
Peter Alexeievich. prince:
Prince Kropotkin, revolutionist. A. Cahan :
c SA
201
* Klux Klan:
Plans invasion of the North : EdP
70
Triumphant in Texas; EdP
906
L
Plan for settling industrial disputes. Coun
cil on industrial relations for the electri
cal construction industry; Cr
664
L., L.:
Prohibition ditties: P
888
Labor and capital :
Face the labor issue . . T. L. Chadbourne ;
SA
84
Labor and laboring classes :
International labor report at the 1920 meet
ing; IRD
26
Labor and laboring classesFrance:
French labor and the Ruhr; IRD
26
Labor and laboring classesGreat Britain :
Collapse of the Triple alliance. F. Morley ;
SA
709
Collapse of Triple Alliance strike ; EdP . . 607
Labor and laboring classesItaly :
Appeal to the Italian workers: IRD
447
Direct action of workers in F.I.A.T. plant ;
EdP
325
925
Workers control in Italy; IRD
492
See also ItalyIndustrial revolt, 1920 : So
cialism in Italy.
Labor and laboring classesJapan :
Labor's status in Japan ; IRD
190
Labor and laboring classesMexico :
Mexico1921 : A labor republic. P. Hanna ;
SA
503
Labor and laboring classesRumania :
Rumanian general strike ; IRD
23
Labor and laboring classesSpain :
Government campaign against working
classes: EdP
420
Labor and laboring classesUnited States :
Labor is watching its leaders. A. Martin :
SA
335
Labor and laboring classes. See also Open and
closed shop ; Textile workers. Tradeunions ; Unemployment.
Labor disputes :
Call for "the public" : EdA
894
Labor disputes. See also Arbitration and con
ciliation, industrial.
Labor laws and legislation :
Interesting labor laws suggested ; EdP . . 279
Labor leaders :
Labor is watching its leaders. A. Martin :
SA
835
Labor party (Great Britain) :
Labor and unemployment in England ; IRD 128
Labor party (Great Britain). See also. Ire
landSinn Fein insurrectionBritish la
bor's attitude.
Labor press :
Enter the labor press. A. Warner : SA . . 785
Labor press. The. Reply to A. Warner's
Enter the labor press by C. Binder; Cr. . 919
Labor press. The. Reply to A. Warner's
Enter the labor press, by G. O'Day ; Cr. 918
Laburnums. P. Colum ; P
655
Lady Billy; D
21
Lamar. W. H. :
Should be returned to private life ; EdP . . 726
Lamont, Thomas W. :
Two Japans; SA
172
Land tenureItaly :
Seizure of the land in Sicily. G. Prezzolini; SA
887
Land tenureMexico :
Mexican land reform: IRD
218
Mexico1921 : Restoring the land to the
people. P. Hanna; SA
632
Landis, K. M. :
Senator Dial threatens impeachment : EdP. 278
Lane. Franklin K. O. G. Villard: SA
783
Lansing, Robert :
Mr. Lansing lifts the veil. O. G. Villard:
SA
472
Lasker, Albert D. :
Appointed head of the Shipping Board :
EdP
884
Laski. Harold J. :
_
British coal strike; SA
617
Latvia :
Communists in Latvia; EdP
71
Lawn-tennis :
National characteristics shown in tennis
chnmpionship between France and Amer
ica T: EdP
886
Lawrenceville School :
Trustees irritated at criticism of dismissal
of a teacher: EdP
497
Leadership :
True leadership ; EdA
423
League of nations :
League and enslaved nations. Reply to The
Nation's Constructive world league pro
gram : Cr
17
President Harding discards league and asks
for peace with Germany ; EdP
607
Scheme of receivership committee for re
construction of Austria; EdP
725
League of nationsAssembly :
First congress of the league. R. Dell: SA. 76
League of Spanish workers :
Launch an appeal for boycott of Spanish
commerce : EdP
420
League of women voters :
Are women a menace?: EdA
198
Begin a movement to end war: EdP
609
Lefevre. Andre1 :
Resigns from French cabinet : EdP
1
Legien. Karl Rudolf. Obituary; EdP
1
Leisy. Ernest Erwin :
Hawthorne's Main Street: Cr
611
Lenin, Nikolai :
Lenin's letter to the Italian socialists ; IRD. 442
Lenin on the state of Russia: IRFP
412
Lever act:
Found to be unconstitutional when applied
to profiteers ; EdP
860
L.:
[Vol. cxii
Lever-more, Charles H. :
New York peace society. Reply to No
compromise on disarmament, with re
joinder by the editor; Cr
611
Lewis, Camp :
Benefits of military training. S. A. Rice;
Cr
611
Post-intelligence concerning soldiers at
Camp Lewis. S. A. Rice ; Cr
849
Lewis, Robert E. :
Judge Lewis refuses citizenship to man
who wanted to vote for Debs ; EdP
421
Lewisohn, Ludwig:
According to Sarcey ; D
598
Beggar's opera ; D
91
Bricks and mortar; D
488
Case of "John Hawthorne" ; D
271
Clair de Lune : D
672
Curtain : Review of plays of spring of 1921 :
D
797
Experimental stages; D
410
Gold; D
902
Gray and gold; D
21
Inheritors; D
515
Interlude; D
126
John Drinkwater; D
664
Last flights; D
750 H
Liliom; D
696
Loaded dice; D
250
Macbeth in the void; D
349
Margaret Anglin (as Joan of Arc): D. . 681
Native plays ; D
189
New literature in America ; SA
429
Note on dramatic dialogue; D
381
Progress of poetry: France; SA
231
Progress of poetry: German; SA
550
Rank and file; D
800
Revivals: D
719
Silver lining; D
48
Tyranny of love; D
489
Liber Alter :
Inexpensive classics ; Cr
86
Liberator :
Granted second class mailing privileges:
EdP
806
Liberty:
Initiative, referendum and recall. J. W.
Wells; Cr
626
Progress of civil liberty in the United
States (Items from recent bulletins of the
American civil liberties union)
509
Repealing the war laws. A. De Silver : SA. 587
Refused citizenship for wanting to vote for
Debs; EdP
421
Senate bill on federal interference with
civil liberty; EdP
859
Teacher-baiting: the new sport; EdA
612
Voice from the past. G. P. West. (Fic
tion) ; SA
889
Libman, Anita :
For suppression of the Dearborn Indepen
dent, with rejoinder by the editor; Cr. . 539
LibrariesIreland :
For the library at Cork ; IRD
354
Liebovitz, David :
John Hawthorne ; criticism L. Lewisohn :
D
271
Lifschitz, Harris :
American murdered in Haiti ; EdP
904
Ligi, Tito:
In the court of press-made opinion. W.
Nelles; SA
711
Liliom: drama by F. Molnar ; D
695
Lindsay, Vachel :
Views of verse: (Congratulations on Na
tion's prize poems; Cr
406
Lipsky, Louis :
Zionism today: SA
649
Literary criticism :
Critic and the artist; EdA
588
Literary style. See Style, Literary.
Lloyd-George, David :
Clash with Premier Briand ; EdP
725
German policy receives opposition ; EdP . . 465
Reported by London correspondents to be
losing his grip; EdP
496
Lockwood investigation. See Building industry.
Long, Cedric :
Unemployment and closed shop in Cohoes :
SA
478
Long, Haniel :
On the road; P
899
Longstreet, Mrs. James :
Disfranchised in Georgia; Dft
16
Lorraine. See Alsace.
Lost anchors. E. A. Robinson; P
184
Love: drama by E. Scott; D
411
Loving, Pierre:
American painter. An; A
125
Archipenko ; A
666
Lowell. Abbott Lawrence :
Quoted on needs of education
908
Lowry, Henry :
American Congo-Burning of Henry Lowry.
W. Pickens; SA
426
Lupis-Vukich, J. F. :
Peasant rule and cooperation ; Cr
610
Lynching:
American CongoBurning of Henry
Lowry. W. Pickens; SA
426
Lynching. See also Negroes in the United
States.
Lyons, Eugene:
Everybody wins in Leghorn ; SA
430
M
MacArthur, Mary. Obituary; EdP
106
McCarthy, Charles. Obituary: EdP.....
527
Macbeth: drama by W. Shakespeare; D
849
MacCurtain. Thomas:
, .
Murder of Mayor MacCurtain (part of M.
McSwiney's testimony before the Ameri
can commission)
809
McGarry, William A. :
Those mark-downs : SA
294
Vol. cxii]
Index
[Jan.-June, 1921
Thought control in Japan. J. B. Wood ;

MexicoLand tenure. See Land tenureMexico.
Maclntyre,
Carlyle
Ferren:
SA
290
InforminK
spirit;
P
M0 MexicoWoman suffrage. See Woman suffrage
Informing
spirit
National drinks; Dft
848
Mexico.
Mack,Near
Willard:
National
Geographic
magazine:
City, Mexico:
SOI Mexico
Santa Barbara; D.
Our imperialist propagandaI. The "Na
Archives
of the municipality from 1524
tional Geographic's" anti-Haitian cam
EdP
807
Mack,Industrial
William peace
J.: in Cleveland , OA.
262 Meyer,discovered;
Martin A. :
paign
608
National
Non-partisan
league:
In the clinic city; Cr
876
Mackall, Virginia Woods:
Membership
campaign
in Kansas and Ne
Military
training
:
626
Plaint; P
Benefits of military training. S. A. Rice ;
braska
EdP
What
is ;happening
in North Dakota. O. S. 105
MacSwiney,
Mary:
.
.
Cr
Testimony
before the American
commisEducators,
not militarists, needed. M. L. 511
Morris;
SA
867
sion . ....Vol. 111. 757. Vol. 112. 53; 309
woman's
party
: strings. F. Kirchwey ;
Thomas;Miller
Cr calls for abolition of train 816 National
Governor
Alice
Paul
pulls
the
Magnes,
. war: A, review;
.
70
ing for high school boys ; EdP
JewryJudah
at theL. :end of the
SA woman's burden: letters of mem 832
Military drill for school boys abolished in
White
SA
b4'
bers of the national advisory committee
New
York;
EdP
578
Mahler,
of the National Woman's Party; EdA.. 257
Charles Grant:
296 Miller,
Why Max
the Socialist vote shrank: Cr.
Pittsburgh's
prostituted press; SA
8 Naval holiday. See United StatesNavy.
Navy.
See Name of country, subhead Navy.
AlainHawthorne's
Street :
Miller,
Nathan
L.
:
Main Street. E. E. Leisy; Cr 511
Advocates economy in all branches of gov
NearIndications
East:
Malipiero, G. Francesco :
of peace: EdP
904
ernment;
EdP
70
Italy's new music-drama. H. Straus; M. 822
Approves new sedition bills ; EdP
726 Near Eastern conference, London, 1921 :
Greece
and
the
conference
on
the
Turkish
Malta:
Mills,
John
Kane
:
Great Britain grants dominion status to
treaty; EdP
525
Malta; EdP
801
living 7; SA
736 Near Santa Barbara. W. Mack; D
682 Mills, of
Manchester Guardian ; EdA
Walter Thomas:
Negroes
:
Baseless slander ; Cr
85
Mandatory
plan
:
Question of mandates under the treaty ;
white. L. S. Gannett; SA
788
A. : passes by. Criticism, L. Lewi
359 Milne,
Mr.A. Pim
Negroes. See also Race prejudice ; Lynching.
EdP
Negroes in the United States:
_
sohn
;
D
410
Manners and customs :
Alice Paul pulls the strings. F. Kirchwey ;
Milner, Alfred Milner, first viscount:
Destruction and creation EdA.
Footnote to Egyptian history. H. K. ModSA
Manning,
Williambishop
T. : of New York diocese;
Concerning
the race commission. W. G. 882
erwell; SA
688
Consecrated
Milner
report;
IRD
616;
540;
699
Burgin;
Cr
726
Milner report on Egypt published; EdP.. 326
Conditions of the Negro in the South ; 849
MarineEdP
corps. See United StatesMarine corps.
Report on Egypt liberal; EdP
860
EdP of Tulsa. W. F. White; SA
496
Marine Btrike. See Strikes.
Eruption
909
Milwaukee
Federal and state authorities seek to stop
Marriage
:
Mailing Leader:
privileges restored; EdP
806
Statistics
of marriage in Berlin and Vicruelty
and
violence
to
Negroes;
EdP..
640
Milwaukee
Leader
case.
Z.
Chafee.
Jr.
;
SA
428
579
enna ; EdP
Governor Dorsey's work for the Negroes in
Supreme court decision on the Leader case ;
703
Worcester
censors marriage; EdP
Georgia;
EdP
727
EdP
391
Martin,
Supreme court striken at the press; EdA. 422
LaborAnne:
is watching its leaders; SA
335 Miners
to F. Adams' Question to democracy, by
: for the miners. S. Sassoon ; P
Martin,
Edward
S.
:
Case
715
A. Craig; Cr
16
Advertising and freedom of the press ; Cr. 267
Murder of Negroes on John Williams's
Martinez,
Gregorio
:
camps.
P.
Hapgood;
SA
661
farm;
EdP
496
Cradle song. Criticism L. Lewisohn: D.. 411 Ministers of the gospel :
Negro hero saves white man's life : Dft. . 593
Mary Magdalene. L. Speyer; P
744
Life service commission of Methodist
Open letter to the governor of Arkansas.
Mary Rose: drama by J. M. Barrie ; D
48
church
recruiting
ministers;
EdP
779
R. T. Kerlin; Cr
847
Mary Stuart: drama by John Drinkwater: D. 564 Minnesota University :
Our aliens and our arts; EdA
330
Maternity
benefits : bill still held up ; EdP 835
Race commissionA constructive plan ;
Academic freedom in the University of
Sheppard-Towner
EdA
5
EdA in Georgia, A.D. 1921. H. J. 612
May Jones takes the air. R. Helton; P.... 223 Mirage.Minnesota;
Slavery
G. Sterling; P
552
Medical
center
:
Miss
Lulu
Bett:
drama
by
Z.
Gale;
D
189
Seligmann ; SA
591
Union of College of Physicians and Sur
Mr. Pim passes by: drama by A. A. Milne: D. 411
Tulsa: EdA
839
geons and Presbyterian hospital in New
Mixed marriage: drama by St. J. Ervine ; D. 21
White
woman's
burden;
EdA
257
York city; EdP
727 Moderwell, Hiram K. :
"White woman's burden." L. G. Gold
Medical
research
:
688
Footnote to Egyptian history 8A.
smith
; CrUnited States. See also Lynch 341
Orphans
as guinea
pigs. K. Bercovici ; SA. 911
G51
Negroes
in the
Palestinian
problems
;
SA.
.
.
Medicine Hat; EdA
895 Molnar, Franz :
ing
;
Race
riots.
Meirowsky,
Dorothy
Liliomthe Roughneck. Criticism, L. Lewi
Nelles,
SilesiaThe
new: plague spot; SA
789
In Walter:
the court of press-made opinion; SA. 711
sohn
;
D
696
Mencken,
L. :
Nemesis: drama by A. Thomas; D
698
MoneyUnited
States
:
Back H.
to American
again. Reply to S. T.
Would the use
of gold
bring down the cost
Nevinson, Henry W. :
Byington's The President's English ; Cr. 849
of
living?
J.
K.
Mills;
SA
735
Desecration
;
SA
84
Literary sterility of the Southern States ;
New Morality: drama by Harold Chapin ; D. 300
MontanaEducation
: California (and Mon
EdP
467
Better
news
from
New
Republic,
The:
Reply to his. Short view of Gamalielese,
8GG
In the clinic city. M. A. Meyer; Cr
876
tana) ; EdA
by S. T. Byington; Cr
798
York (city)
:
case case
: today. G. P. West; SA
Short view of Gamalielese; SA
621 Mooney
G22 NewMunicipal
reformA
suggestion; EdA... 780
Mooney
Mennonites
: in Mississippi ; EdP
Party enrolment figures; EdP
2
:
Welcomed
69 Moreau,
Trial Emile
of Joan
of Arc. Criticism by L.
Street railways tangle. L. Budenz ; SA... 202
631
Merchant
marine:
New
York
(city)
Hospitals
:
Lewisohn
;
D.
.
Shipping conditions at home and abroad :
Union of College of Physicians and Sur
Frederic E. :
_ _ editorial on
geons and the Presbyterian hospital ;
EdP marineGreat Britain :
834 Morgan,
to
Tools of reason. Reply editorial
Merchant
rejoinwith
ed
Christian
Science,
EdP
727
No war with England: Merchant marine
798 New York
(city)-Housing:
der;
Cr
problems; EdA
644 Morley. Felix :
Organization
of
Citizens'
Protective
Hous
Merchant marineUnited States :
709
Collapse of the Triple alliance SA.
ing League; EdP
862
Don't give up the ship!; EdA
109 Morris.
Rent lawsThen what?; EdA
424
Oliver
S.
:
No war with England : Merchant marine
What is happening in North Dakota; SA. 867 New York (city) Music:
problems; EdA
644 Morton, David:
Orchestra to the front; EdA
580
York ( city ) Rapid transit :
Mesopotamia
:
Acquaintance; P
477 NewGeorge
British mandate
in Mesopotamia; IRD.... 491 Moving
McAneny and J. F. O'Ryan on new
pictures
and
morals:
Methodist
Episcopal
church : recruiting preachtransit commission; EdP
608
Morals and the movies; EdA
681
Life service
commission
York (state) Education:
reformA Suggestion; EdA
730 NewTeachers
EdP
779 Municipal
to
take
an
oath
of
allegiance
to
Muriel among the redwoods. J. Rorty; P
121
Mexicans
the United
States:association poor
flag and constitution; EdP
527; 726
Murphy,
Anne: before the American commis
Arizonain Cotton
Grower's
New York (state) Industrial commission :
Testimony
497
treatment of Mexican laborers ; EdP
Republican economy attacks commission ;
814
Mexico
:
EdP
163
Murphy,
P. D.Bourne
:
Mexico1921.
Paul Henna :
398 New York Call:
Cardinal
and Ireland ; SA
1. House set in order
471 Murray,
Mailing privileges restored; EdP
806
Ella
Rush
:
2.8. Labor
republic
503
NewNew
York York
peace peace
societysociety.
:
Future of the woman's party. Reply to F.
Restoring
the land to the people
532
Reply to. No
Kirchwey's Alice Paul pulls the strings ; 431
4. Culture and the intellectuals
585
compromise
on
disarmament,
with re
Cr
5. Relations with the United States
614 Music :
joinder
by
the
editor;
Cr
511
President Obregon's message: IRFP
489
Radicalism
in
music.
H.
Straus;
M
21
New
York
World:
Senator Fall's terms for U. S. recognition ;
Takes
stand
for
disarmament:
EdP
2
: music-drama. H. Straus: M
Italy's new
" Newbern Iron Works, North Carolina :
EdP
390 MusicItaly
Profit
sharing
results
in
reduction
of
pay
;
568
MexicoArmy
:
"Third"
Italy.
H.
Straus
;
M
Army manifestos, issued by Boldiers and
Music. See also Orchestras.
EdP
28
officers desirous of forming cooperative
NewspapersGreat
Britain :
HenryandRaymond
agricultural
; IRD of the army ; 634 Mussey,
12
Farmers
congress: ; SA
.
Manchester Guardian; EdA
682
Reduction
and colonies
reorganization
179 NewspapersNicaragua :
Our armament race with Japan; SA.
U. S. Marines destroy "La Tribuna" of
IRD
638
MexicoConstitution
:
Managua; EdP
277
Oil and Mexico. Reply to P. Hanna's
N
NewspapersRussia
:
MexicoRelations with the United States.
Bogus
newspapers
published
by
enemies
of
Napoleon
I.
(Napoleon
Bonaparte)
:
with a rejoinder by P. Hanna : Cr
816
the Soviet government; EdP
466
NapoleonAfter one hundred years EdA. 646 NewspapersUnited
MexicoEducation. See EducationMexico.
States :
Nation,
The:
MexicoForeign relationsUnited States :
American
Daily
Standard
ceases
publica
Contestants for The Nation's poetry prize ;
Attitude of American oil interests; EdP.. 805
tion; theEdPlabor press. A. Warner: SA. . 785
421
29
Bullying Mexico;Relations
EdA with the United 864
Enter
InEdP
the clinic city. M. A. Meyer; Cr
876
Mexico1921.
Influenced by advertising control in printing
Nation
and
New
Republic
excluded
from
States. P. Hanna; SA
614
news;
640
Los Angeles schools; EdP
640
Recognize Obregon ! ; EdA
780
Sing
SingEdP
paper suspended; Dft
624
New staff members; EdP
677; 725 NewspapersUnited
Why the Obregon government has not been
States.
See
also
Pitts
On truthing it; EdA
863
783
recognized. J. K. Turner; SA
burgh,
Penn.,
and
Names
of
newspapers,
Poetry
prize: Comments on the prize poems 22
MexicoFree ports. See Free ports.
as New York World.
Prize poems
MexicoIntellectuals
:
NewsEnter
service
by V. Lindsay and O. R. H. Thompson ;
Mexico1921 : Culture
and the intellectuals.
the: labor press. A. Warner: SA... 785
Cr poems in Nation*s contest: P
406
P. Hanna; SA
585
"Let's have done with Wiggle and Wob
Prize
223
MexicoLabor, department of :
ble." D. Bryant; SA
534
Suppressed by police in Yokohama: EdP. 162
New Secretary of labor; IRD
687
Index
NicaraguaNewspapers. See Newspapt
Peace treaty, 1919:
Article 22 on mandates ; EdP
869
Nicaragua.
Revise the treaty of Versailles; Cr
690
Nietrahr,
R.
:
Truth about the treaty. A. Tardieu : BR.. 850
Heroes and hero worship ; SA
298
U.
S.
abandons
the
Versailles
document;
Night is forgotten. H. Conklingr; P
266
EdP
678
No war
with England
:
L Reasons
for plain
speech
680 Peace treaty, 1919Reparations :
2. Our world trade rivalry
610
Bad
debts
or
bad
blood;
EdA
282
8. Merchant marine problem
644
Economic effects of the Paris resolutions :
4. Menace of naval competition
681
IRD
678
6.6. Oil
706
Enter trillions; EdA
200
Bearing of international finance
731
Experts'
report
on
reparations
;
IRD
885
7.8. Cables
and
canals
782
Final
German
opportunity
;
EdA
680
Ireland and British imperial policy
809
France's
second
Verdun.
L.
S.
Gannett
:
9. Fact, fancy, myth and rumor
887
SA
686
10. Conclusion
865
French case for German indemnity. M.
Nobel prize:
Casenave; SA
Ill
New rules of award ; EdP
106
French imperialism satisfied with Upper
Silesia
and
the
Ruhr;
EdP
701
NoiseElimination
:
of industrial noise ; Dft
918
German crisis ; EdA
648
Noonan,
Charles
:
.
German
indemnity:
A
British
view.
J.
A.
Ireland. England and the United States;
Hobson; SA
370
Cr to by F. F. Vane ; Cr
266
German terms better than formerly of
Reply
792
fered; EdP
701
NorthBank
Dakota:
Issue of German reparations. F. H.
situation;
EdP
106
Simonds;
Cr
214
North Dakota and the banks; EdA
380
Plan to place Ruhr valley in hands of an
What is happening in North Dakota. O.
Allied receivership; EdP
607
S.
Morris;
SA
Real crisis in France ; EdA
808
North DakotaBanks. See Banks and bank 867
Unconditional
surrender;
EdA
728
ingUnited States.
Peace treaty, 1919Turkish treaty:
NorthNorth
DakotaFinance
"Affected by march of events"; EdP
869
Dakota goes :to the people: issue of
Josiah H. :
630 Penniman,
Provost
of
the
University
of
Pennsylvania
;
EdP
640
EdP
497
Noyes,
Pierrepont
B. : and France ; IRSA ... 92 Pennsylvania
Railroad :
Justice
to Germany
Passed its dividend: EdP
884
Reduced the dividend, not passed it; EdP. 862
O
Pennypacker,
Joseph
W.
:
Obregon,
Alvardo
:
Britain, America, Japanand Yap ; Cr. . . 664
President
Obregon's
message; IRD
489 Pennypacker,
Joseph W. and others :
Recognize Obregon 1 EdA
780
Irish
and American Independence. Reply
O'Callaghan, Donal :
to
L.
Colcord
; Cr
485
Deported: EdP
161 Peonage :
O'Callaghan,
K.
:
Charges
of
peonage
against
John
Williams
;
Death of Limerick'a mayor ; SA
692
EdP
496
O'Callaghan,
Governor Dorsey's pamphlet on, The negro
Death ofMichael:
Limerick's mayor. K. O'Cal
in
Georgia:
EdP
727
laghan ; SA
692
Governors of Georgia and Florida and peo
O'Day,
Gilbert:
nage;
EdP
778
Labor press. Reply to A. Warner's Enter
Slavery in Georgia, A. D., 1921. H. J.
the labor press ; Cr
918
Seligmann; SA
691
Ode!].Cable
George
T. : controversy: SA
legislative service: EdP
609
control
169 People's
Periodicals :
Federal trade commission yields to pres
New
German
liberal
monthly.
K.
Francke:
sure: SA
86
Cr
16
Ohlhaver,
Heinrich
:
:
Discovers
the secret
of Stradivarius ; EdP.. 168 Persia
Soviet
government
in
Persia?
EdP
833
Oil. See Petroleum.
:
On the road. H. Long; P
899 PersiaTreatiesRussia
Russian-Persian treaty means England with
O'Neill,
Eugene:
draws ; EdP
577
Emperor
Jones. Criticism. L. Lewisohn ; D 189
Treaty between Russia and Persia; IRD... 696
Gold. Criticism. L. Lewisohn ; D
902 Peterson,
Frederick
:
Ontario
:
Three wise men of the East; P
787
Prohibition
propaganda; Dft
716 Petroleum
:
OpenHow
and open
closedis shop
:
American
oil
interests
ask
for
change
in
the "Open shop" T EdA
629
Mexican constitution or intervention :
EdP
806
C. Long; SA
478
American
oil interests rejoice in Mexican
Orchestras
:
export
tax;
EdP
904
Orchestra to the front; EdA
680
Mexico1921 : Relations with the United
Outline of history. See Wells. George Herbert.
614
No war with England: Oil: EdA
706
P
Oil and Mexico. Reply to P. Hnnna's
MexicoRelations with the United
Packing
industry:
Federal
mediation means concessions on
States, with rejoinder by P. Hanna; Cr 816
Oil interests in Mexico object to increased
both sides ; EdP
496
Federal trade commission and packers.
export tax; EdP
904
Swift & Co., per. L. D. H. Weld; Cr
267
Oil's part in the Panama-Costa Rica trou
ble:
EdP
890
Painting
:
Dissertation on modern painting. M. Hart
U. S. wants concessions in the Djambi,
Sumatra oil-field; EdP
678
ley: SA
236
PhiladelphiaEconomic conditions :
Palestine :
Palestinian problems. H. K. Moderwell ;
Labor finds out for itself. E. Clark; SA. . 208
SA
661 Phoenix Republican (Arizona) :
Palmer, Alexander Mitchell :
Announces "over the top" for European
Turn the light on Palmer: EdA
164
relief and vast unemployment at home :
Panama-Foreign relationsCosta Rica :
EdP
778
Border difficulties; EdP
890 Photography :
Panama canalTolls :
Photographer challenges. H. J. Seligmann 268
Panama tolls and American honor : EdA . . 704 Pickens, William :
Woodrow Wilson and Panama. J. L. S. :
American CongoBurning of Henry Lowry ;
876
SA
426
Paris Cr
anti-Bolshevist conference; EdP
104 Picketing
:
Parmoor, Lord Charles :
Supreme court of Queens Co., N. Y.. denies
Asks an inquiry on invasion of Shannon
strikers" right of picketing; EdP
278
View hotel : EdP
679 Pilgrim dinner in London :
Passing show of 1921. Criticism. L. Lew
Col. Harvey's speech; EdP
777
isohn: ; D
126 Pittsburgh Employers' Association :
Passport*
No more political asylum; EdA
864
son ; Cr
876
Passports passe; EdA
76 Pittsburgh Ministerial union :
Visas, immigration, and official anti-Semit
ism. R. Fink ; SA
870
son ; Cr
875
Past, The:
Pittsburgh, PennsylvaniaNewspapers :
Those good old days; EdA
613
Pittsburgh's prostituted press. C. G. Mil
Patriotism :
ler; SA
8
Patriotic rally in Madison Square Garden
Cr
841
in response to "Rhine horror" meeting ;
Pizzetti, Tldebrando :
Paul,, EdP
466
Italy's new music-drama. H. Straus; M.... 822
Alice:
Plaint V. W. Mackall ; P
626
Alice Paul pulls the strings. F. KirchPlebiscite :
wey:
SA
882
Silesian
plebiscite.
S.
M.
Bouton
;
SA
871
Pauper witch of Grafton. R. Frost; P
649 Plunkett, Sir Horace:
Peace:
Ireland todaySir Horace Plunkett's plan ;
Correspondence between Emperor Charles
SA
738
of Austria and Mr. Wilson in 1918; EdP 577
726
Slogan : "Too busy to fight" ; Dft
48 PoetaeEdP
minores.
A.
E.
Trombly;
P
117
reace conference, 1919 (Versailles) :
Poetry :
Mr. Lansing lifts the veil. O. G. Villard :
Concerning poetry. M. Van Doren ; BRs . . 241
Contestants for The Nation's poetry prize;
-Peace SA
472
conference, 1921 (Paris) :
EdP
29
Mystery behind the Paris agreements; EdP 2B1
Nation's poetry prize
22
Paris allied decisions : IRD
888
Prize poems in Nation's contest; P
228
[Vol. cxii
Progress of poetry: England. M. Van
Doren; SA
883
Progress of poetry : France. L. Lewisohn ;
SA
231
Progress of poetry : German. L. Lewisohn ;
SA
550
Views of verse. Comments on the prize
poems in The Nation's contest, by V.
Lindsay and O. R. H. Thompson; Cr.. 406
Poetry. See also French poetry, German poe
try, English poetry, Japanese poetry.
Poetry :
Acquaintance. D. Morton ; P
477
Amerindian air. H. Alexander; P
265
Ben Trovato. E. A. Robinson; P
121
Blind gentians. A. H. Evans ; P
406
Boomerang. A. Kreymborg ; P
265
Canopus. C. Wood; P
887
Case for the miners. S. Sassoon ; P
716
Church-belL E. Wylie; P
264
Days, The. D. Rosenthal; P
338
Dempsey and the Carpentier, The: P
839
Different day. G. H. Conkling ; P
266
Earth will stay the same. F. E. Hill: P.. 920
I should like to live in a ballad world. E.
L. Walton: P
626
Informing spirit. C. F. Maclntyre : P
623
Laburnums. P. Colum ; P
655
Lost anchors. E. A. Robinson ; P
184
Mary Magdalene. L. Speyer ; P
744
May Jones takes the air. R. Helton; P.. 223
Mirage. G. Sterling; P
662
Muriel among the redwoods. J. Rorty ; P. 121
Night is forgotten. H. Conkling; P
265
On the road. H. Long; P
899
Pauper witch of Grafton: P
549
Plaint V. W. Mackall: P
626
Poetae minores. A. E. Trombly; P
117
Prelude : When we dead awaken. J. Rorty ;
p
. . 223
Prohibition' ditties. ' L. L. ;' P.' !.'!.'.'!!.'.'!!! ! 888
Sabina. S. Graham; P
264
Salem, Condita 1626. H. C. Gauss: P
44
Sex. A. Guiterman; P
666
Three wise men of the East. F. Peterson ;
P
787
Victory. L. Speyer; P
482
Wanderer. W. Bynner; P
37
Poets:
Poet and the world; EdA
732
Poker :
Oregon man goes to law to collect poker
debt: Dft
690
Poland :
France pays for new offensive : EdP
252
How long will Poland last? J. A. Honeij ;
SA
*
259
Pilsudski mission to Paris; EdP
860
There is Poland. C. Fauntleroy; Cr
916
PolandTreatiesRussia :
Russian-Polish treaty: IRD
720
Police :
Meeting the crime wave : A comparison of
methods. J. Gollomb ; SA
80
Political partiesItaly. See Socialism in Italy.
Political prisoners :
Supreme court refuses to review case of
I. W. W. ; EdP
608
Political prisoners. See also Debs, Eugene.
Poll tax. Alien:
Alien poll tax in California; EdP
836
PortoRiche, Georges de:
Tyranny of love. Criticism. L. Lewisohn :
D
489
Postal employees. See Postal serviceUnited
States.
Postal savings banks :
Government savings system; EdA
329
Postal serviceAerial :
Transcontinental mail service ; EdP
361
Postal serviceUnited States :
Employees permitted collective bargaining ;
EdP
466
Milwaukee Leader case. Z. Chafee, Jr. ; SA 428
Postmaster General to improve the service:
EdP
466
Supreme court strikes at the press; EdA.. 422
Powell, Thomas Reed:
Mr. Choate; BR
482
Mr. Justice Holmes; BR
287
Pratt, Julia D. :
Forfeits position if member of Communist
party; EdP
162
Prelude: When we dead awaken. J. Rorty: P 223
Premiers' conference at London :
Lloyd George announces readiness to dis
cuss disarmament with the U. S. : EdP. 903
Presidential elections. See ElectionsUnited
States.
Prezzolini, Giuseppe:
Seizure of the land in Sicily; SA
337
Prices:
Buyers' strike; Dft
478
Lost: Those lower prices. A. Warner; SA 168
Price of calf skins and shoes; Dft
668
Prices to be kept up in face of famine ;
EdP
Producers
and consumers in the land of 268
opportunity: Items from Capper's weekly 790
Those mark-downs. W. A. McGarry ; SA. . 294
Prisons, Federal :
Heber Votaw made superintendent of fed
eral prisons : "'dP
679
Prison, Federal penitentiary, Atlanta:
J. E. Dyche appointed warden ; EdP
728
"Private citizen" ; EdA
88
Production :
Produce I Produce I G. Soulc : SA
13
Why boup kitchens? C. B. Baldwin: Cr. . 216
Professors. See College professors and in
structors.
Progress :
Teacher-baiting: the new sport; EdA.... 612
Prohibition :
Ontario prohibition propaganda : Dft
716
Vol. cxii]
Index
Political and religious refugees cannot come

Prohibition ditties. L. L. ; P
88
to the United States; EdP
702
Propaganda
Enemies: of Soviet Russia manufacture
Relativity
Physics: In metaphysics. P. Smith: BRs.. 670
propaganda;
EdP
466
English press deceives English during the
ReliefAmerican
work: committee for relief in Irelandj
war; on
EdPthe Mount as propaganda; Dft. 327
Sermon
340
hard
at work ; EdP
162
Standard oil company's headline propa
American workers in Ireland limited by
ganda; Dft
840
Dublin
castle;
EdP
277
Proportional
Drive for funds for Irish relief; EdP
421
Proposed representation
amendment to: base representa
Lies, Russia and the Red Cross; EdA
165
tion on actual vote in last election; EdP. 806
Mr.
Hoover,
feed
Russia;
EdA
256
Ratio of electoral and popular votes in the
Over the top with European relief and un
South; EdP
105
employment at home?; EdP
778
ProseProgress
:
Soviet Russia and the Ukraine to receive
of prose; EdA
109
relief
supplies;
EdP
277
Psychoanalysis
:
State department obstructs relief to Rus
Psychoanalysis.
H. W. Frink ; BR
236
sia;
EdP
104
Frightened analyst; EdA
908 Rent:
Public, The:
Organization
of
Citizens'
Protective
Hous
Callservice
for "the
public"; EdA
ing League; EdP
862
Public
corporations.
See Public utilities. 894 Rent laws
:
Public
utilitiesRates:
Bill in N. Y. legislature making it a mis
Keeping the cost of living high. L. F.
demeanor to refuse tenancy because of
Budenx; SA
501
children; EdP
626
Pueblo
Indians
:
Rent
lawsThen what?; EdA
424
Supreme court decision on rents; EdP.... 641
citizens? E. S. Sergeant; SA
588 Reviewers,
The race of. N. S. Canby: SA
885
Pulitzer
:
Revolvers
: for one good reason for the manu
Goes literature
to Edithprize
Wharton's
Age of Inno
Prize
cence; EdP
807
facture ; EdP
905
Punishment
:
"Rhine horror" meeting :
Crime waves
and remedies. G. W. KirchResponse
is
patriotic
rally
in
Madison
wey; SA
206
Square Garden: EdP
466
Rice, Elmer E. See Hughes. Hatcher.
Rice, Stuart A.:
Benefits of military training; Cr
511
Quakers. See Friends, Society of.
Post-intelligence concerning soldiers at
Camp
Lewis
;
Cr
849
R
Roadruck, Guy E. :
European imperialism vs. cancelation. Re
Race commission :
Concerning the race commission. W. G.
ply to P. B. Noyes's Justice to Germany
and France. G. E. Roadruck: Cr
877
Burgin;
Cr
849
Race
commissionA
constructive plan ; EdA 612
Robinson, Mrs. Annot Erskine:
RaceBlack
prejudice
:
troops on the Rhine; EdA
365
457
Our aliens and our arts; EdA
830 Robinson, Edwin Arlington :
Ben
Trovato;
P
121
RaceEruption
riots : of Tulsa. W. F. White; SA
909
Lost anchors; P
184
Tulsa; EdA
839 Roddis, Louis H. :
Radicals and radicalism :
From an American naval officer; Cr
876
Better news from California; EdA
866 Roman Catholic church in England :
Good news from California. G. P. West:
Cardinal Bourne and Ireland. P. D.
Murphy: SA
898
SA
867
RailroadsConstruction :
Roman Catholic church in Ireland :
Railways and romance; EdA
74
Vatican and Ireland. Reply to P. D.
RailroadsFinance :
Murphy's Cardinal Bourne and Ireland.
Lo, the poor railroads; EdA
281
J. Hearley; Cr
480
Romance
and adventure immortal; Dft
120
RailroadsRates
:
High rates to blame for poor railroad
Romance,
the
pathos
of
;
EdA
424
earnings and business depression; EdP.. 779 Roots of all evil; EdA
645
Hoover demands reduction in transporta
Rorty, James :
tion rates; EdP
608
Muriel among the redwoods; P
121
Wages and rates, too, should be cut; EdP. 834
Prelude : When we dead awaken ; P
223
Railroads, street. See Street railroads.
Rosen, Roman Romanovich, baron :
RailroadsWages
:
Baron
Rosen's
testimony.
R.
E.
Stifel
;
Cr.
86
Railroad labor board recommends 12% re
Rosenberg, James N. :
duction
in
wages;
EdP
834
Public,
painter,
and
dealer;
A
922
Railroads want a standard minimum wage
Rosenthal, David :
for capital ; Dft
815
Days, The; P
833
RailroadsUnited
States
:
Ruhr valley :
Confer with Railroad Labor board on wage
French determination to occupy the Ruhr ;
cuts; EdP
421
EdP
701
Congressional investigation proposed by
French labor and the Ruhr: IRD
26
Senator Cummins; EdP
421
International
labor
report
at
the
1920
meet
Heresy to discuss railroads in school
ing on the occupation of the Ruhr val
houses in 1826 ; Dft
295
ley; IRD
26
Lo, the poor railroads I EdA
281
Plan to place region in the hands of Allied
Railroads and stateUnited States:
receivership
;
EdP
607
President Willard on "The Railroad
Premier Briand opposes the invasion of the
Wreck," with a rejoinder by the Editor;
Ruhr; EdP
805
Cr
594
Results
of French occupation ; EdP
27
Railroad problem ; Mr. Willard's reply to
Rumania
:
the Editorial rejoinder on his "Railroad
President Wilson's statement relative to
Wreck"; Cr
716
armed help for Serbia and Rumania made
Railroad problem : Reply to Editorial re
public; EdP
778
joinder to President Willard on "The
RumaniaLabor
and laboring classes. See
Railroad Wreck," by S. D. Warfield ; Cr. 716
Labor and laboring classesRumania.
Railroad problem again; EdA
705 Russell, George William (AE pseud.) :
Railroad wreck; EdA
469
Protest from "AE" ; IRSA
221
Railway regulation. See Railroads and state
EdP
196
U. S.
Russell, Lee M. :
Welcomes Mennonites to Mississippi ; EdP. 69
Realism in literature :
New literature in America. L. Lewisohn ;
Russell, Ruth:
SA
429
Reconstruction (European war) :
817
France's second Verdun. L. S. Gannett ;
Russia :
SA
686
Moscow radio station stops army of League
now to restore civilization. Reply to P. B.
of nations; EdP
360
Noyes's Justice to Germany and France.
Protest against the "Communistic experi
O. J. SchuBter; Cr
215
ment; EdP
420
Rebellion against the modified Soviet gov
Noyes; IRSA
92
ernment; EdP
420
Russia still in shadows. G. Zilboorg ; BRs. 820
Red Bishop
Cross : of Cork asks for aid and receives
RussiaCommerce :
No trade restrictions in U. S. but gold has
none; EdP
28
Lies, Russia, and the Red Cross; EdA.... 165
no value; EdP
28
Reed. Clyde M. :
U. S. trade with Russia dependent upon
Kansas and Howat. Reply to Kansas court
economic bases of production ; EdP .... 495
of industrial relations by E, Hayes ; Cr. 595 RussiaEconomic conditions :
Kansas court of industrial relations; SA. . 505
Condition of Soviet industrialism. L. ColReply to his, Kansas court of industrial
cord: SA
396
relations by E. A. Wieck ; Cr
625 Russia, Far East. See Far Eastern Republic.
RussiaForeign relations :
Reed, F. W. :
Recognize Russia 1 ; EdA
468
Utter abomination ; Cr
267
Russia and the concessionnaires ; IRD
356
Reed, Homer :
Russia at peace. P. Hibben ; SA
113
Pedestal of principle; Cr
406
Reply to by N. A. Cole; Cr
611 RussiaForeign relationsUnited States :
Mr. Christensen feels America is friend of
Reed, Luther and Hale Hamilton:
Dear me; D
301
Russia ; EdP
29
President Wilson's Russian policy; EdP.. 162
Referendum :
RussiaHistoryBolshevist revolution :
Initiative, referendum and recall. J. W.
Development of Soviet power; IRD
415
Wells; Cr
626
Enemies of Soviet Russia manufacture
Refugees :
No more political asylum; EdA
864
propaganda ; EdP
466
[Jan.-June, 1921
Lenin on the state of Russia; IRD
412
Reports on Russia. J. Zeitland ; BRs
19
Russia: Smoked glass vs. rose-tint. H. G.
Alsberg; SA
844
Soviet orders every one to go to the
theater; EdP
827
Soviet recognized by Great Britain ; EdP.. 778
RussiaHistoryRevolution. 1917 :
Baron Rosen's testimony. R. E. Stifel : Cr. 86
RussiaIndustries and resources :
Russia and the concessionnaires: IRD.... 366
Russian industry; IRD
415
RussiaIntellectual life :
To save the intellectual life of Russia :
IRD
864
RussiaParis anti-Bolshevist conference. See
Paris anti-Bolshevist conference.
RussiaRelief work. See Relief work.
RussiaTransportation. See Transportation
Russia.
RussiaTreatiesAfghanistan :
Treaty between Russia and Afghanistan :
IRD
698
RussiaTreatiesPersia :
Russian-Persian treaty; EdP
677
Treaty between Russia and Persia : IRD . . 696
RussiaTreatiesPoland :
Russian-Polish treaty; IRD
720
Russian clowns ; Dft
48
Russian embassy :
Embassy said to be supported by the U. S. :
EdP
251
Nation's statement of U. S. support of
Russian embassy criticized; EdP
827
Russians in China :
China explains to the diplomats: IRD.... 193
Russians in the United States :
Let ub be fair to Russia. V. Gertlin : Cr. . 816
Ryder, Warren :
Wanted : More tolerance and understand
ing ; SA
180
S
S.. B. W.:
Farmer's testimony; Cr
919
S., J. L. :
Woodrow Wilson and Panama : Cr
876
Sabina. S. Graham; P
264
Sacco, Nicola :
Sacco and Vanzetti case. E. G. Evans :
SA
842
Salem, Condita 1626. H. C. Gauss; P
44
Sales tax. See TaxationUnited States.
Sally ; D
21
Salsedo, Marie :
Suing Attorney General Palmer; EdP
70
Sarcey, Francisque :
According to Sarcey. L. Lewisohn; D.... 698
Sassoon, Siegfried :
Case for the miners; P
716
Sawyer, Charles E. :
Dr. Sawyer made a Brigadier General in
the army; EdP
419
Schapiro, J. Salwyn :
Mr. Wells discovers the past. Review of.
Outline of history; SA
224
Ripping review : Reply to his review of
H. G. Wells's Outline of history, by
S. StrunBky; Cr
266
Why Wells's "Outline" is remarkable. Re
ply to S. Strunsky; Cr
296
Schmedemann, Albert G. :
Diplomat of experience. H. Jackson ; Cr. . 16
Schnitzler. Arthur :
Sixtieth birthday; EdP
703
School boards :
Oppose liberalism ; EdP
640
School buildings. See Schoolhouses.
Schoolhouses :
New York city refuses use to Community
Forum; EdP
640
Schools :
New education : Its trend and purpose. E.
Dewey ; SA
654
New education : The modern school. E.
Dewey; SA
684
Schuecking, Walther:
In behalf of Dr. Simons; SA
433
Schuster, O. J. :
How to restore civilization. Reply to P. B.
Noyes's Justice to Germany and France;
Cr
215
Scott, Evelyn :
Love. Criticism by L. Lewisohn; D
411
"Scrap of paper" :
Origin of "A scrap of paper." O. Klausner; . .Cr
120
Sedition :
Governor Miller approves New York se
dition bills; EdP
726
Philadelphia police arrest E. G. Flynn for
holding seditious meeting; EdP
419
Sedition. See also Free speech.
Seligmann, Herbert J. :
Photographer challenges
268
Slavery in Georgia, A.D. 1921 ; SA
591
Serbia :
President Wilson's statement relative to
armed help for Serbia and Rumania made
public; EdP
778
Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley :
citizens?; SA
688
Serrati, G. M. :
Serrati answers for his party; IRD
443
Service, Robert W. :
Popular poet of the moment; EdP
679
Sevres. Treaty of. See Peace treaty, 1919
Turkish treaty.
Sex. A. Guiterman; P
666
Shakespeare. William :
Macbeth. Criticism by L. Lewisohn : D . . 849
Scheme to use Shakespeare memorial
theater for the movies; EdP
807
Winter's tale: D
301
Xos. 2896-2921]
Index
Soviet government:
"
Henry Wood:
115
Soviet idea is making headway in the Near
Three-shift system steel industry: SA
Sheppard-Towner act. See Maternity benefits.
East; EdP
888
Sparkes, Malcolm :
Sherman anti-trust law :
Solving housing in England ; SA
16
Why the Sherman anti-trust law has failed :
Felix:
SA
403 Sper,Why
is a farmer?; SA
116
Leonora:
Reply to G. Gardner; Cr
696 Speyer,
Mary Magdalene; P
744
Sherower, Miles M. :
Victory;
P
482
Japanese imperialism : SA
176 Spies :
Shipping. See also Merchant marine.
Postmasters
may
not
be
spies
for
corpora
Shipping board (United States). See United
tion detective agencies ; EdP
834
StatesShipping board.
Spies. Industrial :
Offer to obtain among employees petitions
ShippingUnited States :
for wage reduuction ; EdP
834
known to Shipping board; EdP
196-7 Spring :
Spring comes to Fifth Avenue; Dft
406
Shurilla, John C. :
Heralds of spring; EdP
679
Shurilla case. Reply to What is American
Stars; Dft
610
ism anyway? by W. S. Smith, with
Steamship lines :
Editorial rejoinder and quotation from
Royal Mail Steam Packet Co. between
the New York Times; Cr
849
Europe and Seattle; EdP
497
729 Steel industry
and trade:
Sicily:
Three-shift
system
steel
industry.
H.
W.
Seizure of the land in Sicily. G. Prezzolini
Shelton: SA
116
337 Steel strike,
SA
1919:
Sisurjonsson, Johann:
Pittsburgh's prostituted press. C. G.
Eyvind of the hills; D
MiUer; SA
8
301
Silesia :
Sterling, George :
Polish invasion of Upper Silesia on May
Mirage; P
652
2; EdP
701 : 726 Stieglitz, Alfred :
Outcome in Upper Silesia ; EdA
470
Photographer challenges. H. J. Seligmann 268
SilesiaThe new plague spot. D. MeirRichard E. :
owsky; SA
739 Stifel,Baron
Rosen's testimony; Cr
86
Silesian plebiscite. S. M. Bouton : SA
371 Slopes. Marie
:
Still unsettled; EdP
833
"Married
love,"
denied
mailing
privileges
;
Simonds, Frank H. :
EdP
868
Usue of German reparations; Cr
214 Stradivarius,
Antonius :
Simons, Walter :
Ohlhaver discovers his secret; EdP
163
In behalf of Dr. Simons. W. Schuecking
"^vStrange, Michael, pesud.
SA
433
Clair
de
Lune.
Criticism
by
L.
Lewisohn
:
Sinn, William Sowden :
672
Abuse of Irish in America ; EdP
861 Straus,D Henrietta :
"Said Admiral Sims to Ambassador Har
Italy's
new
music-drama
;
1
822
vey"; EdP
863
Radicalism in music; M...
21
Sinclair, Upton :
"Third" Italy; M
668
Andrew Carnesrie in the Homestead strike.
Street
railroads
:
Comment on review of the Autobiography
railways tangle. L. Budenz: SA. . 202
of Andrew Carnegie; Cr
798 StreetStreet
railroadsstrikes :
Correction of an advertisement. H. C.
Maintaining
order in Albany ; EdA 393
Hobart; Cr
689 Strickland report.lawSeeandCork,
Ireland.
Sin; Sing:
Strike
breakers
:
Prison newspaper suspended ; Dft
624
Maintaining
law
and
order
in Albany ; EdA 393
Slacker lists:
:
Impossible and untimely task : EdP
703 Strikes
Bill
to
prohibit
strikes
on
common car
Smith, Edwin S. :
riers; EdP
8
Disarmament parade; Cr
876
Buyers
strike;
Dft
478
Smith, Preserved :
Newbern
iron
works.
North
Carolina
:
EdP
28
Physics
in metaphysics;
BRs
Non-resident marine strikers asked to leave
Smith,
W. Strothers
(Rear Admiral,
U.S.N.) : 670
Portland, Maine; EdP
806
Shurilla case. Reply to What is Ameri
Rumanian
general strike: IRD
23
canism anyway?, with Editorial re
Supreme
court
of
Queens
Co.,
N.
Y.,
re
joinder and quotation from the New York
strains strikers from picketing: EdP... 278
Cr
849
U. S. marine strike due to cut in wages
Smuts,Times;
Jan Christian
:
and open shop ; EdP
702
letter to the district committees of South
Strunsky,
Simeon :
African
party;
IRFP
302
Ripping
review
:
Comment
on
J.
S.
SchaSwwden, Thomas:
piro's review of G. H. Wells's Outline of
Announces withdrawal of American forces
history; Cr
266
in
Santo
Domingo;
EdP
2
Why
Wells's "Outline" is remarkable. Re
Socialism:
ply
of
J.
S.
Schapiro
to
Mr.
Strunsky
;
Propaganda
in girls' colleges ; EdP
779
Cr
296
Socialism
in Germany:
Style, Literary. Progress of prose; EdA
109
Supply
and
demand:
Bouton:
SA
667
Equitable
distribution
of
products.
W.
G.
;
Socialism >n Italy:
Cr
120
Appeal to the Italian socialists; IRD
447
Plea for free credit. J. B. Barnhill : Cr. . 215
Everybody wins in Leghorn. E. Lyons : SA. 430 Supreme
court
of
the
United
States
:
FasciamoThe reaction in Italy. C. Beats ;
Decision in rent laws; EdP
641
SA
666
Decision in the Milwaukee Leader case ;
926
EdP
891
Italian socialists and the International ;
Oases of freedom. N. Hapgood : SA
211
DID
447
Supreme
court
strikes
at
the
press:
EdA..
422
Lenin's letter to the Italian socialists ; IRD. 442 Supreme court vs. labor; EdA
78
Line-up of the factions in Italy ; IRD
446 Sweeney, Charles P. :
Serrati answers for his party; IRD
443
Bigotry
not
one
sided:
Cr
17
Socialist communes in Italy. Resolutions of
& Company, per L. D. H. Weld:
congress of ; IRD
923 SwiftFederal
trade
commission
and
packers
;
Cr
267
Socialists
communists
relationsFrance :
SonalUt
partyand
(United
States) :split; EdP.... 196 SwitzerlandForeign
Franco-Swiss dissension on the question of
Court upholds Mt. Vernon ban on social
free
zones.
R.
Dell;
SA
290
ists; EdP
833
Free zone question still unsettled ; EdP . . 639
Why the Socialist vote shrank. M. Mahler
Sykes,
Sir
Frederick
:
Cr
of frightfulness in war; EdP.. 419
*Tiy the Socialist vote shrank! ' P.' Thomp- 29G SyriaApproves
:
Cr
Feisal
and
the French : IRD
49
481
French in Syria. P. Hibben ; SA
287
ic
course
in
Europe;
EdP..
196
k*hitl. See
International Socialists
T
^ conference.
Tahiti :
*Disabled :
Artists in Tahiti; EdP.
106
John:
men; EdP for care of former service
163 Tangney,
Testimony
before
the
American
commission
President Harding recommends centraliza
818
tion of various services: EdP
609 TariffUnited
States:
.
.
Problem turned over to Brigadier General
Food
taxesfor whom?: EdA.......
363
Sawyer; EdP
678
Free trade against selfishness ; EdA .
582
rreeedence to be given to ex-service men
High
tariff
kills
foreign
trade:
EdP
.-778
i_ civil service?; EdP
826
Mr. Hoover favors high tariff: EdP...... 702
George:
Non-partisan
Leader
on
the
tariff
on
food
;
Coal's black record; SA
78
EdP
251
Good union or bad?: SA
813
Quack remedy : EdA .
32
Produce! Produce I : SA
13
Republicans to put through the emergency
What wage' reduction means ; SA
384
tariff;
EdP
420
kitchens
Tariff comment. N. H. Dole: Cr.. ....... 405
, Why
soup : kitchens? C. B. Baldwin: Cr. . 215
Why tariffs will not stay revised; EdA. 199
'Africa :
Tarkington,
Booth:
f"Wh Africa's crisis; IRFP
302
Contemporary American novelists. I/, van
*"tth
new rrovince : IRD
877
Doren
:
SA
233
Vol Africa's
against accession . EdP
277 TaxationGermany :
est Africa :
Direct and indirect taxation; EdP.
527
r,date for South-West Africa (terms) :
States:
laD
577 TaxationUnited
Secretary Mellon's proposals for readjustSou Africa's new province; 1BD
877
EdP
6"8
r-
[Vol. cxii
Undesirable sales tax: EdA
688
taxes. H. C. Brown; SA
789
Teacher-baiting: the new sport; EdA
612
Teachers :
American federation of teachers, fifth con
vention; EdP
279
New York teachers must take loyalty oath ;
EdP
726
Teaching :
7 out of 308 in Princeton class wish to
teach; EdP
863
Technique, Fallacy of; EdA
283
Teeth :
Roots of all evil; EdA
646
Telephone :
Party line hog; Dft
848
Textile workers :
Labor finds out for itself. E. Clark ; SA. . 208
C. Long; SA
478
Thayer, Abbott H.:
Call for letters and pictures of Mr. Thayer;
Cr
876
Thomas, Augustus:
Nemesis. Criticism by L. Lewisohn; D.. 698
Thomas, Margaret Loring :
Educators, not militarists, needed; Cr. . . . 816
Thompson, John H. :
Prize for one good reason for private
manufacture of revolvers ; EdP
905
Thompson, O. R. Howard :
Views of verse. Comment on Nation's
prize poems ; Cr
406
Thompson, Phillips:
Why the socialist vote shrank; Cr
481
Thompson, William Hale :
Municipal reform. A suggestion; EdA... 730
Those good old days; EdA
613
Three wise men of the East. F. Peterson : P. 787
Thrift :
Menace of thrift: EdA
256
Tirpitz, Alfred C. Friedrich von :
Associated Press publishes interview on
armament; EdP
825
"Too busy to fight" ; Dft
48
Trade. See Export trade. See also Subhead
Commerce under name of country.
Trade unions :
camps. P. Hapgood; SA
661
Trade unionsGreat Britain :
Collapse of the Triple alliance. F. Morley ;
SA
709
EdP
607
Trade unionsUnited States :
Cordwainers' caseAfter a century. A.
De Silver; SA
482
Good union or bad? G. Soule ; SA
818
Supreme court vs. labor; EdA
73
United States steel corporation's attitude
on unions; EdP
607
Trade unions. See also Open and closed shop.
Trade unions congress :
International labor report at the 1920 meet
ing ; IRD
26
Transplanting Jean: drama by Callaivet and
Flers: D
800
TransportationRussia :
Rail and water transportation in Russia :
IRFP
417
Treaty of Versailles. See Peace Treaty. 1919.
Trial of Joan of Arc : drama by E. Moreau : D 631
Trombly, Albert Edmund:
Poetae minores ; P
117
Truth:
On truthing it; EdA
86S
Tulsa, Oklahoma :
Eruption of Tulsa. W. F. White: SA
909
Tulsa; EdA
889
Turgenev, Ivan Sergievich :
Turgenev and his heroes. J. Zeitlin ; SA. 712
Turkey :
Diplomatically wins in the Near Eastern
conference; EdP
859
Treatment of Turks by Crusaders and
modern Christians ; Dft
875
TurkeyTreaties :
Greece and the Turkish treaty; EdP
625
Secret treaty between Italy and Turkish
nationalists: EdP
689
Turner, John Kenneth :
recognized; SA
788
Typhus fever :
Eastern Europe typhus land; EdP
361
Tyranny of love: drama by G. de Porto-Riche:
D
489
U
UnemploymentGreat Britain :
Labor and unemployment in England :
IRD
128
UnemploymentUnited States :
Why soup kitchenB? C. B. Baldwin: Cr. . 215
More soup kitchens; EdA
108
Union of South Africa. See South Africa.
United war fund :
Unexpended balance to feed Europe's chil
dren ; EdP
106
United StatesArmy :
Debate in House on army of 175,000 ; EdP. 677
Senate raises army to 175,000; EdP
105
Army reorganization bill passes the House
over the President's veto; EdP
261
Senate resolution to limit size of the army ;
EdP
69
United StatesCabinet :
Mr. Harding's cabinet: EdA
862
Nation's suggestions for Mr. Harding's
cabinet; EdP
859
Workers in the cabinet. G. Fentrick : Cr. 595
United StatesCommerce:
Canceling international orders; EdA
110
Vol. cxii]
No trade restrictions for Russia but her
gold has no value ; EdP
28
No war with England : Our world trade
rivalry; EdA
610
Trade with Russia dependent upon eco
nomic bases of production; EdP
496
United StatesCongress :
Legislation as the administrations change;
EdP
390
What congress ought to do ; EdA
582
United StatesCongressHouse of represen
tatives
Ratio
of : representation according to 1920
census; EdP
105
Wicked Blanton ; EdA
831
United StatesConstitution :
729
United StatesEconomic conditions :
Business crisis; EdA
906
United StatesExecutive departments:
New departments proposed for government
at Washington; EdP
908
United StatesFederal trade commission :
Federal trade commission and packers.
Swift & Co., per L. D. H. Weld: Cr
267
Federal trade commission yields to pres
sure. G. T. Odell; SA
86
Letter to President Harding on economic
distress; EdP
608
United StatesForeign population :
Bureau of the census and Immigration
bureau differ on alien statistics; EdP.. 640
United StatesForeign relations:
4
Our aggressive foreign policy; EdA
642
No open diplomacy between U. S., Japan
and China; EdP
326
U. S. to take a place again in the Allied
councils; EdP
701
Waiting for the President's foreign policy ;
EdP
903
Wilson's legacy to Harding; EdA
282
United StatesForeign relationsColombia :
Anxious to ratify Colombian treaty ; EdP. 608
United StatesForeign relationsFrance:
Viviani welcomed to the U. S. ; EdP
465
United StatesForeign relationsGermany :
First move for real peace: Secretary
Hughes's note to the Germans; EdA.. 628
United StatesForeign relationsGreat Brit
ain :
No war with England: Fact, fancy, myth,
and rumor; EdA
837
United StatesForeign relationsJapan :
Japan and ourselves; EdA
166
United StatesForeign relationsLatin
America :
Need deeds not merely praise of Bolivar ;
EdP
689
United StatesForeign relationsMexico :
Attitude of American oil interests; EdP.. 805
Bullying Mexico; EdA
864
Mexico1921 : Relations with the United
614
Recognize Mexico 1; EdA
780
Senator Fall's terms for the recognition of
Mexico; EdP
890
recognized. J. K. Turner; SA
783
United StatesForeign relationsRuusia:
Recognize Russia!; EdA
468
United StatesHistory :
Historical analogies. P. Warren; Cr
748
United StatesHistoryRevolution :
Extraordinary parallel between American
revolution and Ireland today. C. M. An
drews; Cr
377
Irish and American independence. L. Colcord ; SA
878
Irish and American independence. Reply to
L. Colcord by J. W. Pennypacker and
others; Cr
435
joinder. C. M. Andrews; Cr
538
United StatesJustice, department of:
Attorney General Palmer sued by Marie
Salsedo; EdP
70
United StatesMarine corps :
Americanizing Santo Domingo. P. Doug
las ; Cr
663
Conduct of Americans abroad. J. C. Gil ;
Cr
376
Destroy newspaper in Nicaragua; EdP... 277
Guam brides and Yap honeymoons ; Dft. . 43
United StatesMerchant marine. See Mer
chant marineU. S.
United StatesNavy :
Disgraceful naval bill; EdA
836
England ready for a navy talk; EdA.... 467
Naval appropriation bill put over to new
congress; EdP
390
No war with England : Menace of naval
competition; EdA
681
Our armament race with Japan. H. R.
MusBey; SA
179
Plan for naval holiday; EdP
69
Senate resolution for a naval holiday ; EdP 162
Utter abomination. F. W. Reed; Cr
267
United StatesShipping board :
known to the board; EdP
196
Albert D. Lasker appointed chairman ;
EdP
834
United StatesState, Department of:
Let's have done with Wiggle and Wobble.
D. Bryant; SA
534
Obstructs relief to Russia; EdP
104
United States and England. See England and
the United States.
United States steel corporation :
Attitude on unions; EdP
607
Universities. See Colleges and universities.
Untermyer, Samuel L. :
Withdraws from building inquiry; EdP... 807
Index
V
Valera, Eamon de:
Returns to Ireland: EdP
28
Van Doren, Carl:
Contemporary American novelists; SA. . 40;
233; 400; 619; 741 ; 914
Van Doren. Mark :
Concerning poetry; BRs
241
John Keats. 1821-1921 ; SA
292
Progress of poetry: England; SA
883
Vane, Francis Fletcher:
Ireland, England, and the United States.
Reply to C. Noonan ; Cr
792
Vanzetti, Bartolomeo :
Sacco and Vanzetti case. E. G. Evans ; SA. 842
Vatican :
Neutral in international affairs ; EdP. . . . 778
Victory. L. Speyer : P
482
Villard, Oswald Garrison:
Franklin K. Lane; SA
788
Mr. Lansing lifts the veil; SA
472
Reply to his, Mr. Lansing lifts the veil, by
J. A. Hennesy; Cr
625
Vilna:
Plebiscite unlikely; EdP
252
Viner, Jacob:
Correcting a historian. Reply to C. M.
Andrews's Iirsh and American indepen
dence; Cr
626
ViolinB :
Ohlhaver discovers Stradivarius secret :
EdP
168
Visa office. See Passports.
Viviani, Rene1 :
Welcomed to the United States; EdP
465
Vivos Voco :
New German liberal monthly. K. Francke;
Cr
16
Vladivostok :
Parties and governments in the Far East :
IRFP
191
Voice from the past G. P. West; SA
339
Von Tirpitz. See Tirpitz, Alfred P. Friedrich von.
Votaw, Heber:
Appointed Superintendent of Federal
prisons; EdP
679
W., F. C:
New destiny for Ireland; Cr
624
Wages :
High wages cut to meet the lower cost of
living; EdP
702
Majority of railroads confer with Railroad
labor board on wage cuts; EdP
421
Method of wage reduction in clothing in
dustry; EdP
779
Methods of cutting labor costs; EdP
779
What wage reduction means. G. Soule ; SA 834
Wake up, Jonathan : drama by H. Hughes and
E. E. Rice; D
189
Walking :
Walking as an amusement; Dft
716
Wall street explosion :
In the court of press-made opinion. W.
Nelles; SA
711
Walsh, R. J.:
Is business a game?; BRs
239
Walton, Eda Lou:
I should like to live in a ballad world ; P . . 626
Wanderer :
W. Bynner; P
37
War:
Frightfulness in war approved by Sir Fred
erick Sykes; EdP
419
From an American naval officer. L. H.
Roddis; Cr
876
How war comes about. H. D. ; Cr
341
League of women voters begin movement
to end war; EdP
609
Tail goes with the hide. H. Channing ; Cr. 665
War. See also Disarmament ; Armament.
War debts. See Debts, Public.
War finance:
"No actual cash transfer" ; Dft
663
Tax on ice cream in automatic eatrys ; Dft. 874
War laws, repeal of. A. De Silver; SA
587
War taxation. See War finance.
Warburg, Paul H. :
International Acceptance bank; EdP
679
Warfield, S. Davies:
Railroad problem. Reply to Editorial re
joinder to President Willard on "The
Railroad Wreck"; Cr
716
Warships :
Battleship a back-number in modem war;
EdP
.'
904
Ware, N. J.:
Creative ideal; SA
374
Warner, Arthur :
Enter the labor press: SA
785
Italians in the United States; BR
744
Lost: Those lower prices; SA
168
Reply to his, Enter the labor press, by G.
O'Day and C. Binder; Cr
918
Warren, Prescott :
HarveyShould be recalled; Cr
919
Historical analogies; Cr
743
Warwick, Gertrude H. :
How not to settle the race question. Reply
to B. Bliven's Japanese problem; Cr. . . . 376
Washburn College:
Report of committee of the American asso
ciation of University professors on dis
missal of J. E. Kirkpatrick; EdP
467
Waste :
Challenge of waste to existing industrial
creeds S. Chase; SA
284
Weitzenkorn, Louis :,
Jew among the Fords; SA
652
Weld, L. D. H. See Swift ft Company.
[Jan.-June, 1921
Wells, George Herbert:
Mr. Wells discovers the past. Review of
Outline of history, by J. S. Schapiro;
BR
224
Ripping review: comment on J. S. Schapiro's review of The Outline of history,
by S. Strunsky; Cr
266
Why Wells's "Outline" is remarkable. J. S.
Schapiro. Reply to S. Strunsky; Cr.... 296
Wells, J. W.:
Initiative, referendum, and recall; Cr. ... 626
Wendell, Barrett. Obituary; EdP
279
West, George P.:
Good news from California; SA
867
Mooney case today; SA
622
Voice from the past; SA
339
Westminster, Archbishop of. See Bourne,
Francis, cardinal.
West Virginia:
Strike question not come up in trial of
"Sid Hatfield"; EdP
465
Wharton, Mrs. Edith Newbold (Jones) :
Age of Innocence receives Pulitzer prize ;
EdP
807
Doren ; SA
40
White, Edward Douglass:
Chief Justice White: Appreciation; EdA.. 781
White, R. Clyde:
Teaching the young idea how to gas; Cr.. 743
White, Sue S. :
Future of the woman's party. Reply to F.
Kirchwey's Alice Paul pulls the strings ;
Cr
434
Women and the law; SA
402
White. Walter F. :
Eruption of Tulsa; SA
909
Wieck, Edward A.:
Kansas court of industrial relations. Reply
to C. M. Reed; Cr
625
Wilde, Oscar:
Importance of being earnest; D
801
Wilhelm, F. P.:
Hymn of hate. Reply to L. S. Gannett's
Black troops on the Rhine, with re
joinder by the Editor; Cr
815
Wilkinson, Ellen C. :
460
Willard, Daniel:
President Willard on, "The Railroad
Wreck," with a rejoinder by the Editor ;
Cr
594
Railroad problem. Reply to Editorial re
joinder on "The Railroad Wreck": Cr... 716
Correspondence relative to armed help for
Serbia and Rumania made public; EdP. 778
Wilson, Woodrow:
Mr. Debs asks American people to pardon
Mr. Wilson; EdP
253
Passing of Mr. Wilson; EdA
328
Refuses to pardon E. Debs on Lincoln's
birthday; EdP
253
Russian policy; EdP
162
Wilson's legacy to Harding; EdA
282
Woodrow Wilson and Panama. J. L. S. ;
Cr
876
Winner, Lily :
American emigres ; SA
714
Winter's Tale: drama by W. Shakespeare; D.. 301
Witch craft:
How it is handled in 1920; EdP
8
Withington, Robert. See Pennypacker, J. W..
and others.
Wolinsky, Mrs. of the brass shop; Dft
715
Woman :
Barber shops preempted by bobbed-haired
women ; Dft
663
WomanEducation. See Education of women.
WomanIreland :
Irish women and the Republican army ;
IRD
858
WomanLaw :
Women and the law. S. S. White: SA
402
Woman suffrageMexico :
Woman suffrage in Mexico; IRD
676
Woman suffrageUnited States :
Disfranchisement of women in Georgia ;
Dft
16
White woman's burden; EdA
257
Woman suffrageUnited States. See also
League of women voters.
Woman's party :
Future of the woman's party. S. S. White
and E. R. Murray. Reply to F. Kirch
wey's Alice Paul pulls the strings ; Cr . . 434
Special committee on disarmament; EdP. 72(
Women and politics:
Are women a menace?; EdA
19*
Home and highwaywomen ; EdA
16'
Women to the rescue. H. C. Brown; SA. . 26:
Wood, Clement:
Canopus ; P
88'
Wood, Junius B. :
Thought control in Japan; SA
29*
Wood, Leonard :
Goes to the University of Pennsylvania as
"head"; EdP
49
"World is so full of a number of things
EdP
7:
Wylie, Elinor. Church-bell; P
26
Y
Yacht races :
Transatlantic races; Dft
21
YaleAthletics :
Besoiled athletes; EdA
58
Yap:
Britain, America, Japanand Yap. J. W.
Pennypacker ; Cr
66
Yogiraja, pseud. :
Non-cooperationIndia's new weapon ; SA. 11
Nos. 2896-2921]
z
Zeitlin, Jacob :
Reports on Russia; BKs
Turgenev and his heroes ; SA
Zilboorg, Gregory :
Russia still in shadows; BRs
lion City (Illinois). Nook of purity; EdP..
Zionism:
Palestinian problems. H. K. Moderwell ;
SA
Zionism today. L. Lipsky ; SA
Index
[Vol. cxii
Becker. Carl: R
186: 747 Business research and statistics. J. G. Fred
Beckett, Grace, comp. :
erick : BR
289
Songs of joy ; BN
630 Butler, Geoffrey :
Beers, Henry A. :
Studies in statecraft; BR
717
Connecticut wits and other essays: AN.. 749%
Behavior of crowds. E. D. Martin ; BN
630
C
Belloc, Hilaire :
Cabell, James Branch :
House of commons and monarchy : BN . . . 796
Figures
of
earth
;
BR
881
Benet. Stephen Vincent:
Cambridge history of American literature. Ed.
651
Heavens
and
earth;
BR
86
by
W.
P.
Trent.
John
Erskine.
Stuart
649 Benet, William Rose:
P. Sherman and Carl Van Doren. Vols.
Moons of grandeur; BR
86
8 and 4; BR
552
Bennett, Arnold :
Campbell, John Archibald. H. G. Connor: BN. 849
Our women; BN
90 Camping and woodcraft. H. Kephart : AN
514
BOOK REVIEWS
Things that have interested me; BN
796 Canfleld, Dorothy and S. Cleghorn :
Book reviews may be found by author and
Bentwich. Norman :
Fellow captains; BR
612
title, the following letters indicate the type
Hellenism:
BR
864 Canopic jar. L. Speyer ; BR
693
of review:
Berdan, John M. :
Carducci, Giosue :
Early Tudor poetry: 1485-1547: BN
671
8R Book review
Selection from poems. Tr. by E. A. Tribe :
Bergson and his philosophy. J. A, Gunn ; BR. 564
BN Book note
AN
718
Bernhardt, F. A. J. von :
AN Brief annotation
Careers for women. C. Filene; AN
300
K Name of the reviewer
War of the future; AN
514 Carnegie, Andrew :
Best short stories of 1920. Ed. E. J. O'Brien :
Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie: BR.. 667
AN
881 Case for liberty. E. S. P. Haynes : BN
90
Betham-Edwards. M. tr. and comp. :
Cassirer, E. :
French fireside poetry: BN
680
Zur Einsteinschen relativitStBtheorie ; BR. 670
Accepting the universe. J. Burroughs; BR... 89 Bing, Alexander M. :
Centennial history of Illinois. Illinois Centen
War time strikes and their adjustment:
Acheson, Arthur :
nial Commission. Vols. 1, 4, 5: BN.... 47
Shakespeare's lost years in London, 1686BR
408
(Review of Vols. 2 and 8 in Vol. 110. p.
1592: BR
745 Biographical dictionary of modern rationalists.
884.)
Across America with the king of the Belgians.
J. McCabe, comp.: AN
514 Chafee, Zechariah, Jr.:
86
P. Goemaere; BR
658 Birds and other poems. J. C. Squire: BR
Freedom of speech; BR
877
Across Mongolian plains. R. C. Andrews ; AN 614 Birds of the La Plate. W. H. Hudson: BN.. 47 Chesterton, G. K. :
Bishop, Joseph Bucklin :
Adams, Henry:
New Jerusalem; AN
614
Letters to a niece and prayer to the virgin
Theodore Roosevelt and his time; BR.... 18
Uses of diversity; BR
484
Blanchard. Phyllis. See Knight, M. M.
of Chartres. With a niece's memories,
Chekhov, Anton :
409
by Mabel La Farge; BR
409 Blind mice. C. K. Scott; BR
Schoolmistress and other stories ; AN
800
Adams, Letters cycle of. W. C. Ford, ed. : BR 242 Blood of things. A. Kreymborg ; BR
86 Chew, Samuel C. : R
652: 745
Adventures among birds. W. H. Hudson: BN.. 47 Blunden, Edmund :
Chips of jade. A. Guiterman ; BN
124
Adventures and enthusiasms. E. V. Lucas :
Waggoner; BR
747 Choate, Joseph Hodges, Life of. E. S. Martin :
299
BN
90 Boas, George; R
BR
482
Aeschylus :
Bogart, Ernest L. :
Christ. N. Morozov ; BR
896
Agamemnon, tr. by Gilbert Murray: BN 749%
War costs and their financing; AN
921 Christian socialism, 1848-54. C. E. Raven ; BN 247
Aesthetic attitude. H. S. Langfeld : BR
846 Bogart, Ernest Ludlow and Charles Manfred
Cicero : A biography. T. Petersson ; BN
694
Africa: Slave or free? J. H. Harris; AN
614
Thompson :
Cicero, Marcus Tullius:
Industrial state: 1870-1898; BN
47
M. Tulli Ciceronis de diviniatione liber
primus. Commentary by A. S. Pease : AN 922
Aeschylus. Tr. by G. Murray: BN.... 749 % Bogart, Ernest Ludlow and John Mabry
Aiken. Conrad:
Civil war in West Virginia. W. D. Lane: AN 922
Mathews :
House of dust; BR
Modern commonwealth: 1898-1918; BN... 47 Clark, Donald Lemen ; R
629
86
Aikman, Henry G. :
Bohn, Georges :
Clark. Thomas Arkle:
Zell; BR
Mouvement biologique en Eurooe : BR ... . 560
Discipline and the derelict; AN
718
409
Alaska man's luck. H. Rutzebeck | BR
19 Cleghorn, Sarah :
298 Bolshevik adventure. J. Pollock; BR
Alexander, Hartley Burr :
Bolshevik Russia. C. E. Raine and E. I.ubofT ;
Portraits and protests; BR
612
Mythology of all races. Vol. 9 Latin Amer
Spinster: BR
612
Cr
820
ica; BR
888 Bolshevik theory. R. W. Postgate : BR
19
Turnpike lady; BR
612
Allen, Henry J. :
Bolton, Herbert Eugene and Thomas Maitland
Cleghorn, Sarah and Dorothy Canfleld :
Psrty of the third part: AN
921
Fellow
captains;
BR
612
Marshall
:
Alvord, Clarence Walworth :
Clemen, Karl, comp. :
Colonization of North America, 1492-1788 :
Illinois country: 1673-1818; BN
47
Fontes historiae religionis Persicae : BN. . 821
AN
800
American English. G. M. Tucker; AN
760% Book of
Clough, Arthur Hugh. J. I. Osburne ; BR
122
Jewish
thoughts.
J.
H.
Hertz,
comp.
:
American footprints in Paris. F. Boucher and
Cocks,
F. Seymour:
BN
630
F. W. Huard; AN
921 Books on the table. E. Gosse ; AN
922
E. D. Morel : The man and his work : BR. 749
American political ideas. 1866-1917. C. E.
Bottomley, Gordon :
Coleridge, Stephen :
Merriam;
BR
842
Plays: King Lear's wife. The crier by
Idolatry of science: BN
47
And the
Kaiser abdicates.
S. M. Ronton ; BR. 843
Collected
legal papers. O. W. Holmes: BR
287
night.
The
riding
to
Lithend.
Midsum
Andrews, Roy Chapman :
mer eve. Laodice and Dana$ ; BR
796 Colonization of North America, 1492-1783. H.
Across Mongolian plains; AN
514 Boucher, Francois and Frances Wilson Huard :
E. Bolton and T. M. Marshall; AN
800
Andreyev, Leonid :
American footprints in Paris ; AN
921 Colum, Padraic; R
846
Satan's diary. Tr. by H. Bernstein: BR.. 48 Bouton, S. Miles :
Columbian
tradition
on
the
discovery
of
Amer
Anthology of magazine verse for 1920. W. S.
And the Kaiser abdicates; BR
848
ica. H. Vignaud; BR
436
Braithwaite.
; BNL. D'O. Walters : 124 Boyle. James E. :
Coming of Gabrielle. G. Moore: BR
852
Anthology
of recentcomp.
poetry.
Community eapito). M. C. Kelly: AN
718
Speculation and the Chicago board of
BN
188
381
trade: BN
410 Comte, Auguste. F. J. Gould; AN
Anthony, Katharine :
Connecticut wits and other essays. H. A.
Bradford. Gamaliel :
Margaret Fuller: A psychological biog
Beers: AN
749%
Prophet
of
joy;
BR
86
raphy : BN
46
Charles. J. M. Robertson; AN
881 Connor, Henry G. :
Anthony, Katharine: R
407 Bradlaugh,
John Archibald Campbell: BN
849
Bradley, A. C, comp. :
Arfcato, Shakespeare and Corneille. B. Croce ;
Conrad, Joseph :
Essays
and
studies
by
members
of
the
Eng
BR
819
Notes
on
life
and
letters;
BR
921
lish
association;
AN
614
Art of interesting. F. P. Donnelly; BN
S48 Braithwaite, William Stanley, comp. :
Cooke, George Willis :
Art of letters. R. Lynd ; BR
669
Social
evolution
of
religion;
BR
187
Anthology
of
magazine
verse
for
1920
and
Art of poetry. W. P. Ker; BR
241
year book of American ooetry: BN.... 124 Corbin, Alice :
"ton. Anthony:
Red earth. Poems of New Mexico; BR
244
Breakers and granite. J. G. Fletcher: BR . . . 662
Anthony
Aston:
Autobiography;
BN
246
Brewster, Dorothy: R
46: 879: 654 Cords of vanityDomnei. J. B. Cabell : AN . . 800
Aunwnier, Stacy :
Cortissoz,
Royal
:
Bride
of
Corinth.
A.
France;
BR
299
Golden windmill and other stories; BR.... 717 Bridges, Robert :
Life of Whitelaw Reid. 2 vols.: BR
794
Aron'i harvest. E. A. Robinson ; BR
696
846
Milton's prosody: AN
749% Course of empire. R. F. Pettigrew ; BN
Awkening. J. Galsworthy; BR
88
Courtney,
Leonard,
Life
of.
G.
P.
Gooch
:
BR
853
October, and other poems : with occasional
revolution. E. and C. Paul: BR
842
poems on the war ; BR
86 Creative
Creek, Herbert Le Gourd. See Saunders, A. G.
Brooke, Stopford A. :
B
Creole
families
of
New
Orleans.
G.
King
;
AN
760%
Naturalism
in
English
poetry:
BR
241
B: R
Crisis of the naval war. Viscount Jellicoe:
.565: 853 Brown, Brian, ed. :
""J. James Branch:
AN
614
Wisdom of the Chinese: Their philosophy
Cords of vanityDomnei (formerly
Croce,
Benedetto:
in sayings and proverbs; BN
800
as The Soul of Melicent) ; AN
Ariosto,
Shakespeare
and
Corneille.
Tr.
by
300
Brown,
John.
See
MacBean,
L.
""on, Roger W. :
Douglas Ainslee; BR
819
Brown, P. Hume:
Fundamentals of prosperity; BR
Benedetto :
269
Life of Goethe: BR
920 Croce,
. Religion and business; BR
Goethe
:
con
una
Scelta
delle
Liriche
nuova269
Brown,
Rollo
Walter,
comp.
:
*k to Methuselah. B. Shaw; BR
mente tradotte ; BR
819
860
Writer's art, by Those who have practiced
"J, Roger:
and narrow streets of the town of
it; BN
630 CrookedBoston.
Opera hactenua inedita Rogeri Bacon!. Ed.
A.
H.
Thwing
;
BN
47
Brown,
William
Adams,
Jr.
:
aj by R. Steele; AN
750%
Samuel McChord :
Groping giant; BR
820 Crothers,
!"*Wey. John F. :
Dame
school
of
experience
;
BN
800
Bryan,
J.
Ingram;
R
560
."iW.
Russia
in the eighties; AN
718 Bryce, James :
Cummings, Bruce Frederick :
John:
Enjoying life and other literary remains :
Modern democracies ; BR
666
. Poetry and commonplace; BR
241 Bryher,
BN
124
W.
:
"jr. Arthur James:
Last
diary: BN
680
BR
188 Cushing, Charles
. Essays speculative and political: BR
564 Buck.Development;
Phelps
:
Albert
H.
:
^Juniied Europe. P. S. Mowrer ; BR
795
If
you
don't
write
fiction:
BR
Dawn of modern medicine: BR
87 Cycle of Adams letters, 1861-1865. W. C. Ford. 629
gwityne, A. See Jenness. D.
Buckle. G. E. :
""wHion. W. P. N. pseud. See Cummings,
ed. ; BR
242
Life of Benjamin Disraeli. Earl of Beacons
Bruce Frederick.
fleld. Vols. 5 and 6: BR
655
"*"*.
Avrom:
C. B. :
Foundations of feminism : BR
406 Burchardt,
Norwegian life and HWature : English ac
""n>. Clara:
and views: BN
124 Dame school of experience. S. McChord Croth
- John Burroughs, boy and man; BR
89 Burke,counts
B. U. : R
297, 858, 748
ers ; BN
800
0*t* of the books in its historical setting.
Ann Elizabeth :
Dana, Richard Henry:
A. E. Burlingame; AN
800 Burlingame,
Battle
of
the
books
in
its
historical
set
Hospitable
England
in
the
seventies
:
AN
.
.
922
j?';wair, Charles. A. Symons; Bb!" '. '. . .. . 669
ting: AN
800 Dante, Alighiero:
011 Ernest Belfort :
Burr, Jane :
Dantis Alagherii epistolae. Ed., tr. by P.
wramiscences and reflections of a mid and
Passionate spectator; BR
406
Toynbee; BN
124
tate Victorian; BN
248 Burroughs,
John
:
Dawn
of modern medicine. A. H. Buck: BR.. 87
^nsfied. Earl of. See Disraeli, Benjamin,
Accepting the universe; BR
89 Dawson, Edgar :
Ul of. Beaconsfleld.
John, Boy and man. C. Barrus :
Organized self government; BN
796
Charles A.; R
187; 842: 297 Burroughs,
BR
89 Death and its mystery, C. Flammarion : AN . . 922
19
712
820
197
Vol. cxii]
De Bunsen,
Old and Victoria:
new in the countryside: BN
S47
De la Mare, Walter :
.
Rupert Brooke and the intellectual imagi
241
Dell. nation
Robert:; RBR
z
Delphi. F. Poulsen ; BR
483
Development. W. Bryher ; BR
188
Devil stories. M. J. Rudwin, ed. ; AN
614
Dewey,
Evelyn:
New schools for old : BR
4is
Discipline and the derelict. T. A. Clarli ; AN . . 718
Disraeli, Benjamin, 1st earl of Beaconsfield,
Life of. G. E. Buckle. Vols. B and 6:
BR
B8B
Dobson, Austin :
Later essays, 1917-1920: AN
749^4
Domnei. J. B. Cabell: AN
300
Donnelly, Francis P.:
Art of interesting : BN
848
Drapeaux, Les. P. Reboux ; BR
818
Dream psychology. S. Freud ; AN
300
Du Bois, W. E. B. : R
749
Dunning, William Archibald:
History of political theories from Rous
seau to Spencer; BR
437
Durstine, Roy S. :
Making advertisements; BR
239
Dust. Mr. and Mrs. E. Haldeman-Julius : BR. 693
E
Early history of singing. W. J. Henderson :
AN
718
Early Persian poetry. A. V. W. Jackson: BN.. 487
Early Tudor poetry: 1486-1647. J. M. Berdan :
BN
671
Economic history of Rome to the end of the
republic. T. Frank ; BN
694
Edman, Irwin :
Human traits and their social significance ;
BR
668
Edson, C. L. :
Gentle art of columning ; BN
597
Eliot. T. S. :
Sacred wood : Essays on poetry and criti
cism ; BR
669
Ellen Levis. E. Singmaster ; BR
696
Ellis, Havelock :
New spirit. (Modern Library.) ; BN
349
Elton, Oliver: .
Survey of English literature, 1880-1880.
2 vols. (Issued in the United States by
Macmillan Co. as Vols. 8 & 4 of Survey
of English literature, 1780-1880.); BR.. 407
Encyclopaedia of religion and ethics. J. Has
tings and others, eds. ; BR
851
End of the world. J. McCabe ; BR
560
English madrigal verse 1588-1632. E. H. Fellowes; BN
47
English of commerce. J. B. Opdycke ; AN... 922
English pageantry. R. Withington ; BN
487
English political parties and leaders in the
reign of Queen Anne. W. T. Morgan : BN 347
Enjoying life and other literary remains. B. F.
Cummings; BN
124
Erskine, John :
Kinds of poetry and other essays : BR .... 241
" sur le poete Saadi. H. Masse; BN
410
and studies by members of the English
association. A. C. Bradley, comp ; AN.. 514
Essays speculative and political. A. J. Bal
four; BR
564
Evelyn. John :
Early life and education of John Evelyn
1620-1641, commentary by H. M. Smith :
AN
614
Evolution of parliament. A. F. Pollard; BR.. 380
Evolution of revolution. H. M. Hyndman : BR 717
Evolution of Sinn Fein. R. M. Henry; BR.. 845
F
Faith of a Quaker. J. W. Graham: BN
671
Fellow captains. S. Cleghorn and D. Canfield ;
BR
512
Fellowes. E. H. :
English madrigal verse 1688-1632; BN
47
Fenwick, Charles G. :
Political systems in transition : War-time
and after: BR
297
Few figs from thistles. E. St V. Millay; BR.. 485
Figures of earth. J. B. Cabell; BR
381
Filene, Catherine :
Careers for women; AN
300
Flame and shadow. S. Teasdale; BR
20
Flammarion, Camille :
Death and its mystery; AN
922
Flanner, Hildegarde :
This morning; BR
485
Flaubert, Gustave:
Temptation of St. Anthony. Tr. by L.
Hearn (Modern Library) ; BN
349
Fletcher. John Gould:
Breakers and granite; BR
562
Fleury, Count, ed. :
Memoirs of the Empress Eugenie: BN. . 348
Floyd, Juanita Helm :
Women in the life of Balzac; AN
718
Foerstcr, Friedrich Wilhelm :
Mein Kampf gegen militaristische und nationalistische Deutschland ; BR
557
Foerster, Norman ; R
407
Fogg art museum of Harvard university, Cata
logue of; BN
486
Folks. V. Murdock ; BR
693
Fontes historiae religionis Persicae., comp. by
K. Clemen : BN
821
Ford, Henry Jones :
Alexander Hamilton: BR
186
Ford. Worthington C, ed. :
Cycle of Adams letters, 1861-1865. 2 vols. ;
BR
242
Foreign exchange. A. C. Whitaker ; BR
343
Foreign trade of China. C. S. See; BR
612
Index
Foundations of feminism. A. Barnett; BR.... 406
France, Anatole, pseud. (Jacques Anatole
Thibault) :
Bride of Corinth ; Little Pierre ; Seven
wives of Bluebeard; BR
291
Frank, Tenney:
Economic history of Rome to the end of
the Republic ; BN
694
Frederick, J. George:
Business research and statistics; BR
289
Great game of business ; BR
239
Freedom of speech. Z. Chafee, Jr.: BR
377
French civilization from its origins to the close
of the Middle Ages. A. L. Guerard : BN 855
French classicism. C. H. C. Wright; BN
126
French fireside poetry. M. Betham-Edwards,
tr. and comp. ; BN
680
French foreign policy. G. H. Stuart: AN
881
Freud. Sigmund :
Dream psychology; AN
800
General introduction to psychoanalysis ; BR 236
Friday, David :
Profits, wages and prices; BR
184
Frink, H. W. ; R
287
Friedel, J. H. :
Training for librarianship ; AN
614
Friedman, Elisha M. :
International commerce and reconstruction :
BR
844
From authority to freedom. L. P. Jacks ; AN . . 881
Fuller, Margaret. K. Anthony; BN
46
Fullerton, Kemper; R
556
Fundamentals of prosperity. R. W. Babson : BR 269
G
G.. E. H. ; R
795
Galsworthy, John :
Awakening; BR
88
In chancery ; BR
88
Gait, Sir Alexander Tilloch, life and times of.
O. D. Skelton; AN
718
Garden of bright waters. E. P. Mathers: AN. 514
Garneau, F. X. :
Histoire du Canada. Vol. 2; AN
718
Garrison, Fielding H. See Wood, Casey A.
Gautier, Theophile :
Mademoiselle Maupin. Ed. by Burton Rascoe; BN
800
General introduction to psychoanalysis. S.
Freud: BR
286
General staff and its problems. E. von Ludendorff; AN
614
Gentle art of columning. C. L. Edson : BN . . 697
Germany and the French revolution. G. P.
Gooch: BR
484
Gibson, Wilfrid Wilson:
Neighbours; BR
86
GUI, C. C. :
What happened at Jutland; AN
614
Gillouin, Rene :
Nouvelle philosophic de l'histoire moderne
et Francaise; BN
855
Goemaere, Pierre :
Across America with the king of the Bel
gians ; BR
568
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. life of. P. H.
Brown ; BR
920
Goethe : Con una Scelta delle Liriche nuovamente
tradotte. B. Croce ; BR
819
Golden windmill and other stories; Br
717
Gooch, G. P.:
Germany and the French revolution: BR.. 484
Life of Lord Courtney; BR
868
Gorki, Maxim, pseud. (Alexel Maximovich
Pyeshkov) :
Reminiscences of Tolstoy. Tr. by S. S.
Koteliansky; BR
379
Gosse, Edmund :
Books on the table; AN
922
Malherbe and the classical reaction in the
seventeenth century ; BR
241
Gould, F. J.:
Auguste Comte ; AN
381
Government and politics. E. M. Sait; BN
348
Graham, John W. :
Faith of a Quaker; BN
671
Great game of business. J. G. Frederick ; BR. 239
Great kinship. B. Lloyd, comp.; BN
630
Grendon. Felix; R
794
Griffis, William Elliot: R
745
Groping giant. W. A. Brown, Jr. ; BR
820
Growth of the soil. K. Hamsun; BR
486
Gruening, Martha; R
612
Guerard, Albert Leon :
French civilization from its origins to the
close of the Middle Ages; BN
855
Guiterman, Arthur :
Chips of jade : Being Chinese proverbs
with more folk-sayings from Hindustan
and other Oriental countries. Rhymed in
English; BN
124
Gulf of misunderstanding. T. Pinochet; BN.. 270
Gunn, J. Alexander:
Bergson and his philosophy ; BR
564
H
Haldeman-Julius, Mr. and Mrs. E. :
Dust; BR
693
Hale. William Bayard:
Story of a style: BN
487
Hamilton. Alexander. H. J. Ford: BR
186
Hamp, Pierre :
People. Tr. by J. Whitall ; BR
717
Hamsun, Knut:
Growth of the soil. Tr. by W. W. Worster. 2 vols. ; BR
486
Hunger; BR
121
Happy highways. S. Jameson; BR
749
Hart, Jerome; R
818
Harris, John H. :
Africa: Slave or free?; AN
514
Hastings, James and others., eds. :
Encyclopaedia of religion and ethics ; BR. . 851
[Jan.-June, 1921
Hayden, Ralston :
Senate and treaties, 1789-1817; AN
718
Haynes, E. S. P.:
Case for liberty; BN
90
Hearn, Lafeadio :
Talks to writers. Ed. by J. Erskine: BN.. 248
Heaton, Herbert:
Yorkshire woollen and worsted industries ;
AN
718
Heavens and earth. S. V. Benet : BR
86
Heifetz, Elias:
Slaughter of the Jews in the Ukraine in
1919; AN
822
Hellenism. N. Bentwich ; BR
864
Henderson, W. J.:
Early history of singing; AN
718
Henry, Robert Mitchel:
Evolution of Sinn Fein: BR
345
Henry V. R. B. Mowat; BN
848
Hergesheimer, Joseph :
San Cristobal de la Habana ; AN
749V4
Herrick, Robert; R
691
Hertz, J. H., comp. :
Book of Jewish thoughts; BN
680
Hindus, Maurice G. :
Russian peasant and the revolution; BR.. 10
Histoire du Canada. F. X. Garneau. Vol. 2 ;
AN
718
History of political theories from Rousseau
to Spencer. W. A. M. Dunning; BR.. 487
of the art of writing. W. A. Mason ;
N
671
History of the peace conference of Paris. W.
H. V. Temperley, ed. Vols. 1-8: BR
746
Hobson, J. A. :
Morals of economic internationalism ; BN. . 245
Hobson, J. A. ; R
666
Hodges, Frank :
Nationalization of the mines; BR
900
Hogan, James:
Ireland in the European system. Vol. I.
1500-1557; BR
717
Holmes, Oliver Wendell:
Collected legal papers; BR
237
Hospitable England in the seventies. R. H.
Dana; AN
922
House in Dormer forest. Mrs. M. Webb ; BR. 749
House of commons and monarchy. H. Belloc :
BN
796
House of dust. C. Aiken; BR
86
How France built her cathedrals. E. B.
O'Reilly; BN
821
How we got on with the war. I. C. Willis ; BR. 297
Huard. F. W. See Boucher, P.
Hudson. W. H. :
Adventures among birds ; BN
47
Birds of the La Plate; BN
47
Human traits and their social significance. I
Edman: BR
558
Hunger. K. Hamsun; BR
121
Hungry hearts. A. Yezierska ; BR
121
Huxley, Leonard :
Thomas Henry Huxley; AN
881
Huxley. Thomas Henry. L. Huxley; AN
881
Hyndman, H. M. :
Evolution of revolution; BR
717
Hyphen, The. L. C. Schem ; BR
88
I
Idolatry of science. S. Coleridge: BN
47
If you don't write fiction. C. P. Cushing ; BR. 629
Illinois Centennial Commission :
Centennial history of Illinois. Vols. 1, 4, 5 ;
BN
47
(Review of Vols. 2 and 3 in Vol. 110, p.
334.)
Illinois country: 1673-1818. C. W. Alvord : BN. 47
Imperial orgy. E. Saltus ; AN
800
In April once. W. A. Percy; BR
86
In chancery. J. Galsworthy ; BR
88
Industrial state: 1870-1893. E. L. Bogart and
C. M. Thompson; BN
47
Industry, emotion, and unrest. E. Thomas : BN 348
Instigations. E. Pound; BR
669
Instinct and the unconscious. W. H. R. Rivers ;
AN
300
International commerce and reconstruction. E.
M. Friedman ; BR
844
Ireland in the European system. J. Hogan ;
BR
717
Iron men and wooden ships. Comp. by F. S. ;
BR
485
Irwin, Will:
Next war; BR
691
Ise, John :
United States forest policy; BR
187
Islands and their mysteries. A. H. Verrill : BN 300
Italian contribution to American democracy.
J. H. Mariano; BR
744
Iyenaga, T. and KenoBke Sato:
Japan and the Californian problem; AN. 718
J
Jacks, L. P. :
From authority to freedom; AN
881
Jackson, A. V. Williams:
Early Persian poetry, from the beginning
down to the time of Firdausi : BN
487
Jailed for freedom. D. Stevens; BN
246
Jameson, Storm :
Happy highways; BR
749
Janes, George Milton ; R
344
Japan and the Californian problem. T. Iyenaga
and K. Sato; AN
718
Japanese Hokkus. Y. Noguchi ; BN
124
Japanese poetry: The Uta. A. Waley ; BN
124
Jastrow, Joseph ; R
185
JaBtrow, Morris. Jr. :
Book of Job; BR
656
Zionism and the future of Paleatine ; BN. 487
Jellicoe, J. R. J., 1st viscount:
Crisis of the naval war; AN
514
JenneBs, D. and A. Ballantyne:
Northern D'Entrecasteaux ; AN
514
Index
Xos. 2896-2921]
Jew and American ideals. J. Spargo : AN
Job. Book of. M. Jastrow, Jr. ; BR
Johnson. Sir Harry:
Man who did the right thing; BR
Journal. S. K. Knight; BN
Jordan. David Starr; R
718
556
794
12S
626
Kaiser vs. Bismarck. Suppressed letters by the

Kaiser and new chapters from the Auto
biography of the Iron Chancellor. Tr.
by B. MiaU; BR
747
Kandel. L L. ; R
4S8
Kawabc, Kisauburo :
Press and politics in Japan ; BR
745
Keats, John :
Poems. Ed. by E. de Selincourt; AN
514
Kelly. M. Clyde:
Community capitol ; AN
718
Kentucky superstitions. D. L. and L. B.
Thomas; BN
124
Kephart. Horace :
Camping and woodcraft. 2 vols, in 1 ; AN 614
Our Southern highlanders ; AN
760%
Ker. William Paton :
Art of poetry; BR
241
Kinds of poetry and other essays. J. Erskine ;
BR
241
King. Grace :
Creole families of New Orleans: AN... 750%
Klickmann, Flora:
Lure of the pen ; BR
629
Knight. M. M.. I. L. Peters and Phyllis Blancharil. Taboo and genetics; BR
406
Knight. Sarah Kemble:
Journal ; BN
128
Kreymborg, Alfred :
Blood of things; BR
86
Krutch. J. W. : R
248
L
L., L. ; R
44; 89: 409
Lambert, Henri :
Nouveau contrat social ou l'organisation de
la democratic individualiste ; BR
892
Lambley, Kathleen :
Teaching and cultivation of the French
language in England during the Tudor
and Stuart times ; BN
125
Lane, Winthrop D. :
Civil war in West Virginia ; AN
922
Langfeld. Herbert Sidney :
Aesthetic attitude; BR
346
Lansbury. George :
What I saw in Russia; BR
820
Laski. Harold J.:
Political thought in England from Locke
to Bentham; BR
629
Last diary. B. F. Cumminga J BN
680
Later essays. 1917-1920. A. Dobson ; AN.. 749%
Lawrence, D. H. :
Women in love; BR
121
Lefranc, A. :
Sous le masque de "William Shakespeare" :
William Stanley, Vie comte de Derby.
2 vols.; BR
844
Leonard, William EUery :
Lynching bee and other poems; BR
44
of a Javanese princess; BN
246
to a niece and prayer to the virgin of
Chartres. H. Adams; BR
409
Lewisohn. Ludwig ; R
819 : 850 ; 920
Life and letters. J. C. Squire; BR
438
Linforth. Ivan M. :
Solon the Athenian ; BN
671
Literature of business. A. G. Saunders and
H. L Creek ; BR
289
Little Pierre. A. France; BR
299
Lloyd. Bertram, comp, :
Great Kinship : Anthology of humanitarian
poetry; BN
680
Long, Haniel :
Poems; BR
86
Loboff, E. See Raine, C. E.
Lucas, Sir Charles :
War and the empire : Some facts and de
ductions ; BN
128
E. V. :
Adventures and enthusiasms; BN
90
Ladendorff, Erich von :
General staff and its problems ; AN
614
lore of the pen. F. Klickmann ; BR
629
i-7Qching bee and other poems. W. E. Leon
ard; BR
44
-md. Robert:
Art of letters; BR
669
M
*.
D.; Joseph
B
244
HrCabe,
:
End of the world; BR
560
Robert Owen ; AN
381
Spiritualism; BN
597
KcCabe. Joseph, comp. :
Biographical dictionary of modern ration
alists ; AN
614
atBean. L. :
Marjorie Fleming's book, with John
Marjorie R..629;
Fleming's692;
book;746;BN794 ; 850
849
' Brown"s
Mill. William;
*At-ionough, Michael :
Pageant of Parliament. 2 vols.; AN
922
*F*e. William:
Ocean
tramp:
BR
921
i-Master. John Bach :
United States in the world war. Vol. 2:
BN
*47
**i!!Doi8eIle Maupln. T. Gautier; BN
300
XajtiBg advertisements. R. S. Durstine: BR.. 239
**fcerbe and the classical reaction in the seven
teenth century. E. Gosse ; BR.
241
a who did the right thing. H. Johnson ; BR 794
Marcovitch, L. :
Serbia and Europe; AN
718
Mariano, John H. :
Italian contribution to American democ
racy; BR
744
Marjorie Fleming's book. L. MacBean ; BN.. 349
Marshall, Thomas Maitland. See Bolton. H. E.
Martin, Edward Sanford:
Life of J. H. Choate: As gathered chiefly
from his letters;. BR
482
Martin, Everett Dean:
Behavior of crowds ; BN
680
Martyrdom of man. W. Reade ; BR
270
Masaryk. Thomas G. :
Spirit of Russia. Tr. by E. and C. Paul:
BR
858
Mason, William A. :
History of the art of writing ; BN
671
Masse, Henri :
EsBai sur le poete Saadi; BN
410
Mathers, Edwin Powys :
Garden of bright waters; AN
514
Mathews, John Mabry. See Bogart, Ernest
Ludlow.
Mayfair to Moscow. C. Sheridan; BR
554
Measure your mind. M. R. Trabue and F. P.
Stock bridge; BN
123
Mein Kampf gegen das militaristische und
nationalistische Deutschland. F. W.
Foerster; BR
677
Memoirs of Count Witte. S. J. Witte, count :
BR
692
Memoirs of my dead life. G. Moore ; BN
247
Memoirs of the Empress Eugenie. Ed. by Count
Fleury; BN
848
Men and steel. M. H. Vorse ; BR
87
Mencken, H. C. ; R
87
Merriam, Charles Edward :
American political ideas, 1866-1917: BR.. 342
Millay, Edna St. Vincent:
Few figs from thistles; BR
485
Milton, John ;
Sonnets. Ed. by John S. Smart; AN
718
Milton's prosody. R. Bridges; AN
749%
Modern commonwealth. E. L. Bogart and J. M.
Mathews; BN
47
Modern democracies. J. Bryce : BR
666
Modem wood cuts and lithographs. By British
and French artiste; BR
244
Moons of grandeur. W. R. Benet: BR
86
Moons of Nippon. E. W. Underwood; BN
124
Moore, George:
Coming of Gabrielle ; BR
862
Memoirs of my dead life; BN
247
Morals of economic internationalism. J. A.
Hobson ; BN
-246
Morel, E. D. F. S. Cocks; BR
749
Morgan. William T. :
English political parties and leaders in the
reign of Queen Anne ; BN
847
Morozov, Nicholas :
Christ; BR
896
Mouvement biologique en Europe. G. Bonn ;
BR
560
Mowat, R. B. :
Henry V; BN
348
Mowrer, Paul Scott:
Balkanized Europe; BR
795
Mulder, Arnold :
Sand doctor; BR
696
Mullin, Glen; R
244: 899
Munsterberg, Margaret; R
846
Murdock, Victor :
Folks; BR
698
Murray, John :
John Murray, III ; BN
90
Murray, John. III. J. Murray; BN
90
Must we fight Japan. W. B. Pitkin; BR
626
Muzzey, David S. ; R
242; 484
Myers, Frederic W. H. :
Collected poems, with autobiographical and
critical fragments; AN
718
Mystic isles of the South Seas. F. O'Brien : BR 898
Myth of the Jewish menace in world affairs.
L. Wolf: AN
718
Mythology of all races. H. B. Alexander.
Vol. 9; BR
888
[Vol. cxii
Nouvelle philosophie de l'histolre moderne et
Francaise. R. Gillouin ; BN
855
Noyes. P. B. :
While Europe waits; AN
381
Oakey, Francis:
Principles of government accounting and
reporting ; AN
718
O'Brien, Edward J., ed. :
Best short stories of 1920 and the year
book of the American short story ; AN . . 881
O'Brien, Frederick :
Mystic isles of the South Seas; BR
898
White shadows in the South Seas; BR.. 898
Ocean tramp. W. McFee ; BR
921
October, and other poems : With occasional
poems on the war. R. Bridges; BR..*.. 86
Old and new in the countryside. V. de Bunson ;
BN
847
Old English ballads, 1553-1626. Ed. by H. E.
Rollins; BN
126
Old Europe's suicide. C. B. Thomson ; BR
748
Opdycke, John B. :
English of commerce ; AN
922
Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi. Ed. by
R. Steele; BN
749%
O'Reilly, Elizabeth Boyle:
How France built her cathedrals : BN
821
Organized self-government. E. Dawson; BN.. 796
Origin of man and his superstitions. C. Read ;
BN
126
Original sinners. H. W. Nevinson; BR
717
Osborne, Sidney :
Upper Silesian question and Germany's coal
problem ; BR
694
Osburne, James Insley:
Arthur Hugh Clough ; BR
122
Our Southern highlanders. H. Kephart; A.. 750%
Our women. A. Bennett : BN
90
Outline of history. H. G. Wells; BR.. 224: 266: 296
Owen, Robert. J. McCabe ; AN
381
Owen, Wilfrid:
Poems; BR
747
P-Q
Page. Kirby :
Sword or {he cross ; BN
821
Pageant of parliament. M. MacDonough : AN 922
Parrington. V. L. ; R
842: 668
Partridge. G. E. :
Psychology of nations; BR
185
Party of the third part. H. J. Allen: AN
921
Passing of the old order in Europe. G. Zilboorg; BR
613
Passionate spectator. J. Burr ; BR
406
Paul. Cedar. See Paul, Eden.
Paul, Eden and Cedar Paul:
Creative revolution : Study in communist
ergatocracy; BR
342
People. P. Hump : BR
717
Percy, William Alexander :
In Aoril once ; BR
jt
86
Perry, Bliss :
Study of poetry: BR
241
Persephone. Mme. M. Tinnyre : BN
248
Peters, Iva Lowther. See Knight, M. M.
Petersson, Tborsten :
Cicero : A biography ; BN
694
Pettigrew, R. F. :
Course of empire. Ed. by Scott Nearing :
BN
Phenomena
of materialization. Dr. von 846
Schrenck Notzing: BN
694
Physicians anthology of English and American
poetry. C. A, Wood and F. H. Garrison,
comps. ; BN
630
Pillsbury. W. B.:
Psychology of nationality and international
ism ; BR
186
Pinochet, Tancredo :
Gulf of misunderstanding; BN
270
Pitkin. Walter B. :
Must we fight Japan; BR
626
Plea for popular science. E. E. Slosson : BR. 629
Pleasures of collecting. G. Teall ; BN
90
Plehn. Carl C. : R; BR
343
Poetic origins and the ballad. L. Pound : BN. 299
Poetry and commonplace. J. Bailey; RR
241
N
Political systems in transition : War-time and
after. C. G. Fenwick : BR
297
Narrow house. E. Scott; BR
696 Politicnl
thought in England from Locke to
Nashe, Thomas :
Bentham. H. J. Laski; BR
629
Unfortunate traveller (Percy reprints) ; BN 47
A. F. :
Nationalization of the mines. F. Hodges ; BR 900 Pollard.
Evolution of parliament: BR
380
Naturalism in English poetry. S. A. Brooke;
John :
BR
241 Pollock,
Bolshevik adventure: BR
19
Negro faces America. H. J. Seligmann ; BR.. 121 Portraits
and protests. S. Cleghorn ; BR
512
Neighbours. W. W. Gibson; BR
86
Postgate, R. W. :
Neihnrdt, John G. :
Bolshevick theory ; BR
19
Song of Hugh Glass; BN
849
Frederick:
Two mothers; BR
796 Poulsen,
Delphi. Tr. by G. C. Richards; BR
483
Nevinson, Henry W. :
Original sinners; BR
717 Pound, Ezra :
Instigations; BR
669
New Adam. L. Untermeyer : BR
86
Louise:
New Jerusalem. G. K. Chesterton: AN
614 Pound.
Poetic
origins- and the ballad: BN
299
New schools for old. E. Dewey; BR
438
Thomas Reed; R
237: 377: 982
New spirit. H. Ellis: BN
349 Powell,
Precipitations. E. Scott; BR
20
Newell, Frederick Haynes :
Press
and
politics
in
Japan.
K.
Kawabe
: BR 745
Water resources : Present and future uses :
of government accounting and re
BR
187 Principles
porting. O. Francis: AN
718
Next war. W. Irwin; BR
691 Pro Patria.
H. Van Dyke; AN
750-4
Noguchi. Yone :
Problem
of
Hamlet.
J.
M.
Robertson:
FN
Japanese Hokkus : BN
124 Profits, wages and prices. D. Friday: BR.... 248
1R4
Northern D'Entrecasteaux. D. Jenness and A.
of joy. G. Bradford : BR
86
Ballantyne; AN
614 Prophet
Psychology of nationality and internationalism.
Norwegian life and literature. C. B. Burchardt;
W.
D.
Pillsbury:
BR
18B
BN
124 Psvchology of nations. G. E. Partridge: BR.. 185
Notable spring books :
Classified list, no annotations;
571-76 Publishing family of Rivington. S. Rivington :
BN
847
Notes on life and letters. J. Conrad; BR
921
Notzing, Dr. von Schrenck :
Phenomena of materialization : BN
694 Radiant motherhood. M. RC. Stopes ; AN
381
Nouveau contrat social ou l'organization de la
Rain<\ C. E. and E. Lubnff:
democratic Individualiste. H. Lambert ;
Bolshevik Russia; BR
820
BR
892
Vol. cxii]
Raven, Charles E. :
Christian socialism, 1848-64; BN
Bead, Carvath :
Origin of man and his superstitions; BN. .
Reade, Winwood ;
Martyrdom of man; BR
Reboux, Paul :
Drapeaux, Lea ; BR
Red earth. Poems of New Mexico. A. Corbin ;
BR
Redman, Ben Ray; R
88:
Reese, Lizette Woodworth :
Spicewood; BR
Reid, Whitelaw. life of. R. Cortissoz ; BR
Religion and business. R. W. Babson ; BR
Reminiscences and reflexions of a mid and late
Victorian. E. B. Bax ; BN
Reminiscences of Tolstoy. M. Gorky; BR
Resurrecting life. M. Strange; BR
Richards, Mrs. Waldo, comp. :
Star points : Songs of joy, faith and prom
ise from the present day poets ; BN ....
Richter, Gisela M. A. ; R
Ridge, Lola :
Sun-up and other poems ; BR
Rites of the twice-born. Mrs. S. Stevenson ;
AN
Rivers, W. H. R.:
Instinct and the unconscious; AN
Rivington, Septimus :
Publishing family of Rivington; BN
Roberts, Richard; R
Robertson, J. M. :
Bradlaugh, Charles; AN
Robertson. J. M. :
Problem of Hamlet; BN
Robinson, Edwin Arlington :
Avon's harvest; BR
Rollins, Hyder E., ed. :
Old English ballads, 1663-1626; BN
Roosevelt, Theodore and his time. J. B. Bishop ;
BR
Rudwin, Maximilian J., ed. :
Devil stories : an anthology ; AN
Rupert Brooke and the intellectual imagination.
W. de la Mare; BR
Russia in the eighties. J. F. Baddeley ; AN..
Russia in the shadows. H. G. Wells; BR
Russian peasant and the revolution. M. G.
Hindus; BR
Rutzebeck, Hjalmar;
Alaska man's lack; BR
Ryder, Albert Pinkham. F. F. Sherman; BR..
Index
247
125
270
818
244
921
698
794
269
248
379
698
680
483
244
800
800
847
269
381
248
696
126
18
614
241
718
564
19
298
899
S
S.; R
664
S., G.; R
298
S., F., comp. :
Iron men and wooden ships; BR
486
Sacred wood. T. S. Eliot; BR
669
Sait, Edward M. :
Government and politics ; BN
848
Saltus, Edgar:
Imperial orgy ; AN
'.
800
San Cristobal de la Habana. J. Hergesheimer :
AN
749%
Sand doctor. A. Mulder; BR
696
Sapir, Edward; R
888
Satan's diary. L. Andreyev; BR
46
Sato, Kenoske. See Iyenaga, T.
Saunders, Alta Gwinn and H. L. Creek, eds. :
Literature of business; BR
289
Schapiro, J. Salwyn ; R
224
Schem, Lida C. :
Hyphen, The; BR
88
Schoolmistress and other stories. A. Chekhov ;
AN
800
Schuyler, R. L. ; R
380; 890
Scott, C. Kay:
Blind mice; BR
409
Scott. Evelyn:
Narrow house; BR
696
Precipitations; BR
20
Scott, Sir Walter, Intimate life of. A Stalker:
AN
922
Secreturn Secretorum. Ed. by R. Steele. See
Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi.
See, Chong Su:
Foreign trade of China; BR
512
Seligmann, Herbert J. :
Negro faces America : BR
121
Senate and treaties, 1789-1817. R. Hayden ; AN 718
Serbia and Europe. L. Marcovitch ; AN
718
Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley:
Shadow-shapes : Journal of a wounded
woman, October 1918-May 1919: BN
128
Seven wives of blue-beard. A. France ; BR . . 299
Shadow-shapes. E. S. Sergeant; BN
128
Shakespeare, William :
Tempest; BN
821
Works. Ed. by Arthur Quiller-Couch and
John Dover Wilson; BN
821
Shakespeare's lost years in London. A. Acheson ; BR
746
Shakhnovski :
Short history of Russian literature; AN.. 514
Shaw, Bernard :
Back to Methuselah; BR
850
Shepard. Walter James; R
487
Sheridan, Clare :
May fair to Moscow (diary) : BR
654
Sherman, Frederick Fairchild:
Albert Pinkham Ryder; BR
899
Sherman, Stuart P.; R
18: 667
Short history of Russian literature. Shakh
novski; AN
514
Singma8ter, Elsie:
Ellen Levis; BR
696
Skelton, Oscar Douglas :
Life and times of Sir Alexander Tilloch
Gait; AN
718
Sketches of Soviet Russia. J. Varney ; BR.. 820
Slaughter of the Jews in the Ukraine in 1919.

E. Heifetz; AN
922
Slosson, Edwin E. :
Plea for popular science; BR
629
Smith, Preserved; R
46; 270; 484; 660: 670:
717: 851
Smith, Winifred; R
844
Social evolution of religion. G. W. Cooke; BR. 187
Solon the Athenian. L M. Linforth ; BN
671
Song of Hugh Glass. J. G. Neihardt : BN
349
Songs of joy. G. Beckett, comp. : BN
680
Soule, George; R
87; 184: 408: 900
Sous le masque de "William Shakespeare" :
William Stanley. Vie comte de Derby.
A. I.ofrune; BR
844
Spargo, John:
Jew and American ideals ; AN
718
Speculation and the Chicago board of trade.
J. E. Boyle; BN
410
Speyer, Leonora:
Canopic jar; BR
693
Spicewood. L. W. Reese; BR
693
Spinster. S. Cleghorn ; BR
612
Spirit of Russia. T. G. Masaryk : BR
858
Spiritualism. J. McCabe ; BN
697
Squire, J. C. :
Birds and other poems ; BR
86
Life and letters: Essays; BR
488
Stalker, Archibald:
Intimate life of Sir Walter Scott; AN.. 922
Stanton, Theodore; R
436
Star points. Mrs. W. Richards, comp.; BN.. 630
Stevens, Doris. Jailed for freedom ; BN
246
Stevenson, Mrs. Sinclair:
Rites of the twice-born; AN
800
Stewart, W. K. ; R
848: 657
Stockbridge, Frank P. See Trabue. M. R.
Stopes, Marie Carmichael :
Radiant motherhood : AN
881
Story of a style. W. B. Hale; BN
487
Strachey, Lytton:
Queen Victoria: BR
890
Strange, Michael, pseud. :
Resurrecting life; BR
698
Stuart, Graham H. :
French foreign policy (1898-1914): AN.. 881
Studies in statecraft. G. Butler: BR
717
Studies in Tennyson. H. Van Dyke; AN... 750%
Study of poetry. B. Perry; BR
241
Sun-up and other poems. L. Ridge ; BR
244
Survey of English literature, 1830-1880. O.
Elton: BR
407
Sword or the cross. K. Page; BN
821
Symons, Arthur :
Charles Baudelaire; BR
669
[Jan.-June, 1921
Tucker. Gilbert M. :
American English; AN
760%
Turnpike lady. S. Cleghorn ; BR
612
Turnpikes of New England. F. J. Wood: AN. 718
Two mothers. J. G. Neihardt; BR
795
U
Underwood, Edna Worthley:
Moons of Nippon. Translations from poets
of old Japan; BN
124
Unfortunate traveller. T. Nashe (Percy re
prints) ; BN
47
United States forest policy. J. Ise ; BR
187
United States in the world war. J. B. McMaster; BN
847
Untermeyer, Louis :
New Adam: BR
86
Upper Silesian question and Germany's coal
problem. S. Osburne: BR
694
Uses of diversity. G. K. Chesterton; BR
484
V
Van Doren, Carl; R
121: 881: 696
Van Doren, Irita; R
658
Van Doren. Mark; R..20; 86: 122; 241; 409: 486:
662; 669: 693; 747
Van Dyke, Henry:
Pro Patria; AN
760%
Studies in Tennyson; AN
760%
Van Vechten, Carl:
Tiger in the house; BR
248
Varney, John :
Sketches of Soviet Russia; BR
820
Vernon, A. W. ; R
187
Verrill. A. Hyatt:
Islands and their mysteries : BN
800
Victoria, queen. L. Strachey; BR
890
Vignaud,
Henrytradition
:
Colombian
on the discovery of
America; BR
486
Tradition Colombienne et la decouverte de
l'Amerique; BR
486
Villard, Oswald Garrison ; R
121
Vorse, Mary Heaton :
Men and steel; BR
87
W
Waggoner, The. E. Blunden ; BR
747
Waley, Arthur:
Japanese poetry: The Uta ; BN
124
Walsh, R. J.; R
239
Walters, L. D'O., comp.:
Anthology of recent poetry ; BN
188
War and the empire. C. Lucas; BN
128
War costs and their financing. E. L. Bogart;
AN
921
War of the future. F. A. J. von Bernhardi : AN. 514
War-time strikes and their adjustment. A. M.
Taboo and genetics. M. M. Knight, L L. Peters
Bing; BR
408
and P. Blanchard: BR
406 Warner,
Arthur; R
744
Taisen-go no Sekai to Nippon (The world and
Water resources : Present and future use. F. H.
Japan after the great war). I. TokuBR
187
tomi; BR
660 Weaver.NeweU;
Raymond M. ; R
898
Talks to writers. L. Hearn ; BN
248 Webb, Mrs.
Mary:
Tardieu, Andre :
House
in
Dormer
forest;
BR
749
Truth about the treaty: BR
860 Wells, Herbert George :
Taylor, Henry Osburne:
Outline
of
history;
BR
224;
266:
296
Thought and expression in the sixteenth
in the shadows; BR
664
century; BR
46 WhatRussia
happened at Jutland. C. C. Gill; AN.. 514
Teaching and cultivation of the French lan
What I saw in Russia. G. Lansbury ; BR
820
guage in England during the Tudor and
labor rules. J. H. Thomas; BR
900
Stuart times. K. Lambley; BN
126 When
While Europe waits. P. B. Noyes ; AN
881
Trail. Gardner :
Frederick Wells; R
613
Pleasures of collecting; BN
90 Williams,
Willis. Irene Cooper :
Teasdale, Sara :
/
How
we
got
on
with
the
war;
BR
297
Flame and shadow; BR
20 Whitaker. Albert 0.1
Temperley, H. W. V.. ed. :
Foreign exchange; BR
848
History of the peace conference of Paris.
shadows in the South Seas. F. O'Brien;
Vols. 1-3; BR
746 White BR
898
Tempest. W. Shakespeare; BN
821
Temptation of St. Anthony. G. Flaubert: BN. 849 WisdomBNof the Chinese. Ed. by B. Brown: 800
Things that have interested me. A. Bennett:
Robert:
BN
796 Withington,
English pageantry; BN
487
This morning. H. Flanner ; BR
486 Witte,
Sergiel
Julievich, count:
Thomas. Daniel Lindsey and Lucy Blayney
Memoirs
of
Count
Witte.
Tr.
and
ed.
by
Thomas :
Yarmolinsky; BR
692
Kentucky superstitions: BN
124 Wolf, A.Lucien
:
Thomas, Edward :
Myth
of
the
Jewish
menace
in
world
af
Industry, emotion, and unrest ; BN
848
fairs ; AN
718
Thomas, J. H. :
in love. D. H. Lawrence; BR
121
When labor rules: BR
900 Women
Women in the life of Balzac. J. H Floyd ;
Thomas, Lucy Blayney. See Thomas, Daniel
AN
718
Lindsey.
Wood, Casey A. and Fielding H. Garrison,
Thompson. Charles Manfred. See Bogart,
comps. :
Ernest Ludlow.
Physician's anthology of English and
Thomson, C. B. :
poetry ; BN
680
Old Europe's Suicide: BR
748 Wood, American
Frederic J.:
Thought and expression in the sixteenth cen
Turnpikes
of
New
England
;
AN
719
tury. H. O. Taylor: BR
46 World and Japan after the great war. L
Thwing, Annie H. :
Tokutomi; BR
660
Crooked and narrow streets of the town
C. H. C:
of Boston; BN
47 Wright,
French
classicism;
BN
Tiger in the house. C. Van Vechten : BR
243 Writer's art, by Those who have practiced 125
Tinayre, Marcelle:
it Comp. by R. W. Brown; BN
680
Persephone: BN
248
Tokutomi, Ichiro :
Y
Taisen-go no Sekai to Nippon (The world
and Japan after the great war) ; BR. . 560 Yezierska, Anzia :
Hungry hearts: BR
121
Tolstoy. Leo:
Posthumous works: AN
800 Yoikshire woollen and worsted industries. H.
Trabue. M. R. and F. P. Stockbridge:
Heaton; AN
718
Measure your mind; BN
123
Z
Tradition Colombienne et la decouverte de
l'Ameririue. H. Vignaud : BR
486 Zeitlin, Jacob; R
19: 613
Training for librarianship. J. H. Friedel : AN 614 Zell. H. G. Aikman; BR
409
Trent. W. P. and others, eds. :
Zilboorg, Gregory :
Cambridge history of American literature.
Passing of the old order in Europe ; BR. 513
Vols. 8 and 4 ; BR
652 Zilboorg, Gregory; R
820: 896
Trumbull, Jonathan :
Zionism and the future of Palestine. M. JasLife of Jonathan Trumbull: BN
849
trow;
BN
Trumbull, Jonathan, life of. J. Trumbull : BN 349 Zur Einsteinschen relativitatstheorie. E. Cas- 487
Truth about the treaty. A. Tardieu; BR
860
sirer; BR
670
The
Nation
FOUNDED 1865
mssVsi?
Vol. CXII
NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 5, 1921

Contents
EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS
1
EDITORIALS:
The Friendless Nations
4
Academic Freedom in the University of Minnesota
8
Creation and Destruction
6
Ending the Intellectual Blockade
6
Inishraore, Inishmoan, Inisheer
7
PITTSBURGH'S PROSTITUTED PRESS. By' Charles Grant Miller
8
THE FARMERS AND CONGRESS. By Henry Raymond Musscy
12
PRODUCE! PRODUCE! By George Soule
13
SOLVING HOUSING IN ENGLAND. By Malcolm Sparkes
15
IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter
16
CORRESPONDENCE
16
BOOKS:
Roosevelt and His Time. By Stuart P. Sherman
18
Reports on Russia. By Jacob Zeitlin
19
Sapphics. By Mark Van Doren
20
DRAMA:
Gray and Gold. By Ludwig Lewisohn
21
MUSIC:
Radicalism in Music By Henrietta Straus
21
THE NATION'S POETRY PRIZE
22
DJTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION:
The Rumanian General Strike
28
French Labor and the Ruhr
26
The International Labor Report
26
OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editor
Associate Editors
LEWIS S. GANNETT
FREDA KIRCHWEY
ARTHUR WARNER
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
ERNEST H. GRUENING
CARL VAN DOREN
Managing Editor
Literary Editor
ottion RatssFive dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and
a; to Canada, 16.60. and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00.
NATION. 20 Vesey Street, New York City. Cable Address : Nation, New
lork. Chicago Office: 1170 People's Gas Building. British Agent for Subscriptions
and Advertising: Ernest Thurtle. 86 Temple, Fortune Hill, N. W. 4, England.
FRANCE, still reeling from the blows of the war, seems
subject to centrifugal forces that tug her in diverse
directions. Andre Lefevre, in his youth a Socialist, more
recently middle-of-the-road Minister of War in the Millerand and Leygues cabinets, has resigned in protest because
the Cabinet accepted a proposal to reduce the term of
compulsory military training to eighteen months, even
though the change is not to take effect for two years and is
made contingent upon various future and problematical
developments. And at the other end of the scale the French
Socialists vote overwhelmingly to change their name to
Communists, and join the Third International. Jean
Longuet, bitterly denounced as leader of the radical mi
nority during the war, and of the peace-with-Russia ma
jority in the armistice period, is now left leader of the
conservative Right of his party because he does not want
oviets in France now. Compromise used to be the price of
political success; on the Continent today the demand is
rather for pure extremism of whatever brand; and the
countries where extremists clash are doomed to something
very like a chronic, if mild, condition of civil war. In the
Jongr run the effects of victory and defeat differ but little;
the alchemy of war distils the same poison everywhere.
KARL RUDOLF LEGIEN, Gompers of the German
trade unions, is dead. For thirty years he guided the
General Commission of German Trade Unions, building the
organization into perhaps the most powerful trade union
body in the world. It had a quarter of a million members
when he took the helm; eight millions when he died. Al
though the "free" unions which he led were a part of the
.No. 2896
Social Democratic party organization, Legien, like Gompers,

with whom he had a warm sympathy and friendship, guided
his unions in predominantly economic channels. But when
the Kapp coup d'etat overthrew for a day the constitutional
Socialist government of Germany last spring, Legien threw
the full force of the unions into the political scale, and it
was the unanimity of the general strike called by him which
turned the tide at once. For a time his influence on the
Government was so strong that he was called dictator, but
it faded. Like most of the other pre-war Socialist leaders,
Legien loyally supported the Kaiser's Government through
out the war; unlike them, he retained his leadership after
ward, and his prestige maintained in the German trade
unions a unity sadly lacking among the German Socialists,
which the unions are now likely to lose.
ANTICLIMAX is inevitable for those who live a time
too vividly. Napoleon at St. Helena may have pre
served something of his imperial dignity, but Wilhelm woodchopping in Holland, and the battalions of defeated gen
erals writing two-volume histories of self-defense, are pitia
ble figures. What can D'Annunzio do next? For months
he has defied the world, a poet flaunting the Supreme Coun
cils of the world's great Powers, pirating victoriously when
the assembled statesmen would have starved him out, cast
ing lyric constitutions at the world when the diplomats
sought to dim his prestige by leaving him to oblivion, a kind
of Latin Czar and Bolshevik combined. When the country
for whose irredentist and imperial unity he sought to act,
sent her battleships against him, he hurled poems at them,
and the crews deserted. He had men shot for daring to
criticize his policies, yet knelt himself in homage to com
mon seamen who deserted in his favor. After laughing at
the world these many months until the world ceased laugh
ing at him, his spell is broken. Italy treats with Jugo
slavia over his head, and sends her legions, this time obedi
ent, to force him to obey. What can life still hold for the
dictator-poet-pirate extraordinary? He can never write a
drama so dramatic nor a poem so epic as this last year of
his life; there is nothing left but deathor the movies.
" rJETWEEN the nether and upper millstones the law-abiding
*-* populationthat is the great majority of the people of
Irelandare ground to powder. They live a life of panic. They
have become a nation of whisperers. No man can trust his
neighbor unless he is an intimate friend. At any moment the
dreadful hammering at the door may come, and then no power
on earth can keep the door closed. . . . No one can go to
bed at night without the feeling that armed men may walk into
his bedroom in the hours of darkness. . . . Every night
thousands of people sleep in fields, under hedges or haystacks,
because they dare not sleep at home."
These are not the vaporings of a Sinn Feiner, but are from
the report of the correspondent in Ireland of no less con
servative a newspaper than the London Times. In addition
the London Nation points out that the Prime Minister of
England lives behind a barricade, the House of Commons
dares not admit strangers, more than three million dollars'
The Nation
worth of property has been de^trojted-by arson in Liver

pool, and the bloodshed goesôn in 'Ireland. "This," says
our contemporary, ."is the- existing measure of the success
of a policy which, by the hbrt, sharp shock of general fear,
was to restore peace *to rebel Ireland. The Terror is there,
but the jT.riumph waits." These are but samples of the way
Englishmen are speaking out. But not even the English
newspapers printed adequately the terrific indictment by
Mr. Asquith of the British Government's policy "of sup
pressing crime by crime, murder by murder." Mr. Asquith
declared that Sir Hamar Greenwood's threat to burn every
Irish creamery whose officials were in the Republican army
was a worse doctrine than any preached in the worst days
of Lord North's attempt to subjugate the American colo
nies prior to 1776. Yet our American public opinion fails
to realize the character of the struggle in Ireland. Our
fashionables, our Anglophobes, and our club world still
believe that there is nothing worse going on in Ireland than
the bushwhacking of a few low-down Irish peasants who
ought to be shot down for their own good.
IT is a pleasure to note that the New York World has
thrown itself into the fight for disarmament with all its
influence and with that same zeal for humanitarian move
ments which characterized it before its adherence to the war
policy dimmed and dulled its liberalism. On Sunday, Decem
ber 26, it gave its front page to appeals for grounding arms,
citing Lloyd George on behalf of its contention and printing
special interviews by cable from Lord Robert Cecil and many
others, some of the expressions being good, some damned by
the familiar ifs, whens, and buts. The World itself editorially
indorses the position taken by Senator Borah, saying that
"if the United States, Great Britain, and Japan would re
duce their naval expenditures 50 per cent for the next five
years the moral influence of that action would be incalcu
lable, and the example would arouse the public opinion of
ever other country in favor of similar measures." The fatal
defect of its position is that it believes disarmament can
only be achieved through the League of Nations by all na
tions acting together. If the way to resume specie pay
ments was to resume, the way to disarm is to disarm and
without regard to anybody else. The spectacle of the United
States disarming of its own accord would have far more
influence than joint action by any three or any thirteen
nations, for it would mean that one great country had de
cided to return to its historic and Christian policy, under
which it was never humbled, humiliated, nor attacked, of
being unarmed and unafraid, and of minding its own
business.
IT is obvious that Soviet republics will never be popular
with the other and at present more prevalent variety.
In view of the reported decision on the part of the Armenian
Soviet to abolish private ownership of property and to can
cel all foreign loans, "especially the American loan," the
name "Armenian" will speedily become as opprobrious as
"Russian," and our esteemed Department of Justice will
have to extend its field of operation in New York City to
the Armenian quarter in lower Washington Street. It is to
be greatly hoped that this Soviet fever, which seems so
contagious and to have on its victims an effect so curiously
stimulating, will not spread to the Republic of Georgia,
though it does seem headed in that direction. For in that
case the wicked Soviet Georgians might be confused with
[Vol. 112, No. 2896
the inhabitants of our own Southern State, where law and

order reigns supremeexcept, of course, for a little matter
of a lynching now and then, and the complete suppression
of the black half of the population by the dictatorship of the
bourgeois whites.
AT President Wilson's behest Rear Admiral Snowden,
who, for some time, has embodied the executive, legis
lative, and judicial functions in Santo Domingo, announces
that the American forces will soon withdraw from the
Dominican half of Hispaniola. Good and important news,
this, and far more effective in promoting better relations
with our Latin-American neighbors than the perennial grist
of addresses, messages, resolutions, and other high-sounding
expressions of superficial international comity or the super
fluous peripateticism of Mr. Colby. A certain skeptical re
serve may, however, justly temper one's enthusiasm at what
appears to be the first step toward amending our imperial
ist Caribbean venture. For Admiral Snowden proclaims
"that a commission of representative Dominican citizens
will be appointed to which it is my purpose to attach a
technical adviser. This commission will be entrusted with
the formulation of amendments to the Constitution and a
general revision of the laws of the Republic." These amend
ments, etc., "upon approval by the military government in
occupation will be submitted to a constitutional convention
and the national Congress of the Dominican Republic re
spectively." Jokers! Naya five-foot shelf of Joe Miller's
Joke Books ! It is Admiral Snowden who appoints the com
mission of "representative Dominican citizens." It is Ad
miral Snowden who appoints the technical adviser to this
commission and defines his powers. It is Admiral Snowden
who must approve the laws and amendments submitted by
this commission, including, of course, the method of electing
the constitutional convention and the now non-existent na
tional Congress to which the new laws are to be "sub
mitted". The new legislation will be worth watching.
Needless to say, no satisfactory and honorable solution can
emerge in this way. It is doubtful whether any admiral is
qualified by training or temperament to erect a stable civil
government, but the dictator and oppressor is surely the
last person qualified to bind up the wounds.
NEW YORK has become a Republican city, if party en
rolment figures mean anything. Despite the increase
in the total registration, the lists show an actual decline in
the number of enrolled Democrats, while the Republican
figures have leaped up. A year ago, less than 39 per cent
of the city's voters enrolled as Republicans; this year, 52
per centand only 43 per cent as Democrats. An interest
ing sidelight is the fact that the Socialists, while adding a
few voters to their total enrolment, lost in proportion to the
total registration. The large Socialist vote in New York
City seems to have come from non-Socialist voters, dis
gusted with the Albany persecutions. It is also a signifi
cant fact that it was the women who deserted the Demo
cratsthe women who were to vote exactly as their hus
bands, and if they did differ, plump for the good old League
of Nations. Less than a third of the enrolled Democrats are
women; 40 per cent of the Socialists and Republicans
are women; and more than half the Prohibitionists. But
after all, what does it matter whether Republicans or Dem
ocrats have the greater hold? The party machines still
work hand in hand in the city in many matters, and for
Jan. 5, 1921]
The Nation
every Diamond Bill Democratic saloon-keeper boss, there is

a Diamond Jack Republican three blocks north.
DEBS, after all, polled less than a million votes, and the
"protest vote," according to complete reports, was
triflingunless the vote for Harding be called a protest.
Harding's vote was even more overwhelming than was real
ized at the time. In the entire North, Middle West, South
west, West, and the border States of the South put together,
Harding had more than two votes to every one for Cox.
Never in all American history, since the days when State
legislatures elected presidential electors and one lone New
Hampshire elector cast his vote against James Monroe's re
election in order that none but Washington should ever have
been elected unanimously, has there been such a one-sided
verdict. The total vote of the protest parties is as nothing
beside it. Debs's total, 910,000, is proportionaUy only a
slight advance over the Socialist vote of 19163.36 per cent
as compared with 3.15, and when the Christensen vote is
added to Debs's, they form together but 4.25 per cent of the
total, whereas Debs alone won 5.96 per cent of all the votes
cast in 1912.
SENATOR POINDEXTER could hardly have expected
that his bill prohibiting strikes on common carriers,
which slipped so casually through the Senate, would become
law as simply. Opposition developed as soon as the vote
was made known, and the "progressive bloc" gathered its
diminished forces together to discuss methods of killing the
measure. The vote on the bill occurred at a moment in
opportune for its supporters, as the leaders of various rail
road labor organizations were meeting at Washington at the
time, and were able to get into touch promptly with the
Senate liberals. The bill probably will never become law,
and it should not. The right to strike is one which no
Congress should lightly decide to abrogate. A far better
method of preventing strikes is now under discussion by the
officers and organized employees of the Pennsylvania Rail
road. Voluntarily adopted, this method will provide for the
settlement of disputes by boards of adjustment. The suc
cessful working out of such a plan, General W. W. Atterbury, vice-president in charge of operation, declares, would
mean "that not only will there never be a strike, but that
it will never be necessary to take a strike vote on the Penn
sylvania system." If strikes are ever eliminated it will be
by efforts such as this to establish between unions and man
agement a link of discussion and reasonable consideration
of the needs of the industryi and it will not be by legisla
tion or by force.
GOVERNMENT officials not only did nothing last sum
mer to protect the public from coal profiteers, but they
actually participated in plundering the consumer, according
to testimony before the Senate Committee on Reconstruc
tion. George H. Cushing, managing director of the Amer
ican Wholesale Coal Association, told the Committee that a
group of government officials (whose names are not yet
disclosed) made a net profit of $1.50 a ton. on 450,000
tons of coal sold in this country and abroad, while
D. B. Wentz, president of the National Coal Operators'
Association, said that the Secretary of War had increased
the panic in prices by making purchases at unnecessarily
extravagant rates. Mr. Wentz himself was authorized to
pay $11 a ton, with a personal commission of fifty cents, at

a time when coal could be mined at a profit for about $3.50.
He bought 150,000 tons for the War Department, clearing
$75,000 in commissions. In the same market the Shipping
Board paid $16 to $21 a ton for coal, which sounds quite in
keeping with the whole orgy of graft. These disclosures of
banditry and waste lead even a staunch organ of the busi
ness interests like the New York Herald to remark:
If the coal industry itself, as we have said before, cannot and
does not summarily put an end for all time to those practices
that have bled the public and put shame on the coal business,
the American people are going to demand national control of
the coal industry like national control of the railroads. And
when the American people do demand it, in the way they will
demand it after what they have gone through, they are going to
get it.
IN Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, there is an aged Italian
woman, Mrs. Catario, whom her neighbors call a witch
and whom they threaten with burning at the stake. Some
inventive tongue or other started the story, and Mrs.
Catario says that tongue swings in the busy mouth of one
Antonio Capriano, whom she has accused before a magis
trate. Capriano is under arrest on the simple but sufficient
charge of disorderly conduct. Thus can modern law deal
with medieval folly. In Jacksonville, Florida, John Bischoff,
for certain silly letters he had written to a newspaper de
manding that the newspaper cease calling the Germans Huns
on penalty of losing Bischoff's advertising, was tarred and
feathered by a gang of unknown miscreants. Modern law
has not done, and doubtless will not do, a thing in this case.
The parallel is deadly. What is the belief at the base of all
witchcraft charges? It is the belief that the accused is in
league with the Devil, the natural enemy of men, to harm
themthat is, that the accused is a kind of traitor. It is
thus that the zealous patriots of Jacksonville presumably
regarded John Bischoff as in league with the Kaiser, the
natural enemy of Americans, to harm themthat is, the
accused is a kind of traitor. Dangerous, dangerous Devil!
Dangerous, dangerous Kaiser!
THE publishers of the Everyman Library announce that
they cannot, at least for the present, continue to
expand the series. New titles can be added only at the
expense of charging four or five times as much a volume
as was originally charged; even to reprint the old titles,
at present costs of paper and binding, means that the series
has to sell for three times the pre-war price. In 1913 it was
possible to obtain practically all the classics of the world's
literature in such series at a price not much above twentyfive cents a volume, and a useful general library could be
collected at an average cost of fifty cents a volume. Now
the book that costs less than a dollar is relatively rare, and
the prices of many new books seem prohibitive. We are
forced back to the plight of most readers in the days before
the Bohn libraries set a new standard of cheapness, when
the circulating library had to serve all but prosperous or
professional or impassioned book-buyers. Other commodi
ties have gone up too, but books are more than commodi
ties : they are the tools of education, the wisdom of the race,
the greatest of all carriers of pleasure. If ever we have in
the United States a Secretary of Education, he should study
nothing more careffflly than the proposal to issue, at cost,
a government edition of the great classics of literature.
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2896
The Friendless Nations

"/T^HIS period of our history would be a bad time for
L the United States to get into another war, for we
have not a friend among the nations of the earth." Thus
spoke the other day an elder American statesman, lately
returned from Europe, where his name is as well known as
in the United States. He was astounded at the bitterness
of the criticism of America which he heard wherever he
went. In England, in France, in Italy, so far from any
feeling of gratitude for us, there was only dislike or anger
to be found. For this he cited various reasons. In Eng
land our assertions that we won the war have rankled deep,
and the rivalry in trade and in fleets, both naval and mer
chant, is doing much harm. Ireland is, of course, he added,
a most serious menace to the friendship of the two coun
tries. On the Continent he found a feeling that we have
profited enormously by the war and have borne few of its
pains. In France the vexation is not concealed; there the
feeling is that we have not stood by our ally as we should
have done. To newspaper readers some of these facts are
commonplaces; but this man of international reputation
could not get over the fact that our unselfish participation
in a war for democracy, as he still believes it to have been,
has left us entirely friendlesseven in South America
where our aggressions in the Caribbean and in the kindred
Central-American republics have made every nation regard
us with a suspicion, distrust, and dislike that a hundred
itinerant Secretaries of State could not removeleast of
all a Bainbridge Colby.
But what is true of the United States is true of England,
while a section of the French press daily harps upon the new
isolation of that shell-shocked and suffering republic. All
the world believes that England has got away with far more
of the swag of the war than it had any right to. Our own
State Department accuses it of monopolizing the oil in
its new mandatory territories. France insists that it got
but little of the recompense it deserves for its martyrdom,
Italy is furious because the Treaty of London has not been
lived up to; and so it goes. No one is happy, no one is
grateful to any one else. The Central Powers are, of course,
still Ishmaelites; Czechc-Slovakia, Rumania, and Jugo
slavia are so distrustful of Hungary that they have entered
into a new alliance against her. At the League of Nations
meeting in Geneva the outstanding fact was the line-up of
the smaller nations against the great Powers which domi
nate the European world, a cleft which according to some
press observers foreshadows the break-up of the League at
its next gathering.
As for Russia, while England has now consented to trade
with her, a notorious German general, Hoffmann, of unsavory
Brest-Litovsk fame, joins with the French chauvinists in
preaching a holy war against the Communists. Every item
of news of the advance of communism inflames further the
passions of those who see in the Bolshevists the enemies of
civilization. In the East, Japan certainly belongs to the
friendless nations. Returning travelers of importance re
port that her elder statesmen are well aware of it. America
is against her and builds a fleet to menace her. China
has dealt her industry a serious blow by its boycott of all
things Japanese; Australia is drawing the yellow color line

more sharply than ever. Hate, jealousy, bitterness, distrust,
and anger are everywhere. No wonder the Manchester Guar
dian declares that the world is much worse off after the holy
war to save humanity than it was before.
The situation is the more striking when one recalls the
honeyed words with which the Allied delegations flattered
our ears when they visited us soon after we entered the war.
Then we swore brotherhood to England, to France, to Italy,
for all eternity. Our blood was mixed with their blood on
the sacred soil of Flanders, and ties had been forged which
nothing could ever sunder. Lafayette, we were with you in
reverence, kinship, and lasting good-will which no debt, no
unpaid interest, and no failure to sign treaties could possi
bly affect. Well, we still pour out funds for Francenot
enough, it is true; we put our hands in our pockets for the
diseased and dying children of Central Europe and Russia.
But nobody loves us even for that, our Quakers excepted,
those noble administrators of our mercy. And then there is
China. China among all the nations still loves us, not for
our alliance in the war to redeem the world, but for certain
altruistic acts of ours in years past like the return of the
Boxer indemnity and the insistence on the Open Door and
fair play for the eldest nation.
Now the solemn truth is that this shocking loneliness and
friendlessness of the nations which but yesterday believed
themselves unselfish saviors of human society, are but an
other, if one of the most striking, of the moral damages of
war, and particularly of such a war. What has happened
should surprise no one who knows history. There have been
holy wars before this, against Russia, against Napoleon,
against the Moslem. But that did not mean that the broth
erhood of joint warring endured. Indeed, the allies were
always all too soon at swords' points again. The fact that
France enabled us to win our freedom from Great Britain
in the Revolution did not prevent us within seventeen years
from entering a state of war with her which lasted for
months, though without a declaration of hostilities. Let
such another question as that of Venezuela arise and the
United States would be swept by a wave of passion against
England as it was when Grover Cleveland published the
belligerent document which brought both nations to the
verge of disaster.
No, lasting friendships are not forged on battlefields; of
this the proof is again the bitterness of Canadian and Aus
tralian troops toward their British comrades. The nature
of war itself forbids it ; the ghastly crime of taking part in
any such mass murder punishes direly those who partici
pate. Was this truth ever clearer than today? Is it not
true that materially the victors are almost as near disaster
as the vanquished? Was it ever clearer that the moral
damages of war far outweigh all possible gains ; that there
are no spiritual profits to offset the contents of that Pan
dora's box of hatred, deceit, lying, cruelty to innocents, and
murder, which the first shot of every war lets loose? Plain
it surely is now that when one would reclose that box one
cannot at will recall the spirits of evil from their devilish
work ; many of them remain at large to plague all humanity.
Jan. 5, 1921]
Academic
The Nation
Freedom in the
THE NATION, some time ago, called attention to a dis

cussion at the University of Minnesota on the question
of academic freedom. The question is apparently not yet
settled. The issue was precipitated by Foolscap, the under
graduates' magazine, which charged, editorially, that mem
bers of the faculty were "annually relieved of their academic
burdens for having dared to utter what they deemed to be
the truth," and, also editorially, declared it to be "undoubt
edly desirable . . . that academic freedom should be
more than a mere academic fiction." So serious a charge
naturally provoked more than purely collegiate comment,
and the newspapers of the Twin Cities gave the matter sen
sational publicity. In this hour of professional peril, came
the Minnesota chapter of the American Association of Uni
versity Professors to the rescue. Professional honor must
be vindicated. The committee appointed for this purpose
summoned the editor of Foolscap, quizzed him in vain, and
finding itself impotent to pursue the investigation further,
decided to lay the matter before the entire faculty.
At the request of this committee, accordingly, a general
faculty meeting was called. Such meetings, in large uni
versities, are rare, and interest ran high. Representatives
of the press were invited. The committee laid before more
than two hundred faculty members its carefully prepared
report with the conclusion that the charges in Foolscap,
being supported by no proof, were to be condemned as
"utterly false and misleading." Dissatisfaction with this
report immediately manifested itself. A new committee of
five, representative of the entire faculty, was appointed on
the spot to investigate the question still further; and a
secret ballot, taken, after vigorous opposition, resulted in
thirty-three votes, more than fifteen per cent of the total
vote cast, in support of the undergraduate accusations.
This took place in February last. Early in June the
faculty again assembled to hear the report of the new com
mittee. Wiser than its predecessor, it decided that its in
vestigation was "wider in scope and more important than a
mere determination of the specific degree of accuracy and
justification attaching to an editorial expression of opinion."
Having thus broadened its inquiry the committee frankly
faced difficulties inherent in the problem, which, "psycho
logical in its nature, was often a matter of tacit understand
ing, recorded in some instances much more clearly by the
feeling of what might, and certainly would, impend rather
than by what had already happened." The testimony to the
existence of this feelingin the words of the reporthas
come "from too many sources to be ignored, and from per
sons of such rank and standing in the faculty as to suggest
that the University has here a real and serious problem."
In this problem, says the report, there are four factors:
a spirit of intolerance in the community at large, the method
of procedure against accused faculty members, espionage by
other than academic organizations, and a misconception of
university teaching. The first of these, "a post-bellum spirit
of intolerance and its concomitant spirit of fear," has
found such lodgment not only in the community at large
bat in the academic community as well, that the faculty
itself, in the opinion of the committee, "has by its own share
in this repressive and intolerant spirit, contributed to its
own intimidation." "Academic freedom," to quote the rePort farther, "like charity, begins at home ; and as long as
University
of
Minnesota
the circulation of unfounded rumor by members of the fac

ulty, and an utter failure by many to understand the intel
lectual value inherent in the free expression of variant
views, can and does jeopardize academic tenure, just so long
will it be absurd for university circles to expect from others
that toleration they deny themselves." The second of the
four factors involves the administrative officials. When,
according to the report, complaint is made against the
"views or activities" of some one member of the faculty
whose years of service entitle him at the least to "a certain
favorable presumption"he frequently finds himself, when
summoned to answer "unjustifiably on the defensive." It
is, of course, impossible to prevent complaints being lodged ;
"but it is desirable," says the committee, "that such investi
gations as are made should succeed in conveying an impres
sion of intelligent adherence to principle, of an eagerness
to protect all legitimate . . . expression of opinion. . . ."
In presenting the third of the four factors, the committee
claims to have had called to its attention "evidence . . .
which plainly indicates the use of espionage by external
forces that continually attempt to exert pressure upon the
authorities as to university teaching and personnel." The
committee is "firmly of the opinion that such pressure is
not in the public interest," and that "invasion by private
detectives of the domain of academic life and thought is
scarcely compatible with the maintenance of a sound and
wholesome intellectual spirit."
The last of the four factors against which protest is made
is the all too correct belief that "the university, instead of
having for its chief function the orientation of the student
within the world of thought in order that he may be pre
pared eventually to form independent judgments, is an in
stitution for the dogmatic indoctrination of opinion." Com
plaints against teachers usually come from "special groups
of citizens imbued with this indoctrination theory." The
professor, fighting against this belief in his class-room, soon
discovers that it is constantly to be met with in his private,
extra-collegiate life as well. "The right of a professor to
express his views without restraint on matters lying outside
the sphere of his professorship," is one which President
Lowell may well champion, but of his enlightened opinion
there are but few. Yet this admirable committee insists that
"an institution of learning endowed by the State cannot
. make itself the champion of any narrowly con
ceived particularity of spirit; it cannot, therefore, make
itself responsible for the private activities of its teachers,
and consequently cannot afford to lay down for those ac
tivities any special rules, either written or established by
tradition, other than those which the laws of the land and
social decorum require."
Thi3 remarkable report was referred back to the com
mittee with demands for specific facts. Objection was made
by the committee that "an obvious reluctance to testify" had
been overcome by an assurance that all testimony would be
held confidential, and that honor permitted no violation of
this confidence. The committee threatened resignation. The
faculty still demanded facts. These, the committeemen were
instructed to report at a meeting whose secrecy would pre
serve their honor. Whether the committee is unable to
investigate further with honor we cannot say, but the re
grettable fact is that nothing further has happened.
The Nation
Destruction and Creation

TRAVELERS relate that in a tribe dwelling by the up
per Amazon the wrinkled elders squat disconsolately
on copper haunches under the giant trees and, when the
moon comes up, raise their voices in mournful ululation.
From time immemorial the tribe has practiced endogamic
marriage. But, misled by explorers and rubber merchants,
the youths now wander where they please in search of
brides. The elders mourn. They cannot regard these revo
lutionary exogamic marriages as anything but crass license.
The sacred institutions of their fathers are in the dust.
They wail for a substitute or angrily demand constructive
suggestions. Still other travelers bring depressing news
from the black dwarf-folk of the Abyssinian hills. There,
too, the hearts of the elders are sore. Oftener and oftener
during recent years the little hill women have caught
glimpses of their white sisters and now stubbornly refuse
to file their teeth, to pierce their noses, to distend their
nether lips. The elders lament that the ancient beauty of
life has fled. What shall be substituted for it? Who will
offer a constructive criticism?
This gossip of the anthropologists is full of pith. Every
where and always the elders of the tribes ask two ques
tions. Shall we give up our hard-won civilization and re
turn to a savage and licentious state? Alas, no savage
state was ever a licentious one. Among the ancient Hebrews
a man was stoned to death for breaking the sabbath ; among
primitive tribes women were slain for using the men's dia
lect or defiling a warrior's weapons by their touch. Where
we have one taboo our remote ancestors had a thousand.
Pursue social history but far enough into the past and you
reach a point where personal volition and privacy did not
exist, where every action was prescribed by steel-hard cus
tom and the tribal mind functioned alike in every individ
ual. Yet in every age the elders ask their second question:
What do you propose to substitute for this dying taboo,
this obsolescent custom, this venerable propriety? They
cannot envisage society without the customs and institu
tions amid which their emotions have ripened. Thus good
and sincere men have defended the torture chambers of
inquisitor and tyrant, human slavery, and capital punish
ment for petty theft; thus noble and impassioned minds
have echoed and reechoed the despairing cry of Edmund
Burke: "The French revolutionists complained of every
thing; they refused to reform anything; and they left
nothing, no, nothing, unchanged. Had parliamentary re
forms taken place, not France, but England would have had
the hflnor of leading the death-dance of democratic revolu
tion." So every revolution has seemed a death-dance to the
elders. At worst they demand violent repressionthe rope,
the wheel, the axe ; at best they ask for substitutes and for
constructive criticism.
The instinctive reply of the conservative to such reflec
tions is that in other ages change and revolution affected
the accidents of civilization, but that today they strike at
essentials. But this cry and its emotional basis are also
recurrent. The foundation of today is the accident of to
morrow. The world is not a finished system; its essence
is not static being but dynamic becoming. People have
learned to live and to live better without the whipping
post, the ghetto, the subjection of woman, the enforcement
of religious conformity. Once madmen were beaten as
[Vol. 112, No. 2896
vicious, or killed as possessed of a demon, or worshiped as

inspired by a god. What substitute was offered in place
of these cruelties and delusions? None. Hence those of us
who fight economic injustice, wage and sex slavery, social
intolerance, and war, need offer neither substitute nor con
structive theories. The things we fight have become clear
evils. They are in the nature of crippling diseases. The
physician guards against disease or destroys it. He neither
compromises with it, nor puts anything in its place. Yet
who will doubt the essential creativeness of his negative
activity ?
The exercise of liberty and justice among men is posi
tive and creative; the attainment of liberty and justice is
today, as it has always been, a negative process. In the
face of an uncomprehended universe, beset by obscure
dangers, the tribes of men, in the name of angry gods,
burdened themselves with heavy loads of intricate and
rigid custom. But as fear and passion recede and reason
comes to rule in the minds of individuals and groups, these
customs and the sanctions that support them are seen in
their true character. They are not sacred except through
emotional habit; they must submit, like all other mortal
things, to the plain test of present and future usefulness or
beauty. If they have become ugly fetters they must be
destroyed. The sculptor, to use an old but apt similitude,
does not mourn over the fragments he hews from the block.
The stone may tax him with destructiveness. He sets
free the statue of his vision. Wherever men have come
to exercise creative energy, they have first attained freedom
by destroying custom, by rebelling against social institu
tions or transcending them. The destroyers are the cre
ators themselves or the creators' heralds and prophets.
The aim of every human future is not substitutes for the
present burdens but fewer ones, not a change from one
prison to another, but the liberation of the creative spirit
of man.
Ending the Intellectual Blockade

WITH the announcement by the Rockefeller Foundation
of its virtual adoption for the present of some of the
medical schools of Central Europe, our intellectual rapproche
ment with the former enemy countries may be said to be
fairly under way. That there was need for assistance goes
almost without saying. The German and Austrian univer
sities, crowded now as they have never been before, lack
almost everything that makes university life possible. They
are in many cases utterly destitutefirst of funds, then as
a natural consequence, of books and laboratory apparatus.
Hundreds of scientific and literary periodicals have had to
suspend publication. There have been no foreign exchanges
since 1914. And the professors and students, besides being
thus denied intellectual nourishment, are often unable to
buy even one regular meal a day, and being in many cases
without lodgings, are found sleeping in railway stations or
other public places. The result of all this, if aid had not
come from the outside world, could have been nothing less
than the cessation of the developmenteven of the existence
of art and science in the Central European countries, an
incalculable loss to the world.
The generous action of the Rockefeller Foundation was
not by any means the first step of this sort. In April of this
year an appeal signed by about twenty well-known men
Jan. 5, 1921]
The Nation
among them Cardinal Gibbons, Frank A. Vanderlip, David

Starr Jordan, Felix Adler, and William Howard Taft, men
representing almost a score of different groups in American
lifewas issued to publishers and publishing societies to ex
change with libraries, publishers, journals, and publishing so
cieties of all European countries "disregarding for the near
future whether the amount of printed matter in exchange
corresponds with the amount sent." This was a beginning.
Later under the direction of the Emergency Society in Aid
of European Science and Art, recently reorganized as the
Emergency Society in Aid of German and Austrian Science
and Art, under the presidency of Professor Franz Boas of
Columbia University, the business of assisting in the publica
tion of scientific journals, providing apparatus or books for
institutions of learning and for individual students was
begun. To date 575,000 marks have been sent to Germany
and 175,000 kronen to Austria by this society. Branches of
the organization are being started or are already operating
in Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, St. Louis, New Haven, Cam
bridge, and Newark. Money is raised by membership dues
of from five to one thousand dollars. The Germanistic So
ciety of America, too, has not been idle. From August 1
to November 10 of this year subscriptions for 224 journals
and periodicals, scientific, political, and literary, have been
sent to thirty-three German schools and universities. These
subscriptions were either given by the publishers or pur
chased by the Germanistic Society itself. Equally important
is the fact that sending American periodicals to the Central
Powers is doing a most useful work in placing the American
points of view a3 to the war and our idealism in it before
those who still misunderstand our national attitude.
The Menorah Society, in response to a moving cablegram
from one of its workers in Paris which described the situa
tion of Jewish students as appalling, and added "shelterless,
hungry, ill-clad, and only too often sick, these students will
surely not be able to go through another winter of suffering
unless help comes to them promptly," has launched a cam
paign to raise $50,000 to relieve these desperate needs. The
World's Student Christian Federation, assembled at St.
Beatenberg, Switzerland, in August, determined to inaugu
rate a scheme of European student relief. Their aim is to
supply to students food, clothing, fuel, books, housing, and
medical aid, by raising money themselves and in cooperation
with existing organizations.
And, finally, now comes the Rockefeller Foundation an
nouncing a "cooperative program" of aid in the rehabilita
tion of scientific equipment for medical teaching and
research and in furnishing medical journals to universities,
and the plan to invite a group of four men from Belgrade
to visit America for inspection and study with the ultimate
purpose of establishing there in the near future a medical
school The representatives of the Foundation investigating
conditions in Central Europe reported that there were less
than 300 doctors in all Serbia, and that the 25,000,000 in
habitants of Poland have fewer than 2,000 physicians avail
able to care for themone doctor to every 12,500 persons !
This is then obviously only a beginning, but the fact that
the long uphill climb is begun is encouraging. Meantime
the winter is pressing on with its fireless, foodless days and
its indescribable nights, and there is no time to be lost.
National enmities and hatreds have a vitality which is some
times amazing. But confronted by hungry bodies and hun
gry minds they must inevitably give way at last to a broth
erhood which transcends them.
Inishmore,
Inishmaan,
Inisheer
IF, as it is reported dimly, the war in Ireland has reached

the Aran Islands, then there is no spot left peaceful
in that ancient kingdom and new republic The story says
the forces of the English Crown heard that those windy
western islets harbored men on the run, and went after
them, patrolling the sea with boats and raiding the land.
Two civilians are said to have been killed in the mimic
battle, three wounded trying to escape, and seven arrested.
But only the barest details have got back to Dublin.
Like enough there were men on the run here and there
among the island cottages. There have always been. Didn't
John Synge when he was on the islands hear of a Connaught
man who killed his father with a blow of his spade because
he was in a passion, and who fled to Inishmaan, where the
natives kept him safe from the police for weeks till they
could ship him off to America? The impulse to protect the
criminal is universal in the Irish west. Chiefly this is be
cause the people, "who are never criminals yet always
capable of crime," feel that a man would not do a wrong
unless he were under the influence of an irresponsible pas
sion. But partly, too, it is because "justice" is associated
with the English. How much more than in Synge's day is
this the case nowwhen "justice" is trying to level Ireland
under its iron feet, and many a fine young man must have
had to run to Inishmore or Inishmaan or Inisheer! Even
in Synge's day the most intelligent man on Inishmaan de
clared that the police had brought crime to Aran. The Con
gested Districts Board has done something to modernize
Killeany, but elsewhere the island population changes very
slowly.
A quaint story has lately come to light about the islands.
They were being used, it says, by the Irish Republic as a
place of internment for its prisoners, though there is, of
course, no jail there. And it seems that when the forces of
the Crown crossed Galway Bay from the mainland and
offered these prisoners their freedom they rejected it com
pletely, desiring rather to stay where they were than to go
free to any other part of the British Isles whatever. One
sees the seed of legends in this story. Pat Dirane, the old
story-teller who made Synge's day delightful, is dead now;
and "Michael" (really Martin McDonagh) has married and
come to America. There will be others, however, to carry
on the tradition among a people who still pass from island
to island in rude curaghs of a model which has served primi
tive races since men first went to sea; who still tread the
sands and invade the surfs of their islands in pampooties of
raw cowskin which are never dry and which are placed in
water at night to keep them soft for the next day; who
make all the soil they have out of scanty treasures of clay
spread out on stones and mixed with sand and seaweed.
Old Mourteen on Inishmore told Synge about Diarmid, the
strongest man on the earth since Samson, and believed in
him. Pat Dirane told tales that were the island versions of
"Cymbeline" and "The Merchant of Venice," tales known
elsewhere in the words of Boccaccio and of the "Gesta Romanorum." Michael's friend sang "rude and beautiful poetry
. . . filled with the oldest passions of the world." How
then shall the story die of how men who were put away on
Inisheer or Inishmaan or Inishmore found that prison
sweeter than freedom and would not go back when the
chance was offered them?
The Nation
Pittsburgh's
[Vol. 112, No. 2896
Prostituted Press
By CHARLES GRANT MILLER

IN the year that has passed since the great steel strike
of 1919, passions have cooled, controversial mists have
cleared away, the truth has emerged from the barrage that
was thrown about it, and it has become established as
general public knowledge that the contest was a thoroughly
orthodox A. F. of L. struggle for better wages and fewer
hours on the one side and for the "open shop" on the
other, with no unusual features either in the causes or con
duct of the strike from beginning to end. At this distance
and with this understanding it has become possible to ap
praise in right perspective, in calm spirit, and with judicial
exactness the one outstanding, sinister, and decisive factor
in that strike. This factor was the prostituted press of
Pittsburgh.
The newspapers of Pittsburgh in particular and of the
country in general persistently misrepresented the strike to
the public as a bolshevik outbreak of foreign workers, with
out basis in real grievances, opposed by all American labor,
denounced by all the clergy, attended by violent riots, a
deadly menace to industry, peace, and established rights, a
thing to be stamped out by any measures and at all cost.
With failure of the press in the truth, there was a conse
quent failure of the public in right sense of justice and
sympathy; there was also a collateral failure of the State
in law and order.
This is an old charge; but I am not dealing in mere
charges, nor in mere generalities, but in detailed evidence.
The indictment brought in the Interchurch World Move
ment Report is firmly based and fully sustained in a volumi
nous supplementary report of its Commission of Inquiry,
never published. No evidence of this perfidy to its public
trust on the part of the press will be adduced, or needed,
other than that presented in the files of the Pittsburgh
newspapers themselves. The Pittsburgh papers stand out,
naturally, because half the steel industry of the country
centers in Pittsburgh and because the developments in and
around Pittsburgh were decisive in the outcome of the
strike, and for the further reason that the Pittsburgh
papers were largely the source of the strike news which
the press associations spread broadcast.
No analysis of the attitude of the Pittsburgh papers
toward the strike would be comprehensive or comprehensi
ble without early consideration of the advertising campaign
against the strike. From September 27 to October 8 over
thirty full-page advertisements, denouncing the leadership
of the strike and calculated to undermine the morale of the
strikers, appeared in the various Pittsburgh newspapers.
They were printed in English and generally in four or five
foreign languages as well. These advertisements, while ap
parently designed for the strikers, unquestionably because
of their prominence and space greater than that of the
strike "news" columns, had an important part in influencing
public opinion regarding the causes and conduct of the
strike, quite apart from any effect they may have had in
influencing the policies of the newspapers themselves.
Coming early, these paid pronouncements had far-reach
ing force. They outlined and crystallized the misinforma
tion that was consistently accepted in the news columns of
the Pittsburgh papers and from them transmitted to the
press of the whole country. The point of view taken in the

advertisements was exactly the point of view adopted in the
news and editorial columns of the Pittsburgh papers, from
the beginning of the strike to its end. Showing a fair
sample of their spirit, the first of these advertisements, in
the Chronicle-Telegraph, Saturday, September 27, carried
a slogan three times repeated across the page in large type,
"GO BACK TO WORK MONDAY," and besides quotations
from the booklet, "Syndicalism," by W. Z. Foster, displayed
such statements as these:
Yesterday the enemy of Liberty was Prussianism. Today it
is Radicalism.
Masquerading under the cloak of the American Federation
of Labor, a few Radicals are striving for power. They hope
to seize control of the industries and turn the country over to
the Red rule of Syndicalism.
Among the slogans presented in the advertising were
the following, printed in type two inches* high :
America Is Calling YouThe Steel Strike Will FailBe a
100 Per Cent AmericanStand By AmericaThe Steel Strike
Can't Win, BoysLet's Be 100 Per Cent American Now
Europe's Not What It Used To BeMaybe the Doors of the
Old U. S. A. Will Not Again Open to Them if Foreign-Born
Now Here Return to Europe and Want to Come Back.
Whether by strange coincidence or as a consequence of
this heavy advertising, the news and editorial attitude of
the Pittsburgh papers could not have coincided with the
attitude of this advertising more completely, or their policy
supported the position of the Steel Corporation more ear
nestly and effectively, had they been owned outright by it.
The public might justly have expected of the newspapers
of Pittsburgh impartial exercise of editorial judgment and
analysis in considering conflicting statements regarding
the strike. The public has a sacred right to expect of the
press that it at least attempt to give a truthful record of
actual happenings. Instead, every one of the seven Englishlanguage newspapers of Pittsburgh insistently gave the im
pression that the men on strike were disloyal, un-American,
and actuated by bolshevik theories.
As to the actual strikers' demands scarcely a reference
can be found in the entire Pittsburgh press, from Septem
ber 22, when the strike began, to its close at the end of
December, beyond statements that they amounted, accord
ing to Judge Gary and other Steel Corporation officials, to
the "closed shop." There was not one word of the resent
ment which stirred a great many good citizens of Pitts
burgh against the suppression of free speech, peaceable as
semblage, right of petition, and other constitutional guaran
ties. Only one article in the 400 issues gave any details of
a first-hand observation of the strikers' loss of civil rights.
That the clergymen of the district were unitedly opposed
to the cause of the strikers was falsely indicated through
out by publication of only such comment by preachers which
set forth that point of view. Only one independent in
vestigation of the number of men striking was printed, and
that, made by a news agency late in November, was based
mainly on company figures. It confirmed the figures of
fered by the strikers, but denied publication, two months
before. The only newspaper attempts to investigate con
Jan. 5, 1921]
The Nation
ditions in the mills were made when visiting correspon

dents tried unsuccessfully to get passes from the companies
into the mills.
In connection with the constantly reiterated charge of
revolution and bolshevism it is worthy of note that no at
tempt was made at any honest, independent investigation
into this grave charge. Disproof in plenty was ignored.
The United States Senate Committee on Education and
Labor in an exhaustive inquiry made in Pittsburgh in the
midst of the strike found no revolutionary tendencies in the
strikers' conduct. Testimony to this effect was available
to the newspapers, but was left untouched.
The Interchurch Commission of Inquiry found that
No interpretation of the movement as a plot or conspiracy
fits the facts; that is, it was a mass movement in which leader
ship became of secondary importance. Charges of bolshevism
or of industrial radicalism in the conduct of the strike were
without foundation.
Not a single conviction was found against anybody and fed
eral officials made not even a single arrest on this charge.
It was as clear to the discerning then as it must be to all
now that "radicalism" was made to appear the chief issue
in the strike solely as a means of falsely winning public
sympathy to the position of the Steel Corporation. Day
after day, with monotonous continuity, the Pittsburgh
papers put up such streamer "scare-heads" as :
ALIEN STRIKERS' DEPORTATION URGED BY WALSH
TO CRUSH RADICAL TENDENCIES HERE.Gazette-Times,
Oct 3.
URGES DEPORTATION OF FOREIGNERS TAKEN BY
POLICE IN STRIKE.Leader, Oct. 6.
ALL ALIENS NOT RADICALS RETURN TO MILLS, RE
PORT.Chronicle-Telegraph, Oct. 7.
DRASTIC STEPS DEALING WITH ALIENS ASKED.
Gazette-Times, Oct. 29.
GERMAN DESIGNS SUSPECTED.Gazette-Times, Oct. 3.
INSPIRED WALKOUT TO REGAIN TRADE, STEEL MAN
ASSERTS.Chronicle-Telegraph, Oct. 2.
The Chronicle-Telegraph, under this latter heading, con
gruously displayed on the front page, had an incendiary
story the full tenor of which as well as its sole authority
show in the first paragraph :
Numerous steel men today expressed themselves as believing
the strike of steel laborers, which they say is now positively on
the wane here, with the Russian Slav as the obstinate radical
still out, was started either deliberately or otherwise in the in
terest of the Central Empires to get back their trade.
Snch screaming headlines as these, supported by stories
of like extravagance, commonly inspired by "a well-known
steel head," no matter how irrelevant or irresponsible, nor
bow prejudicial to a fair understanding of the issues, were
daily favorites for first-page display.
The only offered interpretation of the bolshevik theories
flat were declared to be held by the foreign elements among
tte strikers was that sought to be conveyed by copious extacts from Foster's "red" book, which book, however, cer
tainly not one in a thousand of the unlettered foreigners
"a strike had ever read or even heard of. What rendered
*e name of Foster most odious to the Steel Corporation,
therefore anathema to the Pittsburgh press, was that
^ had just completed organization and leadership of the
^Pbyees of the great Chicago packing combine in their
successful contest for collective bargaining.
Throughout the strike period the Pittsburgh papers maintained an almost unbroken silence regarding the actual
questions at issuehours, pay, working conditions, lack of

means of conference between employers and employees, not
to mention housing and social conditions. The newspapers
of Pittsburgh not only did not print these vital issues, but
confused and covered them up with the false issue of
"bolshevism."
The Interchurch investigation developed these facts:
The annual earnings of over one-third of all productive iron
and steel workers were, and had been for years, below the level
set by government experts as the minimum of subsistence stand
ard for families of five.
The annual earnings of 72 per cent of all workers were, and
had been for years, below the level set by government experts
as the minimum of comfort level for families of five.
Skilled steel labor was paid wages disproportionate to the
earnings of the other two-thirds, thus binding the skilled class
to the companies and creating divisions between the upper third
and the rest of the force.
Wage rates in the iron and steel industry as a whole are
determined by the rates of the U. S. Steel Corporation. The
Steel Corporation sets its wage rates, the same as its hour sched
ules, without conference (or collective bargaining) , with its
employees.
In the Pittsburgh papers, without a single exception
worthy of note, the statements, demands, grievances, and
testimony of the strikers, when mentioned at all, appeared
under such headlines or in such context to give the im
pression that what the strikers sought was something ex
travagant, impossible, and unspeakable, and not at all to be
accorded serious consideration. For example, the GazetteTimes's treatment of the Senate Committee proceedings, on
October 11, when the strikers had their "day in court," was
characteristically biased. Although many witnesses testified
to the steel industry's long hours, to arbitrary treatment,
to intimidation tactics of police and officials, to desire of
foreign workmen to become Americanized, and their diffi
culty in learning English after a 12-hour day, only an
insignificant part of the Gazette-Times story, toward the
end, touched this testimony, while the headlines and "lead"
made no reference to the real significance of the day's
hearing. The next day the Senate Committee heard wit
nesses brought by the Steel Company, including the super
intendent of the mill at Donora; and now a generous por
tion of the Gazette-Times space was devoted to the testi
mony, setting forth in full the superintendent's statement
that the steel workers preferred a longer day with higher
wages to an eight-hour day with reduced wages and the
statements of non-striking highly paid skilled workers that
they were not dissatisfied with their jobs and treatment.
A summary of the Senate Committee hearings was given by
the Gazette-Times in these headlines, October 13:
SENATORS FIND MILL WORKERS
HERE SATISFIED
Steel Strikers at Hearing Yesterday Unable to
Give Cause for Walkout
Domination Charged
Organizers Conducted Movement, Forcing
Men to Leave Plants
Foreigners Testify
Reasons for Strike Unknown
These two-day Senate Committee hearings in Pittsburgh
afforded the only occasion forcing the local papers to give
any recognition at all to the fact that the strikers had a
10
The Nation
case meriting a hearing; and even then there was no re

spect shown for the right of the public to know the facts
brought out. Testimony before the Senate Committee led
that body to characterize treatment of strikers in the name
of the law as follows : "Their treatment by the officers has
been brutal and their treatment in the courts does not
accord with the high ideals of American democracy."
Concerning such suppression of civil rights the news
papers of Pittsburgh did not lack abundant information.
It was thrust on them, but they ignored it. Much of it
was of a character justly demanding not only publication,
but vigorous following up. The Pittsburgh papers simply
suppressed it.
At a special meeting at the Labor Temple on October 10
the Pittsburgh Central Labor Council, a long-established,
traditionally regular trade-union body, adopted a resolution
setting forth the following conditions as existing in the
Pittsburgh district:
That the Steel Corporation and its subsidiaries and all other
steel companies aligned with it in their un-American war upon
organized labor have instituted a campaign of vilification and
libel through the medium of their subsidized press, in purchased
advertisements and editorials and slander by their paid officials
and hirelings.
That they have inaugurated a state of terrorism as their
sole method and hope of breaking this strike.
That in their attempt to break the strike they have procured
the assistance of various State, county, and city officials and
police, together with the hired police, private detectives and
thugs and strike-breakers of the company, and have made
numerous unwarranted arrests and assaults upon helpless and
defenseless people ; denied union men the right to hold meetings,
either upon the public commons or in private or rented halls,
by threats directed against the owners of such halls and by
refusal to grant permits . . . ; and by the sheriff of Allegheny
County refusing to permit interpreters to translate by word of
mouth any message conveyed to them by their English speakers
and by refusing distribution of any literature.
Not only was this whole list of charges excluded from all
the Pittsburgh papers, as if they were non-existent, but
not one of these papers was moved by the natural journalis
tic impulse to make inquiry at the central council as to
what facts it might have as foundation for such grave
charges of official violation of civil rights.
A special convention in Pittsburgh of the Pennsylvania
State Federation of Labor, on November 2, representing
500,000 members, after hearing evidence of the denial of
civil liberties in western Pennsylvania, voted unanimously
to call a State-wide general strike unless the Governor
should call a special session of the legislature or take other
effective steps to restore law and order. This was news
of sufficient importance to be displayed at length on the
front pages of New York and Chicago papers, through
special dispatches, but only one of the Pittsburgh papers
had any mention whatever of the convention, and that on
the sixth page, devoted mostly to quotation of the sole
speaker against the action taken.
There was just one exception to this general rule of sup
pression. The Pittsburgh labor unions offered a petition
to the city council begging the privilege of placing before
that body the strikers' grievances against the police depart
ment, the mayor, magistrates, and sheriff's deputies, which
petition, citing specific counts and signed by the presidents
of seven local labor unions, the council by a tie vote refused
to receive. The Pittsburgh Leader printed, October 15, a
fair brief account of this action of the council and the
[Vol. 112, No. 2896
petition in full. No other Pittsburgh paper saw news in

this strange incident, and no criticism of the council ap
peared in any Pittsburgh paper except the Leader, which
had been foremost in denouncing the strike as bolshevik,
disloyal, and un-American, but now for the moment took a
firm stand against the council action, saying editorially:
It was Pittsburghers who asked for the investigation. Citi
zens and taxpayersand they have the right of petition and
the right to courteous treatment from their representatives in
council. And the people of Pittsburgh, too, have the right TO
know whether any or all of the charges of the labor men are
true or false. A refusal to investigate will be accepted as a
plea of GUILTY.
No results followed, and not even the Leader attempted an
investigation, lacking which Pittsburgh stood convicted by
the Leader editorial, the only article in 400 issues of seven
newspapers in which sentiment for fair play was expressed.
Not alone from labor organizations did complaints come
of the violation of civil rights, but no matter what their
origin, they got scant recognition in the papers of Pitts
burgh.
The Church and Social Service Commission of the Fed
eral Council of Churches of Christ in America urged Gov
ernor Sproul, on November 23, to secure to the people of
his State the right of assemblage and free speech. This
action was taken, it was said, after the commission had
carefully considered evidence gathered by its investigators.
A letter sent to the Governor by Rev. Worth M. Tippy,
executive secretary of the commission, said in part:
In various steel towns in Pennsylvania the right of assemblage
and free speech, even within buildings, has been and is being
denied by various authorities. The consequences of such denial
are to discredit the institutions of the United States among
immigrant workers and to weaken the leadership of those who
seek industrial change by constitutional methods.
While no Pittsburgh paper had space or taste for this
calm finding of an impartial commission, not less than 150
articles appeared in them during the strike tending to
create the impression in the public mind that the strike
was fraught with disorder created by the strikers. Over
stories which in themselves showed an utter lack of first
hand information appeared such headlines as follow:
ONE MAN SHOT; Constables and Strikers Hurt.Dispatch,
Oct. 22.
ONE SHOT; 20 HURT IN BRADDOCK STRIKE RIOTS;
Many Hurt in Clashes Between State Police and Former Mill
Workers.Gazette-Times, Oct. 22.
RIOTING AT BRADDOCK IS QUICKLY SUPPRESSED.
Sun, Oct. 21.
EIGHT SUSPECTS ARRESTED IN RIOTING AT BRAD
DOCK.Gazette-Times, Oct. 24.
STEEL WORKER'S HOME BOMBED AT DONORA; Four
Are Arrested.Press, Nov. 30.
FOUR FOREIGNERS HELD ON DYNAMITE CHARGE.
Dispatch, Nov. 8.
DONORA RADICALS TRY TO BLOW UP HOME AND
BRIDGE.Press, Nov. 11.
NEWSPAPER AT DONORA THREATENED.Leader,
Oct. 12.
TWO SHOT IN STRIKE RIOTS AT DONORA: SEVERAL,
INJURED.Chronicle-Telegraph, Oct. 9.
DONORA AND ENVIRONS TERRIFIED BY BOMBS;
Reign of Terror Exists Following Dynamiting of Homes and
Street Car; Four Arrested on 12-Year-Old Boy's Testimony.
Sun, Nov. 7.
The "Donora bomb outrage," for instance, turned out to
Jan. 5, 1921]
The Nation
be the explosion of a stick of dynamite under the porch not

of a "loyal" worker but of a striker, in a personal vendetta.
The other scare stories had as little foundation. The wide
contrast between these reports of violence and fair ac
counts obtained by disinterested investigators from wit
nesses is so striking as to leave no doubt that there was no
inquiry at all by the newspapers or else no disposition to
give the truth. During the whole period of the strike but
one article appeared which showed beyond doubt that an
attempt had been made at first-hand reportorial investiga
tion of disorder and riots. This article, in the Press, page
1, October 8, told how the writer had seen arms and hands
and heads plastered up and how she had heard unquestion
ably reliable accounts of unprovoked assaults by troopers
upon both men and women. No other Pittsburgh paper
followed this one example of the Press, and the Press itself
limited its enterprise and candor to the one example in
three months. The constantly appearing stories of strikers'
violence, however conflicting the accounts in the various
papers, however unverified, however unfounded, still served
well to justify in a debauched public opinion the official de
nials of civil rights and to create public sentiment for the
Steel Corporation.
Another strike-breaking argument that persisted in ad
vertisements, news articles, and editorials alike lay in the
continuous assertion that the strikers were returning to
work in great numbers. It is true that exact facts on this
point were impossible to get because the steel mills were
fortressed against newspaper men. But the best estimates
then available were that on September 28 about 280,000
men went on strike; during the following week the total
seemed to have exceeded 300,000, and by October 7 this
number had considerably further increased. During these
weeks when the strike was unquestionably increasing the
Pittsburgh papers were invariably stating that it was
waning. The manifest design, and perhaps effect, of these
misrepresentations coming persistently through the press
on the authority of "steel heads" was to drive strikers back
to work through fear their jobs were being taken by others.
The Leader on September 24, the third day of the strike,
had a first-page article under a big display head, "PITTS
BURGH MILLS RUNNING FULL; UNION MEN MEET."
The article, however, contained no statement that the mills
were running- full; and they were not in fact running full
six weeks later. The Chronicle-Telegraph on the same day,
under a conspicuous first-page heading, "SITUATION
GRATIFYING, SAYS CARNEGIE OFFICIAL," stated that
in some manner it has got to them [the foreign workmen] that
the American -workmen had not gone out, as the foreigner had
tan told, and the latter has given expression to the desire to be
aa American and in some instances to have resented being
tailed un-American.
The Leader on September 25 again misled its readers
in the big headline, "WORKERS FLOCK BACK TO JOBS;
BRADDOCK REPORTS THREE TIMES AS MANY
WORKING TODAY AS YESTERDAY; MANY PLANTS
OPEN." The Chronicle-Telegraph on October 1 had the
deadline, "STRIKE CRUMBLING, STEEL MEN SAY,
BEFORE COUNTLESS NUMBERS RETURNING TO
JOBS IN MILLS," and stated in its article:
Countless numbers of men today again walked into the mills
f the Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania district, according
to manufacturers, who declared the steel laborers' strike is
slowly but surely crumbling.
11
This article was a marked exception to the general rule in

that it made some reference to a bulletin issued from strike
headquarters that 370,000 men were now on strike.
Throughout the strike the papers continued this policy. A
wag with a turn for statistics checked up on their figures
and found that the newspapers had informed the public
that 2,400,000 men had gone back to work in the steel
industry, where about 500,000 are normally employed, while
continuing blindly to assert that conditions were "almost
up to normal."
The popular impression that the church sentiment of the
district was against the strikers was created by the
prominent display of the sermons, addresses, and state
ments of both Protestant and Catholic clergy that were in
accord with the policy of the Steel Corporation, especially
when they assumed that the strike was of radical origin,
while at the same time the newspapers strictly suppressed
all preachers' utterances which criticized the civil officers
and appealed for fair American treatment of the foreign
born. Even when the Pittsburgh Council of the Churches
of Christ, embracing 700 Protestant churches of all
denominations in the district, issued an appeal, read from
nearly every Protestant pulpit on Sunday, December 14,
demanding a square deal for the foreigners through
American enforcement of law and order, and designed to
allay public hysteria, mention of this fully representative
church appeal appeared in only two morning papers of
Pittsburgh. The Dispatch printed a large part of it, but in
small type on the fourth page and omitting the most im
portant paragraphs. The Post reduced mention of it to a
few paragraphs on the fourth page, attaching to it a denun
ciation of Bolshevists by a politician.
All this is but small part of the record of the perfidy and
prostitution of the press of Pittsburgh, of which it stands
convicted by its own files. It need not necessarily be
assumed that the lucrative advertising patronage of the
strike period was the sole, or the chief, or even a considerable
element of influence in controlling the strike policies of the
Pittsburgh papers. There are multiform influences too in
tricate for analysis here, but embraced in general by the
fact that Pittsburgh, industrially, financially, commercially,
politically, and socially, is dominated absolutely by the steel
interests. It is thus dominated journalistically also. There
has not been in years such a thing as a free press in
Pittsburgh where steel is concerned.
This is deplorable enough; but infinitely more to be
deplored is the fact we have witnessed that in a great
industrial crisis of nation-wide importance the attitude
of one group of papers, controlled by local conditions,
should through press association transmission become the
attitude of the entire daily press of the country. The
Interchurch report, criticizing the entire press in this
instance, was possibly unfair only inasmuch as the press
generally perhaps, as well as the entire public, were deceived
in accepting as truth the poison propaganda of Pittsburgh.
But while the press of the country in general may not
directly be responsible for these particular suppressions,
fabrications, and distortions of Pittsburgh events, yet the
press in general has the power and upon it rests the duty
to remedy the press association practices through which
selfish interests, prejudices, and corruption, local to one
community, pollute the thought and sympathies of the
whole nation, as one foul ulcer infects the whole system.
The Nation
12
The Farmers and Congress

By HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY
Washington, December 21, 1920
CONGRESS has come back to Washington to find itself
face to face with a farm crisis. The precipitous fall
of agricultural prices during the past six months means an
estimated loss of $6,000,000,000 to the farmers, who after
making this year's crop on the basis of the highest wages
and other costs known since the Civil War, are now obliged
to sell at prices in many instances below those of 1914.
Number two corn, worth $1.90 a bushel in Kansas City on
June 1, has dropped to less than 60 cents, and farmers are
getting only 30 at many country shipping points. Hogs,
fattened on $2 corn, were worth $17.16 in Chicago on Sep
tember 20; today they are selling at $8.97. This year's
cotton crop, perhaps the most expensive in our history, was
planted when the fleecy staple was worth 40y2 cents ; in July
the price reached 43% cents; today the New York market
is not far from 15 cents.
This ruinous fall in prices has caught the farmer unpre
pared. Last spring he was urged to grow record crops, and
he borrowed heavily in anticipation of the harvest ; now with
his notes falling due he is obliged to sell for whatever he
can get, or go into bankruptcy. Twenty-six country banks
in North Dakota have failed during the last thirty days,
their customers being unable to meet their notes. The
farmer's product today is being dumped into a demoralized
market to break prices still farther. During the week of
November 15 all records for receipts at the Chicago stock
yards were broken. No less than 4,503 carloads of cattle
were received, totaling 111,966 head, including 15,281 calves
and thousands of breeding animals which would normally
stay on the farms. A year ago Kansas had 2,000,000 hogs ;
today there are but 600,000 porkers in that State.
As a result of this sudden overturn, Congress is being
deluged with petitions and demands for relief. Members'
desks are piled high with letters and telegrams from all
parts of the West and South. The farmers feel that they
have been subject to discrimination in the matter of credit,
and they do not hesitate to charge the Federal Reserve
Board with bringing about deflation in ruthless disregard of
the present position and needs of the farmer. Indeed, the
feeling has become so acrimonious that Governor Harding
recently interrupted a Congressional hearing on board poli
cies to inquire, "Am I on trial here? Is the Reserve Board
on trial?" The farmers have good ground for complaint,
but they are blaming the Federal Reserve Board too late;
the time to object was when the Board was encouraging in
flation, but that was largely back in the good old days of
the war, when nobody objected to anything except Huns. We
are just beginning to sober up after the financial debauch
of the great conflict, and the farmers have a rather worse
headache than the rest of us.
Whether the Board has been unduly disregardful of agri
cultural needs in its drastic deflation policy is a question of
judgment in the light of more or less contradictory facts.
But one thing is plain to every instructed student of the
Federal Reserve system. That system was devised primarily
to meet the needs of manufactures and trade, not of agri
culture; and its administration, it may be said without im
plying any criticism of the Board, has had in mind primarily
[Vol. 112, No. 2896
the needs of industry rather than agriculture. When the

inevitable credit crash following the war came, the farmer
was landed high and dry, because no proper provision had
ever been made to meet his credit needs. Not unnaturally,
he blames our chief credit agency.
Hence the double proposal, which the Senate is still de
bating; first, to revive the War Finance Corporation "with
the view of assisting in the financing of the exportation of
agricultural products to foreign markets"; and second, to
"direct" the Federal Reserve Board to take action "to grant
liberal extensions of credit to the farmers of the country
upon the security of the agricultural products now held by
them, by permitting the rediscounting of such notes of
extension at the lowest possible rate of interest." The re
vival of the War Finance Corporation is at least an arguable
question, though it is doubtful whether such action would
afford much actual relief, but for Congress to "direct" the
Federal Reserve Board to do this or that in the present
critical credit situation would be much like a blacksmith's
undertaking to repair a watch with sledge and anvil.
In fact, Congress and the farmers and all the rest of us
need to distinguish what can be done from what can't.
Many of the farmers are in a desperate situation ; they are
entitled to any possible relief, and the well-being of the
whole country demands that their industry be put on a
sound basis. But omnipotence itself cannot make a threeyear-old steer in ten minutes. Facts are facts. A spokesman
of the agricultural interests recently declared in the Senate:
The farmer has been made the goat so often that it was
thought he could safely be made the goat again in the big
task of deflation. But we have leaned on him too long. The
burden has become too great. He cannot carry it. He will not.
But the lamentable fact is that he has got to carry it,
though he be ruined in the operation, because there is no
actual way, as conditions now are, of shifting the load. The
task of statesmanship lies in devising permanent remedies
so that he will not have to carry it again. It is this that
lends interest to the proposals of Senator Capper, who has
presented perhaps the most extensive program of farm
legislation that has thus far been put forward.
As immediate measures of relief, he proposes the reestablishment of the War Finance Board, the suspension by
the exchanges of future trading in farm products, the
restoration of trade relations with foreign countries, and
the establishment of credits that will enable Europe to buy.
Deflation and the consequent fall of prices, the Kansas Sen
ator maintains, were unavoidable, but they have been un
necessarily drastic and sudden as they affect the farmer.
The administration of the Federal Reserve Act, he contends,
has been in the hands of men unsympathetic with the
farmer, and prices have been driven down unnecessarily by
speculators, who have taken advantage of the necessity of
the agricultural interests.
This situation suggests the two lines of reform advocated
by the Kansan, the one affecting credit, the other marketing-.
As a permanent measure, he would first broaden the Federal
farm loan system, allowing loans up to 75 per cent of the
value of the land concerned, and would provide adequate
credit through a system of short and long-time loans. He
recognizes that the seasonal character of farming makes the
farmer's paper more or less undesirable for the ordinary
commercial bank, and that a system of agricultural credit
must be devised which will allow for this inevitable differ
ence. He would loan money to farmers on warehouse re
Jan. 5, 1921]
The Nation
ceipts for their grain and cotton, the transaction to be

financed by the issue of short-term debentures to the invest
ing public through the Federal Reserve Board or the Farm
Loan Board. Detailed consideration of these suggestions is
impossible, but it may be observed at any rate that they look
in the right direction. They recognize that a permanent
system of agriculture must furnish the farmer a basis of
proper credit, adapted to his peculiar needs and limitations.
In the marketing field, two definite legislative measures
have been put forward by Senator Capper. According to his
view, the present machinery of the produce exchanges serves
a useful purpose in the determination of prices, but it is
being seriously abused by speculative gamblers, who drive
down prices at the crop marketing season, thus widening the
spread between producer and consumer, to their own gain,
but to the great loss of everybody else. A bill has accord
ingly been introduced placing a prohibitive ten per cent tax
on all contracts for future delivery of grain, grain products
and cotton, and options for such contracts, (1) except where
the seller is the actual owner of the physical property cov
ered, and (2) except that actual growers, manufacturers, or
dealers may make future contracts up to three times the
quantity of products sold by them during their fiscal year.
The purpose of the bill is to stop speculative gambling (more
politely, pure speculation) in farm products, at the same
time preserving the legitimate "hedge" on the part of the
miller or cotton spinner who wants to protect himself against
fluctuations in the price of his raw material. The Senator
from Kansas has not made the mistake of undertaking to
prohibit all sales for future delivery. Instead, he tries to
distinguish "legitimate" from "illegitimate" future sales,
and to make his gun hit it if it is a deer and miss it if it
is a cow. One may have a measure of skepticism as to his
success, but at least he makes an effort to distinguish the
speculative sheep from the goats.
To his second measure almost everyone can give hearty
approval except those persons who fear the bogy of "class
legislation" (when it is not in favor of their own class) and
that other group who believe in competition d I'outrance.
The Capper-Hersman bill, which passed the House last
spring and has just gone through the Senate in considerably
modified form, proposes in effect to exempt associations of
agricultural producers from the pains and penalties imposed
by that addle-headed economic monstrosity the Sherman
anti-trust law. The purpose of the measure is to legalize
and encourage cooperative marketing of farm products.
Few persons outside the movement itself have any idea of
the scope of the plans now being laid by the farmers' groups,
including the powerful Farm Bureau Federation, to handle
the marketing of their own crops and live stock. The pro
posed measure is entirely in line with this tendency, which
is among the most significant in our agricultural life
today.
Given a proper credit system and intelligent cooperative
marketing arrangements, on which other cooperative activi
ties could be built, two of the three major problems of Amer
ican agriculture would be solved. There would remain the
greatest of allthe land question. Everywhere are heard
the same complaints of the alarming growth of tenancy, and
divers plans are proposed to make it easy to buy land. But
the encouragment of small farming, the formation of per
sonal credit unions, and other methods of stimulating own
ership are only superficial modes of dealing with a deepseated uneasiness. So long as land prices go up and down
13
with the value of farm products and so long as every farmer

is either a land speculator or a rack-rented tenant, so long
will each recurrent cycle of agricultural prices cast up on
the shore the wreck of those unfortunates who bought
their farms at the top of the marketonly to discover that
they could not raise 50-cent corn on 500-dollar land. Once
again we are about to be taught this lesson, but there is no
indication as yet either in Congress or out that anyone sees
below the surface phenomenon. For three hundred years
we have successfully dealt with the land question like a herd
of wild asses in the wilderness. Those good old days are
gone, but we have not yet any new ideas to fit our new
world. And so we stand today, a distracted farm population
facing a puzzled Congress, and, staring down on both, like
the three impassible oriental monkeys, our trinity of agri
cultural problemscredit and marketing and land.
Produce!
Produce!
By GEORGE SOULE
TIMES without number, during the past two years,
bankers and employers have told the country to get
down to work. The world, they said, was denuded of
necessary goods. It was the duty of all of us to produce,
regardless of difficulties. Did the steel workers wish a few
of their waking hours to devote to themselves and their
families? Such a desire was wicked, because it interfered
with production. Did the railroad men or the coal miners
want an increase in wages to bring them abreast of high
prices? It could not be considered for a moment. When
the steel workers, and the coal miners, and the railroad
workers, and many others, refused to sell their labor on
conditions disastrous to themselves, their strikes were as
sailed as crimes against the community. They were co
erced with injunctions and troops. And when the buying
public in general protested against high rents, high food,
high clothing, the rulers of industry told us it was all labor's
fault. The thirty million wage-earners in the country were
lazy and undisciplined. They bought silk shirts and auto
mobiles out of their high wages, but they would not produce.
If we wanted better times, we must all work harder.
Now appears a curious phenomenon. Workmen stopped
buying not only silk shirts and automobilesof which, after
all, they had not consumed large quantitiesbut many other
things as well. So did many other people. The silk busi
ness shriveled, and discharged thousands of operatives. So
did the automobile business, and the woolen business, and
the clothing business, and many other businesses. We find,
strangely, that hundreds of thousands of workmen are clam
oring for a chance to produce. And we find that the bankers
and manufacturers who have been talking loudest about the
duty of the workers to work harder, are the very ones who
are now denying them the opportunity to work at all. The
bankers will not give credit, the manufacturers will not
manufacture, and the retailers will not buy. It is now the
turn of the workman to arise in his righteous anger and
say to the masters of the country's business, "Produce!
produce! Why don't you all get down to work? Your con
duct is criminal. You are a lot of unconscionable profiteers,
and you ought to be shot at sunrise."
It is easy to see that such an attitude is unfair. Are
there not already too many goods? The merchant has on
14
The Nation
his shelves stock which does not sell. Any manufacturer

who now should continue operation on a full scale would
merely be piling up unused articles in the warehouses. The
bank which gave the manufacturer credit for such a pur
pose would be risking money unwisely. This is a vicious
circle which no individual can break. We seem to be suffer
ing from what certain ill-advised economists used to call
"overproduction." Overproductionit has a strange sound.
For it impliesdoes it not?that the workmen have been
creating too much and not buying enough. It implies that
all the persons who told us so vehemently to produce were
badly misled. Apparently they should have said to the
workers, "Take it easy. Don't produce so much. Insist on
high wages for a small output. For unless you do this, you
will make more goods than you can buy, and the factories
will have to shut down."
Suppose for a moment that the steel workers had been
granted an eight-hour day with increased wages, and that
their leisure had multiplied their wants at the same time
that their purchasing power was enlarged. Suppose the
coal miners and the railroad men had been able earlier to
bring their wages up to the same level of purchasing power
as before the war, perhaps even beyond it, without the im
mense dislocations of production which the strikes, caused
by the obduracy of the employers, made necessary. Thus
two things would have happened. The interruptions which
were one factor of slackened production would have been
avoided, and prices might not have risen so much. And
thousands of workmen's families would have been buying
houses, bathtubs, stoves, clothing, and a hundred other arti
cles of merchandise which as it was they couldn't afford.
Why are we not justified in saying that in this case there
would have been more effective demand in the market, and
hence larger production ? Temporarily the increase in wages
would have been a disadvantage to the employers in ques
tion. But eventually it would have returned to bless them.
Fundamentally, of course, production and consumption
are two ends of the same stick. You can't eat any more
wheat than you grow. The more goods there are produced,
the more goods there are for use. And, the more people
there are earning wages in production, the more people
there are to buy what is made. Why, therefore, could we
not keep right on making and buying ad infinitum? Why
these involuntary interruptions of the productive process?
We could work, it seems, as hard as we like, knowing that
the result of our labor would be more shoes, clothing, and
automobiles for each of us. Or we could slacken our work
if that pleased us better, knowing that the result would be
less goods for each of us. The only trouble with economists
who theorize thus is that they are presupposing a condition
in which all the producers have equal access to all that they
make. They are presupposing one in which persons who do
not produce get nothing at all. They are presupposing a
flow of products whose valves are not controlled by prices,
wages, and profits. They are presupposing, in other words,
communism. Under communism it would be fair for one
person to tell another that he had a moral duty to produce
for the sake of the community. Under communism a major
share of the responsibility for production would be individ
ual. But let us be just enough to admit that under our
own arrangement the homilies in favor of high productivity
are pretty much beside the point.
Under our arrangement, responsibility for production is
vnot wholly individual. What is important is not so much
[Vol. 112, No. 2896
the desire to produce, as the terms under which production

is to be carried on. When the miners struck, they were
saying that if they could not sell their labor on terms which
they believed necessary, they would not sell at all. The only
difference between them and the business men who are now
refusing to produce is the difference in the thing for sale.
Now the merchants are on strikethey will not or cannot
sell their goods low enough so that people will buy. Every
manufacturer who is shut down is shut down not because
there is any real oversupply of his goods. There are plenty
of people who would like to possess what he makes. He is
shut down because he refuses to make and sell his goods at
prices low enough so that merchants will buy them. If he
cannot produce at a profit, he will not produce at all. It is
the same with sellers of raw materials. It is the same with
every other element in the business complex. Each element
is striking against the others. In the competitive scramble
for the unequal distribution of goods, each group is de
liberately slacking on the jobis forced to slack on the job
so that it may be in a favorable position for bargaining.
Suppose there were a factory in which each department,
instead of being subordinated to the purpose of the whole
factory, were a separate profit-seeking business. Suppose
the receiving department sold the raw material to the first
set of machines, and they in turn had to dicker with the
second set when their work was done. Suppose the book
keeping department were an independent bank, which loaned
money separately to each of the other departments. Doubt
less the factory would produce some goods. But imagine
the confusions and restrictions which would result from the
constant interposition of the bargaining process. Each de
partment would urge the others to produce more, but it
would be neglecting its own business if it produced so much
itself as not to be able to exact a good price. Our present in
dustrial order is operated on the principle of such a factory.
There cannot be one economic morality for labor and
another one for business. We can say, there is a free mar
ket in which everyone is at liberty to grab as much as he
can. Labor unions, retailers, bankers, manufacturersall
business associations are permitted to sell their wares for
what they please, or otherwise not to sell at all. To restrain
any one member of this complex, and not to restrain all, is
impossible. Let them fight it out. The result, to be sure,
is limitation of production, with hardship and want, with
distressing hostilities which disturb our civil peace and
thwart every advance toward humane standards. But the
law of business, we can say, is the law of the jungle, and
mankind must continue on that basis even if it perishes for
the privilege. If, on the other hand, we are really interested
in greater production, we must admit that the whole chaos
of business must be recast on a functional basis. You can
not maintain production if the various groups engaged in
it are always quarreling for the lion's share of the product.
You cannot maintain production if those who control pro
duction are motivated not by the general need for goods,
but by their own desire for profitable exchange. Preaching
will not bring production, nor injunctions, nor compulsory
arbitration, nor the open shop, nor the jailing of profiteers.
Production must be organized. It must be organized on
the basis of service and function, of the equitable distribu
tion, among all the producers, of the goods they make.
It is impossible, of course, to bring about such organiza
tion in a day. But if we seriously want high productivity,
it is well to understand the condition of its attainment.
The Nation
Jan. 5, 1921]
Solving Housing in England

By MALCOLM SPARKES
London, December 15
AMID all the tremendous chaos of the present industrial
situation, the rise of the Guild of Builders stands out
clear-cut and strong, a great fact from which we can take
courage. Planned by men who believe that it is far more
important to build up a new system than to destroy the old,
it is a deliberate attempt to establish here and now a serious
instalment of that new industrial order for which everyone
is looking. And with the signature of its first contract
the Walthamstow Housing Schemethe curtain rings up on
one of the most adventurous experiments of our time.
The Guild is based upon the National Federation of Build
ing Trade Operatives, the London section of which embraces
twelve trade unions with 60,000 men. As the Trade Union
Ticket is the certificate of Guild membership, both Guild
and Federation are really the same people, organized for
different purposes. The Federation regulates industrial
conditions ; the Guild builds the houses. The control in each
case rests with the rank and file and the whole structure is
very simple and easily understood.
A Guild is a self-governing democracy of organized public
service, with the whole team pulling together for the com
mon purpose. The time-honored criticism that the workers
cannot control industry because they know nothing about
business disappears before the fact that the Guild of Build
ers includes in its ranks every type of building trade expert
that there is, whether administrative, technical, or opera
tive. Guild control is control by the people who do the work
instead of control by the people who put up the money.
Every essential function in the industry is therefore repre
sented on the Guild Committee. The Operative Bricklayers'
Society elect their man; the carpenters and joiners theirs;
the painters, plumbers, plasterers, masons, etc., theirs.
The committee thus constituted has power to approve
other associations or groups of building trade workers, and
this is how the technicians come in. Under this clause, the
architects' and surveyors' groups have already elected their
representative; a group of civil engineers is being formed;
and a further group of decorative painters and sculptors is
under consideration. Here, also, come the local Guild com
mittees. The Walthamstow Committee has a representative ;
Greenwich has another, and ten more are to follow.
From this it will be seen that the London Guild Commit
tee will ultimately consist of some twenty-five to thirty mem
bers, about half of whom will be responsible to the craft
unions or other approved functional organizations, and
about half to the local Guild committees. The London Guild
Committee thus forms the legal entity. It has already been
registered as "The Guild of Builders (London) Limited."
All committee men are directors; each holds one shilling
share, and all are removable by their associations.
The labor of the guildsmen will not be treated as a mere
commodity like bricks or timber, to be purchased as required
and discarded when done with. When the financial arrange
ments are complete, pay will be continuous, in sickness or
accident, in bad weather or in good. The word unemploy
ment, as we used to understand it, is to be ruled out of the
dictionary, let us hope, forever.
The contract just signed with the Walthamstow Urban
15
District Council will probably be the model for many others.

It creates a great triple alliance in which the Guild under
takes the whole of the work ; the Cooperative Wholesale So
ciety supplies the materials ; and the Cooperative Insurance
Society guarantees due performance of the contractthe
liability under this head, however, being limited to one-fifth
of the contract price. This price is the actual net prime
cost of materials and labor at standard rates plus 40 per
house to enable the Guild to guarantee a full week to each
of its workers, and six per cent on the estimated cost as
given in the Guild tender. Payments are to begin at the
end of the first week and to continue weekly, the cost of
plant and administration being met out of the six per cent.
It is the size of the contract that makes the six per cent
fully sufficient for administration and equipment. The num
ber of houses to be built at Walthamstow by the Guild is 400
and the estimated cost amounts to very nearly 400,000. It
is anticipated that 3 per cent of this sum would be more than
sufficient to provide first-class equipment of every kind. Al
ready the Guild has secured a splendid plant of wood-work
ing machinery, most of which is being installed on the site.
The payment for this and other equipment is made possible
by an advance by the Cooperative Wholesale Society's bank,
secure against payments falling due under the contract.
These 400 houses only represent the first section of a much
larger housing scheme for Walthamstow, but even by them
selves they will make a very substantial contribution to the
relief of the housing problem. The Walthamstow Guild
Committee, which supplies the labor to the contract, is al
ready overwhelmed with volunteers, and it is quite evident
that the job will be fully manned, and the speed of its prog
ress is only limited by the rate of delivery of materials. This
is a problem that will not be satisfactorily solved until the
Guild sets up an extensive organization for manufacture and
supply of every essential article for building. This, how
ever, is only a matter of time. For preliminary expenses
the Guild is raising a loan without interest, by the sale of
loan receipts of five shillings and upwards, which are repay
able at the discretion of the directors from surplus earnings.
Although the payment of a limited rate of interest for the
hire of capital is clearly permissible, it is a fundamental
rule of the Guild constitution that surplus earnings can
never be distributed as dividends but must always go to the
improvement of the service either by way of increased equip
ment or technical training and research. The Guild intends
to build the best possible buildings at the lowest possible
cost. It concentrates on this service every improvement in
process or in method that science and skill can provide. It
throws aside all class distinctions and boldly calls for volun
teers from every grade of the industry, for men who will
take risks gladly in the doing of one of the greatest tasks
that has ever been attempted. It is a real, living, industrial
comradeship of service.
Contributors to This Issue

Charles Grant Miller, formerly editor of the Cleveland
Plain Dealer, was for ten years chief editorial writer of
the Newspaper Enterprise Association, for four years
managing editor of the Christian Herald, and has re
cently contributed a notable series of articles on Amer
ican journalism to the Editor and Publisher.
Malcolm Sparkes is secretary of The Guild of Builders
(London) Ltd.
The Nation
16
[Vol. 112, No. 2896
A New German Liberal Monthly

In the Driftway
IT was with startled interest that the Drifter read that
Mrs. James Longstreet, widow of the famous Confed
erate general and hero of the South, had been denied the
vote, and that she was going to move to have the vote of
Georgia thrown out in the Electoral College because of the
wholesale disfranchisement of white and colored women in
that State at the presidential election. What, he asked, has
become of Southern chivalry that such a woman, bearing
such a name, could be cheated of her vote? The Drifter
would have expected that Mrs. Longstreet and every woman
relative of Robert E. Lee's family would have been escorted
to the polls by a brass band and a procession of the leading
citizens of the town. And then his mind ran back to an
incident that happened in the early days of Jim Crowing
in Virginia. A white woman insisted upon sitting in the
Jim Crow coach because the white cars were full and no
one gave her a seat. The conductor protested, begged,
urged, and then threatened with arrestin vain. So at
Alexandria the obdurate one was haled to court by a "burly
policeman"all policemen are burly when making arrests.
Once in court, so tradition has it, it came time to take the
lady's name. A Yankee "nigger-lover"? Not she, but Mil
dred Lee, a daughter of Robert E., himself. The speed
with which she was bowed out of court, a thousand apolo
gies tendered, and the affair hushed up, could only be ade
quately portrayedso runs the talein comic opera. The
Drifter has always had a little doubt about the story. Now,
after Mrs. Longstreet's disfranchisement, he believes it to
the full.
The Drifter
Correspondence
A Diplomat of Experience
To the Editor of The Nation:
Sir: I find the following item in the news columns of my
local evening paper:
"The document presenting the peace prize to President Wilson
and also the Nobel medal was received by Albert G. Schmedemann, the American minister to Norway, who read a message
of thanks from President Wilson."
The point of concern, however, is not this new honor to the
Admirable Wilson, which all right-thinking men appreciate as
a peculiarly fitting crown for all his works. Moreover, that the
author and preserver of the Fourteen Points would eventually
receive the Nobel Peace Prize was a foregone conclusion for all
who have been observing the course that ethical intelligence
and international justice have been traversing for some time
past on our globe. Incidentally, it is to be regrettedis it not?
that we are thus far denied the text of this message of thanks;
for, in acknowledging distinguished courtesies from the Euro
peans, Mr. Wilson's vein invariably achieves its most punc
tilious felicities no less than its most felicitous punctilios.
But I forgot my point. Do you, sir, and do you, my fellowcitizens, know who the man is that mediated this historic trans
fer? Who is Mr. Schmedemann? My Capital Times can tell
you. Permit me, then, to quote further:
"Mr. Schmedemann is a Madison man, being a member of the
former clothing firm of Schmedemann & Baillie and a former
alderman from the fourth ward."
I have only to remark that for my part, though I live in the
tenth ward, I used to buy my pants of this diplomat.
Madison, Wisconsin, December 1U
H. Jackson
To the Editor op The Nation:

Sir: Vivos Voco is a new German monthly devoted to the
cause of international reconciliation and domestic reconstruction
upon the basis of liberal thought. The moving spirit in its
management is Prof. Richard Woltereck of Leipzig University,
a noted scientist who during the war organized the distribution
of books in French and Swiss internment camps and who has
since done remarkable work in relieving the widely spread dis
tress, both physical and intellectual, among German students.
Associated with him as co-editors are the well-known poet, Her
mann Hesse, and Franz Carl Endres, editor of the foremost
liberal weekly in Bavaria, the Suddeutsche Presse. The monthly
which was founded a year ago, is doing distinguished service in
counteracting the reactionary tendencies in German intellectual
life and is helping to create a new spirit throughout Europe,
a state of mind to which the lessons of the world war shall
not have been in vain.
It stands for genuine self-determination of peoples, for a
truly authoritative league of nations, for the judicial undoing
of the injustices wrought by force; for freedom in education, in
dustrial democracy, religious regeneration, and against im
perialism and militarism of whatever sort. It combats class
rule, race prejudice, and vested privilege; and calls upon all
classes and parties to avert by common constructive work the
common danger of the extinction of European civilization. It
cultivates a broad cosmopolitanism in literature and art, and
seeks to heal a generation brutalized by the passion of war
through spreading personal refinement and spirituality. And
by placing itself at the disposal of the relief work for hungry
and sick students, it takes part in the actual saving of lives
which are needed for the future of mankind.
It seems to me very important that Vivos Voco should find a
large circle of readers and, if possible, financial assistance in
the United States. No other periodical could give Americans
as vivid and accurate a view of the present state of German
academic opinion or could put them in as close a contact with
the upbuilding forces in contemporary German life. And no
type of public opinion in Germany deserves more hearty sup
port from Americans than that which this monthly represents.
The annual price is 30 marks, or 12 francs in Swiss currency.
The publishers are Seemann & Co., Leipzig.
Cambridge, Mass., November 27
Kuno Francke
Honorable Mention for Jersey City

Sir: I cannot dispute the accuracy of Faith Adams's account
of the social difficulties of the Negroes, but I contend that it
does not apply to all of the United States. I was brought up in
a small town in western Pennsylvania, and I recall that the
colored people, while they were all of the working class, and
were treated as such, went to the same schools and churches as
the whites, and were treated with respect and consideration.
Here in Jersey City my wife has colored girls in her Sunday
School class, and cannot notice the least unkindness shown them.
The senior patrol leader of my Boy Scout troop is a Negro, and
he appears to be well liked by the others. The Jersey Journal
regularly reports the doings of the many colored women's clubs,
and it appears that the average of culture must be higher among
them than among the whites, for there is only one white women's
club, which is select and expensive. Negroes are not segregated
as to residence. I believe that the whole trouble comes frorr*
pretenders to aristocracy and social climbers. Suburban towns
are where they most congregate, and these should be avoided \>y
Negroes. They will do best either in the cities or entirely cleaiT
of them.
Jersey City, November 27
Archibald Craig
The Nation
Jan. 5, 1921]
Mr. Collins in Reply

To the Editor of The Nation :
Sib: I have just received a copy of The Nation under date'of
December 15, and find on page 691 of that issue a letter signed
by one G. J. Knapp, whom I never saw, read of, or heard from
before, of Salt Lake City, Utah, November 25, which contains
the following statement with reference to myself, which he the
said G. J. Knapp pretends to have read in a (western) North
Dakota newspaper, the name of which paper he does not men
tion in the letter to The Nation of the above date. "Socialists,
says Mr. Collins, should be so handled that in a few minutes
they will be scurrying into holes to hide, or seeking hospitals
to have their wounds doctored."
As The Nation deemed this letter of Mr. Knapp's to be im
portant enough to give special prominence in issue mentioned,
I would deem it a favor if you would give the same prominence
to my statement that the above declaration which Mr. Knapp
declares he saw in a newspaper of western North Dakota was
never made by me and is a deliberate and malicious libel manu
factured either by the writer of the letter in The Nation him
self or by some other person.
I must say very frankly that I even doubt the statement of
Mr. Knapp that he ever saw or read such a statement in any
North Dakota newspaper or in any other newspaper in the
United States. The entire letter of G. J. Knapp is fraught with
lurid misstatements and would not be worthy of a dignified
reply other than that, as a matter of justice to your publication
and its readers, statement of its denial should be made.
In the course of Mr. Knapp's letter he classes my activity in
fighting Bolshevism, Socialism, and I. W. W.ism, and allied
isms as the same character of work being done by Rt. Rev.
Bishop Wehrle of Bismarck, N. D., and of the American Legion.
May I say through the channels of your publication that I con
sider this coupling by comparison of my work with that of
the Rt. Rev. Bishop and the American Legion as a sincere com
pliment, for I have had an opportunity of coming in contact
personally from one end of the country to the other with the
excellent work done by the American Legion and also the splen
did service of the Right Reverend Bishop in the cause of Ameri
can ideals and service for citizenship.
New Haven, Connecticut, December SI Peter W. Collins
Bigotry Not One-Sided
Sir: I am glad Mr. G. J. Knapp took advantage of my recent
article on Bigotry in the South to point out to your readers that
bigotry is not at all one-sided in this country and that it is not
confined to the South. Indeed, had I the time, I would gladly
investigate and write for publication an account of the activities
of such pernicious individuals as Peter W. Collins, Knights of
Columbus lecturer, referred to in Mr. Knapp's letter. In the
past year I have visited virtually every State in the Union
and everywhere I have gone I have heard of Mr. Peter W.
Collins. My general information leads me to the conclusion
that Mr. Peter W. Collins is, if possible, a more malignant agent
f bigotry than Tom Watson himself. And I do not stop at Mr.
Collins as an individual, for, as I understand his status, he is
1 paid lecturer of the Knights of Columbus. Personally, I
*ould no sooner join the Knights of Columbus than I would
join the Masons or the Odd Fellows. They are all in the same
category to me. But I do especially condemn the Knights of
Columbus for fostering bigoted attacks on Socialists. This is a
free country and we are supposed to be guaranteed the right to
ftink for ourselves and to vote as we choose without molesta
tion from any source. That is my understanding of American
ism, and that understanding is what impelled my resentment
of persecution of Catholics in the South. So long as the Knights
of Columbus support men like Peter W. Collins in their cam
17
paigns of ignorant incitement to violence against men and

women who happen to be Socialists I shall consider the Knights
of Columbus to be an un-American organization, just as I con
sider the secret Protestant societies which foster bigotry against
Catholics to be un-American organizations. I thank Mr. Knapp
for his letter.
Westport, Conn., December 11
Charles P. Sweeney
The League and Enslaved Nations

Sir: May I ask why you did not include in your program for
a World League what seems to me a most essential provision
for the establishment of a League of Free Nations and the pre
vention of war, that is the right of subject nations to independ
ence? In the same issue in which you set forth your program,
a correspondent says that President Wilson's "war speeches and
messages expressed a lofty aspiration and set forth a magnifi
cent ideal program." That is true; and included in that ideal
program was: "The settlement of every question, whether of
territory, of sovereignty, of economic arrangement, or of politi
cal relationship, upon the basis of the free acceptance of that
settlement by the people immediately concerned, and not upon
the basis of the material interest or advantage of any other
nation or people which may desire a different settlement for
the sake of its own exterior influence or mastery."
In The Nation of May 17, 1919, you characterized the League
of Nations as an alliance of three great Powers to enforce their
will upon all others. Yet you suggest a program that would
leave subject peoples in the grasp of those imperialistic slave
masters and take from the political slaves all hope of freedom.
With respect to the right of peoples to be free and independent,
where, may I ask, does your program differ from the Paris
Covenant? Was not the war fought for the "liberty, self-gov
ernment, and undictated development of all peoples"? Was that
object attained by the war? Was the Covenant formulated for
the purpose of completing that part of the unattained ideal pro
gram? It was not; and because it was not, you and all honest
men condemned it. Why, then, do you propose a program that
does not contain a provision for the completion of that for which
we fought?
Ever since the Covenant was brought from Paris, the most
prominent pro-Leaguers have frowned on any mention of Korea,
Shantung, Egypt, Persia, India, and Ireland as countries en
titled to self-determination. These men have proclaimed from
the house-tops that they favor the League because they believe
it will prevent war. They were the most vociferous in denounc
ing Germany for desiring to make political slaves of other
nations. Did they believe what they said of Germany? If they
did, how can they reconcile their belief that the League will
prevent war and their denunciation of Germany's attempt to
enslave nations, with their approbation of the enslavement of
Korea, Shantung, Egypt, India, Persia, and Ireland? Do those
men deprecate talk of freeing subject nations because England
is the great political slave master? Does The Nation leave out
of its program for a World League all mention of enslaved
peoples because most of them are England's slaves? If that is
not the reason for the omission, as a subscriber and great ad
mirer of The Nation, I should like to know why there was not
inserted a provision for the settlement of every question of
territory and sovereignty before the League is established, and
thus avoid war through the efforts of subject peoples to be
free?
New York, November 15
Joseph Forrester
[What our reader asks in his last question is impossible. But
fke Nation, of course, stands for political freedom for every
subject country and race. Our program, we believe, does lead
directly toward the realization of our American ideals.Editor
The Nation.]
The Nation
18
[Vol. 112, No. 2896
By Joseph Bucklin Bishop. Charles Scribner's Sons.

FTER the flurry of books about Roosevelt that followed his
A death, it should be said with emphasis that this, the author
truth will throw, who, having assembled all Mr. Bishop's

sources of information, begins his chapter on the Progressive
episode as follows: Mr. Roosevelt regarded the administra
tin of Mr. Wilson as an almost unmitigated calamity. Mr.
Roosevelt may fairly be said to have put Mr. Wilson into office
and therefore may be regarded as the cause of that calamity.
Precisely why did he do it, and how did he afterwards regard
his great secession? How far was he led in that affair by
radical liberalism, how far by the spirit of a vengeful Corio
ized life enriched with a quantity of hitherto unpublished letters
lanus?
and documents, may be read with keen interest by those who

have digested all its predecessors. It is a work of notable ar
Mr. Bishop's work is notably contributive with respect to

what Roosevelt best liked to dwell upon, his substantive achieve
ments. He discusses with excellent lucidity and effect Roose
velt's pioneer effort in the taxation of franchises, his great
constructive work towards the control of corporations doing
interstate business, and his active representation of the public
interest in disputes between labor and capital. By the publi
cation of much evidence, of which we have hitherto only guessed
Books
Roosevelt and His Time
Theodore Roosevelt and His Time. Shown in His Own Letters.
tistic merit.
With severe and even subtle economy of means,
Mr. Bishop has composed the figure of an American statesman

of sinewy virtues, essentially self-consistent, of heroic sincerity,
a hard fighter, enormously enjoying the use of his powers, yet
eager to be spent for great ends, and capable in a supreme

crisisif it appealed to him personally as suchof flinging
soul and body down for God to plow them under. Before
the existence, he establishes Roosevelt's title to all the credit
work can hardly fail to strengthen the impression, even in the

minds of the sharpest critics.
he received for his part in concluding the Russo-Japanese War.

He greatly enlarges our conception of the role of American
diplomacy in the Algeciras Conference. He has a very pretty
chapter on the collaborative attempt of Roosevelt and Saint
Gaudens to reform the coinage on the model of the gold coins
Perhaps fifty years hence it may generally be conceded that

this book preserves what is important in the true Theodore
sive supporter of art against the Philistinism of the Mint.
he left the world Roosevelt had pretty well convinced intelligent

observers that he was at heart, through all the dust and whirl
winds of his political conflicts, that sort of a man. Mr. Bishop's
Roosevelts character.
Even then there will be debate about
the wisdom of many of his acts. At present one cannot help

feeling that Mr. Bishop's figure of rugged integrity, unerring
rectitude, and loftiest patriotism has been shorn of some of its
beams. A two-volume record of one who for thirty years
touched the life of his times at every point cannot of course be
exhaustive. Mr. Bishop partly solves his problem by overt
omissions. For example, he gives no account of the Colonel's
active participation in the war with Spain, merely referring to

the authorized version in the Autobiography and The Rough
Riders. With similar reference to Roosevelt's own books, he
passes over in a few paragraphs such episodes as the ranch
struck by Alexander the Great, showing Roosevelt an aggres

As
secretary to the Canal Commission, long resident in the zone,

he writes with intimate information of the diplomatic and ad
ministrative matters connected with the taking of Panama;

and cheerfully quotes Roosevelt's admission that he did not give
the pithecoid bandits of Bogota quite the deal that a civilized
European nation would have expected from him, and his remark
that a goodly number of the Senators even of my own party

have shown about as much backbone as so many angle worms.
There was perhaps not much to add to our previous knowl
edge of Roosevelt as a fearless international poker-player

with Germany over the Venezuela affair, with England in the
matter of the Alaska boundary, with Japan at the time of the
which Mr. Bishop's artistic economy would strike an unauthor
famous voyage of the fleet. On each occasion, he asserted that

he intended to have his way, privately or publicly swung the
big stick, and got away with it. But Mr. Bishop publishes a
batch of Roosevelt's correspondence with King Edward, the
Kaiser, the Japanese Emperor, and the Czar, which throws
striking and sometimes amusing lights on their personal rela
tions, and gives one a rather breathless sense of the dependence
of nations on the skill and good nature of half a dozen great
gamesters, who may, if they like, so please one another by the
ized biographer with access to the same materials as parsimony.

It will rather puzzle the reader of this book fifty years hence
a working entente will develop out of the apparently casual post
to understand why such a man as it presents should have made

in his lifetime so many eminent and high-minded men distrust
ful of him and actively hostile to him. I will mention three
scripts to their letters, and their faithful ambassadors will act

at conference like two souls with but a single thought. In this
connection, it is interesting to note that while King Edward
life in the West, the great African hunting trip, and the explo
ration in South America. The effect is obviously to diminish
the immense impression of gusto, physical daring, and adven

turousness which the living man kept stamping as his personal
mark upon the consciousness of his contemporaries. The means
for restoring the impression are in this case readily at hand.
There are other points, however, of greater importance in an
exhibition of the statesman's relations with his times, points at
tact of their compliments and their exchanges of gifts, that
main points at which Mr. Bishop's treatment is parsimonious.
sends to Roosevelt a miniature of Hampden and a book con
In the first place, though he pays due tribute to Roosevelt's

mere technical efficiency in the Navy Department, he gives no
taining illustrations of the Svres Porcelain Collection in Wind
adequate account of his tremendous contribution, by pen and

tongue and act, to the spirit of militant imperialism in those
years when he nourished the exorbitant dream of expanding

the national domain from the Isthmus to the Arctic Circle.
sor Castle, the Kaiser sends a publication of the water colors

illustrating the history of the uniforms under the King's
reign. In the spring of the following year, 1908, Roosevelt
writes to his dear Emperor William felicitations on the growing
goodwill between the United States and Germany, trusts that
Secondly, he exhibits very scantily the incomparable intemper
his friend has noticed that the fleet has come around South
ance and virulence with which Roosevelt habitually attacked

both his enemies and his old friends, at the first sign of a dis
senting opinion. In the third place, he treads with the wariness
America on schedule time, and concludes with the short and
of one passing over hot ashes, with the delicacy of one passing
over freshly-turned earth in a cemetery, over the grave of the
Progressive Party.
These suppressions, these omissions, this subdued voice at
these trying moments, are all perhaps in the interest of good
taste and the artistic effect which an authorized biographer
should seek. But what a flash of light upon the innermost

springs of character some biographer bent upon the whole
somewhat pointed paragraph:

Their target practice has been excellent.
With high regards, believe me,
Very faithfully your friend.
The most tantalizing sentence in the biography is this: A
bulky volume could be made of his correspondence with English
writers alone. By all means, let us have it, pour encourager
les autresMr. Harding and the rest of us. The love and
cultivation of letters, we can all agree, is a rare and beautiful
trait in an American statesman.
To make the suggestion more
The Nation
Jan.5, 1921]
19
alluring, Mr. Bishop quotes fairly copiously from Roosevelt's
thought, for the moment at least, that he would be willing to
charming correspondence with the English historian, Sir George

Otto Trevelyan. The masterpiece of the collection, probably
one of the longest epistles in the world, is a letter of 25,000
words sent to Trevelyan in 1911, describing Roosevelt's adven
tures with kings and kaisers in his grand tour of the courts
from Khartoum to London. The spice and intimacy of it may
quit office the instant the indispensable national tasks were
be suggested by his cautionary remark that most of it would

be obviously entirely out of the question to make public, at any
rate until long after all of us who are now alive are dead.
accomplished. In April, 1916, he wrote to an English friend

that it would be as hard to elect him as it would have been to
elect Hamilton against Jefferson in 1808: I have had to be the

pioneer in this movement, and as Lincoln, with his homely com
mon sense said, the trouble with pioneers is that they necessarily
get so battered and splashed that they cannot be used at subse
quent stages of the movement.
If ever in his life Roosevelt
Apart from the interest in its untrammeled comment, especially
conceived of himself as merely a selfless instrument to be used

and broken, if necessary, by the nation, it was in the period
on the Germans and their ruler, it is very beguiling reading for
between the sinking of the Lusitania and our active participa
a convinced American because of its undertone of democratic
tion in the war.
compassion for royal society. Roosevelt never believed more

sincerely and sturdily in his native manners and institutions and
in Lincolns plain people than when he came home from hob
nobbing with kings. Perhaps his reaction against the kings is
the real key to his anarchical proceedings against the Republi
can National Committee.
Between the close of the Progressive Campaign and the open
ing of his campaign for America's entering the war there was
a brief lull in his activities, with occasional moments when he
felt that the people were wearying of him and that he didnt
mind very much if they were. Let the heathen rage; he had
done his work and made his place in history. There still re
mained his home, his books, and his rich memories. A letter to
his son, Kermit, written in one of these intervals in November
of 1914, shows him on a quiet holiday with Mrs. Roosevelt in
the delightful autumnal mood of a retired statesman thoroughly
enjoying rest from his labors. I cannot expect most people to
believe, he declares, that I have not for years been happier
than since election.
We have had ten lovely days here.
I have ridden once or twice. Two or three times I have taken
Mother for a row and we have walked together and sat by the
wood fire in the late afternoon and evening. I was going to

say that I have been as happy as a king, but as a matter of
So much is clear.
Afterwards, when preparations for peace were
afoot, when
another leader was in Europe with a high-aspiring plan for the
welfare of the world, when the weight of American influence

still depended as much as in the war upon unity of American
effort, when eminent Senators began to undermine and discredit
abroad the nation's chief representative, when the political
jockeys at home began to sniff the air of the next presidential
election-from that time, the purity of Roosevelt's motives and
the singleness of his patriotic purpose were no longer so mani
fest. The dictator who had set up Mr. Taft and had pulled him
down and had set up Mr. Wilson and was pulling him down
seems almost to have been governed by a habit and instinct
deeper and stronger than any reason or principle. At any rate,
he threw the weight of his immense influence to the blue fac.
tion in the Byzantine circus of American politics, which was
blocking an attempt at a magnificent substantive achievement
by a miscellaneous, helterskelter, but stubborn opposition. Would
Roosevelt, had he been in power, have met a manifest oppor
tunity for the radical reorganization of international relations
with a wiggling and baffling negativity? Would a selfless
leader like Lincoln, whom he proclaimed as his model, have
given to party, in a crisis like this, what was meant for human
kind? A hard question to ask of a political animal.
fact I have been infinitely happier than any of the kings I

know, poor devils!
On these same holidays he wrote, looking back on the crusade
of 1912, these words, in which defeat is swallowed up in philo
STUART P. SHERMAN
Reports on Russia
sophic resignation to man's political nature: The average man

is a Democrat or a Republican and he is this as a matter of
faith, not as a matter of morals. He no more requires a reason
for so being than an adherent of the blue or green factions of
the Byzantine Circus required a reason. The strained voice
The Russian Peasant and the Revolution. By Maurice G. Hin
of the prophet and exhorter has subsided to the pitch of the
The Bolshevik Adventure.
dus. Henry Holt and Company.

The Bolshevik Theory. By R. W. Postgate.
Company.
individual, what society needs is victory.

When it is
evident that a leader's day is past, the one service he can render
is to step aside and leave the ground clear for the development
of a successor.
regards myself.
It seems to me that such is the case now as
Heartily know that the half gods go when
the gods arise.

There was that within Roosevelt, as we all know, which would
not let him retire, an internal spur that drove him at the sound
of the trumpet to the thick of every conflict. The very letter to

his son in which he says that he is happy as a king ends with
the declaration that King Albert of Belgium, in spite of the
awful misfortunes of himself and his country, is of all of them
the one who is leading the life I most admire. There are many
intimate letters of the war period which I think a fair-minded
reader can hardly peruse without feeling that they relieve
Roosevelt's reputation to a considerable degree from the charge
of purely personal rancor and purely selfish political motive in
his ferocious attacks on the Administration. They relieve it by
proving the burning sincerity of his desire to get the country
into the war, even though it should cost him all his popularity.
He did acknowledge that he yearned to be President; but he
By John Pollock.
E. P. Dutton
and Company.
sage, and his reflections have an attractive note, rare in a man
of his intensely active temper, of almost tranquil meditation.

On this same day, he writes to another correspondent: It has
been wisely said that while martyrdom is often right for the
Dodd, Mead and
BOOK of substantial information bearing on the most im
portant factor in the revolutionary situation of Russia

is what Mr. Hindus has provided for us. Its contribution to
4.
the understanding of the political and economic problem is

impressive because the writer is so evidently without any axe
of his own to grind. He is no willing instrument of propaganda,
no slave of a theoretic formula. Such bias as he has is valuable,
being the result of his own peasant origin and early associations.
He knows the people and the experiences that he describes, not
as an interested outsider but as one who has lived the life.
He
carries us to the heart of the peasant's existence, reveals his

characteristic humanity, and makes clear his wants and ca
pacities. There are lucid and concrete chapters, without sen
timentality, as remote as possible from the moonshin with
which Stephen Graham for some years saturated English read
ers, on the home life of the peasant, his manner of earning his
livelihood, the disabilities under which he has struggled during
serfdom and since, his gropings toward an education, his mental
attitude toward politics and society, his strong practical sense
as displayed in his tenacious attachment to his land and his
success in cooperative undertakings. The foundations being

thus solidly laid for our understanding of the peasant's char
acter, we are in a better position to form a judgment on the
probable course of events in Russia. Mr. Hindus does not
20
The Nation
leave us to form that judgment for ourselves, but by his ac

count of the relation to the peasant of the leading political
parties he reenforces our conviction that the final settlement
of the land will not be on the basis of communism. Though not
sharing their ideal, Mr. Hindus seems to be grateful to the
Bolsheviks for their negative achievement, if it is just to call
it negative, in making possible the seizure of the land by the
peasants. There are few recent books on Russia so informing
in substance, so admirably restrained in temper, and so attrac
tively written. It should prove acceptable to readers regard
less of their political sympathies.
Mr. Postgate's volume, while pretending to be only plain ex
position, no more pro-Bolshevik than anti-Bolshevik, is never
theless a statement of communist principles such as any be
liever might give, except that the tone is defensive and emo
tional warmth is quite lacking. The writer is aware of a hostile
audience and he wishes to create an impression that he is dis
passionate. But in reality he has accepted uncritically the Bol
shevist point of view and, in justification of all the policies of
the existing government, he has advanced all its favorite argu
ments against trusting the majority, its theories about the
selfishness of the middle class and the stupidity and inertia of
the lower class. An example of his reasoning in support of
autocratic methods is the observation that "the majority of
Negro slaves in America apparently viewed the change in their
status with resentment." But be the force of his arguments
what it may, Mr. Postgate should be told that the world is at
present much less interested in the discussion of theories in
vacuo than in the actual workings of the Soviet system. Ap
propriate and useful appendices to this book are the Communist
Manifesto and Lenin's theses read before the Third Interna
tional. The latter by its intellectual sweep and boldness and
its uncompromising candor might infect even a sceptic.
John Pollock is described on his title-page as Late Fellow of
Trinity College, Cambridge. The like of his book for misstate
ment, weakness of thought, and excited imagination is not to
be found even among books on Russia. To any one possessing
a modicum of information about the events of the last few
years, the book may be recommended for its perfection of ab
surdity. For most readers it will probably be enough to know
that Mr. Pollock stands on the Sisson documents and on the
theory that the Bolshevist revolution is a German conspiracy
engineered by Jews. He repeats all the celebrated canards
about Bolshevist atrociousness, not sparing us even the "com
pulsory prostitution of women." Mr. Pollock assures us that
he lived in Russia from March, 1915, till late in 1918 and ought,
therefore, to know something of what took place in those fate
ful years. We agree that he ought. It would take too much
space to report all the good things that are to be found in Mr.
Pollock's book, such as his picture of Lenin sumptuously served
by footmen in livery and washing down his magnificent repasts
with choice wines, his suggestion that Petrograd and Moscow
are being starved by the deliberate will of the Soviets, and his
delicious theory of active collusion between Kerensky and
Lenin to bring about the ruin of Russia. The last, we believe,
is his most original as well as his most brilliant addition to
our knowledge.
Jacob Zeitlin
Sapphics
Flame and Shadow. By Sara Teasdale. The Macmillan Com
pany.
Precipitations. By Evelyn Scott. Nicholas L. Brown.
ANEW volume by Sara Teasdale must be opened with anx
ietyanxiety lest its author's old intensity of metaphor
and meter be felt to have lessened, lest the glowing shapes of her
love be seen to have paled and grown vague. The Sappho of
this century and continent must be free, if anyone can be free,
of poetical cant. Thus considered, at least a fourth or a third
of "Flame and Shadow" meets the eagerest expectations. There
is much in the book that is not fine, but there is enough that is.
[Vol. 112, No. 2896
Sara Teasdale seems constantly assailed with two temptations,

and it is only at intervals that she entirely surmounts them.
One is the temptation to make effective endings, to save up points
and appeals for a last line. This may come from having been
set so often to music; she keeps her eye and ear too much, per
haps, on a possible singer whose audience will reward a neat
conclusion with ripples of pleasure and applause. At any rate,
it faintly tends to cheapen her product as poetry. The other
temptation is to deal exclusively in stock love-lyric materials
in herself as "singer," in abstract Beauty, in the "call" of her
love to this or that creature or thing, and in personified Pain.
To handle these things complacently and forever is to be a minor
poet, in whatever age you live. By now, for instance, the "Pain"
of the twentieth century poetess is as conventional and irritat
ing as the "pains" of Augustan Damons and Strephons had
become by 1720. Sara Teasdale only reaches her perfection
when, defeating her temptations, she interpenetrates pain with
metaphor and metaphor with pain, when she finds the proper
balance between fire and form, between the complexity of a con
dition and the simplicity of a cry :
I made you many and many a song,
Yet never one told all you are
It was as though a net of words
Were flung to catch a star.
It was as though I curved my hand
And dipped sea-water eagerly,
Only to find it lost the blue
Dark splendor of the sea.
The world of Evelyn Scott is a violently different one, and her
conduct in it is strange compared with this. Sara Teasdale
lives and speaks within limits, while Evelyn Scott knows none.
Rather than succinct stanzas, she must have free verse; rather
than love for an only subject, she must have the whole universe
of possible sensation and surprise. Sara Teasdale draws her
breath in ecstasy and pain among the time-old facts of poetry
the dark sea, the burning stars, the variable wind, the shining
sun, and rain on flowers. Accepting a sphere of expression from
a long past, she is content with living passionately and plain
tively within it. Evelyn Scott, accepting nothing, is committed
to extravagant effort ; she must live a sphere rather than live in
one. At no time do the walls of tradition serve her, either as
mirrors or as sounding-boards. Her faculties must always be
on the hunt, her fancy must always be clutching for identities
unguessed before. Sara Teasdale can be soft and supplicating
in her simplicity; Evelyn Scott must keep alert and almost rigid,
ready to gyrate forth across new planes of sensation. She must
be bold or be nothing. Yet if her book has the effect of a feat
more often than it has the effect of experience, a great deal of
interesting experience is actually and accurately there, and the
feats themselves are never mean ones. Radical impressionism
rarely produces lines like these, from Winter Streets:
The houses, rearing themselves higher,
Assemble among the clouds.
Night blows through me.
I am clear with its bitterness.
I tinkle along brick canyons
Like a crystal leaf.
And in Old Ladies' Valhalla there is that touch of nature which
is peculiar to none of the schools :
I am thinking of the peace in one's own little home
When the afternoon sunshine drips on the shiny floor,
And the rugs are in order,
And the roses in the bowl plunge into shadow
Like pink nymphs into a pool,
While there is no sound to be heard above the hum of the tea
kettle
Save the benevolent buzzing of flies in the clean sash curtain.
Makk Van Doren
The Nation
Jan. 5, 1921]
Drama
Gray and Gold
A COMPANY of distinguished players has pooled small sums
out of the savings of its members and started acting in
the tiny Bramhall Playhouse on Twenty- Seventh Street. It ia
not unimportant to remark that at the end of the first week the
moderate rental and salaries had all been paid and that the
greater portion of the original investmentall, in fact, that
had not gone for initial expenseswas safe in bank. The owner
of the Bramhall, we believe, inherited the building and in
stalled the little theater that has had 'such varied artistic for
tunes. The whole experiment illustrates once more the fact
that there is an increasing audience for sound plays soundly
presented and that it can be readily reached once the players
escape the slavery to a manager who is himself a real-estate
speculator or at the mercy of those who are. This audience
is new indeed so large that one play after another demands
roomier houses than the little theater movements can pro
vide. The producers of "Heartbreak House," "Emperor Jones,"
"The Mob," "Mixed Marriage" could all take their plays suc
cessfully further up town. But when a large house becomes
empty, there is at once rushed into it a melodrama of inter
tribal hatred and contempt, such as "The Broken Wing" (FortyEighth Street Theater), or a crook-play, such as "Cornered"
(Astor Theater). The friend of the American theater will in
sist on all fitting occasions that what is needed now is at least
one large, independent playhouse to which the successes of the
little theaters can be transferred.
The play selected by the actors at the Bramhall is "Mixed
Marriage" by St. John Ervine. It is not a great play. But
the naturalistic drama entered English literature so late that it
is still fresh and tonic to us. More solidly and coherently moti
vated than "John Ferguson," it is less compact than "Jane
Clegg" and less sharp in its intellectual perceptions. In place
of these its action carries the weighty implication that fancied
and accidental divisions keep men tragically weak in the face
of real and common dangers. The execution has, in structure,
characterization, and dialogue, the merits which still, in a world
that hums with all the varieties of neo-romantic experimenta
tion, render the technique called naturalism unapproachable in
the beauty and lasting power of its creative results. Quite
minor naturalistic novelists and playwrights share in some
measure Hazlitt's memorable praise of Rembrandt. Their pic
tures, too, "savor so of the soul and body of reality that the
thoughts seem identical with the objects."
The production of "Mixed Marriage," making necessary al
lowance for the technical limitations of the Bramhall stage,
rivals the best Theater Guild productions in inner and outer
veracity, in the creation of mood and the imaginative reconstruc
tion of living people. Mr. Augustin Duncan has never been
setter. His John Rainey has a thick and wooden stubbornness.
It is tempered by vanity, but it never really bends and dictates
the tragic outcome. Mr. Rollo Peters and Mr. Barry Macolum
Play Rainey's contrasted yet united sons with touches of poetry
and humor. Miss Margaret Wycherly gives the finest imper
sonation of her career. In "Jane Clegg" her surface was
necessarily hard. As Mrs. Rainey she has a soul no less in
trepid. But the dourness of her resolutions is gone. The years
**W softened her and given her understanding; she has a sort
f fatalism but a fatalism tempered by tolerance and love;
w present resignation has hope and humor and wisdom. And
""t only is Miss Wycherly's individual performance ripe and
beautiful. Like all good art, it is disinterested. She is the
ôter of the play, but she never permits herself to dominate
[t- Her emphasis is not upon herself but upon the exact part
which the dramatist's vision has assigned her. Such harmony
aid intellectual honesty is even more important in this Bram
21
hall group than the well-known gifts of all or any of its single
members.
But we cannot always be grave nor always sustain the mood
which finds the heart of joy in the gravity of the tragic drama.
There must be interludes. These, however, should have some
quality of wit or grace or true visible beauty, and, since these
qualities are rare among our lighter entertainments, it is but
just to call attention to "Lady Billy" (Liberty Theater) and
especially to "Sally" (New Amsterdam Theater). The dis
tinction of "Lady Billy" centers wholly in the diminutive ac
tress who calls herself Mitzi. She has a silvery, bell-like little
singing voice that mocks delicately at the perfection of its own
production and use; she has incredible lightness of movement
which she also treats with a touch of self-mockery; she is
aware of the slight ache of morbidness in her impersonation
of a boy. Miss Marilynn Miller, the new-burnished Ziegfeld
star, has less personality and intelligence. Her extreme prettiness is still a little icy, unmelted from within. But she dances
like an elf, like a petal in the winds of spring. She dances the
triumph of her youth and of all youth. Second only to her is
Miss Mary Haysofter, darker, more roguish. But "Sally"
is especially notable for the superb ballet that opens the final
act. For this ballet, "The Land of the Butterflies," Mr. Joseph
Urban has designed a conventionalized dream-forest of delicate
shades and shapes, and Pascaud of Paris has painted and
executed the winged costumes. These are, on a great scale,
copies or imitations of the gorgeous butterflies of the tropics
and thus possess a radiance and a harmony of color that human
invention cannot rival. The massive green of ominous forests
is in them, the scarlet and yellow of fierce blooms, the hot blue
of a tropic sky. The butterflies fold the glory of their wings
and little, white-clad ballet dancers group themselves about
Miss Miller in a dance that wants only the music of Mozart
or of Schubert's Viennese Waltzes to make it wholly perfect.
Let Mr. Ziegfeld but drop "books" and "lyrics" and give us
such ballets and he will be not the least of our benefactors.
Ludwig Lewisohn
Music
Radicalism in Music
rT,HE somewhat lengthy Beethoven celebration just ended has
* had, in spite of its withering dulness, at least one salutary
effect. It has served to remind us that this musical Titan, too,
had to struggle, not only against his own deafness, but against
the still greater deafness of eighteenth-century "conservatism."
Apparently then, as now, the musical mind was well plastered
with traditions; while those who cherished them probably did
so with the same dreary "reverence" and for the same mis
guided purpose that clogs our progress today. Acting as a
sort of self-elected watch-dogs of the past, these conservatives
never seem to consider that the traditions they guard so jeal
ously had their origin in the spontaneous expression of some
great talent or genius, who probably broke all the canons of
his predecessors in the process; or that these same traditions,
when reduced to bloodless formulas, resolve into abstract and
meaningless rules, waiting their turn to be ignored by some
other boldly creative spirit. And so the living composers con
tinue to be sacrificed to the dead, and the Wagners and Debussys, the Scriabines and Strawinskys, who embody, in their
art, all the distinctive elements of their respective ages, con
tinue to be "futurists" to the bulk of their contemporaries.
Just why a twentieth-century composer should write in the
idiom of some master of two hundred years ago, or why our
musical education should stop with Wagner, our conservative
friends do not tell us. We must therefore conclude that in
their zeal to preserve the classics as a cultural background they
have forgotten that these classics may also be used as a point
of departure.
22
The Nation
Fortunately for progress, the war gave too great an impetus

to modern music for virtuosos to ignore it. The only stumbling
block lies in their inability to present it truthfully. For in
stance, Ernest Bloch's superb Viola Suite was first given at a
Berkshire Festival. There, under the sympathetic fingers of
Louis Bailly and Harold Bauer, its savage rhythms and somber
intensity roused the audience to a frenzy of enthusiasm. It
has since been presented twice in New York by other combina
tions of artists, and both times it has fallen flat, on account of
one or other of the performers. The first time, it became a
series of unrelated notes in the viola part, which Mr. Ferir
seemed to be reading at sight; the second, a series of unrelated
orchestral noises under the uncomprehending baton of Mr.
Bodanzky. Again, the new Strawinsky Concertina, dedicated
to the Flonzaleys, fared pretty badly at their hands. A work
full of shifting color and nuance, they played it in a monotone,
turning it into a senseless, unbearable mass of sound. After
all, the London String Quartet has taught us what heights of
shimmering beauty the moderns can reach in string ensemble,
and Leopold Stokowski has revealed to us their fluidity in the
orchestra. Yet even with this as a basis of comparison, not
one voice was raised in protest over the massacre.
This is not particularly surprising, as there is almost no one
to whom we can look for guidance. The New York critics, for
the most part, seem bent upon crushing to atoms the- slightest
evidence of heretical cacophany. So general and indiscriminating are their ridicule and invectives that one is compelled
to believe, at times, that back of such sweeping denunciation
lie much ignorance and malice. This was forced upon our
notice a few years ago by the "dean of American critics," who
adorns the New York Tribune with his erudition. The sworn
foe of all "futuristic" music and musicians, he had denounced,
in no uncertain terms, the first recital of the Russian composerpianist, Sergei Prokofieff. When Prokofieff dared to make a
second appearance, this time with orchestra, the "dean" was
evidently determined to "get" his victim at all hazards. Notic
ing on the program a certain Witches' Orgy, he lambasted
Prokofieff for it unmercifully in vile and prurient terms. As it
happened, the work was by another Russian, Vassilenko, and
bore not the slightest resemblance, either in idiom or style, to
Prokofieffas any trained musician could hear. But the "dean,"
who had "overlooked the name in the dim light of the concert
hall," apparently needed his eyes to assist his ears. The inci
dent is only worth recording as an instance of the kind of un
scrupulous attack we are asked to accept as enlightened criti
cism. Happily, a strong creative urge is not likely to capitulate
to such bludgeoning; but there is always the fear that some
young and tender talent will succumb to its blowslike Leo
Ornstein, for example, who has been so often blackjacked by
this same critic and his satellites. In the meantime we can
only hope that the day will come when our musical mentors
will learn that time is even more efficient than they themselves
in guarding the sacred fires of the past; that their chief duty
is to interpret the message of the present; and that, when it
comes about that their ears have grown insensible and they
can no longer understand, their usefulness is ended. When this
happens, perhaps we shall not be treated to such criticisms as
the following (by the dean's assistant), which appeared in the
Tribune: "As this noble music [Beethoven's] of unfathomed
depths filled the hall, it invited pitying reflections upon the
strivings and strainings of the ultra-modernists, frenzied in
pursuit of novelty and self-expression, so few of whom have
individuality worthy to be expressed." It was a smile of con
tempt worthy of Miss Squeers, and as we pondered upon the
"Tildys" at whom it was directed, we could not but regret that
Beethoven had to miss itBeethoven, the ultra-modernist of
his own age, who was himself forced to take refuge in posterity,
and to exclaim, what so many since have had to echo : "A second
and third generation will doubly recompense me for the mon
strous things I have experienced at the hands of my contem
poraries."
Henrietta Straus
[Vol. 112, No. 2896
The Nation's Poetry Prize

fTIHE NATION offers a Poetry Prize of $100 for the best
-* poem submitted by an American poet in a contest to be
conducted by The Nation between Thanksgiving and New
Year's Day. The rules for the contest are as follows:
1. Each manuscript submitted in the contest must reach the
office of The Nation, 20 Vesey Street, New York City, not
earlier than Friday, November 26, and not later than Satur
day, January 1, plainly marked, on the outside of the envelope,
"For The Nation's Poetry Prize."
2. Manuscripts must be typewritten and must have the name
of the author in full on each page of the manuscript submitted.
3. As no manuscript submitted in this contest will under any
circumstances be returned to the author, it is unnecessary to
inclose return postage. An acknowledgment of the receipt of
each manuscript, however, will be sent from this office.
4. No more than three poems from the same author will be
admitted to the contest.
5. No restriction is placed upon the subject or form of poems
submitted, which may be in any meter or in free verse. It
will be impossible, however, to consider poems which are more
than 200 lines in length, or which are translations, or which
are in any language other than English. Poems arranged in
a definite sequence may, if the author so desires, be counted
as a single poem.
6. The winning poem will be published in the Midwinter
Literary Supplement of The Nation, to appear February 9,
1921.
7. Besides the winning poem, The Nation reserves the right
to purchase any other poem submitted in the contest at its
usual rates.
The judges of the contest are William Rose Benet, Ludwig
Lewisohn, and Carl Van Doren. Poems, however, should in
no case be sent to them personally.
NoteThe first paper of The Contemporary American Novel
ists series, which was announced to appear in this issue of The
Nation, has unavoidably been postponed. It will appear in the
issue for January 10. Discussions of the following writers will
be published in the months stated below:
January
Edith Wharton
February
Booth Tarkington
March
Theodore Dreiser
April
Winston Churchill
May
Joseph Hergesheimer
June
James Branch Cabell
The Instrument
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Co.
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Copyright, 1910, R. H. Macy & Co., Inc.
International
Relations
The Rumanian General Strike

ON October 10 a memorandum was presented to . the
Rumanian Government by representatives of the So
cialist Party stating that unless certain economic demands
were granted a general strike would be called for October
20. The text of the memorandum was suppressed but the
Government's reply, printed in Universal (Bucharest) for
October 18, indicates the seriousness with which the threat
was viewed.
The earnestness of the memorandum may be gauged by the
assertion that a reign of terror has been inaugurated by acts
of the Government. The Government deems itself in duty
bound to consider the welfare of the working class. Its good
intentions, however, cannot exceed the bounds of possibility.
As the general situation improves, everything possible will be
done so that workers may be benefited to the largest possible
extent by the betterments. For this the Government need not
be goaded by ill-timed demands or anarchistic threats. These
latter it will not take into consideration, and every hostile act
will call for measures dictated by the necessity of public order.
The Workers' Second Memorandum
A new memorandum to the Government, on October 28,
reviewing the results of the Government's policy of repres
sion, was printed in Renasterea Romana (Sibiu) for No
vember 4.
The General Council of Syndicates and the Socialist Party, in
declaring the general strike, only executed a decision supported
by the repeated demands of organized labor.
No one had any intention of lending to this peaceful and law
ful manifestation any character other than that which it main
tained of an economic strike.
The dalliance of various administrations in meeting the eco
nomic demands recognized in the acts of conciliation with the
railway workers, miners, and printers of Monitorul Ofieial [the
official Government publication] ; the failure to fulfil the prom
ises made to the machinists; the abolition of the autonomy of
mutual aid organizations; and the curtailment of individual
rights of assembly and freedom of the press in Transylvania,
the Banat, Bessarabia, and Bukowina, have exasperated the
working class.
The repressive measures now being taken by the Government
as shown by the suppression of Socialismul [the organ of the
Socialist Party], the closing of meeting-places, the arrest of
deputies, of the committees and delegates taking part in the
movement, instead of soothing this state of exasperation, in
tensify it and constitute a blow universally interpreted as her
alding the dissolution of the syndicates and of the Socialist
Party. These organs of the proletariat movement have a contitutional mode of existence and establish the point of contact
between the movement and the state authorities; it has been
Possible through them to bring complaints and memoranda to
f>e Government, to carry on negotiations, and to present openly
and officially the grievances of the entire working class.
To overthrow its organization means to force the workers
*hose discontent springs from economic distress, relieved neither
Wore nor during the strike, into isolated and underground ac
tivitiesinto secrecy. Production will not be increased and
awakening of the workers from the prostrate condition
into which they have been thrown by the ever pressing exi
gencies of a precarious life will not be aided by oppressive
measures involving the loss of liberties hitherto enjoyed.
Crushed morally, shackled in their legitimate aspirations, the
'"fleers will reenter works, factories, and shops with hostile
Noughts that will intensify the bitterness now existing. Iso
Section
lated, deprived of its counsellors, the proletariat will fall a

prey to individual acts, which we have striven to avoid through
the organizations we are representing.
Should the Government fail to reconsider the measures taken,
none of us will assume any further responsibility; moreover,
no one will be in a position to intervene in time to stop the
strike still persisting.
With a view to the immediate resumption of work, we ask the
Government :
1. To bring about the immediate release of all the leaders
and working men arrested during the strike throughout the
country.
2. To order the reopening of all meeting-places and the re
publishing of Sociali8mul.
3. To bring about the economic improvements guaranteed in
the signed acts of conciliation.
On the basis of these points, we request that the Government
designate a mediator with whom we may enter into negotia
tions for the purpose of settling the strike and resuming work
everywhere.
In the name of the Socialist Party and the General Commis
sion of the Syndicates.
M. Balineanu
The Premier's Reply
The Premier's reply to the contentions of the labor men
was printed in the same issue of Renasterea Romana.
The demonstration was not lawful, inasmuch as such demon
strations are prohibited by the laws in force.
The demonstration was not peaceful, inasmuch as its con
sequence, if it had followed the course sought by those who
instigated it, would have been the starving out of those parts
of the country dependent for their food solely on transporta
tion, and starving out the population is one of the weapons
employed whenever possible in conjunction with military operations.
Moreover, this memorandum, like those which preceded it,
starts out with inexact premises. The memorandum contains
a veiled threat, when it is intimated that should the Government
persist in its determination, the danger of violent assaults
must be contemplated. Neither overt, violent attacks, nor cow
ardly threats will ever induce the Government to swerve from
its duty of maintaining order by all lawful means, when the
country is troubled and illegally threatened.
The Government does not propose to go beyond this aim.
Hence to the proposals in the memorandum may be given the
following reply:
1. The strike ceased by itself. The intervention of the
leaders who instigated it is a mere matter of form against
which the Government has no objection.
2. In principle the Government intends to detain and prose
cute only those who violated the laws. The judicial inquiry will
discriminate between those who merely carried out the plans of
others, and those who contributed to the elaboration of these
plans, inciting the workers by subversive utterances to perform
acts punishable by law. The first will be freed; the others
will have to await the decision of the courts.
3. Socialismul will be allowed to appear, subject to censor
ship.
4. Meeting-places will be opened as soon as order is every
where established.
5. With a view to economic improvement and the examina
tion of previous agreements there will be instituted a commis
sion comprising the following members:
One delegate of the President of the Cabinet (Under-secretaryship of Reconstruction and Supplies) ;
One delegate of the Ministry of Labor;
One delegate of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce;
One delegate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs;
24
The Nation
One delegate of the Ministry of Ways of Communication;

One delegate of the Ministry of Finance;
Two labor delegates.
The Commission will be presided over by a superior magistrate
delegated by the Ministry of Justice.
General Avebescu, President of the Council.
The Strike Manifesto
Two days before the date set for the general strike the
railway workers walked out, and on October 20October
21 in Transylvaniathe strike was called. Although the
result was not a complete tie-up, except in Bukowina, the
strike extended to various government enterprises including
the military workshops which the authorities subsequentlyclosed down for a period of three months. The signers of
the strike manifesto were arrested, tried by courts martial
proceedings, and many of them sentenced to five years
forced labor. At the trial the Socialists called as witnesses
several ministers including Premier Averescu and M. Take
Jonescu and it was charged that M. Jonescu had during the
Vaitoianu ministry agreed with the Socialist leader, Hie
Moscovici, that a general strike should be called at that time
to overthrow the Government. Various officials of the
Ministry of Labor testified that promises made to the
workers had not been kept by the present Government. The
leader of the Opposition in the Rumanian Parliament, M.
Iorga, afterwards declared that the sentences imposed on
the leaders of the strike were unjust and promised a re
vision when his party should come into power. Since the
strike, however, martial law has been proclaimed in Buchar
estfollowing the explosion of a bomb in the Senate Cham
berand the failure of the strike and the repressive meas
ures of the Government have increased rather than de
creased general unrest.
The strike manifesto which resulted in the arrest of the
leaders, follows:
The decision of the General Council of the Socialist Party and
the syndicate organizations throughout the country to declare
a general strike in case the Government will not heed the work
ers' demands, has been interpreted as an act of political re
bellion by the press of the political parties interested in arbitrary
and illegal procedure. Moreover, the oligarchy is insinuating
that the general strike is especially directed against citizens
of all categories.
In view of these malicious interpretations aiming to mislead
public opinion in the country, the General Committee of Ru
manian Syndicates wishes to make the necessary explanations
and define exactly the nature of the general strike which is
about to be declared.
Through this act, which is due only to the indifference and
arbitrariness of the governing officials, the working class of
Rumania aims merely at upholding the law. The Government
has not deigned to answer our countless appeals and protests.
Workers throughout Rumania and especially in the annexed
territories are subjected to the most inhuman abuses; neither
their persons nor their liberties are secure.
Evictions and breaking into homes never cease in Transyl
vania and the Banat. Workers who are earning an honest
livelihood in localities where they have been established for
years are exiled or sent to other localities where their work
is not in demand. Any military commander, no matter how
insignificant, is in his own locality the final authority, responsi
ble to no one but himself. The interference of the military
in the civil administration of the new provinces has brought
the people to the verge of despair, while the Government, in
spite of all our solicitations, tolerates and encourages despotism.
This is one of the causes of the general strike.
The state of siege and the censorship serve in the new prov
[Vol. 112, No. 2896
inces as means of terrorizing citizens, especially workingmen,

and are being maintained even in the old kingdom. The sum
mary and illegal acts of the courts-martial, the numerous per
sons daily victimized in spite of our laws and constitutional
principles cannot leave us indifferent. We are convinced that
in striving for the return to normal political life we have the
support of public opinion, and in the general strike to be de
clared by us honest men will regard us sympathetically.
We are not asking increases in salary, nor the shortening of
the working day. We do ask, however, that the promises made
for so many months be fulfilled. It is not selfish, economic
interests that prompted us to enter the great struggle which
is the general strike, but an aim of a superior and general
nature: the sincere application of the laws of the country for
everybody. The struggle is not for our sake but for everybody
and in the interests of all.
Instead of returning to legality, the Government has enacted
laws which deny the workingman the right to labor and attempt
to curtail his right of organization. We are referring to the
law for settling labor disputes, through which the right of
employers to dispose of workers and their labor as they see fit
is sanctioned, and the rights won through many sacrifices by the
workers are abolished. In the face of this law which abolishes
outright the right to strike, the only dignified attitude left for
us is the general strike. With the military in factories, under
the terror of bayonets and machine guns, the laborer cannot
work. The army must withdraw to the armories; its mission
is other than to intimidate, terrorize, and torture workingmen.
What was the answer of the Government to the order given
by the commander of eastern troops, advising them not to fire
for the purpose of intimidation, but to kill directly and ruth
lessly? The commander escaped without even a rebuke; the
Government gives its high sanction to this system which re
minds us of the reign of terror of 1907. And if these assaults
are taking place in the old kingdom, anyone can imagine what
is happening in the annexed territories, where the military com
manders are omnipotent. In order to prevent the repetition
of such horrors, the working class is obliged to resort to the
general strike. It is fighting for the common good, for internal
order.
The working class wishes to direct public attention to the
plundering of its wealth in state institutions. The Central
Labor Fund (Cassa Centrala a Meseriilor) gathers millions
from the modest salaries of workers for the purpose of insur
ing them against illness, invalidity, and old age. These funds,
however, serve only to maintain an army of officials; the work
ers never receive the aid they need. Of late, in the old king
dom, in defiance of the workers' patience, their dues have been
increased 200 per cent, in view of certain aids for which they
are waiting in vain, while in Transylvania and the Banat,
where the sick funds had been administered by the workers, who
bear all the burdens, the Government has now placed them under
state administration, that through these useful institutions it
may serve the interests of its political clientele. Is the work
ingman right in refusing to pay the dues? Assuredly. And
this decision the working class will respect, no matter what may
happen.
These are the causes and the real nature of the general
strike. Far from being a gesture of hostility against the coun
try's inhabitants, as the press of interested politicians would
represent it, the general strike of the Rumanian workers is the
heroic act of citizens who desire nothing but internal tran
quillity through the sovereignty of the law.
We are aware that the public will have to suffer as a result
of the strike. But we, the workers, will have to bear the same
sufferings. And if they are necessary for remedying our ills,
should we not make this sacrifice? Let us rise above our
momentary interests, and looking confidently into the future,
assure the general strike the success so necessary for the wel
fare and the normal political development of the country.
Jan. 5, 1921]
The Nation
The Demands of the Working Class

Onr determination to put a stop to the illegal acts of the
Government, culminating in the decision to declare the general
strike, has aroused, as was to be expected, the anxiety of the
dominant class, and has drawn upon the workers a new ava
lanche of calumny.
We once more repeat the desiderata of the masses, so that the
legitimacy of our action may be seen. These are our demands:
L Respect for the right of assemblage and the recognition
of labor delegates and councils in all enterprises.
2. Withdrawal of troops from all factories, works, and shops.
3. The abolition of any interference by the directors of state
enterprises in matters of workers' organization, and the re
instatement of all workers discharged or suspended.
4. The meeting of the demands formulated by workers in state
industries, in places where the arbitration commission func
tioned (the railways and the printing plant of Monitoml Ofi<M), as well as in those where such commissions have not been
instituted.
5. Suspension of the application of the law for regulating labor
disputes, until the formation of a new law which will respect
the rights won through great sacrifices by the workers.
6. The effective and complete abolition of the state of siege
and censorship through:
(a) the recognition of the unabridged rights of assemblage
and organization, and the freedom of the press;
(b) the abolition of courts-martial and the transference
to civil courts of all lawsuits involving civilians, po
litical misdemeanors, and the press;
(c) the withdrawal of the army from the civil administra
tion of annexed territories;
(d) the cessation of the system of expulsion and forced
evacuations.
7. Regranting of autonomy to the regional funds of Transyl
vania and the Banat, and the modification of the insurance laws
of the old kingdom on the basis of the principle of autonomy,
in consultation with the working class through its authorized
representatives.
Organized labor throughout the country will be called upon
through a general strike to obtain all these rights and liberties
with which its most vital interests are bound up.
The Local Commission of Bucharest
Syndicates
French Labor and the Ruhr

THE following is the text of the official report issued by
the National Committee of the French General Fed
eration of Labor, after hearing the report of their delegates
who had visited the German miners in the Ruhr Valley.
The French members of the delegation of the International
Trade Union Federation who visited the Ruhr Valley, contin
ued their journey in order to have an interview at Berlin with
the Executive Commission of the General Federation of German
Trade Unions.
The Secretary of the General Federation of Labor, Jouhaux,
Md the Secretary of the French Federation of Metal Workers,
Merrheim, accompanied by the Secretary of the International
Federation of Syndicates, Fimmen, were to meet the directors
the German organizations for the reconstruction of the dev
oted regions in France to consider the problems this ques
tion presents to the workers of both countries.
Two conferences took place on November 5 (Friday), at
which the representatives of the central unions adhering to the
German syndicates and representatives of the Federation of
Technical Employees, who are interested in this question, as!,stei Exchanges of opinions were made, as much in connec
tion with the negotiations which have already taken place on
"lis subject and which the French Government did not pursue
25
as on the present situation. They permitted the workers' rep

resentatives of both countries to state their views.
The German representatives expressed again the wish and
willingness of the German working class to participate in the
work of reconstruction under certain guaranties, which the
representatives of the French workers had recognized as just
by declaring that the workers of France were wholly disposed
to accept their help.
German and French workers consider, on the other hand, that
the work of reconstruction should be carried out to the exclu
sive profit of the community, the one thought being the general
interest, and to the exclusion of capitalist profits. The two
representatives stated that the reconstruction of the devastated
regions and the uplifting of Germany as well as the restoration
of the ruins caused by the war in Europe, can only be attained
by the collaboration and willing work of the proletariats inter
ested.
It is with the hope of this international cooperation that they
have decided to take, in accord with the International Federa
tion, the necessary action for putting these ideas into effect.
The two central organizations and more particularly the unions
of the industries directly interested, will get into touch with
one another in order to establish a general plan and to arrange
the details of this scheme for the common good, which will be
ultimately put into effect, in the firm belief that this common
work should help to combat all reaction and all imperialism,
banish the hate of the past, realize the union of the proleta
riats, and prepare for the reconstruction of Europe on the ques
tion of labor.
In conclusion, the following order of the day was adopted by
the Committee of the Federation :
The National Committee of the Federation, having posted
themselves on the reports made in the Ruhr Valley by the dele
gation of the International Federation, wish to make a strong
protest against the threatened military occupation of this
region, which, if put into execution, will inevitably bring about a
catastrophe;
The Committee declares that no reason can be put forward
which would justify such an action, that the workmen of the
Ruhr district are using all their efforts in order to permit the
putting into effect of the Spa convention relative to coal, that
the supplies called for have been delivered, that the campaign
waged in France by reactionary newspapers coincides with that
of capitalist Germany which is hoping, by the help of Allied
bayonets, to find the means of checking the socialization of the
mines;
The Committee of the Federation proclaims that it is the abso
lute duty of the working class to protest against this eventuality,
and to put it to the vote while pointing out to the working
class the inevitable danger of such action.
The Committee recognizes, on the other hand, that the pro
duction of coal in the Ruhr district is dependent upon an im
provement in the food allowance to the workers which would
permit the miners to recuperate their strength, and it demands
that the Entente should respect the engagements which it has
entered into in this respect.
In view of the unhappy situation of the working class as re
ported by the delegates of the Internationale, the misery which
exists in this region and which is condemning children and young
people to sickness and death and endangering the new genera
tion, the Committee demands the organization of a system of
food supply which will fulfil the requirements of the engage
ments entered into, and declares that the workers, no matter
to what country they belong, have the right to live by their
efforts without being forced to apply to charity.
Protesting vigorously against every policy of violence and
force, and against all schemes threatening the liberty of the
workers of the Ruhr for the profit of international capitalism
and military greed, the National Committee of the Federation
sends an expression of its solidarity to its comrades in this
region and declares that the free and voluntary cooperation of
The Nation
26
the workers of the two countries, as well as of all the workers

belonging to the Trade Union Internationale, is necessary in
order to reconstruct the devastated regions of France, to re
establish economic activity, to repair the ravages caused by the
war in all European countries, and to obtain ultimately the
international reorganization demanded by the workers, and
the permanent fraternity of the united peoples in an effort of
production and peace.
The International Labor Report

THE International Congress of Trade Unions held at
London, England, at its closing session on November
27, 1920, unanimously adopted the following resolution,
which was presented by Leon Jouhaux of France. The text
is translated from the Berliner Tageblatt of November 29,
1920, and L'Information Ouvriere et Sociale (Paris) of De
cember 9, 1920.
After hearing the report of the Commission of Investiga
tion sent to the Ruhr by the International Federation of Trade
Unions, the Extraordinary International Trade Union Congress
meeting at London, November 20 to 29, 1920, energetically pro
tests against the threatened occupation of that district by
Entente troops.
The Congress declares that such a measure would be an
unjustifiable act of aggression, doing violence to the interna
tional agreement, violence to freedom, and to the efforts of the
workers to socialize the treasures of the earth, and an attack
by international capitalism upon the workers' movement.
In the conviction that occupation of the Ruhr would have dis
astrous consequences and would benefit reaction and militarism,
that it would add new dangers to those already menacing the
world and constitute an insuperable barrier to the resumption
of normal relations between the peoples, the Congress declares
that the organized workers are ready to oppose such a measure
by all means, and to prevent subjection of the workers of the
Ruhr to a military yoke.
The Congress declares that the coal question cannot be solved
by military measures of violence, but only by an international
organization of the production and distribution of all fuel
materials as the International Miners' Congress demanded at
Geneva.
The Congress emphasizes the fact that production in the Ruhr
is undeniably dependent upon a good provisioning of the miners.
Considering that the miners have completely fulfilled the obli
gations agreed upon at Spa, the Congress asks that the recipro
cal promises made to the miners be fulfilled. It calls attention
to the serious condition of the working people of the Ruhr, to
the misery which threatens children with death, and asks that
steps be taken to end this deplorable situation.
The Congress finally declares that the reconstruction of the
ruins left by the war can be accomplished only by the united
effort of free workers filled with the same will for peace and
liberty.
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Vol. CXII
No. 2897
worth enforcing. These half-armed organizations provide
Contents
the food on which French hysteria feeds, and tacit tolerance
EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
EDITORIALS:
No Compromise on Disarmament. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
British Labor on Ireland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A Quack Remedy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The English Super-Banks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Private Citizen". . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
FACE THE LABOR ISSUE | By Thomas L. Chadbourne. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
THE FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION YIELDS TO PRESSURE.
By
George T. Odell. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
THE WANDERER. By Witter Bynner. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
THE INTELLECTUAL BLOCKADE OF GERMANY.
By J. Anton
de
27
30
31
32
32
33
34
36
37
38
Haas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVELISTS-I. EDITH WHARTON.

By Carl Van Doren . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
DENMARK IS SOLVING THE HOUSING PROBLEM. By Edna
How
ryner
e Silver Lining. By Ludwig Lewisohn. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION:
The British Budget. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Martial
40
41
.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
IN THE DRIFTWAY. By the Drifter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

SALEM, CONDITA 1626. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
BOOKS:
William Ellery Leonard. By L. L. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A Renaissance Feast. By Preserved Smith. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Andreyev's Satan. By Dorothy Brewster. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Books in Brief. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Law
in Ireland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Feisal and the French. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The New State in the Far East. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
THIRD OFFICIAL REPORT OF AMERICAN COMMISSION ON CON
43
44
44
45
46
46
48
49
49
49
51
DITIONS IN IRELAND:
Testimony of Miss Mary MacSwiney, P. J. Guilfoil, and D. F. Crowley
53

ASSOCIATE
LEWIS S. GANNETT
ARTHUR WARNER
ERNEST. H. GRUENING
MANAGING EDITOR
EDITORS
FREDA KIRCHWEY
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
CARL WAN DOREN
LITERARY EDITOR
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and Advertising: Ernest Thurtle, 36 Temple, Fortune Hill, N. W. 4, England.
ERMANY must disarm. She must carry out the dis

armament provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, and
of the Spa agreement. It is true that the world would be
better off had those conventions provided for general dis
armament on both sides of the Rhine; it is true that the
partial failure of Germany to fulfil her obligations has been
grossly and mendaciously exaggerated for political ends;
and it is true that the armed guards still existent in Ger
many are in reality menaces to German civil peace rather

than threats to France. They must go, both for Ger
manys sake and for the sake of the world.
of them adds to the bitterness which breeds bolshevism in

Germany. .
Germany has
reduced her regular army to 100,000 men, as required by

the treaty. But the further provision that the maintenance
or formation of forces differently grouped or of other organ
izations for the command of troops or for preparation for

war is forbidden, has not been obeyed. The so-called
security police is in fact a military organization, carrying
guns. The variously constituted Einwohnerwehr, or citi
Zen guard, is in many places a class military organization,

intended to fight any bolshevist outbreak. And finally the
secret Orgesch, with a membership variously estimated at
anything up to a million, is an organization at least par
tially armed, also anti-socialist in purpose. Germany says
that she is unable to disarm the citizen guards in East
Prussia and Bavaria. She must, or confess utter incompe
tence as a government. There is no part of the treaty more
UT if France invades the Ruhr, or marches up the val

ley of the Main, in order to force observance of the
Spa agreements, she will be doing grievous mischief to her

self and to Europe. Occupation of the Ruhr could only cut
down the production of coal, and since the Spa conference
last July the Germans have loyally fulfilled their agree
ment to deliver to the Allies two million tons per month,
harsh though the obligation has been. If France attempts
to cut off South Germany from North, she will be carrying
on the policy of encouraging Bavarian separatism which
has been largely responsible for the present impasse. If
the reactionary Bavarian Government tells the Berlin Gov
ernment that it will not disarm its citizen guards, French
diplomacy is largely responsible for its insubordination.
The French outcry against German armament is not en
tirely disingenuous. Apart from the French policy in
Bavaria, France has encouraged Hungary to maintain more
troops than the Treaty of the Trianon permits, and she is
herself maintaining a military force utterly out of pro
portion to the real danger. Neither the provocative tone
of the French nor the truculence of the Germans has been
in the spirit of the preamble to the military clauses of the

treaty, setting forth as their purpose, to render possible
the initiation of a general limitation of the armaments of
all nations.
ON BETHMANN-HOLLWEGS death removes a man
who achieved fame not because he happened to be the

German Chancellor when war broke out but because he
blurted out the truth as to the German invasion of Belgium.

He was a typical routine German bureaucrat of the better
type and his utterance was typical also in that it was an
example of the utter inability of Berlin statesmen to gauge
the effect of their expressions upon foreign opinion. It
was fortunate for the world that Bethmann-Hollweg did
use his famous expression; not because there is a single
country which has not on occasion made of its treaties scraps
of paperthe United States certainly can throw no stones
but because it clarified the issue as to Belgium. After
the German Chancellor had confessed the immorality and
bad faith of the invasion of Belgium no amount of German
propaganda could whitewash it. Naturally, the Berlin mili
tarists and imperialists never forgave him for his truth
telling frankness. Had he been of first-class caliber Beth
mann-Hollweg could have made himself the Bismarck of
the war.
But he had neither the force of character nor
the ability to dominate the militarists as did Bismarck;

and he failed utterly to subordinate them to the purposes
of the civil government. Thus the disaster the Government
of Germany so richly merited was rendered inevitable.

After he retired, the power of Ludendorff waxed and the
unrestricted U-boat warfare settled the fate of Germany.
28
The Nation
PRESIDENT DE VALERA'S return to Ireland is the

act of a brave man indeed. With Arthur Griffiths in
jail he not unnaturally felt the need of taking the helm
again in person. That he risks imprisonment and death
is obvious. The dispatches have said that if he came to
negotiate for a compromise peace the English Government
would not molest him, but that if he came for any other
purpose he would be arrested forthwith. He knows well,
therefore, what fate may be before him, particularly as he
is reported to be in ill-health. If Ireland achieves inde
pendence Eamonn De Valera will rank high as a liberator.
It is- the fashion today to decry him in America because he
is opposed to our chief ally in the war for the self-determi
nation of peoples and nations. But we can fancy that Kos
suth and Mazzini and Garibaldi and others are not scorning
him if they look down upon him. They, too, came to Amer
ica for aid, and money, and friends, and they found all three,
for those were the days when the words liberty and freedom
when uttered by sincere men were sufficient to arouse all
Americans to a pitch of high enthusiasm. Mr. De Valera
goes back, he declares, full of the spirit of America. We
hope, then, that he will find the way to renew negotiations
with England so that at least the killings by both sides may
be stopped and the bases for a permanent settlement dis
cussed. The President of the Irish Republic must set his
face sternly against violence by his own people.
WHEN the ruined hungry cities of Belgium cried out
for help, Herbert Hoover did not wait to ask any
semi-official German governmental agency whether it
thought help was needed. But when Cork lies a prey to the
flames, Irish villages by the dozen are laid waste, and the
Bishop of Cork appeals to the American Red Cross for help,
our Red Cross pauses gravely and politely to inquire of the
British Red Cross whether, in its opinion, the appeal of the
Irish bishop should be heeded. The British Red Cross nat
urally says, no. All the more then, when our Red Cross
so signally fails to live up to its mission, do we greet the
organization of an American Commission for Relief in Ire
land, sponsored by responsible financiers, adopting the
methods Hoover used in Belgium, and equipped with a per
sonnel largely recruited from among veterans of the Quaker
relief work in France. It should go far to heal the gaping
wounds of war in Ireland, working as it will in the elder
tradition of American charity, knowing no politics and ex
cluding no sufferers from its ministry. Its very organiza
tion constitutes another serious indictment of the Red Cross.
IT takes talent to be a member of the Administration's
publicity staffa sort of wall-eyed ability to look two
ways at once and solemnly to announce that both eyes see
the same thing. For months the Department of State has
been announcing the removal of restrictions on trade with
Russia. The latest step in this direction was taken by the
Treasury Department which stated in all gravity that no
Government restrictions would be placed upon the importa
tion and acceptance of Russian gold by individuals and
private corporations. The joker concealed in these fair
words was unfortunately given away in the same issue of
the newspaper which published the statement; gold of Rus
sian origin, it was announced in another column, is of no
value in the United States; the mint and assay offices are
closed to it ; even if it is melted into gold bars it is as worth
less as putty. Thus, American merchants who trade with
[Vol. 112, No. 2897
Russia may indeed "import and accept" Russian gold, but if

they want to use it for anything more practical than mantlepiece ornaments or, as a "high Government official" has
suggested, watch-fobs, they may as well give up the idea
of bringing it in. American merchants trading with Eng
land or the Scandinavian countries or the Baltic states must
be equally watchful. If an Esthonian importer, for example,
pays for American goods with gold he has received from
Russia in payment for his own exports to that country, the
American merchant faces a dead loss. But the Treasury
Department says that all restrictions on trade with Russia
are removed and even gold can be imported and accepted as
payment. What more can anyone want? All this talk about
the Government's opposition to trading with Russia and its
willingness to lose opportunities for business and profit
must be, as a special Washington dispatch in the New York
Times asserts, "nothing more than a clever instrument of
communistic propaganda."
WE are not, it seems, the only country that more or less
cheerfully pays 93 per cent of its taxes for war.
Elsewhere in this issue is printed a statement of the British
Chancellor of the Exchequer which estimates the contem
plated budget of the Empire for the coming year. Exclu
sive of the cost of the army, navy, and air forces, the budget
totals 813 million pounds. Almost half of this is interest
on the national debtessentially the war debtwhich
has increased from 24.5 to 345 million pounds since 1914,
or from 10s. a head to 7 13s. 4d. About 290 millions are
to go for soldiers' pensions, ex-soldiers' land settlement, and
other military purposes. Mr. Chamberlain estimates that
the support of the actual military and naval forces will cost
some 270 million pounds additional. Thus out of a total of
1,083 millions all but about 150 millions is for war or the
aftermath of war. Meanwhile in England unemployment is
increasing, rents are prohibitive, houses and coal are scarce,
food prices continue highand nine-tenths of the tax
payer's money is spent for the most unsocial and unneces
sary and unproductive enterprise that can possibly be con
ceived. When will people see the criminal stupidity of such
a budget? When will they realize that war is a monster
that will not fail to devour them in the end?
IN connection with recent events at the Newbern Iron
Works, in North Carolina, we are likely to hear from
various sources that an experiment in "workers' control"
has failed. As the head of the plant recently stated, no "work
ers' control" has been in effect nor was it demanded. The
earnings of the plant having fallen off, wages were cut re
cently by 10 per cent. There was a one-day strike, after which
the men decided to go back at the lower pay. Shortly after,
another 10 per cent cut was announced. To avert another
strike, one of the workers proposed that the plant continue
in operation, and that after deducting expenses the returns
be divided among the workers. This resulted in bringing
wages down from an original 76 cents to 61 cents an hour ;
so the men again walked out. All this is nothing but the oldfashioned scheme of profit-sharing, but in this instance the
shares proved to be losses. In any attempt at true co
operative industry it is obvious that the workers must
expect periods of loss; but it is equally obvious that in com
mon with ordinary well-organized businesses they must have
reserves to carry them through such periods without reduc
ing wages to a point where men cannot live.
Jan. 12, 1921]
The Nation
TO make two blades of grass grow in the place where one

grew before is recognized as a service to one's fellows.
To make two people live in the space where one lived before
is in general a disservice. Yet that is our sole remedy so far
toward solving the housing problem. Regulation of rents
in various sections of the country has lessened the oppor
tunity of landlords to exploit the needs of tenants, but it
has still further retarded, rather' than stimulated, the con
struction of houses. So far as room is concerned, it is only
the infinite capacity of the people to be squeezed, physically
as well as financially, that has averted more of a crisis
than has yet developed. In New York and other cities,
houses and apartments have been divided, two families liv
ing where one lived before, and each paying as much rent
as one paid before. This has prevented an actual absence of
shelter for most persons, but it has set back housing and
sanitary reform twenty years, and is exposing us to immi
nent danger from disease and moral deterioration.
SENATOR CALDER is right in giving warning that,
unless we find some way to encourage building through
the employment of private capital, the Government will have
to stej) in. He reminds us that England and France have
already come to this, and that conditions cannot continue in
this country without a public demand that will compel simi
lar action. Among other suggestions to encourage building
Senator Calder proposes Congressional action providing that
50 per cent of the savings deposits in national banks may be
loaned on mortgage securities. He also advocates banks to
lend money for home building, organized in connection with
the Federal Reserve system. Both suggestions seem to be
worth trying, although it may be doubted if they furnish
the stimulus needed. Meanwhile every State legislature
that meets this winter ought to make housing a leading sub
ject for consideration. If we have to adopt a program of
overnment building, cities and States are probably in a
oetter position to solve their problems intelligently and
economically than Washington is.
PARLEY PARKER CHRISTENSEN, Farmer-Labor can
didate for President last November, has not abandoned
the habit he formed during the campaign of writing letters
to public men, in which he often put much sound sense or
propounded questions highly embarrassing to answer. In a
letter to Mr. Wilson he says the deportation of Mr. Martens
"does violence to the expressed sentiment of America," and
continues :
Daring July, August, September, October, and November,
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, in crowded halls, I addressed
thousands of my countrymen, of all classes, and practically
without exception they are friends of Russia. At every meeting
I spoke of Russia, and the mere mention of the word was electri
fying; and when I urged, as I always did, the recognition of the
Russian Soviet Republic, the affirmative response was tremen
dous. Though your Secretary of State seems ignorant of the
fact, our people are friendly to Soviet Russia, and they should
be encouraged to trade with each other. If the "lesson of the
ballots" at the November election is not sufficient, give us a
referendum, and "Russia, Yes" will be practically unanimous.
This we believe to be a true statement of the facts.
BETELGEUSE is one of the nearer stars. It is one of
the few firmamental luminaries that have a measurable
parallactic anglethat is, it is one which, with our preci3est instruments, shows some change in position during
the earth's six months' swing from one end of its one hun
29
dred and eighty-four million mile orbit around the sun, to

the other. Only a few score of the astral billions which our
growing telescopes increasingly disclose, are sufficiently
close. The neighborliness of Betelgeuse, eight hundred and
eighty trillion miles away, a distance easy to write, impos
sible to comprehend, is preferredly estimated by astrono
mers in light years, of which a mere one hundred and fifty
separate us. Michelson of Chicago University has just
measured its incredible size. Yet neither he nor any other
earthly mortal will ever actually gaze upon the now greatest
known sun. The topaz which glitters nightly in the eastern
winter sky is but a shaft of light thrust from this incandes
cent monster when Napoleon was in his cradle, when the
United States were not born, when steamboat and tele
graph were undreamt of. Michelson's discovery of a method
of finding the size of stars whose distance is ascertainable,
important as it is, is not as great a contribution to science
as his measurements of the velocity of light. But establish
ing the size of Alpha Orionis as about 380 trillion times that
of our earth has more than astronomical value. (An aviator
flying at one hundred miles an hour would require three
million years merely to pass this orb.) Such figures bring
us to the verge of infinity ; speculation as to the possible age
and duration of such a star to the edge of eternity. These
are useful mental exercises when the human microbes on
our terrestrial fly-speck are still spending their living mo
ment either destroying or preparing to destroy each other.
It shows the shallowness and the pathetic futility of our
mundo-centric philosophies, of our small-time conceptions,
of our microcosmic horizons.
MORE than two thousand poems have been submitted
by 835 poets in the competition for The Nation's
Poetry Prize which closed January 1. Poems reaching the
office after that date must be disregarded in accordance
with the rules of the contest. All contestants are hereby
reminded that, also in accordance with the rules, manu
scripts submitted in this competition will not be returned.
The prize-winning poem will appear in the Midwinter Book
Supplement accompanying the issue of February 9. Certain
other poems will be accepted at The Nation's regular rates.
Writers who have not been informed of the acceptance of
their poems by February 9 are free to dispose of them
elsewhere.
TO stir the press of two continents, comment on the
manners or habits of the young girl. Just now the
question is whatand whethershe reads. At Chicago,
where the American Library Association is holding its an
nual convention, a representative of the New York Public
Library recently declared that the library-haunting maidens
of Manhattan, if they may be judged by the books they most
frequently ask for, read books of a classic seriousness, rang
ing from Henry Adams to Harry Franck. The cable took
the glad tidings to London, where some one at the Chelsea
Public Library avows that the British flapper also likes the
classics, though the list he cites is singularly Victorian:
Dickens and Marie Corelli, Tennyson and Browning. What
did it in London, this Chelsea librarian hints, was partly the
air raids, which confined people so long to their quiet hearth
stones that they turned to literature, enduring, pitying per
haps, and at last embracing in a union that has turned out
permanent. The next step in the argument is for some one
to explain what boredom it was which turned our virgins to
the graver quest.
The Nation
30
No
Compromise
TO many other excellent services General Pershing has

added that of urging upon his countrymen the imme
diate reduction of armaments. The head of an army actually
recommending its decrease? It seems incredible, certainly
contrary to all precedent, but it is true. Especially note
worthy is the fact that he squarely takes the pacifist's posi
tion that great military and naval expenditures make for
war, for he said, according to the New York World's report :
As we contemplate the causes of the World War and realize
its horrors, every right-thinking man and woman must feel like
demanding that some steps be taken to prevent its recurrence.
An important step would be to curtail expenditures for the
maintenance of navies and armies (tremendous applause) .
It was gloomy commentary upon world conditions, he added,
that Congress should actually be called upon to appropriate
for the next fiscal year a sum "amounting to over $5,000,000
for every working day in the year." At that his audience is
reported to have "gasped." So does every citizen who is
brought face to face with a figure like this, just as every
reference in every public meeting to the need for disarma
ment brings out enthusiastic applause. Even in Washing
ton they seem to have caught the drift of things, for it is
reported that the President, who but yesterday assured us
that we must arm as never before if we did not enter the
League of Nations, has now discovered that there is another
alternativean international disarmament conference to be
held at an early date.
Indeed, every day brings its additional testimony to the
public awakening to the fact that if the world does not dis
arm it will go bankrupt and perhaps wind up civilization
with a still greater world war than that just ended. Car
dinal Gasparri, the Papal Secretary of State, naturally sup
ports the new campaign with the timely reminder that in
August, 1917, the Pope appealed for the diminution of arma
ments, for the substitution for war of the principle of arbi
tration, for an agreement between all nations for the sup
pression of obligatory military service and the institution of
an "international tribunal of arbitration, with the sanction
of isolation and boycotting." In Germany, the late home
of militarism, the proposal is greeted with enthusiasm by all
who stood out against the Kaiser. In England there is a
surprisingly unanimous approval for the naval holiday plan
and a deliberate delaying of naval building plans to see what
the immediate future will bring forth. Lord Loreburn, for
example, declares flatly that the nations must disarm or
starve. From France alone comes a discordant note; there
the true lesson of the war has not been learned. As to
Japan, where militarists and imperialists dominate the
Government, Baron Hayashi, the Ambassador to Great
Britain, declares:
It is foolish and it is tragic to think of the big states of Great
Britain, the United States, and Japan competing in a race for
armaments. I believe an agreement could be reached quickly
if the big men of each country assembled at a round table not
as pacifists or militarists, but as business men out of whose
pockets must come a large slice of money for the upkeep of
navies. I think Japan is willing to enter such a conference.
To return to America, the chorus of those demanding
immediate reduction of war expenditures, or a five-year
naval holiday, includes not only men like Herbert C. Hoover,
Colonel House, and E. H. Gary, but college presidents, judges,
on
[Vol.112, No. 2897
Disarmament
city and State officials, and churchmen who three years ago
were mostly for preparedness and war. The plain voiceless
people, it is needless to say, are everywhere for disarma
ment and peace. They know well that war invariably spells
loss and never gain for them.
So far so good. But what is the immediate prospect for
genuine disarmament? None too good. The chorus of ap
proval which the campaign has thus far invoked is chiefly
in response to tax pressure upon the pocket nerve. The
business men who suddenly favor a smaller army and navy
do so simply and solely because of the pressure of taxes. If
these can be measurably reduced they will be satisfied, and
the old, hoary falsehood that armaments are merely insur
ance of peace will become effective again. Moreover, Mr.
Harding is for the greatest navy and demands that at least
150,000 boys be kept in military training at schools and
colleges, even though agreeing upon heavy cuts in military
and naval appropriations, while Congressman Anthony of
the House Military Affairs Committee after a visit to
Marion declares that the 15,000 regular officers, 100 per cent
more than we had in 1917, shall not be touched, although
these men breed and keep alive the militarist spirit. Plainly
the talk is far less of disarmament than of reduction and re
trenchment and the saving of money.
But what is more serious is the fact that of those who
pretend to favor the grounding of arms many are of the
same type of peace lovers as those who sabotaged the peace
movement from 1914 onthe pretended lovers of peace like
the members of the New York Peace Society who elected
as vice-president the head of the Navy League, who saw
nothing inconsistent in a Peace Society's declaring for uni
versal peace and advocating more American battleships in
the same manifesto. Then there were the avowed lovers of
peace who insisted that they were for peace but must join
in the killing of Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, and
Russians just to prove itadvocates of peace across whose
lips has come not a single protest against our warring
upon innocent Haitians and Dominicans who never lifted
a finger against America or injured an American. The
"I-am-for-peace-but" man, particularly when he calls him
self a liberal, or a liberal editor, and pretends that liberal
ism must be "practical" and join in the killing now and
then to establish its influence, is the man to be feared in
the new disarmament movement, as well as the statesmen
and diplomats and rulers who will not outlaw war as war
just as the duel was outlawed, and as Mr. Harding, in an
unguarded campaign moment, said he wished war to be
outlawed.
This is emphatically the time for no compromise what
ever for those who feel, as The Nation does, that there is no
crime and no villainy so terrible as war. For such there can
be no bargaining at all, no acceptance of 15,000 mili
tary officers or 500; no consent that there shall be small
cadres to be expanded into large when war comes. The
whole business of making war must be fought unceasingly
on the tremendous vantage ground afforded by the World
War, which has proved so conclusively that war is not to
be cured by war, any more than disease by disease, or
private murder by more murder, or by licensed and re
stricted murder; that if another such war comes civilization*
perishes.
The Nation
Jan. 12, 1921]
British
Labor
IT is almost impossible even at this secure distance to

look at pictures of the stricken city of Corkas desolate
and appalling as the dead cities of Belgiumand then to
write dispassionately of the Irish situation. How much
less could that group of honest Englishmen, the British
Labor Commission, after standing in the wrecked streets of
Cork, think dispassionately or write complacently of the
work of their Government. Their report, part of which has
been cabled over and been published in the New York
Times, is an impressive piece of work, a combination of
careful, candid reporting, vigorous denunciation and honest
shame, and intelligent suggestion. They looked at the ruins
of Cork and were not afraid to put the blame where they
knew it belongedon the forces of the Crown and ultimately
on the British Cabinet. They saw terror and torture fol
lowing in the track of the British forces and were not
afraid to admit "feelings of the deepest horror and shame."
The value of the work they have done can never be lost,
even if the stubborn imperialism of the Government matches
the stubborn desire for freedom of the Irish volunteers ; and
peace is thus brought nearer to Ireland and England by the
British Labor Party, which, a little belatedly, has declared
for the only policy that can bring a solutioncomplete
self-determination for Ireland.
Apart from this single fine gesture, there is small cause
for hope in the Irish situation. Police and black-and-tans
and British soldiers are still being ambushed and shot and
their barracks burned by Sinn Feiners. Homes of innocent
Irish householders are entered, searched, burned; cream
eries and factorieswhich mean life to the peopleare
razed; harmless villagers are casually shot down as part of
a cold-blooded, calculated policy of military reprisal. The
official origin of the reprisals is attested by a statement
issued the other day by the Brigade Major of Cork, part
of which reads :
As a result of the ambush and attack on the police at Midleton and Glebehonse it was decided by the Military Governor that
certain houses in the vicinity of the outrages were to be de
stroyed, as the inhabitants were bound to have known of the
ambush and attack and that they neglected to give any infor
mation either to the military or police authorities.
General Strickland has gone a step farther by proclaim
ing that an "attitude of neutrality" is inconsistent with
loyalty and will render persons liable to punishment. Thus,
practically every man and woman and child in a large sec
tion of Ireland is made an outlaw, held guilty without trial
of any misdeed that may be done; and the psychology of
terror and hate and suspicion which is being fastened on
the Irish people makes the hope of peace grow steadily
more remote. A prominent Canadian, recently back from
Ireland, reproaches the people for continually stimulating
their resentment against England by "dreaming of Crom
well." Headway is not made, he says, by looking over one's
shoulder. Today, we may be sure, Ireland cannot see
Cromwell for the smoke of Cork, and week by week new
martyrs take their place beside the martyrs of the past.
But England still talks in terms of Empire. Even so
lucid and liberal-minded a thinker as J. L. Garvin writes
in the London Observer that the passage of the Home Rule
Act has made obsolete the report of the Labor Commission
and its solution. He expects "that the Belfast Parliament
on
31
Ireland
will be constituted and opened within the next four months

and a working model of home rule will be set up in the
Unionist North. . . . If De Valera and his friends prove
just as extremist and unpractical, we must go on with un
swerving hearts always open to give no more and no less
than we should, while determined, come what may, to pre
serve the real federal integrity of the United Kingdom as a
whole." This is gravely disappointing from such a man.
Acts of Parliament cannot be treated with the solemnity
and fatalism accorded an. act of God ; it is absurd to suppose
that just because a miserably ill-conceived compromise
measure, pleasing to no one, has been passed by the British
Parliament, an Irish settlement is thereby effected. No
settlement will ever be effected until "Mr. De Valera and his "
friends"who comprise some four-fifths of the Irish people
shall become a willing party to it.
So moderate and so wise a man as Sir Horace Plunkett
recognizes this fact. In two letters recently printed in the
London Times, Sir Horace reviews the tragedy of British
policy for the past two years and explains, in words that de
serve quotation, his complete distrust of the Home Rule Act
which, when he wrote, had not passed the House of Lords :
Let me try to explain . . . what the "Northern Ireland"
created by the bill really is. The new English Pale which is
now to be set up, with Belfast instead of Dublin as its capital,
is justified as a redemption of the pledge that Ulster shall not
be coerced. Leaving aside the coercion of the rest of Ireland,
it is almost certain that two counties, Tyrone and Fermanagh,
will have to be compelled by armed force to sever their connec
tion with the twenty-six counties of Ireland to which, if allowed
self-determination,, they would give their allegiance, by a sub
stantial majority. It is strongly suspected that the dictators
of the Government's Irish policy refused to consider county
option because the agricultural vote of these two counties is
needed to dilute the industrial vote, which might place in power
over the author of the policy a Labor ministry. ... If only
British opinion would compel the Government to drop the insane
proposal to force their scheme upon us and to give us, in a
democratically elected assembly, full authority to frame the
constitution we wantwhich tomorrow would not be a republic,
even if it is todaythe close of this chapter of Anglo-Irish
history might be as bright as its opening was dark.
Thus Sir Horace Plunkett comes to the same conclusion that
the British Labor Party arrived at in its proposed policy
for Ireland, which called for "the immediate withdrawal of
the British Army of Occupation from Ireland, and the repeal
of the present measure of coercion which is now being
applied," and "the setting up of a constituent assembly,
elected on the basis of proportional representation, to draw
up a constitution for Irelandon the understanding that
the constitution should be accepted by the British Parlia
ment, subject to two conditionsfirst, that it provided pro
tection for minorities ; and, secondly, that it should prevent
Ireland from becoming a military or naval menace to this
country."
Labor in England succeeded in bending, if not breaking,
the Government's Russian policy. Let us hope that its in
tensive campaign for Irish self-determination may help
toward effecting a settlement by the methods of peace of
this question which Mr. Garvin himself asserts "is not a
local problem, but is a world problem"justification enough
for American interest in it.
The Nation
32
A Quack Remedy
NLY six months have passed since the Republican
Party in convention assembled virtuously declared:

We decline to deceive the people with vain promises or
quack remedies. It may be that this statement was
not
[Vol. 112, No. 2897
bushels of wheat. We are seeking to impose the tariff of 30

cents a bushel on wheat, 5 cents more than the Payne-Aldrich
rate, in the absence of any information at all on the subject.
Just how much revenue we will raise by a tariff of 5 cents a
pound on peanuts, none of the peanut statesmen who worked for
this bill were able to state. Clearly this bill is an effective move
to raise the cost of the necessaries of life to the plain livers of
the country and to increase the cost of plain living and to
intended to be understood as applying to anything other
than the high cost of living or it may be that the
promote the general unrest, under the delusive claim that it is

farmers
in the interest of the farmers.
were not included among the people promised exemption

from deception.
At any rate only fourteen Republican
members of the present Congress refused to vote on Decem

ber 22 for the Fordney tariff bill, a quack remedy which its
sponsors promise will bring prosperity to the farmers. A
tariff on farm products, however high, cannot remove the
cause of the farmers' troubles.
Probably every Congress
man knows that. The fourteen Republicans who remained
true, in this instance at least, to the platform declaration

may not possess more economic knowledge than their party
associates, since they happen to have no farmer constitu
ents to bunco. The forty-one Democrats who voted for the
measure are probably as wise as their fellow Jefferson
ians, but doubtless harbor grave doubts concerning the in
telligence of the rural voters who elected them.
The farmers are undoubtedly in a bad situation and it is
desirable that they be relieved. But they are not suffering
from foreign competition.
Everything they produce or con
sume is heavily taxed. The Fordney bill offers no relief

from that evil. Railroad rates, always oppressive, have
recently been materially increased through the Esch-Cum

mins Act. The Fordney bill does not affect that act. Trusts
exact heavy toll from the farmers. No one accuses the
Fordney bill of causing a decline in the stock of any monopo
listic corporation. The price of farm lands has soared so
Aside from the direct aid the bill gives to the meat com
bination, it is designed beyond doubt as a sop to keep the
farmers quiet when, later on, tariff legislation will be passed

increasing the predatory power of the protectionists pet
monopolies, such as the Steel Trust. Whether it will accom
plish its purpose remains to be seen. But it does seem as
though it would have been wiser for the protected interests
and for the Republican Party to have foregone the oppor
tunity to enact protectionist laws. We are clearly in a
period of severe industrial depression. Protectionism is now
looked upon by its dupes as a reliable talisman against hard
times. To pass a protective tariff law on the edge of a depres
sion is to risk the disillusionment of these dupes. When
Columbus, according to some historians, wished to impress

the Indians with the belief that he could produce an eclipse
he chose a time when he knew an eclipse was about to occur.
Had he done otherwise he would have exposed himself as a
fraud.
It looks as though the protectionists, who say they
can bring on prosperity, are about to commit the error that

Columbus avoided. The result may prove disastrous to
their credit and to the credit of their fetish.
The English Super-Banks
that the farmers cannot pay it and make farming profitable
without getting very high prices for their product. The

Fordney bill makes no change in this situation. So long as
the consumers of farm products were able to pay high prices,
farmers were able to make both ends meet in spite of high
taxes, burdensome transportation charges, exactions of

trusts, and inflated prices for land. But with the first signs
of an industrial depression the purchasing power of con
sumers has fallen and prices of farm products have de
clined accordingly. There has been no lessening, however,
of the drain upon the farmers' resources. They are accord
ingly hard hit. The Fordney bill does not alter the situation
for the better. That it may do so for the worse seems to
be the opinion of the fourteen good protectionists who
voted against it. You will make two lamb chops cost $1.30
again, predicted Congressman Madden of Chicago. If Mr.

Madden is right it will not be the farmers who will benefit
by the increase in meat prices. The meat trust and the
railroads will take care of that, or, if these fail, the specu
lator in agricultural lands will reap the harvest. The aver
age consumer, the city wage earner, will have to tighten his
belt and eat less mutton.
General Isaac R. Sherwood, an Ohio Democratic Con

gressman who believes in democracy, exposes the bill as the
same old fraud and robbery. Says General Sherwood:
Under a tariff of 25 cents a bushel on wheat an average of
100,000 bushels per annum was brought into the United States;
and that is all. Under a tariff of 25 cents a bushel on wheat,
from 34,000,000 to 259,000,000 bushels of wheat were exported.
Now we are afraid of 100,000 bushels from Canada when we
have been exporting from 34,000,000 bushels to 259,000,000
IFTY years ago there were over two hundred separate

banks in the British Isles. But since that time, while
scarcely any new banks have been created, one by one they
have been eating one another. In its early stages this
process did not give rise to much public comment. When a

big national bank with-branches all over the country ab
sorbed some small local banking concern, the only effect
was to enhance the security of the local depositors and to

widen the activities of the larger body. But latterly these
amalgamations have been taking a different shape, for dur
ing the last two or three years there have been no less than
ten cases of the fusion of two banks each possessing large
funds and having branches spread over a wide area. The
latest example was the announcement that the National
Provincial and Union Bank of England would take over
Coutts Bank. It is only a few years since Coutts itself
swallowed up Robarts Lubbock & Co., while the National
Provincial, in addition to its fusion with the Union of Lon
don and Smiths Bank in 1918, has itself devoured two other
banks since 1917, so that the new combination will repre
sent at least six banks of a little while ago. The public
anxiety as to such combinations led recently to the appoint
ment of a special Commission of the British Treasury to
investigate, which issued its report in May, 1918.
The banks had argued that the amalgamations were a con
venience and gain to trade generally (1) because they facili

tated the process of collecting deposits from parts of the
country where they were not required and placing them at
the disposal of other parts which stood in need of advances,
and (2) because large banks with large resources were able
The Nation
Jan. 12, 1921]
33
to make more generous advances. The commissioners de

cided that there was some weight in these arguments,
though not so much as appeared at first sight. On the
other hand they saw dangers in the reduced competition
and in the threat of ultimate monopoly. While believing
that the amalgamations hitherto consummated had not se
riously reduced competition, they expressed their apprehen
The Private Citizen

Na New York newspaper the other day we saw a refer
ence to our old friend the private citizen.
We have
often wondered who a private citizen was, and why. What

distinguishes him from a public citizen, and how? In this
sion that a repetition of the process would certainly check
day when the newspapers are privileged to rout anybody out
it and might produce something like a money trust in the
of bed at 3 a.m. to ask if his daughter knew the minister
near future.
was a married man when she eloped with him, we had sup
posed that no form of citizenship retained much privacy.
In order to avert this they recommended that in future

amalgamations before being carried out should have to
secure the approval of the British Treasury and of the
Board of Trade, and that a similar approval should have to

be secured in cases of interlocking directorates, agreements
for control of one bank by another, interpurchase of shares,
etc. These recommendations were the subject of a bill
which was passed into law in 1919. Since then, until the
absorption of Coutts Bank by the National Provincial, only

two or three minor amalgamations have taken place.
Before attempting to forecast what is likely to be the
development in the future, it will be well to sum up what is
the actual position in England today. First of all there is
the Bank of England, which, though it is essentially a bank
of banks, though it alone among English banks has a con
siderable power of note issue, though it has many subtle

relationships with the Government, remains a company
The newspaper reference in question was to the effect that

so many applications had been made to the Police Depart
ment for permission to carry revolvers that it was unlikely
that those filed by private citizens and ordinary house
holders would be acted upon for some months. The re
porter who wrote that knows the Police Department; and
(Eureka!) he has identified the private citizen.
He is the man whose communication waits in a pile while
those of other persons are attended to.
He is the voter whom politicians shake by the hand before

election, and shake in every other way after.
He is the person who is too honest to pay graft and too
poor to have a pull.
He is the public that turns over its government to bank

ers and big business, and then says: The Government ought
owned by shareholders and managed by a board of direc
to get after those profiteers.

He is the electorate who, in the face of a world-wide need
tors.
Secondly there are the joint stock banks, with
for a new political and industrial vision, hopefully elected
branches all over England and in some cases all over the
Warren G. Harding as President of the United States.

He is the electorate who, in the face of these same con
British Isles. Five of these are so large as to do between

them 85 per cent of the total deposit business, amounting
in all to about 2,300,000,000. Thirdly there are still left
a few so-called private banks, some national and some only
local.
To the activities of these various banks must be
ditions, hopelessly voted for James M. Cox for President.

He is the man who says you cant believe what you see in
the newspapersand then goes on believing it.
He is the man who is disgusted with the result of our
entrance into the European War, but will shout for another
added such functions as are performed by the Government

itself which are analogous to banking. On the one hand
there is the issue by the Treasury of one-pound and ten
shilling notes, of which there are some 330,000,000 worth
ment and the newspapers tell him to.
in circulation today, and there is the Post Office Savings
to become the law of the land, and grumbles now because he

has to pay more for his liquor.
Bank, which fulfils most of the functions of a bank for the
poorer classes and has total deposits of some 350,000,000,
which is about 15 per cent of the total deposits of the ordi

nary banks.
So far, then, in spite of the amalgamations, the essential

elements of the competitive banking system of the nine
teenth century remain in existence.
But when five banks
with Mexico or any other country whenever the Govern

He is the man who, without protest, allowed prohibition
He is the man who likes to sleep late Sunday morning

himself, but doesnt know but what something ought to be
done to give us the kind of Sunday our grandfathers had
but didnt hold on to.
He is the depositor who loses his money when the bank

failsafter the stockholders have made their pile in divi
between them, supported by the Bank of England, do 85

per cent of the whole business, one does not need the eye
of a prophet to see that the old system is very near disap
dends and the officers in salaries.
pearance.
past or future wars.

He is the midget whose only contribution toward reduc
ing high prices is to declare feelingly: Isnt it terrible how
Only a few additional amalgamations would be
necessary to reduce the whole to a unified system with a

single ownership and a single control. And even if this
process comes to an abrupt stop in consequence of the new
He is the man who pays an income tax of a hundred dol
lars or so, ninety-two of which are to pay the bills for
much it costs to live!
law, it is difficult to see how gentlemen's agreements can
He is the trades unionist whose boss patted him on the
be prevented which will in effect eliminate competition and

establish in reality the money trust which the commissioners
viewed with such apprehension. If this condition comes
about the community will be forced to contrive some means
back during the war as a patriot, but now informs him that
he can accept a cut in wages and the open shop or get to
of protecting itself from this peril. If necessary, still

greater powers of control will have to be acquired by the
to be delivered, without asking the price of any of them.
Government to deal with a monopoly which, if left uncon
trolled, may easily become the master of the Government

itself.
hell out of here.
He is the consumer who gives the grocer a list of articles

Sometimes he is a woman who, having spent twenty years
of her life and love on a son, sends him off with her blessing
to kill, or be killed by men with whom he has no personal
quarrel, in the licensed abattoir known as war.
34
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2897
Face the Labor Issue!*

By THOMAS L. CHADBOURNE
I AM more concerned to analyze this nation's indifference
to the three great fears that darken the lives of the
poorthe fear of ill health, of unemployment, and of want
in old agethan I am in the fact that this Association was
responsible for the Federal bill protecting workmen in
match factories from a loathsome occupational disease. I
am more interested to find out why obstacles were thrown
in the way of legislation to protect the compressed-air work
ers in underground work than I am in the fact that we
finally obtained this legislation. The reasons for the inde
scribable slowness and unspeakable difficulties experienced
in securing legislation to prevent lead poisoning are of more
moment to me . . . than is the fact that we were instru
mental in securing such legislation.
The reason why this nation was thirty-six years behind
Germany and twenty years behind Great Britain in adopting
compulsory accident insurance for employees is, in my judg
ment, worthy of a great deal more consideration than the
fact that we drafted and aided the passage of a model bill
for workmen's compensation for the half million civilian
employees of the Federal Government.
It is a splendid thing to feel that we have secured one
day of rest for factory employees in the most important
industrial States in the Union and laid a splendid founda
tion for the extension of this principle, but even this does
not impress me so much as the fact that we are still without
insurance for wage earners against illness, while Germany
has had such insurance for thirty-seven years and Great
Britain has had it for eight years.
It is gratifying that this Association has had more to do
with creating State industrial commissions than any other
organization in the United States, and that these commis
sions are composed of the men who see the procession of
the widows and cripples of industry and who inspect the
work-places for the purpose of preventing accidents, but my
pride in these accomplishments is tempered somewhat by
my wonder why we are so bitterly opposed in our efforts to
secure pension and insurance systems for the aged poor
while Germany has had these provisions for thirty-one years
and Great Britain for twelve years. . . .
There can be but one of two explanations for our failure
to profit by the experiment successfully tried by these two
nations. One is, that social insurance was not needed
here as there. This we must reject. The difference in the
workmen's pay between our country and these two countries
has been practically met by the difference in the standard
of living. The same fears of ill health and unemployment
and want in old age that the Governments of Germany and
England have been attempting to relieve are in the hearts
of our own workmen. The other possible explanation is
undoubtedly the true one: While we, for years, have
been inviting the immigration of the foreign individual,
we have erected a wall as high and as impassable as was
our tariff wall against the immigration of liberal social
ideas.
There is no doubt that contact with things they do not
understand is distinctly disagreeable to many minds. A
dog not only prefers a customary smell ; he hates a good one.
* From an address delivered at the fourteenth annual meeting of the
American Association for Labor Legislation, December 29, 1920.
A perfume pricks his nose and tends to undermine all those

moral principles without which dog society cannot exist.
No more remarkable illustration of this could be cited than
our attitude toward Russia. Notwithstanding the fact that
a social experiment is being tried by that nation on the
greatest scale known in the history of the world, we are not
even curious to ascertain the details of that experiment, or,
perhaps I should say, any details except the horrors which
always accompany a revolution; but those portions of that
philosophy of communism undergoing an acid test by 170
millions of people, the experiences in which might be of
great and lasting usefulness to the human race, their impor
tation is not encouraged, their discussion is not smiled upon,
and our nation and the Allies have done all in their power
to convince the Russian people that if the communistic
experiment fails it fails not by virtue of its inherent weak
ness, but because of its external enemies.
You will remember that in 1906 there was an earthquake
followed by a fire in San Francisco. The catastrophe had
been impending for a long time. The night after it hap
pened, and for some nights thereafter, the banker and his
coachman, the merchant prince and Chinese opium joint
keeper, the lady and the harlot, the ditch digger and his
wife, gathered in one tent and slept under one blanket, and
the world acclaimed it as an evidence of the brotherhood of
man, as an evidence of the leveling qualities contained in a
catastrophe, as an acceptance of the doctrine of the Nazarene. The earth stopped shaking ; all neighboring communi
ties sent aid in supplies and comforts of every nature; the
fire was put out. The process of readjustment began, and
soon the banker and his coachman, the merchant prince and
Chinese opium joint keeper, the lady and the harlot, the
ditch digger and his wife resumed their normal positions
in the social structure, and San Francisco the even tenor of
its way.
In 1917 an earthquake occurred in Russia. It, too, had
been impending for centuries. Analysts of the social struc
ture of that great country were more certain of the threat
ening cataclysm than were analysts of the geological struc
ture of San Francisco. The quake came in the form of
Kerensky's revolution; the fire followed it in the form of
the bolshevist accession to power. Again the banker and his
coachman, the lady and the harlot, the merchant and China
man were jumbled together, but this was not acclaimed as
an evidence of the brotherhood of man ; its leveling qualities
were not apostrophizgd by our press, and the flames of
resentment which made the fire in Russia were fed by
France, England, Japan, and the United States by throwing
troops into Russia, by instituting a blockade of supplies
against the people of Russia, and by encouraging with
advice, arms, and goods the Kolchaks, the Denikins, and the
Wrangels, who were of the very bone and blood and sinew
of those responsible for making the social structure of Rus
sia an abhorrence and a stink in the nostrils of free men for
generations past. And thus have we made it impossible for
the process of readjustment to begin, and the social jumble
there still continues.
The nations of Europe treated the French Revolution in
much the same way, and that experiment is now approved by
Jan. 12, 1921]
The Nation
mankind as the greatest one single aid to the liberty of

humanity the world has ever known.
You may think, and perhaps with reason, that Russia is
far afield from labor legislation, but it stands out as the
most striking illustration of this country's attitude with
respect to the undesirability of all ideas which are not the
ideas Americans are accustomed to.
In appealing for labor legislation, this Association is
obliged to recognize that our national and State legislatures
are practically without direct labor representation, and that
this condition, when compared with the English, French,
and German legislative bodies, is most marked, and in my
opinion most menacing.
The labor leaders in this country have not only refrained
from organizing a labor party, but until the last election
have consistently refrained from attempting to make labor
politically expressive. . . . Labor's inactivity in politics,
its failure to vote as labor, has been reflected in the political
platforms of both our great parties. . . . This has tended
to produce a peculiar situation in our political life. I am
not suggesting that this failure is all due to labor's aloofness
from politics and the impunity with which the two great
parties have been able to ignore labor as a political entity,
but it must have had a great deal to do with it, and nobody
can deny that the existing state of affairs presents a very
strange spectacle.
Industry in this country has developed since the Civil
War with great rapidity. Because of this, a large percent
age of our population has been vitally interested in the rela
tions between employer and employee, but all of these ques
tions have been either settled or left unsettled, and in so far
as they were left unsettled we have had direct action, that
is, the strike and the lockout instead of political action. I
believe everyone will admit that the most important prob
lems in the lives of the greatest number of people in this
country are the problems of the relation between capital
and labor, employers and employees, and yet there has never
. . . been an issue made between the two great political
parties upon any of these questions.
As has already been stated, we do not find labor directly
represented in the State and national legislatures. Neither
is it directly or indirectly represented in the councils of
either the Republican or the Democratic parties as they are
now constituted. These councils are dominated by the
employing group which has been willing, or perhaps I should
say desirous, to have the difficulties between employers and
labor left to other than political means for settlement.
The abstention of the laboring masses from political
action to attain their objects probably arises from their
belief in the effectiveness of direct action, a belief welcomed
by the employer, as it leaves him in control of the govern
mental machinery to withstand direct action when labor
makes its challenge along that line. But unless this growing
industrial unrest, which certainly did not spring out of
nothing and which has surely and steadily been increasing,
performs the miracle of vanishing into nothing, a continu
ance of these attitudes by employer and employee is merely
going to serve to widen the chasm between them.
Now, anybody who is waiting for this social unrest and
industrial ferment to pass without attaining some of its
objects is like the man Horace describes who lay upon the
river bank waiting for the water to pass, in order that he
might have a dry place to cross, not realizing the unlimited
source of the river's headwaters.
35
The workman must be roused to the fact that direct action

is never successful unless the cause in which it is urged has
first been the subject of favorable political reaction, or to
put it perhaps more simply, only when the cause is the
recipient of favorable public opinion. For instance, English
workmen were able to dictate to the British Government, by
the threat of a general strike, a flat prohibition against sup
plying the enemies of the present Russian Government with
supplies to be devoted to its destruction. That was because
the public opinion of Great Britain was in favor of letting
Russia attend to her own domestic problems. . . .
The workman must be educated to the collateral cruelty
and wastefulness of strikes. I would like to have each one
of them read a little one-act French play where the curtain
rises on a workman's family affectionately taking leave of
the father, who is departing to take up his night's work at
one of the railway stations. His love of wife and children
and his reluctance to leave are movingly portrayed. An
hour after he has torn himself away the youngest child is
writhing in pain. A physician is called who diagnoses the
case as one for instant operation. The surgeon comes in
and decides that the child cannot even be moved to a hospital.
A table is moved over under the electric lights. The opera
tion is performed, and before the severed arteries can be
tied and the open wound cared for, the lights go outa
frantic mother and a panic-stricken surgeon. Candles are
brought whose inadequate lights do not permit the surgeon
to stop the flow of blood, and then while the child is bleeding
to death, the voice of the father in the hallway calling to his
wife, "Marie! Marie! We have declared a general strike
and there is not a light burning in Paris!"
The employer must learn that the workman's impatience
with the present social structure is mostly the philosophy
of distress. If anybody stands on your pet corn long enough,
you don't hesitate at murder if you cannot get him off in
any other way. The employer must be made to realize that
he cannot get his philosophy of distress too quickly into the
political arena and take it out of the realm of warfare
between the constabulary, the militia, the strikebreaker, and
the picket. The employer must learn that history is full of
revolutions produced by causes similar to those now operat
ing in these United States.
I realize that while it is considered right to urge the
danger arising from radicalism as an argument for gov
ernmental severity, it is considered wrong and improper
... to urge the danger of radicalism as an argument for
conciliation or political education.
I know of no way by which this education can be admin
istered to employer and employee unless one of our great
political parties will make its house ample and hospitable
for all citizens who want the problems of today solved pro
gressively and peacefully, by knowledge and by reason, and
by political means, but who are bound and determined that
those problems shall be solved, that is, by becoming a real
liberal party; and then this party so constituted must go
out to meet the present condition of affairs by securing an
understanding of what the great bodies of the working
people want and devise means by which their just demands
shall be fairly met and their excessive demands squarely
rejected.
The party that goes out to meet this situation, instead of
emphasizing the old formula that all men are born equal,
must let the laboring man know that it recognizes natural
inequalities imposed upon many of the people from their
The Nation
36
birth so grave as to make it essential that if they are to be

treated with fairness they must be treated with something
akin to tenderness. The party that goes out to meet this
situation must stand ready to bring home to the employer
the artificial inequalities now existing which are so grave
and serious as to be a scandal to civilization. The party
that goes out to meet this situation must be prepared to
learn that the fruits of the world are distributed in such a
way as to be a travesty on human justice.
The leaders of the party that goes out to meet this situa
The
Federal
Trade
[Vol. 112, No. 2897
tion must remember that they are politicians and statesmen

and not antiquaries, because the people of this country are
no more going to be content with reaction or with the return
of the philosophy of twenty-five years ago than they are
going to return to drowning witches, burning heretics, or
selling slaves from the auction block. If one of our great
parties will make its house thus ample and will honestly and
earnestly seek to force industrial questions into the political
arena for settlement, labor will cease trying to indemnify
itself illegally for the denial of legal privileges.
Commission Yields
to
Pressure
By GEORGE T. ODELL
Washington, December SO, 1920
IN the fall of 1919 the Federal Trade Commission issued
a report laying bare the monopoly, profiteering, and
extortion which it charged were enjoyed and practiced
by the five big meat-packing corporations of Armour,
Swift, Morris, Cudahy, and Wilson. This report contained
the results of an investigation undertaken by the Commis
sion at the request of President Wilson and conducted by
a corps of from twenty to thirty expert accountants, exam
iners, and investigators sent into the field for that pur
pose. Most of these agents of the Commission were for
ward-looking men, alive to the menace of big business ex
ploitation of Government and the public and sympathetically
inquisitive toward all theories for the solution of social and
political problems. To the particular task in hand, how
ever, these investigators employed the precise science of
mathematics in unraveling the complicated accounts which
the packers had used to conceal their extortions and profit
eering and the most exacting laws of evidence in dissecting
the legal subterfuges through which they maintained their
monopolistic control over food products.
On October 20, 1919, Senator Watson of Indiana attacked
the Federal Trade Commission upon the floor of the Senate,
charging eleven of its employees who had participated in
the investigation of the packing industry with sedition and
criminal anarchy. He secured the passage of a resolution
authorizing a committee of the Senate to investigate these
charges and solemnly swore that none of his information
came from the packers. The Commission examined its em
ployees, and issued a public statement exonerating them
and denouncing Watson. It could hardly do otherwise con
sidering the public nature of the attack. Meanwhile, the
Senate committee was appointed, lawyers were engaged, wit
nesses were privately examined, and a large amount of pub
lic funds was lavishly expended, but the public hearings
were postponed and remain postponed until this day. A
year and more passed and on the first of December, 1920,
out of the eleven who had been branded by Watson with
the charge of sedition and criminal anarchy, only four re
mained in the employ of the Commission. It is fair to say,
however, that some of those who left were engaged solely
for the investigation of the meat-packing industry and
their services were no longer required when that was con
cluded, while others resigned to accept better positions.
The four remaining on December 1, 1920, were Stuart
Chase, A. S. Kravitz, S. W. Tator, and Earl S. Holmes. On
December 4 and 6, respectively, Chase and Kravitz received
notices that their services would be dispensed with on De
cember 31 on account of "lack of funds." Tator in the

meantime had handed in his resignation in order to accept
a better-paying position. This blow fell upon Chase and
Kravitz without any warning. The persecution that these
men were subjected to during the past year it is onlynecessary to indicate by saying that the espionage of Mr.
A. Mitchell Palmer's band of "Red Raiders" went so far as
to examine every bit of trash which was taken from the
homes of these four men.
Was "lack of funds" the real reason for dischargingChase and Kravitz? Let us examine the evidence. Dr.
Francis Walker, chief economist of the Federal Trade Com
mission, did not know of the discharge of these men until
after the fact, although both of them are subordinates in his
division. Mr. Charles F. Napier, chief accountant who passes
upon all matters having to do with appropriations, wa3
equally in ignorance, although it has been the practice of the
commissioners when reduction of the staff was under con
sideration to request the suggestions and recommendations
of the head of the division and the chief accountant. As
late as November 20, Mr. Miles, who under Mr. Napier had
been investigating the status of the Commission's appro
priation, told Chase that the economic division was more
abundantly supplied with funds than had been supposed.
When the blow fell Chase was in charge of cost finding for
canned milk companies, covering refunds payable by them
to the Government under War and Navy Department con
tracts. The amount of these refunds will exceed $200,000,
but the work cannot be completed by December 31, and after
Chase leaves, the Commission must either abandon it or else
with a large waste of time and money have some one else
check back over all the work already accomplished so as
to be able to certify the amounts. Kravitz was engaged in
writing sections of the final report of the Commission on
oil, and his fellow workers declare that this task cannot be
completed by his successor without reopening the original
investigation.
"Lack of funds" was not the reason, as Mr. Kravitz was
soon to discover when he commenced applying a little pres
sure upon the Commission. It has been customary for the
Federal Trade Commission to ignore the civil-service list in
building up its staff. In consequence, few of its employees
enjoy the protection of the law designed to create stability
in federal employment and place public servants beyond the
vagaries of the political spoils system. But Mr. Kravitz
is a civil-service employee and in discontinuing his services
on account of "lack of funds" the Commission violated that
law which provides among other safeguards that in such
Jan. 12, 1921]
The Nation
circumstances no civil-service employee shall be discharged

until all other employees of the same grade who are not
under civil service have been dropped. Moreover, the law
provides that except for retrenchment no civil-service em
ployee may be dismissed unless charges of misconduct or
inefficiency have been made against him and a hearing
granted. The Commission did not follow the procedure re
quired by law in any particular in the case of Mr. Kravitz.
When Mr. Kravitz laid his case before Victor Murdock,
the former Progressive Congressman from Wichita, Kan
sas, the commissioner exclaimed: "My God, are you under
the civil service? If I had known that I could have stopped
the whole thing." Next, Mr. Kravitz took his troubles to
J. P. Yoder, secretary of the Federal Trade Commission.
"How does it happen that I have been discharged on ac
count of 'lack of funds' while there are so many others in
my grade outside the civil service who have not been dis
missed?" he inquired. "Oh, well, of course you know that
lack of funds was not the real reason, but I will have to
refer you to the Commission's counsel for any further ex
planation," replied Secretary Yoder. So Mr. Kravitz called
on Mr. Warren R. Choate, assistant counsel for the Com
mission, who was at first inclined to treat the matter with
supercilious contempt. "Of course, that was only an excuse,
you know," he said, "but you had better accept it and get
out because there are other methods of getting rid of you.
We can easily prove that you were inefficient." "Then how
about this?" inquired Mr. Kravitz suavely, producing his
civil-service certificate which he had taken the precaution
to obtain from Luther H. Waring, personnel officer of the
Commission, in which he was rated as "highly satisfactory."
Mr. Choate threw up his hands, admitted his defeat, and
referred his caller to Huston Thompson, chairman of the
Commission.
Having established the fact that the Commission re
sorted to subterfuge in assigning "lack of funds" as the
reason for discharging Chase and Kravitz, let us examine
the sequence and logic of other events which lead to the
loss for these two men of their jobs. It has been shown that
Senator Watson denounced them in a speech delivered in
the Senate on October 20, 1919; that he solemnly swore
that his information did not come from the packers; that
he called for an investigation ; that a Senate committee was
appointed, which engaged counsel and sleuths, but, that al
though a year and two months have passed, no public hear
ings have been held. In other words, the accused men have
never been granted a hearing of any sort.
In September of this year William B. Colver wrote to
the President asking him not to renominate him as a mem
ber of the Federal Trade Commission at the expiration of
his term, about the first of October. That letter has never
been made public by the White House. Inside the Com
mission Mr. Colver was looked upon as the backbone of the
struggle against the packers and it was largely through his
efforts that the Commission took up the cudgels against
Watson, answering his charges, defending its agents, and
denouncing the Senator as a tool of the packers. Before
he wrote to the President Mr. Colver learned from "reliable
sources" that his appointment would not be confirmed by
the Senate. In the November elections, Watson was re
elected. He will have a strong position in the next Congress
as a member of the powerful finance committee and a close
associate of Penrose, Smoot, and Lodge. The Republican
platform, in the drafting of which Watson played an impor
37
tant role, has a clause censuring the Federal Trade Com

mission for what is termed its attacks upon legitimate busi
ness. On November 20 Chairman Thompson of the Com
mission appeared before the appropriations committee to
urge the budgetary needs of his body for the next fiscal
year. It lies within the power of Congress to break the
Commission, as it did the commerce court, by depriving it
of funds, and the possession of that power gives to the
leaders of the majority party a potent argument to be used
in any bargain they may wish to make. On December 4
Chase and Kravitz were summarily discharged. Comment
ing on the situation, Stuart Chase wrote the following letter
of protest to Chairman Thompson :
The only interpretation I am able to read into this series of
events is that Senator Watson, while he could not brook a pub
lic hearing in which his relations to the packers might be estab
lished, could brook neither the presence of men in the Federal
Trade Commission whom he had branded as undesirable and
dangerous characters. If, therefore, the Commission desired
consideration at the hands of the new Administration, it must,
among other things, first find means of ridding itself of these
marked men. Such house-cleaning demanded the elimination of
Kravitz and myself, Tator having already resigned to take an
other position. This pressure, as I see it, put the Commission
in a difficult position. If they defied it, their progress in the
coming months might be seriously impeded; if they gave in to it
they would have to sacrifice two men of some ability whose
faithfulness and integrity they had already warmly defended.
They chose the second course, as was perhaps inevitable, but
they could not impart the reasons to the two men in question
because of the insight such a confession would give into the
logic of the situation. We were dismissed therefore on the tech
nical ground of "lack of funds" and the Commission has main
tained an inscrutable silence.
A mind with a philosophic turn can find no grounds for per
sonal blame in all this. Nor grounds for passionate protest.
The vested interests have once more proved their ability to
command the Government. Servants who have genuinely la
bored in the public interest cannot be tolerated when that in
terest conflicts with large corporate progress. In 1904 it was
said that the great meat packers were stronger than the United
States Government and it would appear that this dictum holds
good today. If I entertained certain progressive ideas in the
past, can you wonder that this experience has confirmed my
belief in the inherent injustice of the present economic order?
The Wanderer
By WITTER BYNNER
Sometimes when people pity me
I tell them with no rancor
That for what it costs me to be free
I might have bought an anchor.

Thomas L. Chadbourne is a well-known New York at
torney and a director of several corporations. He was
chairman of Mayor Mitchel's Committee on National
Defense and counselor to the War Trade Board.
George Talbot Odell is an experienced Washington cor
respondent now representing a number of newspapers.
J. Anton de Haas is a professor of foreign trade in New
York University.
Edna Bryner is a writer who has made a special study of
housing conditions in Denmark.
The Nation
38
[Vol. 112, No. 2897
The Intellectual Blockade of Germany

By J. ANTON DE HAAS
SHORT notice in the New York Times of November 7

contains the information that the German Govern
ment is considering the advisability of closing three of its

universities. It is said this step would be taken for rea
sons of economy, and that it would be possible to support
financially the universities of Cologne, Bonn, Heidelberg, and
Karlsruhe. If this notice is true, as undoubtedly it is, we
are here given a glimpse of one of the most serious problems

of after-war readjustment which Germany faces.
The cause of education, and with it the entire intellectual
class, has suffered a severe set-back in practically all the

European countries as a result of the enormous increase in
the cost of materials, equipment, and the necessities of life,
on the one hand, and the inability of the governments to
increase their appropriations on the other. The result is
the same in every countryunderpaid professors, libraries
inadequately supplied, laboratories poorly equipped, and,
more serious still, a wholesale desertion from the ranks
of the disciples of science to those of trade and even skilled
labor.
The new Central Republics, more heavily burdened by
When I was in Berlin the truck drivers were on strike.
According to an article in Freiheit of August 14, 1920, they

demanded a basic rate of 330 marks a week for an eight
hour day, and double rates for overtime. They won their
strike.
The truck-driver in Berlin now makes a little over
17,000 marks a year. The official salary of a full professor

at Berlin University in August, 1920, was 4,800 marks, with
yearly increases to a maximum of 7,200. The state made
an allowance to meet the high cost of living, which brought
the salary of most professors up to about 12,000. Of the
fees which formerly went to the professors 75 per cent is
now paid into the state treasury.
Professor Strauss at the Handelshochschule in Berlin told
me: We have had no milk in our house since the armistice.
We have meat once a week. I can buy no books, no instru

ments. I have had to cancel my subscriptions to scientific
journals. I cannot even write any more, for there is no pub
lisher who will publish scientific works unless the author
undertakes to finance them. Professor Ernst Bergmann
writes in the Tag: Many associate professors sell their
last carpet, the last valuable volume of their library, to keep
debt than their neighbors, their currencies even more hope
themselves
lessly inflated, present this problem in an aggravated form.
Springer, of a well-known Berlin publishing house of scien

tific books, prepared for me figures which show that the cost
of printing 2,000 copies of a pamphlet of sixteen pages has
increased from 108 marks in 1914 to 1,600 marks in August,
The intellectual class in all these countries is sorely pressed;
in Germany and Austria it is in danger of extinction. The

universities and scientific institutes find it impossible to
above
water
for
another
week.*
Julius
stretch their incomes to cover expenses. The Meteorological
1920.
Institute in Vienna has an income which at the present time

is about sufficient to subscribe to one English scientific jour
nal, while the Physiological Institute in the same city enjoys
The cost of the paper alone is from 30 to 40 times

that of prewar times. The publisher who finds himself
forced to tie up a much larger amount of capital than
formerly in new editions will usually refuse to publish at his
risk strictly scientific books. Professor von Harnack writes:
I personally have not been able to publish a study, Die
Vulgata des Hebrerbriefes, which represents more than
half a year's work, because the publisher demanded of me
a yearly income of ten thousand kronen less than the price

of a single microscope. While the prices increased the in
come has remained stationary. Professor Heinrich Rubens,
director of the Physikalische Institut of Berlin University,
writes in answer to my inquiry: The income of my insti
tute for apparatus, books, chemicals, utensils, wages, light,
heat, and electricity before the war amounted to 24,000
marks. The prices for apparatus and chemicals are now
twelve times those of before the war, wages nine times, and
heating fifteen times. As yet no provision has been made
to increase our income. I have received recently one hun
dred thousand marks with the admonition not to make any

new purchases and to use this money solely to pay outstand
ing debts.
It goes without saying that this condition can
not continue in the future if we are to be scientifically
a payment of 3,000 marks before he was willing to publish

the book which, on account of its specialized subject, could
only be expected to have a very limited sale. Now it is
hardly reasonable to expect that a man shall pay out money
in addition to doing the work. Oswald Spengler, author of
Der Untergang des Abendlandes, could only succeed in

publishing the second volume because a group of Hamburg
merchants undertook to finance him.
Scientific societies
have been forced to abandon the publication of their works.

The Prussian Academy of Sciences has entirely discontin
productive.
One of the elements of strength of the old German uni
versity lay in the fact that more even than in other Euro
ued its publications.

Thus as a result of the increased cost of printing, the
pean countries the university professor was highly esteemed

and adequately paid. Germany's greatness as an intellec
tions, is becoming daily more barren and is rapidly degen

erating into an exploitation of best sellers. But the in
creased cost of printing has another effect. It means, of
course, an increased cost of books. The price of strictly
scientific books is from four to sixteen times the prewar
price. Even the popular editions for which Germany was
at one time famous and which sold for a few pfennigs are
no longer within the reach of everyone. The Reklam edition
is now selling for 2.50 marks. This means that the scien
tual and scientific nation was the result of this willingness

to make intellectual work worth while financially and so
cially.
The war and the tremendous premium placed
through its crushing demands upon physical labor has

changed the relative position of the intellectual worker,
while the redistribution of incomes resulting from the cur

rency inflation has contributed its share to push him in the
background. Worship of labor and of mere money-making
German book market, formerly so rich in scientific produc
* According to the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant of October 27, 1920, Dr.
Margulies of the Vienna Metereological Institute died at the age of 40 as
power has displaced respect for intellectual achievement.
a result of long-continued undernourishment.
=====
Jan. 12, 1921]
The Nation
39
tific man not only is deprived of the opportunity of publish

ing the results of his work, but is no longer able to provide
mate effect with the loss resulting not only to Germany, but
himself with the books which contain the results of the
isolation to which the German people are at present exposed.
work of others.
The loss to Germany is irreparable; the body quickly rallies

from a lack of nourishment, but the effect of a stunted intel
lectual life is felt for generations.
Neither is this situation entirely free from danger. While
the crying need of the world today is for freer intellectual
The libraries, facing the increase in lighting, heating, and

labor, are in many cases unable to supply themselves with
the few books which appear notwithstanding the great
handicaps. The library of the University of Heidelberg,
according to Professor A. Kossel, had an income of 72,500
marks in 1914, which amount has not been increased since.
In 1919, so he informs me, the operating expenses amounted
to 126,500 marks, though the library was open only three
days a week during the winter.
More serious still than this intellectual starvation is the
to the world at large, from the intellectual starvation and
contact, for a closer study of foreign nations, a better ap

preciation of the thoughts of others, Germany, more than
any other nation in need of such broadening contact, is
almost completely isolated. The world can only benefit from

a removal of intellectual barriers. The German intellec
tuals, conscious of their hopeless economic condition, are
practical isolation of Germany from the intellectual life of
striving to overcome the barriers of hatred and distrust
the world. Difficult as it is to keep the lamp of science

burning within Germany under such conditions, even more
difficult, well-nigh impossible, is it to keep alive the contact
with the scientific world outside of Germany. There is no
which the war has set up. The recantation of the signers
margin left in the budget of libraries and scientific men.

At the same time the prices of foreign books and periodicals
have risen as the value of the mark upon the world's markets
decreased. The German subscribers of the English Philo
sophical Magazine, who before the war paid forty marks
a year, now are compelled to pay 1,000 marks. The rector
of Berlin University writes in answer to a letter: The
library is, therefore, forced to abandon the procuring of any
foreign books whatsoever, and is not even able to pay the ex
pense of binding the books which it already possesses. The
library of the University of Heidelberg cannot purchase any
foreign literature whatsoever, while the State Library in
Berlin with the greatest parsimony succeeds in subscribing
to 140 foreign periodicals as compared with 2,300 in
of the Kultur Manifesto is one of these steps, and the reply

to the Oxford University appeal for a reestablishment of
friendly intercourse is another expression of this desire.
As this reply is reported in the same issue of the New York
Times, Science knows only one aim, the search after truth;
and it requires for the performance of this task the common
labor of all, regardless of national boundaries.
But the
willingness to forget the past for the sake of science on the

part of the non-German world cannot remove the obstacles
which the changed economic conditions have raised. The
recovery of German intellectual life will be slow, slower than

the recovery of the German industrial and trade life.
herein lies the danger.
And
The old Germany with all its good qualities was led into
the way of its own destruction largely because the thinking
class either did not consider government and international
bring its files of periodicals up to date.
politics as properly belonging to its sphere of thought and

activity or because it was willing to take instruction from
above in these matters. From and through the intellectual
class the mass of the people took their cue. The revolution
has nominally changed the Government and has placed it in
the hands of the masses, and the masses will again look for
their cue to the intellectuals of old. It is therefore of prime
importance how these intellectuals will direct the thought
of the masses. Those among them who preserve their inde
pendence will be sadly handicapped in gaining an under
standing of what the outside world is thinking and doing.
They are in grave danger of misunderstanding world ten
dencies through incomplete information. And in conse
quence of the almost prohibitive price of books and pam
phlets they will be even more handicapped in placing their
knowledge and information before the people. Another
danger arises from the fact that many of the intellectuals,
in order to maintain themselves and promote their enter
While unable to secure the scientific material from the

outside world Germany sees much of its accumulated scien
control wealth. This support will undoubtedly not be given
1914.
The other German libraries merely repeat the story. Forty

five of the larger German state libraries, not including the
one at Berlin, had before the war approximately 1,600,000
marks available for their yearly acquisitions, of which about

400,000 marks a year were spent for foreign literature.
The income of these institutions has not been increased to
any extent, with the result that the increased cost of German
books, of binding, and of other necessary outlays leaves

practically nothing for the purchase of foreign literature.
In order to enable these institutions to supply themselves
as formerly, an income of at least three million marks would
be necessary for foreign acquisitions alone. This does not

provide sufficient funds to supply them with the issues of
periodicals which appeared during the war. The library

in Berlin alone states that it will take several millions to
tific treasure sold to foreign lands. Large numbers of ex

tremely valuable books, many of them the only copies in
existence, have found their way from private and small pub
lic collections into the libraries and museums of more fortu
nately situated countries. Entire libraries are being sold,

not only after death, but in some cases during the life of
their scientific owners, who find themselves forced to make
this greatest of all sacrifices in order to provide food and

clothing for themselves and family. In the words of Konrad
Haenisch: Thus German science is being sold out like our
store of men's clothing and ladies' lingerie.
No material damage can compare in seriousness and ulti
prises, will be obliged to seek the aid of those who now

without an adequate return.
Education and science freed
from the mailed fist of the Government will find an equally

severe master in those who through their economic position
can crush science or allow it to flourish. Nowhere in Europe
is the contrast between the classes as pronounced as it is in
Germany today. The men who have come into the control of
wealth in Germany, drunk with the sense of power, have
discovered in war an effective method of dispossessing the
masses, and they will attend to it that the masses will be fed
not the words of wisdom and knowledge, but the words that
may again fan the flames of international revenge and
hatred.
The Nation
40
[Vol. 112, No. 2897
Contemporary American Novelists

By CARL WAN DOREN
I.
EDITH WHARTON
an established position within the social mandarinate of
T the outset of the twentieth century O. Henry, in
Manhattan as constituted in the seventies of the last cen
a mood of reaction from a prevalent snobbism, dis
tury. They belong there and there they remain. But at

what sacrifices of personal happiness and spontaneous ac
covered what he called the Four Million; and during the
same years, in a mood not wholly different, Edith Wharton

rediscovered what she would never have called the Four
Hundred. Or rather she made known to the considerable
public which peeps at fashionable New York through the

obliging windows of fiction, that that world was not so
simple in its magnificence as the inquisitive, but unin
structed, had been led to believe. Behind the splendors
reputed to characterize the great, she testified on almost
every page of her books, lay certain arcana which if much
duller were also much more desirable. Those splendors were
merely as noisy brass to the finer metal of the authentic
inner circles. These were very small, and they suggested
an American aristocracy rather less than they suggested the
aborigines of their native continent. Ralph Marvell, in
The Custom of the Country described Washington Square
as the Reservation, and prophesied that before long its
inhabitants would be exhibited at ethnological shows,

pathetically engaged in the exercise of their primitive in
dustries.
Mrs. Wharton has exhibited them in the exercise
of industries not precisely primitive, and yet aboriginal

enough, very largely concerned in turning shapely shoulders
to the hosts of Americans anxious and determined to invade
their ancient reservations. As the success of the women in
tion! They walk through their little drama with the un

adventurous stride of puppets; they observe dozens of
taboos with a respect allied to terror. It is true that they
appear to have been the victims of the provincial innocence
of their generation, but the newer generation in New York
is not entirely acquitted of a certain complicity in the

formalism of its past.
From the first Mrs. Wharton's power has lain in the
ability to reproduce in fiction the circumstances of a com
pact community in a way that illustrates the various
, oppressions which such communities put upon individual
vagaries, whether viewed as sin, or ignorance, or folly, or
\merely as social impossibility. She has, of course, studied

other communities than New York: the priest-ridden Italy
of the eighteenth century in The Valley of Decision;
modern France in Madame de Treymes and The Reef;
provincial New England in The Fruit of the Tree. What
characterizes the New
York novels characterizes
these
others as well: a sense of human beings living in such inti

mate solidarity that no one of them may vary from the
customary path without in some fashion breaking the pat

tern and inviting some sort of disaster.
Novels written
out of this conception of existence fall ordinarily into par

tisanship, either on the side of the individual who leaves his
herd or on the side of the herd which runs him down or
keeping new aspirants out of drawing-room and country

house has always been greater than the success of the men
in keeping them out of Wall Street, the aboriginal aristoc
racy in Mrs. Wharton's novels transacts its affairs for the
most part in drawing-room and country house. There, how
ever, to judge by The House of Mirth, The Custom
of the Country, and The Age of Innocence, the life of
the inhabitants, so far from being a continuous revel as
shuts him out for good. Mrs. Wharton has always been
singularly unpartisan, as if she recognized it as no duty of
hers to do more for the herd or its members than to play
over the spectacle of their clashes the long, cold light of
represented by the popular novelists, is marked by nothing
has slightly changed. The House of Mirth, published in
so much as an uncompromising decorum.

Take the case of Lily Bart in The House of Mirth. She
goes to pieces on the rocks of that decorum, though she has
every advantage of birth except a fortune, and knows the
rules of the game perfectly. But she cannot follow them
with the impeccable equilibrium which is needful; she has
the Aristotelian heros fatal defect of a single weakness. In
that golden game not to go forward is to fall behind. Lily
1905, glows with certain of the colors of the grand style.

These appear hardly at all in The Age of Innocence, pub
lished in 1920, as if Mrs. Wharton's feeling for ceremony
Bart hesitates, oscillates, and is lost.
Having left her ap
pointed course, she finds on trying to return to her former

society that it is little less impermeable to her than she has
her magnificent irony. At the same time, however, her

attitude toward New York society, her most frequent theme,
had diminished, as if the grand style no longer found her so

susceptible as formerly. Possibly her advance in satire may
arise from nothing more significant than her retreat into
the past for a subject. Nevertheless, one step forward
could make her an invaluable satirist of the current hour.
Among Mrs. Wharton's novels are twoEthan Frome
and Summerwhich unfold the tragedy of circumstances

apparently as different as possible from those chronicled in
the New York novels.
Her fashionable New York and her
seen rank outsiders find it. Then there is Undine Spragg

in The Custom of the Country, who, marrying and divorc
ing with the happy insensibility of the animals that mate
for a season only, undertakes to force her brilliant, barren

beauty into the centers of the elect. Such beauty as hers
can purchase much, thanks to the desires of men, and
Undine, thanks to her own blindness as regards all delicate
disapproval, comes within sight of her goal. But in the end
she fails. The custom of her countryApex City and the
easy-going Westis not the decorum of New York rein
forced by European examples.
Newland Archer and Ellen
Olenska in The Age of Innocence neither lose nor seek
rural New England, however, have something in common.

In the desolate communities which witness the agonies of
Ethan Frome and Charity Royall, not only is there a stub
born village decorum but there are also the bitter com
pulsions of a helpless poverty which binds feet and wings

as the most ruthless decorum cannot bind them, and which
dulls all the hues of life to an unendurable dinginess. As
a member of the class which spends prosperous vacations on
the old soil of the Puritans, Mrs. Wharton has surveyed
the cramped lives of the native remnant with a pity spring
ing from her knowledge of all the freedom and beauty and
pleasure which they miss. She consequently brings into her
The Nation
Jan. 12, 1921]
narrative an outlook not to be found in any of the novel

ists who write of rural New England out of the erudition
which comes of a more intimate acquaintanceship. Without
filing down her characters into types, she contrives to lift

them into universal figures of aspiration or disappointment.
And in Ethan Frome, losing from her clear voice for a
moment the note of satire, she reaches her highest point of
41
clashes with its membersthis is the subject of Mrs. Whar

ton's curiosity and study. Her only positive conclusions
about it, as reflected in her stories, seem to be that love
cuts deepest in the deepest natures, and yet that no one is
quite so shallow as to love and recover from it without a
scar.
Divorce, according to her representations, can never
bleak hillside there blooms an exquisite love which during a

few hours of rapture promises to transform his fate; but
be quite complete; one of her most amusing stories, The

Other Two, recounts how the third husband of a woman
whose first two husbands are still living, gradually resolves
her into her true constituency and finds nothing there but
poverty clutches him, drives him to attempt suicide with the
what one husband after another has made of her.
woman he loves, and then condemns him to one of the most
In stories like this Mrs. Wharton occasionally leaves the

restraint of her ordinary manner to wear the keener colors
of the satirist. Xingu, for instance, with its famous open
ing sentenceMrs. Ballinger is one of the ladies who pur
sue Culture in bands, as though it were dangerous to meet
alonehas the flash and glitter, and the agreeable arti
ficiality, of polite comedy. Undine Spragg and the many
tragic passion. In the bleak life of Ethan Frome on his
appalling expiations in fictionto a slavery in comparison

with which his former life was almost freedom. Not since
Hawthorne has a novelist built on the New England soil a
tragedy of such elevation of mood as this. Freed from the

bondage of Local Color, that myopic muse, Mrs. Wharton
here handles her material not so much like a quarryman
finding curious stones and calling out about them as like a
futile women whom Mrs. Wharton enjoys ridiculing more
sculptor setting his finished work upon a commanding hill.
than she gives evidence of enjoying anything else belong

nearly as much to the menagerie of the satirist as to the
novelists gallery. It is only in these moments of satire that
Mrs. Wharton reveals much about her disposition: her im
patience of stupidity and affectation and muddy confusion
of mind and purpose; her dislike of dinginess; her tolera
tion of arrogance when it is high-bred. Such qualities do
not help her, for all her spare, clean movement, to achieve
the march or rush of narrative; such qualities, for all her
satiric pungency, do not bring her into sympathy with the
It has regularly been by her novels that Mrs. Wharton

has attracted the most attention, and yet her short stories
are of a quite comparable excellence. About fifty of them
all together, they show her swift, ironical intelligence flash

ing its light into numerous corners of human life not large
enough to warrant prolonged reports. She can go as far
afield as to the ascetic ecstacies and agonies of medieval
religion, in The Hermit and the Wild Woman; or as to the

horrible revenge of Duke Ercole of Vicenza, in The Duchess
at Prayer; or as to the murder and witchcraft of seven
teenth century Brittany, in Kerfol.
Kerfol, Afterward, and
The Lady's Maid's Bell are nearly as good ghost stories as

any written in many years. Bunner Sisters, an observant,
sturdy or burly or homely, or with the broader aspects of

comedy. Lucidity, detachment, ironythese never desert
tender narrative, concerns itself with the declining fortunes

of two shopkeepers of Stuyvesant Square in New York's
her (though she wrote with an hysterical pen during the

war). So great is her self-possession that she holds criticism
at arms length, somewhat as her chosen circles hold the
barbarians. If she had a little less of this pride of dignity
Age of Innocence. For the most part, however, the locality

and temper of Mrs. Wharton's briefer stories are not so
she might perhaps avoid her tendency to assign to decorum

a larger power than it actually exercises, even in the socie
remote as these from the center of her particular world,
ties about which she writes.
wherein subtle and sophisticated people stray in the crucial
chiefly upon those who accept it without question, but not

upon passionate or logical rebels, who are always shattering
mazes of art or learning or love. Her artists and scholars

are likely to be shown at some moment in which a passionate
ideal is in conflict with a lower instinct toward profit or
reputation, as when in The Descent of Man an eminent
scientist turns his feet ruinously into the wide green descent
to popular science, or as when in The Verdict a fashion
able painter of talent encounters the work of an obscure
genius and gives up his own career in the knowledge that at
best he can never do but third-rate work.
Some such stress
of conflict marks almost all Mrs. Whartons stories of love,

which make up the overwhelming majority of her work.
Love with her in but few cases runs the smooth course coin
cident with flawless matrimony. It cuts violently across the

boundaries drawn by marriages of convenience, and it
suffers tragic changes in the objects of its desire. What
opportunity has a free, wilful passion in the tight world Mrs.
Wharton prefers to represent? Either its behavior must
be furtive and hypocritical or else it must incur social dis
aster. Here againMrs. Wharton will not be partisan. If
in one storysuch as The Long Runshe seems to imply
that there is no ignominy like that of failing love when
it comes, yet in anothersuch as Souls Belatedshe sets
forth the costs and the entanglements that ensue when
individuals take love into their own hands and defy society.
Not love for itself, but love as the most frequent and most
personal of all the passions which bring the community into
Decorum, after all, is binding
it with some touch of violence or neglect, or upon those

who stand too securely to be shaken. For this reason
the coils of circumstance and the pitfalls of inevitability
with which Mrs. Wharton besets the careers of her charac

ters are in part an illusion deftly employed for the sake of
artistic effect. She multiplies them as romancers multiply
adventures. The illusion of reality in her work, however,
almost never fails her, so alertly is her mind on the lookout
to avoid vulgar or shoddy romantic elements. Compared

to Henry James, her principal master in fiction, whom she
resembles in respect to subjects and attitude, she lacks exu
berance and richness of texture, but she has more intelli
gence than he.
Compared to Jane Austen, the
novelist
among Anglo-Saxon women whom Mrs. Wharton most re
sembles, particularly as regards satire and decorum, she is

the more impassioned of the two. It may seem at first
thought a little strange to compare the vivid novels of the
author of The House of Mirth with the mouse-colored
narratives of the author of Pride and Prejudice, for the
twentieth century has added to all fiction many overtones
not heard in the eighteenth. But of no other woman
Writer
since Jane Austen can it be said quite so truthfully as of

Mrs. Wharton that her natural, instinctive habitat is a true
tower of irony.
The Nation
42
How Denmark Is Solving the

Housing Problem
By EDNA BRYNER
Copenhagen, December 1
ONE has quite the feeling that Alice must have had in
going through the looking-glass as he passes through
the heavy bronze doors, with their powerful relief design of
workers made by one of Denmark's foremost artists, into the
spacious rotunda of the enormous new gray pile of the
"Axelborg" office and bank building, steps nimbly into one
of the cages that the automatic elevator urbanely offers him
on its ceaseless slow journey up one side, down the other,
and, alighting at the fifth floor, enters the suite of sunlit
generous-roomed offices of The Working People's Coopera
tive Housing Association of Copenhagen. Here architects
are at work on plans made from suggestions brought back
from the June housing conference in London, people are con
stantly coming in to get their Association membership cards,
to take out their association share, to start their savings
account for their housing share, the telephone is busy with
questions in regard to apartments in the buildings under
way. One really feels that he must run as fast as he can
merely in order to stand still, and when he hears from Mr. J.
Christian Jensen, president of the Association, the story of
the housing plan that has worked and is still working, the
illusion that one is in a looking-glass world is complete.
Mr. Christian "House-Need" he is called because of his
constant use of this term in bringing before the people a
housing scheme which meets squarely the problems of work
ing people by building dwellings suited to their needs at a
price they can pay and managed in a way which serves their
best interests rather than the interests of outsiders.
When Mr. Jensen borrowed the money, forty kroner, to
send out the first printed matter for his plan, he was laughed
at on all sides, banks refused to lend him money, and only
one other person believed absolutely in his idea. That was
in 1912. Today the Association has five thousand members
and grows apace. In other Danish cities similar organiza
tions have been formed. The Association has built fifteen
completely running buildings, housing some fifteen hundred
families; and it has four buildings under way which will
house at least a thousand more families. It owns its brick
and cement works. It buys its timber direct from Sweden
and has great yards full lying ready for future building. It
has land enough to build on for years ahead. Its financing is
assured for all time.
All this came about through Mr. Jensen's persistence in
his idea that people should build and run their own houses,
an idea which originated when he was director of a building
organization whose members he called in conference over the
paralysis of building during the economic crisis of 1908 in
Copenhagen. Three-fourths of the workers in this industry,
the largest after the agricultural trades, were unemployed
and were drifting into other trades. The yearly "houseneed" of three thousand new apartments under normal con
ditions took on a terrifying aspect as people looked ahead to
several years without building.
Mr. Jensen was made chairman of a committee of mem
bers from his organization with instructions to approach
the banks for loans. The banks refused to lend. After
many fruitless attempts to borrow money, Mr. Jensen de
[Vol. 112, No. 2897
clared that he would turn the committee itself into a coopera

tive building association. The members of the committee
took fright at this and left him, with the exception of one
man, head of the Cooperative Supply Association of Copen
hagen, an organization which had been unable to secure
quarters in which to run its shops because it was coopera
tive. Naturally this organization was eager to help estab
lish a building association which would furnish quarters on
a cooperative basis.
In March, 1912, a small cooperative organization was
formed by representatives of the building trades and the
Cooperative Supply Association of Copenhagen, acting as a
stock company. Its avowed object was a reform of housing
conditions "by carrying over the principle of sharing to the
production of houses, so that the stockholders by becoming
joint possessors of their dwellings get a share in the profits,
which through amortization of loans and in other ways can
be carried over to members." The Association sought to
bring about a condition in which "rent is always an expres
sion of the amount necessary at any time for interest and
part-payment of the expense consumed for the erection of
the dwelling; and also for taxes, maintenance, renovation,
and administration." The Association sought to procure
the cheapest possible houses by the production and direct
purchase of building material, by being itself wholly or
partly its own contractor, and by purchase of ground when
such could be acquired with advantage.
The organization was formed on practically the same lines
on which it is being carried on today. Anyone can become
a member by paying an entrance fee of two kroner, which
entitles him to a membership card the number of which
gives him his place on the list in selecting apartments. He
becomes a voting member by paying an association share of
forty kroner, payable at once or in instalments within two
years' time. When this share is fully paid, he receives inter
est on it at four per cent and is entitled to a vote in the gen
eral assembly of the Association. He can then open up a
savings account in which to save up the money for his hous
ing share, an amount approximating two years' rent, which
is his investment in the property in which he lives and which
must be fully paid in before he can get an apartment. He
receives four per cent interest on this money while it is still
a savings account and also after it is turned over to the
Association as a housing share.
The money for the first building was borrowed from a
small bank through the friendship of one of its directors
with Mr. Jensen. The land was bought from a lawyer who
took payment in a mortgage of ten per cent on the building,
fully expecting, he later confided to Mr. Jensen, to have the
place turned over to him sooner or later. In 1913 the house
was built, housing 55 families. The Association could finance
only ten per cent of its liabilities, mortgaging out the rest.
The bank, seeing the house built and running, loaned for a
second and third house. Then the war came. The small
bank, threatened by larger ones, refused further aid. For
tunately a new venture was being made. The peasants de
sired to establish in Copenhagen a bank to handle their big
dairy export accounts. They got together with Mr. Jensen
and after hearing his plans, asked him to build them a bank.
This is the big "Axelborg," where the Association now has
its offices free. The fourth house, meanwhile, financed by a
state loan and a friend's loan, was going up. The fifth was
financed by the new peasants' bank, the Danske Andels Bank.
The Association, now firmly on its feet, started buying
The Nation
Jan. 12, 1921]
land, a forty-acre tract. At the same time it began to pur

chase its means of production. It bought a tile factory in
the town of Taastrup, a few miles out of Copenhagen, and
with it a farm of eighty acres, on which some day a new
village may rise. It bought another tile factory on the
island of Bornholm, with twenty-five acres of land. It set
up cement works where it produced all the cement products
necessary for its buildings at half the price it had been pay
ing outside.
At the same time that the Association was building itself
up strongly from within, Mr. Jensen, as a member of the
Rigsdag, was working to get state help for building, because
he believes that housing, like education, is a social need and
that good housing, like good education, is fundamental to
good citizenship. He succeeded. In 1917 the Rigsdag passed
a law which gave the city the right to remit taxes on new
buildings and rents on ground purchased from the city. In
1918 the Rigsdag passed the first law in Danish history by
which the state gives direct subsidy to building houses.
This law authorized communities to give a direct subsidy of
ten per cent to building, and when this was done the state
would give a like amount. In 1919 a new law was passed
authorizing communities to grant fifteen per cent where the
state also gives fifteen per cent. With thirty per cent thus
assured, the Association today is able to take care of the
rest of its liabilities through its own shares of stock.
While the rest of the world is wrangling over the housing
problem, the building of houses goes on quietly and steadily
in Copenhagen. The houses vary considerably in plan but
all apartments have large, excellently lighted rooms, with
conveniences to suit Danish requirements. Rents, in gen
eral, amount to somewhat less than eighteen per cent of
workers' incomes. As time goes on, rents, instead of going
up, come down, which is certainly the last word in successful
housing and imaginable to most of us only in a lookingglass world.
In the Driftway
IT was a happy headline, "Too Busy to Fight," that the
New York Times put over a dispatch from Mexico City
telling how the editor of El Universal had declined a duel
with General Alvarado. The editor, in refusing to accept
the challenge, said that in his journalistic capacity he was
compelled to attack many interests and could not fight duels
every time someone considered that the newspaper had done
him an injustice. The protagonists of world peace might
do worse than to adopt that phrase, "Too busy to fight."
This is an age of slogans; in our helter-skelter rush we let
our beliefs be molded by catchwords instead of by processes
of thought. In any controversy the side that thinks of the
best slogan is likely to win. Mr. Wilson's slogan, "Too
proud to fight," was snobbish in sound and obscure in mean
ing. "Too busy to fight" is plain and practical. It is not
as fine, certainly, as "Too intelligent to fight," or "Too civil
ized to fight," but it is decidedly closer to the temper of the
American people. If we wait to be ruled by intelligence, we
may wait long. But business is business ; it is proverbially
our god. What a bully day for the human race, if some
future government having declared war, its agents seeking
for recruits or for loans were met by the great American
office-boy with the brief response: "The boss sez he can't
see yuh ; he's tuh busy tuh fight."
43
AS a rule the Drifter does not go to the columns of the

London Morning Post for his Russian news, but a
recent dispatch from that paper's Copenhagen correspon
dent stirs him deeply. It tells of the heroic career of Rus
sia's most popular clowns, Bim and Bom. These two mar
tyrs to their art are said to appear in the arena at Moscow
for one brief moment of side-splitting humor once every
six or eight months, to get off a single seditious pleasantry,
and then retire under guard to the Extraordinary Commis
sion which sends them back to the Butyrski Prison for
another entr'acte. On one recent appearance, says the Post,
they committed this outrageous example of lese-majeste :
They walk around the arena pretending that they are mov
ing to a new flat. Bim has hanging from his neck por
traits of Lenin and of Trotzky. Says Bom, pointing at the
portraits, "What are you going to do with them?" Bim
answers: "We'll hang this one, and the other we will stand
up against the wall." Several Red Guards descend upon
Bim and Bom, and they are rescued by the audience just
in time to be turned over alive to the Extraordinary Com
mission. On their next appearance, after another term in
jail, they commit counter-revolutionary impertinence with
undiminished zeal. Bim comes into the arena bearing a tiny
log of wood. Behind him staggers Bom, carrying an enor
mous sack stuffed with paper. Bim, it soon appears, has
just received his winter ration of firewood, and Bom is car
rying in the sack the official cards and documents and per
mits necessary to get it. The chilly Moscow audience roars
approval, and Bim and Bom retire again to the security of
the Butyrski Prison. So says the Morning Post. Having
been driven into deepest cynicism by the number of good
Russian stories that have turned out untrue the Drifter
can accept the tale only with reservations. All governments
are notoriously lacking in humor, especially when the joke
is on themselves, but the Drifter still hopes to read further
that Bim and Bom are living in luxury in the palace of a
former favorite of the Czar and have been decorated with
the red medal of the Revolutionary Order of the Slap-Stick.
*****
EVEN in the South Seas somebody is always taking the
joy out of life. Two United States marines on the
island of Guam recently grew tired of contemplating the
perpetually blue skies and ever-waving palm trees. They
yearned for some of the travel and adventure which, mov
ingly stressed in the recruiting posters, had led them to
enlist. Two native girls, with complexions like cafi au lait
and eyes like chocolate eclairs, and very modest notions in
regard to the character and quantity of a bride's trousseau,
had also found a cloying sameness about Guam but not yet
about marines. So, after the fashion of the Owl and the
Pussycat, all four put to sea in a beautiful pea-green
(motor) boat. After many adventures they reached the
land where the bong tree grows, noted on the charts, less
poetically, as Yap. But there was no wood, no piggy-wig,
no ring for them. Distress, a Japanese military commander
with spectacles on the end of his nose, and a nauseating
insistence in asking who, why, and where! As an upshot
the quartet was bundled off to Yokohama where the Ameri
can consul performed the marriage ceremony (whether as
reward or punishment is not stated), and then sent the
travelers back to the cloying sameness of Guamunless a
term in jail was a novelty for the two marines. It would
seem as if our Government had a good case against the
Japanese for obstructing recruiting.
The Drifter
The Nation
44
Salem,
Condita
1626
By H. C. GAUSS
So you visited Salem?
And you saw the Witch House
And Gallows Hill?
And the House of Seven Gables,
And Hawthorne's birthplace?
But you did not see Salem.
How could you?
It has been shut up in my heart for forty years.
I think I was the last who saw it.
How could you see Salem?
You never lived with maiden aunts
Who remembered better days
And nothing else.
You never went to school
Next a graveyard
To a grim old dame who
Denounced youth and pleasure
With savage Scripture readings.
You never peeped, with splendid awe,
Beneath closed blinds
To see wraiths of women
Nursing life-long grudges or heart pangs
Shut in from the light of day.
You never ran away
To sit for hours with gray men
Who talked of Hong-Kong and Sumatra
Of Singapore and Java
As one talks of the corner grocery
Or the cobbler next street.
You never had idle ships and wharves
And empty granite warehouses
For playgrounds
Nor roamed through great
Three-story houses with infinite rooms,
All full of dust of the departed
Where even the mice were venerable.
All this I did, and
I can see Salem.
I would like to show it to you,
But if I touch it,
It crumbles.
Books
William Ellery Leonard
The Lynching Bee and Other Poems. By William Ellery Leon
ard. B. W. Huebsch, Inc.
IT is now eight years since Mr. Leonard published his first
collection of verse, "The Vaunt of Man." Despite a hun
dred touches of the directest realism and the sharp and homely
sagacity of many lines, the majority of readers saw in those
pages a scholar who made large use of the sonnet form, cherished
many moods that had been historically esteemed noble and fit
for verse, and often delayed expression until experience had
been transmuted into the forms of a cultural tradition. Such
[Vol. 112, No. 2897
an estimate did Mr. Leonard but little justice. It was not,

however, an unnatural one to make. In the same year as
"The Vaunt of Man" appeared "A Dome of Many-Colored
Glass"; in 1913 "General William Booth Enters Heaven"; in
1914 "North of Boston"; in 1915 "Spoon River Anthology"; in
1916 "Chicago Poems." The spectacular revolution in American
poetry thrust Mr. Leonard off the highway of song. He was too
bold for the academic taste; the rebels saw in him a beauty too
ordered according to an order of art and thought which they
rejected. Hence he was sparingly quoted in the anthologies and,
as the eminent voices among an older generation which had
praised him ceased gradually to command attention, he was left
lonely beside his lakes and hills.
As far as the public knew, his creative impulse halted. He
published new versions of Empedocles and Lucretius, a study
of Socrates, learned and witty prolegomena to a projected ren
dering of Beowulf. With the world of readers these works
helped him little. Nor did they help him greatly with the uni
versity which he serves and so obviously adorns. The academi
cians continued often to regard him with a cold and frugal eye.
For they saw in him not only the scholar who had so fruitfully
loitered beside Alp and Apennine; they saw in him the poet and
prophet, the unquenchable sayeralways against the delusion
of the day, always for the truth that should prevail, wrong
today but rightly eternally, content, like his forebears on stony
New England farmsteads, with little, but never content with
less than freedom.
In Mr. Leonard's new volume, 'The Lynching Bee and Other
Poems," the scholar in him has withdrawn into the background.
There is not a touch here of the Vergilian elegance and tender
ness that marked so many of his earlier verses. All traditional
harmonies and images have been discarded. These poems are
like eagles on sunset crags and their plumage is ruffled by the
storm. The verse is homely and often gaunt, written except in
rare moments of recollection and conscious synthesis in a sting
ing American vernacular; there is no adornment and no elo
quence; irony, indignation, and vision are stripped bare and
speak in their immediate characters. The subjects are the over
whelming ones that exercise everywhere the spirits of free men :
The Lynching Bee, A Wartime Movie, The Heretics, The Old
Agitator, The Mountain of Skulls. Here is not literature; here
life itself speaks. Yet there is a profound difference between
Mr. Leonard and his contemporaries. He clings to the concrete,
but he never lets it master him. He is not content with a series
of bright, exact images or of dark, heroic-looking outlines, how
ever sharp and jagged, or with isolated perceptions, however
keen and close. He clasps the world so tight that it wounds
him, but he does so in order to compel it to give up its meaning.
He can chant with the folk like Vachel Lindsay and convey
the multiplicity of things as astonishingly as Carl Sandburg.
But he neither creates myth nor is content with chaos. Imma
nent within these poems of his on the issues and in the speech
of a perishable day is the vigilant and philosophic mind exercis
ing its prophetic hardihood of thought, the historic imagination,
the vision that transcends even while it records. The Lynching
Bee is one of the boldest poems in the world. It conquers for
literature a new series of details and images. But Mr. Leonard
is not awed by his own mode of expression. At the core of the
poem glows the sovereignty of thought; the tortured negro and
the dead child's mother suddenly become symbols of immemorial
rites of blood-sacrifice and vicarious atonement and the trans
ference of pain and guilt. The terrible contemporaneousness
of the scene and the arraignment merge into a wider interpre
tation of the piteous effort of men to free themselves from agony
by inflicting it on others. Always in these poems there arises
from the harsh chaos of earth an intellectual beauty that vindi
cates the nobler possibilities of the mind.
We have said that in this volume the scholar in Mr. Leonard
has withdrawn into the background. But he is massively visible
there. Behind the bitter gaiety of A Wartime Movie, the
craggy ruggedness of Tom Mooney, the ache of silent horror in
Jan. 12, 1921]
The Nation
The Heretics, there is an intellectual passion free of the transi

tory, there is a constant and sustained elevation of spirit. Now
we have almost learned to confound what the older critics called
elevation of mind or spirit with safe opinions and the avoidance
of humble and concrete circumstance. We are hag-ridden by
the lesser Victorians and forget that both Milton and Shelley
were scholars and rebels, too, philosophers and yet of the eternal
company o" prophets and outcasts. In this mood we accept poets
who can have no essential elevation of spirit because they never
seek to interpret the totality of the things that they have learned
to see with so peering and exact a glance. Their gifts are many
and admirable. But they do not know enough and have not
enough intellectual power. That is why we have only minor
poets. But that is also why Mr. Leonard has a strong chance
of rising above that rank. None has surpassed him in seeing
the visible world and the things that fill it; none has equaled
him in thinking about those things largely and nobly and under
some aspect of eternity.
L. L.
A Renaissance Feast
Thought and Expression in the Sixteenth Century. By Henry
Osborn Taylor. The Macmillan Company. 2 vols.
IKE an experienced and urbane host, Mr. Henry Osborn
Taylor invites us to a sumptuous banquet prepared and
served in the style of the golden Renaissance. Nor will our
anticipations of delight be disappointed with the rich viands,
nor with the plate and porcelain in which they are delicately
served, nor with the lovely Abbey of Theleme in which we shall
be entertained. For the philosopher on the one hand and for
the literary voluptuary on the other, there is no field like the
sixteenth century: it surpassed all its predecessors in science
and in learning; it poured forth treasures of art and letters
that are all but matchless. And with loving hand the author
here culls the fruit of that antique lore, savors it, and dresses
it for our delectation, doing for this generation what Henry
Hallam did for our grandfathers. His subject allows him to
wander where he will, and he selects only here and there what
pleases him. Out of account he leaves whole countries, Spain,
Portugal, the Netherlands, Scotland, and Poland, and large
realms of human interest, as politics and historiography and
education and scholarship. On the other hand, he takes in
what extraneous matter he chooses, offering now a sketch of
Italian painting and again an account of the English Reforma
tion.
The same eclecticism marking his choice of subjects charac
terizes his treatment of individuals. By him as by Calvin's
Providence men are elected to grace or to reprobation arbi
trarily, according to his will and not always, perhaps, according
to their merits. If the fare he spreads before us has been com
pared to a Renaissance banquet, the treatment he accords to the
subjects he does not thoroughly likePetrarch, Villon, Erasmus,
Francis Baconmay be likened to that recommended in a
Renaissance recipe for preparing a fat capon for the table:
"Tease him with a pin till he fall in shreds and then seethe him
in wine." The seething is beautifully done, the wine of the best
vintage, but of the poor humanist or poet or thinker little is
left but mincemeat. And Mr. Taylor can snub the lesser lights
to extinction, as when he speaks of a respectable scholar as "a
fool named Bembo," and of a monarch like Richard II as "that
footless king."
But when he thoroughly likes his subject Mr. Taylor is
superb. Frequent and copious quotation of the originals in
several tongues, often so thickly interspersed with the English
text as to make a page read like macaronic, adds a higher
flavor to the delicious draft, like the wine in claret-cup. So in
love is the author, not without reason, with "Calvin's mighty
French" that he has nothing but praise for the great theocrat
who burned Servetus and ruled Geneva with a rod of iron.
45
Never since Jonathan Edwards declared the doctrine of the

damnation of the vast majority of mankind to eternal torment
irrespective of their merits to be "a delightful doctrine, exceed
ing bright, pleasant, and sweet," has any one made such a full
and hearty defense of the tenets of pure Calvinism. While
Calvin himself called God's eternal decree frightfuldecretum
Dei aeternum horribilehis most recent disciple, more royalist
than the king, finds it quite natural and supported by all analogy
in human life. So much of the theologian lurks under the hat
of our author that he fairly revels in the English Puritan
theology, all those controversial and doctrinal books passed over
by Jusserand in his literary history of England, as too "horri
bles a lire."
But the world's supreme poet is the most beloved; it is no
small glory to say something fresh and not unworthy about
Shakespeare. How well is the man here set forth: his broad
tolerance; his love for all life and for all men and women, even
the knaves and fools; his cloudless, boundless view of passion
and of fate. Rabelais is also loved and his vast tide of mirth
and mockery gauged at its true value. Good, also, is the hearty
appreciation of Luther's tremendous personality, and of the
wizard magic of Leonardo's science. This "Italian brother of
Faust," as Michelet called him, this earlier William James who
began life as a painter and ended it as a student of outre phe
nomena, peered and pried into every recess of nature and every
secret of the mind, and recorded his observations in tantalizing
albeit exquisitenotes and designs. The chief characteristic
of his painting, its psychological quality, has escaped Mr. Taylor,
as has the tragic grandeur of Michelangelo, the Florentine who,
amid a world of joy, dwelt in wilful sorrow.
The critic who calls Francis Bacon a great amateur will not
take it amiss to be himself known as a dilettante. With all his
wide and joyous reading of his texts, Mr. Taylor reveals no
systematic knowledge of modern scholarship. Here and there
he quotes a modern work, but his choice of them is excessively
arbitrary, and his lack of criticism often misleads him, as in
his treatment of Paracelsus, an arrant charlatan, exalted, on
the strength of a recent biography, to an unmerited height. For
our author many of the best works on the intellectual side of
the Reformation, for example, those of Beard, and Troeltsch,
and A. E. Berger, and Imbart de la Tour, are as though they
were not. How much he might have broadened and deepened
his treatment of science and philosophy had he consulted the
two best recent works on the subjects, those of Gerland and of
Cassirer ! One divines that the largest aspects of history on the
one hand, and minute research on the other, irk Mr. Taylor's
mind, for his work is neither dense with new knowledge nor
glowing with original philosophy. What he gives us is the
honey and not the meat of history; a lovely work but neither a
profound nor a reliable one.
More care in statement and writing were desirable. If Mr.
Taylor frequently errs in the matter of dates, if he omits or
misinterprets important words in citations and translations; if
he says that Luther never knew an earlier writer for an edition
of whose works Luther wrote the preface; if he says that Calvin
was the first Reformer to reject Purgatory; if he thinks that
Calvin took from Augustine much that he took directly from
Luther; if he says that Henry VIII applied to no Imperial uni
versities in the matter of his divorce ; if he is ignorant that the
Ten Articles were based on a creed drawn up by Melanchthon;
if he speaks of Erasmus's beautiful but most unclassical, almost
barbarous style as "pure Latinity"; if he seems to confuse the
two meanings of the "symbol" and to think that the Nicene
Creed was intended to be taken "symbolically"none of these
errors is of great importance, but their cumulative effect is con
siderable. Moreover, Mr. Taylor has no consistency in spelling
names: we find de Meung and de Meun, Sadoleto and Sadoletus,
Mirandola and Mirandula, de' Medici and dei Medici, Cardan,
Cardano, and Cardanus, Telesio and Telesius, Mansfield for
Mansfeld, John Tyndale for William Tyndale, Ratisbonne, and,
worst of all, the famous Cartesian axiom masquerading as "cog-
-------
The Nation
46
nito ergo sum. The names of Voigt, Williston Walker, and

Janssen are misspelled, the latter in two ways. The reviewer has
counted in all eighty-four similar mistakes. But the scholar and
man of letters should heed the motto of that great scholar and
consummate man of letters Erasmus: in minimis versor, sed
sine quibus nemo evasit maximus; nugas agito, sed quae seria
ducunt.
PRESERVED SMITH
[Vol. 112, No. 2897
are hurled is terrible, and the broken fragments reek with

blood. The Andreyev who was tortured by the monstrous para
dox of divine goodness and hideous evil in manChrist and
Judas-speaks through the passage in which Satan resolves to
accept without reservation all that is implied in being a man:
to be both rabbit and wolf, the timid, lying coward and the
bloodthirsty beast of prey. But what a crucifixion of the soul
of man in this union!
Andreyevs Satan
Satan's Diary. By Leonid Andreyev. Authorized translation by
Herman Bernstein. Boni and Liveright.
HE occasional minor disappointments suffered by Satan in
his wanderings to and fro upon the earth have never

hitherto dulled the zest with which he has continued to play the
role of tempter and deceiver of mankind. But Andreyev, in
the hour of his despair, will not permit even Satan to enjoy
life. In the guise of a billionaire Chicago meat king, Satan
sojourns among men for several monthsnot long enough, it
must be noted parenthetically, to master the English idiom; for
even in Chicago they do not say it is the tenth day since I am
living this life. Then Satan escapes to Hell, tricked and ut
terly humiliated. His frauds, hypocrisies, snares, and cruelties
are all outmoded.
Man defeats him easily at his own game.
Deceived by a mask of divine purity and a mask of misan

thropy, Satan bends his knee in prayer to a prostitute, and is
stripped of his fortune by the first man upon whom he stum
bles. Did you come to play, to tempt, to laugh, to invent some
sort of new evil game? asks the inscrutable Mr. Magnus, the
ruthlessly logical experimenter in dynamites. Youre too late.
You should have come earlier, for the earth is grown now, and
no longer needs your talents.
A theme, this, to tempt one of the masters of free irony and

laughter, a Voltaire, an Anatole France.
Andreyev's hands is disappointing.
Its development in
We have too great a re
spect for the Satan of Job and of Milton to believe that he

could have been so easily gulled, and too great a regard for the
It is well for a wolf to be a wolf.
It is
well for a rabbit to be a rabbit. But you, man, contain both

God and Satan, and how terrible is the imprisonment of both
in that narrow and dark cell of yours! Can God be a wolf,
tearing throats and drinking blood? Can Satan be a rabbit,
hiding his ears behind his humped back?
That fills
life with eternal confusion and pain, and the sorrow of the soul
becomes boundless.
The book is as desolate as Andreyev's own death, in penniless

and broken-hearted exile; a death that dramatizes the tragedy
of the Russian intellectuals, who dreamed of the revolution and
worked for it in blood and tears, and when it came fled from it
in dismay. Not once in this last book does Andreyev stand on
the highest mountain of meditation and catch the vision that
he granted to one of the Seven who were hanged. For Werner
the walls fell at last. From the lofty mountain ridge on which
he seemed to be walking, narrow like a knife blade, he saw on
one side Life and on the other Death, like two sparkling, deep,
beautiful seas, blending in one boundless broad surface at the
horizon.
And life appeared to him in a new light.
Soaring over time, he saw clearly how young mankind
was; that but yesterday it had been howling like a beast in the
forests; and that which had seemed to him terrible in human
beings, unpardonable and repulsive, suddenly became very dear

to himlike the inability of a child to walk as grown people
do, like a child's unconnected lispingflashing with sparks of
genius. Had Andreyev himself been able to share that vision,
with its rare and beautiful sanity, he might, like Gorki, have
faced the crimes and miseries of the Revolution without utter
despair.
DOROTHY BREWSTER
talents of our fellowmen not to feel that they would have staged
a game of more ingenious and varied deceptions, would have
given Satan a livelier run for his money, in the year of grace
1914. But the source of disappointment in the handling of
the theme lies deeper. Can a writer be at one and the same
Books in Brief
other writings, Andreyev shrinks back appalled before the tor

turing riddle of human destiny. He hurls his vain questions
ATHARINE ANTHONY'S Margaret Fuller: A Psycho

logical Biography has all the essentials of a modern por
trait. Painted in the clear, hard colors of realism, it is at the
same time heedful of environment and atmosphere. From the
outset the story plunges into the still unsounded depths of
Freudian analysis. A difficult task has been painstakingly
against the blank wall.
He stands on the brink of the abyss
accomplished; the two opening chapters lay a firm foundation
and flings into it words that fall without a sound, flings laugh
ter, threats, and moans, and still it remains silent and empty.
He seeks Truth, and Truth flees from him. He embraces it
for our understanding of the mental precocity of Margaret's
time the satirist of human greed and folly and the passionate
questioner of life's mysteries? In this book, as in most of his
girlhood, of the woman's woman of her twenties, and of the

long delayed love affairs of her later life. One thing is lacking
to make the years in and around Boston and the subsequent

ones in New York stand out in their true perspective. A few
with his thoughts, and the embrace envelopes only emptiness.

I imprisoned it, says Satan-Andreyev, and fastened it to the
wall with a heavy chain, but when I came to view it in the morn
ing, I found nothing but a shackled skeleton. The rusty chain
dangled loosely from its neck, while the skull was nodding to
more words about human beings shocked at any woman's at
me in brazen laughter. Thus breaking in discordantly upon

the satiric theme are Andreyev's characteristic notes of horror:
home more clearly to the modern reader the immensity of the

struggle which she had to face. Her career, unlike that of
the horror of a resounding silence that flows in icy waves

through the brain; the horror of eyes that gaze into the mys
terious Beyond with a dark and empty madness; the horror of
Susan B. Anthony, or Anna Howard Shaw, or Alice Paul, is

disassociated from any movement except in the broadest sense
of the word. And it is probably that very reason which
makes her career so fascinating. One is sometimes uncom
fortably conscious of compression. The prim Boston parlors
where the Conversations were held; Horace Greeleys charm
ingly sequestered farm at the foot of what is now Forty-ninth
infinite loneliness.
Satan himself is lonely in Hell.
One had
always hopefully supposed that whatever else might be true

of Hell, it would not be lonely.
There is a certain fascination in watching Satan grow into
Andreyevfor, of course, he never grows into the Chicago bil
lionaire. But it is not the fascination proper to the satiric
purpose. Satan comes to earth to play, to take part in a
puppet-show that appeared to him from the Beyond to be a
great and merry game of immortal fragments. And he finds it
not a play at all; the scrap heap on which the broken puppets
tempting to be a journalist and to have a profession would

throw Margaret's own attitude into higher relief and bring
Street where the windows overlooked a scene of wide waters
and moving sails, and where there were eight acres of

wooded grounds, a dell with falling water, paths that wound
through myrtle and white cherry, and waves murmuring in the
moonlight at the base of the rocks; then the contacts with
the great people of London and the meeting with George Sand
Jan. 12, 1921]
The Nation
in Paris; Italy in the days of Mazzini's revolution, crowded

days of conspiracy, civil war, love, and the birth of a child
among the beautiful mountains of Rieti; and finally the dra
matic last chapter of shipwreck and death within sight of shore
all these open up fascinating vistas which are all too quickly
harried by. And yet each is a vivid, clear-cut memory. Taken
as a whole the book opens up wide intellectual and imaginative
horizons.
THE great blot on our civilization is not war nor poverty nor
disease nor sin nor even capitalism, but science. In the
Hon. Stephen Coleridge's "Idolatry of Science" (Lane) you may
read how that despicable fraud has darkened the earth and tried
to snatch away heaven. Why should we take our beliefs from
professors -when that title "except when assumed by conjurors,
jugglers, and tumblers, stamps a man as narrow, prejudiced,
inaccurate, ignorant, and dangerous," and "a man either ignor
ant of, or indifferent to, the laws of evidence," so lost to all
proper feeling that he would "peep and botanize upon his moth
er's grave"? This "great usurpation," at once the "enemy"
and the "cock-a-doodle" of mankind, the supreme expression of
ignorance and absurdity, has created all the ugliness of the
modern world, has destroyed its religion and ideals, has aggra
vated disease and multiplied the horrors of war, and has com
pletely destroyed our powers of appreciating art and poetry.
Nothing so abject and deplorable in our times has ever been
witnessed as the abdication of the church before the Royal
Society, and the haste with which bishops and other clergy now
tumble over one another to endorse the degrading doctrine of
"the gorilla origin of mankind," by which, as by other things,
the professors are waging a guerrilla warfare against God.
And, practically, what have all the inventions done save to
create "in the soul-sterilizing circumstances of the factory
... an insensate din of damned machinery" in which "men
and women become mere living cogs in wagging mechanisms"
in order to manufacture "by the million in dreary facsimile
some horrid jiggumbob that the world had better be without"?
Science has corrupted poetry to the point of making it depict
"the filthy back street of a slum and the gross and bestial pas
sions of the yahoos of the public-house," and has infected paint
ing so that now "we stand awe-struck before pictures of nude
men and women with legs like German sausages and bodies like
undulating gas-bags." Voltaire, on reading Rousseau's praise
of savage life in the forest, said that it made him want to get
down on all fours at once. Mr. Coleridge's effusions make us
agree with him to the extent of wishing that science had never
invented the art of printing or even the alphabet.
OONG is equally far from being at its best when the music is
^ incidental to the words, as was the case in the old ballads,
and when the words are incidental to the music, as is likely to be
the modern case. A happier marriage has never been made be
tween the two than was made during the later Elizabethan days,
when composers, as Milton said of Henry Lawes, knew "how to
span words with just note and accent, not to scan with Mida's
ears," and were profoundly respectful of poetry. Several selec
tions either from the lyrics or from the scores of the Elizabethan
song books have been published from time to time, but Mr. E. H.
Fellowes is the first to venture upon a complete edition of the
lyrics. His "English Madrigal Verse 1588-1632" (Oxford), re
producing the contents of seventy-five old volumes, is a learned
and careful work which only a scholar both in literature and in
music could have brought to a conclusion. Mr. Fellowes, who is
an editor of Elizabethan madrigal music, and a noted one, and
who believes that "the fine imagination of the greatest of the
English madrigal composers may be said without exaggeration
to have been equal to that of the poets," has known how to
reduce the texts of the lyrics, sometimes chaotic in the song
books, to their original form. He reprints the books entire,
without fear of repetition, under two classifications: those of
the madrigalists, wherein the music was intended for several
voices, and those of the lutanists, containing solo songs. It is
47
worthy of note that he spells the name of the best poet-composer

of all Thomas Campian, on the authority of numerous title pages.
A UNIQUE and remarkable town-history is Miss Annie H.
Thwing's "Crooked and Narrow Streets of the Town of
Boston, 1630-1822 (Marshall Jones). Beginning with the lanes
and cow paths of earliest times, she sketches the history of each
street, giving the names of owners and dwellers from the settle
ment to Boston's organization as a city. Its accuracy is vouched
for by the fact that it is the outcome of a life-work, whose
results are treasured by the Massachusetts Historical Society,
consisting of 125,000 cards giving brief details of the lives of
the principal inhabitants of the town, and 22 volumes of extracts
from deeds tracing every estate from 1630 to 1800. There are
numerous agreeable lighter touches. A lady of over two cen
turies ago is characterized in an obituary notice as "a desirable
mother-in-law." When Washington was in Boston, he passed
on horseback a range of boys each with a quill pen in his hand,
with which, as they bowed, they "stroked the President's boot."
The work as a whole might well be imitated in New York and
the other American cities. There are pictures and maps illus
trating the text and a remarkably full index.
'T' HE CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF ILLINOIS (Illinois Cen* tennial Commission), of which the scheme was discussed
and the two earliest volumes were reviewed in The Nation of
March 13, 1920, has now been completed by the publication of
three further volumes, and more than ever proves to deserve
the praise of being the best of our State histories. Vol. I, "The
Illinois Country: 1673-1818," is by Clarence Walworth Alvord,
the editor-in-chief; Vol. IV, "The Industrial State: 1870-1893,"
by Ernest Ludlow Bogart and Charles Manfred* Thompson;
Vol. V, "The Modern Commonwealth: 1893-1918," by Ernest
Ludlow Bogart and John Mabry Mathews. The first brings
the acutest learning to bear upon a romantic story here retold
with energy and feeling. In the last is presented such an
analysis and description of a modern American State as
can hardly anywhere else be found. Vol. IV to many readers
will seem the most interesting of the entire series, dealing as
it does with that crucial epoch during which Illinois advanced,
as other Middle Western States were doing, from the frontier
conditions still prevailing at the time of the Civil War to the
more modern conditions signalized by the Haymarket riot and
the Columbian Exposition.
THE altogether charming series of The Percy Reprints
(Houghton MifHin), edited by H. F. B. Brett-Smith, has
as its first number Thomas Nashe's "Unfortunate Traveller,"
that raciest of Elizabethan picaresque novels, here edited from
the original editions with a scrupulous care which has, however,
allowed the editor to make a slip in the very first paragraph of
his Bibliographical Note, where he assigns the book to a date
ten years too early. The second number of the series is a new
edition of "Gammer Gurton's Needle," with the spelling and
punctuation of 1575 reproduced as nearly as possible, and with
an appendix containing Dyce's version of what is after all the
best drinking song in the language, "Backe and syde go bare,
go bare."
NATURALISTS no longer able to obtain the "Argentine Orni
thology," published by W. H. Hudson and Philip Lutley
Sclater over thirty years ago, and now rare, will be delighted
with the "Birds of La Plata" (Dutton), which contains in two
handsome volumes the descriptions of bird habits, contributed
to the earlier book by Mr. Hudson. The new work is admirably
illustrated in color by H. Gronvold. Mr. Hudson has been happy
in the illustrators of his ornithological books, and never more so
than in "Adventures Among Birds" (Dutton), which reproduces
woodcuts from Bewick's "History of British Birds" with all the
soft and piquant charm of the originals intact, and which adds
a text by comparison with which Bewick seems hardly more
than quaint and queer.
The Nation
48
Drama
The Silver Lining
CONTEMPORARY reviewers of the drama may be divided
into three classes: those who debate whether Pinero or
Barrie is the greater playwright; those who are troubled over
the relative eminence of Barrie and Shaw; those to whom both
controversies are barren of content, as hardly related to serious
dramatic criticism at all. What relation, let us see, has Barrie
to serious drama?
It will be useful to examine the fable of "Mary Rose" (Empire
Theater). The Morelands take their little daughter, Mary
Rose, on a trip to the outer Hebrides. Left for an hour on a
tiny island that has an eerie reputation among the Scotch coun
try-folk, Mary Rose disappears. At the end of thirty days she
is found sketching in the very spot whence she had vanished.
There is no gap in her consciousness; she thinks she was left a
moment before. At times thereafter her mind seems to reach
out after a lost memory; but since her parents have told her
nothing, her development is normal. At nineteen she is be
trothed to a young midshipman to whom the Morelands feel it
their duty to communicate the strange adventure of Mary Rose's
childhood. Her marriage with Simon Blake is very happy, and
when her little son is four years old she persuades her husband
to take her on a fishing trip to the Hebridean islands, of which
her memories are quite unclouded. On the same fatal islet of
her first adventure she disappears again. This time the years
drag on. Her wild young son runs away to sea at the age of
twelve. Her husband becomes a distinguished naval officer,
but does not marry again. When twenty-five years have passed
and Simon Blake is visiting the Morelands, a Scotch clergyman
who was once the Blakes's guide comes in and announces that
Mary Rose has reappeared just as she did on that earlier occa
sion. She enters, young and fresh as on the far day of her
doom, and finds her parents old and weary and her husband
strange and gray. She asks for her little son and asks for him
in vain. At this point the action of the play itself ends. The
epilogue permits us darkly to infer that she died of the shock
of an estranged world and her child's absence. For in that
epilogue the son, now a grizzled Australian veteran of the world
war, holds converse in the deserted Moreland house with her
unquiet ghost, which vaguely intimates that on the island
magical music lured her to an abode of blessed spirits to which
she is now fain to return.
It is clear that Barrie did not mean this fable to be accepted
literally, and equally clear that he was not merely dramatizing
a bit of folk-lore. We must look for the idea about which the
action crystallized. We find it, if anywhere, at the opening of
the third act, immediately prior to the last appearance of Mary
Rose. The Morelands, except" for tremulous hands and white
hair, are exactly as they were a quarter of a century ago. They
question each other and find that the great and strange tragedy
of their lives has left them essentially untouched. After a
little, happiness had come "breaking through." Their daughter's
unheard-of fate, the loss of their grandsonthese things are
now as though they had hardly been at all. Time heals. That
is not a very notable idea, but in a literal sense it is true enough.
Ideas, however, have their own spiritual qualities, and the fact
that time undoubtedly heals may be regarded in different ways.
There is Shelley's way of regarding it:
Alas! that all we love of him should be,
But for our grief, as if it had not been,
And grief itself be mortal!
There is the bitterest sting, the long, immedicable woe. Forgetfulness is the last affront we offer the sacred, unresisting
dead. Barrie does not think so. His famous whimsical kindli
ness comes in. Moreland declares that he has spent his life
pleasantly with pleasant little things; he is not equal to tragedy;
he doesn't know what to do with it. The return of Mary Rose
makes him horribly uncomfortable. He wants to get back to
[Vol. 112, No. 2897
his collection of prints. And Barrie sheds the tough, pink glow
of his optimism on this lost soul. He would undoubtedly avert
his virtuous face from all human errors due to passion, to excess,
to the generous vitality of nature. His plays are commended
for their purity. He surrounds with his gentlest pathos and all
the beauty he can command a triviality of soul that is as shame
ful as one hopes it rare. Spiritual trivialitywe come very
close to Barrie with that phrase. He makes harsh things sweet
ish and grave things frivolous and noble things to seem of
small account. No wonder he is popular among all the shedders
of easy, comfortable tears. He dramatizes the cloud in order
to display its silver lining.
"Mary Rose" is as incoherent in its imaginative structure as
it is false and feeble in idea. If the mysterious world to which
the island gives access is an abode of the dead, why is the living
Mary Rose permitted twice to enter? If it is not, why does the
same music summon the wandering ghost that once lured the
living girl? Why does she leave the blessed islands of the dead
to haunt the decaying house? Do those islands give neither
forgetfulness nor knowledge? Why does a distinguished naval
officer permit his twelve-year-old son gradually to disappear in
Australia? Would not a cablegram have caused the child to be
recovered and sent home? Must he be lost only to give the ghost
of Mary Rose an excuse for haunting the house? Was there
some special purpose in making him so rough a customer that
he converses with his dead mother in gutter slang? Did that
circumstance add an extra luster to the silver lining? Vain
questions. Barrie's imagination is as uncontrolled as his ideas
are feeble and conventional. Yet this is the dramatist whose
position in permanent literature is seriously debated. This
purveyor of sentimental comedy to the unthinking crowd de
ceives the semi-judicious by moments of literary charm and deft
ness and mellow grace that recall the years when he wrote "Sen
timental Tommie" and "Margaret Ogilvie." But those years
are gone. His noisy stage successes have left him increasingly
bare of scruple, of seriousness, of artistic and intellectual coher
ence. They have left him "whimsical" and false and defeated
in the midst of wealth and fame.
Ludwig Lewisohn
The Greatest DEBATE in a Decade!
SCOTT NEARING
versus
Prof. E. R. A. SELIGMAN
of Columbia University
OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Chairman
Subject :
Resolved: "That Capitalism has more to offer the
workers of the United States than has Socialism."
Sunday Afternoon, January 23, 1921, 2 P. M.
Lexington Theatre, Lexington Ave. & 61st St.
Tickets 50c to $2.50 plus 10% war tax.
Box of 8, $20.00: Box of 4, $10.00
On Sale at Box Office or
THE FINE ARTS GUILD, 27 W. 8th St.. Phone Stuyvesant 717
Copyright, 1920, R. H. Maey < Co., Inc.
International
Relations
The British Budget

THE Government manifesto printed below, signed by
the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, appeared
in the London Daily Herald for December 13.
Why your MembeT of Parliament was right in voting against
Mr. Lambert's motion to limit next year's expenditure to 808
millions :
The principal items of expenditure are:
Interest on debt
345 millions.
Redemption of war debts necessary to keep faith
with the holders
110
"
Pensions to disabled soldiers, widows, and chil
dren, and old-age pensions
149
"
Ex-soldiers' land settlement and training schemes 35
"
Payments in relief of your rates, viz.:
(a) Education of your children
56
"
(b) Health and unemployment insurance
17
"
(c) Grants to local authorities and police in
relief of your rates
23
"
(d) Grants to provide houses
11
"
(e) Improvement of roads (in part work for
unemployed)
7
"
Revenue departments, including cost of post office 60
"
813 millions.
Nothing is included in the above estimate for the fighting
forces.
This year the navy, the army, and air force will cost over
270 millions.
Next year large reductions will be made, but something sub
stantial must be added to the above 813 millions for the pro
tection of the Empire.
Expenditure cannot be reduced to the limit of 808 millions
unless the state repudiates its obligations to its pensioners or
to its creditors, or risks the safety of the nation.
10th December, 1920
Austen Chamberlain
Martial Law in Ireland

THE following proclamation, printed in the Manches
ter Guardian for December 14, is now to be posted
in those parts of Ireland declared to be under martial law.
Martial law has been declared in the counties of Cork, Tipperary, Kerry, and Limerick.
Irishmen, understand this. Great Britain has no quarrel with
Irishmen. Her sole quarrel is with crime, outrage, and dis
order. Her sole object in declaring martial law is to restore
peace to a distracted and unhappy country. Her sole enemies
are those who have countenanced, inspired, and participated in
rebellion, murder, and outrage. It is to put an end once and
for all to this campaign of outrage that martial law has been
declared.
The authorities named in the schedule hereto annexed are
hereby appointed military governors for the administration of
martial law in the above counties, and all persons will render
obedience to their orders in all matters whatever.
Note this :
(a) All arms, ammunition, and explosives in possession of
any person not a member of His Majesty's naval, military, air,
or police forces, or who is not in possession of a permit, will
be surrendered by the 27th of December, 1920, to such persons
and at such places as are named in the second schedule hereto
annexed.
(b) After the 27th of December, 1920, any unauthorized
person found in possession of arms, ammunition, or explosives
Section
will be liable on conviction by the military court to suffer death.

(c) Any unauthorized person wearing the uniform or equip
ment of His Majesty's naval, military, air, or police forces, or
wearing similar clothing likely to deceive, will be liable on con
viction to suffer death. And any person in unauthorized pos
session of such uniform, clothing, or equipment will be liable
on conviction by a military court to suffer penal servitude.
(d) Note well: that a state of armed insurrection exists;
that any person taking part therein or harboring any person
who has taken part therein, or procuring, inviting, aiding, or
abetting any person to take part therein is guilty of levying
war against His Majesty the King, and is liable on conviction
by a military court to suffer death.
(e) All law courts, corporations, councils, and boards are
hereby directed to continue to carry out their functions until
otherwise ordered.
(f) The forces of the Crown in Ireland are hereby declared
to be on active service.
Signed this 12th day of December, 1920.
C. F. N. Macready, General Commanding-inChief the Forces in Ireland.
First Schedule: The generals or other officers commanding
the 6 Division, the 16, 17, 18, and Kerry Infantry Brigades.
Second Schedule: To the military or police officer at any
military or police barracks, or to a priest or other minister of
religion, who will at once arrange for their delivery to the
nearest military or police barracks.
Feisal and the French
GENERAL GOURAUD'S ultimatum to Emir Feisal,
King of Syria, which resulted in the latter's deposi
tion and exile in July, 1920, was published in full in
L'Europe Nouvelle (Paris) for December 12. Emir Feisal,
son of the King of the Hejaz, commanded the right wing of
General Allenby's army which advanced through Palestine
and Syria prior to the Turkish armistice in 1918. Arab
troops under his command continued to occupy most of
Syria, in cooperation with the British, during the Peace
Conference period, when Feisal was in Paris. Early in 1920
an agreement between France, Great Britain, and the Arabs
effected a provisional division of the area captured from the
Turks by General Allenby's troops into three zones, the
southernmost to be occupied and administered by the
British, the western by the French, and the eastern, includ
ing Horns, Aleppo, and Damascus, by the Arabs under Feisal.
A congress of Syrian notables held at Damascus in March
proclaimed Feisal King of Syria. At the San Remo Con
ference in April the mandate for Syria was given to France,
but the terms of this mandate have not yet been disclosed.
Subsequent disagreements between Feisal and the French
appear in General Gouraud's ultimatum. Feisal was re
ported to have given a qualified and unsatisfactory accept
ance of the ultimatum, as a result of which Damascus was
occupied by General Gouraud, who commanded 60,000 French
and French African troops in Syria and Cilicia, equipped
with field cannon, airplanes, and tanks. Feisal was exiled
and an indemnity of ten million francs imposed on Syria. A
new Government, satisfactory to France, was, in the words
of the French communique, "spontaneously constituted in the
presence of General Goybet," General Gouraud's representa
tive at Damascus. Since then, according to Feisal, who is
now in London, thirty-seven Syrian leaders have been tried
en bloc, in their absence, by the French authorities, and
sentenced to death. The French budget calls for an ex
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2897
50
penditure of 1,200,000,000 francs on military operations in
Syria and Cilicia in the coming year.
The text of the ultimatum follows:
In the name of the French Government, I have the honor to
make a final statement to Your Royal Highness of the situation
in which that Government is placed by the attitude assumed
by the Damascus Government since the Beginning of the year.
Whereas calm reigned in Syria during the English occupa
tion, disorders began as soon as our troops relieved the British,
and since then they have only increased. These disorders have
been more injurious to Syrian prosperity and to its political,
administrative, and economic organization than to our troops
and to the French occupation of the West Zone. The Damascus
Government is responsible for them to the Syrian people to
whom France was, by the mandate of the Peace Conference, to
bring independence and order, tolerance and prosperity.
France expressed to Your Royal Highness her desire for
friendship and collaboration when she affirmed the right of the
Arab-speaking peoples living in Syrian territory, of whatever
religion, to govern themselves as independent nations. Your
Royal Highness in reply stated that the Syrian people, as
a result of the disorganization consequent upon Turkish op
pression and of the damage suffered during the war, would
need the counsel and support of a great Power to aid them in
realizing their unity and organizing the administration of the
nation, this counsel and support to be recorded with the League
of Nations when it is practically realized.
In the name of the Syrian people, Your Royal Highness ap
pealed to France to fulfil that mission. When, in January,
while you were negotiating with the French Government, bands
from Damascus invaded the West Zone, M. Clemenceau tele
graphed to me as follows :
"Upon hearing of the Beduin attacks in southern and north
ern Syria, I told Emir Feisal that I was establishing a tempo
rary agreement with him upon certain principles, and that I
would keep my word, but that I expected an equal loyalty from
him, and that his partisans should respect his authority; if
these two conditions were not fully complied with, the French
Government would resume complete freedom of action, and
would impose order and the respect of the rights granted it by
the Conference, by force."
The following summary shows clearly that the Damascus
Government has steadily followed a hostile policy definitely
opposed to the policy of collaboration referred to by the Presi
dent of the Council (Clemenceau) and which you agreed to
follow.
I. Hostilities Against Our Forces of Occupation
The obstinate refusal to let the French authorities dispose
freely of the Rayak-Aleppo railroad is an act of marked hos
tility on the part of the Damascus Government. That Gov
ernment is not unaware that this line is indispensable to the
life and provisioning of one of the French divisions of the
north. This division is fighting hostile forces coming from
Turkey, from whose oppression the victorious Allies rescued
Syria; it is fighting to defend the frontiers of the new Syrian
state which ought to be attached to us as much by self-interest
as by gratitude.
The organization and employment of bands against our
troops of occupation has been made a principle by the Damascus
Government. The commandant of the Third Aleppo division
solemnly proclaimed this doctrine on April 13 in the following
terms: "Since we cannot formally declare war on the French,
let us flood the country with bands which will destroy them
little by little. They will be commanded by our officers, and if
any of these are killed, the families of such martyrs will be
cared for at the expense of the state."
It will be enough to enumerate the following proofs of the
strict application of such a system. On December 3, 1919, our
post at Tel Kalaa was attacked at the instigation of agents of
the Cherif of Horns. At the end of December, 1919, Beduins
attached to Mahmoud Faour, who Your Royal Highness told

me was your personal friend, massacred the Christians of
Merdj-Ayoun. At the same place our troops were attacked,
on January 4, by bands flying the Cherif's flag. On January
6, 1920, at Kirik Khan, those who attacked our troops recog
nized the complicity of the Cherif's regulars. On January 25,
Captain Fouad Selim, with a detachment including regulars,
attacked our post at the bridge of Litani. After Harim and
Antioch were attacked by Arab bands, Babana suffered, from
April 16 to 22, an uninterrupted attack led by the Cherif's
officer Hassan Bey. In June it was discovered that among
the troops operating at Merdj-Ayoun were one colonel, one
captain, six lieutenants, and 317 men of the Cherif's army, and
four heavy and two light machine guns and fifty cases of am
munition from the same source. The complicity of agitators
in the Zone was again obvious in June, in the disturbances
marked by the massacres of Ain Ibel and the rebellion of the
Shiite groups. Professional organizers of brigand bands have
been treated with honor at Damascus, especially Soubhy Bey
Barakat, whose crimes against us are notorious. When these
bands are not launched from the East Zone, the disturbances
are fomented in the French Zone itself. That is the case with
the many attacks upon Christians, especially those of Djisrel
Karaon on December 29, in which the two Cherif's officers
Ouahed Bey and Tashin Bey were implicated. Constant and
effective support was given Sheik Saleh, champion of dis
order and hate of the French, at Djebel Ansarieh. These ex
amples might be multiplied. They have been called to the
attention of Your Royal Highness as they occurred.
II. Aggressive Policy of the Damascus Government
Your Royal Highness has seen fit to include in his Govern
ment men known for their hostility to France. Their influence
was such that Your Royal Highness was unable to leave on
schedule time in reply to the invitation of the Peace Confer
ence. The present ministry is chosen from this group. Its
very program is an insult both to France, whose aid it rejects,
and to the Supreme Council, which gave to France the mandate
for Syria. The pure and simple rejection of the French man
date on May 18 last is a measure so blind that the consequences
of it may be disastrous for Syria.
III. Administrative Measures Directed Against France
To be a friend or a partisan of France in the Cherif's zone
means being suspected by the authorities and often means be
ing mistreated. The return of our partisans Fares Gantous and
Nesseb Gobril to Rachaya, where they were seized and im
prisoned upon their arrival, despite the official guaranty of
the Damascus Government, is typical. On January 22 a dele
gation of Druses from Hauran which had come to greet me was
attacked on its return at Ouadi Harim, and some of its mem
bers were killed. To be our enemy, on the other hand, is a title
of honor, and is sufficient to be protected and to receive asylum.
After the affair of Tel Ealah the Dandachles were feted at
Damascus. Amin Mahio, who blew up the munitions store at
Beirut, was not disturbed at Damascus. Recently Your Royal
Highness took steps looking to the return into the West Zone
of Kamel Bey Assad, a notorious rebel, exiled as a result of
the disturbances in the Shiite country, for which he bore a large
share of the responsibility. The number of inhabitants of the
East Zone whose hostility to us has won special tribute from
the Government, is considerable. The anti-French propaganda
in the West Zone has been conducted by the Damascus Gov
ernment by various but all equally perfidious means to which
the French Government, true to its policy of good-will, has long
sought to close its eyes. The last and most striking of these
acts was the bribing, for 42,000 Egyptian pounds, of the ma
jority of the members of the Administrative Council of Libya.
These gentlemen were arrested by our posts on July 10 when
on their way to Damascus to sell their country in opposition
to the desires long expressed by almost all their fellow citizens.
Jan. 12, 1921]
The Nation
The Damascus Press, generously supported by the Government,

is constantly attacking everything French. It attacks the au
thorities occupying the West Zone, repudiates all French offers
of aid, misinterprets the generous intentions of France, and
heaps abuse upon me.
V. Violations of International Law
As Syria remains Turkish, according to international law,
until the peace treaty is applied, the army of the Hejaz which
occupies Syrian territory provisionally should confine itself to
the maintenance of the status quo. But it acts as a sovereign
power. Despite the fact that Syria is foreign territory, it de
cided upon, and has been applying, conscription, since Decem
ber, 1919. This heavy and useless burden is imposed upon the
people, even in special zones such as Bekaa, and upon people
having legally valid exemption such as the Lebanese and Moghrebins living in the East Zone. This recruiting, where it has
met with resistance, has frequently involved bloodshed.
The so-called Syrian Congress, irregularly formed, has been
legislating and even governing for a government and a state
the existence of which is not recognized. More than that, it has,
without mandate or authority, conferred the title of king upon
Your Royal Highness, thus putting itself in a position of re
bellion against the Peace Conference.
Finally, the capitulations are not respected, for Emir Mouktar,
one of our dependents, a representative of a distinguished family
long attached to France, was arrested at Aleppo under scanda
lous conditions. Nor are diplomatic agreements better re
spected, for despite the agreement reached with M. Clemenceau last December, according to which neither French nor Arab
troops were to occupy Bekaa, a battalion of the Cherif's army
has just been advanced to Merdj Andjar.
VI. Injury Thus Done to France and to Syria
The French Government, compelled to devote its attention
and its forces to constant repression of disorder, and to pursue
laborious and sterile political negotiations with the Damascus
Government, has been Unable to give to Syria the organization
expected of it. France is not responsible for this delay. But
the financial and military burden caused by the situation sys
tematically maintained by the Damascus Government falls upon
France. These outlays could not fail to affect the Syrian budget
both because the unrest lessened the income, and because the
expenses were increased. The state of anarchy in which dis
turbers have placed the country was such that larger forces
were required than would have been needed peacefully to replace
the British troops.
It has thus become evident that it is impossible longer to
trust a Government which has so clearly demonstrated its hos
tility to France, and which has done such serious wrong to its
own country while proving itself incapable of organizing and
governing. France, is therefore obliged to take measures to guar
antee the safety of her troops and of the people of the country
for which a mandate was given to her by the Peace Conference.
I have the honor to inform Your Royal Highness that the
necessary guaranties are as follows:
1. Absolute Control op the Bayak-Aleppo Railroad. This
control will be guaranteed by complete supervision of traffic in
the stations of Rayak, Baalbek, Horns, Hama, and Aleppo by
French military commissars, aided by an armed detachment
intended to assure the policing of the station, and by occupation
of the city of Aleppo, an important center of communication
which we cannot permit to fall into the hands of Turkish troops.
2. Abolition of Conscription, recruiting to cease and con
scripts to be released, the Cherif's army being restored to its
condition as of December 1 last.
3. Acceptance of the French Mandate. The mandate will
respect the independence of the Syrian people and will remain
wholly compatible with the principle of government by Syrian
authorities properly invested with powers by the popular will.
It will entail, on the part of the mandatory Power, only aid and
51
-cooperation, and in no case will it involve annexation or direct

administration.
4. Acceptance of Syrian Currency. This will become the
national currency in the East Zone, and all prohibitory decrees
affecting the Bank of Syria in that zone will be revoked.
5. Punishment of the Guiltythose compromised by acts
hostile to France.
These conditions are presented en bloc, and they must be
accepted en bloc within four days beginning July 14 at midnight,
and ending July 18 at midnight. If before this latter date I
am informed by Your Royal Highness that these conditions are
accepted, orders must also have been given to the authorities
concerned not to interfere with my troops when they undertake
to occupy territory as indicated. Official decrees should also
have been issued prior to July 18 in accordance with conditions
2, 3, 4, and 5, and these conditions must have been carried into
effect by July 31 at midnight.
If, on the other hand, Your Royal Highness does not inform
me within the time limit set that the foregoing conditions have
been accepted, I have the honor to inform you that the French
Government will feel free to act as it sees fit. In that case I
cannot say that the French Government will be satisfied with
these guaranties.
France will not be responsible for the suffering which may
come to the country. She has long evidenced her moderation
and does so now. The Damascus Government will bear the
entire responsibility for the extreme measures which I contem
plate only with regret, but which I am prepared to carry out
with firmness and resolution.
[Signed] General Gouraud
French High Commissioner in Syria and Cilicia,
Commander-in-chief of the Army of the Levant.
July U, 1920
The New State in the Far East

DURING the last week of October and the first two
weeks of November the "Conference of the Far
Eastern Governments," in session at Chita, established a
Far Eastern Republic extending from Lake Baikal to the
Pacific. A Government was formed which is reported to
have gained the support of most of the local governments
of eastern Siberia, including the government at Vladivostok
which had held aloof during the earlier part of the nego
tiations at Chita, and to have reached an understanding
with the Japanese Command. It was decided that the
coming constituent assembly should be elected according
to a law based on the regulations drawn up in Kerensky's
time for the election of the All-Russian Constituent As
sembly. At the first sitting of the Executive Committee
of the Far Eastern Republic the following declaration
was published:
To all the district governments, civil and military institutions,
partisan detachments, and to all citizens of the Far East:
We proclaim: (1) Through the goodwill of all the people
who were represented in the Chita conference of delegates from
the districts of the Far East and in perfect harmony with our
declaration of October 29, all the territory from Lake Baikal
to the Pacific Ocean is declared to be the Far Eastern Republic.
(2) In harmony with the declaration of the conference on Oc
tober 29 and also by the unanimous decision of the conference
on October 30, full governmental power, civil and military, in
the Far East will rest with the Executive Committee of the Gov
ernment of the Far Eastern Republic.
Among the members of the first ministry of the new state
is Mr. Shatuv, Minister of Communications, who until re
cently was at the head of the Police Department of
Petrograd.
The Nation
>2
Contemporary
[Vol. 112, No. 2897
INDEX
FOR VOLUME CXI
American Novelists
(June - December 1920)
The first of this series of articles by Carl Van
Doren appears in the current issue of The Nation.
Other articles in the series will be published once a
month during the coming year. Following is a par
tial list of the novelists to be discussed :
In
In
In
In
In
FebruaryBooth Tarkington
MarchTheodore Dreiser
AprilWinston Churchill
MayJoseph Hergesheimer
JuneJames Branch Cabell
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"NIETZSCHE vs. SPINOZA AS A GUIDE TO LIFE."
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Two Sections
Vol. CXI I
American
The Nation
FOUNDED 1865
Section II
No. 2897
Commission
on
Conditions
in
Ireland
Third Report: Hearings in Washington, D. C, December 9 and 10, 1920

Testimony of Miss Mary MacSwiney, P. J. Guilfoil, and D. F. Crowley
INTRODUCTION
THIS third report of the American Commission on Con
ditions in Ireland concludes the testimony of Miss
Mary MacSwiney given in Odd Fellows Hall, in Washing
ton, December 9. Those of the Commission present were:
Miss Addams, Senator Walsh, James H. Maurer, L. Hollingsworth Wood, Norman Thomas, Senator Norris and
Frederic C. Howe presiding. The testimony of Miss Mac
Swiney includes not only the story of her brother's arrest,
imprisonment and death, but much valuable information
upon the whole history of the Irish movement for freedom.
On Friday the hearings were continued at the Hotel La
fayette. Mr. J. P. Guilfoil, the next to tell his story, is an
American citizen who was visiting in Ireland and a witness
of the disorders there. Mr. D. F. Crowley is the first of
four former members of the Royal Irish Constabulary to
testify before the Commission. These men resigned as a
protest against the things they were ordered to do in Ire
land.
In her previous testimony Miss MacSwiney gave an ac
count of some of the various national movements in Ireland,
of the educational system there, and of the history of her
own family. She now takes up one of the chief activities
of her brother, the late Lord Mayor of Cork.
The Testimony of Miss Mary MacSwiney

(Continued)
THE VOLUNTEER MOVEMENT
The Witness. I now come to the volunteer movement. You
know that there was a Home Rule bill introduced in Parliament
in 1912, one of many. It was in the hope of stopping all this
activity and getting the people to accept definitely Home Rule
in the British Empirewhich would, of course, leave Eng
land's hands in our pockets all the time and only center Irish
interests in Dublin instead of London. Sir Edward Carson did
not want Home Rule, so in 1913 he started the idea of forcible
resistance to Home Rule. He said, "Ulster will fight and Ulster
will be right," and "we will not come under a Catholic govern
ment. If the English people throw us over, we will enroll our
selves under the greatest Protestant nation in the world, un
der the German nation." He said he would invite the German
emperor over himself if the English forced Home Rule upon
them. Meantime he got guns and ammunition from Germany.
These statements of Sir Edward's gathered from English and
Irish newspapers, have been collected into a book called, "The
Grammar of Anarchy." When Sir Edward Carson made those
statements, he got something like two million pounds from
England for propaganda, and also the promise that the English
Tories would fight with them.
Sir Edward Carson started the Volunteers. There was a
law in Ireland that you must not have arms in your possession,
but it was not enforced. Sir Edward Carson succeeded in
getting a large quantity of arms presently.
Then our people in the south began to say publiclyWell, of
course, if Sir Edward Carson is getting armed for a march on
Cork, we will have to arm also. So they started the Irish
Volunteers. England was in a fix. Within one week of our
starting the Irish Volunteers, the arms act was enforced and the
Government said, No arms in Ireland. Within one week! Sir
Edward Carson had been getting arms for several months.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. What date was this? A. Early
in 1914, in the spring, before the war.
Q. Had the Home Rule Bill passed Parliament? A. It had
passed the House of Commons in 1912, but on account of the
House of Lords it had been thrown out until 1914.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. Was it passed after the war? A.
After the war, yes; after the Recruiting Act.
Q. But it was known in 1914 that it would be passedit
was known before the war? A. Yes.
Q. So that the preparations of the Ulster Volunteers were
made in anticipation for the Act? A. Yes. When, in the
spring of 1914, a ship- loaded with arms for Sir Edward Carson
reached Ireland from Germany, the English Parliament held up
their hands in horror. It was a very illegal act, said Mr.
Asquith, but he made no motion to punish that act. We were
not too proud to follow Sir Edward Carson's example, so in
the last week in July, 1914, the Howth gun-running started.
The Howth gun-runningnow notice the difference. The Ulster
gun-running was in support of what England wanted, but when
we started gun-running she knew that what we said, we meant,
and therefore our gun-running had to be stopped. Well, it
was not. Our people got in quite a number of guns that day,
in spite of soldiers and all the Royal Irish Constabulary that
were available. But several men, women, and children were
shot down on the streets of Dublin by the soldiers returning
empty-handed from Howth. That was the massacre of Bache
lors' Walk, which took place exactly one week before the dec
laration of war on the continent and two weeks before England
declared it. Then came the war.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. These Volunteers meantime had
organized all over Ireland? A. All over Ireland. But there
was this against them. Mr. Redmond set his face against any
volunteers. He wanted to keep to the constitutional movement.
Q. Up to this time, Miss MacSwiney, was there a Sinn Fein
movement, or was this simply a movement among the people?
A movement among the Irish Volunteers to arm and protect
themselves against attacks from the north? A. Well, this was
a movement among the young men to arm to defend themselves
for Irish rights.
Q. Exactly. But up to this time there was no movement for
independence? A. No. Of course, that was the idea back of
every movement in Ireland. But it was not precisely stated
until the first Volunteer convention, which was held in 1914.
They definitely stated their policy for a republic. The policy
of the Irish Volunteers was the policy of the Irish Republic,
a continuation of the fight for freedom that had been always
54
The Nation
going on. They armed themselves in defense of the rights and

liberties of the Irish nation. The women joined Cumann na
m'Ban, corresponding to your Red Cross.
Q. Now, going back to Redmond's position before the out
break of the war? A. Before the war Redmond disapproved
of the Irish Volunteers. He sent orders that no member of his
organization was to join the Irish Volunteers. But they joined
in hundreds and thousands all over the country. So that by
June, 1914, they were coming in in very large numbers, and
Mr. Redmond began to see that he could not possibly forbid
the movement. And therefore the next step was to control it.
His policy was to weaken the Volunteers because he didn't want
any physical force in Ireland. We know that he didn't want
it, and that his action was weakening our movement. But after
a time it would have been worse to start out against him and
sayyou will not get a single nominee on our council. When
the war came Mr. Redmond started as recruiter-in-chief for
England.
Q. In Ireland? A. In Ireland. You remember Sir Edward
Grey speaking of the black outlook in Europe on the eve of the
war, spoke of Ireland as the one bright spot, because he thought
that Ireland would follow Mr. Redmond. But he made a mis
take. Ireland was furiously and indignantly insulted at being
called the one bright spot. But the people did not know what
was going on. The next thing was that stories of German
atrocities in Belgium began pouring in and the people became
violently anti-German, and because anti-German, pro-British.
That is, the unthinking people. Those of us who knew some
thing of history knew that perhaps ninety-five per cent of the
stories were lies. War always brings atrocities. There is no
doubt that Germany was guilty of atrocities in the recent war.
There is equally no doubt that England committed worse atroc
ities. One of our national journals printed the stories England
was telling Ireland about German atrocities, and in a parallel
column it put the stories England was telling the world about
Irish atrocities in 1798. And we who knew what lies the stories
of 1798 were, concluded logically that the other stories were
lies, too. But you must remember that the Irish people did not
know their own history.
The next point was an absolute division with Mr. Redmond's
Volunteers, the National Volunteers, as they were called, and the
Irish Volunteers. But very soon the National Volunteers dis
appeared. The recruits all went into the Irish Volunteers. My
brother was one of the first volunteers in Cork.
EASTER WEEK1916
In 1916 we began our first open battle. I suppose you can
start regarding the declaration of war on England as the day
we reorganized the Irish Volunteers and said they are out to
fight for the rights and liberties of the Irish people. That first
battle failed. But Padraic Pearse said, on the night before
we were forced to evacuate the general post-office, "We have
lost the first battle, but we have saved the soul of Ireland, and
now the people can go ahead." From that day on there was no
more possibility of the Irish people mistaking their duty. From
that day on there was no such thing as recruiting for any army
except the Irish Volunteer Army. But because of the insur
rection, the Irish people were arrested. About two thousand
of them filled English jails.
Q. About how many Irish soldiers took part in the Easter
uprising? A. Not more than two thousand. The English
brought in regiments and tanks and guns and shelled our capital.
Q. Were they all Irish Volunteers? A. No, there was also
the Citizens' Army, the Irish Citizens' Army.
Q. Commissioner Thomas. It was not a Sinn Fein army?
It was a national army? A. It was a national army. The
reason the name Sinn Fein stuck to it was that all these people
got mixed up in the Irish Industrial Development Association
and the Gaelic League, and all got to be called Sinn Feiners
because some of them were Sinn Feiners, and because they all
joined the Irish Volunteers' movement. Sinn Fein was a tag put
[Vol. 112, No. 2897
on by the people. Sinn Fein was originally a constitutional

policy. But now the name has been adopted everywhere, and
it is a Republican policy. After Easter Week there were whole
sale arrests.
Q. Chairman Howe. The story of what has happened in the
Easter Rebellion ought to be a continuous story, which we would
like you to tell us.
The Witness. The essential point for you to understand is
that this insurrection was confined mainly to Dublin. Galway
rose also, but most of the fighting was in Dublin. You have often
heard that Ireland was divided over this insurrection. I should
like to explain about that. We expected help in this insur
rection. We expected arms. We had very few arms at that
time. We were expecting Roger Casement to come from Ger
many with arms. I have no hesitation about acknowledging
that. We were at war with England, and we were at liberty
to get guns where we could to carry on that war. England said
she was fighting for the rights of small nations. We had
absolutely as much right to our liberty as Belgium had, about
whose rights England was so solicitious. If we wanted to take
Germany as an ally we had a right to take her as an ally.
England had a great deal of talk about us being pro-German.
She did turn France against us. Only my brother's death has
softened France. She said we weakened her ally at a critical
moment. But what right had France to expect that we should
not weaken the cause of her ally when her ally was oppressing
us?
Q. We were told you took German gold. A. We did not
take German gold. We took the pennies and sixpences of our
people. But did not we have a right to take it if we had
wanted it? Did not France take English gold, and did not
England take American gold when she could get it? Surely
no one could rightly criticize if we had taken it. But we did
not. Surely not England, who was borrowing from America.
Any nation has a right to make alliances when she is fighting
against an enemy. It is said that we wanted to invite the Ger
mans into Ireland. We did not. The only man who ever tried
to invite Germans into Ireland was Sir Edward Carson. If
Germany tried to take Ireland we would fight her just as long
and just as effectively as we are fighting England.
It was a point made much of by England that the Easter
week insurrection was not an insurrection of the Irish nation;
but only of a few extremists. They stressed the fact that the
fighting took place in Dublin only. We had hoped to get some
arms to enable us to carry on the fight, because the arms and
ammunition of the country did not amount to much. And those
arms failed us. They did not come. An insurrection had been
arranged for Easter Monday, 1916. The leaders had counted
on getting the arms the last of the week, on a Good Friday,
but the ship bringing the arms was sunk by the British. They
were perfectly justified from their point of view in sinking that
ship, just as we were justified in bringing it in if we could.
However, it was sunk. The result was that some of the leaders,
notably Mr. MacNeil, thought that the time was not opportune
to begin. And though the orders had gone out for the whole
country for the insurrection on Easter Monday, the orders were
canceled at the last moment by Mr. MacNeil. Many of the
leaders did not agree with the canceling of those orders and
thought that Mr. MacNeil had exceeded his powers and his
rights in sending these cancellation orders, and the Irish Citi
zens^ Armywhich was a labor organization not under the
control of the Volunteersthreatened to go out in any case.
The secret history of those few days has not been fully pub
lished, and the documentary evidence in connection with it was
largely burned during Easter week. Some of us, even though
we were on the inside of Republican affairs, are not exactly cer
tain of all the orders and counter-orders of that week. It ended
by only a portion of the Volunteers rising in Dublin. They
began on Monday morning, according to the plan. Mr. MacNeil
had sent the order all over Ireland on Sunday that the Volun
teers were not to rise. An order followed on Monday signed
Jan. 12, 1921]
The Nation
by Padraic Pearse and John McDermott that they were to rise.

By the time these orders reached the outlying districts it was
too late. Cork was not in the Easter rising. That fact was a
lasting source of grief to my brother. Many of the people
thought they should have gone out, even though they were cer
tain to fail. There were some people, I am not sure how many,
who accused them of cowardice or funk at the last moment.
That charge was not justified, and I do not think it will be ever
made again. But the situation in Cork made it impossible for
them to rise. Cork is built in a valley. The British military
barracks are on the highest hill in the district. By Tuesday
night they had a huge gun planted on every hill around the
city. They could have shelled the city in an hour until there
was nothing left of it. The Volunteer commanders in Cork
knew that. They did not want to order the men out to what
was absolutely certain slaughter. They realized that Dublin
was only a first battle in the war, and for the time they had to
remain inactive. I can speak of personal knowledge of the
very, very great reluctance with which they decided that.
The military in Cork were so certain that they would rise
that the military commander appealed to the mayor and the
bishop to try to get the Volunteers to lay down their arms. If
the Volunteers showed no signs of giving the military trouble,
the military undertook not to give them any trouble. Our men
would not have any negotiations with the British except on equal
terms. But they came, by the advice of the bishop and the
lord mayor, to an understanding, as they were assured that a
rising in Cork was impossible. The understanding was that
they would hand over to the bishop and the lord mayor of the
city the guns, the arms and ammunition that they had; that
these arms and ammunition were to remain under the charge
of the bishop and the lord mayor as joint guarantors that the
Irish Volunteers would not rise in insurrection, on the one hand ;
and that the military authorities would not capture the guns
and would not arrest the leaders, on the other. That was Mon
day night and just three-quarters of an hour after midnight, a
military party headed by a captain went to the lord mayor and
demanded the arms that had been intrusted to him. He said
they had been given to him as a trustee, and the military had
promised not to ask for them. He was told that he would be in
jail in a very short time if he did not give them up. Not being
an Irish Republican at the time, he gave them up. At seven
o'clock in the morning the arrests began. Practically every Irish
Volunteer in the city was arrested, and two women were ar
rested. My brother had left for the country early on Tuesday
morning before he knew of it, and he was out of the city when a
party of six policemen with loaded rifles came to our house.
But they stood around my sister, and the whole six pointed
their loaded rifles at her and demanded to know where her
brother was. She said she would not tell them. They threat
ened and coaxed her, but she gave them no answer. And they
finally went away.
In the meantime they went to the school and arrested me.
All over the city that day the tension was frightful. Great
squads of soldiers and police going all over the city, one officer
leading as many as a hundred and fifty soldiers. Naturally the
word was taken to the bishop. He got in touch with the military
authorities. And finally, although they did not give back the
arms, Colonel East sent an order to release all the people who
had been arrested in the city about seven-thirty Tuesday even
ing. So we all got out. They did not take the women back, but
they began rearresting the men in twos and threes until they
had about two thousand of them arrested and put in jail in
England. My brother was arrested in the country and taken.
We did not know for a long time where he was and were uneasy
because for over a week we did not have a word from him. We
knew he had been arrested. Someone had seen him brought
into Cork at half-past four in the morning, and they were tak
ing him up to Cork jail. A few days afterward we learned that
someone had seen him about five o'clock in the morning removed
from Cork jail. We applied to the governor, but got no infor
55
mation where he was. After a question asked in the House of

Commons as to why these men were not allowed to see their
relatives, Mr. Asquith, the Prime Minister at the time, replied
that all the Cork prisoners were allowed to see their friends
and had fresh air and food and visitors and all other nice things.
It was utterly false. That appeared on Thursday morning,
about the thirteenth of May, I think. He had been missing since
the third. Some of us whose relatives had been taken away and
did not know their whereabouts went to the general post-office
and sent a series of telegrams to Mr. Asquith, and sent him
each one his own particular story, and told him that our rela
tives had been taken away and we had been denied all informa
tion as to where they were. We also sent copies of these tele
grams to William D. O'Brien, because it was he who asked for
information from Mr. Asquith, and to Laurence Ginnell, be
cause he was the only one in the House of Commons on whom we
could depend to bring out the truth. We sent them in great
hurry, because there was to be a debate in the House of Com
mons that day on the Irish question. Mr. Ginnell told me that
those telegrams created a great sensation when read in the
House. That was on Thursday. On Saturday morning we all
got letters. That was my brother's second imprisonment. They
were all in prison most of the time until the general amnesty at
Christmas. But the men who were concerned actually in the
rising, the men who were in Dublin, were sent most of them to
penal servitude, those who were not shot. And they were not
released from prison by the amnesty.
The Witness goes on to show that civilians, too, suffered from
the effects of Easter week by telling how she was dropped
from the school where she was teachingostensibly to facilitate
changesreally because as the reverend mother admitted, she
was "too Irish."
The Witness. It was the shooting of the leaders of the 1916
movement and the arrest of two thousand that woke up the
ordinary man, who up to that time had been a home-ruler, per
haps, to realize that it was the same old fight over again in
their generation, although they had not realized it up to that
time; and that when England began shooting Irishmen, no
matter what the Irishman's political opinions were, he must be
right. From 1916 on Ireland became more and more consciously
Republican in the hearts of the common people. They had, of
course, been instinctively so. They became consciously so after
that. The first chance they had to give expression to that was
in the general election of 1916. In that election Sinn Fein or
the Republican movement swept the country. There were very
few constituencies in which there was a fight. But where there
was a fight in the whole of Ireland, outside of Ulster, there was
only one man got in who was a Redmondite, and that man was
John Redmond's son, who because of sympathy for his father and
because of his hold on the people of Waterford, was returned.
Q. Mr. F. P. Walsh. That is exclusive of Ulster? A. Yes. .
Q. Commissioner Walsh. Was there a candidate repre
senting the Nationalists in every county in that election? A.
No, very few.
Q. But where there was a contest? A. Where there was a
contest it was a contest between the Redmonites and the Repub
licans, and Redmondism was wiped out completely, except in
Waterford, where it was not Redmondism that won but a feel
ing for Redmond's son.
In Ulster the case was rather peculiar. You have at present
four men representing the Constitutionalist Home Rule Party
in Ulsterfive men. Four of them got in in this way. There
were eight seats in Ulster of which the majority were Nation
alists, using Nationalists in its broad senseIreland versus
England. But if Sinn Fein, Redmondites, and Unionists
went up, the three-cornered division would probably let the
Unionists in. On those seats, on the advice of Cardinal Logue,
a compromise was suggested, that the Redmondites should have
them. Our people wanted a much fairer thing than that, a kind
56
The Nation
of plebiscite of the Nationalist population held on the preceding

week, everyone to vote, and the seats to be given to either the
Republican or the Redmondite according to the votes cast. If
that had been so, we would have had seven or eight seats. Con
sequently the Redmondites did not agree to it.
Q. Commissioner Wood. Seven or eight seats in Ulster?
A. Oh, yes, this does not deal with the contests with the Union
ists, but only with the contest between the Republicans and the
Redmondites. They would not agree to this plebiscite, so it was
either let them have the seats or give them to the Unionists. I
mean the risk would be letting the Unionists slip in. So the
people agreed to have them, and that is why you have a few
representatives still of Redmond's party.
With regards to the general election of 1918, it was eighty
per cent Republican. And it was claimed by the British Gov
ernment and by our opponents that it did not represent a Sinn
Fein election or a Republican election, but an anti-home rule
election. It was an anti-Redmond election rather than a proRepublican election. And they said that ever so many people
had got tired of a parliamentary policy and were willing to
give Sinn Fein a chance. We knew it was not so, but of course
they had a certain amount of plausibility behind their argu
ment; and so it was not until 1919 and 1920 that we were able
to counter that, and prove that they were false by the municipal
and county elections. It is true that every candidate who went
up had to take the Republican oath.
Q. Mr. F. P. Walsh. What was that oath? A. "I pledge
my allegiance to Dail Eireann and the Parliament of Ireland."
I do not know the exact words, but it was pledging allegiance to
the Irish Republican parliament and renouncing everything
English. But some said, after the Republican victory in 1916:
"Even so, the candidates were Republican, but we have people
voting for the Republican candidates not because they were Re
publicans, but because they were anti-parliamentarian. They
were sick of parliamentarianism." And so when the municipal
and county elections came and were overwhelmingly Republican,
even more so than the general elections had been, that argument
was killed.
Q. Commissioner Addams. That was the general election of
1920? A. Yes. In spite of the fact that proportional repre
sentation laws had been passed by the House of Commons sev
eral times for Ireland for the purpose of destroying Republican
elections and getting in candidates who would not otherwise
have got in. Our people had from 1905 advocated it. And so
when it was passed by the House of Commons it was opposed,
not by us, because we welcomed it, but by the Carsonites. And
the result showed that they had good reason to be afraid of it.
For the first time we have Irish members in the Belfast corpora
tion. We have Irish Republican members in county councils
that before were wholly Unionist. We have won all over the
country. Probably in the south and west there are Unionist
members on the councils who might not have been there other
wise; but we have no fear whatever of Unionists getting on,
providing they get on fairly and in proper proportion. We do
not dread proportional representation, and you have a proof of
that by what I have given you and what you get in the daily
newspapers. But proportional representation was passed to
ruin the Irish Republican elections. The only people who op
posed it were Carsonites.
THE FINANCIAL QUESTION
And even then they did not keep their word. When they
passed the Union they made a solemn promise that the English
and Irish exchequers were to be kept separate. The reason was
that Ireland had a national debt of two and one-half million
pounds. England had a national debt of over two hundred mil
lion pounds. Those seem very small sums in today's computa
tions. After the Act of Union in 1801, Ireland's debt was twen
ty-one million pounds. How did it get up to that sum? She
bribed these men, England did, in the House of Parliament to
pass the Union, and then she paid the bribes out of Irish money.
[Vol. 112, No. 2897
And then she promised that the exchequers would be separate.

In 1817 the English national debt, owing to the Napoleonic Wars,
had gone up to something like four hundred fifty million pounds.
The Irish national debt had gone up, I think, to something like
twenty-five million. And England suggested that it would be
very nice for Ireland if they amalgamated their exchequers.
The Irishmen representing Ireland in the English Parliament at
that time did not think it would be nice for Ireland to saddle
Ireland with that debt. But of course they were outvoted. So
the two exchequers were amalgamated. One clause of the Act
of Union was that they should not be amalgamated. But they
were amalgamated as soon as it suited England. From that
time to the present day Ireland has been in the control of Eng
land.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. Grattan and his party then op
posed the Act of Union? A. Oh, yes, absolutely.
Q. Was it just before the Act of Union that Grattan was
carried into the House of Parliament on his sick bed to make his
protest? A. Yes, he was carried in, practically a dying man,
and made an eloquent protest against it.
Q. What was the vote. Was it close? A. I cannot recall it.
It was close. I would like to say another thing about financial
matters of that period. Before the war, while the Home Rule bill
was being discussed, we were told that Ireland could not possibly
govern herself; as it was, she could not pay her own way; that
England had to subsidize her to the extent of half a million a
year; and what would she do if she were her own mistress and
England would not be able to subsidize her. This was one of
the economic points brought up against Irish Home Rule. Ire
land never got a subsidy of half a million a year from England.
She got it one year, and I will tell you how it happened. The
old age pension was passed, giving to each old person over
seventy several shillings a week.
Q. Chairman Howe. This was quite recent? A. Yes, it
was quite recent, but I must go back to give you an idea. You
can get from reliable statistics an idea of how many old people
in the country there ought to be. The result of the pension bill
was that that year there was a deficit of a half million, and
England used that one year to say that she was subsidizing the
Irish exchequer to the extent of half a million pounds a year.
Q. Chairman Howe. What year was that? A. That was
1912, I think.
When the Home Rule Bill became an issue of practical poli
tics, they wanted to adjust the relations between the two coun
tries, and consequently there was a commission appointed by
the King to inquire into the financial condition of Ireland from
1817that was the date the exchequers were combinedto 1908.
That was about one hundred years. This was known as the
Childers Commission, and their statistics can be found in the
blue books. They found that during the period when we were
supposed to be an impoverished country, we had paid three hun
dred sixty-nine millions into the English treasury!
Mr. F. P. Walsh. You might discuss some of the great bene
fit that has been given to the people of Ireland by allowing them
to purchase their land.
THE LAND LAWS
Q. Chairman Howe. When you discuss that, will you not
discuss that land levy, please? How much alien landlordism
still exists, how the people were allowed to purchase land, and
so forth? A. I will do my best, but I cannot be very accurate
on percentages. The landlord question was very vital to us, and
yet the land acts have been very beneficial to the country. But
they were not passed by England to benefit the country. They
were passed by the campaign in Ireland of Parnell and the Land
League, in the early eighties, I believe. That part of history has
not been written yet, at least not very fully. I have never read
it, at least. I cannot give you full details, but this, at all events,
is the outline of it. When Parnell carried on his Constitutional
Movement, he felt that it was very necessary to get the land
for the people. The farmers could do nothing, because if there
Jan. 12, 1921]
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was an adverse vote in the district against a landowner's plans

or against England, the farmers all got notice of ejectment.
They had no security of tenure for their lands. It certainly
was a wise move for the people to get the land tenure fixed. But
England never gave these land acts as an act of justice. When
the Fenians blew up Clerkenwell prison, Gladstone took it into
his head in 1881 that there was something behind the movement,
and he had better do something for those people. I could not
give the details of that Act, but I will come to the last Act, the
Windham Act, which has been very beneficial.
Q. Chairman Howe. What date? A. In 1901, I think.
That act has enabled the farmers to buy out their land. They
could pay rent for twenty or twenty-five years, and at the end
of that time their land was their own.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. They paid so much on the prin
cipal as well as the interest? A. Yes. Immediately that Act
was passed, the farmers started to improve their land. They
did not do it before because they had no security of tenure.
Do you know, in that period if a mother put a clean pinafore
on her child, she had her rent raised from two to ten pounds a
year. And any woman would say, Is it not better for a child to
have a dirty pinafore than to have the rent raised? And that
is why you hear the Irish described as a lazy, dirty people some
times.
Q. Chairman Howe. Did that apply to the whole country?
A. Yes, to Ulster just as much as the rest. That Land Act
gave the people the right to purchase their farms. The instant
the farmers could purchase, they went on improving and im
proving and improving. Why? Because they knew they were
doing that for their sons and their daughters, and they knew
they would not be thrown out of it next week. If a man put a
new paling up around his field, he knew that his rent would go
up several pounds the next week, and consequently the paling
was not put up. If too many improvements were made, the
farmer could be ejected and lose them all. But the moment
the farmers got their security, they improved their farms. And
consequently you have a good many prosperous farms all over
Ireland today.
Q. Chairman Howe. How many farms have been converted
in that way up to todaytwo-thirds of them? A. I don't know.
Perhaps.
Commissioner Walsh. It is not as much as that.
Q. Chairman Howe. How prosperous is the agricultural
population in Ireland today? A. Of course, the agricultural
population benefited by the war, as all agricultural popula
tions did. They got high prices for their crops, as all the rest
did. Some of them were unpatriotic enough to sell too much of
the country's food, and some of them had to be stopped.
Q. Chairman Howe. There have been a number of state
ments made about economic embargoes on Ireland by the British
Government. Can you tell us anything about them? A. I know
they have put an embargo on everything they could. They have
put an embargo on our best port, the port of Queenstown. Once
Queen Victoria visited us, and the sycophantic council of that
day (for then it was only that kind they could get into the coun
cil) , ordered in her honor that the port ever afterwards should
be called Queenstown. But we do not recognize it as Queenstown. I would like our friends in America to get into the
habit of calling it Cove, the Irish name for it.
There was a question about one million pounds loaned to
farmers in Ireland. That one million pounds was very bene
ficial, but I would like you to understand that the security given
by the farmers was quite adequate, and that the people who are
paying the money are Irish. It was advanced by England for
the time being, but it is Ireland that is paying the debt. But
do not let them hypnotize you into believing that that money was
given by England, for it was not. England and France borrowed
huge sums from America during the war, and they borrowed it
without giving you security. But you do not say that you have
given them a present of all their war debt. And this loan is
very largely paid back already, and paid back out of Irish money.
57
Q. Mr. F. P. Walsh. And it was paid back to absentee land

lords and those who have succeeded to their estates, was it not?
A. Yes. And there is a very large number of farms where the
payments have been completed, and that money has all gone back
to England. I believe the great bulk of that money has been al
ready paid back.
Q. Chairman Howe. To what extent has alien landlordism
prevailed as it did in the Hungry Forties? A. Not much.
There are very few big landlords today. They may spend a part
of the year in England or abroad, but generally those that are
left spend a part of the year in Ireland. The alien landlord of
the early nineteenth century has gone.
THE DE FACTO REPUBLICAN GOVERNMENT
Q. Commissioner Walsh. Miss MacSwiney, I would like to
have you give us for the record just when there was organized
in Ireland the de facto Republican Government, who organized
it, how long the Parliament continued to meet in the open, when
it began to meet secretly, and if it is meeting now, how long it
will continue? A. I would like to answer the last question first,
because it [Parliament] is meeting and will continue to do so.
Q. I would like to get in the record how much of local gov
ernment there is and how it is functioning, and if it will con
tinue to function. A. The Republican Government was de
clared in 1916, but for two years it did not function, until the
general election of 1918.
Q. In other words, you made your declaration of independ
ence in 1916, but it took you two years to get your government
organized so that it could function openly? A. Exactly. There
were seven Irish Volunteer leaders in the Dublin General Postoffice on Easter Monday in 1916, who in the name of the Repub
lican Army declared Ireland a free and independent Republic.
They were Padraic Pearse, Thomas Clarke, John MacDermott,
Connolly, Kent, Plunkett, and MacDonagh, and they were all
executed for it afterwards.
Q. Chairman Howe. They were executed for that offense
for signing your declaration of independence? A. Yes, that
was the chief thing for which they were executed.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. The elections took place in 1918?
A. Yes. And immediately after the general elections the Re
publican Parliament got busy.
Q. Were the members of that Republican Parliament the
Republican members who were elected to the British Parliament
from the boroughs or constituencies in Ireland? A. Yes.
Q. So that upward of seventy-five men who received a ma
jority as Republican members of the British Parliament at Lon
don from Ireland, these men met to form the Irish de facto Gov
ernment? A. Right, quite right.
Q. How many, of all that number, were elected from Irish
constituencies to the British Parliament? A. 103.
Q. How many of that number met in Dublin, or wherever
they met afterwards to organize the Republican Government of
Ireland? A. I think that at the very first meeting of Dail
Eireann there were only 37, for all the others were in jail.
Q. How many went to England? A. None of the Repub
licans went to England. The only Irish who went were the Redmondites and the Carsonites.
Q. It was alleged in America that sixty or seventy or so did
not go to the British Parliament, and answered, either de facto
or in person, the call for an independent Parliament. A. Yes.
You see there were seventy-five members elected, but some of
them were elected from two or three constituencies. President
De Valera was elected from three constituencies.
Q. How many constituencies were represented at the first
meeting, either by those present in person or in jail? A. I
suppose it would be about sixty-nine men, but the constituencies
represented were seventy-five.
Q. So that seventy-five constituencies out of one hundred and
three sent representatives to get a Republican organization?
A. Yes.
Q. Where did they meet? A. In the Mansion House in Dublin.
58
The Nation
Q. But some of them were not there, because they were in

jail? A. Yes. President De Valera was in jail, and my brother
was in jail, and a number of others at that time.
Q. What steps did they take? Was this first meeting in the
open? A. Yes, oh, yes.
Q. Now give us the history of that organization. It is very
important. A. As so many were in prison, the government
elected was only provisional. Because you must remember that
the cream of the men were in jail, and those who were left felt
that they should wait until they got all their comrades together
before electing a regular government. So they elected only a
provisional government. That was in January, 1919. In
March there was a general amnesty. It was in connection with
the German plot idea of May, 1918, that they were put into
prison. In March they let them all out. And then they had the
election of the Irish Government. President De Valera was
elected president, and Arthur Griffiths was elected vice-presi
dent, and the names of the others I would rather not give for
state reasons. Some of them are known and some of them are
not known.
Q. But a complete organization was effected ? A. A complete
organization was effected, and the first resolution to be passed
was that Irish would be spoken in the Irish Parliament, although
English could not under the circumstances be excluded entirely,
and that all the records of the Parliament should be in Irish.
English could not be kept out altogether, because some of the
older men could not learn to speak Irish. But all the records
are in Irish, and all who can speak Irish use it.
Q. How long did they continue to function openly in the eyes
of the British officials? A. I think the first attempt to smother
them up was on the occasion of the American delegation's visit
to Ireland in 1919. Mr. Frank Walsh, you were on that dele
gation, I think. You see, the Irish Parliament only held a few
sessions in the open ; and then the word was passed around that
there was going to be a meeting of Dail Eireann, and the public
was admitted. But the enemy did not get word beforehand.
They really held their meetings in public for twelve months, or
nearly twelve months at any rate. But they have been able to
do almost as much meeting in secret. They immediately com
piled statistics as to the conditions of the fisheries and of agri
culture, and the condition of the ports, and the improvements
that could be made. They have done all the ordinary work of
government, and have done it very well and very effectively.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. Up to this time the municipal and
county council members had not declared themselves openly and
publicly as to whether they were still holding allegiance to the
British Government or not? A. That is quite true.
Q. Then the elections came, in 1919 and 1920, when that issue
was presented to all candidates for office in Ireland? A. Yes.
Q. Will you kindly state how many elected members to the
municipal councils and county councils declared under oath their
abandonment of allegiance to the British Government and swore
their allegiance to the Irish Republic? A. All the county coun
cils in the south and west of Ireland, in what are called the chief
provinces, and I think three or four in Ulster. But all of the
south and west.
Q. What per cent would that be? A. That would be twentyseven out of thirty-two. There are thirty-two counties in Ire
land. There are nine in Ulster. Out of that nine in Ulster,
there were four, I thinkI am pretty certain of fourthat de
clared themselves for Dail Eireann.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. I have seen the statement in some
English paper that ninety-one per cent of county and municipal
councils had declared their allegiance to the Irish Republic. A.
It was fully ninety-one per cent.
Q. So that in 1920 you had, in addition to the Irish national
Parliament, some ninety-one per cent of the municipal and
county councils recognizing the Irish Government and declaring
that they no longer gave allegiance to the British Government.
A. Right.
Q. Now, to what extent did the courts and judicial functions
[Vol. 112, No. 2897
of Ireland pass from the control of the British Government to

the Irish Government itself? A. It passed almost absolutely.
THE REPUBLICAN COURTS
Q. Give us the figures. I want to get what you claim the facts
are, so your friends in America can get the truth. A. Wherever
the councils had declared allegiance to Dail Eireann, that was in
ninety-one per cent of the counties, the courts were established
immediately. At first the courts were not noticed very much by
the British Government. She did not like them, but she had no
law which could absolutely forbid them. Arbitration courts were
legal. And these courts, under the head of arbitration courts,
began their functioning.
Q. So that ninety-one per cent of the elected representatives
of the people established arbitration courts? A. Yes, certainly.
But you must remember that they came on only gradually.
Q. Yes, I understand. But previous to this movement the
judicial control of Ireland was never a matter of local control;
it was always a matter of British control? A. Yes, always.
Q. So that the entire judiciary was appointed by the British
Government? A. Yes.
Q. So what became of them? A. They sat in state in empty
courts, surrounded by barbed wire and soldiers. And they
waited for cases, and none came. In one caseI would like to
have you notice that when the judge came to the city he was
always lodged at one of the friendly houses in the city, in what
would correspond to your Four Hundred, I suppose. And when
the arbitration courts began to function the Irish Parliament
said that these judges were forbidden to hold their courts. The
result was that when the judge came to Cork there was no lodg
ing for him. He could not sleep in the barracks, because it was
against English law in some way. And so he had to sleep in the
court house.
Q. So that in Cork there was not only no court for the judge,
but not even a bed? A. Yes, not even a bed.
Q. Chairman Howe. Were there no hotels? A. There are
hotels, but the judge, you see, in Ireland is always an obnoxious
person. You see, he was in the pay of the enemy, and he was
doing the enemy's business, and he always came surrounded with
a great deal of police and military. And so he did not consider
it safe to stay in the hotel.
Q. How many of these judges have resigned their positions?
A. Many of the magistrates have resigned. They sit in the
petty courts.
Q. Are they elected officials? A. No. The Local Govern
ment Bill gave the right for nationalists to become J. P.'s. But
they have many of them resigned now.
Q. But the judiciary, the English judiciary has practically
disappeared? A. Yes. But they sit there yet for purposes of
state, I think.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. Now let us come to the police
force. To what extent does the old Irish police force, the Royal
Irish Constabulary, exist to this day? To what extent has the
old Royal Irish Constabulary disappeared by resignations or by
severing allegiance to the British crown, and gone over to the
Republican movement? A. Several hundreds of them have re
signed. I do not know how many of them have gone over to the
Republican movement. They have not gone over as police. They
would not be accepted as police. They have been trained very
largely as spies, and they have been trained to spy on each
other. When we set up a police force, it will be a police force
such as the R. I. C. never was.
Q. That force has largely broken down? A. Yes, although
it has been largely recruited from England.
Q. Commissioner Wood. I would like to ask Miss MacSwiney
a question in regard to the resident magistrates. The resident
magistrate is a paid official? A. Yes, he is a paid official ap
pointed by the British Government.
Q. What has become of them? A. They have continued to
sit in their courts. If a policeman catches something like a petty
The Nation
Jan. 12, 1921]
thief, he will bring them up before the court. But the court is
empty most of the time.
Q. Have not many of them resigned? A. No, not many. They
have nice, comfortable jobs, you know, and are always selected
from the anti-Irish population. Not many of them have re
signed.
Q. Commissioner Thomas. Does the authority of the Irish
courts rest upon the consent of the people or upon some other
force? A. Upon the consent of the population entirely. And
I do not think anything could show the truth about the false
contention, put out by England, that we are not a law-abiding
people better than the success of these courts, with only moral
force, in many cases, to enforce their decrees. We are a lawabiding people absolutely, if we are given a chance to have our
own laws. I would like to stress the good the courts did in
bringing together the people. Unionists brought their cases to
the Irish courts. Protestants brought their cases to the Irish
courts. And although they may not have ceased to be Unionists,
they have come to the conclusion that if they want their claims
settled, they must bring them into the Republican courts. There
was one case where a Protestant landlord had a case which he
felt he must have settled, and so he took it to the Irish courts.
And his friends were shocked, and remonstrated. And he said,
"I do not care. If I take it into the English courts I might get
a just judgment, but it will not be obeyed. And if I take it into
the Irish courts I will get a just judgment and it will be obeyed."
And he did get a just judgment and it was obeyed. There is
another rather interesting incident in connection with those
courts. Three men were arrested for breaking down a wall.
They were convicted in a Republican court. One consented to
repair the damage, and the other two refused. We have no jails.
However, it happened to be on the coast of Galway, So those
gentlemen were taken to one of these islands off the coast of
Galway. They were given food and everything, for we believe
in treating our prisoners humanely. After a couple of days the
British police heard where they were, and went out in a boat
to rescue them. But when the British police came out, these
prisoners stoned the police away, said that they were prisoners
of the Irish Republic and would not be molested.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. Is nearly all the civil litigation
and criminal litigation carried on in these Irish courtsin the
Republican courts of Ireland? A. The civil litigation alto
gether. The criminal litigation would be a burden if there were
much of it. But it is not an excessive exaggeration to say that
there is no crime in Ireland. That would be true before the
trouble started rather than now. In Ireland there is a rule that
when a judge goes on circuit and has no cases to try, he is pre
sented with a pair of white kid gloves. And there were sessions
after sessions where the judges going around their circuit got
white kid gloves. There was a joke about it, that the judges
should set up a glove factory. And that is an absolute fact.
There may be little petty larceny cases and breach of promises
and the like, and I think that is about the most serious thing.
We occasionally have a murder case, but very, very rarely.
The English take criminals out of the jails and send them to
spy on the Irish. And they take them out of the jails and make
Black-and-Tans of them. There is a friend of mine who is the
prison physician at Portland prison, and one day he met a man
on the street in the Black-and-Tan uniform and stopped him and
said, "Where did I meet you?" And the man said, "Oh, doctor,
don't you know? I was at Portland prison when you were the
prison physician." That is the way we get English law and
order in Ireland. Most of the criminals are sent in from the
outside. We have no trouble except where the British forces
make it.
ACT OF UNION
Q. Mr. F. P. Walsh. Miss MacSwiney, while it is a very wellknown subject in England, one of the Commission has asked
you to briefly sketch the Act of Union, it being claimed by many
59
persons that there is some parallel between the efforts of cer

tain states in the American union to secede and the efforts of
the Irish people to get their independence. Do you understand
what I mean? A. Oh, quite, Mr. Walsh.
Q. Give the date of the Act of Union and what attitude the
Irish people take toward it. A. I would like to deal first with
the suggestion that there is any parallel between the fight
between your north and south against secession. If you want
any parallel you will have to go back to 1776, and not to 1861.
That is the parallel, and not the war for secession. And I
would like to say in connection with this that you had far less
reason to secede from your mother country than we had, be
cause she was never our mother country. We are a distinct race.
A parallel with your war of secession is the parallel between
Ulster and the rest of Ireland today. And if you maintain that
you were justified in waging a long war of five years which
nearly broke President Lincoln's heart, if you were justified in
fighting that war rather than let a part of your country secede,
then you must admit that we are justified in fighting for a
century, if need be, rather than let a part of Ireland secede.
The Act of Union was signed by King George III in 1801.
He was your enemy as well as ours. Ireland had always had
her own parliament. But Poyning's Law of 1494, and what is
known as the Sixth of George I, passed in 1709, I thinkI am
not certainthose two laws destroyed all the powers of the
Irish Parliament. Poyning's Law said that no laws could be
made in Ireland or for Ireland without the consent of the king
and the privy council of England. The Sixth of George I went
a step further, and declared that all laws passed in England
were binding in Ireland. That distinction is quite clear. The
first said that all laws passed in Ireland must be approved in
England. The second one, passed three centuries later, said
that all laws passed in England would become operative in
Ireland. And thus those two laws ruined all of the power
of the Irish Parliament. The 1782 movement followed very
largely from the example of your War of Independence. Ire
land could not see why she could not follow your example. But
just as in the beginning of your war you had no idea of seced
ing from your mother country, so those in the Irish rebellion
of 1782 had no idea of breaking connection with the English
crown. They wanted what they called "the King, Lords, and
Parliament of Ireland." They wanted an Irish Parliament sep
arate from that of England, but the English king was to be the
ruler in both countries. After a great deal of work that was
passed in 1782. But the Act of Union, definitely rescinding
all power of Ireland to pass, laws, was passed in 1801.
Now, we wanted free trade in Ireland. And when the Volun
teers were formed and got their power they began to say they
could not see why Ireland should not have the right to trade
abroad if she wanted to. She was not allowed to. And so she
demanded free trade, the right to trade where she liked. And
there is a very famous march of the Volunteers in Dublin when
they took up their position before the House of Parliament with
a cannon trained on the House, and they put a motto on the
cannon, "Free Trade Or This." I think there is a very striking
parallel there between your position in 1774 and this. That act
resulted in Grattan's Parliament. It had its disabilities, but
it doubled Ireland's trade in a short time, and made it very
prosperous.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. Miss MacSwiney, just what years
are you talking about? A. That was in 1782. The Parliament
lasted until 1800. But it really only lasted about ten years,
because intrigue destroyed its power.
Q. The prosperity you mentioned was during that period?
A. Yes. But you must remember that the Irish people at
that time were ignorant, and being ignorant, they were poor.
The Catholics, then as now, were in the majority. But the
Catholics did not have a vote. Only Protestants could sit in
Parliament. But they were Irishmen, and they believed that the
development of their country was necessary. Grattan's Par
liament had its disabilities, but it was an honest attempt to
60
The Nation
develop Ireland for the Irish. Pitt decided that the Irish
Parliament was inconsistent with the rights of England and
that it was injuring English trade. (I would recommend to
you to read a book by Mrs. Stopford Green, "The Making of
Ireland and Its Undoing," which will tell you how England has
deliberately destroyed Irish industries whenever they conflicted
with her own.) By this time the Irish Volunteers began to admit
Catholics to their ranks, and Catholics and Protestants all
over the country began to work harmoniously in the ranks of
the Volunteers. The Earl of Charleton was commander in
chief of the Volunteers. He was a very good man, no doubt,
but he was a very timid man in some respects, being afraid of
all innovations. He was afraid of Catholic emancipation.
And Pitt worked on his horror and dread of Catholic emanci
pation until he split the Volunteers over it. Always the same
British policydivide and conquer. The Volunteers split over
the Earl of Charleton's resignation. The others wanted to
keep the Volunteers intact and have Catholics admitted. Hav
ing split the Volunteers, the next thing was to disband them.
When Charleton had them disbanded, those who would not dis
band formed themselves into United Irishmen, a definite body
announcing a Republican policy and declaring for the Irish
Republic.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. What year was that? A. 1795,
1796, and 1797. The Act of Union was passed in that way.
First the Volunteers were alienated from each other. Having
alienated them, they were suppressed. A fresh supply of Hes
sians were brought over and let loose on the country. I dare
not tell you of the horrors that were committed by them and
by the English yeomen in our own country.
Now, at that time all the Irish Volunteers who were willing
to be Irish first, formed themselves into the secret society of the
United Irishmen. It had to be a secret society, because were
it known to exist every member would be killed on the spot.
They formed their society in secret and then entered into the
'98 insurrection for a republic. This was exactly what Pitt
wanted. He wanted an insurrection in order to smash the
growing liberty of the people and give him an excuse for the
Union. History is repeating itself today. In order to get that
insurrection, which the people did not want, because they were
not ready for an insurrection, he instituted a system of horrors
similar to those of the Black and Tans today. Devastations,
lootings, murders, and burnings took place all over the country
to exasperate the people into insurrection before the people
were ready for it. That insurrection followed, and the result
was that the Act of Union was passed. Parliament at that
time was purely Protestant. It was made up of Protestant
landlords from Englandmen who bought up pocket boroughs.
That is, there were certain districts Which returned parliamen
tary members where there were really no population, no houses
at all.
You can see that the Parliament which passed the Act of
Union voiced only the minority of the people, because Catholics
had no representation at all. In the second place, it voiced only
a small minority of that minority because of the property quali
fication and because no man who had a vote dared thus openly
vote against his landlord. If he did, then he lost his holding
at once. And that was how the Act of Union was passed.
When England says, "The Irish people passed the Act of Union
and wanted to be united with us," go and tell her to read his
toryread Lecky, who certainly is not an Irishman. Froude,
the historian, will tell the truth. Gladstone himself says that
the blackest stain on England's history is the Act of Union.
At the time that the Act of Union went through, it was
promised that English and Irish finances would be kept sep
aratebut the promise was broken. England's national debt
was nearly ten times Ireland's, so getting Ireland to help pay
it could hardly have been called a fair bargain, but the same
obliging parliament was converted to the English point of view
in the matter.
[Vol. 112, No. 2897
THE RELIGIOUS ISSUE

Miss MacSwiney. I have been told since I have come to
this country that there were three things that were a great
stumbling block to American sympathy in the Irish situation.
First, that it was a religious fight Second, the difficulty of
giving England guaranties that we would not molest her nor
let our coast be used for purposes of military aggression. And
third, that the Irishmen are going about murdering policemen.
With regard to the religious difficulty, there isn't any, except
that which England creates. The religious difficulty of today
is created exactly as she created the religious difficulty with
the Earl of Charleton in 1797 and smashed the Irish Volunteers.
She keeps alive the religious issue in Belfast for her own
purposes.
Q. Mb. F. P. Walsh. What is your history in Cork? And
what per cent of the people are Catholic? A. The population
that is non-Catholic would be about ten per cent. The Jews,
the Nonconformists, the Protestants, of Cork all have their
churches just like the Catholics, only they are not so numerous.
But the very biggest business houses in the city are owned by
Protestants. For a long time they employed only Protestants,
but not now, as they have become more broadminded. Ireland
has been remarkably free from religious persecutions. We are
the only nation in the whole wide world that accepted Chris
tianity without murdering the first apostles. We are the only
nation in the whole world that does not show in its history
some early persecutions for religious heresies.
Q. Commissioner Addams. You never have had an antiSemitic movement in Ireland? A. We never have had a re
ligious persecution movement of any kind whatever. In the
north of Ireland are very ignorant people who have the idea
very firmly fixed in their heads that the Pope is coming over to
Ireland and persecute all the Protestants. Of course, it is
nonsense and when the English army of occupation is with
drawn it will disappear.
So much for the religious difficulty. The fact that there will
not be any religious persecution under the Irish Government
can be proved only by experience. We know there will not be.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. Is it true all over the Catholic part
of Ireland that they have elected mayors and officials repeatedly
who have not been Catholics? A. Yes, but they would not elect
a Unionist at all, no matter what his religion was. If a man
is for Ireland, we never ask him his religion. Ireland alone
counts.
IRELAND AS A HOSTILE NAVAL BASE
Q. Commissioner Maurer. Do you not think that perhaps
those religious difference's may be more economic than political;
that those who profit by keeping employees in shops and fac
tories unorganized simply start a religious war whenever there
is an effort made to improve the workers' standard of living?
A. Yes, that is largely true. But the main interest in Ireland
is not capitalistic. It is political, England versus Ireland.
Then when it comes to what the British always call
guaranties for England's safetythey call it safetyour Presi
dent lately took the first paragraph of the new agreement made
with Cuba by the United States. It is a guarantee that the
ports of Cuba will not be given to any foreign power or used
in any way that would injure the United States. I am not sure
of the wording of it. But the point is thisthat we are per
fectly willing to give a promise that we will not let any other
foreign power, or any power, use our ports as a war base.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. Against Great Britain? A. Yes.
We are perfectly willing to give that guarantee and to keep it,
because when we get our Republic, we are not going to go to
war with anybody.
The third thing I was asked is about what is called often the
murdering of policemen. I will simply take the murders of
policemen by denying that there ever has been a policeman mur
dered in Ireland. Now I will deal with the shooting of police
men. Will you please start out with the premise that Ireland and
Jan. 12, 1921]
The Nation
England are at war. One of the instances about the shooting

of policemen was the ambush of seventeen Black and Tans last
week at a place not far from Mallow, when the whole seven
teen of them were captured, sixteen of them killed, and the
seventeenth very severely wounded. That was put down as a
very horrible murder. Suppose that in the recent war an
American scouting party went out on a Belgian road and got
information that three or four lorries of German soldiers carry
ing ammunition were coming along the road. If they felt
strong enough and if they were very pluckyperhaps even if
they did not feel strong enough, they would get into a nice
little ambush and they would give the best account of that Ger
man party that they possibly could. Would you do anything
but laugh at the man that would call that ambush party mur
der? It is an act of war. The Black and Tans were armed
to the teeth. I should like to tell you how the Black and Tans
go around the streets of our cities and country places. Four
or five days ago there was an ambush at Darden, and in that
ambush our men got the worst of itfour or five of our men
were killed. You will not find any Irish citizen coming before
this Commission and claiming that these men were murdered.
It was an act of war. It was the shooting of one set of sol
diers by another set of soldiers.
SHOOTING UNARMED POLICEMEN
I have also been told that individual policemen who were
unarmed have been shot. That is also true. Now I will tell
you who those individual policemen are. I was asked a little
while ago about the police in Ireland. The police in Ireland have
always been under the authority of the British Government.
They have not always carried arms, but they carry arms at
present, and therefore they are among the armed forces of the
Crown. Among the Royal Irish Constabulary was a division
known as the G Division. Their work was purely detective
work. The people they were sent to spy upon were our fellow
citizens. And that went on during every political agitation in
Ireland. During the present war, since 1916since 1914 in fact,
the police in that G Division were very active. I am sorry to
have to acknowledge that they were Irishmen, but that only
makes them greater sinners. The information that they gath
eredfrom girls they met and othersled very often to the
arrest and imprisonment of their fellow countrymen. There
fore they were spies. In the recent times in Ireland, when
things got very hot, these spies have done very good work for
the English Government in Ireland. One of our leaders who was
executed in 1916 was executed through one of these spies, who
has himself been shot since. During Easter week some of the
Volunteers were anxious to shoot down every policeman, every
police spy, that isevery policeman of the G Division, and the
leaders, Pearse and MacDermott, said, "No, this is a clean fight,
and we will deal with them afterwards. There was one detec
tive who was very active in tracking down our men. His life
was saved by John MacDermott, one of the signatories of the
Irish Declaration of Independence. John MacDermott was a
very young man and very lame. Because of his lameness the
military officers who captured the people after Easter week
came to the conclusion that he could not be one of the leaders,
so he was thrown into the barracks along with the rank and
file and put in the batch to be sent to the Wakefield prison in
England. They were paraded in the Richmond barrack yards
before leaving Dublin, and this particular detective was sent up
and down the ranks to see if there was any man there who
ought to get penal servitude rather than deportation. In going
up and down the ranks he saw John MacDermott, and he
pointed him out to the British authorities as one of the seven
signatories of the Irish Declaration of Independence. And
John MacDermott was taken out and shot a few days after
wardsby the man whose life he had saved. That man has
subsequently been shot, and shooting was too gentle a death
for him. No unarmed policeman has been shot in Ireland
unless he has been proved a spy. We have captured the official
and private correspondence of Lord French, and we have sent
61
back his personal correspondence marked "Censored by the

I. R. A." His official correspondence he did not get back. The
official correspondence we have captured from time to time has
been conclusive evidence that there are spies at work among us.
These are the men we shot.
Q. Commissioner Thomas. There is also a third case that
happened when you were on the water, perhaps. Something
like fourteen policemen were shot at different times and places,
some on duty and some off, some of them in their homes. A.
Those men were spies. They were English secret service men
who had the clews of the machinery of our Government. I
believe they were the head men there, who were doing untold
damage. I do not know the details. But I know this, if any
of those men were shot by the Irish Republican Army they
were shot justly and after warning.
Q. Chairman Howe. What do you mean by warning? A.
Oh, they have been told that they would be shot.
Q. You mean that they were told they would be shot if
they did not leave the country? A. Yes, they had to leave
the country.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. You claim that the shooting of
these men who are spies is justified as England is justified in
shooting spies? A. Certainly.
Q. But it is quite a different thing for England to shoot at
random at a crowd of civilians? A. Yes, certainly.
Q. Commissioner Maurer. Are any of these Irish state
policemen or Irish Constabulary resigning? If so, why do they
resign? A. They are resigning because they will not take any
part in what is going on now in Ireland.
Q. After they resigned, did anything happen to them? A.
Not by our own people, but some have been shoteither acci
dentally or on purposeby the Black and Tans. They have
also caught and flogged other policemen who have resigned
from the force.
Q. Have you any personal knowledge of such cases? A. The
information I have of such cases I got from the newspapers.
Q. But you have read in the newspapers that many of them
have been shot after they have resigned? A. Yes, I have.
After they had resigned.
Q. But it seems to me that a Royal Irish Constabulary man
who had resigned would have rather endeared himself to the
people of the Irish Republic. A. Yes, they would. And fur
thermore, I can tell you that the Irish Government would see
that they do not suffer from their resignations.
Q. But the Black and Tans and the military notice it? A.
Yes, that is it. About the time my brother was being taken to
Brixton Prison, I read in the paper that about four hundred
R. I. C.'s sent in a notice to the Government warning the Gov
ernment that if he were not released, they would resign in a
body. The very instant that I saw that, I knew for one that
it was a lie. There are not four hundred of the old R. I. C.
men left, nor four dozen, who would say such a thing. The
four hundred, if there were four hundred, I knew were the
English recruits to the R. I. C, commonly known as Black and
Tans. It sounded very big in the English papers that four
hundred R. I. C.'s threatened to resign if the Lord Mayor of
Cork was not released, because their lives would not be safe in
case he died. That, of course, was another piece of lying
propaganda. I said that on the instant I saw it, because I did
not believe they would do it. The very next day the chief of
the R. I. C. sent a letter to the paper denying that the R. I. C.
had taken any such action, and very vigorously protesting that
such a statement should be made. There are not four hundred
or four dozen of the old R. I. C. who are left, but there are any
number of Black and Tans who might say it if their lives were
in danger.
Q. Commissioner Wood. You said that some policemen,
when they resigned from the R. I. C. had been shot by the Black
and Tans. Do you claim that any such killings have been given
as an excuse for the shooting up of communities by the Black
and Tans? A. I could not say about that.
62
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THE ARREST OF LORD MAYOR MacSWINEY

Mb. F. P. Walsh. Now Miss MacSwiney, will you please tell
us the story of the taking of your brother to London, and what
took place at Holyhead, and all that.
The Witness. I think it might be well for me to emphasize
something in my sister-in-law's story, something that she did
not emphasize very much. She is very young, and she was never
used to fighting things out as we were, and the constant strain
of her husband's being on the run, as we call it in Ireland
that is, avoiding arrestespecially that terrible time when she
had to take a little baby of six weeks old from the south to the
north of Ireland to see her father, because we knew her hus
band would be arrested upon his release, left her in a very
precarious state of health for months before my brother's final
arrest. From Christmas last until Easter she was so ill that
she was unable to have her little baby with her, and the baby
tvas with us all the time. Her husband went constantly to see
her when he could. He occasionally spent a night with her.
She did the best she could to keep up, and towards Easter she
was better. That was just before he was made Lord Mayor.
You asked her to state what he said to her about that. I
imagine he said very little, because he knew and we all knew
that it would mean his death. And naturally he did not want
to distress her by talking about that.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. May I interrupt to ask you what
per cent, of young men are on the run? A. I would say about
ninety-nine per centperhaps a hundred per cent, of the young
men and some of the old men. A few of them take their
chances and live at home. My oldest brother, who is an Ameri
can citizen, is not sleeping at home with us simply because my
sister will not have him in the house. I can also tell you that
a couple of nights when the searching seemed to slacken a
little, my brother, the Lord Mayor, was in very great need of
rest, and he said he would sleep at home, which always meant
our home, because although they had two houses after they
were married, he was never able to sleep at them. One night
when he decided to risk it, at half-past eleven there was a
knock at the door. You can imagine our state of mind. But it
was one of his Volunteers who came to tell him that the enemy
were on his track and he would have to go. Another night, when
he and his bodyguard ventured to stay in the house, a similar
message came. The result of it was that he got no rest. He did
not try to stay at home a third time. That was the kind of a
life they were living. He always went about guarded. All his
meals were taken at our house. We are quite near, not more
than six minutes' walk from the city hall. He was able to come
over the bridges of the north and south channels quietly and take
his meals. His last meal there was for tea at half-past five on
the afternoon of his arrest. And then he went to the city hall
and was arrested.
In telling you my brother's story, I would like to confine my
self to his prison experiences from the point of view of Ire
land and not the personal point of view. I want to deal with
the English propaganda to discredit him and to discredit Ire
land's cause.
METHODS OF MANUFACTURING EVIDENCE
When my brother was arrested, he was arrested on no par
ticular charge. The charge was manufactured after the arrest.
That was quite usual. They always manufacture the evidence.
They have very often manufactured evidence in this way:
they have sent anonymous letters to the houses of people which
they were going to raid, addressed to the person they wanted
to implicate. These anonymous letters were very often incite
ments to shoot policemen, and various things like that. My
brother was arrested on Thursday night at seven o'clock. On
that afternoon, by the afternoon post, which comes between
half-past four and five, a letter came addressed to The Lord
Mayor of Cork, or Miss Mary MacSwiney, Belgrave Place,
Cork. I opened it. It was in a disguised handwriting, and
purported to be from a Volunteer in Tipperary saying that the
[Vol. 112, No. 2897
Volunteers in Tipperary were very lax in the people they al

lowed to go about, giving details about a certain policeman
named Quinn, whom this letter said was causing a great deal
of trouble, and urging that without further delay this man
should be shot. I read the letter twice over. It was an anony
mous letter. I tore it up and burnt it. When my brother came
in, I told him what had happened. These things are so much
matters of course that there was not much more comment
made about it. At midnight that night two military officers
and a large body of men came to our house to raid it. They
were sent for that letter, for that bit of evidence against my
brother. That is the sort of thing that we have to put up with.
If that letter had been found in my house he would have been
charged, not with the charges that were preferred against
him, but on being the leader of a conspiracy to murder police
men. And they searched my house very thoroughly indeed
that night to get evidence of his complicity in the murder of
policemen.
My brother was arrested on August 12, and kept in Cork
jail. My sister-in-law told you that I went down to see her
on Saturday. I saw him in Cork jail that morning, and that
was the first intimation I had that he was hunger striking.
He looked very bad then, although it was only his third day.
On Saturday I went down to see her and to look after the
baby. Therefore I was not present at the trial, but I know
that he said that he was really the person who should be trying
his judges, and he told those military officers, with respect to
the charge that he had a police code, that he was the only per
son in that city who should have a police code, and anybody
else who had one without his permission was guilty of an
illegal act. They said they found the code in his desk. That
was a lie. The code at the time of his arrest was in the pos
session of somebody else. That man did not have time to de
stroy it, and he stuck it in a place that he thought might escape
the attention of the military. But they captured it. They did
not capture it in the city hall at all. But they took it at once
and put it in the Lord Mayor's desk, and said they found it
there. That was a lie.
The other two charges, that he had a uniform of the Irish
Republican Army and that he was the presiding officer of a
body that had sworn allegiance to Dail Eireann, were due, of
course, to the English attitude toward their authority in Ire
land. And their right to assume that authority he denied
absolutely.
When my sister-in-law came up to Cork on Monday, after
my brother's arrest, I remained at Youghal. I did not know
then she was coming down, but I got a telegram to catch the
four o'clock train up to Cork. My sister-in-law met me at the
station and told me that the trial was over, and probably he
would be deported that night, and that I had better go up at
once as a special permission had been given for me to see him.
I went up to Cork, arriving there about six o'clock. My sister
had by that time received the letter from General Strickland,
commander of the British forces, that I and my younger brother,
who had not seen him during the day, might see my brother.
We went up to the barracks. He was sitting in one of the
large roomsevidently an officer's bedroom, and he was sitting
there wrapped up in a big coat and evidently feeling very
badly. I asked when he was to be sent away. The military
officers said they did not know. Of course they knew, but they
had orders not to tell us. I said, "This thing is rather impor
tant to us. My brother has only the clothes he has on. If you
are going to send him out of the country, we want to send him
a suitcase with clothes." They could not tell us but they thought
it would be wise to send the suit case.
On Friday we learned that he was at the military barracks,
but we did not know what they were going to do with him.
On Saturday he was sent to the Cork jail. On Tuesday he
was sent over to England.
I think my brother left Cork about four o'clock Tuesday
morning or at any rate during the curfew hours. And then
Jan. 12, 1921]
The Nation
we wired the authorities to know where he was, and we did not

get any information. Meanwhile we wired friends in England
to learn where he was. Mr. Arthur O'Brien put his machinery
to work and finally wired us that my brother was at Brixton.
That was Thursday morning. The authorities also found out
that he was over at Brixton. But I was half-way over when
they wired. I left Cork immediately and arrived in London
Friday morning, the twentieth of August, and I saw my brother
that day. My sister-in-law arrived Saturday, and it was ar
ranged that as soon as the situation got so dangerous that my
brother was on the point of death, that I should send word to
my sister to come at once. When I saw my brother then on
Friday the twentieth, I did not think he could live a week.
Dr. Hickson, the doctor of the prison who was then in charge,
told me he would tell me when my brother was at the point
of death in time to advise my sister-in-law. On the following
Tuesday my brother had a very bad time, and he was so seri
ously ill that I did not wait any longer, but wired my brother
and sister to come, too, and not wait any longer. Then he
seemed to remain stationary. But when it was about half over
he got very great pains, a kind of neuritis. Then at the end
time there was nothing but very great weakness.
I want to speak of the English anti-Irish propaganda on the
whole situation. We were allowed, as I said this morning,
unlimited access to my brother, even to the extent of allowing
my youngest brother to remain in the prison all night long.
That seemed very kind, but I believe it was done not so much
to be kind to us as to break my brother down. England, from
the point of view of getting a victim, got a very bad one in the
case of my brother. The doctors were obliged to report that
forcible feeding would not do in his case. On account of an
attack of pleurisy in his infancy he had a weak spot in his
lungs, and forcible feeding would only have hastened his death.
MacSWINEY'S FAST EVOKES WORLD'S SYMPATHY
The second mistake England made was the bringing of him
from Cork to London. If they had kept him in Cork you prob
ably would never have heard of the matter. But by taking him
to London, he was in the spot where newspaper reporters from
all quarters of the world are. And the result was that the
reasons of that hunger strike were heralded all over the world
and did more good for Ireland than anything that has happened
for a hundred and fifty years.
And then again, it would not have done so much good for
Ireland if they had not taken him to London and his family
had not moved over there and settled there with him. England
was very much surprised at the great wave of sympathy be
ginning to go throughout the whole world, and then she began
to try to counter that propaganda in every way she could. The
papers began to say that the doctors were feeding him, that
they were giving him proteids in his medicine. I called the
doctors' attention to it, and they pooh-poohed it and said, "Who
cares what the newspapers say? Who pays any attention to
it?" These are the words of the English doctor, gentlemen
of the press, and not mine. I asked the doctors to make a state
ment that they were not putting food in my brother's medicine,
and they refused. That was getting such world-wide publicity
the newspaper reporters were coming to us to know if that
was possible, and the belief was getting so general that it was
being done that we had to counteract it somehow. I am now
going to give you a piece of information that is given for the
first time to anybody. We stole some of the medicinefrom
under the very eyes of the jailerand we had it analyzed.
The analysis proved that there was absolutely nothing in the
medicine but just what the doctors had told us it wasa purga
tive medicine to keep the body functioning in an orderly way.
There was absolutely no trace of food. This is the first time
that this is given to anybody, even to our own intimate friends.
Only my brotheT knew of it, and my sister, and myself; for a
long time even my sister-in-law did not know because we wanted
to keep it very secret. Now, you will ask, if it was so secret
63
as all that, what use was it to us? If the prison authorities

had found out that we had the medicine analyzed we would
have been turned out of the prison. But having satisfied our
selves that they were not playing any tricks, we set about
satisfying the public. We got the most eminent doctor that
we could, and we told him to examine the medicine, that we
wanted to be satisfied that the doctors were not putting pro
teids in the medicine they were feeding my brother. Then
there was a rumor that my brother, being on the point of death,
was to be moved to a nursing home, as the authorities were
afraid to have him die in prison. The first thing the doctor
said to all of us, when he came out of my brother's room, was,
"The Lord Mayor does not want to die. He has no intention of
committing suicide." Of course we knew that. What he wanted
was freedom. And I told him straight out what we wanted
to know, and he assured us that the doctors were not feeding
my brother secretly, and said we might trust the doctors be
cause they were all honorable men. We had obtained our ob
ject as far as the newspapers were concerned; and from that
day on there was not a hint in any of the English papers that
the doctors were feeding him secretly.
That disposed of that, but they said that his relatives were
feeding him secretly. Of course they could not say openly
that we did that secretly. They said, of course, even the doc
tors said, "The food is always there, and he can eat at any
time.'' And the curious thing was that they changed the food
to meet his condition. At first there was chicken and eggs and
the like. And as he got weaker afterwards they brought him
chicken broth, meat essence, milk with brandy, and the things
he would naturally get if he would take food. And we were
invited to give them to him. We never gave him food, but we
were giving him water whenever he would ask for it, but from
the day that this propaganda began that we were feeding him
secretly, we would let the nurse get him the water. We had
to watch like lynxes from beginning to end.
ATTEMPTS TO SAVE MacSWINEY
Another thing I would like you to know about the English
attitude toward us is that we found out that they were counting
very strongly on the effect my brother's death might have on
the Irish Volunteers. They had tried in every way to provoke
the Volunteers until they would come out in the open so that
they might crush them, but they had not succeeded in doing it.
They had come to the conclusion that they could not defeat the
Volunteer organization in that way, but they still thought that
if they could get hold of the leaders and get them killed in
large numbers, they would be able to conquer the rest of the
country. Rumors were brought to me from Ireland that the
Volunteers were in a very great state of tension. And some
people whose advice could not be set aside, were very much
concerned lest his death would cause just such an uprising in
Cork as would give the English their chance. And so, when
the opportunity came, I said to my brother, "Do you think the
Volunteers will be out of hand? Would you not like to send
them a message?" His answer to me was, "Certainly not. The
Volunteers are soldiers who are effectively officered, and it
would be an insult to both officers and men if I sent them such
a message. They are a disciplined body, and they know their
duty and they will do it." When the end was very close and
the tension very high, I sent a message to Cork myself, and the
message was just what my brother had said.
While we were all perfectly satisfied that my brother should
carry his sacrifice to the end, and while we did not begrudge
him to Ireland, we felt it our duty to do every single thing
we could to save him, everything we could consistently do with
his principles and with ours. Short of a compromise, we felt
bound to try to save his life and make the English release him.
I went the day after my arrival in London to the Home Office.
That was on Fridaythe first day I arrived in London. I
went to the Home Office. I saw some of the under secretaries.
They told me that the Government's decision was unalterable;
64
- -- - -
The Nation
that my brother's death would be on his own head; and that

they would not release him on account of the hunger strike. I
asked to see Mr. Short, and I was told that Mr. Short was busy.
I wrote to Mr. Short and told him that this was a very serious
matter, and asked for an interview. He wrote back that no

good purpose was to be served by an interview, since the Gov
ernment's decision was unalterable. Lloyd George was then in
Lucerne or Geneva, Lucerne I think, and I asked who was re
sponsible in this matter. Mr. Short sent back a message, which

probably appeared in the American papers at the time, which was
a deliberate insult to a woman to whom he was already causing
as much suffering as was at all necessary. He said that he had

received my appeal on behalf of my brother's life. (I made
none.) He said that he regretted that my brother was causing
such suffering to his family by his deliberate suicide. He ac
cepted the responsibility, and he is responsible before God and

the world for that murder.
I found, then, that the Home Office was quite determined to

let him die, but the English press was quite sympathetic. Even
the anti-Irish press said it was a mistake to let my brother die.
And the labor people were passing resolutions about the matter.
I told my brother one day that the labor people were very
sympathetic, and his answer was, If English labor really

wanted to get me out, they could do it in twenty-four hours if
they liked.
Then I went to interview the Council of Action.
They were
very sympathetic, very, but no man was sufficiently courageous

to take action. Then there was a big labor congress held this
summer at Portsmouth. I went down to Portsmouth, and al
though they were all intensely sympathetic they felt it was not
their business. They were not responsible. That was their
attitude.
And now I come to our own particular treatment.
On the
Monday before my brother's death, exactly a week before he

died, there was a consultation of doctors, and when they came
out they called me aside and they said that my brother had
developed symptoms of scurvy, and that it was necessary for
him to take lime juice, but he had refused, and when they had
asked him he said that he only wanted to be left alone and to
die in peace. And the doctor said (this was the special doctor
[Vol. 112, No. 2897
thoughtless people could look at that, and I knew it was more

propaganda. And that morning I tried to get hold of Dr.
Hicksonand if I got him before Dr. Griffiths was there, I
usually succeeded in getting the truth out of him before he
was coached. And I said to him, You know very well that that
action of swallowing is a reflex action, that it is not a volun
tary action. And he said that my brother was quite uncon
scious that he was swallowing, and that it was a reflex action.
And I said, Have I your permission to quote that in public?
And he said, Yes. And I went away and immediately made
it public. I sent it to the House of Commons and to Mr. Short,
and asked Mr. Short to retract the lie he had stated the night
before. I sent it over home, and I also gave it to the news
paper correspondents of the whole world, that statement of the
doctor's with his name attached to it. The result was my
expulsion from the prison. I am quite sure that that was why
I was forbidden to enter the prison after Friday. When I went
to the prison on Saturday I was not allowed to see my brother
although I waited until half-past ten that nightand then it
took nearly an hour to get myself and my sister out of the
prison. Sunday was the same for us except that we had to
stand outside the prison gate all day long. On Monday my
brother died.
I want to say something about the inquest that my sister-in

law did not mention this morning, and that is that they did
everything, every single thing they could, to bring in a verdict
of suicide. I do not know anything about the law of it, but
I heard quite late on Tuesday evening that if my brother was
found to be a suicide, they could hold his body. We called
up Sir Norman Moore, the specialist whom we had sent for to
see my brother, told him the circumstances and asked him to

come and tell the jury that my brother did not want to die.
After his testimony, although the jury was asked to bring in a
verdict of suicide, they brought in an open verdict. Then finally
we got permission from the Home Office to take the body to Ire
land.
THE HOLYHEAD INCIDENT
urge him to take lime juice now. And I told him that I was
At Crewe we were told that when we got to Holyhead we

were to go straight to Cork. My brother was sent for by the
police inspector. I do not know that you are aware that a
large body of police traveled on the train from Euston to
Holyhead. They tried to play a trick on us, and tried to send
afraid I could not.
the train off without the friends knowing it.
who came to see him once a week), I assure you, Miss Mac
Swiney, that your brother will not die in peace if he gets scurvy.
He will die with the most terrible tortures. And you had better
And then he continued and tried to tell me
what a terrible death dying by scurvy was. And I turned to

him and said, It would be a terrible thing to die with tortures.
The matter is in God's hands, and we can only ask that He
does not let him suffer too much.
And he turned to me and
said, God has nothing to do with it. The case is in our hands,
your hands and my hands. And we shall see that he will have
to take lime juice. I said that I would not urge my brother to
take lime juice, and that was all there was of it.
On Wednesday he was wildly delirious all that day, and at

night time he was very uneasy. I am not given to asking favors
of the doctors, but I did beg them very hard that night to let me
stay in the prison with my brother. Father Dominick, I think
it was through Dr. Hicksonhe was always very humane
was allowed to stay in the prison. Although I was not allowed
on the landing, I took occasional peeps to see what was going
on, and they fed him all through Wednesday night. They did
And then my
sister and myself went into the van where my brother's re

mains were, and said we would not go away. Then they started
the train and sent us away to get us outside of London. We
were then informed by the police that the remains were to be
put on the steamship Rathmore and taken to Dublin, and that
not more than twenty of my brother's friends were to be allowed
to travel with my brother's remains. A consultation was held
with my sister, and we decided unanimously that we would not
one of us go on that ship. If they took my brother's remains
away from us by force, and then we went on the ship, it would
be a tacit consent to their action. People seemed to think that
we were very hard-hearted to let my brother's remains travel
like that without any of his friends.
We did what we knew he
would have liked us to dowhat would be for Ireland's good

first.
When Holyhead was reached we went and stood by the van
not begin to feed him until Wednesday night, when he was

quite unconscious.
where my brother's remains were.
My younger brother went
I got permission to stay there all that night. The next thing I
want to call your attention to is that in Friday morning's papers
appeared a remark by the Home Secretary in answer to a
question in the House of Commons by an honest man, Lieuten
ant-Commander Kenworthy, about forcibly feeding my brother
in his weak state. And he answered that the Lord Mayor was
not being forcibly fed, but that a cup was held to his lips and
he was swallowing it voluntarily. Now, you will see how
that the body was to be taken by force, and they came into the
van to take it. Then we were asked to go outside, and we
and interviewed the station master, and we were told finally
refused.
When we got on the platform at Holyhead there
were about one hundred fifty Black and Tans there, and their
faces as they sneered and jeered through the window at my

brother's body were the most evil sight I have ever seen.
Finally all our friends gathered around the coffin, and re
fused to move. I would rather be spared the details of what fol
The Nation
Jan. 12, 1921]

lowed.
65
There were some men first: I can only say that I was
were pigs and dogs around there. I told him that if he felt that
the first woman to be picked up like a bale of goods and thrown

outthrown out literallyonto the platform. My brother
jumped to try to save me, and he was nearly choked by four
policemen. And a military officer jumped over a wagona small
cart, and took him by the back of the neck and tried to choke
way about it, I would remain with him, which I did. About two
o'clock the military arrived, about fifty on horseback. They got
the priest to provide a horse and cart to carry the remains into
the town. They carried the bodies into the town, and some of the
military remained there with the horses, and the others went
him.
on with the bodies.
He had his arms around me and I threw my arms around
him to try to save him from being choked to death. The inci
dent was a very painful one. And I thought every instant that
my younger brother would drop dead before my eyes, because
I remained there where the police were shot for about half an
the treatment he received by the Canadian authorities in a
hour, and then I walked into the town. As I got into the town
there was a man named Considinehe has got a public house,
which is what they call a saloon hereand he is a carpenter by
Canadian prison during the war has injured his heart; and a
trade.
doctor in America has told him that any excitement is apt to
with the Sinn Fein movement. The military had taken posses
cause him to drop dead. I was afraid he was going to drop

dead that night. Then they took the body, and increased the
sion of his house when I arrived. They were standing out in

front with their bayonets fixed, standing on guard. They were
number that could travel with it from twenty to seventy-five;
plainly partaking of the liquids in the house. I saw that as I

passed by.
and when we refused to go the police inspector asked Mr.

OBrien to point out to the relatives the sacredness of the re
mains and what respect was due them. As if we needed to be
He has three young sons whom it seems are connected
The remains were taken
I walked on up the street. About fifty or sixty yards up is

where my sister-in-law lives, on the other side of the street. I
had no more than entered when an officer comes in and asks,
by the Rathmore to Dublin, and the funeral was carried out,
Where is the civilian who just entered? I was the only man
and then we went on to Cork by special train. In the evening
living in the cottage.
I got a letter than my brother's body was at the customs house

and we might have it. He was buried in what is called the
Martyrs' Plot not far from Lord Mayor MacCurtain and some
of the fallen soldiers of the Irish Republican Army.
I explained who I was, showed him my passport, and told him I

was an American tourist. He examined the passport very
told of the sacredness of his body!
Witness gave an account of the functioning of the Repub

lican courts and of her own part in the educational sys
tem. On being asked what plan the de facto Government has

for financing the country, Miss MacSwiney thought that no plan
has as yet been formulated. But the loan which was floated
some time ago was oversubscribed, so that the Irish do not feel
despondent on that score.
closely, and asked me if I had a pencil, and I told him no, I

had a fountain pen. And he said he was going to put me on
the black list, and he took the number of my passport and also
my name. I said that was very nice. He left there, but soon
returned and had six soldiers come back with him. They stood
on guard outside the house and remained there until five that
evening.
Some of the men were visibly under the influence of
liquor coming on towards evening.

At six-thirty that evening there was a military officer and a dis
trict inspector who had come from Tulla, about eight miles away.
They went to where this priest was living, this Father O'Reilly.
There is a stone coping about three feet high around the house,
where there is a garden and flowers inside.
The Testimony of P. J. Guilfoil
The six soldiers
remained outside and the officer went in and knocked at the
Mr. P. J. Guilfoil is an American citizen from Pittsburgh who
took his wife and two children to Ireland last May.
He wanted to know where I belonged.
They
visited his sister-in-law in Feakle in County Clare.
Q. M.R. D. F. MALONE. I understand, Mr. Guilfoil, that the

home in which you were living was burned. A. Right.
Q. Were you there at the time? A. Yes.
Q. Just relate briefly for the Commission the circumstances
of that burning. What date was that? A. On the morning of
October seventh. The postoffice is about a quarter of a mile
out from this little town, and there were six of the Royal Irish
Constabulary who went out to this postoffice, and two of them
got shot just as they reached the postoffice at ten-thirty in the
door. And I stood directly across the street taking it all in.
The officer said to the priest when he answered the door, Are
you O'Reilly? The priest answered, Yes. Then he grabbed
him by the collar and said, Come here, you.
horrible murder committed this morning.

five minutes to confess.
You saw this
I will give you just
Who committed this horrible murder?
The priest said, I am innocent. I had nothing to do with it.

The officer said, Attention, men. The six soldiers were stand
ing outside the wall on the road. The six soldiers then went in
Q. THE COMMISSION. Did you see this or just hear about

it? A. I saw the whole thing. I went out there about eleven
or eleven-thirty to send a wire to Thomas Cook & Sons of Dub
and grabbed hold of the priest. Three of them had him by the
head and three by the feet. They carried him out, the three in
the lead carrying him out of the gate, and the three on the
inside laid him down on the wall, face down. The two officers
remained inside in the garden, and one of them said he would
give him just one minute to confess to the horrible murder. The
priest said he was innocent. One of the officers said, Let him
lin about my return to the States. I knew about the happening

before I left the town to go out there, and being an American
have it. And the sight of it was too horrible for me to wit
ness, and I pulled my cap down so I would not see the flash.
morning.
citizen and having my passport there, and being of good cour
Instead of that, one of the soldiers stepped forward and with the
age, I went out there after the two policemen were shot.
butt of his rifle hit him three horrible blows across the hips.
The officer said, Now, will you confess to this horrible crime?
He said, I am innocent. The one officer spoke and said, We
will show you we are more humane than you are. And now get
Q. But you saw them shot? A. No, I saw them lying there.
I was in the town then. When I got there there was a young
priest, Father O'Reilly, the only priest in the parish, with the
dead men. I viewed the remains by the roadside. Word had
been sent to the military at Ennis, a town about eighteen miles

from there. I questioned the priest about the matter, and he
said that all he knew about it was that he was called there about
a half hour before by a young girl who told him there were two
men at the postoffice in a dying condition. The town physician
had been there also, Dr. O'Halloran, but he had left before I
arrived. I asked the priest if he did not run great danger of

reprisals for remaining there. But he said, What could he do?
He could not leave two dead bodies by the road, because there
up and get into the house. The priest got up and started to
go into the house, and as he did so, the officer gave him a kick
and called him some terrible names as he went into the house.
The six soldiers went on up to the barracks.

The officer and soldiers went up to the barracks and got into
a big motor lorry and went away. I went across the street and
knocked at the door of the priest's house, and he let me into the
house, and I said, My God, are you able to stand up? And he
said, I got some awful wallops and am suffering great pain,
but what am I going to do? And I said, I don't suppose your
The Nation
66
feet can carry you very far, but as far as they can carry you, I
would advise you to get out of the town. There will be reprisals
tonight. He said, Well, if there are reprisals there will be
people dying, and they will need a priest. I said, You would
not abandon that place out there this morning, and I will not
urge you to leave. Use your own judgment, Father O'Reilly.
As I went across the streetit was getting dark-and as I
crossed the street Dr. O'Halloran, the town physician, came
[Vol. 112, No. 2897
Q. CoMMISSIONER WALSH.
In another town?
A.
It is in
the country.
Q. How many houses were burned? A. Two that night.

Q. Anybody shot? A. Nobody shot, Senator. The only thing
was the beating of the priest that evening.
Q. MR. D. F. MALONE.
Did they injure his property?
A.
Well, that happened next day. They came down the next day
and asked Mrs. MacDonald, the woman who owns the property,
down, and I said, Where have you been? And he said, Up to
if any of the furniture belonged to her. She said no. They took
the barracks. The conditions up there are terrible. They are

all wild drunk. He said Finnery, a sergeant up there, got a
terrible cut in his wrist. He stuck his fist through a plate glass
window down at Considine's. He said, P. J., I would advise you
the entire furniture, with the exception of a wardrobe that was

too heavy to pack down stairs, and packed it out to the middle
of the street and set fire to it. And they said they were only
sorry that they did not have that bloody bastard, as they called
the priest, to put him on top of it. The following nightthat
would be October eighththey went out to the postoffice, and
the postoffice and the house next to it, they set fire to both of
those, and burned a lot of hay that was in the field back of it.
And about two hundred yards in the field there was a man named
MacCullough, and they burned his house and all the out
houses and two big stacks of oats. They burned everything he
had but a little house covered with galvanized iron, which I
to get in and stay in off the streets tonight, for there is going
to be trouble. I told my wife and sister-in-law about the con
versation.
I had not been in three minutes when the shooting
began. The police and the military came on down the street
banging and shooting and throwing hand grenades in all direc
tions. We had just been drinking some tea that was standing
there, and I said, We had better get out of the way. Here they
come. I got the two little children, and we went upstairs.
And I said to the children, You had better lie next to the
walls. I do not need to tell you how nervous those children
dare say they could not burn.
were.
hundred.
They were shaking so that I got to shaking myself.
After they got on down the street I went down stairs and got
some souvenirs.
record?
A.
A steel bullet.
What is it, for the sake of the

(Exhibits bullet to Commission.)
Q. How large a town is this, Mr. Guilfoil? A. Two or three

Q. When did you leave Ireland? A. I left Ireland the twen
ty-first of October on the steamer Celtic.
Q. CoMMISSIONER ADDAMs. I would like to ask you about
the killing of the policemen at the postoffice. There were two
After they passed down the streetthis Considine place, as I
killed?
have stated, is about fifty or sixty yards from us on the left

hand side of the streeta thatched house. They took a big long
Q. Did you get any information about why they had been
killed? A. The only information I received as to that was that
it must have been done by the Irish Republican Army. There
were six of those policemen. The two that they killed they
deprived of all their arms and ammunition. The papers there
brought out the unscrupulous way in which they robbed the
bodies. I was there when they put the bodies into carts, and the
officer took the men's watches and pocket books, but he gave
candle and they lit it. I got up and looked out of the window
as they passed. They just took this candle and held it under the
roof of the house until it was all afire.
BURNING A COTTAGE AND SHOOTING UP A VILLAGE
They went on down the street, firing and shooting and shout
ing, until about twelve-thirty or one. At one o'clockin the
other half of the cottage there is a family named O'Brien.
They vacated at some part of the evening, the time I do not
know. The military went in and searched the house. I under
stand that one of the young OBriens was in sympathy with the
Sinn Fein movement. The cottages are only divided by parti
tions. I was in the part of the upstairs near the O'Brien's
cottage. My Misses told me that the soldiers were on the roof.
I said, They are on the roof taking observations the same as

ourselves. She said she smelled rags burning. I said it was
the Considine house, because the wind was westerly and we were
getting the smell of their burning. The Misses said it was not.
At one or one-twenty the Misses got up and pulled the blinds
back, and the flames were coming up to the window. She said,
My God, I told you the house was on fire! I got out of bed and
told her to get the children out, and ran down with an armful of
clothes for the children, and threw them over the wall that
divides the field from the house, and told her to bring the chil
dren down there. I looked up at the cottage, and there was a
hole just about as big as that skylight burning in the roof. I
ran back and said, We have no time to fool around here. Take
what you have and get out of here. I prefer to be shot than to
be burned to death. They were still shooting down the street.
So they got out of there and went back in the field. The Misses
got dressed and dressed the children.
After that a bit they ceased shooting for a time. Some kind
neighbors came to our assistance, and we said that if we had a
ladder and some buckets we could save part of the cottage. Mr.
Maloney, who lives across the street, got a ladder, and some of
the men got some buckets, and we succeeded in saving the big
gest part of the cottage.
At six o'clock that morning I got hold of a car to convey my
baggage and the children out of town, and about ten oclock I
left myself. Then I went to a place where my wife's people live.
A.
Yes.
Stanley'sone of the deadto his wife.

Q. CHAIRMAN Howe. What statement did they give as to
why they were killed?
A. The statement was made that they
were shot and robbed.
But he asked you what made
these men marked menwhy were they killed? A. There was
one of them, Stanley, who came up to Mrs. McDonough's public
house and pulled out a forty-four revolver, and he said, If I

only had a few more like these I would damn soon finish the
Republican Army.
KILLING OF FOUR YOUNG MEN
I would like to have you develop
any facts or evidence that you have as to what these men had
done to interfere with the happiness and peace and good order
of these people before they were shot. A. Nothing that I
know of further.
Q. Did you hear anything as to why the members of the

Republican Army were going to shoot them, or did shoot them?
A. The only thing I heard around there was that the Sinn Fein,
the Republican Army, was trying to take those barracks just

a week before I arrived in that town, but did not succeed.
There is a little town about six miles from there, Scariff; they
started on that barracks on Saturday, the eighteenth of Septem
ber, I think. There were about three hundred of the Irish Repub
lican Army who came there that night, but they did not succeed
in taking that barracks either. The second or third day after
that the military or police evacuated and went to a town named
Killaloe, about eight miles away. And the day after that the
Irish Republican Army came there and tore the barracks
down. There were some young fellows, Rogers, a cousin of mine,
MacMahon, Eagan, and Gildan, these four young fellows
were on the run. They were down at a town named Whitegate
about eight miles from Scariff. The town of Killaloe is about
The Nation
Jan. 12, 1921]
eight or nine miles below Scariff. The River Shannon comes

in between and divides those towns.
They make an angle like
this (indicating an acute angle). The military went across the

river in a boat and arrested all four of these young fellows, and
two others who owned the house in which they were living.
They took them across the river, and not through their own
town, and the four of them were shot out in the middle of the
Killahoe Bridge. There is quite a depth of water there, and
right in the middle of the bridge is where they were shot.

Q. CoMMIssionER WALSH. What date? A. I have the
papers here.
Q. Did this happen before you left Ireland?
A.
No, these
men were shot since.
Q. Were these men shot before or after the shooting of the
police? A. After. This happened about the fifteenth or six

teenth. The paper is dated the nineteenth. The military tried
to make it out that these men were shot trying to escape, but
the paper brings it out that these men could not have tried
to escape in the middle of the bridge, because the channel is too
deep there, and they were handcuffed.
Q. Were the bodies found? A. Yes.
Q. Handcuffed where they were found? A. No, the military
-
67
later kidnapped at Fermoy, gave in the barracks. If they found

a Sinn Feiner, they were to turn the machine gun on him.
Q. Did you hear these instructions issued yourself? A. Yes,
I was in the barracks when he issued them.
Q. Were those general orders carried out? A. The military

carried them out. I did not, nor did two other men who pro
tested against them. I remember that on the night of May
21 myself and Constables Kirwan and GalvinMr. Galvin will
also speak here-were sent out on a night patrol, with two

Black and Tans named Richards and Gillett. About nine
o'clock Richards said he wanted us to show him where Maurice
Walsh and William Joseph Condon lived, that he was going to

shoot them. Condon was chairman of the Clogheen District
Council.
The only reason for shooting them was that the
Sunday before these men had said at a meeting of the Council

that Clogheen was such a peaceful district that they could well
get on without the one hundred military stationed there. The
acts of the military were something disgraceful.
Q. Describe what you mean by the acts of the military were

something disgraceful. A. Well, I have seen them stop two
girls of the town coming to the Rosary at half past six in the
evening, and they said to the girls, Hands up, and knocked
took their bodies to their barracks and would not let the people
them down. And I came to their rescue and said, Stop, they
of the village see them after they had them in there.

Q. How long had they been pursuing them? A. These young
fellows who were arrested had been on the run since September,
are innocent girls. And I surely believe that if I had not been
there, they would have been brutally assaulted.
1918.
that the acts of the military were something disgraceful? A.

They were so disgraceful that Mr. Talbot, the Protestant min
ister at Clogheen, wrote to Dublin Castle saying that their acts
and deeds in Clogheen were shameful and he got this Devon
Testimony of Daniel Francis Crowley

Daniel Francis Crowley was born at Bohocoghlin, County
Kerry, and is twenty-three years old. Mr. Crowley served for
three years as a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary at
Clogheen, a town of about 600 inhabitants, in Tipperary.
Q. What other acts did you witness that makes you believe
shire regiment sent out of the district.

Q. You said that these Black and Tans went out to kill this
man Walsh and the other man. What did you have to do with
it?
A.
They did not know where these two men lived and
wanted me and Galvin to show them.
They would go and
Throughout your three years' ser
shoot them, they said, and bring back their ears as evidence
vice as a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary, did you ever

have to make an arrest or serve a warrant there? A. No, I
never arrested a person there during my time, and I never
issued a summons against any person.
Q. Did you ever know of any serious crimes committed by
any of the population? A. No no serious crime.
to the barracks. We refused, and turned back to the barracks,

and begged Richards to come back with us. Richards got
Q. M.R. D. F. MALONE.
Q. Do you remember that incident of petty theft which you

told me? A. Oh, yes. Mr. Talbot, the Protestant minister in
Clogheenhis fishing rod was stolen, and he reported the matter
to the police sergeant, and the police sergeant could not find
his fishing rod for him. And then he reported it to the Irish
Volunteers, and the Irish Volunteers got his fishing rod back
for him. And the consequence was that he said that the police
service in Ireland was useless, and the Volunteers far better.
Q. What was the religious feeling between the people there?
A. The religious peace was very great.
Q. CHAIRMAN HOWE.
Did Protestants and Catholics trade
with one another? A. Oh, yes.

Q. Did they go to each other's houses freely? A. Yes, sir.
Q. Clogheen then was a peaceful city? A. Yes, sir, very.

How many constables were there in
the barracks? A. Five. Four constables and a sergeant.

Q. Do you know what the orders issued to police immediately
before and continuing for a time after the murder of Lord
Mayor MacCurtain were? A. Yes. The orders issued where
I was stationed in Clogheen by General Lucas, who commanded

the military forces of Cork and Tipperary, were that if two
police could be spared to go with the military, they were to go
on an armored car with a machine gun, and they were to
patrol the country night and day, and every man who took a
prominent part in the Sinn Fein movement they were to stand
up in front of his house and turn the machine gun on it. In
this armored car there were put one hundred twenty cans of
petrol and also one hundred twenty Mills' bombs, for burning
houses. Those were the orders which General Lucas, who was
behind a black-thorn fence.
We begged him to come on back
with us. He said that if we came one step nearer, he would

blow our brains out. We went on down the road, and when
only about two hundred yards off, fired several shots at us.
Q. CoMMISSIONER ADDAMS.
wards?
A.
Were those men killed after
No. The next day I went into the village and
told Walsh and Condon what Richards had done.
It went out
publicly then, what these Black and Tans, who were the only
ones in the barracks, wanted to do. They heard of it, and
Gillett pointed his loaded revolver at me three times and wanted
to shoot me. I guess they would have shot me but there was
an Irish sergeant there, and they were afraid to do it.
Q. How many Black and Tans were there in your barracks?

A.
Just three of them.
Q. CHAIRMAN Howe.
And how many of the Royal Irish
Constabulary? A. There were five, sir.

Q. CoMMISSIONER WALSH. And a hundred military. A. Yes.
Q. Who controls the Black and Tans there? A.
Since March
last, the Black and Tans are under military orders.

You said that Mr. Walsh and Mr.
Condon were not killed? A.

Q. CoMMISSIONER ADDAMS.
No, they are still there.

I would like to ask about the two
girls whom the Black and Tans commanded to throw up their

hands. What happened to them? A. Well, on this evening,
an English soldier and six Black and Tans shouted at the girls,
Hands up! and they began to search them. And I came on
them and said, Stop, stop. They are innocent girls!
Q. But you had no proof that they had evil motives. One
man like yourself could not stop them if they had. A. But
what right did they have to assault the girls?
But there was no attempt to
rape? Their clothes were not disheveled? A. No, no rape.
But they were searching them, and their clothes were disheveled.
The Nation
68
CoMMISSIONER ADDAMs.
We have had no testimony of that
CHAIRMAN HOWE.
[Vol. 112, No. 2897

Where were these Black and Tans from?
From England? A. Yes, from England, most all ex-army men.
kind and we want to be positive.
MR. D. F. MALONE. But the girls were knocked down.

CoMMIssionER ADDAMs. He did not say they were knocked
down, but that they were told to throw up their hands.

THE WITNEss. No, one of them, a Miss Barrett, had fallen
down in the road.
Q. CHAIRMAN Howe. You were in uniform? A. Yes.
Q. And you knew these men? A. Yes, I knew all of them.

Q. M.R. D. F. MALONE. What was the reason for stationing
so many of the military in a peaceful district like Clogheen?
A. Well, they were trying to stir the people up, it seems to me.
Q. So that as far as your business goes, the military there
in this peaceful district only stirred the people up? A. Yes.
Q. Did you know of any police murders after police had
resigned? A. Yes, I know of a Constable Fahey stationed at
Adair in County Limerick. The rule of the Government is that
a man must give from three to six weeks notice before they
can resign. This man Fahey was out on duty one day after he
had sent in his resignation. Three Black and Tans were with
him, and when they came back they said that they were at
tacked by Sinn Feiners and Fahey was killed. None of them
Q. Were the officers from the ranks, or of the officer class?
A. Most of them were from the ranks, or petty officers.

Q. MR. D. F. MALONE. Why did you tender your resignation
from the Royal Irish Constabulary? A. I tendered my resig

nation from the constabulary because of the misgovernment of
the English in Ireland. .
Q. CHAIRMAN. I would like to ask you what pay the con
stables received. A. The wages were advanced in March,
1919. When I resigned we were offered two shillings a day

more if we would remain. The pay then was twenty pounds
a month, in American money at present rates of exchange about
eighty dollars.
Q. What was the pay of the Black and Tans?
A.
The
Black and Tans were getting one pound seven shillings a day.
Q. CoMMISSIONER WooD. Why do you say you think that?
A. The pay was not made known to the R. I. C. in the barracks.
Q. CHAIRMAN Howe. So that the Black and Tans are get
ting about twice what you got? A. Well, they were
getting
seven shillings more a day than we would get after the raise.
Q. They were safe themselves? A. Yes, they were all right.

Q. COMMISSIONER THOMAS. You said that this General gave
orders for the homes and property of Republican sympathizers
to be destroyed. How many houses and hay ricks were de
stroyed where you were? A. None around Clogheen.
Q. Why is that? A. Because the people were so quiet there.
The people there were in favor of the military and police going
Q. MR. D. F. MALONE. Mr. Crowley, what can you tell us

about the destruction of creameries? A. Well, I remember
passing by Killmacomma and Way Cross in Tipperary the day
after the creamery there had been destroyed. There were
thirty-six soldiers and officers who had taken crow-bars and
knocked down the creamery, saying they were looking for arms.
They didn't find any, but they wrecked the creamery.
Q. MR. D. F. MALONE. When was that? A. The end of March.
Q. Were fairs and markets prohibited at this time? A.
Fairs and markets in Tipperary were prohibited for about a
year, from February, 1919, to the end of March 1920for over
out of Ireland.
a year that is.
had been injured, and they had not arrested anybody.

Q. COMMISSIONER WALSH.
By whom was he killed?
They said he was attacked by Sinn Feiners.
A.
They were not wanted there.
Q. MR. D. F. MALONE. Do you remember the raid on Mrs.

Walsh's home? A. Yes, I do.
Q. Who was Mrs. Walsh?
A.
Mrs. Walsh lived at Castle
Grace, about two and a half miles from Clogheen. Her husband
died in May last and she had three little children.
Q. What happened? A. On different occasions the military

would raid her house, sometimes at twelve o'clock and some
times at two. It got so bad that she complained to County
Inspector Langhorne, the county police inspector for the South
of Ireland, and he said it was too bad, but he could do nothing
for her, because the military were not under the control of
the police inspector.
Q. CoMMISSIONER ADDAMs. Why did they raid this house?
Q. What was carried on at these fairs? A. The chief pur

pose of these fairs was that the Irish farmers could sell their
cattle and butter and their foodstuffs in these markets.
Q. CoMMISSIONER WALSH. Are they held there now? A.

They are held there now, but they were not until March, 1920.
Q. How long have the people been denied the right to
assemble for public meetings and discussions? A. Especially
since March, 1919, no meetings have been allowed to be held.
Q. Is that still true? A. Yes. If a man wanted to sell his
house or farm, he could not sell it without a permitan auction
would not be allowed to take place. And if he were a Sinn Fein
sympathizer, he couldn't get the permit. If a hunting match

or a football match took place without a permit, a party of
soldiers would come and drive them off the field.
A. Because they suspected that the Volunteers were training

around there. But they never found anything in the house on
any of the raidsnot anything.
Q. CoMMISSIONER WooD. Were you there? A. I was there
on one occasion, and refused to go into the Walsh house.
Q. Did you hear reports about it? A. Yes, I heard reports
Q. Since what time? A. Since March, 1919.

Q. Now, in the county of Clare were there any murders of
police officers or any interference with police officers previous
to March, 1919? A. No, there was not, sir.
Q. CoMMISSIONER ADDAMs. You say, Mr. Crowley, that there
in the barracks when they got back, and also heard of it from
had been orders to shoot on sight a Sinn Feiner or Republican.
the Walsh's themselves.
But that was never done in daylight? A. Most of the cases
Q. Do the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Black and Tans

get along very well together? A. No, they do not. An Inspec
tor General, Deputy Inspector Geddes, Mr. Pierce, and several
were at night, yes.

Q. So that they did not carry out that order of shooting with
machine guns on sight? A. Well, they did. The military car
ried out the order in different places of setting fire to houses.
Q. COMMISSIONER ADDAMS. Yes, but shooting people on sight
was not done. A. Not in Clogheen, but it was done in other
others, and five hundred men of the ranks, tendered their res
ignations from the force during April and May because of the
present conditions that are disgracing the service.
Q. Out of how many?
A.
Out of nine thousand men.
Q. The Royal Irish Constabulary are not used any more

alone now? A. The R. I. C. are not used to carry out these
military orders.
The Black and Tans do that.
Q. Mr. Crowley, after you resigned, were any attempts made

against your life? A. Yes, after I tendered my resignation,
the Black and Tans put loaded revolvers up and backed me up
there against the walls and threatened to shoot me.
Q. COMMISSIONER WOOD. For what reason? A.
Constabulary? A. While I was in the R. I. C. I was in favor

and sympathy with the Irish movement. But I did not join any
organization until after my resignation.
Q. MR. D. F. MALONE. Mr. Crowley, have you a family?
A. No, sir.
-
Because I
had told Mr. Walsh and Condon that they were going to shoot
them.
parts of Ireland.
Q. COMMISSIONER WALSH. Did you belong to any Sinn Fein
organization while you were a member of the Royal Irish
Q. Why did you leave Ireland?
A. I was afraid the Black
and Tans would follow me.
Q. You left on account of your health then?
A. Yes, sir.
The Nation
FOUNDED 1865
Vol. CXII
Contents
69
EDITORIALS :
Mr. Hardin? for Simplicity
72
The Supreme Court vs. Labor
78
Railways and Romance
74
Passports Passe
W
Fit for Boys
76
THE FIRST CONGRESS OF THE LEAGUE. By Robert Dell
76
COAL'S BLACK RECORD. By George Soule
78
MEETING THE CRIME WAVE: A COMPARISON IN DETECTIVE
METHODS. IBy Joseph Gollomb
.'
80
THE DESECRATEON. By Henry W. Nevinson
84
85
CORRESPONDENCE
85
BOOKS:
Effects in VeT-se. By Mark Van Doren
86
The End of the Trilogy. By George Soule
87
Chapters of Medical History. By H. L. Mencken
87
Hyphenate. By Ben Ray Redman
88
The Forsytes. By L. L
89
The Optimism of an Octogenarian. By D. M
89
Books in Brief
90
DRAMA:
The Beggar's Opera. By Ludwig Lewisohn
91
DJTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION:
Justice to Germany and France. By Pierrepont B. Noyes
92
Associate Editors
LEWIS S. GANNETT
FREDA KIRCHWEY
ARTHUR WARNER
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
ERNEST H. GRUENING
CARL VAN DOREN
Managing. Editor
Literary Editor
Subscrdtion RatesFive dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and
THE NATION, 20 Vesey Street, New York City. Cable Address: Nation, New
AN eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth through a ven
detta in America against the English if they do not
stop their misdeeds in Irelandthis is what Mr. Harry Boland, secretary to President de Valera, called for at a mass
meeting at Madison Square Garden. He would even pull
down everything English in America if need be. We suppose
that occasionally one of Celtic temperament must boil over,
but it is to President de Valera's credit that he never did
while he was here. It is perfectly plain to anyone who
knows the American temperament that nothing could be
worse for Ireland's cause in America than the giving of
such advice as Mr. Boland's. Any attempt to carry on the
struggle by force here can only react most unfavorably and
deprive the Sinn Feiners of most of the American sym
pathy they now have. It will take only a few more Union
Club incidents to do this. The hope of Ireland lies in con
vincing the world of the justice of her cause and the use of
peaceable means only to obtain it. England is daily showing
that she can beat the Irish at their own game of reprisals
and is outdoing the Prussians in her newly announced
policy of burning the houses of citizens who live near
an ambush. Yet every such act as the killing of the fifteen
British officers at Dublin reacts terribly upon the Irish cause,
however great the provocation and however unfair that
may seem to the Irish. America, we believe, will respond
to the legitimate Irish demand for self-determination, but
not if the idea spreads that its proponents in America seek
to embroil the United States and Great Britain in order to
have their way. The American people intend to have peace
with England.
No. 2898
AGAIN our militarists turn to a pacifist device. Secre

tary Daniels having suddenly remembered that in
1917 Congress passed the Hensley amendment to the Naval
Appropriation bill, authorizing the President to call an in
ternational conference on naval disarmament and appropri
ating the funds therefore, Chairman Butler of the House
Naval Affairs Committee has solemnly journeyed to Marion
to show it to Senator Harding. Just what the outcome of
the meeting of these two great minds was is not clear, but
Chairman Butler is at least now convinced that this is the
time to try out the sincerity of former allies on this question
of a naval holiday. So there is at this writing an excellent
prospect that Senator Borah's proposal for a naval holiday
conference will go through in the hope of stirring the Adminstration to action. Again, the Senate Military Affairs
Committee has agreed to a resolution limiting the size of
the army to 175,000 men, but this does not satisfy Senator
Lenroot, who, having failed to win the Committee to an
army of 150,000 is going to-carry the fight to the floor of
the Senate with fine prospects of success. How he would
have been denounced as a little American and a treacherous
pacifist a little while back if he had even insinuated that the
time would ever come again when we should reduce our
forces ! But economy is the watchword of the day, and any
step thereto is popular. In his retirement in Missouri Mr.
Hensley must be meditating with satisfaction upon the
variability of republics, and the time may yet come when
that arch-apostate, our pacifist Secretary of War, will regret
his brazenness in recruiting the armyan expensive task at
bestfar beyond the correct limit. As for the New York
World, it continues to do wonders in its disarmament fight
and has rolled up an astonishing amount of world-wide senti
ment for the limitation of armaments. It has even called Sec
retary Daniels the Tirpitz of 1921 and has had no difficulty
in proving that Daniels talks exactly the Tirpitz language.
"T HAVE not opposed and shall not oppose what is guarX anteed by the Constitution of the United States." In
this day when the name of the Constitution is taken so fre
quently in vain, sentiments like these are likely to be heard
calmly and even, at times, with suspicion. But Governor
Russell of Mississippi means what he says and proves it by
continuing to welcome the 162,000 Mennonites who are
planning to emigrate to Mississippi from Canada, in spite
of the protests of the American Legion. The latter body
objects to the Mennonites because they are on religious
grounds conscientious objectors to war, and because they
do not send their children to the public schools, but to their
own private ones where only German is taught and spoken.
This would, of course, be too much for the American Legion,
but Governor Russell rises to the situation like a man. "I
have guaranteed religious and educational freedom to the
Mennonites," he says. "I am giving them a guaranty only
of what the Constitution of the United States guarantees
to everyone who enters its doors." It is plain that the Con
stitution is entirely adequate as a safeguard of public lib
erty. What we need is more public officials who are at once
70
The Nation
as fearless as Governor Russell and at the same time as

well aware of their duty as public servants.
MARIA SALSEDO, wife of the Italian printer who
leaped from the fourteenth floor of the Park Row
Building in New York City, where Department of . Justice
agents had kept him in secret confinement for two months,
is suing Attorney General Palmer, and his agents Flynn
and Lamb and Scully, for one hundred thousand dollars
damages, on the ground that they had tortured Salsedo into
suicide. Roberto Elia, Salsedo's companion in persecution,
before leaving for Italy made a detailed affidavit concern
ing the treatment given Salsedo by the agents of our
strange Department of "Justice." Our courts now have
an opportunity to vindicate their independence by giving
fair treatment to the innocent men so recently abused, tor
tured, and manhandled by Government agents; a Washing
ton court has already awarded $400 damages to one of the
victims of the "Red raids" of a year ago, and the Chicago
raids are coming into an official limelight which they can
scarcely stand. A case worthy of the closest attention is
that of Sacco and Vanzetti in Boston. Sacco and Vanzetti
were organizing meetings in protest against the treatment
of Salsedo when they were arrested on a technical charge,
and some time later they were charged with a hold-up
against which they had perfect alibis. The case seems to be
one of the most flagrant "frame-ups" in American history.
WE do not yet realize how brutal our Red raids were, nor
how many utterly innocent simple-minded foreign
ers were caught in their toils. Perhaps the report on "The
Deportation Cases of 1919-1920" just issued by the Com
mission on the Church and Social Service of the Federal
Council of the Churches of Christ in America may serve
the same useful purpose in correcting newspaper misin
formation as was served by the Interchurch Report on
the Steel Strike. It repeats the sorry story revealed in
Judge Anderson's decision last June, of complete scorn of
legality by the sworn agents of the law, of illegal invasion of
homes, illegal seizure of property, indiscriminate arrests,
maltreatment, provocation, imprisonment incommunicado
resulting in at least one instance in the deportation of a
Russian who belonged to only one organization in the United
States, and that a Methodist church! This report lifts
another corner of the veil which has hidden the activities
of Governmental agents provocateurs in promoting Red
activities. Fortunately some of the men who plied this
disgusting trade have already been sickened by the lies
which they were forced to tell and the newspapers pub
lished ; hence the nauseating truth may soon become public.
THE Ku Klux Klan which is now planning active inva
sion of the North is not merely anti-Negro. In the
words of its "Imperial Wizard," Colonel W. J. Simmons,
"only native born American citizens who believe in the
tenets of the Christian religion and owe no allegiance to
any foreign country, political institution, sect, or persons"
are eligible. The Ku Klux is anti-Catholic, anti-Jew, and
anti-agnostic as well. In the North we need not take too
seriously the attempt to transplant from another age and
clime this night-blooming poisonous weed. It will not
thrive here in the light of publicity. In the South, its
brutal lawlessness, its violation of every real tenet of the
Americanism to which it falsely lays claim, should evoke
the prompt action of the Federal authorities. To the Klan
[Vol. 112, No. 2898
may be laid the recent murder and burning of men, women,

and children in Florida because a few colored citizens at
tempted to exercise their constitutional right to vote. The
attempted northward extension of the order is merely an
other symptom of the intolerance and hatred which inevit
ably follow the passions loosed and accentuated by war.
No right-thinking American can regard the Klan as aught
but the antithesis of everything decent for which this coun
try stands.
A GOVERNOR who preaches economy and then sets out
to practise itthis is New York's New Year surprise.
Mr. Miller in his inaugural message scandalized all the poli
ticians by demanding the abolition of needless offices, the
consolidation of others and the cutting down of the budget
which has risen from $47,899,527 to $145,219,906 in six
years. More than that, the Governor is opposed to any
further salary increases and to starting any new project of
public works until those under way are completed. Natu
rally the political heathen rage. This man would even end
that popular sport of joy-riding around the State in Stateowned cars, and he was at once met half way by his AdjutantGeneral, who cut $400,000 out of a budget of a million. Best
of all, the Governor calls for the immediate abolition of
compulsory military training for all boys of high school age.
This precious bit of Prussianism was passed during the
hysteria of the war and has been a fraud upon the tax
payer from the beginning, inasmuch as it could by no con
ceivable stretch of the truth be pictured as benefiting,
physically, the youth subjected to it, could not be enforced,
and from the military point of view was of no value what
ever. As one of the officers of the State Guard wrote to
the Herald, two hours of training a week without arms
taught nothing soldierly and simply filled the boys with dis
gust for the whole military business. Yet there was asked
for this farce for the next fiscal year no less than $607,480.
We venture to assert that if the Governor goes on as he has
begun he will find that there is not a single department in
which he cannot make drastic savings and that wherever
he saves he will find increased efficiency following in its
wakealso that his fame throughout the country will spread
with the rapidity of a prairie fire. Retrenchment is the most
popular policy of the day.
THOUSANDS of persons all over the world are engaged
in a battleoften a losing oneagainst starvation
and cold this winter. We think nothing of it. But when
three balloonists fight hunger and cold for four days, the
whole country thrills with the story. It is not that we are
brutes in one case and humanitarians in the other, nor
even that we have any snobbish preference for young naval
lieutenants, but merely that the sequence and character of
events in the finding of our plucky lost airmen dramatized
the story for us all. It is well so. Into the lives of us
steam-heated, fur-coated, overfed Americans it is good to
bring a reminder that all existence has been primarily a
struggle against hunger and the elements since the Great
Landlord dispossessed his first tenants from the Garden of
Eden. And when we can feel the hideousness of some of
our present civilization as we have felt the plight of the
lost balloonists, we shall rescue ourselves without the need
of a barking dog or a suspicious Indian. Long live melo
drama, with its power to stir us human clods with imagi
nation and understanding!
Jan. 19, 1921]
The Nation
REPRESENTATIVE JOHNSON'S bill for the exclusion

of all general immigration for a year, which the
House rushed through, is meeting in the Senate the opposi
tion that it merits. Predictions of an overwhelming inrush
of aliens this winter, attributed to Frederick A. Wallis,
Commissioner of Immigration at the Port of New York, had
much to do with getting the Johnson bill through the House,
but Mr. Wallis has since appeared in Washington to voice
his disapproval of the measure. The Italian Government,
moreover, has volunteered to refuse passports to its sub
jects until it learns from this country what and how many
immigrants it is ready to receive. As The Nation has
already said, nothing less than emergency conditions could
justify the Johnson Measure. These, it becomes contin
ually clearer, do not and are not likely to exist. The New
York Herald recently printed data from its European cor
respondents controverting prophecies of a great rush to
this country. The high cost of transportation in depreciated
European currency and lack of steamship facilities were
cited as adequate practical checks to emigration, regardless
of the number of persons who might want to leave their
homes. Moreover, a Berlin steamship agent has estimated
that the total steerage accommodations on all vessels leav
ing the eight chief ports of Northern Europe would provide
for only 350,000 persons in a year.
IF the Red Terror is to spread westward, let us at least
believe the spread due to the march of a criminal and
licentious soldiery. Such is the principle of the corre
spondents of our conservative press. Mr. Walter Duranty
informs the Times from Paris, first, that delegates from
all the Lettish communist centers met openly at Riga;
second, that the Lettish Government "dares take no action
and make no arrests," which, as he truly says, "speaks
volumes"; third, that of the 45,000 men whom Latvia has
under arms many are "contaminated by communism." But
since the innocent readers of the Times must not be per
mitted to think that a considerable body of the Letts have
become communists either through experience or reflec
tion, Mr. Duranty seeks to minimize his own facts and rep
resent the whole danger as coming from a Russian Soviet
army that is on the borders of Latvia and is largely com
posed of troops who "are ill-fed and eager for loot." Yet
this army, he says, includes many Lettish communists.
Thus we are to tremble at the thought of a communist
army, represented by eye-witnesses as almost dourly puri
tanical, joining forces with a powerful communist party
in a small and starving state. This is 'Bolshevist inva
sion," this is rude conquest and terror. It is a curious ex
ample of the type of thinking that can imagine no disagree
ment with its own principles that does not spring from
force or fraud.
SENATORIAL elections in France reveal very little of
the temper of French public opinion, for the senators
are elected indirectly by an electoral college composed of
municipal councilors, district councilors, departmental
councilors, and deputies, all elected long before the sena
torial elections, and more subject to official wire-pulling
than to the less clearly expressed shades of public feeling.
A third of the French Senate has just been balloted upon.
The outgoing senators were elected before the war ; the new
senators naturally reflect something of French post-war con
servatism. That the Socialists elected no senators was to be
71
expected; the system bars them; before the war, despite

their impressive general vote, they never had a representa
tive in the Senate. Rural discontent at the resumption
of diplomatic relations with the Vatican accounts for the
reduction of the avowed members of the "Right" party from
eight to three; the so-called Radicals, really a mildly pro
gressive party, lost nine seats but retained forty-three,
which, in view of the collapse of that party at the previous
elections, seems to indicate a revival of the anti-clerical feel
ing that gave it its dominant position before the war.
Premier Leygues's position remains as before, neither
strengthened nor weakened by the elections.
IT is impossible to view without some uneasiness the
cause of the sending of General Crowder to Cuba. Gen
eral Crowder has the confidence of the people both of Cuba
and of the United States, and by means of advice and a
little judicious pressure ought to be able to assist in un-'
kinking the political and financial tangle in which the island
is enmeshed, without the dispatch of troops and formal
intervention by this country. Affairs are undeniably in an
unhappy state. The drop in the price of sugar has brought
a financial panic, while the moratorium, recently extended
until February 1, is by some resented on the ground that
it keeps bankrupt business alive at the expense of sound
industry. In addition to the island's financial troubles
there are political difficulties. The result of the recent
election for President has not been officially announced.
It is said that Zayas, the coalition candidate, was elected,
but the friends of Gomez, the Liberal Party's aspirant,
charge that the result was obtained by fraud and intimi
dation on the part of the administration of President Menocal, and the Liberal Party recently requested the Govern
ment of the United States to supervise the approaching byelections upon which the main contest may hinge.
ALTHOUGH General Crowder will attempt in all sin
cerity to unkink the Cuban tangle, as he has ably
aided Cuba before, it is not to be forgotten that Taft, then
Secretary of War, went to the island with a similar purpose
in 1906, but events so shaped themselves that the visit re
sulted in American occupation of the republic for the next
three years. There are interests both here and in Cuba,
of course, that are working for another intervention, an
excuse for which is easy to find under the so-called Piatt
Amendment. This was incorporated in the treaty we made
with Cuba upon our withdrawal from the island four years
after the Spanish-American War. It reads:
That the Government of Cuba consents that the United States
may exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of
Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government ade
quate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty,
and for discharging the obligations with respect to Cuba im
posed by the Treaty of Paris, now to be assumed and under
taken by the Government of Cuba.
THE Chinese famine grows worse so rapidly that the
few efforts being made to fight it seem pitifully inade
quate. Even the famous famine of 1878 was less devas
tating, as a crop had been harvested before the drought
began. The present famine follows two years of scanty
rainfall and crop failures. One thousand deaths from
starvation daily are reported in the Pekin district alone,
while in thirty-one counties in the province of Shantung,
where two great floods washed away the crops, 3,827,000
72
The Nation
people are wholly destitute. The funds so far collected to

prevent great sections of China from being converted into
a vast graveyard are insignificanta few million dollars
at mostand while it is reported that the Japanese Gov
ernment has offered 500,000 bushels of rice for relief pur
poses it is also charged that Japanese officials and spies
have interfered with the efforts of the American Red Cross
to get supplies into the suffering districts of Shantung.
The White Terror of starvation is the enemy of all nations
and to allow jealousy and intrigue to interfere with the
war against it would be an international crime. Every
country in the world should send money and food to save
the people of China from the horror of famine.
THE world is so full of a number of things
I'm sure we should all be as happy as kings.
For instance, there is the news that a French vicomte, em
ployed in a London department store, by patient industry
and unremitting application to his duties has risen from his
modest station like the apprentice of the old tradition and is
now to marry the merchant's daughter. Some belted earl,
no doubt, who entered the shop the same day, with the same
prospects and advantages, has trifled away his time with the
ponies and the lasses of the music halls, and now sees his
great chance gone. Hogarth never dies. Then there is the
publisher of Topeka, Kansas, who has retired to his com
fortable vault in the nearest cemetery with such a passion
for Topeka journalism that he has ordered a newspaper of
the place to be delivered at his tomb for twenty years. Re
membering the papers that accumulate around suburban
doorsteps in one vacant summer, we speculate and shudder.
As the Kansas winds blow through that cemetery, what
sheeted ghosts will not rise and drift down the cedarn alleys !
In the bailiwick of Uncle Joe Cannon a pious wife is hungerstriking upon her husband to make him leave his job and
turn evangelist. She has already fasted forty days and yet
his heart is still, like the heart of Captain Hook, "cold, quite
cold." And finally, in Kansas City a woman one Sunday
evening recently killed a man, swept his body under the bed,
and did not recall the deed or him till the Tuesday follow
ing. What next, we pray?
THE artistic life of America is being enriched by several
schools which are more than places for the mere teach
ing of a given technique. They are centers from which
there radiates an atmosphere, a mood, an attitude finely
calculated to soften the rigidness of our artistic perceptions,
and to furnish something of that background against which
the creative life must be lived. Chief of these schools is
that conducted for the arts of the theater by Yvette Guilbert.
Definite things are definitely taught here; precisely as they
are in our ordinary schools and colleges. But they are
taught in a mood of creation and vigor, and under the guid
ance of a commanding personalityrich, flexible, and pene
tratingly intelligent. As the students of the medieval uni
versities wandered from city to city to become disciples of
famous and inspiring masters, thus are her pupils drawn to
Mme. Guilbert. Her example should go beyond her special
sphere and be fruitful to those institutions of ours where
the relation of creative master and impassioned disciple is
a most vivid need. Professors from our colleges, whatever
their specialties, could profitably watch the Guilbert School
for the relation between teacher and pupil without which
learning is so often sterile and wearisome.
[Vol. 112, No. 2898
Mr. Harding for Simplicity

MR. HARDING deserves all praise for his appeal to
Senator Knox and Mr. Edward B. McLean asking
that all elaborate plans for his inauguration be abandoned.
It is in the best American spirit that he writes to Senator
Knox: "Please convey to your committee my sincere wish
for the simplest inaugural program consistent with the
actual requirements in taking the oath of office and the
utterance of a befitting address. I very respectfully request
that Congress will not appropriate and your committee will
not expend any fund whatever." He asks this in order that
"we shall be joint participants in an example of economy as
well as simplicity." So the inaugural ball is to be abandoned
and the parade cut to troops in the District of Columbia.
This is precisely as it should be. The dignity and solemnity
of an inaugural are not enhanced by lavish display or by
that extraordinary spectacle of ostentation, vulgarity, and
curiosity-seeking which goes by the name of the inaugural
ball. Jeffersonian simplicity, so much sneered at, is the true
ideal for an American President. Hence, Mr. Harding
serves his country well when he places a ban upon a spec
tacle the chief purpose of which in the eyes of most Washingtonians is to draw as large a money-spending crowd as
possible. To Senator Borah, too, the thanks of the country
are due for having blocked the appropriation in the Senate.
Whatever else may be said of Mr. Harding, however happy
or unhappy, useful or worthless his administration may be
come, no one can deny that in some respects it will take us
back to American methods of government. It will be a
boon to have the historic tradition of an accessible Presi
dent restored, one who will receive visitors who have some
thing to say and will know how to listen to them without
having closed his mind to them in advance because of the
superiority of his intellect. We wish Mr. Harding had
a clear-cut mind and could use language that would leave
no one in doubt as to how he feels. But it is something to
have the prospect of a man in the White House who will be
in touch with the people, who will not deny, because of shy
ness, or egotism, or for any other reason, the right of
petition to those who have a cause to present.
We trust that Mr. Harding will go further in the path of
economy and that we shall see the removal of the armed
guards at the White House and the abolition of all uniforms
within its doors. He has only to look around after he enters
it to see plenty of opportunities for stopping waste and
"honest graft." He will, we trust, find some other employ
ment for a medical admiral than personal service. We have
never been able to see any reason whatever why without
warrant in law the navy should waste hundreds of thousands
of dollars in maintaining three yachts for the President and
the members of Congress who desire to go junketing from
time to time. Mr. Harding has the correct American instinct
about this: that it is the duty of the President to set an
example and the greater the simplicity of the President and
the easier the access to him, the more the office will be truly
enhanced. Let us not forget that the United States is after
all a republic, devoted by all its doctrine and history to a
policy of plainness in government. Nor let us forget that
our national mistakes have been connected with departures
from the plain path of republican simplicity, virtue, power.
Some of our citizens may turn foolishly Byzantine, but the
government ought to help the old faith.
The Nation
Jan. 19, 1921]
The
Supreme
THE International Association of Machinists, the third

largest union in the United States, failed to secure a
satisfactory agreement with the Duplex Printing Press Com
pany. It therefore decided to have nothing to do with the
products of that company. When a printer bought a Duplex
press, the machinists would refuse to set it up. Against
this practice a court issued an injunction. The machin
ists' boycott injured the business of the Duplex Company,
but it was not particularly injurious to the people in
general. Nevertheless the Supreme Court last week up
held the injunction, deciding that such a "secondary boy
cott"more accurately described in the language of labor
as a sympathetic strikeis illegal. Now the Bethlehem
Steel Company has the same hostility for all unions that
the machinists' union has for anti-union manufacturers.
Therefore it will not sell steel to contractors in New York
and Philadelphia who do not agree to operate under the
open shop. The President of the Bethlehem Company, Mr.
Grace, so testified before the Lockwood Committee. A
prominent contractor said, under oath, that this practice
interferes with housing construction and makes the cost
of steel erection appreciably higher. It not only tends to
drive the unions out of existence, but it gravely injures
the public. Yet no injunction has been issued against it.
What unions may not do even in a small way, large corpora
tions may apparently do freely on a grand scale.
The Duplex Printing Press decision is a highly signifi
cant decision, but not simply because it outlaws the sec
ondary boycott. This weapon has not recently played an
important part in the unions' tactics, and though the possi
bilities of its development are large, it is not indispensable
to their existence. It has frequently been condemned in
other decisions, and although in this case the Supreme Court
has reversed the Circuit and District Courts, the decision
has not invalidated any fully won right of labor. The case
is significant rather because it is a clear illustration that
unions have little security in the law of the United States.
Those, like Mr. Gompers, who expected that the Clayton
Amendment to the Sherman Act would provide such secur
ity were unduly optimistic. After the Danbury Hatters
had been fined $250,000 in 1908 for "conspiracy in re
straint of trade," labor secured the passage of the Clayton
bill, which provided that the anti-trust laws should not be
construed to forbid the existence of labor organizations,
or to restrain them from striving for their "legitimate
objects." It is that phrase "legitimate objects" which is
the gate in the back fence. For it allows the court to decide
as before just what the legitimate objects of a union may
be, and thus permits the whole cumbrous discussion of
conspiracies, motives, and rights, locked out by the front
door, to steal in at the rear. If the Court may decide that
the secondary boycott is not a legitimate aim of a union,
it may by similar reasoning forbid almost any other union
practice. It might even, like Judge Gary, deny unions all
opportunity to function, while generously admitting their
technical right to exist.
There have been, in general, three courses of reasoning
underlying decisions hostile to unions. One is the doctrine
of conspiracy, which makes it illegal for a combination to
do things which might be done without harm by an indi
vidual. In deciding what things it is harmful for a com
Court
73
vs.
Labor
bination to do, the question of whether its motive is "mali

cious" plays a large part. Such reasoning makes the union
and the employer unequal before the law.
While
the union, as a combination, has to submit to the analysis of
its motivesa highly metaphysical affairthe firm or cor
poration is legally an individual and hence is not subject to
such scrutiny. This is why the machinists may not wilfully
injure the business of an employer, while the Bethlehem
Steel Company may act as maliciously as it pleases toward
unions. But the absurdity of trying to analyze motives has
led to the second course of reasoning, which is based on
the doctrine of natural rights. It is held that the employer
has a right to conduct his business as he sees fit. Inten
tional interference with this right on the part of a union
is said to be malicious, unless this interference results from
the right of the union members to the reasonable pursuit of
their own advantage. Industrial warfare is seen as a con
flict of rights. Here again is a cloud of abstractions, in
which the bias of the court is likely to be the deciding factor.
The third theory places emphasis on the methods employed
by unions, largely disregarding the nature of the aims them
selves. In this kind of discussion such words as "coercion"
and "intimidation" are freely used and freely defined. In
timidation and coercion may be threats and use of physical
force, in which case they are clearly illegal, or they may be
threats and use of economic or even moral force, in which
case the bias of the judge is allowed free play.
In these circumstances, it is to be expected that judges
will disagree largely according to their general views as to
unions. As Justice Holmes has contended, "the true grounds
of decisions are considerations of policy and of social ad
vantage, and it is vain to suppose that solutions can be
attained merely by logic and the general propositions of
law which nobody disputes." The majority of the Supreme
Court in the Adair case, the Coppage case, the Hitchman
Coal and Coke case, and others has decided adversely to
the unions, while a minority fluctuating from two to four,
and staunchly led by Justices Holmes and Brandeis, has
dissented because it has conceded a higher social value to
organized labor. We may expect that the habitual splitting
of the court in such cases will continue, because it repre
sents a real difference in attitude toward public policy rather
than a divergence in legal reasoning.
When the Taff-Vale decision in England threatened to
cripple the unions, they secured the enactment of the Trade
Disputes act of 1906, which registered the will of the nation
to make a place for organizations of labor and to put them
on an equal footing with employers. It left no room for
the metaphysical speculation of the American labor cases.
Both unions and employers' associations are clearly distin
guished from combinations to control prices, and are em
powered to take any action in furtherance of a trade dis
pute which can lawfully be taken by an individual. Thus
the law of conspiracy is expressly removed from the realm
of industrial warfare. The boundaries between lawful and
unlawful threats and coercion are clearly defined, so that
union members may know exactly what they may do and
may not do. And also, if an individual striker breaks the
law, he may be punished or sued, but his fault cannot be
used to destroy the union or to penalize its members with
heavy damages, as in the United States.
[Vol. 112, No. 2898
74
Railways
and
WE are not much given nowadays to associating rail

ways and romance. The more usual connection is
railways and rates. But it was not always so. Railway
building in the United States in the past century was a
glorious page of romance, and it is still such in the more
remote regions of the world, where the railway reveals new
wonders and increases, as it goes, the area and variety of
the earth. For to most of us this planet consists not of
what is, but only of that which has been made easily
accessible. Consider the romance of the completion of the
first transcontinental railway in the United States! Few
other events in our history have equaled it; but latterly our
railway-building has appealed less to the imagination and
more to the pocketbook. The great areas have been opened
up; we have been thrown back on double-tracking existing
routes and connecting established lines.
Not so in the more remote regions of the earth, for there
romance still consorts with railways. Who can think of the
Cape to Cairo line and not be thrilled by the picture it
throws upon imagination's screen, of wildernesses con
quered, of vastnesses thrown open where but yesterday
Livingstones toiled only to disappear? And the All-America
line from Texas to the Argentine? Is that merely a dream?
Railways under construction in the zones of romance have
no publicity agents, but from Canada the other day came
the news that a line might soon be completed opening up
that vast and frigid area of water that reaches down from
the ArcticHudson Bay. The terminal is Port Nelson, on
the southwest shore; the route itself will give a thrill not
only to the globe-trotter; the wheat grower of Canada's
Northwest eagerly awaits its going in to his service. From
Saskatoon, in the Saskatchewan wheat belt, the distance to
Liverpool by Port Nelson will be 697 miles by rail and 2,966
by sea. The present route by Montreal is 1,489 miles by
rail and 3,359 by sea. Thus the new route will save 1,185
miles and reduce the land haulage by one half. If kept
open for three months in the year, it is estimated that
30,000,000 bushels of grain can be sent to Europe at a
saving of fifteen cents a bushel in freight.
But this is getting back to rates. Let us instead jump
to South America's second transcontinental railway. Today
there is one iron link between the Atlantic and the Pacific
the trans-Andean line from Buenos Aires to Valparaiso
which on account of the narrow gauge and the steep climb
over the mountains has proved expensive and less practi
cable than had been hoped. The new route, for which con
tracts have been let, save for one gap, will unite the rich
provinces of northern Argentina with the Bolivian railway
system. The missing link is only 128 miles, between La
Quiaca, Argentina, and Atocha, Bolivia. Of this, 57 miles
is provided for in the recent contract. The rest will come
soon, and then the llama, the ox cart, and the mule will give
way to the express train from Buenos Aires to La Pax.
Thus does South America repeat our own railroad history;
may it profit by our mistakes!
But not even in the Andes can the romance of railroad
pioneering equal our own in the last century. No one who
was not intimately connected with that can ever appreciate
what it meant and how intense the lure for all who partici
pated, from the humblest rodman to the most powerful
financier in Wall Street. For there was not only the joy
Romance
of pioneering, but the actual thrill of discovery, not merely

the conquest of the wilderness, but the actual revealing of
the natural resources hidden by the forests and the un
touched lands. The very land grants themselves smacked
of all the excitement of gambling, for no one could foretell
what the alternating sections, so lavishly bestowed by the
Government, actually contained. Again, the land grants
were usually limited in period and so it became a race for
great stakes against time and the expiration of the grant.
We know of one Western Union telegram of less than a
dozen words which compressed within it the victory of a
generation of effort, of man over nature, a triumph bought
at a cost of hundreds of lives and endless treasure. In an
ugly frame it still hangs upon a certain wall and reads
"Tracks east and west connected through at three p.m. to
day. Chief Engineer." By it was won the grant which to
day seems so great a waste of the people's resources. Yet
without it the railroad could never have succeeded, for those
were days when there were from 75 to 159 miles between
stations surrounded by a dozen huts; when the coolies who
laid the rails were guarded by the blue uniforms of the regu
lars of the seventies, more than one of whom perished at the
Indians' hands that the Union Pacific, or the Central, or
the Northern Pacific might come into being.
Those who beheld the last spike driven beheld romance;
those like James Bryce who crossed the continent upon a
first through train and listened to more miles of speeches
than there were stations on the road, all telling of new
empires unleashed, of great plains soon to blossom with the
golden miles of corn and wheat to feed the peoples of all the
earth. No thought of any high cost of living then; only
prophecies of the incredible cheapness with which wheat,
which then went under bellying sails from Oregon to Liver
pool, would soon be placed on those docks via Duluth or
New York. King Cotton? It was King Wheat who ruled
then and made men dream visions of a world conquered by
Minnesota and Dakota. Romance? Romance? Every rail
sang it then; every turning wheel hummed it; every mile
lived it and visioned it. And the perishing pictured it; the
buffalo, the antelope, the deer of startled, affrighted gaze,
and, among humans, the explorer, the pony mail rider, the
Concord stage-driverand then the cheated, defrauded
owners of it all, the only one hundred per cent Americans,
the Indians themselves, whose doom the transcontinental
locomotive spelled.
No, they may cross the Andes all they like, penetrate to
Hudson Bay or the Arctic Ocean itself and strike hands
with romance all the way; never will there be as much
romance to the mile again as stalked our continental rail
way builders. There was Major General Grenville M. Dodge,
for instance. He brought a good bit of his army corps right
out of the South to doff the uniforms of civil war and don
the garb of trackbuilders along the Union Pacific and lay
new rails in hostile territory much as they had in the South.
The romance of the war to free the slave still cast its glamor
over them; the spell of unconquered desert and primeval
forest and trackless plain came on top of that. Romance?
The whole American world was young then and thrilled
hourly with the boundless opportunity before him who
dared to dare. Fifty years ago is it? Nay, a thousand;
the Magna Charta barons seem as near.
Jan. 19, 1921]
The Nation
75
Passports Passe
PASSPORTS, like poison gas and Palmerism, were known
even before the war, but owe their general popularity
and wide application to that greatest of educational insti
tutions. And, like poison gas and Palmerism, their sur
vival in general usage is an anomaly. It is high time that
they were put in their proper place. In the good old ante
bellum days a passport was a luxury, secured only by fas
tidious old ladies who liked their important official appear
ance, or by nice young men who needed them to enroll as
students in foreign universities. The ordinary wanderer
in Europe no more thought of securing a passport for the
journey than did a Niagara Falls tourist crossing to the
Canadian side.
In wartime there may have been a certain justification
for ticketing every entry and departure from the land of
the free, and for checking every traveler who sought to cross
the international boundary-lines in Europe. But in these
days of howling peace, there are too many frontiers, and the
passport business has become something like the stamp
business in certain of the lesser republicsmerely a source
of annoyance to those using them and of revenue to those
issuing them. A vast army of able-bodied young men and
women is employed in a sort of useless card-cataloguing of
the mobile population of the world, and the passport photog
raphers have founded a new and terrible industry.
If passport fees were honestly imposed as a form of tax,
passports being handed out without question to those who
had the price, there might be some excuse for them. The
tax would for the most part fall most heavily upon those
best able to pay itthe commercial traveler and the tourist.
The immigrant, poor as he is, would have to bear his share,
but that would be no more unjust than is the distribution
of most forms of taxation. But as things are, the passport
system is double-faced: it is used complacently as a source
of income, but it is essentially a form of censorship upon
the incomings and outgoings of citizens, and utterly re
pugnant to the freedom of movement which has been one
of the great blessings of the post-feudal period. It is used
to discriminate politically: our Government sometimes re
fuses passports to labor men and assumed radicals, and no
man can compel it to explain its idiosyncracies ; the British
Government refuses passports to a group of citizens who
wish to confer with British citizens about the Irish ques
tion. All that is necessary is for a government to dislike
a man's views, and it may bar him, or refuse to let him
travel. This is the old Prussian police system, and it is
time it was done away with.
For its own ends the system is a failure. Moderate men
of mildly objectionable views can be and are excluded from
travel ; extremists travel anyway. The men whom the gov
ernments really care most to bar, succeed by some under
ground route in going where they will. Communists and
Irishmen find hidden routes to all parts of the earth.
De Valera comes and goes, when and where he will. The
German Communist, Clara Zetkin, spent a day in Paris,
then went to Tours and made her speech to the French
Socialists despite the French Government's refusal to give
her a passport. The delegates to the Moscow International
asked no permission of their governments before they set
sail. No, the system is useless; it fails of its own purpose.
Let us return to peace-time ways.
Fit for Boys

THE philosopher must look with what grace he can upon
the process by which the uglier deeds of a nation are
transmogrified at the hands of the popular romancers. Con
sider, for instance, a recent book about our exploits in the
Caribbean"The Marines Have Landed" (Penn) written
for boys by Lieutenant Colonel Giles Bishop, Jr., of the
Marine Corps. The author knows the Corps and he runs
briskly through a string of clattering adventures which have
sufficient superficial accuracy. But on almost every moral
point he deceives his young readers by that half-truth which
is worse than no truth at all. His marines are fine, manly
youths who go ashore to help the Dominicans in the simple
American way which consists of regarding the natives of
Caribbean islands as "niggers," driving them hither and
thither by the exercise of superior force, and shooting all
who show signs of being stubborn in behalf of their rights.
In the book this is easy to justify, since these Dominicans
are merely dirty bandits whom it is made almost an act of
sanitation to exterminate. Reading the tale the blood of
red-blooded American boys will presumably grow redder still.
Let us make the boys' books of a nation and we care not
a rap who makes its laws or its songs either. Boyhood is
the susceptible age of the race. The Jesuits knew that.
The popular romancers, without knowing it so well, or see
ing all the bearings of the matter, still act upon it with
effective skill. In the long run a people perhaps comes
nearer to believing what its boys are taught about its his
tory and achievements than to believing anything else. All
the better reason then, when it comes to recording a na
tion's wars, why they should not be set forth in the simple
tribal terms to which boys naturally respond. It is bad
enough to make out that wars are pretty picnics, with natty
uniforms and prancing horses and shining weapons and
encouraging flags. It is worse to make out that they are all
honorable conflicts between one's snow-white countrymen
and the sin-black foe. So the Israelite boys regarded the
Amalekites ; and the Greek boys the Trojans ; and the Roman
boys the Carthaginians; and the medieval boys the Sara
cens; and the English boys, during hundreds of years, the
French ; so American boys have long regarded the English ;
and so now doubtless the boys of half the world will long
regard the Germans. When will it be time to put away
these childish things?
That they are not a necessary accompaniment of juvenile
fiction appears from Walter A. Dyer's "Sons of Liberty"
(Holt), an admirable version of the career of Paul Revere
from his childhood to the year of the Declaration of Inde
pendence. The plot is conventional and Samuel Adams rather
too heroic a figure to be true, but the history behind the
record is unusually sound. Revere and his associates, says
Mr. Dyer, "were, in a measure, the dangerous radicals, the
Reds of that day, and were looked upon as such by the Tory
reactionaries." Mr. Dyer even uses the dread word prole
tariat to apply to the classes who furnished the sinews of
the Revolution. His Paul Revere is not only a fleet noc
turnal horseman but a skilled workman, who understands
the interests of his class and contends for them in a spirit
not noticeably unlike that of William Z. Foster. At the
same time, the Boston mob that wrecked the houses of
Tories comes in for unsparing censure. That is to say, Mr.
Dyer knows the truth and uses it.
The Nation
76
The
First Congress of the
[Vol. 112, No. 2898
League
By ROBERT DELL
Geneva, December 21, 1920
THE Assembly of the League of Nations came to an end
three days ago with a rather too carefully rehearsed
oratorical effort by its president, M. Hymans, and a simple
straightforward speech from M. Motta, President of the
Swiss Confederation, who took the opportunity to repeat the
appeal for international reconciliation and the admission of
Germany into the League, which seemed not to be greatly
appreciated by the French delegation. I am told that more
interest has been taken in the proceedings of the Assembly
in America than in most European countries, where, to tell
the truth, the public has been rather indifferent. Americans
will naturally wish to know what the Assembly has done to
prevent war or make it more difficult, for that was the chief
purpose for which the League was founded. The answer is
unfortunately only too easy: it has done nothing. For one
can hardly count the institution of a Court of International
Justice whose judgments will not be binding as a solid con
tribution to the end in view. It differs from the Hague
arbitration tribunal only in the fact that it is permanent.
But although the Assembly has done nothing effective to
prevent war, it has not been entirely useless. The mere fact
that forty-two nations have been represented at an inter
national gathering, not only by diplomats meeting in secret
conclave, but by men for the most part not professional dip
lomats meeting in public, is in itself a step forward. Such
a gathering would have been impossible seven years ago.
And never before have Europe, Asia, and Latin America
been brought into such close contact. Latin America is
almost unknown to the great majority of Europeans, who
imagine that it consists entirely of countries in a state of
chronic revolution and less than half civilized. Some of the
Latin-American delegates have shown themselves far more
in touch with international affairs than many of the Euro
peans. Senor Pueyrredon is a man of marked ability and
force of character, who at once took a prominent place in
the Assembly, which elected him one of its vice-presidents.
I gathered from American visitors that Haiti is not re
garded with very great respect in the United States. If you
have many men in your politics as well-informed, capable,
and enlightened as M. Frederic Doret, I congratulate you.
We have not many in Europe. He is colored, of course, but
I would rather be governed by him than by most of the
statesmen now in power in Europe. A great many of the
white delegates to the Assembly were very much his in
feriors in every way.
But perhaps the outstanding phenomenon of the Assembly
was the triumph of Asia. The Chinese and Japanese dele
gations were second to none and superior to most in culture,
in knowledge, in ability. Mr. Wellington Koo was quite one
of the ablest men in the whole Assembly. I often wondered
what these highly cultured representatives of an ancient and
splendid civilization thought of the crude, primitive, halfcivilized Australians and New Zealanders. The Yellow Peril
must be something like the Jewish Perilthe danger that a
more quick-witted and instructed race will cut the others
out. I rejoice at the election of China on the Council of the
League, for the world has much to learn from her. Chinese
policy in the Assembly was most enlightened, and her influ
ence will be on the side of peace and international reconcilia

tion. The Persian delegation had also an enlightened policy,
and M. Zoka ed Dowleh, in particular, more than once inter
vened happily in the debates. The Japanese were reticent.
They concentrated on the Council, from which they failed to
obtain their two principal desiresracial equality and the
"open door" in the mandatory territories. But the question
of racial equality will have to be faced by the League and
by the European races. Viscount Ishii announced the deter
mination of Japan to raise the question next September in
the Assembly. The ultimate choice will be between concilia
tion and war. Asia will not consent to anything less than
equality with the rest of the world, especially now that she
has two out of the eight members of the Council.
A large part of the time of the Assembly was spent in
settling its rules of procedure, perfecting its organization,
and defining its relation to the Council. Apart from that
the only thing that it achieved which is likely to be valuable
was the creation of the so-called "technical organizations"
the standing committees which, between now and next Sep
tember, are to deal, respectively, with economic and financial
questions, with transport and communications, and with
health. This, of course, is promise rather than performance.
The organizations can do much ; they may do little or noth
ing.
One of the greatest blunders committed was the postpone
ment until the next session of all the proposed amendments
to the Covenant, in deference to the wishes of Great Britain
and France. France is particularly afraid of any amend
ments to the Covenant, for that document is an integral part
of the Treaty of Versailles. Mr. Balfour used the fact as an
argument against considering any amendments. M. Leon
Bourgeois went further, and roundly declared that the
League could not do anything that would involve an amend
ment of the treaty. The Covenant itself justifies no such
thesis. Article XXVI puts no limit on the power of the
League to amend its own charter, but amendments have to
be agreed to by all the members of the Council and a major
ity of the Assembly, so that France can veto any or all. The
theses of Mr. Balfour and M. Bourgeois met with immediate
protests. It was clear that the majority was against them.
Their position in this matter was typical of the consistent
policy of Great Britain and France during the session. The
Covenant is so framed as to give all the real power in the
League to the Council, on which the five Principal Allied and
Associated Powers are to be permanently represented. Its
framers intended the Assembly to do nothing but talk; it
was to be an occasion for the representatives of the inferior
countries to let off steam and to give themselves the illusion
that they had a real voice in the direction of the League.
The aim of British and French policy at Geneva was to keep
the Assembly in its place and maintain the domination of the
great Powers in the League. Mr. Balfour, in a moment of
irritation, let the cat out of the bag when the report on man
dates, presented by his cousin, Lord Robert Cecil, was being
discussed. In what Lord Robert afterward described as
"somewhat harsh language" Mr. Balfour in effect told the
Assembly to mind its own business and said that the Council
would do as it pleased. Incidentally he objected to the view
Jan. 19, 1921]
The Nation
"that the mandatory Power should have all the responsibility

and all the trouble and none of the profit"a precious
admission of the hypocrisy of the "mandate" system. And
he made an unmistakable threat when he spoke of a possible
conflict between the Council and the Assembly, by which the
future of the League would be "profoundly imperiled." That
is to say, unless Great Britain and France can exploit the
League for their own purposes, they will smash it.
It was a pity that the Argentine delegate, Sr. Pueyrredon,
retired from the Assembly without first putting up a fight,
but he was right in holding that the first thing to be done
was to settle the constitution of the League. The Covenant
was not framed by the members of the League, but by Mr.
Wilson, Mr. Lloyd George, and M. Clemenceau. It should
have been regarded as provisional. The fact that the agenda
of the Assembly included the consideration of amendments
to the Covenant suggested that the Council at least admitted
the right of the members to be consulted. The Covenant in
its present form paralyzes the League. What can be expected
of a body that can make no decision, except in one or two
specified cases, unless it is unanimous? The requirement of
unanimity enabled the British Empire, France, and Japan to
override all the rest of the League on one important matter
and led to the postponement of every important question. This
grotesque provision must go, and so must the predominance
of the Council As the Argentine delegation held, the Coun
cil should be an executive entirely elected by the Assembly,
and the latter should be the effective organ of the League.
That would involve a change in the system of voting. At
present the delegation of each state, however small it may
be, has one vote and no more in the Assembly. But it is as
unjust to give Haiti or Luxemburg the same voice in the
Assembly as the United States as it would be to give a
village the same representation in Congress as the city of
New York. States should have at least one vote, and an addi
tional number proportional to their population, with perhaps
a certain maximumsay five or six. That means, of course,
a large number of votes for China, for example, but the pros
pect has no terrors for me.
Further, as the Argentine delegation proposed, the League
must cease to regard itself as a club and it should be made
impossible to exclude any nation from it except by its own
will. Albania was admitted into the League and Georgia
excluded from it, simply because that course suited the policy
of certain Powers. It was admitted that Georgia and the
Baltic states fulfilled all the conditions of admission as de
fined by the Covenant, but M. Viviani appealed to the cow
ardice of the delegates by holding up before them the bogy
of Article X and warning them that they might have to
defend the states in question from attack. Georgia was
indeed attacked by General Denikin, and Lithuania by Po
land, the attackers in both cases being subsidized by the
Government that M. Viviani represented! The real motive
of his opposition was revealed by M. Viviani's remark that
the Assembly must not prejudice the future of Russia, or, in
plain English, of the Russian reactionaries.
France, too, threatened to leave the League if Germany
were admitted into it. And Germany was excluded, because
the British Government bartered the exclusion in order to
get French support for other propositions, particularly for
opposition to any sort of international economic arrange
ment. Had Great Britain supported the admission of Ger
many, France would never have dared to run the risk of
being isolated in Europe, for she would have had no support
except from Belgium, Greece, Poland, Rumania, and possibly
77
Czecho-Slovakia. The Greek, Polish, and Rumanian delega

tions were the faithful satellites of the French in the Assem
bly ; the Greek delegation, of course, representing M. Venizelos. Belgium by no means always voted with France; the
Belgian Government instructed its delegates to vote for giv
ing obligatory jurisdiction to the Court of International Jus
tice, to which France was opposed. In the election of nonpermanent members of the Council France ran Rumania
against China, and Rumania got seven votes. France was
supported by only six delegations in her opposition to the
motion asking governments not to increase their armaments
for two years ; they included Brazil and Chile.
The views of the Argentine delegation about the Covenant
were undoubtedly shared by the majority of the Assembly.
One of the most interesting phenomena was the development
of a consciousness of international solidarity, and the in
stinctive tendency of the Assembly to regard itself as the
sovereign organ of the League. But the British Empire
ultimately dominated the Assembly, as in fact it dominates
the Council. This was not the necessary consequence of the
separate representation of the British Dominions, whose
delegations took a very independent line, especially that of
South Africa, which Lord Robert Cecil represented with Sir
Reginald Blankenberg. Lord Robert was perhaps the most
prominent figure in the Assembly; he intervened on every
question, but no other delegate had so much initiative and
few had as much courage. On the whole he was a progres
sive force, but he sometimes unexpectedly gave way. Sepa
rate representation of India was indefensible and in fact a
breach of the Covenant, for India is not a "fully self-gov
erning state, dominion, or colony," nor had the government
official, the tame Maharajah, and the very governmental
Indian politician who formed the delegation any claim to
speak on behalf of the Indian people.
The Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand delegations
were among the most backward in the Assembly. They
evidently had a sincere desire for peace, but they were des
titute of international spirit and ignorant of international
affairs. Their point of view was intensely and narrowly
nationalist and their ideal seemed to be a self-contained,
protectionist British Empire, which would lead inevitably
to war, for the rest of the world would sooner or later be
obliged to combine against it. They were unpopular in the
Assembly and contributed greatly to the general unpopu
larity of the British Empire. There are rocks ahead if and
when there is a change of government in England, for noth
ing could be more alien from liberal and labor opinion in
England than the point of view of the Dominions, always
excepting South Africa. The Dominion delegates believed
themselves to be very much ahead of the "old world." To
me they seemed about a century behind it. Their opposition
to measures for the protection of racial minorities was a
case in point. Their ideal, they said, was the absorption
of racial minorities and their transformation into hundred
per cent Canadians or Australians.
The protection of
racial minorities is, of course, an interference with national
sovereignty. But as the Belgian delegate, M. La Fontaine,
said in the debate on the Court of International Justice,
national sovereignty means the right to make war and that
is just what we have to get rid of.
The question of giving obligatory jurisdiction to the
Court was an acid test. The British Empire was solid
against iteven Lord Robert Cecil was on the wrong side
and was supported by France, Japan, and Greece. All the
rest of the Assembly was in favor of it. The matter was
78
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2898
settled in committee, and the majority made a great mis

take in not fighting it out in the Assembly. Although
unanimity was necessary for action, the moral effect of an
Coal's Black Record
overwhelming majority voting for obligatory jurisdiction
By GEORGE SOULE
would have been considerable. On this matter England and
France have gone back, for they advocated a tribunal with
MOST people know very little about the coal industry
obligatory jurisdiction against Germany at The Hague in
except that it is the perpetual bad boy of the American
1907, when M. Bourgeois was one of the French delegates!
industrial family. It is always getting us into outlandish
The failure of the Assembly to deal with the economic
trouble of some kind or other. There are shortages which
question was also due to the non possumus of the British
nearly close down the railroads and freeze us out in zero
Empire, supported by France. This was the greatest failure
weather. Prices mount at the most inconvenient times to
of all. A great part of Europe is slowly starving to death
prohibitive figures. There are strikes which cause both
and the whole world is faced with the prospect of famine
expense and wasted wrath ; first we condemn the miners for
and final economic disaster, yet the matter has not even been
their impudence in demanding a thirty-hour week, and then
discussed in the Assembly, although it was mentioned in one
we discover that the miners are actually asking for longer
of the general debates. The Italians did their best to get
hours than they had been permitted to work, on the average,
the matter considered. They wanted international control
throughout the year. We are told that some coal companies
and rationing of raw materials, or at least the removal of
made
war profits running into the thousands per cent, and
all restrictions on their exportation. The British policy of*
yet
the
miners cannot be paid a subsistence income. We
selling coal at a comparatively low price to the home con
hear
of
feuds and dispossessions and murders in the war
sumer at the expense of the foreign consumer is inflicting
of
the
operators
against the union in West Virginiaand
grievous injury on Italy and Switzerland. In Geneva coal
such things have been going on for years.
costs 300 francs (about $50 at the present rate of exchange)
Now, listening to the investigation of the Calder Com
a ton. Great Britain, however, refused to hear of any sort
mittee,
we discover that high prices have been boosted by
of international economic arrangement. We shall have to
four
or
five unnecessary "brokers" and middlemen between
come to universal free trade if we wish to save the world
producer and consumer. We discover that the War Depart
from ruin and to secure permanent peace. Some day the
ment appointed as its purchasing agent a large operator who
imposition of import duties by any state will be regarded as
bought
coal from his own mines at more than twice the cost
what it isa declaration of economic warand treated ac
of
production.
We discover that as a result of a threatened
cordingly.
bituminous
shortage
in some localities the Interstate Com
On the question of armaments the Dominions were op
merce Commission authorized the issuance of priority orders
posed to Great Britain and were keenly desirous that meas
for coal shipments, specifying that in carrying out those
ures should be taken to limit them. But Great Britain,
orders
contracts previously signed might be broken. Then
France, and Japan blocked the way. France would not
we
find
that subordinate transportation officials forged and
even support a mere pious hope that armaments would not
padded
the
priority orders, accepting bribes for doing so, so
be increased. In this matter the Assembly has done nothing
that coal might be diverted to speculators and contracts
and could not do anything. It passed some excellent recom
favorable to the purchasers might be invalidated. These
mendations in regard to mandated territories, but the Coun
measures
having been taken to deal with the "shortage," we
cil will take no notice of them and they will likely remain
discover
that
up to November 6, 1920, 46,000,000 tons more
ineffective.
coal had been mined in the United States than in the cor
So the Assembly avoided division only by postponing the
responding period of 1919. We read that in Scranton, Pa.,
difficult problems. But they cannot be postponed indef
the heart of the anthracite district, anthracite is so scarce
initely. Next September will show whether the League can
that in some households there is actual suffering. And at
hold together or not, for then will be fought out the strug
length we get some measure of the former profiteering by
gle for supremacy between the Assembly and the Council.
seeing coal fall. Inside of a few weeks the price of export
It will in effect be a fight for the deliverance of the League
coal fell from about $14.50 at the mine to about $3.50.
from British domination. Italy seems likely to lead the
Whereupon
the operators said that it would be "unprofitable
opposition. No doubt Italy's motive is self-interest, but at
to
continue
to mine coal under $3.00." Apparently, then,
any rate it is enlightened self-interest, and that is more
they had been making a sales profit of some 400 per cent on
than can be said of French and British policy. A change of
every ton when the price was fourteen dollars.
government in England and France would of course alter
After this happy and bewildering experience with the
the situation. A liberal England and a liberal France might
vagaries
of coal, we are shocked and astonished to hear a
make the League of Nations an instrument of international
Republican Senator, Mr. Calder, threaten something very
ism and peace, not, as the present governments of the two
like nationalization of the industry. Does not everyone
countries are trying to make it, an instrument of domina
know that government ownership is a blight on enterprise,
tion.
and that the present system is the ideal one because it
"works"? What can the Senate Committee be thinking of
when it reports: "Our investigation into the coal situa
tion has convinced us that private interests now in control
Joseph Gollomb is an American journalist now traveling
of the production and distribution of coal, in spite of the
abroad.
6
efforts
of some, are actually unable to prevent a continu
Henry W. Nevinson is the well-known English writer
ance
or
repetition of the present deplorable situation, and
and correspondent.
that it is the duty of the Government to take such reason
able and practical steps as it may to remedy the evil"?
Jan. 19, 1921]
The Nation
A rough outline sketch may be helpful to understanding.

Anthracite is not nearly so important as bituminous, but
it comes first to our attention because most of us depend on
it to keep warm. A preponderant part of the anthracite
deposits in the country are owned by companies closely
affiliated with a few railroads. The greater part of these
fields are held out of production, but of the anthracite
actually put on the market, the railroad mines account for
about three quarters. The mining companies themselves
make for the most part a very modest profit. In some cases
their sales are handled by. separate, related companies
which make a large profit. But in most cases the lion's
share of profit goes to the affiliated railroad carriers. The
freight rates on hard coal are said by W. Jett Lauck, rail
road and coal economist, to be two and one-half to three
times the operating cost of transportation. The income
from coal carrying comprises from six to sixty per cent of
the total freight revenues of the anthracite roads. Thus
immense earnings are created. In some cases they have
been made the excuse for greatly increased capitalization.
In some cases they are used to pay dividends on a capitali
zation based on the undeveloped coal depositsas if a land
lord should charge enough rent for a single occupied house
to pay a profit on a hundred others which were empty. In
the case of roads which have not gone the limit in possible
capitalization, the surplus and dividends show the situation.
The actual earnings on the capital stock between 1913 and
1918 have averaged in the case of the Lackawanna from
24 to 36 per cent, in the Lehigh Valley 29 per cent, in the
Central Railroad of New Jersey 27 per cent.
The merchandising of anthracite, compared to that of
bituminous, is on a fairly decent basis. There are, ordi
narily, few irrelevant middlemen. But the trouble is that
the anthracite market is in large measure dependent on the
bituminous market, because when soft coal is scarce, hard
coal is often used in its place, and its price rises. When
there is a shortage of carsas there usually isbituminous
drives anthracite off the roads and the retailers are thus
given a chance to charge enormous figures for what hard
coal they can get.
The mining of bituminous coal is in the hands of many
companies. While the bulk of the production in Pennsyl
vania, for instance, comes from a small group of large
operators, the marginal production is widely scattered.
And there is a great difference in the cost of production of
various mines, due in large part to the difference in the
width of seams, and in lesser degree to differing efficiency
of management and other factors. In the year 1918 the
cost of production of 199 operators in the southwestern
field of Pennsylvania ranged, according to the Federal Trade
Commission, from $1.21 to $4.04 per net ton. Nearly 77 per
cent of the total production cost $1.99 or below. Over 90
per cent cost only $2.20 or below. When there is a great
demand, it is the highest-cost mine which fixes the ultimate
market price. In order to get that last 10 per cent of soft
coal on the market, enormous profits had to be paid on the
other 90 per cent. This is an inevitable feature of widely
distributed private ownership.
There is also the artificial shortage caused by insuffi
ciency and improper distribution and use of coal cars. The
operators have never devised successful ways of storing
coal. If they have no cars to put it in, mining operations
stop. This causes scarcity in the market, and terrific
wastage and unrest of labor. Lucky is the miner who gets
79
a chance to work more than two-thirds of the year. Scar

city of bituminous coal is thus chronic. It creates a com
petitive demand, and attracts hordes of speculative middle
men. Although $3.50 a ton is a liberal estimate for the cost
of production at the mine, the consumer is fortunate to get
his soft coal at four times that price. This in spite of the
fact that transportation rates to few industrial centers in
the country are more than $3.00 a ton, and a fair overhead
for the local distributor was reckoned by the Fuel Admin
istration, under war prices, at the same figure.
In 1917 the Federal Trade Commission examined the sit
uation and came to the obvious conclusion that "if a uni
form price were fixed many mines will be shut down unless
the price is high enough to make the highest mine cost
profitable." It therefore suggested ascertaining scientifically
the cost of production at each mine, paying the owner or
operator a fair profit, and then pooling the total national
supply in order to make possible its sale at an average
figure. This is what Great Britain has now been doing for
some years. Even then, distribution could not be effective
"without similar control over all means of transportation,
both rail and water, and to meet this the pooling of rail
roads and boat lines is clearly indicated." The Commission
therefore recommended the operation of the railroads as a
unit on the government account. But we have now returned
the railroads to the management of private, competing
owners, on account of the "superior efficiency" of that
arrangement.
Mere government control of mines and railroads could
eliminate enormous waste in the sale of this product which
lies at the basis of our national economy. Government own
ership would make possible additional savings in production.
Production engineers like Walter N. Polakoff show how
heat and power could be distributed at a small fraction of
their present cost by a radical revision of the technique
of the industry. Highly valuable chemical by-products
of coalsuch as dyes and fertilizerwhich are now wasted,
could be extracted at the mine mouth. The coal could then
be transformed into electricity and much of the cost of trans
portation saved. In addition, the inefficient use of coal in
many antiquated furnaces would be avoided. The high-cost
mines could be eliminated, and labor could be continuously
employed at good wages. These reforms could not be
effected in a short time, of course, but they have not even
been begun under private ownership.
Aside from such ambitious plans, however, there is not
the slightest doubt that with no changes in technique, a
merely efficient management under unitary control in the
public interest would be of great value. Whether the pres
ent Congress will go so far as to adopt such a measure
is doubtful in the extreme. It cannot do so much discour
tesy to the god of private enterprise. We shall have to
freeze and starve more than we have so far before the lesson
is driven home to us. In the meantime the effort of the
more daring Senators will probably be to educate us to the
problem. Some form of national oversight may be estab
lished. A governmental agency may be given the power to
examine the companies' books, so that publicity may be
accorded to the figures. This cumbersome supervision would
provide for the public a minimum of protection against con
scienceless and wilful profiteers, but it would leave un
touched the maladjustments of the industry which, in spite
of anyone's good intentions, keep us in a constant turmoil
about our coal.
80
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No.2898
Meeting the Crime Wave: A Comparison of Methods

By JOSEPH GOLLOMB
HE crime wave now afflicting the whole world is a
logical aftermath of the war. Economic distress
inconspicuousness, its strong doors and windows, attracted

him and he bought it. He secured every possible entrance
poverty, insufficient food, clothing, and fuelthe loosing of
with bars and double locks and had his home wired so that
men's animal passions, coupled with the general disorgani

zation of our social structure, are producing their inevita
ble effect. While its manifestations vary, subject to local
conditions, the disease knows no geographic boundaries,
but its treatment is still largely national. Moreover, the
police power of the world has been rudely shaken by events.
It needs reconstruction, revitalization, and above all in
creased international cooperation. The American has, of
course, always taken it for granted that his police organiza
tion is the best on earth, his system of detection the shrewd
est, most scientific, most persevering. Present-day New
Yorkers, in the face of a mounting epidemic of unsolved
murder and robbery, may perhaps entertain a lurking
nobody could touch a door knob, window sash, or grating

without setting an electric bell ringing. In addition he
arranged it so that if any one detected the wiring and cut
it, the loosened wire, dragged down by a leaden weight,
would fall on a cartridge and exploding it would give as
effective notice of danger as the electric bell. He lived by
himself, received no one, and attracted as little attention as
doubt. But it is questionable whether we could ever justly

boast of anything in this direction but a mistaken pride.
he could.
Nevertheless, one day tradesmen began to wonder why he

did not take in off the front steps the articles he had
ordered delivered. The police were notified, an entrance was
forced. Smithers was found murdered. The burglar alarm
had been cut, under the fallen leaden weight was found a
pad of cloth and the cartridge unexploded. A strong-box
had been rifled.
Whoever had done the business was no
The actual claims of France and Britainin fact and fiction
novice. There was not a finger-print to be found, the work
seem more valid.
having obviously been done in gloves. The only clue left for
the police to work on was a small dark-lantern, a childs toy
without doubt, which had been contemptuously left behind
by the burglars.
Scotland Yard went to work on the case characteristically.
A conference was held of the Central Office Squad, consist
ing of four chief inspectors, ten detective inspectors, nine
teen detective sergeants, and fourteen detective constables.
They went at their problem like a team, captained, but
working as one. There was no star performer. With only
the childs lantern to work on as a clue, the problem became
at first mere drudgery. A tedious round of manufacturers
and toy shops followed to determine if possible where that
lantern was bought. In this search team-work was every
thing, individual cleverness nothing. Finally it seemed
probable that the lantern was such as a mother in one of
several tenement districts in London would buy for a seven
year-old child.
A simple plan was devised as the next phase of the hunt.
A detective who had a seven-year-old son was assigned to
allow his boy to play with the lantern in the streets of the
quarter from which it might have come and to see what hap
pened. For a week nothing at all happened, and father and
son were asked to repeat their task in the adjoining district.
Here the simple device brought no better results and again
they were assigned new territory. This happened several
times, until it began to look as though nothing at all would
come of it. But with the doggedness of the race Scotland
Yard hung on to the trail. Then one day a little boy of the
quarter edged up to the policeman's son, looked sharply at
the lantern with which the youngster was playing, and set
up a wail.
What have we comparable to the great
Bertillon and to M. Lecoq'.
What traditions to equal the
famous Scotland Yard organization, what hero of detection
superior to Sherlock Holmes? As for Germany, its ver

boten has become notorious as the symbol of the omni
present and ever-watchful arm of the law. We shall do
well to study our neighbors' methods.
The tracking by society of the men who prey on man is
already something of a sport and sometimes an artin
fiction. In real life it is a crusade, a science, a profession;
there is no sporting ethics in it as yet and police prefer the
shortest way to the kill whether it is good sport, art, or
neither. But the quarry has grown clever with science and
technique, and the hunter has had to keep up with him. The
result is that so infinitely complex, delicate, and manifold
have become the means and weapons of crime and of man
hunting with X-ray, dictaphone, micro-photography, chem
ical reagents, psychoanalysis, organization technique, card
cataloguing, and ten thousand other devices that the modern
detective has come to exercise something of the care of the
artist in choosing weapon and trail in his hunt. It is inter
esting to observe, therefore, the differences in the manner
of man hunting shown by the detective systems of London,
Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, and how in their hunting they
reveal their racial traits.
Let us consider four actual
CaSeS.
In a half-asleep residential section of east London is a

neglected three-story private dwelling with heavy shutters
and doors, inconspicuous and unattractive. It was just the
kind of house for which an old man, calling himself Smith
ers, had been looking. For twenty years he had been accu
mulating money by buying all kinds of objects and no ques
tions asked. He could drive a shrewd bargain and his busi
ness associates usually acceded to his terms, though not
I want mah lantern l he said.
more and more rich he worried about the threats. He knew

his customers. So he tried to hide his riches and lived
Taint your lantern l the policemans son retorted in

dignantly.
Yes, it is! I know it is!
The detective came forward. Are you sure? he asked,
gently. Because my son has had it for many weeks, you
penuriously.
know.
without many a curse and often more or less impressive

threats. Smithers did not mind the former; but as he grew
Fear of being murdered and robbed drove him
from his business to a retreat. The house, by reason of its
Ere, I'll prove it's mine, the stranger boy said. W'en
Jan. 19, 1921]
The Nation
mah wick burned out I cut off a little piece of my sister's

flannel petticoat for a new wick."
The detective opened the lantern and examining the wick
found it to be of flannel, as the boy had said. "We'll have to
ask your mother about this," the detective said. "If you're
telling the truth you shall have your lantern back."
The three went to the boy's mother, a widow who kept
boarders. The woman, honest and hard working, con
firmed her son's claim. The detective kept his word, re
turned the lantern, but questioning the widow further found
out that the boy missed the lantern at about the same time
that two of her boarders had left without paying their
board bills. One had told her that he was an electrician, the
other a plumber's apprentice, and she remembered seeing
tools of their trade, or what she thought were such, in their
room.
Followed then another series of weary searches by the
men of Scotland Yard ; searches among young plumbers and
among electricians; in the underworld for two young fel
lows answering to the descriptions the widow gave; in the
files of criminal records in Scotland Yard; in more expen
sive boarding houses and in dance resorts. Nothing short
of a big organization imbued with team work and bulldog
perseverance could have accomplished that search. But at
last two young men were found whom the widow, unknown
to them, identified as her former boarders.
The police had as yet nothing more serious against them
than unpaid board bills. So they secretly kept them under
surveillance. It was thus they learned that the young men
were fond of target shooting with a revolver at trees in
the country. The bullets extracted from the trees proved
to be of the same exceptionally large caliber as that found
in the murdered miser's brain. Tactfully, patiently, a corps
of detectives searched into the past of the two men, each
finding out some seemingly unimportant item. But the
whole was becoming a net in which one day the two men
found themselves inextricably fast on the charge of the mur
der and robbery of Smithers.
Now let us contrast with this man hunt another under
similar circumstances in Paris. There had been a remark
able series of burglaries in the aristocratic Etoile section.
In each case the burglarfor there was every sign that one
man was committing themtook art objects of considerable
value but never of such marked uniqueness that they could
not be disposed of without difficulty or danger. Indeed the
man's skill in entering well-guarded homes, in gathering
his loot, and in disposing of it was such that the Paris
police had not a trace to work on. This man, too, worked
with gloves, so that there was never a finger-print left
of his visits.
The Paris police, so to speak, ran around in circles trying
to find his trail. One theory was as little fruitful as another
and each man on the hunt followed his own. One detectiveinspector, let us call him Dornay, struck out on a lone hunt.
Posing as a nouveau-riche art collector and bon vivant, he
made scores of acquaintances in the fast set where his
quarry might conceivably be found. In this way he became
interested in a rather quiet, alert man who knew where
good values in art objects could be had. Dornay showed
more friendliness than the other accepted and, apparently
hurt in feelings, the detective thereafter avoided the un
sociable man, whom he knew by the name of Laroche. Thus
far Dornay had only a nebulous theory about Laroche's
connection with the elusive burglar he was hunting. It
81
was so nebulous that the detective could not convince his

colleagues sufficiently to secure the number of men needed
to keep track of all of Laroche's movements, for the latter
had an uncanny way of eluding Dornay's vigilance. There
upon Dornay determined to get Laroche unconsciously
either to clear or to implicate himself. Watching one night
outside Laroche's hotel he saw the latter leave in evening
dress. Dornay stole up to the man's room, let himself in with
a skeleton key, and made a thorough search. The only dis
coveries that interested him were a much-used pair of
gloves and the water caraffe and drinking glass Laroche
kept on a little stand to the left of his bed. With a file Dor
nay rubbed gently at a spot in the thumb of the left-hand
glove until little more than a thin filament of chamois
remained, which, however would not be noticeable at a care
less glance. Then the detective carefully polished clean the
outsides of the caraffe and the drinking glass. He took noth
ing with him when he left. But next morning, when La
roche again left the hotel Dornay stole back into the room
and eagerly examined the caraffe and the drinking glass.
With a camel's-hair brush he dusted some graphite powder
on it until Laroche's finger-prints showed clearly. Substi
tuting other glassware Dornay carefully brought Laroche's
to police headquarters.
Three weeks later still another burglary was reported,
bearing all the marks of the elusive burglar. But this time
the police found faint impressions of a left thumband
only that. It was, however, sufficient. Dornay's instinct
and little plot had won. As he knew, the moisture of the
human finger is sufficient to leave a print even through
gloves if the intervening texture is thin. And the finger
prints on the scene of the latest burglary were identical
with those on Laroche's caraffe and drinking glass.
Call it Anglo-Saxon love of team-play, or a racial disin
clination of the individual to shove himself forward at the
expense of the group interest, or whatever other trait it
illustrates, the Scotland Yard treatment of the Smithers
murder mystery was characteristic. Certainly the instinct
for organization and organized effort, which has made Scot
land Yard the foremost man-hunting medium in the world,
is the inspiration not of individuals but of the race. In
contrast in method was the Paris police treatment of the
Laroche burglaries. The Frenchman is keenly individual
in his work. It makes him less patient, therefore less effi
cient in organization, and consequently throws him back
again on individual effort. He is much more prone, as a
detective, to hunt by himself than with his colleagues.
Like the Anglo-Saxon gift for organization is the Ger
man passion for it. But there is a vital difference between
the two in the outcome of the organization, a difference
which is illustrated in the treatment by the Berlin detective
force of a murder mystery that occurred in that city sev
eral years ago. The under-secretary for one of the impor
tant governmental departments was found dead near his
home in a Berlin suburb. He had evidently been seized
from behind, garroted until dead, dragged into an alley and
robbed. It was not till late the next day that his body was
found ; no one had been seen lurking about the scene of the
crime ; so that the police had practically nothing to work on,
other than the manner of the crime.
But they have a machine in the Berlin police department
that works almost automatically in the solution of such
mysteries. It is typically a German product in the thor
oughness of its organization, in the ruthlessness of its oper
82
The Nation
ation, in the vastness and at the same time in the minute

ness of its product. Its principal part is the Meldewesen.
Every citizen and visitor in Germany, the former from the
day of his birth, the latter from the day of arrival, is re
corded at police headquarters, a card for each individual,
and every card is kept up to date. If, for instance, the
police want to know something about Carl Schmidt, respect
able citizen, in three minutes after his name reaches police
headquarters they know the date, place, and circumstances
of his birth, a brief history of each of his parentsif Ger
man, a cross-reference to their individual cards will give
a complete history; his education, religion, successive resi
dences, dates of removals, names of business and other asso
ciatesagain cross-references afford fuller information on
each of these; the name of his wife, date of marriage,
names, and other data of his children; dates of the death
of any of the family, place of burial ; names and histories of
servants, employees, etc. At Berlin this Meldewesen depart
ment contains over 20,000,000 cards today, occupies 158
rooms, requires 290 employees, and is daily growing in size.
The cards of names commencing with H alone take up ten
rooms, S requiring seventeen.
What happens to any individual in Germany who fails to
register can be seen in the working of the Razzia system,
which is used as a complement to the Meldewesen, and which
the police of Berlin proceeded to use in the case of the
strangled under-secretary. The Razzia consists of police
raids without warrants on gathering places of every kind
and even on private dwellings. Every person caught in
such a raid is required to give a complete account of him
self or herself. This account is checked up with the record
in Meldewesen. If there is a discrepancy, it means anything
from a fine, for a first offense for failing to register, to
prison if it is repeated.
In this particular case the Berlin police raided Jungfernheide, an amusement park. Of the people there, three hun
dred could not give a clear account of discrepancies between
their status then and what the Meldewesen showed. They
were all arrested and a minute investigation of each case
begun. Out of the three hundred sixty were found to be
"wanted" by the police of other cities for various crimes.
At the same time that this sifting was going on a special
"murder commission," appointed to deal only with this par
ticular case, was proceeding with coordinating investiga
tions. Such a commission consisting of seven or eight men
as a rule, but calling in as many others as necessary, usually
includes three or four of the higher officials of the detective
force, a police surgeon, a photographer, and one or two men
from some highly specialized detective squad. There are
thirty-one such squads, each sharply specialized. These
squads are known by numbers and the classes of crimes
they deal with. For instance: 1. Church thefts, counter
feiting, safe-breaking. 2. Thefts on stairs, streets, squares,
hallways, cemeteries, gardens, lead pipes, zinc, etc. 6.
Larcenies in flats, tenements, apartments. 7. Burglaries
in flats, tenements, apartments. 11. Thefts of overcoats,
umbrellas, canes, in restaurants, waiting rooms, institu
tions, etc. 24. Usury, postal frauds. 31. Perjury.
To the special commission in this case were added two
members of a squad specializing on highway robberies and
an expert on stranglers. These men sifted out the mountain
of cards dealing with every individual who could even in
the remotest way be suspected of a possible connection with
the murder of Under-Secretary Rheinthal. Meanwhile
forty-two individuals caught in the Jungfernheide were
[Vol. 112, No. 2898
waiting in prison together with other suspects arrested

without warrant or charge. The search revealed that one
of the women detained was the mistress of a man against
whom were recorded in the police departments of two cities
three former highway robberies and a burglary in which
the victim was found nearly dead of strangulation, and
through the elaborate system of records of the man's accom
plices, friends, and family, he was finally caught. Once
in the clutches of the police the celebrated method of "sweat
ing" or "third degree," which includes every possible means
of coercion, pinned the man to the crime itself and he con
fessed.
Clearly, then, what solved the Rheinthal mystery was a
machine, which is what the German passion for organiza
tion produces, rather than a team, as in the case of Scot
land Yard. With the Germans organization reduces its
human elements to cogs and parts of an automaton. In Eng
land it binds human beings into a group, which retains
initiative on the part of the individual and adds to it the
increased competence of the group. In France organiza
tion is the minor fact, the individual is everything.
Aside from the emphasis which national and racial traits
give to their different ways of man hunting, these things
are also determined by the manner in which men are chosen
in these countries to become detectives. In England the
instinct is against the creation of a man-hunting class.
Scotland Yard, therefore, looks for its raw material among
the common people, preferably those near the soil. The
Metropolitan Police send scouting teams into the country
and offer sufficiently inviting terms to splendid physical
specimens to join the police force of London. They investi
gate most carefully the moral character of the applicants,
take the successful ones to London, and school them to
become one of the world-famous force of "bobbies." Then
if a man shows special aptitude for detective work he has
to pass an examination, is given a special training in the
detective school of Scotland Yard, and is allowed to work
his way up to the top of the system as fast as merit entitles
him to promotion. Three elements in his education are con
stantly stressedthe jealously guarded right of every
citizen to untrammeled freedom until sufficient evidence is
available to justify arrest; the subordination of individual
benefit to the good of the group ; the duty of every individual
to develop initiative and some degree of specialization.
In Germany the practice is to limit the detective force
to men who have had at least nine years' training in the
regular army. By the time a candidate becomes a member
of the detective staff he is usually past the plastic stage of
life and set in his ways. His army life has drilled every
vestige of individuality out of him. He is confronted with
a future in which he can rise only a grade or two, no matter
how efficient he turns out to be. The higher ranks in the
service can be reached only through a university training.
The result is that the German detective can be depended
upon only to follow a routine. It is a machine that the
German system demands, rather than an organization.
In Vienna the detective system can draw on neither a
people gifted with regimentalized efficiency, nor the individ
ual efficiency of the Scotland Yard man or the French detec
tive. Yet the man hunting done by the Vienna police equals
in efficiency any other in Europe. For, in the professorial
chairs, the laboratories, and the research departments of
Austrian universities man hunting has attained its highest
development. In Vienna it is not organization or the indi
vidual detective or a marvelous machine that hunts the
Jan. 19, 1921]
The Nation
criminal most successfully, but modern science with its

microscope, chemical reagents, the orderly processes of in
ductive reasoning, carried out by professors, and a minimum
contribution on the part of the professional detective.
Let us illustrate with the murder and robbery of a mil
lionaire recluse who lived in a villa on the border of Wiener
Wald. He was found dead in his barn, his skull crushed in
with some blunt instrument which could not be found.
The only clue left by the murderer was a workman's cap.
Dr. Gross in his celebrated work on criminal investiga
tion, which is the most exhaustive study of the science of
man hunting in existence, stresses the importance of hairs
and dust as clues. The inside of the cap, therefore, was
carefully examined and two hairs found, which were not
those of the murdered man. These hairs were placed under
the microscope, experts called in, and the following was ascer
tained as the description of the man to whom those hairs
belonged: "Man about forty-five years old; robust constitu
tion; turning bald; brown hair, nearly gray and recently
cut." The cap was placed in a tough paper bag, sealed,
and beaten with a stick as hard as possible. When it was
opened again there was dust at the bottom of the bag. This
dust was microscopically examined and chemically analyzed.
Disregarding the elements that came obviously from the
floor of the barn where the cap was found it was discovered
that wood dust, such as is found in the shop of a carpenter,
predominated. But there were also found minute particles
of glue. The combination pointed to a wood joiner.
There was such a man living near the scene of the crime,
who also answered to the description derived from the two
hairs, a man of morose temperament rendered desperate by
drink and poverty. A search of his premises for the instru
ment which might have caused the death of the murdered
man yielded a hammer and two mortar pestles. The ham
mer with its octagonal nose was found incapable of inflict
ing the shape of the wound in the man's skull. The pestles
fitted. There were two of them, an iron one rusted in spots
and a polished brass one. The rust spots on the iron one
were found on chemical analysis to be due to water. But
under the metal polish of the brass pestle, when it was
carefully scraped away, were found remnants of stains
which on analysis and microscopic examination proved to be
blood. By a system of reagents developed by Professor
Uhlenhut the blood was found to be that of the murdered
man. After the investigation had proceeded a little further
the murderer broke down and confessed his guilt.
Nothing is too small or insignificant to furnish clues to
the Vienna school of laboratory detectives. The marks of
teeth on a cigar holder left on the scene of the murder were
found to indicate unusually long canines, a clue which led
to the murderer. The dust found in pocket knives or clasp
knives with which crimes had been committed brought many
a criminal to justice wholly through laboratory methods.
The readiness of the German police to search, arrest, and
detain citizens on the slightest ground, and the methods em
ployed by the French police in extracting confessions from
suspected persons vary fundamentally from the procedure
followed in man hunting by the English. When a Scotland
Yard man, backed with a warrant, makes an arrest he is
compelled by law to say to his prisoner: "Do you wish to
make any statement? I warn you that anything you say now
may be" used against you. You are not required to make any
statement." It is generally acknowledged that a confession
extorted from an accused would be barred as evidence in
English courts. In contrast to this is the brilliant record
83
made by a Paris detective in tricking arrested suspects into

confessions. This man would cultivate the friendship of the
accused, say, of murder. Outside of prison the detective
would spend most of his time investigating not so much
evidence of the prisoner's guilt but his grievance against the
murdered man. Then one day he would rush into the ac
cused man's cell, his face burning with indignation. "My
friend!" he would exclaim. "I don't understand why you
hesitate for one instant in confessing that you killed that
snake ! I am not a bad man myself. But if any man ruined
my business and outraged the woman I love and did a tenth
of the vile things that snake did to you, I would kill him
and be proud of it!" "Isn't that so?" the accused would ex
claimand find himself betrayed.
In England a man's home is his castle and a detective is
limited accordingly. No search can be effected, no arrest
made without a warrant based on such evidence as will con
vince a judge in open court. In Berlin a police lieutenant
boasted with truth to a student of European police meth
ods : "I can have my neighbor arrested, his house searched,
and the man detained in prison for twenty hours even if he
is innocent as a lamb. And I can do it without a process
beforehand or being made to answer for it afterward."
This free hand the German police has, together with the
infinitely elaborate net in which the German public con
sents to live, gives its detectives a tremendous advantage
over the English. A man's house in Germany is not his cas
tle ; an accused can be forced to testify against himself ; the
habeas corpus is not the institution it is in England. As
Sir William Harcourt said : "You must not be surprised if
the English police is sometimes foiled, baffled, or defeated.
. . . It is, the price England pays for a system which she
justly prefers." On the other hand the German system does
not necessarily argue a slavish people. The German is
equally surprised at the English lack of the institution of
the Meldewesen and other aids to the police. "What do peo
ple in England do to find where a certain criminal is?" a
German asked in discussing the Meldewesen. "And why
should I resent the Meldewesen when it operates to protect
me against the criminal? Also suppose I want to find out
the address of any man in Berlin or Dresden. For a small
fee the police will get it for me. As for the right of search
and arrest, well, an innocent man will not suffer long. In
return he gets the protection of a system from which the
criminal undergoes a maximum of insecurity."
As the criminal becomes more and more international in
his operations, more and more cosmopolitan in his knowl
edge of the ways of man hunters, so the latter, too, are
forced to become broader in their hunting methods. The
science and some of the organization technique of the Austrians and the Germans are being added to the equipment of
Scotland Yard. Republican Germany, on the other hand, is
modifying some of the autocratic police abuses established
by an imperial regime. Paris police are working in close
harmony with Scotland Yard and are assimilating from
them some of the lessons of team work. Vienna is borrow
ing German organization and Scotland Yard emphasis on
the selection of the raw material of its detective force and
has surpassed Scotland Yard in the educational training it
now gives its operatives. Some day there may even come
true the dream of several visionaries among police chiefs
an international police headquarters in The Hague or in
some other city from where man hunting in Europe will
proceed on a world-wide scope and with the combined skill
of all nations.
The Nation
84
The Desecration
By HENRY W. NEVINSON
Dublin, December 18
WITHIN the last five weeks I have been for some days
off and on in Dublin, and have also visited the fol
lowing scenes of recent devastation or murder, or both:
Templemore, Thurles, Mallow, Castleisland, Tralee, Ardfert,
Foynes, Limerick, Killaloe, Scarriff, Raheen, Gort, Ardahan,
Galway, Tuam, Swineford, Belfast, and Cork, in that order.
On my way I have also seen the ruins of the partially or
utterly destroyed creameries at Loughmore, Ballymacelligott,
Abbeydorney, and Lixnaw, and the cooperative stores at
Foynes. In all those places, with the possible exception of
Killaloe and Swineford, private houses, people's halls, or
public buildings had been burnt out, and in many of them
murders had recently been committed by groups of men
whom everyone in the place or district believed to be mem
bers of British armed forces, either military or police.
If reprisals upon innocent and untried people could ever
be justified, excuse might be pleaded in a few of those cases,
where members of British armed forces had been kidnapped,
ambushed, shot at, or killed by unknown people who prob
ably maintained they were at war with the British Govern
ment. But, as Mr. Justice Pim said in his charge to the
grand jury in Belfast on the first of the month, "There can
be no legal reprisals. If reprisals were carried out, or if
there were an excuse for that kind of thing, it would lead
directly and absolutely to anarchy, and to nothing else."
In Ireland it is leading to anarchy and nothing else. The
worst of it is that the anarchy of reprisals is being produced
by the representatives of "law and order." In Belfast and
other towns of the northeast corner, reprisals have been
perpetrated by Protestant and Orange mobs. But I suppose
that there is not one human soul living in Ireland who even
pretends to believe that the reprisals in the rest of the
country are not the work of the British reinforcements to
the armed police, whether Auxiliaries or Black and Tans
proper, or, in far fewer cases, the work of the regular
British army. In Ireland I have never heard or read even
a suggestion of any other agency. Besides, the ques
tion always recurs: if the agents of the "reprisals" are not
in the service of the Government, how do they procure the
motor lorries in which they rush through the streets of
cities and through the country, and the rifles with which
one sees them firing at random? How do they secure the
immunity to prowl in cities at night and burn out buildings
such as the Freeman's Journal office or the Sinn Fein
Bank in Dublin, or the great shops and Sinn Fein Clubs in
Cork, where the earlier burnings were all done during
curfew hours? Or how is it that a party of five or six in
the Auxiliary uniform could with impunity rush into the
shops and homes of Catholic Irish people and smash all the
goods, glass, furniture, and other possessions, as I saw had
been done in Cork last week, while they kept crying, "We'll
teach you to mock at us!"
I do not know who imagines himself in control of these
Auxiliaries on such occasions. The men are supposed to
be all ex-officers. In thirty years' fairly intimate ac
quaintance with the British army, I have never seen officers
like these. General Tudor tells us they get a guinea a day.
What more they acquire I cannot say, but many of them
behave more like a gang of bandits let loose upon a poor
[Vol. 112, No. 2898
and distracted country than like the British officers to whom

I have hitherto been accustomed.
Cardinal Logue is an old mana man of known modera
tion and studied discretion. Let me, then, recall a passage
from his Pastoral Letter of three weeks ago. After saying
that men had been taken from their homes and shot because
they were suspected of sympathy with Sinn Fein, their cap
tors acting as judges, juries, and executioners, he continued :
Lorries laden with armed men career through the country
day by day, and when the unhappy people seek cover or fly, as
one naturally would when a cry is raised of a mad dog at large,
or a savage beast escaped from a menagerie, that flight is taken
as sufficient proof of guilt, and they are pitilessly shot down at
sight. No false pretences, no misrepresentations, no pall of
lies, even though they were as dark as Erebus, can screen or
conceal the guilt of such proceedings from anyone who knows
and can weigh the facts.
It is difficult to give names or direct evidence, except
where the victim has been actually killed and so is free from
harm. When Mr. Edward Lysaght gave evidence about the
character of his assistant, Connor Clune, who was slaught
ered in a chamber of Dublin Castle "for attempting to
escape," just as the brother of Mr. Lysaght's chief manager
had been slaughtered on Killaloe bridge a few days before
"for attempting to escape," the store of his Cooperative
Workers' Society at Raheen was promptly looted. Mr.
Lysaght is known to all Ireland as one of the greatest bene
factors of his country, owing to his experiments in co
operative farming, and the encouragement of Irish culture
and art among the people. What new disaster may happen
to him owing to this account (for which I have his leave)
one can only fear.
What may be the Government's intentions with regard to
the Irish nation, I cannot tell. But I do know something
about the present condition of the people under our Govern
ment's methods. Martial law and open war could hardly
make it more pitiable. Cardinal Logue's comparison is
exact. The people live as though a mad dog might spring
upon them at any minute and from any corner. It is a life
of perpetual fear and strain. No man who has any sym
pathy with the national cause (one of the causes for which
we were told the Great War was fought) can regard his
property or his life as secure from evening to morning. No
woman can regard her home as safe. It is safer to take the
children for refuge to the bogs and mountains. The chil
dren cannot sleep at night. Doctors tell me that St. Vitus's
dance and other nervous affections are terribly on the in
crease among the young. Men, women, and children, against
whom there is no proof or charge or even suspicion of guilt
in any kind, are insulted, humiliated, and brutally treated.
To my mind the insolence and scorn which will prompt
armed men to thrash passers-by with whips as a joke, or to
compel them to kneel in the mud and take the oath of
allegiance at the revolver's point, or to sing "God Save the
King" under compulsion in a cinema, reveal a lower depth
of degradation in our Government's agents than the more
violent "reprisals" of pillage, arson, and murder. Of
one thing at least I am certain: whatever martial law may
accomplish, or discussions on truce suggest, there can be
no possible hope of peace or of truce until, as the first step,
the Auxiliaries and Black and Tans are withdrawn or dis
armed, and such arms as may still be thought necessary are
limited to Irish police who have some feeling for their
countrymen, and to regular troops who have some respect
for their officers and the honor of our English name.
Jan. 19, 1921]
The Nation
In the Driftway
SO Betelgeuse is twenty-seven million times as big as our
puny little sun, and may have scores of inhabited
worlds hanging about it, each with a dozen attentive moons
as large as the ball of mud which we find so troublesomely
diverse and big. The Drifter wonders if those far-off
planets have canals, and if their astronomers think to dis
cover canals on other planets, and if the small boys of
Betelgeuse's satellites have half as good a time in those
sluggish streams as he had in the old Erie Canal. The
Drifter considered himself something of an astronomer in
the days when the Erie Canal lay just beyond the school
room windows, and he remembers many an anxious night
dreading the sight of ruddy Betelgeuse"bottlejuice," he
called itrising above the winter horizon to warn him that
the hour was already past when his parents had bade him
be home.
*****
WILL the Barge Canal ever be as fair as the old Erie?
And can the canals of Mars or of more distant con
stellations have half the charms of that muddy ditch ? Do
the boys of Betelgeuse's universe, so far away that light,
speeding 186,000 miles a second, take3 a hundred and fifty
years to reach the Erie's towpath, swim, and skate, and,
when the canal is low in autumn, boldly chase the dangerous
bullhead in its shallows, as the Drifter did in the old Erie?
The Drifter still thrills at the thought of the magnificent
mudfields of the Wide-Waters when the canal is emptied,
when every puddle holds new wonders, and adventure calls
the small boy over his shoe's depth of mud in search of
mussel shells more beautiful to his awed eye than any
mother-of-pearl, of larger snails than any canal had ever
before yielded, and of stranger fish to languish and die in
his untended aquarium. He can still feel a shudder at the
thought of winter's first ice, when he had to slide hard to
get past the thin edge to the solid ice in the middle, and
when the unwary skater gliding magnificently Fairportward might feel the ice crack and give under his feet, and
sit ingloriously on the mud bottom in two feet of shallow
but very cold canal. He recalls the Dingle, watered by the
canal's leakage, where he saw his first Cape May warbler;
he remembers the guilty joys of swimming in the canal's
forbidden dirty water, and the sense of God-sent retribu
tion that came with a rash that followed a swim, but which
later years taught him was due to poison sumach bordering
the canal. And the locks, and the old lock-tender, and
hours passed in watching them; and his first overnight
vagabond journey on a canal-boat. Do the Martian boys
and the little Betelgeusians have half as good a time with
their canals? Or have they such developed brains that the
children are too mature for unintellectual joys?
*****
ANATOLE FRANCE, meditating upon the inevitable
chilling of this world of ours, wonders what race of
beings will succeed man when the temperature drops too
low to support our frail existence. If evolution be true to
her erratic past, it will not be a direct offshoot of our tempo
rarily dominant genus homo. Anatole France looks to some
form of butterfly as Life's highest achievement. The superhumans of Mars and Betelgeuse may, like the butterfly, be
inferior in brains, but surpass us in other ways. The
85
butterfly, instead of wasting love in youth, and living on

into gray old age, is caterpillar first; he eats and plods
when young, and then, emerging into winged beauty at the
end, lives for a brief season untrammeled by harsh needs
of food and toil, has love at the last, and dies in the full
blow of life's climax. Perhaps the dominant creatures of
the distant worlds fret less, with less brains than we, but
are born senile, and grow old into youth's warm passion.
The Drifter
Correspondence
A Baseless Slander
Sir: It is currently stated that the Allies paid rent, and are
still paying rent, to the private owners of the lands used as
battlefields during the war and now for military purposes in
Europe. Can you give me the facts and authorities which I may
quote on this, if it be a fact?
Walter Thomas Mills
Berkeley, California, December 22
[There is no basis whatever for this rumor. It is an echo of
anti-Ally propaganda during the war.Editor The Nation.]
Inexpensive Classics
,
Sir: I hate to say a good word on behalf of a publisher, for
such action is against the best and oldest tradition of the guild
to which I belong. But why bewail the sad fate of the Every
man Library when a similar American effort continues, against
great odds, to provide us with an increasing list of ninety-cent
classics? It is very unfortunate indeed that the paper manufac
turers and the printers and the binders of Great Britain have
made the further fabrication of reasonably priced books an
impossibility. But our own printers and lithographers and
binders have nobly striven to do likewise, and if I am not mis
taken their warfare upon good but cheap books will be continued
for another twelve months. The continued appearance of the
Modern Library series is the sort of thing which would throw
all good hundredpercenters into an ecstasy of pride. Those of
us who, less pure, still confess to a love of letters and art, show
our joy in a less boisterous way, but we appreciate the battle
on behalf of popularly priced classics with sincere gratitude.
New York, January 4
Liber Alter
Baron Rosen's Testimony

Sir: The Nation has made no comment on the interesting
disclosures of Baron Rosen's "Forty Years of a Diplomat's
Life," more particularly his insistence from the start that the
Revolution of March, 1917, was a demand of the Russian masses
for peace. The large newspapers of Russia refused to publish
Rosen's articles. He appealed to Maxim Gorky, who printed
his views in the Socialist paper, Novaya Zhisn, and thus won
for their author the epithet of pro-German and Bolshevik.
Rosen saw clearly that the only salvation for Russia from
disruption and anarchy was the speedy conclusion of a general
negotiated peace on the basis of the new democracy's formula
of no annexations and no indemnities and in accord with Presi
dent Wilson's principles and with the Reichstag's resolution of
July 19, 1917. As a lover of his country and the old estab
lished order he worked for such a peace. But the intelligentsia
of Russia and the influential and moneyed classes of all the
Allied countries, like the militarists of Germany, were eager to
have the war go on and let it go on another year and threequarters because they were callous and found it a good thing.
Cleveland, Ohio, December 28
Richard E. Stifel
The Nation
86
Books
Effects in Verse
A Prophet of Joy. By Gamaliel Bradford. Houghton Mifflin
Company.
Blood of Things. A Second Book of Free Forms. By Alfred
Kreymborg. Nicholas L. Brown.
The New Adam. By Louis Untenneyer. Harcourt, Brace and
Howe.
In April Once. By William Alexander Percy. Yale University
Press.
Moons of Grandeur. A Book of Poems. By William Rose
Benet. George H. Doran Company.
Heavens and Earth. A Book of Poems. By Stephen Vincent
Benet. Henry Holt and Company.
The House of Dust. A Symphony. By Conrad Aiken. The
Pour Seas Company.
Poems. By Haniel Long. Moffat, Yard and Company.
October, and Other Poems; With Occasional Verses on the War.
By Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate. Alfred A. Knopf.
The Birds, and Other Poems. By J. C. Squire. George H.
Doran Company.
Neighbours. By Wilfrid Wilson Gibson. The Macmillan Com
pany.
MR. BRADFORD'S poem is a parable of society's salvation
in six books and 667 "Don Juan" stanzas. The prophethero, a young, angelic Quixote of a millionaire, proposes as a
road to freedom not anarchism or socialism or syndicalism but
sheer golden joy and the irrepressible grace of good nature.
His is the old story of regeneration (practical union-leaders
would call it being bored) from within. He dances through the
world preaching soft, pure joy in the hardest of places
prayer meetings, business houses, political rostrums, socialist
and anarchist conventions, and labor warsbut is everywhere
repulsed for a meddling fool and is finally trampled to death
under a strikers' mob which he has tried to melt with his sun
shine. Thus the butterfly flutters into the mouth of the thresh
ing machine. Mr. Bradford consents to the catastrophe as
natural, but implies that the future will witness butterflies
coming in such profusion that they will choke the threshing
machine and cover its whole frame with a heap of beauty. He is
hardly convincing on that point, since the genius of joy which
he invokes is incorrigibly trivial. He takes pains to show
what it is that he is not talking aboutChristian Science, Sun
day school morality, silly altruismbut we are never sure
what it is that he is talking about, and never sure that his is
not the nambiest-pambiest of palliatives. His stanzas are occa
sionally merry, but most of the time they bear a heavy burden
of self-conscious rhyme.
Mr. Kreymborg is burdened neither with rhyme nor with
reason. He is as incapable of expressing a theory about society
as he is of composing a "Don Juan" stanza. He may indeed
have in his possession the one idea needful for the salvation of
us all; but we shall never get it out of him. Nine-tenths of
"Blood of Things" is unintelligible, or if intelligible is irrele
vant to any human concern. The one-tenth which is intelligible
and relevant is diffuse to the point of evaporation. Vers libre
was invented, or at least has been accepted, as a means whereby
poets might avoid having to use words which they did not want
to use; in the hands of Mr. Kreymborg and others it becomes
the excuse for swarms of words which no one wants to read.
Mr. Kreymborg is encouraged by his particular kind of free
verse in a habit of reckless ratiocination. He has a passion
for expressing things forward and backward, up and down,
and from side to side. His effect is not the effect of thought,
or even of the garment of thought; it is the effect of the gar
ment of thought unraveled, strung out into ungainly, kinkled
threads of desperate discourse. Here is precisianism without
preciseness; here is the mathematics of a March hare. Here
[Vol. 112, No. 2898
is the way not to say the last word. The Japanese used to say
the last word in 17 or 31 syllables; Mr. Kreymborg fails to
get it said within 150 pages.
Mr. Untenneyer aims at nothing short of a revolution in
love-poetry. For the "one-dimensional effects" of Victorian
amatory verse, for the monotony of Tennysonian adoration and
Swinburnian intoxication, he would substitute a species of
communication admitting, along with the "major emotions," the
"minor moods of irony, irritation, frivolity, ennui, . . . the
little fluctuating phases of love which, besides being ecstatic
and mystical, are so often petulant, sportive, cynical, some
times merely companionable, sometimes actually flippant and
vulgar." He would return to Marlowe, Drayton, Donne, Suck
ling, Carew, Marvell, and Prior. It is well enough in the
preface to a volume of poems to castigate patent poetry of
any sort, but it is better yet to produce poems which transcend
patentism. Mr. Untenneyer, glib of phrase and smug of meter,
merely writes patent poetry of another sort. He is casual, as
he promised, and flippant, and frank, and dutifully vulgar;
but seldom is his effect other than that of an agile pen tracing
a facile passion.
The roughest seasons have their poets who, subscribing to
a tutored and more or less fragile tradition, tease fine music
out of the obscurest strings. Mr. Percy has returned to thir
teenth-century Florence for the setting of a blank-verse play,
and to the ancient Greek scene for inspiration in song. He is
by no means distinguished, and he is somewhat too fond of his
literary good manners, but he has done some shapely, thorough
bred exercises in elegy and exultation. William Rose Benet, a
poet who was taught Browning by his father and whose muse
is at home in a very wide world of allusion, exploits for dra
matic monologues Venice, Rome, Milan, Egypt, Scandinavia,
Saxon England, sixteenth-century Mexico, and the Western
plains of North America when the Indians rode free. A poet
so fertile and diversified is bound to be interesting, and one
cannot but recognize Mr. Benet's gifts of streaming phrase and
bannered fancy; at the same time one often misses the clear,
strong note of nature, often feels the absence from this work
of actual blood and bone. Stephen Vincent Benet, a brother, is
equally lavish with his material, and in the same degree unreal.
He has a swirling dexterity in syntax and rhythm, and prac
tices a gorgeous, hot impressionism. He is an excellent teller
of luxurious stories, stories of purple murder done in a world of
typhoons and orchids. His lighter poems, including some bur
lesque sonnets, are too confiding. Mr. Aiken, as his title-page
admits, has written music rather than poetry. His subject is
Life, and his aim has been to make us overhear stray bits of it,
not hear it steadily and hear it whole. He has held the musical
equivalent of a kaleidoscope up to nature, with whose aid we
receive, out of a dim, uncertain chaos of people passing to and
fro, occasional ripples and whimpers of clear sound. Episodes,
ill-defined and prematurely broken off, swiftly come one after
another, so that we never quite know what is happening; we
only assume, if we are tractable, that this is Life.
It is a relief to turn to poets who always do definite things
and who sometimes do perfect things, if only in a small way.
Mr. Long, in Barakeesh, The Herd Boy, Three Quakers, Mad
ness, A Sea Maiden, and The Moon Beloved, has been droll and
chaste and practically perfect. Not that he deals in flat and
trivial materials; he moves by preference through delicate, dim
between-worlds. It is his art that is definite, his naive quatrains
and couplets that are perfect. Mr. Bridges was created to do
small things in poetry, and to do them very well. At his best
he has a fainting, fairy fineness, a fern-leaf, sun-lace touch.
For the bland and ready Pindarism of the laureateship he is
weirdly unfit. The patriot-moralist's cloak wraps twice around
his figure when he dresses for an ode. It is only in his private
moments that he produces poems of lonely beauty and un
earthly temperature like the admirable Philosopher and his
Mistress. Mr. Squire in his latest and very slight volume is
definite in the least complimentary sense of that word, being
Jan. 19, 1921]
The Nation
what is the deadliest thing for a poet to be, literal. His head
is clearer than his poetry is fine ; he is sober, and he has a vein
of reflection not wholly resembling other men's, but the strength
that he has is displayed rather than implied, and his meta
phors, of which he apparently is proud, are painfully over
developed.
The only definitely interesting section of Mr. Gibson's new
book is the first, called Neighbours, containing a series of grim
rural monologues and dialogues. The other sections are filled
with turgid sonnets and monotonous quatrains about the war.
The monologues and dialogues unquestionably derive from the
poems of Thomas Hardy. Their laconic business is to reveal
desperate situations suddenly discovered to exist between hus
bands and wives. They are square and plain and honest, and
they are interesting to the last syllable, without ever pulling at
the roots of the imagination as Mr. Hardy's can, or as Robert
Frost's still complexer recitals do. Mr. Hardy and Mr. Frost,
whatever points they want to make, begin by being absorbed
with persons whom they profoundly see and feel; Mr. Gibson,
having an imagination less original and tenacious, begins with
the idea of a condition he wants to exploit, or a point he wants
to reach, and artificially, if professionally, proceeds in that
direction.
Mark Van Doken
The End of the Trilogy

Men and Steel By Mary Heaton Vorse. Boni and Liveright.
Y\/ITH "Men and Steel" the trilogy of the steel strike is com plete. Foster's book told what may be called, in no
slighting sense, the professional labor leader's story. The Interchurch RepoTt set down with authority the facts and figures
about the labor policy of the employers and its result. Mrs.
Vorse speaks as a poet An incalculable, a terrific thing hap
pened in the soul of the nation when three hundred thousand
steel workers and their families arose to demand justice and
were crushed back into the maw of the furnaces, into their
own helplessness and discouragement. Foster gave us the
bine-print, and the Interchurch Commission the statistical sur
vey; Mrs. Vorse has written the tragedy.
The Principality of Steel is a majestic, a beautiful, and a
cruel kingdom. It covers many states and rules hundreds of
towns; it extends from the great red open-pits of Mesaba, with
engines crawling along their sides like beetles, to the gigantic
blast furnaces of Homestead, to the mills flaring red upon the
rivers at night and sending up pillars of smoke by day. Their
rows of stacks loom across the sky like Gargantuan organ pipes.
Before the pomp and power of steel, one scarcely thinks of men
at all. In the mills the men are almost hidden, servants of the
levers and slaves of the furnace doors; outside the mills they
are huddled in drab piles of huts. To find women here in the
houses, washing for their children and spreading the curtains
eternally to dry, to find children, wholesome, merry children
playing in the muddy alleys, is as startling as it would be to
find mortal families dwelling on the borders of Inferno.
Mrs. Vorse has built up this picture by vivid spots of color
which seem for a while chosen at random, just as they would
flash upon a sensitive observer as he looked about him at this
strange country. Gradually the things of steel take form before
the eyes, then the people of steel, then the revolt of the people
against the things. We receive the same sense from the book
which those of us who were there received from the reality, and
which none of us but Mrs. Vorse has adequately expressed:
that this was not merely a quarrel for domination, that it was
a heroic thrust of humanity upon "chaos and the dark," that it
was symbolic of the high drama of the earth. How hopeless
was the struggle of these simple people against the impersonal
power of the corporations, against the cold and hypocritical
hostility of officials and institutions, against the ignorance and
prejudice of the public, against the silence which robbed them
of the knowledge of their own achievements and insulated them
87
from the courage of their fellows ! Each man in his own house,
waiting, waiting, drawing every day nearer the time when there
would be no more bread for his wife and children, had to
nourish himself against doubt by a superb faith. And at the
end, the breaking of that faith was far more cruel than blows
from State constabulary or the return to a life of nothing but
toil and sleep. We are not likely soon to forget the sobbing of
the big Slav in the silent hallway outside the strike headquarters
at Youngstown, when he had been scabbing because he thought
the strike was over, and knew now it would soon be over in
earnest.
It is a beautiful and a terrible book, because like a true work
of art it embodies the elemental beauty and terror of life. If
we think of the sacrifice of individual persons and individual
causes, and of the vengeance that some day is likely to be
exacted for those sacrifices, it will depress and frighten us. But
if we think of the mighty faith of the humble that some day
must triumph, it will strengthen our courage. Mrs. Vorse
might have ended with the prophecy of Zephaniah : "Woe to her
that is rebellious and polluted! to the oppressing city! . . .
Her princes in the midst of her are roaring lions; her judges
are evening wolves; they leave nothing till the morrow. Her
prophets are light and treacherous persons; her priests have
profaned the sanctuary, they have done violence to the law.
. . . Therefore wait ye for me, saith Jehovah, until the day
that I rise up to the prey; for my determination is to gather
the nations, that I may assemble the kingdoms, to pour upon
them mine indignation, even all my fierce anger; for all the
earth shall be devoured by the fire of my jealousy. . . . Be
hold, at that time I will deal with all them that afflict thee ; and
I will save that which is lame, and gather that which was
driven away; and I will make them a praise and a name, whose
shame hath been in all the earth."
George Soule
Chapters of Medical History

The Dawn of Modern Medicine. By Albert H. Buck. Yale
University Press.
A LOOSE and disorderly arrangement greatly lessens the
usefulness of this stately volume, which appears as "the
third work published by the Yale University Press on the
Williams Memorial Publication Fund." Dr. Buck says in his
preface that it is in the main "a continuation and amplification"
of his earlier work, "The Growth of Medicine." After com
pleting the latter he was unexpectedly given access to a collec
tion of medical works in the library of Transylvania College,
at Lexington, Kentucky. This collection, purchased in Paris
in 1819, had remained unexplored by historians of medicine for
nearly a century. Dr. Buck went to Lexington and spent seven
months studying it. Unluckily, the fruits of his labor do not
testify very eloquently to the value of the collection. The ma
terial of genuine interest that he presents might have been
discovered without difficulty in any of the medical libraries of
France or in the superb collection of the Surgeon General of
the Army at Washington.
Worse, the circumstances of his inquiry give a decidedly lop
sided character to his book. All the stress is laid upon French
physicians and surgeons at the expense of their colleagues in
other countries, and though it is undoubtedly true that French
medical men, during the period he covers"from the early
part of the eighteenth century to about 1860"played parts of
enormous importance in the development of their art, particu
larly on the surgical side, it is equally true that advances of
the utmost value were also made elsewhere. As a result of this
stress men of obviously inferior talents are given a false sig
nificance. For example, Raphael-Bienvenu Sabatier. Sabatier
was a respectable surgeon in Paris from 1756 to 1811, "highly
esteemed by his professional brethren," but there is not the
slightest indication that he stood appreciably above many
others of his kind, or that he had anything whatsoever to do
The Nation
88
with "the dawn of modern medicine." So with Desgenettes,

Napoleon's chief medical inspector. Desgenettes was Larrey's
superior, but is certainly not to be mentioned in the same
breath with him. If any one man was to blame for the chronic
inefficiency of Napoleon's medical service, Desgenettes was. He
contributed nothing to surgery. And the only example of his
medical skill cited by Dr. Buck shows him to have been an utter
ignoramus.
Unfortunately, this lack of a sense of proportion, so essential
to the medical historian, is not the worst defect of Dr. Buck's
book. It contains a number of slips that almost deserve to be
called howlers. On page 109, for example, in discussing the
pre-vaccination method of protecting patients against smallpox
by the heroic device of inoculating them with the actual dis
ease, he gravely says that "no satisfactory evidence was forth
coming that these inoculations possessed the slightest degree
of genuine protective power." And on page 50 he falls into
the almost inconceivable error of confusing Konrad Johann
Martin Langenbeck, one of the founders of modern surgery, with
his equally famous nephew, Bernhard Rudolph, the successor
of Dieffenbach at Berlin and for many years the chief military
surgeon of Germany. It is difficult to imagine such a blunder
being made by an author with access to ordinary medical ref
erence books, or, indeed, to ordinary encyclopedias. What one
derives from it and from Dr. Buck's frequent complaints about
his difficulties in researchon page 262, for instance, he says
that he is unable to find out what sort of work is done at the
Saint-Louis Hospital in Paris at the present timeis a feeling
that he is an historian full of a laudable curiosity and diligence,
but not very well informed and surely not gifted with any
special capacity for his task.
His book, in brief, presents a good deal of interesting raw
material, but it is not a history. Its arrangement is casual and
often absurd. It confuses men of the highest importance and
men of no importance at all. It presents a chaotic and unin
telligible picture of the progress of the medical sciences during
the period under review. The syndics of the Williams Memo
rial Fund would do well to choose and edit their publications
more carefully.
H. L. Mencken
Hyphenate
The Hyphen. By Lida C. Schem. E. P. Dutton and Company.
THE central figure in the German-American group that peo
ples "The Hyphen" is Guido von Estritz. His father was
an enthusiastic political theorist who found his ideal in the
powerful centralized government of Hohenzollern Germany; his
mother was Princess Vasalov, a distant kinswoman of the Ro
manovs and an ardent revolutionist with several assassinations
to the credit of her convictions. These two opposed individuals
who experienced the flame of a mutual passion foresaw in their
union the possibility of a synthetic child in whom conflicting
heritages would combine for profound wisdom and exceptional
clarity of vision, and whose life would be the accomplishment
of a great destiny. With these high hopes was Guido born.
The father died, the mother was thrown into prison, and the
care of the precious baby was undertaken by one Ursula von
Wendt who had loved Guido's father with an unrequited affec
tion. It had been the parents' determination that the synthetic
child should be reared and educated without any taint of that
dread force called bias. To carry out this parental desire
Ursula von Wendt, Frau Hauser as she became, fled with her
charge to the neutral soil of America. The story follows the
development of the synthetic victim. The exclusion of all bias
becomes the sedulous care of Guido's foster-mother. For almost
a thousand pages Guido endures every agony of doubt that is
known to man. His soul is swept by the biting winds of all
doctrines. Then comes the war to add its deluge to his sea of
troubles. More torture at the perfidy of a race whose blood is
half his own! Applied Christianity in the form of socialism
[Vol. 112, No. 2898
ensnares his imagination for a while, but he frees himself when

he comes to know some of its least desirable exponents. Mean
while his heart causes him extreme distress. He successfully,
if rather unbelievably, plays Joseph to a succulent charmer;
he falls in love with a girl who is ideally suited to his nature;
and then he proceeds to stumble into an engagement with a
German-American doll who is the incarnation of chaste dumess.
Most very long novels are a sad mixture of virtue and fault,
but "The Hyphen" is a masterpiece of inequality even when
judged in the company of its own kind. Excellent in parts, it
is dismally unsatisfactory as a whole; rich in promise, it is a
triumph of frustration. The author, apparently, drew the plans
for an imposing work of fiction, but as the business of construc
tion proceeded she became so engrossed in ornamental details
and features of dubious importance that she mislaid her draw
ings. The great pity of it is that Miss Schem possesses nearlyall the gifts that go to make a novelist. Her language, although
a little tortuous at times, is usually vigorous and effective; she
can create characters, and she can, when she allows herself such
a diversion, write flowing narrative. But though she can write
convincing conversation she does not know when to stop. She
endows her characters with true Russian loquacity. At times
their interminable discussions are spirited and vital, but often
enough they are as devoid of life as the records of a Monophysite
controversy.
Ben Ray Redman
The Forsytes
In Chancery. By John Galsworthy. Charles Scribner's Sons.
Awakening. By John Galsworthy. Illustrated by R. H. Sauter.
Charles Scribner's Sons.
XX7HEN you are not reading them, the works of John Gals* * worthy, reviewed in memory, create a sense of pallor and
primness beneath their grace and wisdom, and you wonder
whether they were not, after all, written for the class of people
described by John Morley, the class which "will tolerate or
even encourage attacks on the greater social conventions, and a
certain mild discussion of improvements in themprovided only
neither attack nor discussion be conducted in too serious a vein."
Then a new play or a new novel by Mr. Galsworthy appears and
you read it. The pallor begins to glow and the primness to fade,
and you face, with a little shock of astonishment, not only one of
the first artists but one of the most intrepid thinkers of the age.
The faint hues of his books in memory are once more seen to be
due merely to the studious avoidance not only of any excess in
the way of speech, but of any sharp or surprising collocation of
words. His style flows on in a very smooth and quiet current.
We miss the sudden eddies and swift fountains to which most of
our eminent contemporaries have accustomed us. "Free will,"
writes Mr. Galsworthy, "is the strength of any tie, and not its
weakness." It sounds so mild and harmless, this truth which
"In Chancery" bears out and illustrates. People scarcely believe
Mr. Galsworthy aware that its implications are calculated to
obliterate institutions and shatter empires. But the joke is on
them. He is intensely aware of it all, while guarding the fru
gality of his quiet speech.
In his new novel he returns to Soames Forsyte, "the man of
property," the last and perfect product of Victorian England
"an epoch which had gilded individual liberty so that if a man
had money, he was free in law and fact. An era which had
canonized hypocrisy, so that to seem respectable was to be. A
great Age whose transmuting influence nothing had escaped save
the nature of man and the nature of the universe." Like all the
Forsytes, Soames had become very rich, and his sense of property,
into which he had packed all ideas of order and culture, of
family and the state, had become rigid as bone. But a worm
gnaws at the foundations. His wife Irene, who, though she ran
away from him twelve years ago, can still stir his emotions and
his imagination, will not return to him. He cannot dent her cold,
firm hatred. Yet is she not his? The whole structure trembles.
Jan. 19, 1921]
The Nation
Soames is forty-live; the days of his last chance of renewing life

are numbered; he wants a son to inherit his property and con
tinue his traditions and be to him what he is, so beautifully, to
his father. So he must have a divorce and a Forsyte must air
his private affairs in a court of law. Property and inheritance
are more than spotless repute. Irene goes off to Italy with
Jolyon Forsyte, the one outcast, artist, rebel in all that formidable
clan, and Soames marries a sane, hard, metallically competent
little Frenchwoman, who succeeds in giving him only a daughter.
Mr. Galsworthy envelops him in a fine, still, grave irony that
misses none of the man's weaknesses, nothing of the real opaque
ness of his soul, but that does not make light of the tragic
element in his fate. Mr. Galsworthy never lets his utmost
penetration make him ruthless. He knows that ruthlessness is
simply a failure to perceive the dark and pathetic humanity that
lies just beyond the immediate horizon of one's vision. Later
the horizon widens and one stands rebuked. It is that rebuke
which Mr Galsworthy is careful to avoid.
Soames Forsyte is shown against the background of his tribe
and of his period. Occasionally he recedes and other members
of his family are drawn into the fuller light. In these episodes,
closely woven into the texture of the storya tale of one man
but also a continuation of the "Forsyte saga"Mr. Galsworthy
has produced some of his best and most memorable pages. Two
of these passages may be selected to illustrate the ripeness and
serenity of his art: the return of that amiable rogue, Montague
Dartie, to Winifred Forsyte, his wife, and the death of old James
Forsyte. The episodes dwell in the mind like two picturesthe
one a little grotesque, with sharp, jagged lines and edges of
soiled scarlet, the other full of monumental whites and grays
trailing off into perpetual night. To reread these episodes slowly
and watchfully is to gain a very high notion of the art that
wrought them. It is both rich and austere. The stuff is mag
nificent; the arrangement is severenoble draperies falling in
few, simple, inevitable folds.
Jolyon Forsyte and Irene, the two rebels, artists, clarifiers of
life, are of course Mr. Galsworthy's personal favorites. There
was no way of emphasizing that within the exact framework
of "In Chancery." So Mr. Galsworthy wrote the engaging little
story "Awakening" to show us through the consciousness of
little Jolyon how happy the union of those two wild ones became.
The story is slight and the note of tenderness is perhaps too long
drawn out. But it throws an agreeable sidelight on the
"Forsyte saga" and on Mr. Galsworthy's affection for some of
his creatures.
L. L.
The Optimism of an Octogenarian

Accepting the Universe. By John Burroughs. Houghton Mifflin
Company.
John Burroughs, Boy and Man. By Clara Barrus, M.D.
Doubleday, Page and Company.
I T is not many men who could write in the preface to a book,
* without incurring quick resentment: "All roads lead to the
conclusion that this is the best possible world, and these people
in it are the best possible people." The prevailing instinct is to
smile, either indulgently or wearily, a one who confides that
"to feel at home on this planet ... I look upon as the
supreme felicity of life." Mr. Burroughs is licensed to say
such things, partly because he is eighty years old, and partly
because he is known to have spent his life in discovering what
the world, at least the world of Nature, is probably like. His
is not that "mealy-mouthed enthusiasm of the lover of Nature"
which Thoreau so commendably despised. He is a piece of
Nature himself, in a sense. He is a shaggy bear, exposing an
eighty-years' store of strong and sensible honey. He is a large
old tree, running with excellent clear sap and coated with
deeply-seasoned bark. A son of Evolution, he stands freed
from the pathetic fallacy, and nowhere reads himself into
Nature as Wordsworth and Emerson beautifully did. He
89
demolishes final causes as earnestly as Spinoza demolished

them. "The pampered goose was right: all things are just as
much for her use as for men's, while there are reasonable
doubts whether things were created for the especial use of
either." In so far as he approximates the humility of the
greatest spirits, he approximates their profundity and their
power to move.
But in the end he does only approximate their humility and
their profundity; and the reason lies in the reason which he
feels for believing that the universe, despite its large regardlessness of man, is the best possible universe. His reason is
simply the fact that we exist; a universe that lets us exist
must be the best. "In spite of .
short-comings and
delays and roundabout methods, here we are, and here we wish
to remain. . . . Whatever has failed, we have succeeded,
and the beneficent forces are still coming our way.
Some power other than ourselves ... is more positive than
negative, more for us than against us, else we should not be
here." Life being ours, all that remains is to make the best of
it; and Mr. Burroughs leaves us at that point. But it is pre
cisely there that philosophy begins; and Mr. Burroughs is not a
philosopher. He is a naturalist ; his vision is as broad as terres
trial time; he leads us over much geological and biological
ground to the mind of man. But once confronted with that
phenomenon, he is, like many a scientist, evasive; he is reduced
to the merest academic platitudes about man's "moral nature,"
a thing which he cannot describe, let alone explain. The problem
of the metaphysician is to state the relation between man now,
which is to say always, and the universe now, which is to say
always. The naturalist is concerned with the universe always
and man nowman in his turn, crawling by no one knows
what good luck over crust and slime that other animals once
felt at home on. The naturalist may talk as he pleases about
the moral nature of man, but this approach to it gives him
no clearer notion about it than he already has about the moral
nature of the amoeba. The metaphysician is interested in mind
as mind, and not as the mind of this or that animal in this or
that time. The important distinction for him as a moralist is
not between great Nature and little Man, but between great
men and little men, between, for instance, Spinoza's man whose
reason makes him to some extent aware of himself and the
world, and Spinoza's man who is aware of nothing. Mr. Bur
roughs, to be sure, has something to say about the discipline to
be derived from knowing oneself, from reflecting upon what
powers around are friendly and what powers are hostile; but
he communicates no urge to be wise or good. What really
fascinates him, and what he really believes in, is the unchastened, enormous nonchalance of Nature. What he really be
lieves and implies about war, for example, is that it comes
and spreads and goes inevitably, like cancer; what he dutifully
says about it, that the willing of it is a crime, fails to convince.
Mr. Burroughs is manly and eloquent, but he is not actually
profound.
His eloquence, as a matter of fact, is against him rather than
for him. It is sincere enough, but it lacks the fine and necessary
quality of imagination. His is the syntax but not the soul of
a sage. His Emersonian aphorisms, rounding off torrents of
Emersonian instances, are nothing like as potent as Emerson's
ethereal metaphors or Spinoza's crabbed propositions. Spinoza's
optimism (the comparison is fair since it is invited) is great
because bare, is terribly profound because infinitely abstract.
It is so searching that it suggests all examples, so sure of itself
that it gives none. Our minds go prowling after Spinoza's,
through the divine mathematical dusk of his "Ethics," and
supply whatever he left unspoken. Mr. Burroughs, who says
more, we respect as much but believe less.
Dr. Barrus's biography, intended at first for boys, but re
arranged for "grown-up boys and girls as well," is cheerfully
condescending and commonplace. It is nowhere called a "labor
of love," but that is what it reads like. Mr. Burroughs deserves
something better.
D. M.
The Nation
90
[Vol. 112, No.2898
to that general will, which thinkers like Mr. Harold Laski
regard as a mystical abstraction. The author would certainly

agree with Mr. Walter Lippmann that there can be no liberty
Books in Brief
RNOLD BENNETT attempts to disarm criticism by his
avowed humility and timidity in Our Women (Doran).
He not only admits his enormous incapacity for the business
of writing about women, but he shows that our women, being
those of the leisured class, are, after all, only a very small
for the community which lacks the information by which to de
portion of female humanity. Thus to any woman who chal

lenged his statements he could and doubtless would invariably
shells, stones, and feathers, to connoisseurs like the Medicis

and the Morgans, a constant love of acquiring unusual or in
trinsically beautiful objects has shown itself. Do not we our
selves often dream of picking up for a song rare books on the
reply: But of course this does not apply to you, my dear.

Having furnished himself with so excellent an avenue of escape,
he proceeds to put woman, neatly and expeditiously, in her
place. Woman is the most fascinating subject of conversation
that men have, confides Mr. Bennett; she is the butt of the
great majority of all witticisms; her faults and her virtues
have been catalogued a million times, and the list almost in
evitably ends off with The Women! God bless 'em! followed
by loud applause.
Although a feminist to the point of pas
sionateness, Mr. Bennett is constrained to admit that intel
lectually man is superior to woman, and he brushes aside as

partisan the contention that so far woman has not had a chance
to show what she can do.
is supreme.
But in the field of sentiment woman
She is also more decorative than man.
And her
job in life is infinitely harder than his, for since her place is
no longer exclusively in the home, she must not only manage
a household scientifically (and right here is room for improve
ment, Mr. Bennett thinks), but she must have a career in
addition.
At that rate it is no wonder that there are fifty
male poets greater than any woman poet, or that no woman
has achieved either painting or sculpture

that is better than second-rate.
or music
When Mr. Bennett is most
serious, he is, by his own confession, platitudinous; when he

is most delightful he is not serious. The result is what he
doubtless expected it would be: he breakfasts boldly on the lip

of the lioness, and she, far from being annoyed at such temerity,
smiles a feline smile and playfully strokes him with her paw.
S. P. HAYNES, author of The Case for Liberty (Dut
ton), shares with Mr. Belloc the conviction that widely
diffused ownership of property is needed to foster the indepen
dent spirit and the sense of individual responsibility that may
save us from the Servile State. He vigorously resolves with
tect lies. But he fails even to state the difficulties in the way
of a solution of this basic problem of democracy.
FROM
untutored savages and children who have hoarded
Paris quays, lovely pieces of old silver in England, and old

mahogany furniture in remote villages in New England and
the South? It is not so much the desire for permanent posses
sion as the interest of gathering the treasures that is the real
attraction. Someone has estimated that every collection which
does not go into a museum changes hands every twenty years
on an average. Collecting is one of the games that even serious
people play to lighten the strain of life. Thackeray said in
his Roundabout Papers of a certain antique and curio shop:
I can never pass without delaying at the windowsindeed, if
I were going to be hung, I would beg the cart to stop and let
me have one more look at the delightful omnium gatherum.
The true collector is not merely a gatherer of things but adds
knowledge and discriminating taste. Many books have been
written to guide him. The Pleasures of Collecting by Gardner
Teall (Century) condenses into thirty-five brief chapters inter
esting bits of history, accounts of famous Roman collectors,
Cretan discoveries, etc., as well as hints in regard to the rela
tive value of art objects. It is distinctly a man's book, and we
find English Jacobite Drinking-Glasses, Japanese Sword-Guards,
and Desk-Furniture treated, while fans, lace, and jewelry are
robustly omitted.
TH:
industrial Peerage records no family more illustrious

than that of the Murrays. For more than a century and
a half the control of the famous publishing house has been
handed from father to son, and rests now with John Murray IV,
who, in time, will pass it on to John Murray V. The true great
ness of the firm was established by John II, who founded the
Quarterly Review, and was gloriously maintained by his son,

who, in addition to so many other important works, published
Mr. Chesterton that Britons never shall be slaves to Prohibition.
The Origin of Species and invented the traveler's handbook

Happy moments of trust in the British instinct for freedom
idea, later borrowed by Baedeker.
come to him when he contemplates the deplorable dryness across

the Atlantic. But at home in the political field the prospect is
gloomy. Parliamentary government, like the vote, has become
has made a rather tame affair of his memoir John Murray

III (Knopf), which is reprinted with additions from the
Quarterly. Most of it is taken up with an account of the
origin of the handbooks and with letters written by the John
a sham; the leaders of the two major parties are in secret
collusion; the bureaucratic state maintains control in the in

terest of a minority by insidious newspaper propaganda and
monopoly of news sources; politicians are the tools of the in

terests that finance them. England, in short, is a government
of the democrat, by the bureaucrat, for the plutocrat.
Murray III while traveling.
The present John Murray
One misses such anecdotes and
illustrations of literary life as might have been expected from

a publisher in close contact with great writers.
Mr.
Haynes admits that all discussion of liberty is academic so long
S welcome and as agreeable as E. V. Lucas's books are, the
as war remains, for in war time he believes the state justified
appearance of a new one cannot be called a literary event,
in rigorous repression. Though in normal times attempted

suicide, for instance, should not be punished by the state, in
war time only killing under state direction is permissible. But
for his fecundity is fearful. You can never be sure just what
form his next book will take. Some of them are travels, some
entertainments, some books for children, and some, like
suppose war eliminated. Liberty will depend on the establish

ment of genuinely representative government, the encourage
ment of the small land owner and the small investor, a general
Adventures and Enthusiasms (Doran), are light essays.

Both the adventures and the enthusiasms are mild. Meeting
with a melancholy ferryman or meditating on the ideal guest are
to Mr. Lucas adventures; and his enthusiasms lie among those
defunct departments of literature and art which are usually
called quaint. His almost universal success in extracting some
thing delightful out of nothing is subject for amazement. For
such perfection in a minor art one must have a never failing in
terest in the trivialities of life, something of the patience of
those who carve the Lord's Prayer on a pin-head, and a com
plete lack of passion. Mr. Lucas's taste is generally impeccable
interest in public affairs, increased local self-government, and

the control of politicians by the recall and the referendum.
How are these prerequisites to liberty to be secured? Nothing
is said of revolution, but it required a revolution to loosen the
grip of the great landlords in France and in Russia. More
fundamental problems perplex the reader. Which among com
peting theories of the state does Mr. Haynes accept? Discus
sion of such a proposal as the joint sovereignty of an industrial
and a political parliament would illuminate vague references
and sane.
The Nation
Jan. 19, 1921]
Drama
The Beggar's Opera
S PENCE'S anecdote of how Swift once observed to Gay "what
an odd, pretty sort of thing a Newgate Pastoral might
make," how "The Beggar's Opera" came to be written, and how
Congreve, having read the manuscript, remarked that "it would
either take greatly or be damned confoundedly," is a common
place of a hundred classrooms. It is also known that the piece
did take greatly, that it made Rich the manager gay, and Gay
the author rich, that the actress who took the part of Polly
married an earl, and that Hogarth painted the whole trium
phant company. But the opera itself drifted into gradual forgetfulness. The early nineteenth century revivals were bowdler
ized, softened, and sweetened. Johnson, to be sure, had said:
"I do not believe that any man was ever made a rogue by being
present at its representation." But he had afterwards added in
order to give, Boswell tells us, a heavy stroke, that "there is in
it such a labefactation of all principles as may be injurious to
morality." The "labefactation" theory prevailed on both sides
of the Atlantic. In America, moreover, if we are to believe
Hazlitt, "this sterling satire was hooted off the stage," because
the Americans "have no such state of matters as it describes
before their eyes and have no conception of anything but what
they see." Virtue or ignorance, in brief, robbed the English
speaking stage for over a century of this strong, witty, and
delightful work.
Its very character came to be a matter of dispute. It is, first
of all, a dramatic satire in the exact taste of the eighteenth
century. To ascribe to highwaymen and women of the town
the pseudo-noble sentiments and swelling speech which courtly
life had borrowed from the pastoral tradition was obviously
amusing to a fashionable audience of 1728. That audience was
also, in its own way, politically minded and relished the sec
ondary intention by at once identifying Peachum and Lockit
with Walpole and Townshend. So much for the satiric sub
stance. It was the form of "The Beggar's Opera" that made it
an unmistakable burlesque of the Italian opera. Whenever
the action touches emotion the characters drop speech and ex
press themselves in sudden arias. This was the technique of
every opera before Gluck and remains customary in the cruder
type of operetta to this day. Contemporary witnesses are quite
clear on this point. The Companion of the Playhouse asserted
that "The Beggar's Opera" overthrew for a time the Italian
opera, "that Dagon of the Nobility and Gentry, who has so long
seduced them to idolatry." A final bit of evidence that has not
always been given its due weight is the fact that the Italian
opera company managed by Handel and Bononcini failed in
the very year of Gay's success.
The London production of Mr. Nigel Playfair which Mr. Ar
91
thur Hopkins has brought to the Greenwich Village Theater

gives us "The Beggar's Opera" in a form as close to the original
as our modern lack of leisure permits. The satire now reaches
us with all its cold, sardonic force. It is brilliantly gay, but with
a cruel sort of gaiety. The Duke of Argyle in his box on that
first night of January 29, 1728, was quite sure that the play
"would do." He was equally sure that all rogues ought to be
hanged and that to make game of them before hanging was
vastly good sport. The reprieve given to MacHeath at the last
moment does not soften the inner tone which the piece shares
with the comedy of Congreve. This high-spirited mercilessness
was no doubt in part a literary convention. But such conven
tions answer to a prevalent mood. Today that mood can be
accepted as a purely artistic one within which there live such
incomparable nerve and grace, elegance and wit. The verses
are as hard but also as translucent as clear agate; the satiric
thrusts in the dialogue glitter like rapiers and glide home. We
are very fine fellows today and transcend the age of Anne in
all our thinking. But we have not its magnificent perfection
of literary skill, its power of sheer writing on little things or
great. Our musical comedy lyrists do not compose verses like
Gay; no pamphlet on the Irish question rivals the "Drapier's
Letters" of Swift.
There remains the music, which will appeal more strongly to
modern audiences than the wit or action of the fable. The airs
were all, in their origin, folk-tunes, and students of popular song
complain that the transcriptions were not faithful and that the
rhythm and the whole modal character was changed. The lover
of music who is not a specialist need not regret this. It was
the age of Handel, a march from whose opera "Rinaldo" (1711)
is actually introduced. To the modern ear the airs seem all to
melt into the mood and pattern of the music of that age, to
share its lovely and pure simplicity of melodic line, its clear and
sober gravity, its compact and finite charm. This music is as
innocent as the gods. It knows neither regret nor yearning.
It is not always, not even generally, gay. But the sadness never
cries or rebels. It accepts and expresses itself as a plain fact
like any other. The melodies are neither like homeless souls
nor like gardens in the rain; they are like Grecian urns set in
the cool shadow of a well-trimmed tree.
The performance of Mr. Playfair's company is always ade
quate and often beautiful. Miss Sylvia Nelis has a slovenly
enunciation. But her voice is perfecta round, velvety, yet
almost sexless soprano produced with a clean effortlessness even
at its mocking little coloratura moments. Mr. Percy Heming
acts admirably if he does not sing quite so well. Miss Dora
Roselli adds a warmer touch; the parts of Lockit and the elder
Peachums are interpreted with ripe and agile comic force. The
dances are as grave and graceful as the tunes, and but for
the secondary matter of decorative skill the earliest of all mu
sical comedies may still be said to be also the best.
Ludwig Lewisohn
INDEX
FOR VOLUME CXI
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Copyright. 1921, R. H. Macy & Co., Inc.
International Relations Section

Justice to Germany and France
By PIERREPONT B. NOYES
Late American Commissioner in the Rhinelands
HE following article is part of Mr. Noyes's forthcoming book, While Europe Waits for Peace, and is published by
courtesy of The Macmillan Company. Mr. Noyes, as American Delegate on the Inter-Allied Rhineland Commission,
was the highest American civil official in the Rhineland, and at the time of his resignation it was reported that he had
resigned as a protest against the methods of the occupations. He was also President of the Inter-Allied Committee on
Coal for the occupied territory; he is now president of the Oneida Community, Ltd.
EUROPE AFTER THE WAR
Up to the very day war was declared experts insisted, and

the people believed, that a general war was for economic rea
sons impossible, or at least that it must be very brief. Volumes
were written to prove that the expense of modern war-making
would reduce the richest country to bankruptcy within a few
weeks. Yet for more than four years the greatest nations of
the world maintained a struggle on the most gigantic scale and
with an unremitting intensity of action beyond any war in

history. A majority of the male population of Europe, and later
of America, either fought in the ranks or produced supplies
for the armies, and the destruction of property reached a total
hitherto undreamed of.
Month after month we saw the armies
grow larger and munitions increase, both in quantity and de

structive efficiency. All economic traditions were shattered.
War came to seem the normal occupation of mankind. As
stadt, and other territory across the Rhine last April, I was
officially informed that the French Government had decided on

this military move. A high French official to whom I expressed
regret and who was, I think, inclined to regret the decision him
self, told me that the Government was being pushed from be
hindthat the people in France were forcing the Administra
tion to adopt an aggressive military policy toward Germany.
During June I was discussing the situation with the German
Foreign Minister in Berlin. He talked to me very frankly, and
in the course of our conversation made one significant state
ment. France, said he, refuses to permit us to make any

start toward economic recovery. I admit that France will be
taking some chances in letting us become economically strong,
but she will have to take those chances or give up any idea of
indemnity. These two statements furnish a clue to the psycho
logical factor which is mainly responsible for the creeping
paralysis now afflicting the continental nations.
years went by our minds became accustomed to the idea of

endless fighting.
Financial miracles were commonplaces and
people ceased to speculate on the economic conditions which

would follow the war.
From a prewar belief that world insolvency must follow even

a short general conflict, the average mind swung to the other
extreme and came to hold the settlement of the world's war
losses as a rather academic problem to be adjusted between

victor and vanquished. Especially in America, where there
was no devastation and the losses were smallest, people were
prepared to minimize the problem of European restoration.

As a nation we were war-weary. Our own minor problems of
adjustment seemed large. The call for help came faint and
confused, and, being far removed from the turmoil in Europe,
THE CRUX OF THE SITUATION.FRANCE AND GERMANY
It is very necessary after such a destructive war that sus

pended production shall be started as promptly as possible. The
only remedy for an economic sickness such as exists today in
Europethe only hope of the millions and the only chance for
peace lies in production and more production. But war not only
destroys the products of industryit disarranges the entire in
dustrial machinery. Hence, each nation must reconstruct its
productive system as quickly as possible under pain of social
and political degeneration if it fails.
that we could safely and conscientiously leave the people of the
A survey of European conditions and especially of the prog

ress made toward industrial revival by the European nations
will be greatly simplified if we concentrate our examination on
France and Germany. These two nations have been the hub of
the Continental system. They are the seat of the present dis
ease. Within their boundaries live more than 100,000,000 of the
war-wrecked countries to work out their own salvation.
best producers in Europe. These two are so situated with ref
we allowed ourselves to believe what we wished to believe
that European reorganization was coming along fairly well and
Unfortunately, our prewar theory that even a short war
erence to other countries that their economic condition is the
meant economic ruin was more nearly correct than our later
complacency. The only error in this theory arose from over

looking the reserve resources, both material and spiritual, which
exist in all nations and which can be temporarily brought to
determining factor in the welfare of most of the continental

nations. Together with England (omitting Russia for the pres
ent), they represent three-fourths of the productive capacity
upon which the 470,000,000 inhabitants of Europe depend for
bear when the issue seems life or death.
prosperity and happiness.
Like a man in the delirium of fever who performs impossible

physical feats, apparently defying all natural laws, nations
locked in a death struggle are able to muster forces unsus
pected and at other times unavailable. Like the fever patient
also, their collapse when the struggle ends is proportionately
severe. Europe since the armistice has experienced just such a
collapse-economically, politically, and socially. The American
Great Britain, while she is unquestionably the most favored

spot on the European economic map and the only important
country making progress, can be neglected in this survey. One
has only to consider her debts, her loss of foreign trade, her
people should face the disagreeable fact that little real progress
has been made toward European restoration, and that ruin
still stalks in plain sight of most of our former Allies; and the
additional fact that little progress can be made without our
active help. Before entering upon details I ought to add that
the repair of material destruction in Europe is greatly hindered

by national hatreds and antagonisms, and by the poisoning influ
ence of fear in national councils.
Two days before the French army invaded Frankfort, Darm
labor situation, her Irish crisis, and the steady drop in the value
of the pound sterling, to recognize that while her indomitable

courage and willingness to face her troubles frankly and to tax
herself savagely are likely to keep her afloat until she can make
the shore, she positively cannot take any one else into the boat
without sinking it.
Russia I have omitted because we have little real information
as to her condition, and for the time being that country is cut
off from the rest of the world. Italy is struggling with an al
most hopeless internal situation. A country without coal and
formerly very dependent upon foreign capital, she will sink or
swim with the failure or success of her larger industrial neigh
The Nation
Jan.19, 1921]
93
The little nations, new and old, while in the aggregate
linen; 70 per cent of the cotton textiles, besides very large con
they represent with Italy perhaps a quarter of the European

production, are so tied economically to the fortunes of France
tributions to the clothing of the country.

Of course not all of the machinery for this production was
and the old central German bloc, that whatever conditions we

find in France and Germany will very largely govern their fate.
destroyed, but the coal mines and the basic iron and steel mills
Europe, then, must stand or fall with the success or failure of
the mines had recovered only about 13 per cent, and the steel
reconstruction and economic revival in France and Germany,
and metal mills only 23 per cent.

It should also be noted that the region where destruction was
the worst contained steel construction plants and most of the
factories making tools and hardware, so greatly needed by all
bors.
and the steady deterioration of Europe's economic condition

from the date of the armistice down to the present time has
arisen from progressive deterioration in these two countries.
They are both sorely wounded; they are poverty-stricken beyond

anything known in modern times. They have need of each
other; they need cooperation. All their energy and intelligence
were wiped out to such an extent that in March of this year
other industries. This is also the district which, more than any
them would still have been a terribly difficult one. But hatred,
distrust, and fear have dictated an opposite course.
other, manufactured what have been called the essential items

of merchandise, while the regions not touched by war were
devoted more to wines, silks, and other luxuries. The impor
tance of this fact will be appreciated at this time when the
reconstruction of France and Europe places especial emphasis
on the production of essentials. Stress might be laid on the
crippling of the railways, on the devastation of food-producing
land, and the loss of an enormous number of cattle. I wish,
CONDITIONS IN FRANCE
however, to bring into this survey only those larger factors

which, in my opinion, have rendered France unable to save her
should have been directed during these eighteen months to
nursing such industrial and economic resources as they had left.

Even had they cleared away the rubbish of war as rapidly as
possible and adopted a policy of cooperation, the task ahead of
In order to get a clear view of the economic problems before

the French people, it will be well to show first the situation
which confronted them on the day the armistice was signed, lest
stories of the truly heroic efforts toward restoration already
made in the devastated regions divert attention from the over
whelming magnitude of France's original problem. The won
derful courage as well as pride of the French people would con
ceal from the world how inadequate all of these efforts have
been for the solution of that problem. France would rather be
represented to the world as hopeful and determined than as an
object for pity, and yet, with all their courage and hopefulness,
the responsible men of France are sick at heart when they con
template the gigantic task ahead of the nation and the broken
tools with which they must work.
The war cost France in cash nearly $40,000,000,000. Her
interior debt has increased since 1913 $28,000,000,000 and her
foreign debt, of which there was none in 1913, is now nearly

$6,000,000,000.
The destruction of property in France during the war has

been variously estimated at from $15,000,000,000 to $30,000,000,
000. The capitalization of pensions for orphans and wounded is

$10,000,000,000. Although the total of these liabilities would be
considerably reduced if figured in par exchange, such an esti
mate would be misleading. To obtain an American equivalent
for the internal debt, the value of the franc today in French
labor and materials must be used and, of course, the full amount
of the foreign debt, $6,000,000,000, must be added. If, for the
sake of discussion, we cut in half the interior debt and the cost
of reconstruction and the pensions, we still have a staggering

total of somewhere between 35 and 40 billion dollars lost by
France through the war. It should be remembered that France
is a country of only 40,000,000 people and that a few years ago
Sir George Paish estimated the total value of all property in
France, public and private, as $50,000,000,000.
These huge liabilities created by the war are not the whole
story. The French people bore the brunt of the fighting and
their country was the battleground. As a result their most
serious loss is the destruction of equipment and the demoraliza
tion of those economic forces on which France must rely to make
good the huge deficit.
self economically without help from the outside. When this sit
uation was considered by the representatives of all the Allies
assembled in Paris, it was unanimously agreed that France's
salvation depended upon a huge German indemnity; German

coal as a basic industrial necessity, and German money for finan
cial solvency.
Before leaving the survey of French conditions, it should be
recognized that the miseries of war and the hopeless character
of the peace up to date have created a very dangerous internal
-
situation.
It is immensely to the credit of the French people that during
this very trying year radicalism has not gone further in adding
to chaos. But there is a limit to this immunity. Proportion
ately, the radical element in France has been increased; for it
was found necessary during the war to send a very large num
ber of the factory workers back from the front in order to keep
up the manufacture of necessary supplies. Women could per
form much of the farm work, but the factories depended upon
the presence of skilled workmen. The result was that out of the
1,500,000 killed, France lost a much larger proportion of her
conservative peasant population than of her industrialists. This
shifting of balance may have a very decided effect on future
events. The increase of conservative deputies returned to Par
liament at last year's general election was hailed as evidence
that the masses in France were becoming less radical. An
examination, however, of election statistics shows that more
socialist and ultra-radical votes were cast than in any previous

election.
It is interesting to note a confirmation of the desperate eco

nomic outlook I have depicted, which can be read between the
lines as it were, in a statement made recently to the National
City Bank by the head of a great French bank. This statement
is mainly devoted to showing what remarkable progress France
has made under the circumstances. I quote the significant para

graph: On the day of the armistice, the whole American army in
France did not possess a single field-gun which had not been con
structed in and supplied by France. Imagine the United States
in the same situation; having lost the coal-fields in the Alle
ghanies, the iron ore of the lakes, some of the largest and rich
est cities such as Chicago, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh; having
One and one-half million of her men be
had three million five hundred thousand men killed, and while
tween eighteen and fortyher best producershave been killed,

and in spite of this she feels she must keep up a standing army
struggling for their life on their own soil, helping others to get
ready and devoting all their productive capacity to war-material,
while others had something over for domestic requirements and
investments such as shipbuilding, etc., how would American eco
of 700,000 men until some world settlement is made which will
relieve her of the old danger of invasion.

The devastated region, while only 7 per cent of the area of
France, furnished before the war one-fifth of her exports. From

it came 92 per cent of the iron ore; more than half of the coal
(in fact, a large proportion of the industrial coal); 60 per cent

of the steel; 77 per cent of the zinc; 22 per cent of the lead; 20
per cent of the machinery and machine tools; 80 per cent of the
nomic conditions look, under these circumstances, after five

years?
He might have added to this picture an American standing

army of 2,000,000 men, which in proportion to our population
represents the burden entailed upon France by the 700,000 sol
diers she maintains at the present time.
The Nation
94
CONDITIONS IN GERMANY
[Vol.112, No.2898
28, 1919, a new protocol was signed reducing the demand to about
2% million tons per month with a sliding scale based on
The total German war expenses, including loans to insolvent

increased production.
allies, were considerably larger than those of France. Ger

many's national debt is now around 190,000,000,000 marks, to
which must be added an unsecured note circulation of about
half that amount, and liabilities for indemnity to her own sub
jects of over 100,000,000,000 marks. On their face these debts
are equivalent in American money to more than $100,000,000,
000. The total is reduced, however, to about $30,000,000,000 if
as in the French estimate we use the present value of the mark
in German labor. On the other side, it should be noted that any
attempt to redeem the circulating notes and so restore German
currency would bring these notes very close to par and thus
largely increase the debt figure stated above. To the debt must
be added the minimum indemnity imposed on Germany by the
Treaty of Versailles, which is there stated as approximately
$24,000,000,000.
While in one way it is now an advantage to Germany that she
was obliged during the war to do all her borrowing at home,
this is offset by the fact that having had to rely almost entirely
on her own material resources she found herself in 1919 abso
lutely bare of merchandise and of the raw materials with which

to manufacture more. An American buyer of long experience
in Germany passed through Coblenz during the fall of 1919

with a $25,000,000 credit to be used in buying German merchan
dise for export. He returned six weeks later and told me that
he had advised his syndicate to withdraw the credit; he found
no stocks of any kind in Germany. He said there were small
quantities of merchandise in retail stores,
absolutely no
but,
When during the futile discussion in
Paris last March between the Reparation Commission and the
German Coal Delegation, I was called in as an American expert,

I urged that France for her own sake recognize the facts and
make a business-like bargain with the German Coal Komissar,
one which could be and, I believe, would be kept. I informed our
representative on the Reparation Commission that Germany

could at that time deliver 1% million tons, but no more. M.
Poincar was unwilling to discuss with Germany any reduction,
and as a result deliveries continued at about 600,000 tons per
month, until at the Spa Conference in June, 2,000,000 tons was
agreed upon. This quantity, considering the increase of German

production at that time, corresponds very closely with my
1,250,000 tons in March.
Lack of transportation is another obstacle to economic revival.

Of ocean shipping Germany has practically none left. Her
river and canal equipment has been much reduced by the
operation of the treaty. While the railroads, especially the
Prussian lines, are doing much better than one would expect
from the statistical situation, the 5,000 locomotives sent to
France and Belgium, the bad condition of those left in Germany,

the lack of good repair material, and the inefficiency of shop
workers have created a shortage of locomotive power felt with
especial severity in coal distribution. Out of 22,000 locomotives

left in Germany, 10,000 are continually in the repair shops.
Food is still one of the worst deficiencies.
Herbert Hoover
(the best informed man in America on European food condi

tions) told me that normally Germany can produce only four
wholesale stocks.
sevenths of her own foodthe balance must be imported in
The labor situation is another serious factor in the problem

of German economic revival. German industrial supremacy was
founded on a productive capacity per man which no longer exists.
exchange for German exports. Such imports of food are only

possible now at ruinous prices on account of the rate of ex
change.
In most trades the output per man is now a little over one-half
what it was before the war, due partly to shorter hours which
came with the revolution of November, 1918, partly to six years
of underfeeding, and partly to a radicalism which makes the
masses disinclined to work effectively.
When I talked with the Minister of Economics last June as to
the relative importance of the various factors operating to pre

vent industrial revival, he rated the shortage of coal as one of
the worst. In fact, he placed it second only to the unlimited
indemnity.
During the year 1919 production of industrial coal in Germany

was about 60 per cent of the 1914 total. As president of the
Inter-Allied Committee on Coal for the occupied territory, I
The Government has already spent hundreds of mil
lions of marks in subsidizing food to bring prices within the

limits of the workingman's purse. The mass of the people in
Germany can only afford to buy this subsidized food, and the
subsidized ration during the first seven months of 1920 con
tained only 1,090 calories as against 1,500 calories during the
war, and 3,000 calories before the war. Both production and
the morale of the people in Germany are suffering from this con
tinued underfeeding.
The Versailles Treaty calls on Germany to pay a minimum

indemnity of 100,000,000,000 gold marksapproximately 24,
000,000,000 gold dollars which, paid in francs at present ex
change rate, would equal 400,000,000,000 francs. In 1871 Ger
many imposed upon France an indemnity of 5,000,000,000 francs.
made a careful investigation of the cause of this reduction in
output.
The ineffectiveness of labor, referred to above, was
blamed for about two-thirds of the difference.
I found that
whereas one ton of coal per man was mined in Germany before
and during the war, the average in 1919 was .58 ton. The
balance of the shrinkage was accounted for by deterioration of
equipment and by loss of the Saar and Lorraine coal fields to
France.
Looking into the future, the Germans are worrying over the
threatened loss of the Upper Silesian coal field, which pro
duced annually about 45,000,000 tons before the war.
If the
plebiscite gives this district to Poland, Germany will be obliged

to reduce shipments of coal to France or allow her own industries
At the time this was expected to ruin France, and history has
applauded the heroic energy with which she accomplished the
seemingly impossible by paying the whole amount within two
years. After making every allowance, it is not reasonable to
expect that France can collect from Germany 80 times the
indemnity imposed in 1871. The attempt does not seem a good
business proposition unless the advantage sought is German
bankruptcy instead of cash. Certainly, in the light of the eco
nomic prostration described above, the policy of Great Britain
and Italy, which calls for a revision of the treaty, seems the
wisest course, both in the interest of France and the peace of
the world.
The most depressing influence of all on German economic life

to collapse.
During 1919 the average amount of coal received by German

industries was a little better than 30 per cent of their normal con
sumption. The steel mills, because they were near the mines
is the uncertainty created by Allied refusal to fix a limit for the

indemnity. This has been one of the chief points of difference
between Great Britain and France, and the fact should be
clearly understood.
and the output of coal at pit mouths was greater than the
available cars to transport it, received as high as 60 per cent of
The Treaty of Versailles recognizes that Germany ought to
their requirements. This summer, however, delivery of coal to

steel mills has fallen to about 40 per cent of their requirements.
The contest between France and Germany over coal deliveries
has been misunderstood in this country. The Versailles Treaty
called upon Germany to deliver to the Allies 3% million tons
per month. This was so manifestly impossible that on August
pay for all the devastation, as well as the cost to the Allies, of
the war. Nothing which has come to light since the armistice
has raised a doubt as to the justice of this propositiontheoret
ically. Practically, the peace commissioners agreed that such
complete reimbursement was impossible. Being ignorant of
German economic conditions, they left the total amount of the
The Nation
Jan. 19, 1921]
indemnity to be settled when more information regarding Ger

many's finances should be obtained. The treaty names 100,000,
000,000 gold marks as an immediate payment to be recognized
by the issuance of German gold bonds. Beyond that, the Repa
ration Commission is to decide as to how much additional in
demnity the Germans can pay year by year without ruining

their industries. For two years this uncertainty has hung over
the economic life of Germany like the sword of Damocles.
If you say to a person, Work as hard as you can and at the

end of the year we will decide how much of your product we
will take from you, there is no incentive for that person to
work. Equally, if you say to capital, domestic or foreign, We

are waiting to see how much real money will come into sight in
Germany before settling on a maximum indemnity, capital will
certainly refuse to show itself. That provision of the Versailles
Treaty which permits the Allies to add to the minimum indem
nity of $24,000,000,000 whatever they decide at a later date
Germany is capable of paying has so far deprived her people of
incentive to enterprise and her industries of much needed new
capital. More than a year ago the representative of a group of
American capitalists who were prepared under certain condi
tions to grant large financial credits to German industries, told
me that they considered it unwise to invest a cent in Germany

until the limits of the indemnity had been fixed.
It has been and is today of the utmost importance to Ger
many and to Europe, and it is an essential prerequisite to the
payment of any indemnity, that the broken circle of production

raw material, power (coal), labor, transportation, and sale
be repaired as quickly as possible.
progress made in this direction.
So far there has been no
Certain it is that unemployment in Germany is now increas

ing faster than at any time since the war. Official reports in
June, 1920, showed that the Government was giving unemploy
ment pay to less than 1,000,000 men. Today the same reports
show that nearly 1,500,000 are officially out of work and receiv
95
violence. The French populace passionately threw its support

to that political group which has no confidence in any inter
national agency save military power. These Chauvinists (not a
large, though an influential group) have believed throughout
that France should seize the present opportunity so to destroy or
mutilate Germany as to render her old enemy permanently in
ferior to herself, both economically and in a military way. Now,
this military party in France finds itself backed by an almost
unanimous people.
Since America deserted, French policy has been poisoned by

dreams: First, of separatist movements to be fomented among
the German states; second, of establishing her eastern frontier
on the Rhine; third, of a militaristic Poland on Germany's
eastern frontier; and fourth, of new invasions of Germany.
Many German activities have appeared to threaten these ambi
tions and have been promptly crushed.
For instance, when the Sparticists created a reign of terror
in the Ruhr last March, France refused the German Government
permission to send enough troops to crush the rebellion, and

when, in spite of this refusal, 18,000 more Reichswehr than are
permitted by the Treaty of Versailles entered the Ruhr and
cleaned things up, France invaded Frankfort and Darmstadt
as reprisal. Since the most radical sovietism was establishing
itself throughout that territory, the Allies would have been
forced to occupy the Ruhr themselves had the German Govern

ment withheld its troops, and such an occupation would have
involved France and the Allies in a major military adventure.

For the Ruhr is a tough district, a mining and steel mill dis
trict containing 515,000 miners and a larger number of mill
workers (Russians, Poles, and Italians being mixed with the
Germans).
The Ruhr is also more infected with bolshevism
than any other part of Germany with the possible exception of

Saxony.
News dispatches sent to America during the Ruhr trouble

were very conflicting. Later, I obtained permission to go
ing government aid.
through the government files in Berlin and found there hun
To sum up, Germany finds herself deprived of her iron mines,

and a part of her coal, with a debt of at least $30,000,000,000,
a fixed liability for indemnity of another $24,000,000,000, and
unable after nearly two years to raise the production of her
industries to a point where she can pay for the foreign food
absolutely necessary for the feeding of her people. She is short
of coal, short of food, short of transportation, crippled by social
unrest and a weak government, and her future is shadowed by
such uncertainty regarding the financial and political intentions
of the Allies that the population, from the government officials
down to the workers in the mines, have become possessed with
a sort of fatalistic hopelessness which has killed both initiative
and energy.
It is my firm opinion that Germany, once the industrial back
bone of continental Europe, is steadily sinking into a social and
economic feebleness very dangerous to the peace of the world. I
dreds of original letters and telegrams confirming the reports

made by representatives of the American Commanding General
who were in the Ruhr during the rebellion.
agree with Mr. Paul Cravath that it will be hard to make Bol
shevists of the German peoplethat this is not a real danger

unless the Allies leave them helpless and hopeless too long.
Fear dictated French insistence on reduction of the German
army to 100,000 men. It is not simply that so small an army

will place Germany at the mercy of dangerous eastern neigh
bors, but 100,000 soldiers cannot keep order at home under pres
ent unsettled conditions.
She, unlike America and Great Brit
ain, has always depended upon the military for police work.
Local police forces are small. In Cologne, for instance, there
are in proportion to the population less than one-quarter as
many policemen as in New York City. The local police in Ger
many merely manage traffic and arrest drunks. Serious disorder
is handled by the military.

France also fears the economic recuperative power of Ger
many. French statesmen are apprehensive as to the temper of
their own people who were long fed on glittering promises that
the expected flow of German money into France would permit
a low tax rate to be maintained and would bring prosperity.
Believing that industrial revival if given a chance would pro
THE DEADLOCK
ceed in Germany faster than in France, these statesmen fear
The above description of the economic wreckage left by the

war in France and Germany has not been overdrawn.
I be
lieve that the authorities in either country, if they felt free to

speak frankly, would confirm my estimate. To complete the
picture, it is necessary to describe the deadlock which has ex
isted between these two countries up to the present time, and

which by defeating their attempts to revive industry and restore
finance, threatens disaster to both.
French statesmen are possessed by two great fears. The

first is a very natural dread of a revengeful, military Germany
again grown strong. When America withdrew from the League,
this fear which had been fading away in the hopeful prospect of
a new international force capable of making justice an effective
arbiter between nations, swept over the country with renewed
that the French masses would vent their disappointment and

wrath upon the Government. Hence, the French refusal to fix
a maximum figure for the indemnity; hence, the former French
insistence on more coal than Germany could possibly send;

hence, also, the French opposition to outside loans to Germany.
In fact, the determined hostility in France to any revision of the
treaty so as to adapt it to known conditions and thus, while
obtaining all practicable reparations make economic revival in
Germany possible, has been based on a profound uneasiness as
to the consequences of such revival.
MILITARY OCCUPATION OF THE RHINELAND
The Allied occupation of the western provinces of Germany,

originally planned to last fifteen years but extended for an
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2898
96
indefinite period by M. Millerand's note to the Germans last
March, is so unmistakably a prime factor in the European out
look, and it so directly threatens the future peace of the world
that knowledge of its character and history is essential to a true
understanding of the European situation. The history of Arti
cle 428 of the peace treaty, and of the "Rhineland Agreement"
created in conformity with Article 432 which defines the terms
of occupation, is typical of the entire struggle at the Peace
Conference between what is now referred to as the "Peace De
lusion" of Wilson and Lloyd George and the "Continental Pol
icy" which M. Millerand has during the last six months tri
umphantly reestablished. Similarly the character and history
of the occupation itself suggest the foundation of sand upon
which the present peace of Europe is built.
All that portion of Germany lying west of the Rhine, together
with about 2,000 square miles on the eastern bank, is now occu
pied by Allied troops under conditions laid down in the "Agree
ment." Temporary occupation was absolutely necessary. This
occupation, however, having already lasted longer than the Ger
man occupation of France in 1871-72, must according to the
Treaty of Peace continue, with possible reduction of territory,
for fifteen years, and M. Millerand notified the Germans last
April that the date from which the fifteen years should be reck
oned was postponed until all obligations of the treaty are met by
Germany. Since some of these conditions cannot be complied
with at the present time, this automatically extends the occupa
tion indefinitely.
In order to realize what this means for the peace of the world,
Americans should conceive of a territory about the size of New
England, with a larger population than is contained in those six
States, and an industrial importance for Germany even greater
than New England has for the United States, occupied by 120,000 enemy troops and its people and government subjected to
minute inspection and interference by representatives of its tra
ditional enemies.
All of the cities in the Rhineland are crowded with Allied
officers living in the finest private houses, commandeered from
their owners. These owners are usually permitted to live in a
few rooms in the rear or in the attics of their former homes.
Municipal regulations, including street traffic and the prices of
merchandise, and many of the smaller restrictions which were
in force in America during the war are prescribed by the repre
sentatives of the occupying Powers. Every German law and
regulation must be submitted to those representatives. If dis
approved by them they become invalid throughout occupied Ger
many.
Newspapers are censored, private mail may at any time
be seized, and the local movements of persons may be subjected
to passport regulations. The right of requisition of supplies
for the Allied army and officials may at any time break down
the very difficult "rationing" plans of the German food commis
sioner. The appointment of even local officials must be ap
proved, and their liability to summary removal on grounds sat
isfactory to the Commission alone is a standing threat to landrats, burgomeisters, and presidents. Many other harassing
interferences with the daily life of the population are the neces
sary accompaniments of a hostile occupation. These it must be
remembered are conditions in the occupied territory of Germany
under a regime which was given a civilian character and made
as liberal as possible by the moderate elements at the Peace
Conference against violent opposition from the military
group.
M. Tardieu, in recent magazine articles, gives an account of
the struggle over this question of extended occupation. He
shows that Mr. Lloyd George and President Wilson were for
months unalterably opposed to it. He states that a special
defensive alliance was offered by the two statesmen to France as
inducement to abandon the plan. He reveals step by step how
M. Clemenceau's persistence broke down opposition and how in
May, 1919, by conceding civilian control, he finally made a
fifteen-year occupation part of the treaty with Germany.
A Brutal Document
An original draft for the "Rhineland Agreement" was pre
pared by the Supreme Military Council under the influence of
Marshal Foch, and it was an extremely brutal document. It
decreed that "martial law with all its consequences" should
remain in force in the Rhineland for fifteen years; it placed
control of the German police and the conduct of the occupation
in the hands of the French military commander.
I was at that time serving on the temporary Rhineland Com
mission, and together with Sir Harold Stuart, the British com
missioner, entered a strong protest against this plan of the
Supreme Military Council. Several revisions were attempted,
in the preparation of which I assisted, but becoming convinced
that a mere revision could not make such a plan workable I
wrote a letter on May 27 to President Wilson embodying my
objections and outlining a plan for civilian control.
This letter seems to have reached the President at a psycho
logical moment, for he took it to the Supreme Council and ob
tained unanimous consent to the appointment of a committee
instructed to draft a plan along the lines I had suggested. This
committee, after a week of continuous session, presented to the
Peace Conference the "Rhineland Agreement" which was finally
signed by Germany and the Allies at the same time as the
Treaty of Versailles. The French White Book, containing the
discussions of this special committee, states in Paragraph I :
"That a commission composed of:
"A representative of the United States of America who will
be designated by President Wilson ; Lord Robert Cecil, for Great
Britain; Monsieur Loucheur, for France; Marquis Imperiali,
for Italy, will be appointed to draft a plan of agreement con
cerning the occupation of the Rhineland Provinces, in accord
ance with the scheme suggested (skeleton plan) in a letter
dated May 27, 1919, from Mr. Noyes, American delegate to the
Inter-Allied Rhineland Commission, to President Wilson."
It also contains a copy of my letter, which I will quote since
it states my position at that time ; a position which I have since
seen no reason to alter.
"American Commission to Negotiate Peace
"Paris, May 27, 1919
"To the Honorable Woodrow Wilson,
"President of the United States of America,
"11, Place des Etats-Unis, Paris.
"Dear Sir: After a month spent in the Rhineland as Amer
ican commissioner, I feel there is danger that a disastrous mis
take will be made. The 'Convention' for the government of these
territories, as drafted by the military representatives of the
Supreme War Council on May 11, is more brutal, I believe, than
even its authors desire upon second thought. It provides for
unendurable oppression of six million people during a period of
years.
"This 'Convention' is not likely to be adopted without great
modification. What alarms me, however, is that none of the
revisions of this document which I have seen recognize that its
basic principle is badthat the quartering of an enemy army
in a country as its master in time of peace and the billeting of
troops on the civil population will insure hatred and ultimate
disaster.
"I have discussed this matter at length with the American
commanders of the Army of Occupation, men who have seen
military occupation at close range for six months. These offi
cers emphatically indorse the above statements. They say that
an occupying army, even one with the best intentions, is guilty
of outrages and that mutual irritation, in spite of every effort to
the contrary, grows apace. Force and more force must inevi
tably be the history of such occupation long continued.
"Forgetting the apparent ambitions of the French and possi
bly overlooking political limitations, I have sketched below a
plan which seems to me the maximum for military domination in
the Rhineland after the signing of peace. Our army command
ers and others who have studied the subject on the ground agree
with this program:
Jan. 19,1921]
The Nation
"Skeleton Plan
"I. As few troops as possible concentrated in barracks or
reserve areas with no 'billeting,' excepting possibly for officers.
"II. Complete self-government for the territory, with the ex
ceptions below.
"III. A Civil Commission with powers:
"a. To make regulations or change old ones whenever Ger
man law or actions
"(1) Threaten the carrying out of terms, or
"(2) Threaten the comfort or security of troops.
"b. To authorize the army to take the control under martial
law, either in danger spots or throughout the territory when
ever conditions seem to the Commission to make this necessary.
"Very truly yours,
(Signed) "Pierrepont B. Noyes,
"American Delegate,
"Inter-Allied Rhineland Commission."
The negotiations which resulted in this plan being adopted are
of special interest to any one studying the international psychol
ogy of the past two years. It is history now that M. Clemenceau
on May 29 seized upon this more liberal plan of occupation pre
sented by President Wilson in order to make more sure of the
final adhesion of the American and British premiers to the main
principle of occupation. Sitting in the meetings at the Quay
d'Orsai as a spectator, I witnessed the most intense and per
sistent hostility to this "civilian" plan on the part of Marechal
Foch and his aids. During recent months leading French states
men and the French press have bewailed the weakness which
yielded to the Anglo-Saxon liberalism. It is loudly maintained
that since the compromise was made in view of active Ameri
can participation and a defensive alliance, a way should now be
found to get back to that sterner control originally planned, and
by doing away with the interference of the Inter-Allied High
Commission which "has continually opposed French interests"
insure success for the new French policy.
I was the American member of the Commission from its cre
ation until June of this year. The president of the Commis
sion, M. Paul Tirard, is a forward-looking, conscientious man
who has worked with the other members to carry out the details
of the Rhineland Agreement in the spirit intended by the Su
preme Council. He has succeeded as well as any man could
surrounded by an intensely military atmosphere and under the
pressure of a French national policy steadily swinging toward
aggressive military and political action.
I believe that in the Rhineland a hostile military occupation
is seen at its best, and at its best, I can say from personal
observation, it is brutal, it is provocative, it is continuing war.
A temporary occupation was, as I have said, inevitable, and
its continuance until the disarmament of Germany has pro
ceeded to a point satisfactory to the Allies is probably desirable,
but its maintenance as a debt-collecting agency through fifteen
years is unthinkableit will be a running sore. America is
today participating in this occupation with more troops than any
nation excepting France, and yet we have elected to place en
tirely outside of our own influence the character of the occupa
tion and the length of its continuance. During the fourteen
months in which I worked as a member of the Rhineland Com
mission, I became daily more shocked that any responsible man
should be willing to curse the world with such a hatred and
war-breeding institution as this. I could multiply the details
until every American would be equally shocked, but I will leave
it to the imagination of my readers to decide for themselves
what would be the ultimate result of a fifteen-year occupation
of the New England States by victorious German or other for
eign troops.
German "Separatists' " Movements Instigated by the
French
After the war there was a general conviction in France, as
there was in all Allied countries, that a political separation of
the Rhine Provinces from Prussia would be in the interest of
97
future peace. Dominated by Prussia the German Empire had

plunged the world into war. Hence, it seemed probable that
strengthening the power of the other German states and weak
ening the influence of Prussia in the German Reich would tend
to eliminate the Hohenzollern dream of world conquest. Unfor
tunately, this scheme of political readjustment, which was looked
upon with favor by many Germans, easily formed the basis in
France for the more radical plan of an independent Rhineland
which should act as a buffer state. And in the upper hierarchy
of French nationalism and militarism the thinly veiled expecta
tion that this buffer state would be under French influence,
became a definite determination to make the Rhineland ulti
mately French territory. A few months' experience with occu
pation in the Rhineland and the unlimited power possessed by
an occupying army made this plan of annexation seem feasible.
In the end it tempted even those moderates who were at first
inclined to look askance at a policy likely to create another
Alsace-Lorraine to approve French efforts for a "frontier on
the Rhine."
A brief account of the separatists' plots fomented by the
French in the Rhineland during the past eighteen months will
add a point of definiteness to my statement that a fifteen-year
hostile occupation is certain to prove a curse to the world. It
will also suggest in general the part America must play, if
Europe in the twentieth century is to be anything but a powder
magazine of dangerous possibilities.
While I was in the Rhineland four open attempts at secession
were made. These were of two kinds. Three of them were
roughly similar in principle to the demand of our Southern
States during the 50's for "State rights." The fourth attempt
was bold "secession."
Curiously enough the two most ambitious attempts revealed
a conflict between two opposing French policies striving for
success under the leadership of two rival French generals. The
declaration of "The Palatinate as an independent neutral Re
public" on May 21, 1919, was a bold bid by General Gerard, com
mander of the French Eighth Army, for success in his extreme
policy of dismembering Germany. Official France was at that
time swinging over to the slower and more subtle policy of Gen
eral Mangin (commander of the French Tenth Army) and it
was hinted at the time that General Gerard already knew of
his own impending recall and that he precipitated this flare-up
as a last gamble. At any rate, he made the action sharp and
snappy and he was recalled a short time after his attempt failed.
His army was then added to the command of General Mangin.
Proclamation of this new Palatinate Republic, which was to
be entirely independent of Germany, was posted on the night of
the 21st of May, and on the 22d General Gerard issued a mani
festo, a copy of which I have seen. The following is a quotation
from this document:
"It came to the knowledge of the general in command of the
French army that the Landau population owing to their sympa
thetic sentiments toward France had to undergo certain annoy
ances on the part of German officials. Such actions from the
side of these officials constitute a misuse of power and authority
and are 'A breach of orders of Marechal Foch as well as an
incorrect action toward the victorious and benevolent France.' "
The manifesto also contained a declaration that the French
commander of the occupation of the Palatinate would support
in every way all attempts for the creation of a Palatinate Re
public in connection with France.
During the next few days there were riots in Speyer, Landau,
and Zweibrucken. Regierungs-Prasident Winterstein was re
moved from office and expelled from the territory by the French.
Other officials hostile to the separatists were arrested. This "rev
olution" was too artificial and too premature for any chance of
success. It could not compete with the more moderate and care
fully planned scheme for a larger Rhineland Republic within
the German Reich which was at the same time developing under
the management of Doctor Dorten and General Mangin.
This latter movement, usually referred to as the "Dorten Re
98
The Nation
bellion," was much more ambitious territorially than any of the

others. Not only the five Rhine Provinces were to be included in
the new Republic, but it was expected to comprise most of
Hesse, Nassau, the Grand Duchy of Hesse, the Bavarian Pala
tinate, and the rich Province of Westphalia across the Rhine, in
which are located the great manufacturing industries of Essen
and the coal mines of the Ruhr. Final plans for the revolution
were perfected at a conference in Mayence attended by General
Mangin, the French commander, Doctor Dorten, a Mr. Kuchkoff
of Cologne, Frohberger, a newspaper editor, and several other
Germans.
I About 2 a. m. on the morning of May 22 a French lieutenantcolonel from General Mangin's headquarters arrived in Coblenz. He managed to get the American Chief of Staff on the
telephone and insisted on an immediate interview with the
American Commanding General. He was very urgent. The
conference, however, was postponed until morning, when the
French officer informed the Americans that on Saturday, the 24th,
a republic would be proclaimed with Coblenz as its capital. He
gave the names of the men who would form the new cabinet
and stated that fifty officials of the new administration were
then on their way to Coblenz to organize the government. The
new state was to remain for the present a part of the German
Empire, but later would be made wholly independent. He stated
that he was sent by General Mangin to solicit the aid of the
American general in promoting this movement.
Our Commanding General replied that the occupation was
governed by the terms of the armistice, that an honest carry
ing out of those terms would not permit the occupying authori
ties to recognize revolutionary movements, that this had been
the policy of all the Allies, and that in any case his own instruc
tions from General Pershing were positive. He courteously re
fused to permit the Coblenz part of the program to be carried
out in any way.
We found that fifty billets had been actually engaged for the
Dorten officials by the French mission in Coblenz, and it turned
out that carloads of proclamations had been printed and were
ready for distribution.
With its proposed "capital" in the hands of the "Ober-Prasident" and the officials of the old regime, and with the forbidden
American area lying like a wedge between Mayence and the
rich provinces to the north, the "Dorten Revolution" hung fire
for a week. The conspiracy, however, had gone too far to be
halted. On June 1 the republic was finally "declared"; procla
mations were posted in all occupied territory excepting the
American area. Wiesbaden was announced as the temporary
capital; Doctor Dorten proclaimed himself as the Chief of the
Provisional Government and appealed to the Peace Conference
at Paris to recognize the new state and to protect the authors
of the movement from punishment for treason.
Evidence that the "revolution" had no popular support began
to come from every direction. Even before the 1st of June the
revolutionary plans had leaked out and strikes and other demon
strations of protest were organized by the population in vari
ous cities. When the Dorten Cabinet was announced the list of
names was found to be quite different from that brought to
Coblenz in the early morning hours of the 22d of May. Not one
prominent member of the Centrum Party, to which belong a
large majority of the Rhinelanders, was in the new Cabinet. In
many places the proclamations were torn down by the inhabi
tants. On the 3d of June a counter-proclamation appeared in the
German newspapers bitterly denouncing the "discord shown in
the ranks of the Rhinelanders in this the hardest hour of the
German Republic," and signed by the Rhineland representa
tives of six of the great national parties headed by the Centrum
Party.
On the 4th of June Dorten was "escorted" and the other min
isters were "ejected" from the Regierungs building in Wies
baden, the latter being very roughly handled by the populace
waiting outside. This practically ended the "first Dorten Re
bellion." It never had a chance of success unless backed by
[Vol. 112, No. 2898
Allied bayonets. Soon after June 4th the Doctor issued a state
ment in which he naively announced that he would "permit the
old officials to remain in office for the present." The net result
was to effectually kill the sentiment favorable to separation
from Prussia which had undoubtedly existed among the Ger
mans of the Rhineland. Since then separation from Prussia
has meant to the average Rhinelander the first step toward be
coming a province of France. He is afraid of it.
The failure of the policy intrusted to General Mangin and
the need of a different policy which should quiet the fears of the
German population became so evident that General Mangin was
recalled a little later, and General Degoutte, a man inspiring
confidence in every American who meets him, was placed in
command of the French occupying forces. It is significant that
afterward during the enthusiasm aroused by the occupation of
Frankfort the Paris journals urged that General Mangin replace
General Degoutte in Mayence. Some of the papers even pub
lished rumors that the Government had decided to make this
change.
Doctor Dorten is still conspiring and has been repeatedly pro
tected from official and unofficial persecution. He can bide his
time, for French troops are scheduled to stay in the Rhineland
at least fifteen years, and M. Millerand has declared French in
dependence of Anglo-Saxon policies. The demand for occupa
tion of the Ruhr (which was temporarily negatived last April by
Mr. Lloyd George's note regarding the Frankfort invasion)
grows louder and louder in France. It is hinted that the bait of
a Rhine-Westphalian state, strengthened economically at the
expense of the rest of Germany by the coal of the Ruhr and the
steel production of Essen, will bring a majority of the German
population to support the next revolution.
No power but the United States can halt the present march of
events, which promises to make France temporarily the military
master of Europe, while the peace of the world becomes "a house
of cards."
If We Abandon Europe
Prophecy is always dangerous. It is especially liable to
error of detail when, as in the present European tangle, a
thousand factors are working in obscure relations to each other
toward the same general result. That disaster is imminent no
one can doubt, but it is beyond the power of the keenest vision
to predict what form the catastrophe will take. If the brakes of
an automobile give way on a steep hill, it is impossible to pre
dict in advance what kind of a smash there will be. The ma
chine may turn over, climb a telegraph pole, or run into another
auto, but in spite of uncertainty as to where and when and how
the catastrophe will come, there is no uncertainty as to the fact
of an approaching disaster.
In every European country financial insolvency, economic
stagnation, unemployment, starvation, misery, and social de
moralization have been reacting upon each other with deadly
effect during the past year. These conditions are shaping the
daily development of European politics, and those who have
seen their effects near at hand have no doubt that there must
be a tragic conclusion. So interlaced are the many factors, and
so interacting are their causes and effects that one can with
difficulty classify them for intelligent analysis.
The most obvious factors can perhaps be grouped under two
headingseconomic and military. The facts already given
showing economic conditions in Europe suggest that there is a
"jumping-off place" in the financial road not far ahead. A
British authority recently asserted that "The whole of Europe
today is producing not over one-half it is consuming." This
may be an exaggeration. When I repeated the statement to Dr.
Leach, an American who has spent all his time during the past
two years on official business in Italy, Serbia, Poland, and the
other countries of Eastern Europe, he was very positive that it
was not exaggerated. He may have been over-impressed with
life in those smaller countries which for more than a year have
fought much and produced little or nothing. The announced
Jan. 19, 1921]
The Nation
fact, however, that France, herself, during the first six months
of this year imported $1,414,000,000 worth of merchandise more
than she exported tends to confirm the Englishman's statement.
Until the United States comes to the rescue the nations of
Europe, like the inhabitants of Mark Twain's village, must con
tinue their present attempt to "live by taking in each other's
washing." Where this financial jugglery, which is partially con
cealing the helplessness of Europe, will end, and when it will
end, is hard to predict. That it will end in a crash is certain,
although it is possible the economic catastrophe will be ob
scured by an earlier social or political debacle.
Half the free gold of the world has been shifted to the United
States. We have the lion's share of raw materials and if we do
not quickly restore, at least partially, the world's financial bal
ance, our possession of the materials needed by Europe plus
our monopoly of the gold and credit, without which she is un
able to pay us for those materials, will react with telling effect
on our own economic life.
The huge favorable balance of our foreign trade during the
past eight months has undoubtedly involved large private credits
from America to Europe, principally to England, but these tem
porary loans are mere palliatives. They tend ultimately to
increase the difficulties of European buyers by forcing down ex
change. Organized governmental supervision of credits and
exchange can alone make possible continued American exports
on a scale sufficient to start industrial revival in Europe.
It is, however, the recent political developments in Europe
which give us a real glimpse, as it were, of the future. Here
one need not tax his imagination with prophecy. The reaction
ary militaristic movement which started after America's inten
tion to dissolve partnership with Europe seemed certain, and
which has made such insidious progress during the past few
months, points the moral of our delinquency and suggests its
tragic consequences.
Belgium has been recently persuaded to sign a treaty with
France, by the terms of which she agrees to maintain a field
army of 500,000 men as compared with 100,000 men before the
war.
Italy has exchanged the liberalism of Premier Nitti for the
sordid nationalism of Giolitti. Nitti recently declared:
"I do not know if there is peace anywhere in the world, but
there certainly is none in Europe. Around you, you see nothing
but armies. While the war was still going on people said this
would be the last war, but Germany's militarist spirit has been
acquired by the peoples who overthrew Germany. Europe is
alive with proposals of conquest, with eagerness to hoard raw
materials."
Giolitti, who succeeded Nitti as premier, concluded at Aix-lesBains in September a virtual alliance with France, by the terms
of which Fiume, as well as all the Dalmatian coast will pass
quietly to Italy, depriving the Jugoslavs of access to the sea. In
return, Italy will never repeat her former protest against the
French invasion of Frankfort.
Poland, dazzled by hopes of more territory, has cheerfully
turned to military conquest those energies which, if she is to re
main an independent nation, should be concentrated on her wellnigh hopeless internal problems. The Poles are a brave people.
They have preserved their national hopes through centuries of
discouragement. Unfortunately their genius seems better
adapted to war than to peace. Politically they are "many men of
many minds" and they have never developed that capacity for
compromise which has made democracy in other countries pos
sible M. Paderewski struggled for more than a year to form a
stable government. He finally resigned the premiership and left
Poland a broken-hearted man. Sixteen political parties are
struggling for mastery in the Provisional Parliament for Poland.
After a year of discussion not even the introduction to the pro
posed national constitution has been agreed upon. Considering
the industrial prostration of Poland and her chaotic political
condition, the encouragement given by France to Polish military
adventure seems very regrettable.
99
And FranceFrance is congratulating herself on the return

to a "continental policy"; M. Millerand has been elected Presi
dent of the Republic with unanimous acclaim. Militaristic
statesmen and journalists loudly assert that he has rescued
France, and with her all of Europe, from the Anglo-Saxon peace
domination to which M. Clemenceau yielded so weakly. Through
the Belgian treaty of alliance, through the Italian "agreement"
of Aix-les-Bains, and through the establishment of a Frenchdominated military Poland on Germany's western frontier, he
has made France for the moment what Germany was before
the warthe dominating military power of Europe.
The well-known American war correspondent, Frank Simonds,
in a long newspaper article dated September 26, congratulates
the French nation on its final disentanglement from the peace
propositions of Wilson and Lloyd George. He concludes: "All
in all, the French situation is better diplomatically speaking
than at any time since the armistice, and this is due unmistak
ably to the return of Millerand to the system which Clemenceau
endeavored to follow at the Paris Conference but abandoned
under Anglo-Saxon pressure." This popular writer sums up
the blessings conferred on France by the Millerand diplomacy
as follows: "She has finally substituted a continental for an
Anglo-Saxon policyshe has regained her freedom of action by
her old-fashioned bargains with the Belgians, the Poles, and the
Italians." Yet this same correspondent was eighteen months
ago writing from Europe the most fervent hopes for the new
internationalism and the most fulsome praise of the peace ideals
of President Wilson and Lloyd George.
I have no quarrel with this writer's change of opinion. I
have quoted him merely to emphasize and contrast the change
in European opinion as well as policy which has taken place
since America withdrew from the European "settlement." It is
another stage passed in weaning the war-weary masses of
Europe from those idealists who seemed all-powerful at the end
of 1918. In America as well our people have been almost per
suaded that we may well leave European affairs alone. It now
only remains to convince them that it will save us much expense
and trouble if France will reorganize Europe on the old system
of military alliances, "strategic frontiers," and "balance of
power," which has for hundreds of years given men of "blood
and iron" a chance to show their worth.
It was just so that Metternich, after the Napoleonic wars,
finding himself unable directly to oppose the demand for a new
internationalism, gave way at first and then with consummate
skill led the unpractical idealists gradually around a circle to
that imperialistic peace which made possible Bismarck, Hindenburg, and the great World War.
Now, as then, the friends of peace are silenced and on the
continent at least, there is little chance they will be heard from
again unless America, by joining the League of Nations, reopens
the discussion. All the cynics, pessimists, and sincere militar
ists of Europe are rejoicing with the French over the successful
launching of the Millerand policy.
But what a prospect ! Such a military combination may bringgloryfor the momentit may bring revenge, but it cannot
bring safety. Looked at even from the Chauvinist's viewpoint,
this reenthronement of the god of war is sure to prove a Frank
enstein's monster. Consider the situation. A war-ruined
France, with the aid of little Belgium, poverty-stricken Italy,
and deluded Poland sets up a military domination of Europe,
while a Brobdingnagian Russia struggling sullenly toward re
birth nurses an ever-growing desire for revenge, and a Germany
more powerful potentially than this new military alliance awaits
her opportunity. One hundred and sixty million Slavs will soon
emerge from that same melting-pot which gave Napoleon his
unconquerable opponents and, backed, it may be, by untold mil
lions of Asiatics, will find a Europe returned to the doctrine of
"blood and iron." They may find a Germany driven by despera
tion into their partnership. Whether Europe is to suffer a
bolshevik inundation or face the challenge of a Napoleonic
conquest, the stage is certainly being set for a conflagration
The Nation
100
[Vol. 112, No.2898
from which the United States will be unable to stand aloof.
in every country to drive from their chancelleries all the agents
No one can predict the exact nature of the catastrophe now
of military ambition and revenge.

3. Assume that financial leadership which will be gladly ac
rushing upon Europe, but a catastrophe is inevitable and not

far away, unless we bring to Europe our financial support and
the irresistible moral leadership which this support insures.
corded us, and back with the enormous wealth acquired during
the war by the United States some carefully worked out plan
for the financial salvation of Europe.
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS
4. Forgive France all the debts she owes the United States
. At the Peace Conference the executive half of our Gov
as a result of the war.
ernment joined in creating the plan for a new kind of peace, and
Europe, never dreaming that America was capable of deserting
Not forgive! I cannot regard this as an act of charity. It

would represent no more than our share of the settlement.
in the hour of need, let President Wilson build into this new
international structure the best of American ideals. Whenever
in Paris statesmen hesitated the people themselves forced their
vided in the Treaty of Versailles.
representatives to follow American leadership. The Covenant

of the League of Nations is in the main a statement of old
American ideals.
By the same token, its practicability was
always dependent upon the United States taking a leading part
France is entitled to and has sore need of all the indemnity pro
Hence, if we must in the
interest of world restoration join Great Britain in advising
France to accept a smaller indemnity from Germany, we will

be hypocrites, indeed, if we permit the full burden of this self
abnegation to fall on the most sorely wounded of our Allies.
We cannot do less than accept cancelation of the Franco-Ameri
in its execution, especially during the critical period of its
can loans as our share of the Allied war burden.
infancy.
that this suggestion is very unpopular in America.
I am told
The Covenant of the League of Nations is neither complete

nor perfect. No one pretends that it is. It was built as a
bridgeprimarily as a bridge over which a ruined world might
pass from the chaos of war to peace and early reconstruction.
But beyond, it was to be a bridge leading from the wornout
quite natural, but just as the American people cheerfully spent
This is
billions for winning the war when they really sensed its mean
ing, so I believe they would cheerfully relieve France of this
medieval system of national isolation, selfishness, and intrigue
added burden if they knew what it meant toward the winning

of a lasting peace.
We did not enter the war for nearly three years because we
which produced the war to a better world where peace should
did not realize until then that the issues were our own.
be the joint responsibility of all civilized peoples.
It was
it dawned on us that the Allies were fighting our battles, as well
hastily built, for its creators knew that only during that time
as their own, many Americans regretted that we had not gone
of spiritual exaltation immediately following the war could any

effective start be made toward realizing an ideal so contrary
to the political habits of mankind. They knew that if this
chance were missed, the centrifugal force of hostile nationalism
would postpone any practical steps for a league until war was
again upon usand again it was too late.
in before.
It is a disingenuous taunt that the League broke down at its

first test in Poland.
Every one knows that there is no effective
League without the United States.
Certain European states
men are bravely maintaining its shadow, hoping that we will

come in at the last and make it a reality, but until we join, the
League is helpless as an agency for controlling the wild horses
of war.
When
Our loans to France are a small part of the money
we would have spent had we entered the war a year earlier.
| France spent it for us, and in addition sent to their death during
that year a full half million of her young men in place of an
equal number of American boys who would now be buried in
foreign soil.
I have yet to meet an American in close touch with the details
of the French and European financial situation who has not

agreed with the above conclusion. I have talked with the most
practical, unsentimental bankers and business men. I have in
mind one man in particular, a very prominent American finan

cier, who told me that when he came to Paris he would have
scoffed at the suggestion that France be relieved of any part
of the American loans.
[In the following chapter Mr. Noyes deals with the ques
tion of the Senate reservations to the treaty and Covenant.
While essentially favoring ratification without reservation,
Mr. Noyes expresses his regret that Mr. Wilson was not
willing to accept them when it became evident that the
choice lay between ratification with reservations or no
After six months' official work in
European capitals, he was converted to not only the justice but

the necessity of such action on the part of America. He added
in a discouraged tone, But how can you get the real facts to the
100,000,000 people at home?
*
I cannot, however, agree with Keynes that the American

loans to Great Britain should also be canceled.
The conditions
ratification at all. This chapter, with the next one on the

labor section of the treaty, was omitted owing to limitations
are very different and the compelling arguments for relieving
of space.]
proposition. France has suffered from an impairment of

capital, as the bankers would say, to a far greater extent
CANCEL THE FRENCH DEBT
France do not apply to Great Britain.
than Great Britain.
It is after all a business
In addition if a rational settlement is made
with Germany the loss of cash indemnity by France will be out

The American people should not let the honeyed words of
diplomacy conceal the fact that the masses in Europe are be
ginning to hate America. This is a fact. They see us safe by
the accident of distance, and rich through their misfortunes.
When we have carried through our policy of America for
Americans and Why should we trouble ourselves over
Europe's troubles to its squalid end, we shall find one bond
of all proportion to that of the other Allies. Great Britain has

already obtained advantages from the war whose value for her
future is incalculable. The threat to Great Britain's carrying
trade which just before the war was very menacing has been re
moved and the German merchant fleet has been very largely
transferred to her. The specter of a growing German navy
has vanished.
The British Colonial Empire has been im
uniting all Europehatred of America.
mensely strengthened at the expense of Germany, and the re

It is not too late to save the situation, though it soon will be.
Already the task has been made immensely more difficult by
a year of delay. Millions have died during this year; untold mil
lions have endured misery and starvation, and thousands upon
thousands have turned in desperation to the bolshevik faith.
As to what we are called upon to do, it seems to me very
moval of German intrigue from the politics of the Near East
has relieved a former anxiety for the safety of India.

Finally, as concerns relations between France and Germany
it is England's policy which I have advocated.
If we enter the
League of Nations, we shall find that we must join England in
clear:
urging upon France a modification of her claims under the
1. Ratify the treaty and the Covenant and bring American

leadership to the building of a real league of nations.
2. Relieve the fears of France and assist the righteous forces
is justly hers, the benefit of her sacrifices will accrue to Eng
Versailles Treaty.
If we thus ask her to give up that which
land as well as to ourselves and the rest of the world.
It will
The Nation
Jan.19, 1921]
101
be the first step toward general industrial revival. No one

denies that Great Britain played a major part in winning the
war. The money cost to her was terrific. She has a staggering
debt and immense economic problems, but she also has the re
sources with which to meet those problems.
Going back to the second point suggested above, a question

will undoubtedly be raised as to the possibility of our relieving
the fear of France and thus reversing the militaristic policy
to which this fear has led. The answer is contained in a state
ment made to me by a very prominent French statesman during

the excitement over the opposition of Mr. Lloyd George to the
new French policy. Said he, If America were to really come
in and France felt that your country was committed to partner
ship in the settlement of Europe, France would accept any
advice America might offer. He meant this to be in contrast
with their unwillingness at that time to accept the advice of
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In spite of all that has been written to the contrary, Ameri

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was not from sentimental or personal reasons, but arose from
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The bankruptcy of Europe is so universal and extreme that

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As such receiver we shall be
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tion of policies which will permit the energies of all nations to

be devoted to industry. There is not an important nation in
Europe will dare to defy our expressed opinion.
After all, a majority of the French people long for peace.
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They have been converted to the Millerand policies by fear

alone. They are not blind to the frailty of any military defense
against Germany. Our joining the League of Nations and our
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evident intention to back only those nations which accept the
development of that League as the basis of their foreign policy

would instantly bring a feeling of safety to the French people.
Our whole-hearted acceptance of the League will have an

equally decided effect on the policy of Germany. That country
today has a half dozen different policies. The people are hope
lessly divided and their opinions distracted. One element has
used every possible means to keep arms and ammunition within
reach, against hoped-for opportunities. Another is for throw
ing overboard without reserve, at least for the time, all that
relates to warfare, both plans and equipment, in the hope that
thus the Allies will be induced to permit economic revival. A
third class, which has grown to huge proportions in nearly all
parts of the German Empire, is composed of workmen, both
extreme socialists and moderates, who have a deadly hatred
of the militaristic junkers of the old regime and will back all
the disarmament plans of the Allies with a fierce determination
to put it out of the power of their former rulers to execute a
coup d'etat and lead them again to the slaughter. . .
There is a fourth class, including in its numbers many of the

old aristocrats who hope and more than half expect that a
wave of bolshevism will sweep over the country. They believe
that Germany could recover from such a period of anarchy
quicker than other continental nations and when they say that
bolshevism would surely pass from Germany into France, their
longing for revenge is evident in tone and gesture.
Without America the League of Nations is a puny, mechani
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ambition. Under the leadership of America the League of

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toward industry and cooperation rather than mutual destruc
tion. It would encourage the forces of democracy, and would
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BONI & LIVERIGHT

109 West 40th Street
NEW YORK
[Vol. 112, No. 2898
The Nation
102
The
10%
is THE &lA'L'S Record of Perfection in the Field
..
. ' '"
of the Short Story.
By Percentage of Distinctive
THE DIAL leads all maga
Stories
zines in America in the per
centage of distinctive short
Per Cent
stories published in 1920, ac
1. The Dial (including
cording to the classification of
translations)
100
Edward J. O'Brien, who every
95
Atlantic Monthly
year compiles an anthology of
Midland
85
the best short stories printed
84
Century
in American magazines. Mr.
Harper's Magazine.... 76
O'Brien's classification for 1920
Scrlbner's Magazine.. 72
appeared in the Boston Even
G5
Pictorial Review
ing Transcript for December
New York Tribune
1st. In making this analysis
(including transla
of the short story output of
63
tions)
American magazines,
Mr.
9. Reedy's Mirror (in
O'Brien says: "The present
cluding translations) 53
record covers the period from
Pagan
(including
10.
October, 1919, to September,
translations)
50
1920, inclusive. During this
c C 1 u r e's Magazine
period I have sought to select 11. M (including
transla
from the stories published in
tions)
45
American magazines those
Set (including
which have rendered life 12. Smart
translations)
40
imaginatively in organic sub
McCall's
Magazine
(in
1*.
stance and artistic form."
This record of achievement is 14. Everybody's Magazine
all the more remarkable when
(including transla
it is realized that THE DIAL
tions)
31
is not primarily a fiction maga
Romance
26
zine. Short stories form but
Metropolitan
26
15% of the material in each
Collier's Weekly
25
Cosmopolitan
23
number.
Hearst's Magazine (in
19 short stories were pub
lished in the first 9 months of
Munsey's Magazine. . . 17
1920.
Red Book Magazine. . 15
19 of these were stories of
distinction.
11 Mr. O'Brien says, "may The Percentage of Materials in
fairly claim a position in our
THE DIAL.
literature."
Per Cent
3 were selected by Mr. Articles
30
O'Brien for his anthology of Poetry
12
the best short stories of 1920. Book Reviews
20
The essays, the book reviews, Criticism of art and music 16
8
the poetry, and the art of THE Pull page reproductions. .
Short Stories
16
DIAL are equally distinctive.
// a classification were made of the best essays,
book reviews, poetry, an d art appearing in American magazines in IQ20, we are certain the record
would again read
THE
DIAL-100%
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THE DIAL for one year
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Reminiscences of Tolstoy, by Maxim Gorky
The Three Taverns, by Edwin Arlington Robinson
The Rescue, by Joseph Conrad
Youth and the Bright Medusa, by Willa Cather
Introduction to Psychoanalysis, by Sigrnund Freud
Seven Men, by Max Beerbohm
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DEBATE in a Decade!
SCOTT NEAR1NG
Prof. E. R. A. SELIGMAN
of Columbia University
OSWALD GARRISON VRJjARD,
Subject:
Resolved: "That Capitalism has more to offer the
workers of the United States than has Socialism."
Sunday Afternoon, January 28, 1921, 2 P. M.
Leiinqton Theatre, Lexington Ave. * 61st St
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The True Nature and Source of Vitamines or Life Elements

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methods answers the greatest question as to the true
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revolutionizes the science of dietetics.
This treatise from beginning to end abounds in aston
ishing revelations concerning the most important prob
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FRENCH
FOREIGN
POLICY
(1898-1914)
by
GRAHAM H. STUART
. Of the School of Political Science
University of Witcomin
\ N impartial and accurate picture of the foreign
policy of the French Republic from the Fashoda
incident in 1898 up to the murder of the Archduke
Ferdinand in 1914. This is the period during which
France turned toward Great Britain and after settling
long-standing differences led the way to the formation
of the Triple Entente.
T7RENCH foreign policy is so completely involved
with the foreign policy of her neighbors during this
crucial period that the book necessarily gives an inti
mate and fairly comprehensive view of European diplo
macy as a whole, the conflicting aims and rivalries which
led up to and brought about the World War.
Price $3.00
Published by
THE CENTURY CO.
N-l-21
A
The Nation
FOUNDED 1865
Vol. CXI I
Contents
108
EDITORIALS:
Austria in Collapse
107
More Soup Kitchens?
108
Don't Give Up the American Ship 1
109
The Progress of Prose
109
Canceling International Orders
110
THE FRENCH CASE FOR GERMAN INDEMNITY. By Maurice Casenave
Ill
RUSSIA AT PEACE. By Paxton Hibben
118
THE THREE-SHIFT SYSTEM STEEL INDUSTRY. By Henry Wood
Shelton
116
WHY IS A FARMER7 By Felix Sper
116
POETAE MINORES. By Albert Edmund Trombly
117
NON-COOPERATIONINDIA'S NEW WEAPON. By Yogiraja
118
120
CORRESPONDENCE
120
HEN TROVATO. By Edwin Arlington Robinson
121
MURIEL AMONG THE REDWOODS. By James Rorty
121
BOOKS *
Black Facing White. By O. G. V
121
Hungry. By C. V. D
122
Arthur Hugh Clough. By M. V. D
128
Books in Brief
128
ABT:
An American Painter. By Pierre Loving
126
DRAMA:
Interlude. By Ludwig Lewisohn
126
The Balance-Sheet of Austrian Misery
127
Labor and Unemployment in England
128
The Berne Manifesto
128
SUPPLEMENT :
Report of the British Labor Commission to Ireland
181
OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editob
Associate Editors
LEWIS S. GANNETT
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LUDWIG LEWISOHN
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and Advertising: Ernest Thurtle, 86 Temple, Fortune Hill. N. W. 4, England.
ARISTIDE BRIAND is the Lloyd George of French
politics. He is thoroughly and ably opportunist, will
ing to drop his past beliefs and forget his former utterances
to meet the parliamentary majority of the moment, a bril
liant orator, and a skilful negotiator. His appointment as
successor of the negligible Leygues as Prime Minister of
France means nothing as regards French policy. He will
be able to make fiery speeches eating Germany alive in the
Chamber, and then follow England's lead in a policy of
amicable compromise. He was the apostle of the general
strike as the working class's best weapon in his younger
days; yet it was he who, as Prime Minister in 1910, first
called the railwaymen into the army as a means of defeat
ing a strike. Unlike his fellow-apostate from socialism,
Millerand, he has managed to continue his friendship with
the leaders of the Left; yet his cabinet contains some of
the bitterest jingoes in France. Poincare may yet carry
his campaign for the use of the mailed fist to victory, but
if Briand sees the wind blowing in that direction, he may
trim his sails to meet the gale and be first in any port.
POOR old Leon Jouhaux ! He climbed to the top rung in
the French Confederation of Labor as a revolutionary
syndicalist, decrying all wars as capitalist wars and recog
nizing no such thing as a war of defense; then, at Jaures's
grave, on August 4, 1914, he announced his intention of
No. 2899
volunteering as a private in the army ; a month later, still in

civilian clothes, he fled to Bordeaux on a Government train ;
all through the war, under a special dispensation for civilian
duty, he made speeches and fought the home battles for the
successive Governments of France; and since the armistice
he has battled unceasingly against the Reds in the ranks of
labor. And now, when he might be expecting a decoration
and a rosette, his friend the Government turns upon him,
fines him, and orders his Confederation of Labor dissolved
because of the railroad strike last May, a strike which
Jouhaux did his best to prevent. Gompers, still smarting
from the Supreme Court's treatment of his carefully nursed
Clayton Act, must feel in a mood to collaborate with Jou
haux in a ditty to be dedicated to labor with a running
refrain: Put not your faith in Governments. Meanwhile,
the 800 local unions which make up the French Confedera
tion will continue functioning; and Zinoviev, who has been
working from Moscow to break up Jouhaux's organization
and make way for a newer, more radical body, must be
grinning a bolshevik grin. Jouhaux kept the French unions
from indorsing Moscow last summer; but the French Gov
ernment seems determined to fight Moscow's battles for it.
SANTO DOMINGO has a distressing way of popping
into all the news that comes out of Latin America.
When Secretary Colby visited Buenos Aires in pompous
state, he learned that a mild-mannered Santo Dominican
delegation had been there before him, telling what Ameri
can marines were doing in the Caribbean island republics.
And while Samuel Gompers was presiding over the sessions
of the Second Pan-American Labor Congress, the question
of Santo Domingo intruded again, some of the delegates
even threatening to leave the Congress unless Mr. Gompers
at once forwarded to President Wilson the unanimous pro
test of the Latin Americans against American occupation
of Santo Domingo. The Administration's latest proposals
mean nothing but "a repulsive protectorate," the Santo
Dominican delegate asserted, and, he continued, "American
bayonets are supporting American capital in Santo Do
mingo. The American Government is not actuated by love
of liberty, but because the country is a valuable field for
American expansion and American capital and because it
is valuable for strategic purposes." The Latins all ap
plauded. Samuel Gompers has a long record of service to
the cause of Mexican-American friendship; perhaps this
Congress may teach him that Mexico is not the only play
ground of American imperialism.
IN the Czechc-Slovak Republic the very nearly four mil
lions of Germans who form one-third of its total popula
tion are being hard pressed despite constitutional provisions
and specific safeguards introduced into the agreements be
tween the Republic and the Entente. A policy of Slavization has already closed 754 classes and 35 German schools
in German districts. Similar complaints come from the
Siebenbiirgen Saxons in Transylvanian Rumania, the Ger
man minority in Jugoslavia, and the Germans of Riga
104
The Nation
whose historic playhouse has been confiscated by the Letts.

What applies to these German minorities whose cultural
equipment makes them the first to become articulate, applies
with equal force to the Slovaks in Bohemia, the Jews and
Ukrainians in Poland, the Bulgars in Greece. The imme
diate menace of famine and economic collapse must not cause
thoughtful men to forget that only the scrapping of the
Versailles treaty on its territorial as well as on its economic
side can save Europe from the tragedy of half-a-dozen Irelands under the heel of tyrannies more blind and ruthless.
IT was probably clever of General Smuts to force a gen
eral election in South Africa now, and to push forward
the question of secession as the chief campaign issue. The
Nationalists have been aggressive enough and numerically
strong enough lately to worry the Unionist minority and to
make it susceptible to General Smuts's plea for its coopera
tion in a new "center" party headed by Smuts himself.
On the other hand the Nationalists had their chance to
join with the South African Party and were forced to take
a stand flatly in favor of secessiona subject which
they have talked much of in general terms and have been
extremely cautious about approaching as a practical politi
cal issue. The Labor Party, although a growing force, is
split by internal dissension, and is unprepared for a cam
paign fought on an imperial issue in which there is little
chance to bring forward its economic grievances. Thus
General Smuts, by taking his enemies unawares and by
utilizing to the full their fears and weaknesses, may be able
to secure the majority he so sorely needs. But it will be
an unstable majority at best, composed of elements which
will fly apart when the time comes to meet domestic issues,
and one faced by a powerful Nationalist opposition which
can afford to bide its time and will carry on its propaganda
for independence and separation under any government that
may be formed.
AS a propaganda organization the State Department
runs Mitchell Palmer's Department of Justice a close
second. Its latest achievement is a letter addressed to
Alton B. Parker of the National Civic Federation, in reply
to a series of questions about Russian policy which the
League of Free Nations Association had put to presidential
candidates some ten weeks before. The League charged
that the State Department obstructed relief to Russia;
Secretary Davis sends to the press his letter stating that
this is "unqualifiedly false," whereas the uniform testimony
of the four relief societies which have sought to send sup
plies to Russia is that they have been hampered at every
step by this very Department, and that they have in some
cases been compelled to ship their supplies to Hamburg and
have them reshipped from there. The State Department
says that "the only relief work which the Soviet (sic) will
tolerate is the direct gift of supplies to the Soviet Govern
ment to be distributed as their own largesse." The Amer
ican Friends Service Committee, however, has already dis
tributed through its own workers almost $200,000 worth of
supplies in Moscow and Petrograd. There are other
"errors" in the Secretary's letter; but the significant fact
is that he no longer dares bray a defiance to the entire
world; he would have us believe that in fact the Depart
ment seeks only to encourage relief for Russia and that it
will grant passports to travelers to and from Russia. We
greet these assertions with incredulous enthusiasm.
[Vol. 112, No. 2899
THOSE vociferous representatives of the old Russian

regime who have been making themselves heard in
every corner of the world in loud praise of starvation and
invasion as the proper methods of combating the present
system of government in Russia, must be crestfallen at the
news from Paris. Led by Kerensky, a group of antiBolshevists who were members of the Constituent Assem
bly are meeting to discuss Russia's future. But they have
decided, contrary to the custom in such matters, to abandon
the discredited methods of the past and attempt simply to
"create a unity of basic social-political aims and ... to
create a close bond between ourselves and the people, the
great masses of peasants and workers." They look forward
hopefully to the day when the Russian people, "by their own
action and free will, will restore and recognize a legally
constituted Russian state." This is a legitimate hope, and
if they can accomplish it by organization and propaganda
no one can complain. Meanwhile their words in condemna
tion of the intervention policy of the Allies, in opposition
to the blockade, and in vigorous repudiation of the sugges
tion that German troops be used to overthrow the Bolsheviki
must fall like drops of acid in the ears of those Russian
"patriots" who for three years have told the world that
Russian children must be starved that the Czar's friends
might again come into their own.
THE Commission on Conditions in Ireland, instituted
by The Nation, resumed its sessions in Washington
on January 13 in order to hear the testimony of the Lord
Mayor of Cork, Donal O'Callaghan, and the Mayor of
Thurles and other witnesses, and it meets again this week.
The Commission remains greatly handicapped because of its
inability to obtain pro-English witnesses, or to receive per
mission to cross the ocean for testimony as to the English
side on the spot or in England. Meanwhile, the situation
in Ireland itself remains unchanged. Atrocities continue
on both sides, relieved only by the rumor that Lloyd George
is now going to reverse his policy and remove the gangs of
gunmen who have committed so many atrocities. President
De Valera remains in seclusion, but his presence in Ireland
is no longer denied by British officials and there is growing
evidence that he is throwing his influence to the side of
moderation and against the policy of force. His promised
statement to Ireland has not appeared at this writing. The
British Labor Commission has now published a report,
supplementary to the one in this issue of The Nation, again
attacking the Government, this time for "deliberate faking
of a photograph portraying a battle scene," giving a "fanci
ful and highly colored report of the battle of Tralee," etc.,
and, what is even more serious, recorded an attack by Crown
forces upon a witness who had testified before them in their
inquiry. Finally, Dublin was subjected to a wholesale raid
on January 16, which resulted in eight arrests but not in
the capture of the important leaders whom the Government
sought. The detention and imprisonment of hundreds of
Irishmen without charges being preferred against them,
and without having their day in court, continue.
WHILE liberals and socialists all over the world pro
tested against the death sentences imposed upon the
former Hungarian commissars, and while the governments
which presumably supervise Hungary's affairs turned their
eyes away and said nothing, the Russian Government in its
usual alert style secured the pardon of the condemned
Jan. 26, 1921]
The Nation
men by threatening to cut the throat of every Hungarian

officer in Russia. The shocking character of such a threat
needs to be dwelt on, but the actual results were good.
The commissars were ordered pardoned and a Hungarian
emissary is on his way to Reval to arrange for the release
of some six thousand officers of the Hungarian army.
DISTINCTLY disappointing is the final action of Con
gress in regard to the army. Having first boldly
reduced the enlisted forces to 150,000, the Senate receded
from its position and raised the limit to 175,000. In this
the House concurred, and Secretary Baker, whose conduct
in the matter of recruiting was again roundly denounced, is
now instructed to reduce the army as rapidly as possible to
the new sizeprovided, of course, that Mr. Wilson does
not veto the bill. Unfortunately, the reduction only affects
the enlisted men and our heavily over-officered army remains
more top-heavy than ever. More than that, our officer
propagandists for larger forces remain in the service. In
other words, the army is skeletonized to a degree and we
shall have a larger number of regimental organizations only
one-third to one-half full, which from any point of view is
wasteful and inefficient. Congress should have relegated at
least half of the officers to private life and reduced the
number of organizations to a point where those surviving
could be properly manned. But Congress has never learned
anything about conducting a military or naval organization
economically. It now remains to be seen what procedure
it will adopt in regard to the navy. Fortunately, the trend
for disarmament continues strong. There is the New York
Mail, for instance, which but the other day was calling for
universal military service, now declaring that "huge arma
ments breed distrust and vicious rivalries." "Why not,"
it asks, "give our billion a year, if we must give it up,
to building friendship with other nations, instead of build
ing battleships to encourage enemies and death?" Danger
ous pacifist stuff this!
IN the matter of an army Germany is now much more
fortunate than we are, for it has been compelled to
reduce its establishment to 100,000, including officers.
Whereas we have 15,000 officers to 175,000 men, it has 4,000
officers to 96,000 men. Germany is fortunate, too, in that
the Entente has abolished its general staff which was such
a curse to the country, and the army is federalized instead
of being made up of separate armies from Bavaria, Baden,
Prussia, and the other states of the Empire. The army is
forbidden the use of tanks and gasas all armies ought to
be. But best of all, it is to be a democratic army, this new
German one, for it is to be governed in part by an army
council whose members shall be elected from the force itself,
each rank having representation. Its mission is to be an
advisory council to the new Minister of Defense. What
a revolution this connotes! America has never had a demo
cratic army, and we have taken not a step in that direction
despite the effectiveness of the new Russian armies, in
which, if reports are correct, there remains much of the
amazing democratization that came with the revolution.
BY common consent our national House of Representa
tives is too large. It has long since virtually ceased
to exist as a deliberative assembly, and accomplishes what
it does only through an elaborate committee system. Any
change in size ought to be one to make it smaller, but here
105
comes its Census Committee with a report urging an in

crease of the membership by forty-eightfrom 435 to 483.
On the basis of the 1910 census one Representative was
allowed for 211,877 inhabitants. The ratio proposed on the
basis of the 1920 census is one Representative for 218,979
inhabitants. No State would lose any Representative and
twenty-five would make gains. California would be the
chief beneficiary, with five extra seats, while Michigan, New
York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania would each get four.
THE Census Committee ignored the proposal of Repre
sentative Tinkham to reduce the representation of
States which disfranchise the Negro, although such action
is required by the Constitution as well as by the most ele
mentary considerations of justice. The Nation lately pointed
out that in the Presidential election of 1916 the ten States
of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Missis
sippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia
cast only 8 per cent of the nation's popular vote but cast
21 per cent of the vote in the Electoral College. A similar
ratio was in evidence last November, while the figures from
certain individual States show an even more glaring in
equality. New York, with 45 electoral votes, gave a popular
vote of 2,895,524 for President in 1920, while Mississippi,
with 10 electoral votes, had a popular vote of only 82,492.
Ohio, with 24 electoral votes, presented a popular vote of
2,019,480, while South Carolina, with 9 electoral votes, cast
a popular vote of 66,150, according to the World Almanac
for 1921. Thus, based on the popular vote, Mississippi has
eight times the strength of New York in the Electoral Col
lege and South Carolina has twelve times that of Ohio.
This is indefensible on its face.
ONE of the characteristics of the National Nonpartisan
League that has made for its success is its belief in
an offensive rather than a defensive campaign. Hence, at
a moment when its industrial program in North Dakota is
suffering both on account of the League's reduced political
control there and because of the financial plight of the far
mers, the organization starts a counter-offensive by sending
its forces into Kansas and Nebraska in a membership cam
paign. It is also characteristic of the American Legion that
it should have risen to oppose the League in those States.
The national commander of the Legion very properly for
bade such action, on the ground that the organization's con
stitution did not allow it to meddle in politics; whereupon
the membership defied the intent of the ruling by organiz
ing as an independent body to oppose the League. One of
the ironies of the World War, which America entered in
the name of freedom, is that the chief patriotic organiza
tion which it developed in this country should be found
lining up against every movement to achieve greater free
dom, industrially, for the actual producers of our national
wealth in the cities or on the farm.
W
MEANWHILE the situation in North Dakota seems to
be clearing somewhat. The State's financial troubles
commenced with the passage of an act by referendum at the
November elections making it no longer obligatory for
counties to deposit their funds in the Bank of North Dakota.
Withdrawals began, and put the State bank in a precarious
situation, much to the glee of the private bankers who had
sponsored the referendum law. But it soon became plain
that bank wrecking was a pastime at which two could play.
106
The Nation
The Bank of North Dakota, either as a measure of necessity

or retaliation, began to call in the deposits it had made in
the various private banks of the State, and these institu
tions, unable to collect their notes to farmers, were forced,
one after another, to the wall. Thereupon a truce was ar
ranged, by the terms of which the private bankers have
undertaken not only to cease sabotaging the Bank of North
Dakota, but to assist in the effort to dispose of the State
bonds, the revenue from which is needed to carry on the
industrial program. For the moment, lack of funds has
made it necessary to stop work on the terminal elevator at
Grand Forks and on the houses under construction in Bis
marck and Fargo by means of State aid. The Eastern
bankers are refusing to aid in the disposal of the State
bonds although they are excellent 6 per cent, income-taxfree securities of a sovereign State.
NO better use of the undistributed five million dollars of
the United War Fund can be made than that recom
mended by the Board of Directors of the Knights of Colum
busto turn this balance over to Herbert Hoover's relief
council for the feeding of Europe's starving children. This
sum is owned jointly by the Knights of Columbus and the
six other organizations which fused for relief work during
the latter part of the warthe Y. M. C. A., the Y. W. C. A.,
the Jewish Welfare Board, the Salvation Army, the Amer
ican Library Association, and the War Camp Community
Service. One can only wish that the Knights had had equal
vision in disposing of their own five million dollars which
they offered to the American Legion for the erection of a
permanent building in Washington. As The Nation previ
ously pointed out, such a disposal of funds at a time of so
much misery and suffering on all sides seems ill-advised
indeed even if that money was originally subscribed for war
time soldier relief. The United War Fund was raised for
a similar purpose. By all means turn it over to Hoover.
But what of the newly organized American Association for
Relief in Ireland? While the American Legion continues to
hesitate whether or not to "accept" the Knights of Colum
bus's gift, the latter cannot do better than to rescind its
offer and dispose of its fund where the need is immediate
and overwhelmingfor the suffering in ravaged and perish
ing Ireland.
FIRST the missionary with his tract; then the trader
with his looking-glass and calico ; and finally the gun
boat with its useful guns to persuade the natives to worship
with the missionaries and traffic with the tradersthis has
long been the natural history of civilized adventure arn^ng
the backward races. The twentieth century, upsetter of old
tradition, has added another figure to the neat procession.
In Tahiti, according to credible dispatches, the artist has
come in to see whether Melville and Stevenson and Gauguin
have been right in their praises of the perfect islands.
There is a painter behind every bush and a lover of land
scape on top of every hill. Well, Melville and Stevenson
had their John La Farge, who helped to perpetuate the
lovely Fayaway ; and, of course, Gauguin was painter as well
as poet. On the whole, we suspect that these new-come
artists will do rather less harm than any of the elder gentry
who have turned their attention to the South Seas. Where
the artists find beauty they will cherish it instead of forcing
it to wear alien clothing and so to die of tuberculosis.
Where they find natural thirst and hunger they may'not do
much to quiet them, but neither will they furnish whiskey
[Vol. 112, No. 2899
or tainted canned goods. Where they find a disposition to

live one's own life in one's own Pacific way, they will not
thrust in gunpowder and the industrial age. And the loot
the artists carry away from Tahiti will leave the natives as
little desolated as after any pillaging they have ever sus
tained.
BRITISH labor sustained a serious loss in the death of
Mary MacArthur in London on January 1 at the age
of forty-one. She was a speaker of great force and vigor,
as those who heard her on her last trip to America to rep
resent England at the Labor Conference in Washington will
well remember, she had an impressive personality and typi
fied the international point of view on which rests the hope
of the world. A student in London under Sir Charles Dilke
and Sidney Webb, she organized the chainmakers of Cradley
Heath and other home industries, and to her and to Sir
Charles England owes the first minimum wage legislation.
She never yielded to the war mania, though she worked on
numerous important Government committees during the war,
and her voice was among the first to be raised in favor of
breaking the blockade in Germany and succoring its starv
ing women and children. Her chief activity was for many
years as Secretary of the Women's Trade Union League
and of the National Federation of Women Workers, in
which her unusual executive ability had full sway. When
one contemplates the extraordinary usefulness of so brief
a career as this, one can begin to measure what the world
has deprived itself of for centuries by its fatuous refusal
until now to make use in public and semi-public activity of
the talents and abilities of the women of the race.
THE report that the Nobel prize will henceforth be given
each year to the man of letters who in the opinion of
the judges has done the most important work during that
year, instead of being given to the writer who on the basil
of his total work seems that year most to deserve it, means
in all probability that Thomas Hardy will now never receive
the prize. At eighty-one even the most powerful imagina
tion may reasonably restthough it is true that Mr. Hardy,
after completing his great series of Wessex novels and tales,
went on with mounting stride to the poems and dramas
which almost all honest poets and competent critics will
agree have been the supreme imaginative achievement of
the English tongue in the twentieth century. And if he
never receives this particular recognition, the Nobel prize
will be in the position of the French Academy with respect
to Moliere; he will not seem to lack it, but it will seem to
lack him. For Thomas Hardy, while the lesser novelists,
the Gissings and Mrs. Humphry Wards, fade out of view,
looms steadily larger. He has been the deep voice of dim
underlying currents of the racial life of Britain. In him
the ancient soil, moor and heath and rounded hill and quiet
river, has risen up into a new beauty; in him the ancient
stock, once savage, then Roman, then Christian, never but
partially imperial, has been raised up to a new significance.
At the same time, from that soil and stock he has looked out
over the vast body of Europe lying prone under the wars of
Napoleon, and has mused upon the Immanent Will with a
profundity which the world rarely matches as often as once
in a hundred years. It is not easy to say more for a poet
than that, as one may say of Mr. Hardy, he has written
such pastorals as almost make us want to substitute the
word Dorset for Doric and has written such tragedy as
takes us back again to the mighty visions of Aeschylus.
Jan. 26, 1921]
The Nation
107
Austria in Collapse
AUSTRIA is at the end of its rope. Whether the re
port that the Clerical Government now in power will
place the administration in the hands of the Allied Repara
tion Commission be confirmed or not, the amputated repub
lic established by the Treaty of St. Germain is dying. It
cannot pay the salaries of its own officials; it cannot pay
for the flour it must import if it is to maintain its people at
the barest subsistence level; its printing presses can hardly
issue paper money fast enough to keep pace with the de
clining value of its currency. It is preyed upon by foreign
speculators, and by Entente officials who, in their task of
supervising the execution of an impossible treaty, demand
more for their maintenance than the Government spends
in ruling six million people. Its people are dying, its chil
dren sickening. The war brought it to the verge of ruin;
the peace treaty, and the peace period of isolation, miti
gated by generous but merely alleviative charity, has com
pleted the work of destroying a nation. Austria is done.
This is the fate which The Nation, first among American
journals to denounce the cruelty and economic puerility of
the peace treaties, predicted; this is the fate which, unless
the great Powers bestir themselves, will creep like a gaunt
shadow north and west from Austria, destroying that which
we have boasted as civilization. Here is no encouragement
even for communists who dream of a new dawn to follow the
destruction of the old order; here is simply a worn-out,
underfed people with no new hope and no new vision, col
lapsing. Here is the product of the "just and generous
peace" which closed the war to end war, and today papers
like the New York Herald which a year ago were relentless
for punishment and vindictive in their denunciation of jour
nals which prophesied this collapse, see that "even victors in
war must heed danger signals when their peace terms and
decrees become high explosives."
The peace treaty left the Austrian republic an economi
cally impossible unit, consisting virtually of a chain of
sparsely populated mountains and a great industrial capi
tal. Vienna, with its two million population, is the center
of a network of railways which in the pre-war days brought
coal to her factories from Silesia, sulphur from Bukowina,
lead and graphite from Bohemia, wheat and fruit from
Hungary. But the peace treaty dissected the old empire,
and erected frontiers between raw materials and their
markets; the new nations, in a mistaken endeavor thus
to solve their own problems, set up tariff barriers and
hoarded their own materials. The Viennese mills, even
when they could get raw materials, have been idle for lack
f coal. Visitors comment on the strange spectacle of
great industrial suburbs with rows of idle smoke-stacks
guiltless of smoke. Meanwhile the city, too big for its
present hinterland, has been slowly decaying. Last year's
census showed a decline of nearly 200,000 in its population.
Austria cannot possibly grow enough food to support her
own population. She is a sort of inland England, depending
for her life upon other nations from which she must draw
food, and to which she must send manufactured goods as
pay. Isolated she cannot exist; she must have markets, and
she must have coal and raw materials. But since the armis
tice she has had little of either; and for the coal and food
which she has been able to import, has had to pay ruin
ously and exorbitantly. The Austrian krone, worth twenty
cents before the war, has fallen to a nominal value of about

one fifth of a cent A ton of coal bought at twenty dollars
costs Austria one hundred thousand kronen. Her railroads
alone show a deficit of more than two billion kronen. Apart
from the indemnity which the treaty sought to impose
upon her, her debts jumped from 2.3 billion kronen in June,
1919, to 43.1 billion kronen in October, 1920, and the con
tinuous fall in Austrian exchange has since added at least
15 billion more. When debts reach such figures they are be
yond the power of any finance minister; juggling with them
is puzzle play, meaningless in the world of economic reality,
and the problem of feeding and rehabilitating Austria must
perforce fall upon the outside world.
The Austrian people have seen one way outfederation
with their blood-brothers of Germany, who might share
with Austria their coal, and link their industry with hers
. in such fashion as to give both life. But this the peace
treaty forbids Austria to do, unless with the consent of the
Council of the League of Nations, and France, still ob
sessed with the fear of a mighty Germany, stands adamant
against such consent. Forbidden such a solution, a declara
tion of bankruptcy seems inevitableentrance into some
sort of receivership at the hands of one or a group of the
Entente allies or a group of their financiers. There was a
time when credit or coal might have been guaranteed by the
Allies and Austria have been saved. But the statesmen were
busy building their League, or bullying Germany, or out
lawing Soviet Russia. They did indeed maintain commis
sions in Austria, but the commissions, instead of relieving
Austria, squandered her money. Eleven of these commis
sions recently had headquarters in Vienna; they had a
personnel of more than a thousand, and the humblest clerk
attached to them received a salary which, when translated
into kronen, was more than four times as high as the salary
of the president of the Austrian republic. According to the
treaty, all the expenses of these commissions must be borne
by Austria, and they cost her more than all the expenses
of her national government put together.
What next? A nation, or even a city of two million peo
ple, cannot be left to die. Will the answer be a cold busi
ness solution mortgaging everything of money value in
Austria and making of her people a race of slaves? Will
the people of Vienna be left embittered, to turn to some
mad mood of bloody desperation which could then be de
nounced, without thought of its causes, as "bolshevism"?
There is no time to waste, for bankruptcy is contagious, and
half of Europe is on the verge of the illness. Polish and
Hungarian moneys are worth even less than the Austrian
krone, and the Jugoslav, like the German mark, is 95 per cent
below par. America must awake to the fact that the Cen
tral Powers are still the keystone of the economic situation
of Europe. If they collapse, especially with Russia out
lawed, there can be no health on the Continent, nor any
where in the markets of world trade. Everything depends
upon the spirit in which the receivership for Austria is
undertaken. America might give the answer. But Amer
ica is headless at this juncture; the Government at Wash
ington breathes but does not function; and the people, ab
sorbed in their own troubles with profits and prices, are in
no mood for drastic and generous action. What more will
it take to awaken governments and peoples?
108
The Nation
More Soup
[Vol. 112, No. 2899
Kitchens?
THE United States is drifting into one of the worst un *of this sort, public unemployment insurance is probably
necessary. The charge that such insurance encourages
employment crises for many years with face averted
and eyes shut. It is stated that there are now two mili;""t
idleness is not borne out by observation of the countries
where it is in practice. The payment is too small to com
and a quarter out of workbut our officials have been so
pete with regular wages, and it is not extended to anyone
little interested in the subject that we do not have even a
who has refused a position for which he is fitted. It is, to be
basis for a careful estimate. There is no national agency
sure, an unproductive expenditure of public funds, but it is
whose business it is to be concerned with employment.
justified by the failure of the community otherwise to sus
There are no remedial measures in readiness for the crisis,
tain its necessary workers. In normal times the charge
so far as we can now discover. England and the Continent
is not great and may be written off like fire and other in
also are burdened with serious unemployment, but in our
surance losses. In times of emergency it is in the long run
carelessness of remedies we are alone among the industrial
less wasteful than the misery which otherwise poisons a
nations. Is it because we are not yet spurred, like the
considerable part of the working population, physically and
Europeans, by fear of a desperate and starving proletariat
mentally. Such negative measures, however, should not
which is out of humor with the existing control of industry?
exhaust our resources in severe industrial depressions like
Shall we wait, as we have so many times in the past, until
the present. Much is being said about governmental
bread-lines and evictions and riots have underscored our
economy, but economy involves not merely the curtailment
failure to provide? We have not even decided whether the
inevitable burden is to be thrown on local charity, munici
of expenditures, but the wise use of what we do spend.
While money is being prodigally sunk in dangerous arma
palities, States, or nation.
ment, the country is in need of roads, of housing, of many
Unemployment is not merely an occasional, but also a
public works. A far-sighted and imaginative government
normal problem. Every year, even in the most prosperous
would have completed plans for large super-power stations
times, there is a margin of competent workers without jobs.
This margin may coincide with an unfilled demand for their
transforming water and coal into electric current for more
efficient industry and more comfortable homes. Now is the
labor. An industry may be more prosperous in one section
of the country than in another. Readjustments in indi
time of times to undertake such projects. The labor directly
vidual plants and in the general balance of production are
employed would affect only a comparatively few trades, but
continually throwing employees on their own resources.
it would throw a switch which would before long start a
During the war, when it was to the interest of the govern
great many other wheels turning.
ment and of the war industries to economize labor, a na
It is now too late to make more than a beginning of most
tional system of free labor exchanges was built up to bring
of these remedies before the worst of the crisis is upon ua.
the worker and the job together. All dictates of public in
If we had been interested in the problem of unemployment,
terest would have made the United StateB Employment
such instruments would have been ready for use. It is
Service a permanent institution. But after the armistice
probable that even now they would be vetoed by those in
it was scrapped in response to the demand of selfish inter
control of industry. Why? Because many large employers
ests. Therefore it is not here now to reduce the avoidable
actually welcome unemployment. They call it "liquidation" t
unemployment, or to give us a useful measure of the situa
of labor. It is a chance to force reduction of wages, to
tion.
break up unions, to put the fear of starvation into the heart
Unemployment is normal also in seasonal occupations.
of the worker and so restore "discipline." Apparently we
There are many industries, such as the manufacture of
are too stupid to bring about efficiency in any other way.
clothing, which in busy seasons depend for their prosperity
And so once more we enforce the lesson that the present in
upon a supply of labor a large part of which they lay off
dustrial order can be operated only at the cost of careless
in slack seasons. This margin can be reduced by syste
ness of human life and human values. The chief hope of
matic planning. In some cases the factories may find a
action seems to depend on a seriously prolonged depression.
product with which to fill their dull periods. In other cases
Eventually the great employers may conclude they have to
industries may be so matched against each other that the
do something for labor in order to stimulate the market
workers may find regular work when away from their main
and save their own skins. If action by legislatures cannot
employment. For the remaining surplus the industry as a
be obtained in time, banks and chambers of commerce may
whole ought to assume responsibility through some form
accomplish something by unofficial activity.
of insurance. As a resolution of the Amalgamated Clothing
Of course, if we had been far-sighted, the depression
which causes the unemployment might itself have been far
Workers has put it:
less severe. There might have been a decent peace treaty
Justice dictates that the industry which depends upon the
so that industry could have revived in Europefor the
workers to keep it alive should take care of them when they are
unemployed. That can be done only by the creation of a special
present industrial crisis is world wide. World-wide trade
fund for the payment of unemployment wages; no gift and no
with Russia might have been established. We might have
alms, but wages from the industry to the worker. There is no
undertaken a genuine industrial reconstruction. Perhaps
reason why the industry which pays a permanent tax to the
such regrets are not too far afield. They are of use to
various insurance companies in order to indemnify the employer
remind us that abnormal unemployment itself is avoidable,
in case of emergency should not likewise have a permanent fund
and that even the best remedies are mere palliatives. Not
for the indemnification for lack of work. The welfare of the
having undertaken these palliatives in time, it may be that
workers in the industry should be entitled to at least as much
consideration as the property of the employer.
we shall find the shortest route to the desired end in the
To care for those who are not reached by group methods
correction of our more fundamental errors.
Jan. 26, 1921]
The Nation
Don't Give Up the American

Ship!
PROHIBITION is now the worst enemy of our sea-going
passenger-ships. This we learn authoritatively, for
Mr. P. A. S. Franklin, president of the International Mer
cantile Marine, and other representatives of our American
lines formally protested in Washington last week against
the enforcement of the Volstead amendment upon their
liners. Mr. Franklin was straightforward and direct about
it. He said that the present interpretation of the law as
it stands will "mean the death of the American flag in the
passenger ship trade of the world. Unless some definite
assurance of a change is given I don't see how anybody can
deliberately build American ships. If we are prohibited
from serving liquor, hope of obtaining business in compe
tition with foreign vessels will be impossible." Thus to the
menace of lower seamen's wages and lower costs on foreign
ships is now added the liquor issue. There is no doubt that
it is serious. The American ships plying to South America,
mostly former German steamers, are running half empty,
while the slower, older, and far less comfortable English
craft are crowded. It is the bar that does it, the agents say.
Our sympathies are with the steamship owners. There is
no reason that we can see why they should be compelled to
refuse to serve wine to Frenchmen, Germans, and English
men and the rest of the world while they seek the trade of
those people. Whatever the ultimate fate of the Volstead
Act and the enforcement of the Amendment at home, we
are entirely clear that beyond the limits of the United
States Americans should not seek to impose their views
upon others. American ship-owners have troubles enough
without this one of prohibition. They are in the tran
sitional period of post-bellum reorganization. Many of
them are entirely inexperienced and they are facing
an unprecedented slump in finance and trade. If gos
sip in shipping circles is correct only one line is mak
ing money today and that one because of unusually efficient
management. Our excellent new trans-Atlantic liners,
operated by the United States Mail Company, are carrying
cargoes barely sufficient to ballast them. Almost every day
the Shipping Board announces the laying up of more ships
because of the falling off in trade. Bids for the ships the
Government seeks to sell are almost impossible to obtain.
It paid at the rate of $220 a ton for these, and similar
vessels can now be built for less than half the price. If
these idle vessels can be sold it must obviously be at a great
sacrifice. More than that, the evil effects of building "ships
by the mile" are now being felt. To standardize them in
war-time was absolutely essential ; in peace time the realiza
tion has come that special trades call for special ships. The
craft that are ideally fitted for running through the Mediter
ranean and the Suez Canal to India are by no means the
ones to enter the Argentine meat-carrying trade.
So our harbors are filling up with idle ships, and their
crews and officers are turned adrift to go back to other
trades while operators and owners demand Government sub
sidies. They seek to be a favored and privileged industry
maintainingmany with the utmost sinceritythat if the
United States wishes to have ships under its own flag upon
all the seven seas the taxpayers must help them out by giv
ing them, through Congress, a guaranteed dividend. They
109
do not put it as baldly as that, of course, but that is what

it comes to in the last analysis. If American ships are to
pass through the Panama Canal toll free, the taxpayer must
make up the deficiency, if any, in the upkeep of the canal
and its bond interest. At the same time, we hear few voices
for Government ownership and operation of ships because
people are appalled at the waste, extravagance, inefficiency,
and corruption which have characterized so many of the
phases of the construction and management of our vessels.
For ourselves, we should prefer to see our ships go into
other hands rather than to have them maintained partly at
Government expense, through subsidies, direct or indirect.
Yet The Nation has from its foundation hoped and worked
for an American fleet under our own flag. For the present
the only thing to do is to sit tight until the collapse of our
trade passes, taking such losses as are inevitable and bear
ing them with the best grace possible. Then, with normal
conditions returned, we believe that native American in
genuity, skill, and shrewdness will find the way to operate
ships so efficiently as to keep the flag on the seas. If one
line can do it now, others can later on. Moreover, we did
it previous to 1861 and we can do it again. In addition, the
wage competition of other nations, the Japanese in par
ticular, is not an insurmountable barrier. That has been
shown by the Nautical Gazette and other authorities. It is
emphatically the time to repeat Lawrence's cry "Don't give
up the ship!" Frightful financial losses the Government
will have to take and write off as part of the cost of the war.
But as Europe revives the need of our ships will once more
become imperative.
The Progress of Prose

TWENTY years ago bright youths in American colleges
swore by Stevenson and discoursed on style. The art
of writing seemed to them a fragile and intricate but ex
ceedingly definite matter. They knew precisely why their
master had used the word "tremendous" in a given passage
and how Shakespeare and Milton had produced divine har
monies by a judicious use of the liquids and a combination
of p, v, and /. They played the "sedulous ape" with con
scious virtue and rubbed their dazzled eyes every time they
beheld the pages of Professor Walter Raleigh's Byzantine
treatise on their favorite subject. More learned persons
than these youths recalled very seriously the exercise of
the Greek rhetors and set their pupilshand inexperti
loquimurthe task of measuring cadences from Rabelais to
Ruskin. Prose became a problem in fine mosaic or inlay
workmanship. Everybody was busy and everybody was
happy. They sucked the sweets even of Henry Harland and
were unabashed by any memory of Swift "There is no
inventing terms of art beyond our ideas ; and when our ideas
are exhausted terms of art must be so too." They were
quite satisfied with their ideas and strove only to incrust
them with blithe and happy patterns.
It was, as one recalls it, an easy and complacent time.
Educated persons prided themselves on taking the young
Stevenson's side in his theological quarrels with his father,
but counseled reverence for the proceedings of the Fifth
Street Church; they were thrilled by Kipling's "Without
Benefit of Clergy" and proud that their thrill was not also
a shock; they felt life to be a great adventure, preferably
in the South Seas, and wore the white flower of a mild re
The Nation
110
belliousness carefully tucked beneath their coats. Their

stories alternated between tepid realism and wax-flower
romance; their essays bristled with little unconventionali

ties that were blandly retracted in the last sentence.
They
sought the inevitable and unique expression for ideas and

emotions that were both artificial and common. They
wanted a limpid medium and generally achieved one. For
their prose was quite unvexed by the smart of sensation,
the roughness of things, or the rending conflicts of thought.
Assuredly it was Shaw who first troubled these quiet
literary waters. Stevenson had written about him in his
letters. The man had to be read. Gradually he was read.
Publicly it was good form to call him a clown; privately
one pressed against one's bosom the sharp spears of his
sentences. The dialogue of his plays, not to speak of the
prefaces, was seen to be literature, to be prose. And that
prose helped to kill the feeble Alexandrianism of the period.
There are passages in Man and Superman (1903), both
in the preface and the play, that have the naked speed
of thought itself, the strength and resilience of fine steel,
that are as careless of mere beauty and as secure in its
possession as a wave of the sea. It was once more observed,
however faintly, that an inner flame or sword is the best
master of rhetoric. Next came Chesterton. The style of
Heretics (1905) is itself Shavian. For it was Shaw who
had changed antithesis from an agreeable device to a natural
expression of cruel conflicts and rooted contradictions.
Chesterton borrowed his weapons to fight his view of things,
and the sensitive student of prose notes constantly today
the stylistic impress of that controversy in which things
and thoughts were pounded back into an anemic vocabulary
and a vainly gesticulating rhythm.
The tumult of the war silenced the last echoes of Alex
andrianism. A thick and meaningless or a suave and false

eloquence prevailed in official places. But wherever think
ing and suffering was done, prose sought to cut and cry
rather than swathe and muffle. Who reads the essays of
Stevenson today? Ruskin has yielded to Swift and De
Quincey to Hazlitt. Rhetoric is vain and adornment an
insult. Our minds, to use the strong vernacular phrase, are
up against blood and hunger, injustice and reaction. A
new prose is arising day by day. This prose seeks to
rip the veils woven by inner and outer censorships, to

pursue reality to its last hiding place and set it shivering
in the tonic winds. Its practitioners are artists, too, and

often conscious artists. But stylistic technique is only their
means to the end of expression and expression itself a
weapon rather than a decoration. They are too busy to

shift bits of mosaic or carve fragments of ivory. Their
sentences draw impact from thought and felicity from the
breaking through of the savor of things. They remember
with Remy de Gourmont that works well thought out are
invariably well written, and spend more time clarifying
their minds than pondering words. This tendency has not
yet culminated in any master and the new prose is in the
same state as the new verse.
Meanwhile one observes older
men trained in other days seeking cleaner, more energetic

speech and young men wholly unconscious of the decorative
taste that prevailed so recently. Curious felicity and melt
ing rhythm are gone; Mill seems closer than Pater and the
harshest simplicity more comforting than an otiose charm.
Iron brooms sweep clean. We dare not litter the earth
with vain artifice.
Exactness must be our felicity and our
rhythm the rumor of the world.
[Vol. 112, No. 2899
Canceling International Orders

RITISH business men, and the Lancashire textile in
dustry in particular, have been deeply perturbed over
the volume of cancelations of American orders.
The sudden
drop in the market caught many Americans unawares, and

they got out from under by the direct routeby cancela
tion. Englishmen, whose practice differs from ours, are in
many instances questioning American honesty. The Ameri
can buyers who acted honorably and swallowed their con
tracts at a loss were insignificant and unnoticeable in the
dbcle. French manufacturers suffered like the British.
That American manufacturers have been accorded the same
treatment by wholesalers, jobbers, and retailers does not
console the European victims of the policy or make up for

their financial losses.
British and French business men have indeed a just griev

ance. While cancelation in the American textile trades has
grown into an accepted custom, it is neither good busi

ness, even by the standards of the passing cutthroat days,
nor reconcilable with elementary modern business morality.
The Paris correspondent of an American trade paper reports
that it is scarcely possible to exaggerate the ill feeling which
the cancelations have caused abroad, and that it is seri
ously proposed to boycott all the offending firms. The Man

chester Guardian, however, speaks kindly of the experience
of British business men with the American consular service
but thinks that the situation may demand an international
conference to discuss this new and unpleasant development

in commerce and to suggest measures to check it.
We
should heartily welcome it.

That American practice in this regard needs reversal
admits of no discussion. Indeed American business good
sense has already asserted the need for a system of business
contracts which will stand up under the pressure of hard
times. A recent gathering of representative Eastern textile
men unanimously indorsed the formation of a new organiza
tion, The National Bureau of Commercial Contracts, which
aims to eliminate precisely the abuses described above. The
first speaker voiced the common purpose in saying: I want

to see the day when Americanization stands for thisa con
tract is a contract; when a man sells he will deliver, and

when a man buys he will take the goods no matter what it
costs. Even without the loud note of nationalism this would
be obviously sound doctrine. American, not foreign, busi

ness is the chief sufferer by departure from it. It is of
course true that the war undermined business morality.
But England and France were far more deeply involved
in the conflict than were we. And long before 1914 sharp
dealing in our export trade had given American business a
decided black eye in many portions of the globe. In
large areas of South America the American business man is
anathema, and not unjustly. Some of the worst offenders
are unfortunately firms of established repute at home,

whose honesty apparently succumbed to mal de mer outside
the three-mile limit. Deliberate substitution of inferior
goods and persistent refusal to rectify defective shipments

have contributed to the loss to America of fertile commer
cial fields abroad. Yet this is not a matter which affects busi
ness alone; our commercial reputation in large measure

determines our national prestige in other countries, and sets
the limit to our potential influence as a factor in the new
international world.
The Nation
Jan. 26, 1921]
111
The French Case for German Indemnity

By MAURICE CASENAVE
HE position of France on
Treaty of Versailles is
often been severely criticized.
many reproaches; she refuses
the reparation clauses of the

seldom understood and has
France has been subject to
to fix the amount of the in
lation of the Allied and associated Powers and to their

property by land, by sea, and by air.
If one considers the time when this admission was made,

the feelings which then prevailed among the nations of
demnity which she will exact from Germany and at the
Europe toward the vanquished enemy, it seems that the
same time bases her entire reconstruction on German in
negotiators of the Treaty of Versailles were very tactful

and very wise and that the French statesmen who signed
such provisions and undertook to force their acceptance on
demnity.
She forces an unbearable burden upon Germany
without letting her know the weight of that burden. Thus

Germany does not know where she is; she refuses in her
the public opinion of a people whose wounds were not even
turn to produce the maximum of work which she would

produce if she knew the amount that will be required of
healed cannot be reproached for unreasonableness or avidity.
her. The equilibrium of Europe is disarranged and cannot

be reestablished as long as Germany abstains from work
ing. Her abstention is due to the unreasonableness and
greediness of France. France is consequently responsible
for the actual unsteadiness of Europe.
It is true that France has not yet fixed the amount of
the German indemnity, but this is not due to any unrea
sonableness on her part; it is due to her common-sense and
to her sense of justice. The principles on which repara
tions are based are not in any way unreasonable. In No
vember, 1918, just after the armistice, heavy indemnities
were expected from Germany. The conquered foe, accord
ing to a celebrated formula, was to be held to strict ac
countability, not only by France but by the other Allied
nations of Europe. Before the electors of the new House
of Commons Mr. Lloyd George had undertaken to make
Germany pay shilling for shilling and ton for ton.
The French Minister of Finance had requested the Allied
plenipotentiaries meeting at Versailles to make Germany
pay the entire costs of the war, a request surely based on
strict justice. France was not the assaulter, France did
not want the war, France was not even prepared for the
war. On the contrary, France had been assaulted, 1,500,000
of her sons had been killed and 500,000 permanently crip
pled, her richest provinces had been invaded and scientifi
cally destroyed, and she knew that future generations
would have to bear for centuries an overwhelming finan
cial burden due to the war. According to justice France
was entitled to reimbursement of these expenses by her
people to realize that they could not obtain fair and just
reparations. A man whose house has been destroyed by
It is no wonder that it took some time for the French
arson requires some time to comprehend that he will not
be fully compensated by the incendiary, or at least by the

insurance company; but finally France understood the
situation, precisely because France is not unreasonable.
Time was required, indeed, to bring the French people to
accept sacrifices, but this is far from being the only reason
of the delay in the fixation of the indemnity.
France has always contended that she needed a reasonable
length of time in which to estimate the damage which she
has suffered during the war: half a million homes, 4,400
factories, 6,445 schools to be totally rebuilt, 400 million
cubic meters of trenches to be filled in, 4,500,000 hectares
to be made fit for agriculture, 4,000 kilometers of railways

and canals to be put in order again. Add to this the diffi
culty of calculating the cost of raw materials when French
exchange was falling 150 per cent.
France did not want to ask from Germany any fixed sum
unless satisfied that there had been damage of at least
that amount: she intended to offer accurate calculations,
revisable by the Inter-Allied Commission provided by
article 233 of the Treaty of Versailles. This commission
has been established to determine the amount of the
damages for which compensation is to be made by Germany
The result was that
and to give the German Government a just opportunity to

be heard. Suppose French calculations not to be approxi
mately accurate, as is possible, France would be accused
of proceeding by guesswork and of being unscrupulous. . . .
The task of the Reparation Commission is to estimate
precisely what losses the invaded countries have suffered;
it is also to estimate the German capacity of payment and
to investigate the fiscal system of Germany so as to ascer
tain if that fiscal system is proportionately as heavy as that
of any other ally or associated nation.
During the negotiation of the treaty a wide divergence
existed among the Allied experts on what Germany could
pay. According to Mr. Bernard Baruch, one of the Ameri
can representatives in the Reparation Commission, the
amounts varied from 8 billions to 120 billions of dollars,
and what is most interesting, both extreme figures came
from British experts. But all the estimates of Germany's
riches had been made before the war, at a time when nobody
complained about a poor Germany. Naturally, these figures
cannot be taken at their face value. The possibility of
the Allied and associated Governments required of Ger

many onlyand Germany undertook onlythat she will
make compensation for all damage done to the civilian popu
which are even more difficult to appraise than the amount

of the sums due by her as damages.
assaulter.
The demand of the French Minister of Finance was con
sequently just, but justice could not be exacted under the

existing circumstances. The French representatives, to
gether with their European colleagues, were obliged
frankly to recognize the wisdom and the expediencyif not
the strict justiceof the formula of the President of the
United States that only reparation of damage should be

collected, and not the cost of the war. So they signed
article 232 of the treaty which states that the resources
of Germany are not adequate, after taking into account

permanent diminutions of such resources which will result
from other provisions of the treaty, to make complete rep
aration for all the loss and damages to which the Allied and
associated Governments and their nations have been sub
jected as a consequence of the war.
payment by Germany depends upon many contingencies
112
The Nation
Some of these contingencies are moral ones;

. . .
others purely material. The possibility of Germany paying
depends largely upon the restoration of her agriculture
and the crops in the years to come and upon the future of
her industrial production. These contingencies are the
more difficult to forecast because Germany has been com
pelled to cede some of her territory for the profit of foreign
nations . . . The two years passed since the armistice
have been helpful to a solution of some of these problems.
The much-abused Secretariat of the League of Nations has
undertaken the task of comparing the tax burden of France
and Germany and has recently published the figures.
The basis for such comparison is necessarily a computa
tion of the proportionate percentage of total per capita in
come paid to the state in taxes, direct and indirect. This
computation in France and Germany for the year 1920 pre
sents unusual difficulty and the Secretariat had to proceed
with great care. It gave due consideration to the problem
presented by the work of reconstruction in France and took
into account the fact that the Treaty of Versailles obliged
Germany to make certain deliveries of cattle, coal, and ma
chinery at various times during the year.
A wholesale price index is published in both France and
Germany showing the month to month variation in prices
of every commodity necessary to economic life. The Secre
tariat, in calculating the present national income of France
and Germany, estimated that 60 per cent of the prewar
national income consisted of goods the value of which was
subject to variations in the said price index. It also esti
mated that, because of the war, this part of the national
income had been reduced in volume by 30 per cent in both
France and Germany, while the price levels applicable to
this portion of the national income, also owing to the war,
had increased in France 5y2-fold and in Germany 10-fold.
The volume of the remaining 40 per cent of the national
income respecting transport, distribution, personal, pro
fessional, and other services was assumed to have remained
stationary. It was further assumed that the valuation of
this 40 per cent of the income has risen at the rate of 50
per cent of the average increase of the wholesale priceindex numbers in France and Germany since 1914.
Taking into consideration the 30 per cent reduction on
the first portion of national income, the price-level increases
of 5%-fold in France and 10-fold in Germany, and the in
crease of 50 per cent in the second section of national income
of France and Germany, the following factors for the total
national income for 1920 are obtained : France, 3^ ; Ger
many, 6%.
Applying these factors to the figures of the respective
budgets of France and Germany, the population of France
being 40,000,000 and that of Germany 59,500,000, the fol
lowing results were obtained:
FranceNational income per capita, 3,200 francs; Gov
ernment revenue per capita, 574 francs, or 18 per cent.
GermanyNational income per capita, 3,900 marks;
Government revenue per capita, 474 marks, or 12 per cent.
From this computation, compared with the general condi
tions in both countries, several conclusions must be drawn :
(1) That the limit of taxable income is considerably lower
in France than in Germany; (2) that if Germany were to
increase the burden of her taxes so that the proportion of
her per capita income paid to the state would equal the pro
portion paid in Franceimplying an increase from 12 per
cent to 18 per centthe Treasury would receive an addi
[Vol. 112, No. 2899
tional sum of 12,540,000,000 marks; (3) that it must be

borne in mind that the burden of taxes imposed in France
requires from her people a much greater effort to meet than
a similar burden would in Germany, since the physical
means of wealth production suffered no destruction in the
latter country; (4) that, by comparing the German and the
French percentage of taxation, the reproach often raised
against the French Government for not taxing its people
falls to the ground; (5) that there is only one country in the
world which is more heavily taxed than France, namely
England, where 28 per cent of the per capita national in
come is paid to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. In Amer
ica only 8 per cent of the per capita income is collected by
the Federal and State Governments.
Without waiting for the German indemnity, the French
Parliament helped solve the problem of reconstruction by
voting in the budget of 1920 a part called "extraordinary
budget," covering the expenses of reconstruction and pen
sionsexpenses to be recovered from Germany and her
allies. Advances have had to be made by the Government
and by the public, which responded generously. The big
public banks associated themselves with the work and estab
lished a bank called the Credit National which issued to the
public debentures for 8 billion francs. Moreover in 1919 a
government loan of 17 billion and in 1920 a government
loan of 27 billion have been issued to the public.
The proceeds of these loans have been successfully em
ployed, the fields are cultivated again, public buildings,
schools, post offices, town and city halls, and churches are
reconstructed at least provisionally; 76 per cent of the
destroyed manufactures are rebuilt; 44 per cent of the
laborers working in these factories before the war are at
work again. Production in devastated France is 62 per
cent of the prewar total. The destroyed metallurgical in
dustries are working at 50 per cent of the prewar condi
tions, textile industry at 67 per cent, chemical industry at
54 per cent, and new developments are being made in the
production of electrical energy. Since the armistice, exportations from France to foreign countries have passed
from 4,750,000,000 to 16,550,000,000 francs.
But the enormous sums which France is appropriating
for reconstruction and for the reestablishment of a regular
order of things are only advances made by France to Ger
many. It is absolutely necessary that Germany shall under
stand that she must repair the wrong she has done not only
to France but to other countries as well. Belgians, Ser
bians, Italians, Rumanians, English as well as French are
able and willing to help themselves, to help the world return
to normal conditions, and to pay the great debts which they
have incurred through Germany's attack; but, they have
the right to expect a corresponding effort on the part of
the author of the wrong: they expect, as the French Prime
Minister recently expressed it, "that Germany will make
all efforts to pay, no matter if she pays in goods or gold, as
long as she pays."
With regard to reparation, many people seem to be very
anxious to treat German public opinion with the greatest
consideration, while few appear to be equally regardful of
the public opinion of the countries which have been plun
dered by Germany. These nations are ready to do their
duty, but Germany must do hers. This is the only way to
heal the wounds, this is the only way to keep the peace of
the world and to assure the great object of maintaining
"friendly relations between foreign nations."
Jan. 26, 1921]
The Nation
Russia at
113
Peace
By PAXTON HIBBEN
SOVIET Russia is at war with no onewhich is more
than can be said of most of the belligerents in the late
war. But while Soviet Russia is not at war, it would be an
exaggeration to say that she is at peace with all the world.
On the whole, the present situation is in the nature of a
breathing spell, an armed truce that tomorrow may be war
or permanent peace the world over.
Which it is to be depends less upon Soviet Russia than
upon other considerations. Russia is ready for wara
certain faction, in Russia quite as much as in France, per
haps, is spoiling for war. That there is peace today in
Russia, not war, is sufficient evidence that this faction does
not control.
Nevertheless, the professed altruism and the practiced
greed of the victorious Powers have demonstrated to others
besides Trotzky that readiness for war on an instant's
notice is the safest course for Soviet Russia, albeit possibly
not so safe for Russia's neighbors. Given a breathing spell,
therefore, in which for the moment moving armies are still,
it is well for the rest of the world to take stock of where
Russia's forces lie and their potential strength, as the
ringside spectator at a prize-fight at the end of a round
appraises the punch each combatant has left in him.
Since the annihilation of Wrangel's grotesque adventure
there are five main Russian "fronts": the Baltic states,
Poland, Rumania, Transcaucasia and Persia, and India. Of
these only the first three may be considered essentially Rus
sian in that a blow struck at one of them with success might
possibly reach to Russia proper. For the strength, and it
may one day prove to be also the weakness, of Soviet Russia
lies in the fact that it not only permits but encourages a
very large measure of autonomy, if not indeed actual inde
pendence, among the associated peoples who for one reason
or another have sought or accepted the cooperation of the
Soviet Government at Moscow.
In Transcaucasia, for example, the entering wedge of
soviet influence was not, as the press dispatches gave the
impression, an advance by the Red army into Azerbaijan
and the conquest of the oil wells of Baku. The communist
movement in Azerbaijan was from within, stimulated of
course by agents from Moscow who found ready material
at hand in the 60,000 radical Russian and Armenian labor
ers of the oil fields, out of work for over a year on account
of the British control of the oil output. There were only
these 60,000 radicals out of a population of approximately
2,911,300. But in Azerbaijan as in Russia the vast mass of
the population were and are peasant farmers, who were
almost as ready to throw off the yoke of the great estate
owners as the laborers were to rebel against working for
the Royal Shell Company of London or the Rothschilds of
Paris. When the revolution was effected on April 27, 1920,
and a soviet regime installed, agents of Soviet Russia came
to Baku and taught the Tartars of Azerbaijan how to make
a soviet government effective, how to organize an Azerbaijan
soviet army, to nationalize the land and the oil wells, and to
consolidate the new Government. It was neither an in
vasion nor a conquest of Azerbaijan; but it was a very
rapid profiting by conditions to the existence of which
Moscow had not been blind, while England had.
The same is true of Persia. The downfall of the British

influence and the rise of communism had their roots in the
greed that dictated the Anglo-Persian agreement of August
9, 1919, which bound Persia hand and foot to Britain,
While the British last May were dealing with Prince Firouz,
who scarcely represented the servants in his own household,
Mirza Kutchuk with over half the people of Persia actively
behind him was leading a revolt against an arrangement
which would place the whole Persian army under a British
commander, every division under a British general, and
every regiment under a British colonel, with four other
British officers in each regiment. Four months before the
bolshevist army was within 800 miles of Persia, and while
the wall of Denikin's forces still separated Soviet Russia
from Transcaucasia, British staff officers from northwest
Persia told me that it was as much as a British officer's life
was worth to travel through Persia, so bitter were the
people against the Anglo-Persian agreement.
It was not Soviet Russia that invaded Persia, but the
Persian people, rebelling against British military, economic,
and financial domination, who organized their own independ
ent government and voluntarily associated themselves with
Soviet Russia. Russian officers, administrators, and organ
izers were sent to them when they asked it. They were not
imposed upon them when they neither asked it nor knew it.
There is a difference, and the difference is the strength of
Soviet Russia in Persia today.
The same story is repeated in the Khanates of Khiva and
Bokhara and in Turkestan, north of Afghanistan. No Red
army marched into this territory and subdued the people.
They are independent, but they are also associated with
Soviet Russia, which means that they neither can nor will
enter into such a combination of Uzbegs, Afghans, and
Persians against Soviet Russia as that which the British
planned six months ago, and are still talking of. It is too
late. Even at this present writing a British mission has
gone to Kabul to try to negotiate a treaty of friendship
with the Ameer. It is too late here, also. While the Viceroy
of India and the Ameer of Afghanistan have been exchang
ing polite letters, the agents of Soviet Russia have been at
work among the people of the land that commands the gates
of India. There are reports that a revolution like that in
Azerbaijan, like that in Persia, has taken place in Afghan
istan, and that the Ameer has fled to India. It may not be
true. But it will be true, sooner or later ; for Soviet Russia
has taken a leaf out of President Wilson's book. Lenin and
Chicherin appeal to the people, direct, over the heads of the
rulersand it wins in Afghanistan, in Persia and Trans
caucasia, in Bokhara and Khiva and Turkestan, as it won in
Germany for us in 1918.
It is precisely this alliance with the rebel who represents
the will of the vast majority of the people that Soviet Russia
has made with Mustapha Kemal Pasha in Turkey. While
Britain and the Allies generally deal with the Sultan, im
potent in Constantinople, possessed not even of the shadow
of authoritynot enough to keep his heir apparent from
trying to join the Turkish Nationalist armyLenin is deal
ing in realities. Mustapha Kemal Pasha has 90 per cent of
the Turks (including those in Constantinople) with him. It
The Nation
114
is with Mustapha Kemal that Soviet Russia has reached a

working understanding by which the influence of Moscow
stretches from Arkhanghelsk to Teheran, and from Angora
to Tibet.
And from end to end of this southern line defending the
frontiers of Soviet Russia, over 2,200 miles long, the armies

that hold the line are not Russian armies. They are Turks,
Armenians, Persians, Tartars of Azerbaijan, Georgians,

Uzbegs, Afghans, TurkomansGod knows what-each and
every one fighting for his own country, for his own right
to self-determination and freedom from European rule and
European exploitation. They are the bulwarks of Soviet

Russia, and they cost the Moscow Government merely a few
officers to organize the local forces, a few staff officers to
help direct the military operations, a few preachers among
the people to keep their rebellion of spirit against the old
order alive.
It could be done with little more than a score
[Vol. 112, No. 2899
The Near East Relief learns at last that the situation is so
serious that some 40,000 Assyrian refugees who had been

granted land by the British in the Mosul district have been
turned back and are now to be sent to the United States, if
possible.
In Transcaucasia Armenia has set up a soviet government,
and the menshevist government of Georgia has made the
slight alteration that bridges the difference between it and
bolshevism. In Turkey, while the sinister figure of Tewfik
Pasha is back in power in Constantinople, the mission sent
to Angora to try to reach an understanding with Mustapha
-
Kemal Pasha has returned with nothing accomplished. The

Turkish Nationalists control Turkey far more effectively
than anyone else even pretends to control it, and the way
from Angora to Moscow is as unimpeded as that from
Athens to London.
On October 28, in the cloak room of the Quai d'Orsay, a
of translators to spread broadcast throughout the Near East
treaty was signed giving Bessarabia to Rumania.
and Central Asia the proceedings of the Assembly of the

League of Nations at Geneva or the news of the secret
agreements of Svres and San Remo, the partitions among
neither the sanction of the Peace Conference nor that of
It had
the League of Nations, and neither Russia, of which Bessa

rabia was part, nor the United States were signatories. Not
Armenian newspapers printed daily the Soviet propaganda

wireless dispatches from Moscow because they had little or
no other news of the outside world, it was not communist
dissimilarly in 1861 Mexico was assigned to France. Be

tween Mogileff and Kamnets-Podolsk, Budenny has 40,000
cavalry, as the left wing of the army holding the frontier
against Poland. But it may also serve at need as the right
wing of an army to sweep into Rumania on provocation.
Rumania has called to the colors the classes of 1913, 1914,
propaganda that did the work of disillusionizing the people
and 1915a mobilization.
the self-styled victors of spoils which they do not possess

and cannot conquer.
A year ago in Tiflis and Erivan, where the Georgian and
of Transcaucasia with the professed altruism of the Allied

and associated Powers. It was the cold, hard facts of the
-deals and dickers in London and Paris, yes, and Washington.
It was the bargaining for this bit of territory or that, the
compromises, the concessions, the trades, which Moscow
knew to spread before the world in all their ugliness of fact,
unsugared by the columns of explanatory and apologetic
matter with which the same facts reach us. In Afghanistan
and Azerbaijan and Persia and Kurdistan you cannot explain
So, in 1914, in the very same way, the World War

began. The last relic of feudalism in Western Europe, the
paradise of the great landowners, Rumania is a standing
invitation to communists of the passionate conviction of
those in Moscow. Last August there was talk in Paris of
Rumania coming to the aid of Poland when Soviet Russia
was struggling against the Polish invasion. It was the
French Government that told the Rumanians, unofficially,

to go ahead and march on Budapest, to put an end to com
that Constantine of Greece wrote some letters to his brother
munism in Hungary.
in-law the Kaiser that the Allies did not approve of, while
Venizelos consistently did just as he was told from London
and Paris. It is too complicated. The facts stand out: at
the Peace Conference Greece was given Thrace and a five
years' tenure of Smyrna. Then the Greek people by a vote
of a million to 10,000 dismissed the man who had negotiated
this little deal and chose Constantine as king. Immediately,
the Allies began to talk about taking back from Greece what
was granted by the Peace Conference. To the untutored
mind three questions occur, and only three: Have not the
Greeks the same right to choose their own ruler as the Eng
lish or the Norwegians or the Americans? If the grants to
Greece were unjust, why were they made? If they were
just, why should they be taken back? And of a situation
The Treaty of Riga that put a stop to war between Soviet

Russia and Poland was far from satisfactory to the Rus
sians. Here, too, the French are egging the Poles on.
such as this Moscow makes the most.
Paris.
In Afghanistan the British hold only the forts that pro

tect the southern entrance of the Khyber Pass. In Persia,
Duna being planned, at the Quai d'Orsay perhaps, to engulf

five millions more in a war that may last years, cost untold
first Enzeli, then Tabriz, and now Teheran have been evacu
ated by all save those friendly to the soviet movement. Thou
treasure, and tear down the very pillars of civilization in

Eastern Europe?
If so, Trotzky must be grinning as he thinks of his south
sands of refugees, the Near East Relief hears, are moving

south to Hamadan, and from Hamadan to Kermanshah and
Bagdad. On December 15, Mr. Lloyd George said unequivo
cally: It is part of our definite policy to clear out of
Persia.
In Mesopotamia, reports as yet unconfirmed indicate an
early abandonment of the district around Mosul, oil and all.
Perhaps a combination of Rumania and Poland could ac
complish what Kolchak, Judenich, Denikin, and Wrangel

have failed to do, and collect France's Russian claims. From
Paris Walter Duranty cables a long story, unconfirmed

otherwise, of an impending bolshevist attack on Latvia. It
is the usual way of preparing the public mind for another
effort against Russiareports of the intention of Moscow
to move against this country or that.
Wrangel is by the board, but the French policy does not

change. It cannot change, so long as Millerand and the
unholy alliance between profiteers and militarists rules in
Is a great spring offensive from the Danube to the
ern frontiers safely shored up against surprise, and a single

line against which to concentrate the whole man power of
Russia in a final struggle for the life or death of commu
nism. Had he chosen time and place himself, such an offen

sive could not have been better for Soviet Russiaor worse
for the world.
Jan. 26, 1921]
The
The Nation
Three-Shift
System Steel
115
Industry
By HENRY WOOD SHELTON

THERE is no real obstacle to the steel industry as a
whole changing from the two- to the three-shift day.
"Both economic and humanitarian considerations indicate
that this change is inevitable and, on account of present
conditions, may even now be at hand. It would directly
relieve about 150,000 workers now on the twelve-hour day,
and afford work for at least 50,000 more who are now un
employed.
These statements epitomize the conclusions reached at one
of the largest gatherings of engineers ever arranged in this
countrya joint meeting of the Taylor Society, the metro
politan and management sections of the American Society
of Mechanical Engineers, and the American Institute of
Electrical Engineers. The occasion was the presentation
and discussion of a report on "The Three-Shift System in
the Steel Industry," prepared by Horace B. Drury, for
merly of the department of economics, Ohio State Univer
sity, and recently with the Industrial Relations Division
of the United States Shipping Board. Mr. Drury, dur
ing three months of study and field investigation, visited
about twenty independent steel plants already running on
a three-shift basis, representing about 40 per cent of the
industry. His general conclusions may be summarized as
follows :
1. The managers of those steel plants which have made
the change are all glad it has been done. They are con
vinced that it was "good business." Increased alertness
of the men, with improved quality of product, less waste,
and less wear and tear of equipment have been reported;
also less absenteeism and less carelessness; and a better
spirit has prevailed among the men. In some cases the
output has been increased and the costs lowered.
2. The workers have been so glad to get the shorter
hours that they have been willing to make substantial con
cessions in daily wages.
3. While in many cases the adoption of the three-shift
day may result in slightly higher labor costs, this need not
be the case. Whether labor costs are increased or not de
pends primarily on the preparation and skill of the man
agement in bringing the change about. The extreme cost
under the worst conditions of change might amount to 21
cents per ton of pig iron selling for $40. The increase for
open-hearth work might amount to 25 cents per ton. Thus
the total increase in labor cost for a steel ingot would be
not more than 46 cents. If the entire steel industryblast
furnaces, steel works, and rolling millswent on three shifts
with no increase in efficiency, careful analysis shows that
it could not add more than 3 per cent to the total cost of
making the finished steel rail, bar, or sheet. As the change
would bring into play many factors making for increased
efficiency, it is probable that costs in the long run would
actually be lowered.
4. The experience of those plants which have made. the
change, together with the present fact of considerable and
increasing unemployment in the steel industry, makes the
immediate change largely a matter of the will to undertake
it by those directly concerned.
In the typical American steel plant more than half of
the men are still employed twelve hours a day. In those con
tinuous-operation processes which make up the heart of the

steel industry, such as the blast furnace, the open-hearth
furnace, and most types of rolling mill, together with the
various auxiliary departments necessary to support these
processes and make a complete plant, the proportion of
twelve-hour workers is considerably more than half. There
are probably 150,000 such twelve-hour workers in the coun
try. In blast-furnace plants and often in open-hearth de
partments these men work seven days a week. Once in two
weeks they have eighteen-hour or twenty-four-hour turns.
For a long time it was supposed in the steel industry that
no other system of operation would work. Leading steel
manufacturers told the Senate Committee which investi
gated the steel strike that the men wanted to work twelve
hours a day in order to get twelve hours' pay. It was also
said that modern machinery had so lightened labor in the
steel industry and work was so intermittent that a twelve
hours' duty involved no physical hardship.
Prior to the war there were undoubtedly many men in
the steel industry who desired the twelve-hour day. The
typical steel worker has been the newly arrived foreigner,
often unmarried, whose greatest desire was to earn a lot
of money to send or take back to Europe. Other reasons
for the continuance of the twelve-hour day in this industry
long after other industries as a whole have made the change
are the shortage of labor during recent years, the shortage
of houses, the large size of most of the plants (making
them unwieldy and slow to adopt any radical change), and
the general freedom of the industry from labor unions and
the pressure which they are able to exert.
Some of these conditions are rapidly changing. The
growth of the eight-hour-day idea in Europe means that
the immigrant to this country will be less passive than
heretofore. As men are being laid off in the steel industry
the shortage-of-labor argument no longer holds except in
isolated cases. In addition the steel strike played a con
siderable part in awakening the desires of the employees
and strengthening the movement toward a better organiza
tion of the workers. According to Mr. Drury all the evi
dence indicates that most of the men now feel that twelve
hours' workwhich, with going and coming, means thirteen
hourscannot give them enough time for home life, let
alone education in English or activity in community affairs.
It is hardly open to question that a regular twelve-hour
day, not to mention the seven-day week, is a strain on the
health of the worker. He would be better off physically
and in all that depends upon physical welfare with the
shorter day of eight hours.
Nor can the larger though less tangible question of
humanitarianism be ignored. The higher development of
the individual cannot come except by leisure waking hours
for education and cultural development. When he has but
a scant two hours in the day for this purpose, we can
hardly expect much growth in the ideals of American citi
zenship. So from the point of view of both individual
and national welfare, the logic of the situation points to
the adoption of the shorter day.
The general drift in other continuous-process industries
in the United States is also having its effect on the mind
116
The Nation
of the steel worker. The chemical, glass, coal-mining, and

paper industries are examples of those in which the shift
has already been made or in which the process is well under
way. No other industry in America now practices the
twelve-hour day to any great extent.
The adoption of the eight-hour day as the universal prac
tice in the steel industry itself in other countries is an-
Why
Is
[Vol. 112, No. 2899
other influence on our own workers. England, France,

Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Italy, and Spain have all gone
over to the three-shift system. How long can we expect
the employees of this one industry and country alone to
acquiesce in a condition which the world has outgrown?
To continue it longer violates the public sense of what is
just and what is truly American.
Farmer?
By FELIX SPER
OF all industrial groups, the farmer has always been
reckoned the sustaining nerve of society. His con
servatism has been lauded as a bulwark to erratic social
vibrations; his horse sense has been an anchor amid the
fluctuations of economic change. But human nature every
where will snort under the whip. Beneath the skin, the
farmer is sensitive. It may take a longer time for a wrong
to prick him, but once aware, he moves with slow in
evitability, like a boulder rolling valleyward.
Throughout the rural areas of New Jersey, New York,
and parts of Connecticutas indeed throughout the coun
trythe farmer is grumbling. The grumble threatens to
deepen into a roar. Lacking a voice to trumpet his griev
ances, and untutored in the tactics of mass action, he is
unable to fight the enemy in the open. Besides, living apart
has made him unfit for controversy. He is therefore fol
lowing the readiest road of his instincts. They tell him
that labor without reward is futile. Accordingly, in mo
menta of depression, he threatens to stop producing. In
fact, as an emergency weapon, a number have begun to prac
tice this form of sabotage. "We can always grow enough
for home use," is frequently heard. This futile way of
hitting back might easily become widespread under severe
provocation.
Not many weeks ago, I spoke to scores of up-State farmers
and was alarmed at the unanimity of their views. They
talk like men who have pondered ancient grievances and
are rousing themselves from sleep. I set down a typical
talk as showing which way the gale will blow. The milk
cart rolled slowly along the mountain path. I turned to the
driver, a typical, slow-witted Yankee dairyman, and asked:
"Do you expect a good year?"
A momentary pause, the customary expectoration, then
the drawl over the poised corn-cob: "Not much."
"Why?"
"Didn't plant much. Just enough potatoes and things to
store in the cellar for the winter."
"What's the trouble?"
"Hi Trouble enough ! Can't make the farm pay."
"Then you don't intend to sell your products?"
"Why should I? We don't make enough. The farmers
round here are gettin' to the point where they don't care.
That's why most of 'em's raisin' just enough for home use."
He shrugged his shoulders doubtfully and flicked the reins.
As a matter of fact, the farmer's income is the most
variable quantity in nature. The fortunes of farming fluc
tuate as wildly as the Wall Street market during a panic.
It is safe to say that most farmers do not know definitely
whether they gain or lose at the end of the year. They
just push along and muddle through. Farm bookkeeping
requires considerable figuring ability if one is to follow such
a scientific method as the cost-accounting system of the New

York College of Agriculture. At present it has only fiftytwo farms under its jurisdiction. One of the supervised
farmers learned that at the end of the first year he suffered
a deficit of $4.70 per cow; at the end of the second year,
$5.60, while for the third year he earned a surplus of $11 on
each cow. There is little doubt that accurate accounting of
farmers' incomes would show more deficits than surpluses.
"But," I persisted as my taciturn companion puffed away,
"who is making all the profit?"
"Armour, Nestles, Sheffield, Borden, and the middleman.
Them fellers is pilin' up the doughbut not usno siree!"
I hesitated to prod further. There is something about the
manner of these men of the soil that discourages probing.
I summoned courage for a final shot.
"But milk? Doesn't that pay well?"
He grinned sardonically. "No. We're gettin' $3 for a
hundred pound milk. To make a decent sum we ought to
earn from $5 to $6. But then I suppose the dealers would
charge you city folks thirty cents a quart."
I reckoned on the basis of 2.15 pounds a quart that the
milk he sells at six cents a quart is sold to the housewife at
sixteen cents. Why the margin of ten cents? I suggested
cooperative dairies, cooperative bottling and sterilization
plants, the elimination of the middleman, socialization of
railroads, and other off-hand panaceas familiar to armchair
theorists. He smiled at my heavy prescription. "Tell it to
the Dairymen's League." By this time my questions had
the effect of unsealing a reservoir of rancor which flowed
without further pumping. "Look at the price of feed," he
went on. "They've jacked it up to $60 a ton." The
thought rankled deep as it does in every other farmer
I have met. By feed he means concentrated grains, such as
gluten feed for cows and whole grain for horses. Every
dairyman must have horses to cart the hay to the barn and
milk to the platform, for the contract price implies delivery.
Hay and corn, which constitute the roughage in the diet of
cattle, can be raised, but they are not enough to sustain
animal life or yield a high-grade milk. Extracted protein
products must be bought from the manufacturer.
"And look at labor," he continued with a ring of anger
in his voice. "Hired hands now want from $4 to $4.50 a
day with board. Why, in the next village men are receiving
$100 a month with board and washing. Jumping pickerel I
Who ever heard of such wages for farm hands? And then
we can't get help when we need it bad. If the whole family
don't pitch in at haying and harvest time, the hay rots and
the crops go to the devil." He spat again by way of relief
and fell back in gloomy meditation.
No. He did not overstate. The price of machinery, feed,
and fertilizers is becoming prohibitive. All the profits
Jan. 26, 1921]
The Nation
formerly made are now swallowed up by the corporations

that sell farm necessities. In self-defense, therefore, the
farmer has had to organize. He feels a closer kin
ship with the city proletariat than ever before, though
he may not confess it. Circumstances are throwing him into
the same lap of fate. The rise of the Nonpartisan League,
despite apparent set-backs, has been steady. The growth of
cooperative leagues among truck-growers, fruit farmers,
and dairymen has been remarkable. Within the last few
years considerable progress has been made in the coopera
tive marketing of farm products, such as fruit, potatoes,
dairy products, and live stock. The movement is spreading
to include timber products. There are now in operation a
number of cooperative shingle mills and box factories which
supply boxes to fruit growers at cost. The last survey un
dertaken by the United States Bureau of Markets (1914)
reported approximately 12,500 farmers' purchasing and
marketing associations in this country.* Since then the
number has leaped upward.
In the East, the best-known farmer group is the Dairy
men's League. Its membership, scattered throughout six
States (New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut,
Massachusetts, and Vermont), supports 1,103 local branches.
From 15,000 in 1916 it has grown to number approximately
90,000 members. Primarily protective in purpose, it serves
as intermediary between producer and distributor. It bar
gains directly for the farmer and sells his product at con
tract prices which vary from month to month. For example,
the price of July 3 per cent milk was $2.95 a hundred pound
delivered to the platform within a 210-mile zone of New
York City. August milk fetched $3.35. Of course, the
advantages of a bargaining agent are apparent. The farmer
knows that his milk will find a market though not always
at a price above cost. As an instance, December milk was
sold at a loss of one cent plus, per pound. In 1916, before
the league became a selling agent, he received $1.41 per
hundred pound. Three years later the price was $3.01.
Naturally the farmer is unhappy. When we consider
the increased expenses of farming, the yearly surplus is
either negligible or a minus figure. In hundreds of cases
it is estimated that his income is below that of the humblest
artisan. What then is the farmer to do? Stay on the land
when higher wages are beckoning in town ? Many are rent
ing their land or leaving it idle to follow a trade. The
small margin of profit, though the major cause of rural dis
content, is but one of a number. The lack of labor has
been a sharp thorn in the flesh. Last autumn one could
see acre upon acre of corn, lettuce, and cabbage rotting and
being choked by weeds and high grass for want of men to
gather the crops. The Chester Meadows near Goshen, New
York, are but one of the many areas that present such a
wasteful spectacle. Many vegetable growers were forced to
sell their potatoes and beans to town folk with the proviso
that they came to gather them.
As if the dairyman's lot weren't sufficiently hard, he is
often driven to desperation by a kind of inspection that
might better be called pin-pricking. In his present temper
he is impatient of anything that will harass him unjustly.
When, therefore, ignorant and incompetent inspectors from
the New York City Department of Health give idiotic in
structions and make stupid criticisms, he is ready to throw
up the sponge. Farmers resent the clumsy meddling of
Tammany politicians whose knowledge of farming has been
See Farmer'* Bulletin 1,100, U. S. Dept. of Agriculture.
117
picked up along the Bowery or around the fountain of

Madison Square. For instance, for what appears an in
fringement of sanitation, such as frosted dairy windows
on a frosty January day (though they may have been
washed perfectly clean the night before and be at the proper
temperature behind), two points are deducted by way of
threat to shut out of the city market. In milk counties
the practice of New York City inspection is well established.
The State inspectors, for the most part, are competent and
get on well with the farmers. When the provocation there
fore becomes unbearable the farmer sells or slaughters his
cows and washes his hands clean of the whole business.
To us, such a reason for refusing to carry on may seem
trivial, but, to a degree, it is responsible for lowering the
mark of production.
As a logical consequence, the drift to the cities flows
faster year by year. On February 1 last year, the Depart
ment of Agricultural Economics and Farm Management of
the New York State College of Agriculture in cooperation
with the United States Bureau of Crop Estimates obtained
reports from 3,775 New York farms. The figures show a
decrease of 3 per cent in the number of persons living on
farms, while the number of hired men decreased 17 per
cent. Of the habitable houses occupied a few years ago by
hired men 10 per cent are vacant. If the same ratio holds
for all farms in this State, then it is estimated that the net
loss to one State of men and boys who left farming to enter
other industries within the past year was 24,000. Com
pare this estimate with similar figures for the year ending
February 1, 1918, when the net loss was only 7,000. Within
two years the loss has multiplied 3.4 times. For the bor
dering States figures are not available.
More and more the difficulties of farm life increase.
Added to the hazards of wind, lightning, tornado, and ex
cessive rain are the man-inflicted burdens of a silly system
that will not encourage maximum production, nor assist
to transport products to terminal markets and warehouses
in the most economical and efficient manner. To ignore the
toiler who draws from the soil the means of life is sheer
insanity. We reward more handsomely the makers of cigars
and perfumes.
There is but one conclusion: the farmer's position must
be safeguarded. He must be assured a workable return on
his labor and capital. Childish illusions about farm pros
perity are remote from the truth. There are the few who
prosper, while the many hobble along painfully. Facility
in gathering crops and marketing them at a tangible sur
plus, no profiteering in machinery, packing material, feed,
and fertilizer, a ready labor market, and less pin-pricking
by governmental officials will keep the farmer on the land.
Poetae Minores
By ALBERT EDMUND TROMBLY
Nightingales and larks are found
Not everywhere: they can't go round.
Room enough and more there is,
Warblers, bluebirds, goldfinches.
Many a country would be dull
Should there be a cricket-lulL
Crickets, when the larks are flown,
Warm us with their undertone.
118
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2899
Non-Cooperation India's New Weapon

By YOGIRAJA
THE policy of non-cooperation has been inaugurated in
India. How it will work out remains to be seen. It
means, according to its principal supporter, Mahatma
Gandhi, the boycotting not only of British-made goods, but
also of the new councils, the law courts, and educational in
stitutions. It is not probable that the last two will be boy
cotted by the majority, even if the first two are, since the
average Indian still has faith in British justice and more
over believes that there is no advantage in withdrawing
boys from government schools until you can create a large
number of private schools. Mr. Gandhi's object seems to be
to show that the Indian people can exist without depen
dence on the British, and this, he thinks, can be successfully
demonstrated only by following the policy of non-coopera
tion. In other words, he aims at the achievement of selfgovernment for India passively by a complete withdrawal
of cooperation with the Government.
There are several causes that have led to the adoption
of such a policy, among them the awakening of the national
conscience through the study of the international situation
of the world as created by the war. It is argued that if Eng
land fought for the liberty of small nations like Belgium,
and that if the great European nations, together with
America, agreed upon self-determination as a criterion for
national readjustment, India may reasonably expect Eng
land to apply the same criterion to her. England, indeed,
agreed to a measure of self-government for India through
the Government of India Reforms Act recently passed, but
this measure has failed to satisfy the aspirations of the In
dian people, who demand a more liberal treatment, not only
because of their unstinted support of the war, but also be
cause of the necessity of meeting their legitimate national
aspirations. The average Indian bitterly complains that in
stead of impressing the Indians with the British sense of
gratitude for their admirable part in the war, Britain passed
the Rowlatt Act in the teeth of all opposition and is re
sponsible alike for General Dyer's behavior at Amritsar in
shooting down by machine guns a vast multitude of people,
and for the bombs said to have been dropped from airplanes
on the town of Gujranwalla. These things, not to speak of
the utter humiliation inflicted on them in the Punjab by
the martial law regime, have created misgivings in the
minds of people who lay claim to an ancient civilization.
The knowledge that the officials guilty of last year's martiallaw excesses have escaped punishment and that General
Dyer, far from being adequately dealt with, is allowed to
draw half the usual pension from the pockets of the Indian
rate-payer is enough to create in their minds a deep sense
of resentment.
All these circumstances have resulted in the organization
of the policy of non-cooperation. There is, moreover, an
other remarkable factor that will greatly contribute toward
making this movement a success. I refer to the close entente
between Hindus and Moslems, the two great sects of India
which have cut each other's throats for centuries. Their
quarrels have ceased; they have begun to respect each
other's aspirations. This unity of interests, brought about
partly by the treatment accorded to Turkey after the war,
differentiates the non-cooperation movement of today radi
cally from the Swadeshi movement of a decade ago. Both

indicate a policy of boycott toward the British. The latter
was more restricted in scope, however, aiming at the boy
cott of British-made goods only, and soon collapsed owing
to a want of national unity and the lack of a leader who
could win the confidence of Hindus and Moslems alike. The
present movement is much more extensive, and its chief
supporter is a man held in high esteem by the majority of
both sects.
The National Congress held a special sitting at Calcutta,
during September when a sub-committee was formed to>
study the question in detail and work out a scheme whereby
the policy might be put into practice. This sub-committee
consisted of Gandhi, Moti Lai Nehru, and Patel, who have
since issued their report, together with the note of reserva
tions and dissent by Patel. It purports to be for those who
approve of the resolution of non-cooperation passed at the
special congress of Calcutta which advised:
1. Boycott of government titles and honorary offices;
2. Boycott of government functions, such as levees and dur
bars;
3. Gradual boycott of educational institutions controlled
wholly or in part by the Government, and opening of national
institutions instead;
4. Gradual boycott of law courts by lawyers and litigants
and institution of private arbitration courts;
5. Boycott of legislative councils both by candidates and
the electorate;
6. Boycott of recruiting of clerks, soldiers, etc., for service
in Mesopotamia;
7. Boycott of foreign goods;
8. Promotion of home industry.
It has been proposed by Mr. Gandhi that this program shall
be gradually carried out in the spirit of absolute non
violence, a proposal approved by the congress charged with
the determination of ways and means.
The first item is the boycott of titles. There is a class of
people who look upon titles and honorary offices as things
worth having at any cost. These people must be disillu
sioned as to the real value of these things, and "must be edu
cated to consider gifts from an unrighteous government as a
dishonor to be shunned." A list of all title-holders and
honorary officials is to be drawn up, and such people are
to be induced in all respect and humility to renounce their
so-called marks of honor. No pressure of any kind is to be
brought to bear on them ; the renunciation is to be entirely
voluntary. Patel supplements this procedure by the fol
lowing lines of action:
a. All Indian newspapers should in future in their writings
drop all references to titles, and the title-holders should be ad
dressed or referred to as Mr. or Esquire;
b. No Indian newspaper should in future publish in its col
umns any honors' list or any nominations by government;
c. The Indian public in addressing title-holders should drop
all references to titles as in the case of newspapers.
Another item is the boycott of government educational
institutions. Opinion on this point not being unanimous,
only a "gradual" boycott is proposed, meaning thereby that
immediate results need not be expected owing to the great
confusion in the people's minds concerning these schools
Jan. 26, 1921]
The Nation
and colleges. People are required to realize that the aim

of such institutions is to prepare the young for a degree as a
stepping-stone to government service, but when such ser
vice is not needed the utility of the schools and colleges
ceases automatically. Boys should be withdrawn and placed
in national schools which are to spring up immediately, but
so long as they do not come into existence, private tuition
should be resorted to. Where that is impossible owing to
economic strain, boys should be apprenticed to patriotic
merchants or artisans. Volunteer teachers should be en
listed and national schools opened, government aid dis
pensed with, and government service relinquished.
The fourth item is the boycott of law courts by lawyers
and litigants. It is said that a real national awakening
of th masses should manifest itself in the decrease of
crime and consequently of litigation. If people are seri
ously thinking of their national problems, they will hardly
find time to pick up private quarrels and go to law courts
for redress. Lawyers, who have always taken a prominent
part in all nationalist movements, would naturally be ex
pected to suspend practicing their profession and devote
their time and energy to intensive public work. A national
fund should be created for the support of such lawyers as
suspend their practice and place their talents at the service
of the nation. Litigation now pending should be withdrawn
and referred to national arbitration courts presided over by
lawyers and prominent citizens. The national fund should,
moreover, be devoted to the encouragement of home indus
tries and the maintenance of national schools and colleges.
If popular leaders seek election to legislative councils,
people can hardly be expected to understand the policy of
non-cooperation. To insure consistency, these councils must
be boycotted. Self-government will not come as a free gift
to the people from the Government, but as something forced
on them by necessity. The councils will not hasten such a
necessity. Candidates should be persuaded to withdraw
their names, and electors to declare that they do not care
for representation in the provincial legislative council and
to repudiate candidates persisting in seeking admission to it.
The declaration concludes: "We do not desire to be repre
sented in the reformed councils till justice has been granted
in the matters of the Khilafat and the Punjab, and Swarajya is established in India." A propaganda is also to be
conducted for the purpose of dissuading all persons from
service .in Mesopotamia when the present situation in the
country should be explained to them.
People should forthwith boycott foreign goods, limit their
wants, and dispense with luxuries that are dependent on the
use of foreign goods. The use of foreign cloth has been
most detrimental to the people of India by robbing thou
sands of weavers of an honorable and lucrative occupation.
To supplement the output of the Indian mills, hand-spinning
and hand-weaving should be encouraged. Women in par
ticular can do a great deal in this line. In every street
arrangements should be made to give lessons in handling
such hand looms.
This is a brief summary of the whole scheme. Reports
show that so far only a small number of persons have ac
tually carried out any one or more of the proposals. There
is at present no unanimity on this subject on its practical
side, even among the leaders of the Congress. I have re
ferred to Patel's note of dissent. Therein he shows how
the carrying out of some of the items would be tantamount
to an "unconstitutional" act "The stage which involves
119
resignations of government employees, particularly those

in the military department, can hardly be deemed consti
tutional." He also declines to agree with the "gradual"
boycott of schools, colleges, and courts, and proposes that
for some time to come attention be concentrated on boy
cotting councils as completely as possible. Other leaders,
like Pandit Malaviya, hold another view, and moderates,
still another. For instance, the former, while declaring him
self in favor of the policy of non-cooperation, differentiates
between the legitimate and illegitimate items of the pro
gram. Concerning the boycott of the councils he said:
"Mr. Gandhi thought that if people refused to enter coun
cils, the Government would feel that they were dissatisfied,
but it was to be considered whether the people would gen
erally favor the policy. If some of them would refuse to
enter the councils, there were others who would go there.
Their duty was to send the best men to the councils, their
objective being to establish responsible government. If
they had strong men in the councils, they would be able to
expose the wrongs done by the executive both inside and
outside of the councils."
The latest news from India is that the Nationalists seem
to be very anxious to give the non-cooperation policy a full
swing in order to create an "impression" on the Govern
ment. Mr. Gandhi is reported to have visited the Punjab
recently and to have secured the sympathy and cooperation of
the warlike race of the Sikhs also. At Lahore Mr. Gandhi met
hosts of students of the different schools and colleges to
whom he preached the cult of non-cooperation. Addressing
a large assembly of students there he said: "Abandon the
use of these foreign clothes ; take to Khaddar (coarse stuff)
produced by hand looms; boycott all foreign-manufactured
cloth, and all government-aided schools and colleges. Let
us open our own schools and colleges on national lines!"
The next day the majority of students from all local
schools and colleges came out on strike. They attacked
the Dayanand Anglo-Vedic School. Benches were broken,
window panes smashed. The attackers kept shouting:
"Come along, brothers! Leave these schools! Victory to
Mahatma Gandhi! Victory to the Hindu-Moslem entente!"
Altogether about 60,000 students walked out of various
educational institutions, amid great excitement in the stu
dent community. To meet such popular explosions and to
maintain order, the formation of volunteer corps has been
suggested. According to latest reports, the policy of noncooperation seems to be developing into a reality. What
measures the British Government will take with regard to
this new and growing movement remains to be seen.
Maurice Casenave is the French High Commissioner to
the United States.
Paxton Hibben was a secretary to the American Embassy
in Russia during the Russo-Japanese War and the revo
lution of 1905, a member of the American Military Mis
sion to Armenia in 1919, and correspondent of the
Chicago Tribune in Transcaucasia and Asia Minor.
Felix Sper is a New York journalist.
Henry Wood Shelton is a consulting engineer in Phila
delphia. He has been assistant professor of organiza
tion and management at Dartmouth College.
Yogiraja is the pen-name of a professor of philosophy in
the University of Calcutta and the author of numerous
philosophical works.
The Nation
120
[Vol. 112, No. 2899
Correspondence
In the Driftway
6-
HE constantly increasing costs of living in Bagdad
T with increased rents, clerk hire, etc., the Drifter

read in a consular report. And he rubbed his eyes, and told
himself that romance was gone from the world.
His morn
ing paper had given him a fleeting thrill when he read of

fighting in the mountains of Tipperary, for it seemed that
fighting in the mountains of Tipperary must be hobgoblin

warfare carried on with cobweb-woven spells; but in the
next paragraph he read of armored lorries and machine
guns and the ugly accouterments of realistic modern mur
der. Clerk hire in Bagdad, and machine-guns in Tipperary
what is the excuse for telegraph and cable if instead of
adding to the pictured mysteries of the far corners of the
world, they but divest it of all color, and reduce the whole
Equitable Distribution of Products

TO THE EDITOR OF THE NATION:
SIR:
What is the matter with the great god Efficiency?
For
these many years our wise captains of industry, and profound

and powerful thinkers on economics, have been preaching the
gospel of increased production as the one great aim of industry.
Speed up, hustle, get the goods out, has been the injunction
of efficiency engineers to the industrial workers. Never mind
about wages or long hours, the country needs the goods and you
must make them.
And now. Thousands of factories and mills closed down or
running on half time.
More than 2,000,000 idle workers. Wide
spread industrial and commercial stagnation. All on account of

lack of demand for goods.
Is it just possible that the problem
of an equitable distribution of the product of labor that will
earth to a monotonous sphere of rising rents, second-rate
give the worker a purchasing power equal to the value of his
stenographers, and Winchester rifles?
product is of more importance than the making of things?
Disgusted, the Drifter cast the consular report and the

morning paper into the gaping waste basket, and fingered the
foreign papers that rose mountain-like on the editor's desk.
A map of China, with lines of big black dots indicating
railroads in process of construction stretching back from
the rivers almost into the sacred precincts of Tibet, added
to his spleen. Then he picked up a little French paper,
radical, undersized, badly printed, unattractive to the eye.
A paragraph stared at him telling of the arrival in Petro
grad of the convoy of Russian children who, Odysseus-like,
had wandered across the Urals and Siberia, the Pacific,
America, and the Atlantic, from land to land on the long

world-about voyage back to their starting-point. Another
On the surface it would seem that the productive capacity of

the country far exceeds its consuming capacity. This, of course,
is nonsense. The people can use ten times as many goods as
they now consume. They need more clothes, more shoes, more
furniture, more food. Why do they not get them?
The platitudes about increased output per man will do service
no longer. Factories are closed because the workers have pro

duced too much. What is the use of vastly increasing produc
tion if the goods cannot be sold?
It is not the workers who
are to blame now. They are willing to work, but there is a

lack of demand for their product. Will not some of these wise
and solemn advisers of the workers apply what they think are
their reasoning powers to the question of making the demand
equal the supply?
W. G.
New York, January 11
item told of the death at sea of three French Communists,
pilgrims returning from their Moscow Mecca, who, avoiding

the governmental formalities of passports, took to a tiny
sailboat somewhere in the icy regions where Russia skirts
the Arctic, on the day before a great storm broke. One
of them was the ditch-digger Lepetit who, emerging from
prison whither he had been sent for pacifist propaganda, a
week before May Day, 1919, provoked the demonstration
which brought red flags to the doors of the American peace
delegation in Paris. The second was Vergeat, member of
the metal-workers' union which sent delegates to meet Ger

man workers at Zimmerwald in the midst of the war.
The
third, Raymond Lefebvre, a gaunt young Norman bourgeois,

came back from the war tubercular and, renouncing his
life of comfortable literature, became a leader of the French
extremists. This strangely assorted trio made the perilous

underground pilgrimage to Russia, passed three feverish
months studying their Jerusalem, set sail for homeand
met the Arctic gale.
After all, the Drifter meditated,
though rents be high in Bagdad, and though banshees and
leprechauns give way to Black and Tans, romance and ad

venture are immortal.
*
'The Origin of A Scrap of Paper

SIR: It may interest you and your readers to learn that the
late Von Bethmann-Hollweg was not the originator of the now
historic mot, a scrap of paper, used in relation to Belgium's
neutrality. The following communication to the Manchester
Labour Leader for December 23, 1915, is of interest in this
connection:
Sir: A great deal has been made of the expression, scrap of

paper, used by the German Chancellor in a moment of extreme
Exactly the same expression
distress and agitation.
in almost precisely the same connection was used by the Rus

sian minister, Baron Jomini, almost forty years before. On
January 17, 1878, Baron Jomini, writing from Petrograd to
the Rumanian Minister of Foreign Affairs with reference to
the passage of Russian troops through Rumania used the fol
lowing words: Do not allow yourself to be deceived by the
humbug (the English word humbug is actually used) of
neutrality. That of Belgium, which is preached to you as a
model, does not rest at all on treaties, which in our day, alas,
are but scraps of paper. It is guaranteed by the powerful
interest of England, her neighbors, not to allow a great Power
PUBLIC official in Massachusetts has discovered that
to establish itself at Antwerp.

These words were used in cold blood to coerce a small nation.
nine-tenths of all the unfaithful husbands in his baili
I hope that the press will not explode with moral indignation.
wick are blue-eyed. This is bad enough, but not as bad as

if nine-tenths of all blue-eyed husbands were unfaithful
which is doubtless how the statement will presently be re
peated. Anyhow it appears that in matrimony blue eyes

are as much to be shunned by wise young women as blue
beards.
THE DRIFTER
Verb. sap.
Yours, etc.,
[Signed] RoNALD CAMPBELL MACFIE, M.A., LL.D.

This shows alike that Von Bethmann-Hollweg did not originate
the phrase and why he called the Belgium neutrality a scrap
of paper.
Detroit, Michigan, January 5
OSCAR KLAUSNER
The Nation
Jan. 26, 1921]
121
excellent discussions of such questions as social equality and
Ben Trovato
By EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON
The deacon thought.
I know them, he began,
sex relationships. He proves that the exploitation of the Negro

as a wage-earner is fortified by race prejudice until it is diffi
cult to see any way out as long as the Negro is disfranchised
and remains without class solidarity and consciousness. That
he does not organize is held up against him as one of his inherent
weaknesses; if he does organize to free himself economically we
And they are all you ever heard of them
have the horrors of Phillips County. He is denounced as a lazy
Allurable to no sure theorem,

The scorn or the humility of man.
rascal, the curse of the South, but if he accepts offers of any

agent to emigrate in groups of fifty or more the agent is held
You say Can I believe it?'and I can;
to be guilty of crime under the laws of several States.
And Im unwilling even to condemn

The benefaction of a stratagem
Like hersand Im a Presbyterian.
Negro seek to vote and, as happened in Florida recently, his

people are killed for daring to exercise the right guaranteed to
every American. Because he does not lift himself more rapidly
in the social scale he is denounced as a weakling or a dullard;
Though blind, with but a wandering hour to live,

He found the other woman in the fur
That now the wife had on. Could she forgive
All that? Apparently. Her rings were gone,

Of course; and when he found that she had none,
He smiledas he had never smiled at her.
Let the
yet he is expected to rise rapidly when deprived of about every

incentive that leads white men to be industrious, thrifty, law
abiding, and ambitious. He is without security of life and
property; he cannot be certain of due process of law or of a
trial by his peers (for he cannot sit on juries); and then if he
lifts his head to demand the rights of a free man he is lynched
and those of his race who voice the simplest desire for his con
stitutional guaranties are decried as bolsheviks, or solemnly
written down as dangerous radicals by our incredible Attorney
General.
Muriel Among the Redwoods.

By JAMES RORTY
Those truths and many others Mr. Seligmann sets forth. His
book has but one serious defect. For some time past the chief
hope and inspiration for better things has come from Southern
sources.
How can they be so still?

She marveled prettily, and from her ears
She shook the rings that jingled till
It seemed the redwoods might for once relent
And break their silence of two thousand years.
But nothe trees were all intent
On standing straight and growing high

And looking steadfast at the sky.
How can they be so still? she said
And fluttered onward; for the trees
Did not reply.
That sounds like a paradox in view of what has been
said, but it is true. The still, small voice of conscience is begin

ning to be heard in the South. Southern men are beginning to
lift up their voices and, here and there, to speak out; while in
the North few interest themselves in the question, and many go
over to the conventional Southern position. Mr. Seligmann does
quote from the findings of such excellent Southern bodies as the
University Commission on Race Questions, but a whole chapter
might well have been devoted to the stirring that is going on
within the South itself, where, despite the terrible influence of
the dominant public opinion, a growing number of white men
and women are daring to express themselves, each year more
clearly, about the frightful crimes against the subject race from
which the perpetrators suffer in the long run more than the
Books
Black Facing White
The Negro Faces America. By Herbert J. Seligmann. Harper
and Brothers.
R. SELIGMANN has now brought the Negro problem up

to date, and no one who wishes to understand that problem
can fail to take note of this book. Herein is narrated, for
oppressed. If ever there was a race that needed the One Big
Union and the general strike it is the Negro. Should all Negro
laborers lay down tools for three days industry in the South
would cease. But any Negro who should venture into the South
today to preach this doctrine would pay for it with his life. The
South has the best and the most docile labor in the world and
the largest and most homogeneous manual labor group in

America. Anybody, black or white, who puts ideas into the
heads of these millions of peons must expect for some decades
to come to pay for, if not to swing for it.

O. G. V.
instance, the so-called rebellion in Phillips County, Arkansas,

in October, 1919, for which a number of colored men have been
sentenced to death; and here are the details of some of the
latest lynchings. Amid all the horrible miscarriages of justice
Hungry
of which the United States has been the guilty scene during the
past five years none is worse than this Arkansas case, which
should be studied by all who still believe that the Southern white
man knows how to handle the Negro and should be let alone to
do so as he sees fit, and by all those who fail to see that at

bottom the race problem is an economic one as it has been from
the beginning of our history. In Phillips County some Negro
share-croppers came together to discuss their emancipation from
what is nothing else than industrial bondage. The meeting was
raided by white men, firing began, and the rebellion was on-in
the columns of the pressonly to be followed by wholesale
arrests and legal lynchings of hundreds of Negroes. It is no
wonder that Mr. Seligmann speaks of Arkansas as the Amer
ican Congo.
Besides reporting unanswerable facts Mr. Seligmann gives us
Women in Love.
By D. H. Lawrence.
Subscribers Only. (Thomas Seltzer.)
Privately Printed for
Hunger. By Knut Hamsun. Alfred A. Knopf.

Hungry Hearts. By Anzia Yezierska. Houghton Mifflin Com
pany.
Th: hunger of sex is amazingly and appallingly set forth by

D. H. Lawrence, whose novel The Rainbow was sup
pressed in England and who has now brought out his Women in
Love in the United States in a sumptuous volume delightful to
eye and hand. Mr. Lawrence admits no difference between

Aphrodite Urania and Aphrodite Pandemos; love, in his under
standing of it, links soul and body with the same bonds at the
same moments. And in this latest book of his not only is there
but one Aphrodite; there is but one ruling divinity,
and she
122
The Nation
holds her subjects throughout a long narrative to the adventure

and business and madness and warfare of love. Apparently
resident in the English Midlands, Gudrun and Ursula Brangwen
and their lovers Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich actually inhabit
some dark wood sacred to Dionysiac rites. If they have an
economic existence, it is of the most unimportant kind; at any
moment they can come and go about the world as their desires
drive them. If they have any social existence, it is tenuous, or
at best hardly thicker than a tissue of irritations. War and
politics and art and religion for the time being are as if they
had never been. Each pair of lovers recalls those sundered
lovers of whom Aristophanes told the guests at Plato's Sym
posiumlovers who, in reality but halves of a primordial whole,
whirl through space and time in a frantic search each for its
opposite, mad with delay, and meeting at last with a frantic
rush which takes no account of anything but the ecstasy of
reunion.
If references to Greek cults come naturally to mind in con
nection with "Women in Love," these lovers none the less have
the modern experience of frantic reaction from their moments of
meeting. They experience more than classical satiety. Mad
with love in one hour, in the next they are no less mad with
hate. They are souls born flayed, who cling together striving
to become one flesh and yet causing each other exquisite torture.
Their nerves are all exposed. The intangible filaments and
repulsions which play between ordinary lovers are by Mr. Law
rence in this book magnified to dimensions half heroic and half
mad. He has stripped off the daily coverings, the elaborated
inhibitions, the established reticences of our civil existence, and
displays his women as swept and torn by desires as old as the
race and older, white-hot longings, dark confusions of body and
spirit. Gudrun and Ursula are women not to be matched else
where in English fiction for richness and candor of desire. They
are valkyries imperfectly domesticated, or, in Mr. Lawrence's
different figure, daughters of men troubling the sons of God,
and themselves troubled. No wonder then that the language
which tells their story is a feverish language; that the narrative
moves with a feverish march; that the final effect is to leave
the witness of their fate dazed with the blazing mist which
overhangs the record. Most erotic novels belong to the depart
ment of comedy; "Women in Love" belongs to the metaphysics
and the mystical theology of love.
By comparison the wolfish rage for food which appears in
Knut Hamsun's earliest novel, and which accurately reports his
own early starvation time in Christiania, seems cool and spare.
And yet "Hunger" is actually full of the fever of passion. The
narrator walks the freezing streets as an animal might prowl
through a naked forest, sustained by only one instinct; but,
since he is a man, not a wolf or a bear, his mind ranges farther
than his feet. The dim resentment of the beast rises up into a
man's rages at the powers which condemn him to such agony.
His rages now warm him, now drive him back to numbness
again. The frame of the universe as he has conceived it twists
and cracks and flows into new forms. He is haunted by such
grotesque specters as those which tortured the cenobites of the
Egyptian deserts. At the same time, his vision, in certain
lucid moments, is a dozen times more penetrating than ever it
could be were it not for the pain which drives him back and
forth through the snowy city. Hamsun's triumph is his fusion
of a vision fiercely accurate with visions that flutter in the
atmosphere like a thousand gaudy banners.
Miss Yezierska, most newly arrived of our literary immi
grants, does not escape touches of sentimentalism quite alien to
Knut Hamsun or D. H. Lawrence. Her little book is full of
tears that sometimes come too quickly, as if she had not learned
that the quickest tears dry soonest. She repeats her formula
an immigrant girl longing for escape from bitter conditions
too frequently. When she leaves the East Side neighborhood to
which her art is native she never quite has the look of reality.
And yet she has struck one or two notes that our literature can
never again be without, and she deserves the high credit of
[Vol. 112, No. 2899
being one of the earliest to put those notes into engaging fiction.
As a nation we have taken, she cries out, the bodies of our
immigrants and used them to make the nation. But what of
their souls? What of that radiant aspirationalas, too often
disappointedwhich has drawn our immigrants hither from the
most cramped and wretched corners of the earth? What of the
uprush of affection which many of them, yes, most of them, still
experience long after they may be thought to have won the right
to disillusionment? These are elements in the national wealth
which simply must not be wasted. "Hungry Hearts" is a genuine
little horde of that wealth, an evidence of the tongue of
flame which flickers beautifully above the slums in which we
negligently leave some of our truest lovers.
C. T. .
Arthur Hugh Clough

Arthur Hugh Clough. By James Insley Osborne. Houghton
Mifflin Company.
OF a man who generally lacked nerve, and of whom the most
that can be said is that "he had a positive genius for
being . . . good"; of a poet who lacked "passion and an
acute sense of beauty," the hero of whose best poem is "unat
tractive, uninspiring, and unprofitable," and of whom the most
that can be said is that he was to a painful, prosaic degree
intellectually honestof such a writer it might appear alto
gether superfluous to have written a biography. Of any nine
teenth-century poet-doubter, indeed, it sometimes seems grace
less to record further facts. Biography and criticism cannot
go on forever being interested in helpless men, at least of a
certain sort. A Hamlet or a Henry Adams is perennially im
portant, but adolescent Arnolds and valetudinarian Cloughs
grow tiresome. Something strangely vague and soft about them
renders them difficult to see or hear or touch, while the bland
myopia which philosophically and historically is their claim to
consideration becomes more and more impossible to appreciate.
They sought truth, of course, but after what sleepy periods of
error ! They shed illusionsbut what third-rate illusions ! Firstrate minds in any generation and place have been clearer from
birth. They have had their awakenings, but not from a village
torpor, and not with audible gasps.
Mr. Osborne, despite all this, has written a skilful and inter
esting book. Finely sympathetic toward the psychology of
failure, and equipped with a delicate, grave sense of bio
graphical values, he has tracked Clough's spirit through a boy
hood in England and America, through a priggish and dream
less discipleship to Dr. Arnold at Rugby, through a vacantly
stoic discipline at undergraduate Oxford, through a fellowship
at Oriel, through the composition of three long poems, "The
Bothie of Tober-Na-Vuolich," "Amours de Voyage," and "Dipsychus," and through ten faint, final years to a death from
paralysis in 1861. Mr. Osborne's temper, at least as it exhibits
itself here, is almost too well suited to his subject. A heartier,
less scrupulous treatment might have left more oxygen in the
air at the really depressing end. Mr. Osborne's narrative is
quiet and watchful. His style is a suspended, contemplative
style, registering sometimes speculation and sometimes reverie,
but always careful concern about Clough's processes. Accom
plished in the art of condescension, he perhaps condescends too
much to Clough. Capable of mordant comment somewhat as
Lytton Strachey is capable, he almost bites his man to death.
With a penchant for perplexities, he emphasizes Clough's per
plexities at the expense of the several decisive qualities that
he had. The poet knew his healthy moments; Mr. Osborne
rarely, and then almost regretfully, lifts him from his spiritual
sick-bed.
After all, Clough cannot be laid permanently away. It was
not a wholly passionless and futile man of whom Carlyle
could write to Froude, extravagantly perhaps (and Mr. Os
borne conscientiously estimates the extravagance) : "A mind
The Nation
Jan. 26, 1921]
123
more vivid, more ingenious, more veracious, mildly radiant, I
so furious that theyle turn out of the path for none except a
have seldom met with, and in a character so honest, modest,
Loaden Cart.
kindly. A wholly dull man would not have elicited such ad

jectives from Lowell (and Mr. Osborne does not omit them)
as rare, original, and charming.
A wholly insignificant
poet might not have done so sensible a thing as emulate Crabbe

at forty-two and begin a cycle of tales like Mari Magno. He
probably would not have executed so powerful and accurate a

philosophical piece as Say Not the Struggle Naught Availeth.
He certainly would never have sung:
They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,
And how one ought never to think of one's self,
And how pleasures of thought surpass eating and drinking
My pleasure of thought is the pleasure of thinking
How pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!
How pleasant it is to have money.
M. V. D.
Books in Brief
TH: may have been more sprightly women in colonial New
N a pamphlet entitled The War and the Empire: Some Facts

and Deductions (Oxford University Press) Sir Charles
Lucas, who is perhaps the foremost living authority on modern
British colonial administration, discusses certain aspects of the
history of the British Empire during the World War. He be
lieves that the recent territorial gains of the Empire illustrate
the processes by which it has expanded in earlier wars. Though
a result of war, these gains, he insists, are owing not to mili
tarism and the desire for imperial aggrandizement, but to un
foreseen circumstances and the need of security. As evidence
that the war has made for greater equality, Sir Charles cites the
leveling tendencies in British military and civil life, the ex
tension of the franchise to women in the United Kingdom and in

Canada, the participation in military operations in Europe of
colored troops from Africa, Asia, and the West Indies, and the
recognition of the rights of India in the British Imperial Com
monwealth.
The war, in his opinion, has greatly strengthened
the sense of nationhood in the Dominions, and he sees in equal

partnership the only possible basis for the Empire of the
England than that Madame Sarah Kemble Knight who late

in 1704 rode on horseback from Boston to New York by the
future. He distinguishes between the feeling of nationhood

and the sentiment of nationalism. The former, which he re
Shore Line route and who kept the Journal which, first pub
lished in 1825, has now been reissued (Small, Maynard) in a
beguiling edition printed by Bruce Rogers; but they did not
write books of travel. Madame Knight, a person of some modest
importance in Boston, found the condition of roads and inns raw
almost beyond endurance, and the yokels along the way inquisi
gards as wholesome, aspires to equality of status within the

Empire between the Dominions and the United Kingdom; the
latter, which he considers much less wholesome, desires inde
pendence and secession from the Empire. The good kind of
nationality is in evidence in Australia and New Zealand; the
tive with an ardor which would be hardly credible were it not

for the additional evidence which has come down to us from
Charles tells us that the future of backward peoples lies not in
bad kind, among the Dutch Nationalists of South Africa.
Sir
self-determination or internationalization, but in trustee
other sources. When she sought for guides at Dedham she

found the available persons tyed by the Lipps to a pewter
engine, and at last had to put up with a personage who told
her so many tales of his adventures that she remembered the
Hero's in Parismus and the Knight of the Oracle. The fords
were appalling and the food no less so; Madame Knight, cer
tainly not a squeamish woman, repeatedly went hungry rather
than eat the best she could get at the stations of her journey.
Nor had she a more comfortable time when it came to sleeping;
she suffered from mattresses which Russelled as if shee'd bin
in the Barn amongst the Husks, and at one inn was kept awake
by fellow-guests brawling over the meaning of the word Narra
gansett until she composed an invocation in verse which seemed

to take effect:
I ask thy Aid, O Potent Rum !

To Charm these wrangling Topers Dum.
Thou hast their Giddy Brains possest
The man confounded wth the Beast
And I, poor I, can get no rest.

Intoxicate them with thy fumes:
O still their Tongues till morning comes!

She was as curious about New Haven as if it were a foreign
country and soberly set down what she could pick up about
Connecticut customs and polity, not forgetting to pay her re
spects to the Blue Laws. The Indians interested her, as did
New Rochell a french town, and above all the Cittie of New
York
. . a pleasant, well compacted place, situated on a
Commodious River weh is a fine harbour for shipping. The
Buildings Brick Generaly, very stately and high, though not
altogether like ours in Boston. .
Their Diversions in the
Winter is Riding Sleys about three or four Miles out of Town,

where they have Houses of entertainment at a place called the
Bowery, and some go to friends Houses who handsomely treat
them. Mr. Burroughs caryd his spouse and Daughter and my
self out to one Madame Dowes, a Gentlewoman that lived at a
farm House, who gave -us a handsome entertainment of five or

six Dishes and choice Beer and metheglin, Cyder, &c. all which
she said was the produce of her farm. I believe we mett 50 or
60 slays that daythey fly with great swiftness and some are
ship, and, stalwart champion of British imperialism that he is,

he adds: The best trustee must necessarily be a nation, such as
our own, which has had long training in this highly-skilled work
and has bred for many generations a school of men with ample
store of precedents and traditions as to what to do and what to
avoid, relying on justice rather than force, and promoting the

development of the native races on their own lines and through
their own usages in preference to worrying them into alien and
unaccustomed ways. Apparently there is no limit to Britain's
capacity to sustain the White Man's Burden |
A'. men
are created equal, except that no two of them are
exactly alike. Our selective draft, selective on the theory

that the national emergency required each person to serve at
the point where he could be of the greatest value, made neces
sary a machinery for classifying people rapidly and adequately.
The general principles of the various schemes for testing human
ability are described for the non-technical reader in Measure
Your Mind (Doubleday Page), by Professor M. R. Trabue of
Teachers College and Frank P. Stockbridge.
The book gives
the layman a great deal of reliable information about the

methods used for testing in the army, in industry, in educa
tional classification, and so on. Indeed, the authors might well
have taken a little more for granted; a large part of our popu
lation has already come directly or indirectly into contact with
one or another type of mental test. The Mentimeter is sub

mitted by the authors as a collection of some thirty tests or
sets of tests, compiled from many sources, and in some cases
adapted. The directions for conducting the test are given, and
the appendices contain, in addition to the army Alpha and
Beta tests, the correct solutions for all the problems, except
those that call for special stencils or figures. Many will want
to use a book like this to prepare themselves for tests, as others
use quiz-compends; but the chief value of the book lies in its
contribution to the general education of the public.
st
HAMPAGNE is a mild stimulant by comparison with this
pain of mine. A black, misty, mounting flood which

sweeps me off, tosses me back and forth like a cork on its tide.
On such a turbulent tide was composed Elizabeth Shepley Ser
124
The Nation
geant's brilliant "Shadow-Shapes: The Journal of a Wounded

Woman, October 1918May, 1919" (Houghton Mifflin). The
title is derived from a poem by Siegfried Sassoon, the material
from the impressions of Miss Sergeant in field and Paris hospi
tals as she slowly and painfully outgrew the effects of a grenade
accidentally exploded while she was visiting the front as a
representative of the New Republic a few weeks before the
armistice. The tide of her text as she proceeded was as turbu
lent as that of her pain, running finally into the most impres
sionistic, breathless prose. But turbulence was never confusion.
"The tossing and swirling do not muddle my head. Somehow
they clarify. Never did my senses feel so acute." Books so
concentrated, so vivid, and so sustained in their spiritual excite
ment rarely get written.
INDIVIDUAL man is so incurably proud, that literary and
philosophical resemblances, like family resemblances, are
pathetic in proportion as they are marked. There is something
distinctly pathetic about the fact that Bruce Frederick Cummings, or "W. P. N. Barbellion," whose "Journal of a Disap
pointed Man" burst so feverishly into fame a year ago, and a
posthumous collection of whose fugitive works is published now
under the title "Enjoying Life and Other Literary Remains"
(Doran), reads, however sincerely and passionately he wrote, so
exactly like some nineteenth-century members of his literary
species. This fact need not mean that he is insignificant, but it
should remind certain of his admirers that he is not unique.
There can be no doubt, for instance, that his zest for living,
though desperate, is convincing and contagious. "When I awoke
... I lay still for a moment in luxurious anticipation and
listened to a tiny joy, singing within like the voice of a girl in
the distance, until at last great waves of happiness roared
through my heart like sea-horses." But that zest is clearly the
valetudinarian zest of Stevenson and Thoreau and Richard
Jefferies. Cummings had an insatiable thirst for things : "I cannot
concentrate. I am ready to do anything, go anywhere, think any
thing, read anything"; he fed on phenomena. But so did Amiel,
and so in another century did Rousseau, and so in still another
did Sir Thomas Browne. It was the fascination of facts, inci
dentally, that made Barbellion a naturalist rather than a meta
physician; he could not order and subordinate, or assume and
ignore, the innumerable details of his universe, but must be
plunged every moment among them. One essay here, On Journal
Writers, is as authoritative as any upon the subject; for Barbellion's soul was first and last the soul of a keeper of journals.
A VERITABLE diamond mine for anthropologists is "Ken** tucky Superstitions," by Daniel Lindsey Thomas and Lucy
Blayney Thomas (Princeton University Press), wherein nearly
4,000 separate folk-beliefs have been classified and listed. The
authors, operating by correspondence and by interview, through
town and country schools and through a variety of neighbor
hoods, have combed approximately clean, for their particular
purposes, the mountain whites, the lowland whites, and the low
land Negroes of a State whose more isolated districts have re
tained in peculiar profusion the primitive Indo-European faiths
and practices. The layman in these matters will be surprised at
hearing that "the negroes originally obtained most of their
superstitions from the whites," and as servants and slaves have
only been giving them back to white children. "The only class
of original contributions made by the Negroes ... is that of
the hoodoo or voodoo signs, which were brought from Africa by
the ancestors of the present colored people of America." The
authors have been content with printing their superstitions as
they found them, and have interposed no apparatus of hypothesis
or genesis-hunting. Anthropologists, historians, novelists, and
poets can now do what they please with the material, and there
is much that can be done. Mark Twain would have been de
lighted with the book, although in fact he did not need it; every
superstition made use of in "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom
[Vol. 112, No. 2899
Sawyer" appears in these pages. "The amusement of the curi

ous" was the last aim of the authors; yet the curious will every
where be profoundly amused, and they will even envy the Louis
ville Negroes such a notion as that "If you cut your eye-lashes
you will be able to see the wind."
\X7ILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE'S "Anthology of
* * Magazine Verse for 1920 and Year Book of American
Poetry" (Small, Maynard) is a thinner volume than any of its
predecessors since the first. The bibliographical apparatus,
which in some years has been the most valuable thing about the
book, is reduced by omitting the Biographical Index and the
reviews of Important Volumes of Verse; and the poems them
selves are considerably fewer. The first retrenchment has not
done harm, while the second has done good; the number of
trivial performances included is negligible when set over against
the admirable body of deeply spirited poetry brought here from
the work of John Gould Fletcher, Amy Lowell, Winifred Welles,
Edwin Arlington Robinson, Sara Teasdale, David Rosenthal,
Leonora Speyer, Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, Ida O'Neil, and
John Erskine. The Introduction, an analysis of America's
poetical soil called Tap-Root or Melting Pot, is reprinted from
the editorial pages of The Nation.
"f* HIPS of Jade: Being Chinese Proverbs with More FolkSayings from Hindustan and Other Oriental Countries.
Rhymed in English" (Dutton) by Arthur Guiterman is a thor
oughly delectable addition to the already rich proverb-literature
which exists in English. Naturally, since the common denomi
nator of the world's wisdom is prudence, Mr. Guiterman has
concentrated upon the salt and sense of the Far East rather
than upon the frankincense and beaten gold of its finer, solitary
spirits. The best definition of a proverb yet made is Lord
Russell's "The wisdom of many and the wit of one." The wis
dom of the many in this case is seasoned with old folk-cynicism,
while the wit of the one is sly and dry and adorably figurative:
To do Good Deeds where none may mark
Is much like Bowing in the Dark.
Who sports with Ruffians earns his Broken Bones.
What Business had the Eggs to dance with Stones?
JAPANESE poetry continues to furnish excuses and reasons
for books in English. It is little more than an excuse for
Edna Worthley Underwood's "Moons of Nippon: Translations
from Poets of Old Japan" (Ralph Fletcher Seymour), in useless
meter and obtrusive rhyme. It is at least half a reason for
"Japanese Hokkus," by Yone Noguchi (Four Seas), wherein a
Japanese long familiar with the speech of England and America
communicates moods in miniature pieces inspired by the famous
old seventeen-syllable form. In his preface he makes a valuable
point about "suggestive" verse"that your poem would cer
tainly end in artificiality if you start out to be suggestive from
the beginning." His command of English, unfortunately, is not
perfect, so that in practice he fails, through lack of dignity and
delicacy, to strike the balance he desires between ideas and
facts which hint ideas. There is ample and excellent reason for
Arthur Waley's "Japanese Poetry: The 'Uta' " (Oxford), which,
with grammatical and historical introductions, a bibliography, a
glossary, and notes explaining syntactical nuances, furnishes for
the first time in English a translation of ancient tanka and
naga-uta which is convincing as well as beautiful. Lafcadio
Hearn was less literal, and not on the whole more fascinating.
rPHE services to learning of the various university presses,
* never entirely ended by the war, have been resumed in
various quarters. From the Oxford University Press comes
"Dantis Alagherii Epistolae," a careful text of Dante's letters
edited, translated, and commented upon by Paget Toynbee with
the care and acumen to be expected from his hand; and a
minute study by C. B. Burchardt of the influence and reputation
The Nation
Jan. 26, 1921]
of modern Norway in England, published under the title "Nor

wegian Life and Literature: English Accounts and Views."
The Cambridge University Press has just issued a collection of
"Old English Ballads, 1553-1625," dealing for the most part
with the struggle between Catholic and Protestant, particularly
illuminating the Catholic side of the struggle, and excellently
edited by Hyder E. Rollins of New York University; and "The
Origin of Man and his Superstitions," by Carvath Read, an
anthropological treatise devoted to the argument that the earli
est form of human society was the hunting pack and that the
development of man from animal has been attended by magic
and animism for the reason that the elders of the hunt relied
upon wizardry to maintain their prestige after their hunting
prowess had departed. The Manchester University Press has
published a competent monograph on "The Teaching and Culti
vation of the French Language in England during the Tudor
and Stuart Times," by Kathleen Lambley. The Harvard Uni
versity Press publishes the thin, over-academic "French Class
icism" of C. H. C. Wright of Harvard, who by this book will
do much to confirm the uninstructed in the absurdly false notion
that the writers of France's classical age are dull and bloodless.
Columbia University makes the important announcement that
the great edition of Milton long contemplated by Professor
Trent is at last under way, with the cooperation of various
of his colleagues. The edition is planned to be in eight volumes,
six of prose, one of verse, and one of bibliography and notes.
The text will be the best that has ever been prepared for Milton.
Art
An American Painter
A T Beveral exhibitions in the recent past we have observed
* American artists, both native-born and naturalized, groping
for a pure indigenous idiom on canvas. Every year, almost, a
cluster of younger men emerge who essay in a tentative fashion
to embody and reproduce our evolving American folk-lore.
These dim feints and sallies show a fine spirit of exploration,
a pragmatic desire to live by sight, as Manet lived by sight
alone. If we have not yet produced a Whitman or even a
Masters or a Sherwood Anderson in art, it may be that art as
a medium for strict nationality is inherently recalcitrantas
Whistler, were he alive today, would be the first to insist.
The Montross Gallery is currently exhibiting the paintings
of Frank Overton Colbert, an American Indian, a member of
the Chickasaw tribe whose rapidly dwindling fragments may be
found scattered throughout the States of Oklahoma, Arizona,
and Mississippi. The Chickasaws are closely related to the
Choctaws; their laws, language, and customs are substantially
the same, except that the Chickasaws appear to be more seden
tary, devoted to agricultural pursuits, oratory, and ceramics;
their history, moreover, reveals a fine appreciation of the arts.
Mr. Colbert, although educated in American schools, is deeply
pervaded by the spirit of his tribe and race. He has saturated
himself, as indeed he could not help doing, with the wealth of
myths and legends that group themselves around the imagina
tive and suggestive customs of his people.
The impulse to express his people already keenly aroused,
Mr. Colbert spent a number of yearshis formative nonage
at the art schools and in the studios of several well-known
American and European painters. This training brought with
it intellectual confidence in the justness of his original impulse.
As a result, he has issued from this student period altogether
nncorrupted by the idiosyncratic duress which many of his in
timate and well-wishing painter friends have sought to put upon
him. A brief career as a poster artist netted him no positive
disservice. In one sense the experience was helpful, for it re
minded him that his race had long ago surprised the richest
sources of color in natural objects, not one of which was so
mean as not to volunteer golden hints for the artist's palette.
125
Accordingly we find Mr. Colbert in his studio collecting red

peppers and tomatoes, studying their merging shades in various
lights, and thus rounding out his theory of the transition of
color. No object however humble, as we have said, is overlooked
by primitive man, and, just as the Egyptians, for example,
preserved the delicate marking and tints of the beetle, so Mr.
Colbert does not hesitate to study under the microscope a casual
bedbug for design and color suggestions.
In reverting to his beginnings, Mr. Colbert has gone back to
flat decorative surfaces, to the engaging symbolism of color and
design such as we find in primitive art everywhere, to the
symmetrical principle which is derived from the calling of the
basket-maker who is obliged to arrange his material in a reg
ular manner. We note, too, the primitive artist's exquisite
simplification of objects, so that they may be fixed in the mind
and easily recognizable. In Mr. Colbert's treatment of subjects
we behold the lordly irony characteristic of the Indian, which
is but the obverse side of his sturdy honesty.
The katchinas or gods and demigods of the Indians are mas
terfully portrayed by the Chickasaw artist. Each wears the
insignia and sign-manual of his especial orb worked out in
simplified designs on his blanket, mask, and picturesque head
gear. A striking example of this is the God of Germination.
In the center stands the god, posed as if he were thoroughly
conscious of his divine vocation. He bears emerald green corn
stalks in his hand and an ear of corn affixed upright on his head,
while symbols of rain and sunlight are delicately woven in his
blanket. The very colors pleached in his matvermilion, violet,
yellow, and one neutral toneaccent the theme of fertility.
The caustic humor or satire of the Indian is visible in Mr.
Colbert's picture of the tribal braggart homeward bound from
the annual hunt. The subject is rather a good-looking young
man who stalks with a gay abandon. The light slides suavely
along his rippling brown musculature. A melon-shaped holi
day mask, tipped at a rakish angle, adorns his head. Is not
that swaying fierceness put on for sheer effect? No mistake is
possible: brag makes him square his shoulders and gasconade
inspires the freedom of his strife. But, while the others have
fetched back from the hunt buffaloes and bisons, his trophy is
a pair of harmless jack-rabbits and three field mice, which he
carries toploftily in his arms.
Mr. Colbert responds willingly to his heritage of the decora
tive, and goes a step further. Using gradual transition, he
manages to introduce the effect of perspective. Fine grada
tions of pigment enable him to achieve a suggestion of depth
dramatic or conventionalized depth. The blue immensity of the
sky, for instance, is produced by laying on subtle shades of
emerald green contrasted with deep violet and mauves. In
his present showing the process of color transition is well mod
ulated. Both nuance and contrast are achieved, and the com
position as a whole possesses a special richness of tone ensem
ble.
All of Mr. Colbert's subjects are drawn from Indian folk-lore.
He is not, however, a servile copyist of the models and
materials visibly at hand. Between him and his sources there
is, first and last, an identical language of design and symbol.
That is how he manages to release his own personality while
expressing the racial traits of the Red Man. The high intel
lectual passion of his own tribe is over all his work, and this,
coupled with his native bias, gives him an unmistakable touch
of originality.
To complain that his tones are over-rich, that his drawing
is too studied and fine to squeeze the proper amount of feeling
out of his primitive themes, would be wrong. The American
Indian is always an excellent draftsman and a still better colorist. Thus Mr. Colbert has continued rigorously faithful to the
spirit and tradition of his people, even while apparently depart
ing to utter himself. Whether we believe in a strictly national
art or no, suTely this young Indian painter is well worth
watching.
Pierre Loving
[Vol. 112, No. 2899
The Nation
126
Drama
Interlude
THE critic was quite suddenly charged with a duty. He
hates duties imposed from without. It is hard enough to
meet the obligations dictated from within. He was to take to
the theater a lady whom he had barely met. He surveyed her
coldly. Mouse-colored hair, bluish-gray eyes, a faintly agree
able precision and purity of lines, but no curves. Or, rather,
all curves were subdued. Her clothes were neither rustic nor
innocent. There was a pallid but ordered decorative scheme.
A large ring of turquoise brought out the blue of her eyes.
Severity is here, the critic reflected, partly a matter of defense;
also of deference to a New England ancestry, a doctorate, and
the authorship of several learned pamphlets. He was asked for
suggestions and reminded that the lady's stay in New York
was brief. He firmly named a given evening, promised a sur
prise, and was rewarded by a smile that was meant to be wintry
and ended by being wistful.
He had his first misgiving when he conducted his friend to
their seats in the Winter Garden on the opening night of "The
Passing Show of 1921." She admitted that the auditorium was
magnificent but glanced nervously at the little glass ashreceivers attached to the backs of the chairs. An obese gentle
man on her left smoked an obese cigar; the lady with the
diamond necklace in front lit a cigarette. The critic became
for a moment false to his own harsh intentions. "I hope the
smoke doesn't bother you." Of course she said that it didn't.
Next she glanced wonderingly at the bridge which ran from
the stage straight through the audience. "The chorus comes
eut there," the critic explained. He saw his friend's lips grow
into mere lines. Suddenly he remembered that one of her
pamphlets dealt with the classification of images in Latin poetry.
He took a plunge and quoted:
Gratia cum Nymphis geminis que sororibus audet
Ducere nuda choros.
She laughed and there was a richer alto tone in the depth of
that laughter than he had expected.
She hadn't seen the recent Broadway successes and the paro
dies bewildered her a little. The critic also knew that her
spiritual antennae quivered perceptibly at the bare knees of the
chorus. Nevertheless she admitteddiscreet conversation was
easy herethat there was something exhilarating in the play of
light and color and rhythm. "The rhythmic movement of the
lightly draped human body singly or in groups," the critic re
minded her, "is not only the oldest but the mother of all the
arts." She looked at him with grave wonder. "I've made that
very statement." "Very well, here is your academic maxim
come to life." Just then the lights grew dim and the chorus,
carrying small, duskily glowing balloons, tripped across the
bridge out into the audience. The lady watched the girls closely
and almost with a quiver. Then she whispered, "I suppose the
artifice saves it. They're like girls in a picture. Anyway it's
lovely." The critic would have put it differently But he was
well content.
Only the chief comedian, he saw clearly, repelled her. A
hard disdain came into her eyessomething aloof and feudal.
She was building a wall of glass about her nerves. The critic
crashed through. "Ah, yes," he said, "Howard has a mons
trously Semitic nose and, apparently, a forehead of brass. But
remember the clown must hit the fancy of the populace. We're
not in the Watteau garden described by Pater; Howard is no
Pierrot lunaire. This is New York. Howard's Yiddish jokes
offend you. But you see, the descendants of the Back Bay fam
ilies run no theatersneither the Guild which you so delicately
approve nor the Winter Garden which you are almost ready to
endure. This rude farceur and Max Reinhardt of whom the
cultured patter and the divine Sarah whom they glory to have
seen all belong to the same tribe. Howard is, at least, effective.
As a trombone, you think? The Harlequin doesn't play the

horns of Elfland." She turned to the critic with a disarming:
smile. "I suppose he is funny." "Funny and, as he should be,
vulgar. He wants to reach the profanum vulgus."
During the second part of the entertainment the learned lady
did not speak. Her pupils expanded; her features softened and
glowed. All her life she had been taken only to the more arid
among the "better things." Intently she watched the magic
melting of one exquisitely conventionalized background into
another and watched Cleveland Bronner and Ingrid Solfeng
dancing a vizualization of symbolic dreams. Here a new art
was revealed to her, an art she had known only from the frozen
gestures on some crumbling frieze. It was allied to music, but
less intricate and more primitivean art of expression divinely
perfect yet wholly natural. Thus would we all dance if we
could and dared and had the beauty and strength of body and
were not the crippled slaves of routine and ugliness. Thus
would we all, intoxicated by our own fleeting but immortal
rhythms, throw off "the heavy and the weary weight of all this
unintelligible world." And now the critic's guest gave a little
thrilled gasp when in the Firefly ballet the innumerable chorus
surged in wild rhythmic lines about Mr. Bronner and a hundred
limbs streaming through the changeful lights built up an alti
tude of pure motion like the fortissimo of a great orchestra.
And she smiled and even swayed gently when, in later scenes,
two less poetic and imaginative dancers created with their dry
but inimitable nimbleness the moods of ordinary pleasure and
liberation that we meet upon our dusty road.
She insisted on walking to her hotel. All her defenses had
broken down. A lock of hair tumbled from under her hat and
streamed in the wind. She said good-night with a strange
swaying forward of her body. The lines had become curves.
She chanted under her breath as she went "Gratia cum
Nymphis."
Ludwtg Lewisohn
BROCK PEMBERTON Praentt
gales
Miss Lulu Bett
In the New Republic, Francis Hackett says:

"For Miss Lulu Bett is, on the whole, a larger accomplishment
thanwell, let us say, a large accomplishment on its own ad
mirable account.
In this honest and thrilling discovery
Miss Cale {"of Main Street, Portage, Wisconsin") has done
authentically what perhaps only a feminist and certainly vhat
only an artist could do. She has shown, in perfect American
terms, the serious comedy of an emancipationthe sort of eman
cipation that no national optimism can set aside."
Miss Lulu Bett
is now at the Belmont Theatre, West 48th Street, New
York. Evenings, 8:30; Mats., Thursday and Saturday.
Copyright. Ml, R. H. Mac* A Co.. /no.
International
Relations
The Balance- Sheet of Austrian Misery

THE Austrian Trade Union Commission presented to
the Congress of the International Federation of Trade
Unions held at London in October a memorandum, dealing
with the impossible economic situation and miserable condi
tions of life in Austria, which has particular interest in
connection with the reported abdication of the Austrian
Government in favor of the Entente's Reparation Commis
sion established by the Treaty of St. Germain. This memo
randum was summarized as follows in the Arbeiterzeitung
(Vienna) of November 30, 1919.
The source of Austria's need, as of all Europe's, is the war;
but the destructive aftermath of the economic crisis which
followed the war struck Austria with particular force because
the Treaty of St. Germain had dismembered Austria, cut her
off from economic aid, disorganized her financially, and deprived
her ef the possibility of restoring herself by her own forces.
Rich as the country is in forests and mountains, it can feed only
a fraction of its population from its own harvests. Forests
make up 46.8 per cent of the area of Styria; 44.1 per cent of
Carinthia; 38.8 per cent of Tyrol; 34.5 per cent of Lower Aus
tria. Far more than a third of the soil of the republic is
unavailable for the production of foodstuffs. To supply one
pound of flour and two and a half pounds of bread per week to
each inhabitant of Austria will require the importation of 520,000 tons of grain even if 100,000 tons are delivered from the
home harvest. And bread, sugar, milk, meat, and fat are lack
ing just as is bread; the Government estimates that the mini
mum importation necessary to maintain life for the next year,
an amount scarcely sufficient to maintain the vital forces of the
people in their present weakened state, will be $85,000,000;
reckoning the dollar at 500 kronen, this amounts to 42% billion
kronen !
Such immense imports can be paid for only by export of
Austrian goods. To increase exports as much as possible is
hence an absolute life and death question for Austria. Austria
has three very valuable raw materials: wood, magnesite, and
iron ore; Austria has blast furnaces, smelting works, and
rolling mills; a highly developed metal industry; locomotive
factories; an important automobile industry; very efficient
leather, woodwork, and furniture industries; and art and fancy
goods industries favorably known in the markets of the world.
But although there is a shortage of many other raw materials,
the lack of coal is decisive. The average daily coal requirement
is 48,000 tons; including the low-grade home product, the coun
try has only 20,000 tons daily. Coal requirements at best are
only 43 per cent covered. But the iron industry has
only 35 per cent, the leather industry 25 per cent, the paper
industry 23 per cent, the chemical industry 15 per cent, the
textile industry only 12 per cent, of their requirements. The
Alpine Montangesellschaft, Austria's biggest industrial enter
prise, requires 5,000 cars of coke per month; but only 1,250 cars,
on an average, reach it per month. The business is naturally
eriously impeded. Almost all industries share the same fate:
unemployment, short shifts, increase of the business deficit,
decline in the value of the krone, increase of all prices, decline
in the purchasing power of wages and salaries, growing pauper
ization of the working masses, are the consequences of the
inadequate operation of our economic life.
The whole burden of the economic disaster falls upon the
working classes and upon civil servants and office employees.
Despite the great increase in the power of the working class in
the state and in society, its economic position is worse than ever
before. Increases in wages have not kept pace with the soaring
cost of living. The average wages of various classes of workers
in 1014 and in 1920 were as follows:
Section
July, 1914
October, 1920
(in kronen)
Highly skilled workers
50
1,100
Mechanics (Professionisten)
36
850
Skilled assistants
26
650
Assistants
20
550
Highly skilled women
30
600
Women mechanics
20
400
Women assistants
12
300
Retail prices, however, jumped as follows:
Beef, per kilogram
1.95
120.
Pork, per kgm
2.
160.
Lard, per kgm
1.90
180.
Milk, per liter
30
10.50
Butter, per kgm
3.20
240.
Fresh eggs, each
07
12.
Wheat flour, per kgm
44
11.
Mixed bread, per 1,250 gms
32
6.
Potatoes, per kgm
24
7.20
Onions, per kgm
40
11.
Lentils, per kgm.
64
56.
Peas, per kgm
48
56.
Sugar, per kgm
84
46.
Corn, per kgm
.'
16
11.
Roasted coffee, per kgm
5.
200.
Beer, per liter
32
8.40
Cheese, per kgm
2.50
_ 210.
Sauerkraut, per kgm
25
6.
Kerosene, per liter
26
20.
Coal, per 100 kgms
4.16
300.
Mutton, per kgm
1.92
95.
Horse-meat, per kgm
1.05
85.
A worker whose weekly 36 kronen in 1914 were equivalent to
120 liters of milk, can buy only 81 liters with his 850 kronen
today. His 1914 wage would buy 18% kilograms of meat, but
his present wage will buy only 7.08 kilogramsat the officially
fixed prices, and the Schleichhandel (illegal speculative trade)
prices are naturally higher still. Despite the dazzling increase
in his wages, the worker's real wage has sunk abysmally.
The result of this economic destitution is the death and wast
ing away of the children of the working class, a decline in the
birth-rate, a terrific extension of tuberculosis, digestive diseases,
afflictions of the circulatory organs, dropsy, softening of the
bonesvisible evidences of the physical decay of the people.
The death-rate per thousand inhabitants of Vienna for four
months of 1913 was 13.05; in four months of 1919 it was 26.3,
100 per cent greater; twice as many people are dying as in
1913. In the first half of 1918, 7,480 Viennese died of tubercu
losis; in the same period in 1919, 7,716; one in every four
Viennese dies of tuberculosis. And while death seizes twice as
many people as before, fewer children are born. In 1911,
41,080 children were born in Vienna; in 1919, only 19,070. And
to what misery are they born! Of 57,000 Vienna children
medically examined, only 4,637 were in a satisfactory condi
tion of health. The children's clinic reports the following aver
age children's weights:
Boys
Girls
1918 Before the war 1918 Before the war
(pounds)
(pounds)
One year old
14.5
22.4
14.3
21.3
Three years old ... 23.3
32.3
22.2
31.2
Six years old
34.5
45.1
33.6
41.8
Nine years old
46.6
60.5
44.0
55.0
Twelve years old . . 58.3
77.0
61.6
70.4
Fifteen years old.. 65.6
99.0
These figures tell a terrible tale. Boys six years old nearly
ten pounds underweight, boys twelve years old thirty-three
pounds below par! They fall helpless victims to tuberculosis.
The Nation
128
The increase of tuberculosis between the ages of 11 and 20 is

95 per cent, between the ages of 15 and 20, 160 per cent.
Thus a people wastes and dies, and unless quickly helped,
moves inevitably to complete destruction. Austria cannot exist
without revision of the fatal Treaty of St. Germain and annex
ation to Germany.
Labor and Unemployment in England

ON December 29, at a special conference of the British
Labor Party, the following recommendations regard
ing unemployment were adopted.
1. This Conference, realizing that the growing volume of
unemployment and under-employment is due in a large measure
to the interruption in world-trading following on the war and
the defective peace treaties, in addition to the folly of British
and Allied policy in relation to the Soviet Government of Russia,
condemns the British Government for the unwarrantable delay
in securing peace and opening trade relationships with the
Russian Government.
2. The Conference further condemns the Coalition Government
for failing to make provision for the prevention of unemploy
ment and for the proper treatment of unemployed persons; it
calls attention to the fact that in February, 1920, the Labor
Party in Parliament introduced its Bill for the Prevention of
Unemployment, containing provisions for the maintenance and
training of unemployed persons, which the Government refused
to accept.
3. The Conference declares that the existing unemployment
can only be substantially alleviated by such a free flow of com
modities as before the war made this country one of the prin
cipal manufacturing and distributing countries of the world.
It calls upon the Government to take effective steps to secure
the restoration of the economic life of Central Europe by a
scheme for providing adequate credits; to remove immediately
all blockading influences; to discontinue the destruction of
normal trading facilities by means of indefensible legal quibbles.
4. The Conference is further of opinion that the Govern
ment and the local authorities should make the fullest use of
their legislative and administrative powers to facilitate the pro
vision of immediate work under satisfactory conditions for un
employed men and women; and as an emergency measure to
meet the serious situation that now exists the Conference de
mands the immediate adoption of the following proposals by the
Government :
a. That a person for whom no work is available at the em
ployment exchanges, or through his or her trade union, shall
be entitled to maintenance, or
b. That the rate of maintenance (including other benefits)
shall be at least 40s. per week for each householder, and 25s.
per week for each single man or woman, with additional allow
ances for dependents.
5. The Conference further urges the imperative need for deal
ing with the permanent causes and conditions of unemployment,
and warns the Government that both the unemployed and the
employed workers are not prepared to remain the victims of the
pernicious economic system which exposes them and their fam
ilies to hardship and demoralization as a consequence of
unemployment.
The Berne Manifesto

THE manifesto adopted by the International Socialist
Conference, held at Berne on December 4 to 7, ap
peared in the Labor Leader (Manchester) for December 16.
The World War has opened the decisive struggle between the
proletariat and the bourgeoisie for political power. Its imme
diate result is the domination of the world by British and
[Vol. 112, No. 2899
American capitalism, leaving on the Continent the predomi

nance of French militarism and in the Far East that of Japa
nese imperialism. In the first stage victory has strengthened
the power of capitalism and sharpened the oppression of the
working class in the victorious countries. At the same time
there has issued from it a system of world domination directed
primarily against the proletarian revolution in Eastern and
Central Europe, and against the aspiration for liberty of op
pressed nationalities and subject races.
The victors have tried to break down by blockade and by
intervention the Russian Soviet Republic, the advance guard
of the social revolution. They are profiting by the economic
dependence of the vanquished countries of Central Europe to
hinder the development of the proletarian revolution in these
countries. They are using the sanguinary counter-revolutionary
forces in Hungary, Poland, and Rumania as mercenaries not
only against Russia, but also against the proletariat of Central
Europe. They are helping in Germany, Austria, in Czecho
slovakia the counter-revolutionary movements. They menace
the revolutionary movement in Italy by threat of blockade and
make the small states instruments of their will by the weapons
of economic reprisals and financial pressure. They suppress
the aspirations for liberty of the peoples of the Near and Mid
dle East in a sea of blood.
But this system of capitalist domination is destroying the
economic necessities of life of the working class even in vic
torious countries. The blockade against Russia and the eco
nomic destruction of Central Europe caused by the iniquitous
peace treaties are excluding the greatest part of Europe from
the world market. Thus, not only are the peoples in Eastern
and Central Europe thrown into intolerable want, thereby pro
viding an opportunity for the bourgeoisie of inspiring counter
revolutionary and nationalist movements, but Western Euro
pean and American industry is deprived of its greatest mar
kets, and great unemployment is appearing among the masses
of the people.
The workers of the Western countries are, in consequence,
threatened by the danger that wages will be reduced when
workers in the vanquished countries are working at lower
rates, and the standard of life of the workers of Western coun
tries will be reduced for many years.
In view of these facts it is necessary to concentrate all the
forces of the workers and to put in the forefront the final social
ist demands. The workers must oppose their own world policy
to that of capitalism.
It is the part of such a policy to defend with all its might
Soviet Russia against the attacks of the capitalistic Western
Powers, to oppose strenuously the plans and counter-revolution
ary intrigues of the French imperialists, and to break the chains
that European imperialism has fastened on the revolutionary
movements in Eastern and Central Europe, to help the op
pressed peoples of the subject nations and in the colonies to
recover their liberty, and thus to unite all the revolutionary
forces of the world in their fight against imperialism. This
task can only be accomplished by the world proletariat on the
principles of socialism enforced by the inflexible determination
to use all its forces to that end in a powerful international
organization.
The world war has destroyed the Second International, which,
when the war came, was unable to prevent its continuance be
cause parties within it capitulated before capitalistic imperial
ism. Instead of uniting all their strength they took the side
of one or the other of the capitalist groups and made it impos
sible for themselves to work for the ending of the war.
The Conferences in Zimmerwald and Kienthal demonstrated
that even early during the war it was possible to formulate
a policy guided by socialist principles. It also showed that the
Second International, which was incapable of such a policy,
failed to fulfil its historic mission.
The result of the failure of the parties within the Inter
national has been that the masses of workers within the dif
Jan. 26, 1921]
The Nation
ferent countries were kept apart by hatred and suspicion. The

organization which is now called the Second International is but
a union of those parties which form the purely reformist wing
of the revolutionary working class movement, and they mis
understand the theoretical and historical necessities of the revo
luti nary class struggle when they restrict the working class
to democratic methods without regard to the special phases of
development in various countries. In practice they abandon

the revolutionary struggle for the capture of power by the
129
then, in the vent of resistance of the bourgeoisie, such democratic
state power would be compelled to break that resistance. If,

however, in the period of the decisive struggle for power
democracy is destroyed through the intensity of class antag
onism. the workers must assume a dictatorship of proletarian
class organization, organized according to the conditions of the
particular country, i. e., workers or soldiers or peasants'
councils, trade unions, factory councils, local administrative
bodies, or other assemblies peculiar to each nation.
proletariat when they enter into coalition with bourgeois parties
Just as the bourgeois revolutions in the various countries were
on merely reformist programs. The same parties have, during

the war, destroyed the mutual confidence of the workers of the
carried through in different forms, so will the proletarian revolu
various nationalities in one another, and the so-called Second

International is therefore not able to organize the living forces
because the stage of capitalist development is not the same in all

countries, and the final structure of the proletarian democracy
of the class-conscious proletariat, and is only an obstacle to

the unity of the working class.
countries. On the basis of these common views, inspired by the
The Communist International described itself as the Third
spirit of revolutionary socialism, representatives of the follow
International, thus arrogating to itself the privilege of con

tinuing the historical work of the First and the Second Interna
tionals, and successfully bringing it to completion. But in prac
else so long as it maintains the resolutions of the second con
ing parties have met at Berne, from December 5 to 7, for a pre

liminary conference: Swiss Socialist Party, Independent Labor
Party of Great Britain, Independent Socialist Party of Germany,
German Social Democratic Party of Czecho-Slovakia, Austrian
Social Democratic Party, French Socialist Party, Lettish Social
Democratic Party, American Socialist Party, and Russian Social
ference.
Democratic Party.
tice the International of Moscow has hitherto been simply a

union of Communist Parties; and it cannot become anything
tions in the separate countries be carried under various forms,
must be adapted to the special conditions in the different
The Communist International wishes to transfer the methods
In view of (1) the world reaction, which is continually becom
of the proletarian and the present revolution in Russia to all
ing more acute, and of the rapid reconstruction after the World
other countries without any restriction, and prescribes these
War of the international fighting front of the bourgeoisie; (2)

the need for international action by the proletariat to defend the
revolutionary achievements already attained and the systematic
promotion of the working-class development; and (3) the serious
division of the working-class forces in all countries, which
methods for all other working-class parties. It wishes to abolish

the autonomy of the different Socialist Parties which are alone
capable of judging the actual circumstances, and of determining
the means to be used "for the purpose of the working class,
without regard to the diverse conditions under which the class
struggle has to be waged and the circumstances prevailing in
the different countries. It imposes a form of organization de
termined by the special conditions in Russia upon the Socialist
Parties of all other countries; and deliberately works to shatter
all Socialist Parties which do not unresistingly submit to its
dictation.
It seeks to make the trade unions in each country
subservient to the Communist Party in that country, and creates

division in the ranks of the Trade Union International, which
today is the only united organization of the workers.

*
It puts in the place of the working-class movement in each
country, organized in accord with the special circumstances pre
vailing, a sectarian movement, based upon preconceived ideas,
identical for all countries and elaborated by a central organiza
tion. By this means it renders itself entirely incapable of unit

ing the whole proletariat under its standard.
The socialist world policy of the workers and the realization
of socialism presuppose the existence of an international fight
ing organization capable of action. Such an organization can
only be created by the ceaseless struggle of the proletariat of
each country in opposition to the capitalist class rule. In this
struggle the methods and tactics are determined by the degree
of ripeness of the revolutionary situation. The working class,
during the time when it is fighting as a political minority within
the bourgeois states, can neither limit its methods of action to
those of the purely traditional trade union and parliamentary
struggle nor transfer in a stereotyped manner to other countries
the methods used by those masses of workers and peasants
taking part in an acute revolutionary struggle.
As soon as the proletariat has conquered political power it
will adopt the methods of dictatorship wherever the bourgeoisie
renders an effective struggle impossible, those who have taken
part in this preliminary conference recommend the calling of an

International Socialist Conference on February 22, 1921, at
Vienna, to discuss the followingprovisionalagenda:
1.
Constitution.
2.
Imperialism and the social revolution.
3. Methods and organization of the class struggle.

4. The international struggle against the counter-revolution.
The parties represented at this conference will be intrusted with
the task of remaining in close touch with one another as a solid
organization, or uniting further all the forces of the international
proletariat against international capitalism and imperialism, and
finally of forming a true international of the class-conscious pro

letariat.
All Socialist Parties which have left the Second International
and stand on the ground of the principles in this appeal will be

admitted to the conference.
To prepare the way for the conference a committee, consisting

of one comrade to be named by the parties of each of the follow
ing countries, viz., Austria, Germany, France, Great Britain, and

Switzerland, will be appointed. This committee will submit to
the conference drafts of proposals covering the subjects men
tioned in the provisional agenda.
Those intending to take part must announce their intention
before February 1, 1921, to Friedrich Adler, Rechte Wienzeile
97, Vienna.
FOR THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST CONFERENCE
Berne, December 7, 1920
In Coming Issues of
sabotages or resists the proletarian state power.
Dictatorshipthat is the application of all the means of

state power of the proletariat when it becomes a ruling class, to
counter the resistance which the bourgeoisie may offer to the
realization of socialismis a transitional phase in the evolution
from the capitalist class state to the socialist commonwealth,
and the form which it will take depends upon the economic,
social, and political conditions of each particular country.
If the workers conquer power by the methods of democracy,
The International Relations Section

The Japanese Labor Law
Russia's Policy Toward Concessionnaires
The Proposed Land Reform Act in Mexico
China and the Czar's Ministers
130
The American Empire
is an illuminating book in which

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NEARING
Tells why and how the American

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<I Gives the wealth and economic
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<J Treats of the European Revolu
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^ And explains where the American
worker gets off.
Jamt Publiahedt
No. 69.
Catalogue of
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The Nation
FOUNDED 186E
Vol. CXII-
Report of the
British
Labor Commission to
THE most important document which has emerged from

the struggle for freedom in Ireland is the Report of
the Commission of the British Labor Party, printed below.
The thoroughness of its methods, its impartiality, and its
desire for truth, make the Commission's findings invaluable
as a revelation of the situation to be found in Ireland today,
and startling as an indictment of the British Government's
Irish policy.
The situation in Ireland today is nothing short of a tragedy,
whether from the point of view of the Irish people or from the
standpoint of British honor and prestige. British labor is
vitally interested in the Irish situation from two points of view.
It is concerned with the problem of Irish government and the
bestowal upon the people of Ireland of the freedom which they
passionately desire. It is concerned also with the degradation
which the British people are now suffering in consequence of the
policy of repression and coercion which has been carried out in
its name. On the general problem of the settlement of the
political problem in Ireland, the Labor Party has declared its
policy. The manifesto embodying this policy is reprinted as an
appendix to this report. Labor representatives in the House of
Commons have protested against the policy of physical force
applied to Ireland, as the Labor Party regards recourse to
methods of violence as a confession of bankruptcy of states
manship.
On October 25 Mr. Arthur Henderson moved in the House of
Commons: "That this House regrets the present state of law
lessness in Ireland and the lack of discipline in the armed forces
of the Crown, resulting in the death or injury of innocent citi
zens and the destruction of property; and is of opinion that an
independent investigation should at once be instituted into the
causes, nature, and extent of reprisals on the part of those
whose duty is the maintenance of law and order."
This proposed vote of censure condemned the action of the
British Government and its agents in Ireland, and asked for
an independent inquiry. The request for an inquiry was refused.
The situation in Ireland did not improve. Indeed it grew worse,
and the Labor Party, therefore, decided to set up a commission
under its own auspices to inquire into the whole question of
reprisals and violence in Ireland.
The Personnel op the Commission
The Parliamentary Labor Party appointed three of its mem
bers, Right Hon. Arthur Henderson, M.P., Mr. J. Lawson, M.P.,
and Mr. W. Lunn, M.P., to serve on the Commission, whilst the
Executive Committee of the Labor Party appointed its chair
man (Mr. A. G. Cameron), its vice-chairman (Mr. F. W.
Jowett), and Mr. J. Bromley to represent the Executive of the
party. At the first meeting of the Commission Mr. Henderson
was unanimously elected as chairman. In view of the impor
tance of the delegation's work, and opportunities which it was
thought might arise to assist the establishment of peace in
Ireland, the Right Hon. W. Adamson, M.P., was persuaded to
join the Commission. Brigadier-General C. B. Thomson became
military adviser, and Captain C. W. Kendall, legal adviser. Mr.
W. W. Henderson accompanied the Commission as press secre
tary, and Mr. Arthur Greenwood was appointed secretary of
the Commission. Mr. Tom Johnson, secretary of the Irish Labor
Party and Trade Union Congress, was attached to the Commis
No. 2899
Ireland
sion, and the services of Mr. E. Rooney as stenographer were

placed at the disposal of the Commission by the Irish Transport
Workers' Union.
Sir Hamar Greenwood, Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieu
tenant of Ireland, gave every possible assistance to the Com
mission. As a result of his instructions we were supplied with
permits to enable us to travel by motor anywhere we wished to
go and at any hour. We were everywhere received with the
utmost courtesy by responsible officials, both civil and military.
We wish, therefore, to place on record our sense of obligation to
the Chief Secretary, to the officials of Dublin Castle, and to the
responsible military and police officers with whom we came into
contact. We do so the more earnestly because the main burden
of our report is a denunciation of the Government's policy.
The Diary of the Commission
The Commission left for Dublin on Tuesday, November 30.
That evening it met the Secretary of the Irish Labor Party and
Trade Union Congress. On the following day a long discussion
took place between representatives of the Irish Labor Party and
the Commission on labor policy regarding Ireland, the possi
bilities of securing a suspension of acts of violence, and the
detailed work of the Commission. Both the Commission and
the Irish Labor representatives were in perfect accord, and the
latter proffered every possible help to the delegates. They
placed at our disposal the services of Mr. Tom Johnson, whose
assistance was invaluable. During the time we were in Ireland,
Mr. Johnson acted as a liaison officer between the Commission
and Irish labor, both in Dublin and elsewhere. The attitude of
the Irish labor movement toward the promotion of peace in
Ireland is dealt with later in this report, and need not there
fore be referred to here.
The Commission made Dublin its headquarters for several
days. During this time, evidence was taken at the Shelbourne
Hotel, and visits were paid to Balbriggan, Skerries, Croke Park,
and other places in Dublin itself. At Balbrigganthe scene of
a reprisal on a large scalethe delegates visited the hosiery
factory which was destroyed by fire, and the many houses and
other premises which were burned in the attack upon the town
on September 20. The evidence of eye-witnesses was taken in
the Town Hall.
At Skerries, witnesses were examined with regard to the
shooting of individuals there. At Croke Park, the Commission
reconstructed the scene of Sunday, November 21, and took evi
dence on the spot. In Dublin visits were paid to the Painters'
Trade Union Club and the Women's Trade Union Club, both of
which premises had been raided, and some of our members
investigated incidents which had occurred in private houses.
In the meantime, Mr. Henderson and Mr. Adamson inter
viewed Mr. Arthur Griffiths in Mountjoy Prison, and visited
the Archbishop of Dublin. Mr. Henderson also traveled to
Armagh and interviewed Cardinal Logue.
On Saturday, December 4, the Commission visited Dublin
Castle and had an interview with the Chief Secretary for Ire
land. The chief military, police, and civil officers of Dublin
Castle were present at the interview.
On Sunday, December 5, Mr. Adamson returned to Scotland
to fulfil an important engagement in Fifeshire, and on the fol
lowing morning Mr. Henderson left for London. Mr. A. G.
Cameron acted as chairman of the Commission during the
The Nation
162
[Vol. 112, No. 2900
HE adoption by the Senate of Senator Borah's resolu
HE American Commission on Conditions in Ireland
tion for an immediate calling of a conference with
concluded its public hearings with the testimony of

two Protestant Irish women who repeated the story of
England and Japan to bring about a naval holiday is highly

gratifying, because as amended the resolution went even
further than as first drafted.
It now asks for the prompt
negotiation of a treaty to bring about the reductions in

naval armaments and it was wisely altered to leave out the
50 per cent figure which Senator Borah originally sug

gested. This would leave the negotiators free to cut build
ing to 5 or 10 per cent or stop it altogether. The Senate
was also correct in refusing to be inveigled into adding
France and Italy to the nations to be negotiated with. That
would have been a red herring across the trail, as Senator
Borah insisted. Mr. Root, too, has been trying to block
the game by urging that nothing be done until Mr. Harding

comes in. Every day's delay is costing the taxpayers of
military destruction of cooperative creameries, of British

attempts to revive religious prejudice, and misuse of tax
funds. The Commission is now engaged in the preparation
of a preliminary report, but it will continue to watch the
Irish situation closely, and to resume public activity if it
feels that it can again be of service. It is gratifying to
note that the American Committee for Relief in Ireland,
which in a sense grew out of the interest aroused by The
Nation's Commission, is hard at work and has already cabled
large sums of money for immediate relief in Ireland. The

distribution is being supervised by a group of English and
Irish Quakers, who will shortly be joined by an American
unit. While the big official and semi-official relief organiza
ing should take precedence over this question of disarma
tions pause and palaver, new organizations arise spontane

ously to express the will of Americans to give aid where
aid is needed regardless of danger or of political compli
ment with Mr. Harding, when he becomes President.
cations.
the United States millions of dollars in useless expenditure .

worse than useless, for it is dangerous expenditure. Noth
ENATOR HIRAM JOHNSON
has introduced a bill
calling for a Senate investigation of our invasion of

Haiti and Santo Domingo. Good. A Congressional inquiry
would be the first step toward righting an intolerable wrong,
but only if painstaking and determined to go to the bottom

of one of the most wanton and unjustifiable acts of aggres
sion in our history. Strong words these, but the evidence
will disclose a combination of administrative autocracy
flagrantly violating our Constitution, of brutal militarism,

of financial exploitation, of official incompetencewithout
precedent or parallel. That the whole wretched business
is glazed with a veneer of hypocritical idealism, only makes
it the more nauseating. When so eminent and conservative
an authority on American law as Mr. Moorfield Storey,
lately President of the American Bar Association, declares
publicly that every official connected with the seizure of
Haiti can be and should be impeached, even the skeptic may
feel certain that investigation cannot proceed too swiftly.
RESIDENT WILSON is so proud of his Russian policy
that he desires the entire civilized world to adopt and
follow it. He would have the boundaries of Russia guaran
teed by the Powers; he would have France forget her plans
of invasion and conquest; he would have England abandon
her hope of trade. He would, in fact, make his policy of
infinite negation the universal policy. No trade, no recog
nition, no invasion, no partitionsuch is his motto. Those
VEN application for membership in the Communist

Party is reason for forfeiting public officethis is the
decision of the Acting Superintendent of Education of New
York. So Miss Julia D. Pratt, for seventeen years a valued
teacher in the public schools, has lost her position. Miss
Pratt applied for admission to the Communist Party, but
speedily canceled her application in order to save her job,
the Acting Superintendent alleges. Stripped of its essen
tials, the decision serves notice that one cannot hold com
munist ideas and remain a teacher no matter how sincerely
or how lightly one may hold such beliefs, no matter how

rigidly one may keep such beliefs from one's pupilsthere
was no allegation that Miss Pratt ever taught either so
cialism or communism to her pupils. It is idle to point
out, we suppose, that there can be no wrong in believing if

one wishes to that the perfect state is to be communist in
character as it was believed in the early days of civiliza
tion. To that the reply will be that the party with which
Miss Pratt sought for a few days to be affiliated advo
cated reform by violence. But if communists were all
dyed-in-the-wool Tolstoyan pacifists, it would still be held

to be a crime to believe in such ideas, precisely as it was at
one time a penitentiary offense to teach Negroes to read in

the South. America today neither recognizes nor respects
freedom of conscience, and those who take up or appear to
take up new and strange doctrines, particularly if they

menace the right of private property, pay the price.
hopeful Russian sympathizers who see in President Wilson's

note to M. Hymans a virtual recognition of the Soviet Gov
ernment are deluding themselves in spite of his vigorous
denunciation of armed intervention. Mr. Martens was not
HIS business of attempting to suppress thinking goes

on in Japan much as it did in America during the
war and in the post-war days of Palmerian persecutions.
police, so the Japan Chronicle reports, re
deported the other day in order to facilitate trade and good
The Japanese
feeling between the Bolsheviki and the Department of State.

The fact of the matter is that Mr. Wilson has been con
sistent and steadfast in the vision that possesses him: the
vision of a vast undivided Russian empire, miraculously
restored from within to a new view of economic questions,
cently raided a Yokohama bookshop and seized 150 copies
to a faith that more nearly approximates the national plat
ments that the seizure will be a splendid advertisement

for The Nation, and will make the Yokohama police the
form of the Democratic Party.
The President is correct
in stating that the Armenian question cannot be detached

from the Russian question. But he is quite wrong in as
suming that either question can be solved by a general
adoption of a policy of militant inactivity.
of The Nation for October 20, containing an article on the
I. W. W.
The article, as the Chronicle says, was merely
an endeavor to prove that the I. W. W. was not so black

as it was painted, and the Japanese paper cannily com"
laughing-stock of the world.
The Nation earnestly hopes
that the Chronicle is right on both counts; a little suppres"
sion now and then is relished by the best of circulation

managerS.
The Nation
Feb.2, 1921]
163
N declaring that Senator Calder's bill for the regulation

of the coal supply contains provisions revolutionary in
debate. Our neglect of our crippled soldiers is already a
their application to existing relations of American govern
recrudescence of disease sheds new light on the devastation
ment and industry, Mr. J. D. A. Morrow, Vice-President

of the National Coal Association, gave it higher praise than
it deserves. Almost everyone is so dissatisfied with the ex
isting control of the coal industry that a genuine revolution
in its conduct would be welcome. As a matter of fact, how
ever, the bill aims at little more than the sort of control
which Mr. Hoover established over food during the war.
It would establish a system of licenses, which in normal
times would enable the government to obtain and publish
figures of cost and profit, and in abnormal times would per
mit it to regulate prices, and even if necessary to deal in
coal and control its production and distribution. High taxes
on useless brokers are also provided for. Ordinarily, the
only protection afforded the purchaser by this measure
would be exposure and elimination of the worser sort of
profiteer. Price fixing alone is of little value when basic
of modern war. Indeed the spiritual parallel is all too plain.

Not for some time shall we know how gravely our body
ghastly scandal.
But this latest revelation of the insidious
politic has broken down. The white plague and mental aber
ration are with us as never before. Living man, nay, the
fourth generation, may not see the end of our poisoning.
But to return to our burden: Thirty million dollars, and
where to find it? Cross off one dreadnoughta solutio
easy, obvious, and appropriate!
VERYBODY his own Stradivarius?
Such is the star
tling news just come from Hamburg where a certain

Heinrich Ohlhaver declares that he has found the secret of
the greatest of violin-makers for which artists, scientists,

and craftsmen have sought in vain for centuries.
He can
so improve any cheap instrument as to make it perfect. What
reorganization is necessary. Pooling of the coal supply,

which would afford more relief, would probably not be un
is even more interesting is that Mr. Ohlhaver, being a

spiritualist, asserts that it is the spirit of Stradivarius him
self which revealed this mystery of ages to him. Now
dertaken by any administration unless under the heaviest
with many people this latter fact would lead to the dismissal
kind of pressure. Yet unitary control of production and
of the whole matter. But it is added that at a recent private
distribution, not merely in emergencies, but permanently, is

probably the only measure that can begin to achieve real
efficiency.
concert no one could tell the difference between an Ohlhaver
violin and a real Stradivarius, the artist being the great

Dutch violinist Vandenberg. More than that, no less a
person than Arthur Nikisch is interested in a concert to be

EPUBLICAN economy is making a bad beginning in
New York State by attacking the nonpartisan Indus
trial
Commission.
When
we
remember the
record
of
the Republican legislature in blocking enlightened labor

legislation before economy was ever thought of, we are
justified in inspecting the woodpile closely. The joker
emerges when we discover that under the present law the
terms of the commissioners expire in rotation so that no
incoming administration can seize control suddenly, and
that Governor Miller proposes to substitute a one-man
Commission. There are excellent reasons why there should
be a number of commissioners. In the first place, the em
ployers, the employees and the public should all be repre
sented. In the second place, the commission not only has
executive duties, but also must act as a court, gradually
building law by making precedents. If the Republicans

abolish it they cannot save much money, but they will surely
render impossible the wise administration of the labor code
for some time to come. Apparently, however, that is just

what they intend to do. Governor Miller, in speaking re
cently to a group of Republican women, attacked the law
forbidding night work for women, on the high ground of
given in Berlin on February 7, which is to be a complete

public demonstration as to whether a miracle has been
achieved or whether it is all a hoax. If Mr. Ohlhaver has
really discovered the secret he has done a wonderful ser
vice to the musical world.
To have an orchestra before him
with every instrument of Stradivarius tone-quality would

fire every conductor to new efforts, while the democratizing
of the fiddle-world by giving a Strad to every beginner
would wipe out at one blow the line between poor and rich
players. Still, we fancy, there would always be competition

for a real Stradivarius as against an Ohlhaver one, even
if the tone-quality were the same.
N the Emperor of Japan's annual poetry competition, in
which many scores of native poets joined, the fourth
prize was awarded to Mrs. Charles Burnett, wife of the
American military attach at Tokio. This is not only an
amazing linguistic and literary feat, but the finest type of
cultural internationalism and peace-making. There is no
reason, however, why such examples, especially where the
languages are simpler, should not multiply. Macaulay's
dictum that no man could write genuine literature in any
language but that to which he was born has long received

the contradiction of experience. The Americans Francis
Wiel-Griffin and Stuart Merrill went to France and became
ORMER service men are breaking down at the rate of
eminent poets; the Pole Conrad became an English stylist
one thousand a month. Seventeen thousand hospital . of a high order; the Frenchman Adalbert Chamisso de Bon
patients six months ago, there are today over twenty-two
court is a minor German classic, the Scotchman John Henry
thousand, a number which in the opinion of Surgeon Gen
Mackay a contemporary German lyrist of high rank. Among
eral Cumming of the Public Health Service will increase
us there are, of course, numerous writers, such as Abraham
progressively for at least six years. The majority of these
sex equality.
Indeed a revision downward of the whole
labor code seems to be in prospect.
belated war casualties are victims of tuberculosis or in
Cahan, who have done solid literary work in a tongue that

was once unknown to them.
sanity. Accommodation for their care and treatment is

lacking. Ten thousand beds at an estimated cost of $3,000
A few bilingual poets or prose
once. The $30,000,000 needed will meet only this year's

augmented casualty list. Assuming the figures to be correct
writers in every country, if they were soundly inspired

politically, could do untold good in destroying those subtle
but dangerous misunderstandings between nation and na
tion which are caused by slight psychological differences
the bill providing this relief should pass Congress without
embodied in an unfamiliar idiom.
teach, including maintenance for a year, are required at
164
The Nation
Turn the Light on

APPEARING before the Senate Judiciary Committee
on January 19, Attorney General Palmer was asked
in regard to charges made against his administration, espe
cially those of twelve eminent lawyers against his handling
of alien radicals. According to press reports, Mr. Palmer
pounded vehemently on the table before him, and demanded
this:
I feel that in justice to this great department, whose actions
have been denounced, the facts ought to be made known. I ask
you gentlemen to bring these witnesses here. The only fair
and honest thing to do is to ascertain the whole truth of these
charges.
Mr. Palmer ought to be accommodated. We support
unqualifiedly his demand for the whole truth. In the in
terest of law, justice, and American honor, an investigation
into his administration cannot come too soon nor be too
deep, broad, and impartial. As long as eight months ago
The Nation, convinced of Mr. Palmer's lawlessness, bru
tality, and temperamental unfitness for the post of Attorney
General, called for his impeachment. His term of office
is now too short to make that possible, but as the twelve
lawyers say in a brief just filed with the Judiciary Com
mittee, it is imperative that Congress take some action to
repudiate the policies of Mr. Palmer and not, by its silence,
allow them to become precedents for the Department of
Justice and other executive branches of the Government.
Mr. Palmer's administration ought to be scrutinized in at
least four spots: i. e., his use of Government funds to
conduct a personal press campaign against free thought
and speech; his violation of the Constitution in deportation
proceedings against aliens; his betrayal of international
custom and common decency as Alien Property Custodian;
his failure to accomplish anything tangible to check profi
teering or prevent illegal practices by trusts.
A year ago The Nation exposed the way in which Mr.
Palmer was using Government machinery and funds in
an unauthorized and illegal newspaper and magazine cam
paign intended to prejudice the public against radicals and
deprive them of the right of free expression. At about
the same time it was obliged to take note of the accumu
lating evidence of barbarism and lawlessness employed
against aliens by the Department of Justice. Mr. Palmer
had tried in the autumn of 1919 to engineer through Con
gress some sedition legislation that would have made even a
citizen's thoughts subject to inquiry and criminal prosecu
tion. Failing in his effort to obtain new laws for the
prosecution of citizens, Mr. Palmer turned his efforts
against that easiest and most defenseless prey, the alien.
The results were strikingly set forth in the charges brought
by twelve of the country's most distinguished lawyers, in
regard to which much has appeared in The Nation. Evi
dence was presented of arrests, seizures, and searches with
out warrants; of secret imprisonment; of forgery and
perjury by Department of Justice agents; of illegal destruc
tion of property; of the beating and terrorization of
aliens ; of, unlawfully compelling persons to testify against
themselves ; of the use of agents provocateurs. Mr. Palmer
has never answered the charge of United States Judge
Anderson of Boston that his department "owned and oper
ated" a part of the Communist Party. Most recent of all,
Samuel Untermyer, counsel for the Lockwood Committee
[Vol. 112, No. 2900
Palmer !
in New York, has accused Mr. Palmer of gross malprac

tices as Alien Property Custodian, and has said that the
Attorney General has not only failed to assist but has
actually impeded the effort to stop graft and profiteering
in the building industry. In calling for an investigation
of the office of Alien Property Custodian and of the De
partment of Justice, Mr. Untermyer declared:
The vast powers and patronage of these great offices are said
to have been used, and it is the general belief that they were
used, to build up a political machine which, however, fortunately
failed of its purpose. I have no direct legal evidence, but if a
fraction of what comes to me is true, and I believe much of it
to be true, such an investigation will disclose to the world a
series of the most mortifying scandals that has ever befallen
our country. Fortunes in patronage are believed to have been
squandered among favorites, in the form of lawyers' and direc
tors' fees taken out of the pockets of citizens and aliens whose
properties were seized or unfortunately came under the control
of the Government. There is just one decent loophole of escape
for us, and that is by a merciless exposure of the facts by
Congress.
And what has Mr. Palmer had to say to all these charges?
In answer to The Nation's repeated revelations he has made
no direct reply at all. His response to Mr. Untermyer is
a volume of personal abuse. The most damning of the
charges brought by the twelve lawyers have not been
denied by Mr. Palmer but have been justified with the
amazing contention that aliens are not "persons" within
the meaning of the provisions of the Federal Constitution
guaranteeing to all such "due process of law." In support
of his position he has cited various decisions of the Supreme
Court to the effect that an immigrant seeking to enter this
country is not considered legally of it until after he has
been admitted, and until such time cannot claim the pro
tection of our courts or Constitution as against the deci
sions of the immigration officials. In a brief which has just
been submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee by the
twelve lawyers these facts are granted, but it is pointed
out that the contention is without relevancy since in all
Mr. Palmer's prosecutions the victims have been aliens
already admitted to this country. Mr. Palmer's sugges
tion that aliens are not "persons" is demolished by a series
of Supreme Court decisions of which it is sufficient to
quote briefly from Yick Wo vs. Hopkins, 118 U. S. 356,
where it is said:
The rights of the petitioners, as affected by the proceedings
of which they complain, are not less because they are aliens and
subjects of the Emperor of China. . . . The Fourteenth Amend
ment to the Constitution is not confined to the protection of
citizens. It says: "Nor shall any State deprive any person of
life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny
to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the
laws."
The Nation has no animus against Mr. Palmer personally.
In another month he will pass from our political life, prob
ably forever. We would gladly speed his exit and forget
him, but the evil he did will live after him unless some
action is taken to condemn the sinister and illegal methods
that he injected into the Department of Justice and to
counteract their corrupting and brutalizing effect on the
personnel of our judicial machinery. Mr. Palmer should
have the investigation that he asks for. Let us turn on the
light and turn it on without the loss of a moment.
The Nation
Feb. 2, 1921]
Lies,
Russia,
and the
THE American Red Cross ceased work in Soviet Russia

in 1918 because of the Allied blockade. It is not doing
relief work there now, nor has it done any relief work there,
or attempted to do any for the past two and a half years,
although it has engaged heavily in relief work in the train
of Kolchak's, Denikin's, Judenich's, the Polish, and Wrangel's anti-Soviet armies. This relief work has been publicly
acknowledged by some of these adventurers as of vast
assistance in maintaining the morale of their armies and
of the restless civilian population which they have tried to
hold in check; they have advertised it as an inducement
to the people behind the Soviet lines to revolt. It has been
used as political propagandapropaganda by food, and,
conversely, propaganda by starvation. Almost the last act
of Baron Wrangel before taking refuge on a French war
ship at Sebastopol was to award decorations to sixteen Red
Cross officials, the highest civilian honor of the Czarist Gov
ernment being accorded to the Chairman of the Red Cross
Executive Committee in Washington. Such partisan and
discriminatory relief has, we believe, been urged upon the
Red Cross by our State Department. We are not aware
that the Red Cross has made any serious effort to overcome
this opposition.
Yet all testimony, hostile and friendly to the Soviet Gov
ernment, agrees that nowhere in Europe is the need for
relief greater. Were the Red Cross still true to its tradi
tional motto "NeutralityHumanity" it would have sought
its field of action in the field of greatest need. Instead it
has supinely followed the State Department's propagandist
preferences. That is what The Nation meant when, in its
issue for November 24, 1920, it said that the Red Cross had
"become a propaganda tool of the State Department."
For that statement we were widely criticized. We re
ceived a flood of miscellaneous misinformation about the
Red Cross and Russia. A reader in Davenport, Iowa, in
closed a set of clippings from local papers quoting a "former
Red Cross worker" to the effect that the Red Cross had left
Soviet Russia in 1918 because "the Bolsheviki demanded
that all Red Cross workers swear allegiance to the Soviet
Government or get out,"- and that a number of Red Cros3
workers had been thrown into prison. We wrote to the
"Red Cross worker"; he replied that the Davenport news
papers had "editorialized"; he had not been a Red Cross,
but a Y. M. C. A., worker ; he knew of no Red Cross workers
who had been imprisoned by the Bolsheviki; nor of any
"oath of allegiance." A Cincinnati reader sent us a state
ment, given out at the Cincinnati headquarters of the Amer
ican Red Cross, that work in Russia was impossible "because
Bupplies sent into Soviet Russia are seized immediately by
the armies." We wrote to the Cincinnati headquarters,
asking when and where supplies had been so seized; we got
no answer. We received other letters, with other explana
tions of Red Cross withdrawal from Soviet Russia in 1918
which we knew to be untrue; so we wrote direct to the high
est administrative official of the Red Cross in Washington,
Dr. Livingston Farrand, Chairman of the Executive Com
mittee, asking certain specific questions. These questions
and Dr. Farrand's replies are as follows:
1. When and why did the American Red Cross leave Soviet
Russia? A. A Commission representing the American Red Cross
went to Russia in August, 1917, and carried on a certain amount
165
Red Cross
of relief work during the balance of that year and in the first
part of 1918. Difficulties of transport made it increasingly hard
to forward supplies to the Commission, and the blockade finally
stopped all shipments of relief supplies. [Italics ours.] The last
members of the Commission left Russia in the autumn of 1918.
The American Red Cross Commissioner was requested to leave,
I understand, by the American Consul, together with all other
Americans. A further reason was that our representatives had
exhausted their supplies and could obtain no more.
( 2. Was an oath of allegiance required of its workers? A. We
have not heard of any such oath being required.
3. Were any of the American Red Cross workers seized before
leaving? A. We have not heard of such experience.
4. Have any American Red Cross, or, as far as you know, any
other relief supplies been seized by the Soviet armies? If so,
what, when, and where? A. No Red Crosf relief supplies have
been seized by the Soviet armies. We can, ot speak as to other
relief supplies, but have no information
such seizure.
5. Has the Red Cross made any at
to work in' Soviet
Russia since 1918? A. The Red Cross
made no attempt to
work in Soviet Russia since 1918.
This, then, is authoritative: thej ed Cross abandoned
its work in Soviet Russia in 1918 be lse the Allied blockade of Russian ports made shipment )f relief supplies impossible. There was no interference oy the Soviet Government; and no attempt has been
le to work there since
the blockade was nominally lif
The attitude of the
Soviet Government, therefore,
' nothing to do with the
failure of the Red Cross to un
ike relief work in Soviet
Russia.
Why has the Red Cross not' undertaken such work? Dr.
Farrand's letter is not explicit. He says:
The Red Cross has had constantly in mind the suffering which
has been reported as existing among the civilian population of
Russia. The decision with regard to possible Red Cross opera
tion in that or any other country, or in any situation, must obvi
ously always be made in the light of many considerations. These
considerations, which naturally vary with the circumstances in
every instance, include notably the possibility of effective and
independent operation according to Red Cross principles and
standards, as well as the relative importance of demands upon
the organization and the resources at its command. The Red
Cross has not felt that up to this date the conditions in Soviet
Russia warranted action in the light of all considerations. While
no formal negotiations have taken place, informal discussions
have been held, and our best judgment based upon such discus
sions and the knowledge and advice of our representatives and
advisers best qualified to form opinions has been that such action
was inadvisable. Independence and impartial operation has not
been assured, and that fact as well as the presence of greater
need and distress in other parts of Europe than any possible
resources of the organization could meet, and yet with conditions
more favorable for effective relief, has guided the policy of the
Red Cross in its attitude.
We do not know with whom "informal discussions" have
been held, nor who are the "advisers" of the Red Cross who
consider relief in Russia "inadvisable." We suppose they
are representatives of the State Department. Nor
do we know what assurance of "independence and im
partial operation" the Red Cross secured before under
taking the somewhat precarious and not wholly impartial
task of distributing relief to and with Wrangel's legions.
We do know that the Jewish Joint Distribution Board and
the American Friends Service Committee have both been
able to obtain ample assurance of independence in relief
166
The Nation
work within Soviet Russia, and that they are already dis
tributing relief there through their own agents. (The
recent statement of the State Department that the Soviet
Government would tolerate "only the direct gift of supplies
to the Soviet Government" was a malicious falsehood.) The
Swedish Red Cross, too, is at work in Soviet Russia.
The Red Cross has recently donated about $50,000
worth of relief supplies to the American Friends Service
Committee for distribution in Russia. The gift has not
been publicly announced. But we hope that further gifts
will be, and that this one is a first step toward the old
policy of most help where there is most need, toward return
to the Red Cross traditionNeutrality, Humanity.
The Bishop for New York

There is not the slightest chance of New York's getting the
bishop it ought to have. He doesn't exist.
The next bishop of New York must build the cathedral, we are
told. A cathedral is the last thing which this great city needs.
It is filled with stone, and brick, and mortar. Is there religion
enough among us to be housed in a mighty nave? If we do not
trust Christ, cathedrals are only a mockery. And we do not trust
Him. We put our trust where civilization is staking its confi
dencein the power of money!
The people who love the world as it is, are afraid that the
Church will apprehend Christ. New York needs a bishop who
will go forward penniless to seek Him. New York has not
expressed a desire for such a bishop. New York would be panicstricken should God send him to her.
WE have taken these words from the most remarkable
editorial to appear in a religious journal in years.
It is from the Churchman, whose brave, outspoken editor,
William Austin Smith, never permits his readers to forget
that this is not a world to care about unless there is a
promise of its ethical redemption, unless men and women
are willing to go forward in the spirit of Christ to better the
conditions under which the masses live. So he has proceeded
to blurt out the truth about the bishop for New York. We
shall be surprised if he escapes without at least being de
nounced as madman or Bolshevist. For he says much more
than we have quoted. He declares that when the war was
over the ministers of Christ forgot the phrase "a new
world" which was on everybody's lips during the struggle.
They have instead "echoed men's fearsfears of bolshevism, fears of class conflict, fears for national safety."
Among those, the Churchman declares, who have been talk
ing loudest during the past two years, the merchants' asso
ciations, national civic federations, patriotic societies, "not
a whisper has been heard that sounded like St. Francis or
Loyola. Those who should have uttered the Beatitudes
were dumb."
So the Churchman's editor wants a bishop who will "wed
poverty" and thus become a "glowing leader"this in the
richest, most exclusive of our churches, those most closely
knitted to Big Business, which live largely by and through
the beneficiaries of special privilege. Naturally he sees that
he asks the impossible. Not only would New York be panicstricken, it would probably lynch any bishop who would thus
disturb its self-satisfaction, interfere with its contented
going of its own way, its control of our social and business
life, and upset the holy business of money-making. The
mildest ch.r r terization of him would be that he was a dis
ciple of T
Well, the vestrymen of Grace Church, of
[Vol. 112, No. 2900
Trinity, of St. Thomas, need not worry. The new bishop,

who is to be chosen while this Nation is on the press, will be
no disturber of the traffic of the day. If he were he could
not be elected; if he concealed a passion for the righteous
ness of Christ and were elected, the Church would speedily
rid itself of him. Men may still be excommunicated; the
power of a hopelessly blind reaction may still be brought to
bearas the Rev. Percy Stickney Grant can testify.
For that is the truth that lies behind the Churchman's
article. The very churchmen who are selecting the new
bishop met the other day in a church congress. There was
no doubt among them as to the gravity of the crisis before
them. They knew that their churches are emptying, that it
is only the exceptional orator or lecturer who fills one. They
are profoundly anxious as to whether they can save enough
from the wreck to retain the Church as a great ethical and
educational training school. They know that they have
often been worshiping a kind of God which does not exist.
They listen quietly to a proposal from Dr. Grant to bury
the Apostles and the other creeds in the back of their books,
though ten years ago the suggestion would have filled the
air with indignant reprobation of this heresy, this blas
phemy. Many in their hearts no longer believe in the Vir
gin birthand yet they cannot face any real issue as the
Churchman has done. They will elect a hard-working rec
tor of a Fifth Avenue church, able, popular, and pious, but
one who never lifted his voice against the clamor of the
crowd, whose church is a citadel of privilege as remote as
Mount McKinley from the plain people.
The pity of it is that all this is happening when men and
women desire and crave religious leadership as never
before. With the world crashing about our ears, with
church and family and state in process of violent change,
multitudes long for someone to revive hope and faith in
humanity and its mission. The only thing that they ask is
truth-telling and sincerity; that ministers shall practice
what they preach; that they shall not pretend to follow
Christ and yet turn their backs upon Him; that they shall
not pretend to serve the Prince of Peace and yet compromise
with war. The Episcopal Church in America particularly
pays today for its support of the rulers of this country in
going to war; it is right and just that it should. Perhaps
some day the Churchman will recognize this, too.
Japan and Ourselves

IT is not as easy to champion Japan before America as it
was a few years ago. The manifestations of Japanese
imperialism to which the war has given rise have aroused
widespread distrust quite aside from the particular ques
tions affecting directly the relations between the United
States and the Mikado's realm. But the truth is that the
situation in Nippon is but little different from the condi
tions in other great nations. It is the Government, not the
people, which is leading the Japanese into those oversea
adventures which are costing her so dear in lives, in treas
ure, and in the favorable opinion of the world. It is the
Government which insists that it is ordained to set a bar
rier to the westward spread of bolshevism and makes this
one excuse for holding Siberian territory. It is the Govern
ment which holds Koreans as its subjects contrary to their
desires and misgoverns them as we misgovern in Haiti and
Santo Domingo, and England in India, Egypt, and Ireland.
Feb. 2, 1921]
The Nation
It is the government and the military party that insist upon

more battleships and a great army and hang back when it
comes to the question of taking the lead in any move for
international disarmament. Japan is still governed by men
of caste and privilege, inherited from centuries of feudal
rule, men who order every socialist meeting broken up, who
detest liberalism, and deny labor the right to organize.
Because there is this cleft between the masses and the
Government of Japan, it is all the more necessary for the
friends of the Japanese in this country to redouble their
efforts to bring about an American understanding of the
Japanese situation. It is in this spirit of goodwill and
friendship that The Nation dedicates this issue to Japan and
prints varying views of the problem and its underlying
facts. There is one phase, however, which has not been as
fully covered as we should have liked. That is the growing
spirit of liberalism in the island kingdom. True, the liberal
movement is still but a swaddling-clothed infant, yet it is
there and it is beginning to have a press and spokesmen of
its own. The beginnings of a new Japan are in sight. There
are the Osaka Mainichi and Tokio Yomiuri, for instance,
powerful liberal journals entirely outspoken in their demand
that the Government cease attempting overseas adventures
and devote itself to a program of internal reforms and the
improvement of conditions among the working classes. Mr.
Thomas W. Lamont has testified that it was the aid of
liberal groups that made successful his mission to induce
Japan to enter the Chinese Consortium without insisting
upon special reservations as to Manchuria and other terri
tory. Marquis Kato is not a liberal, yet we do attach con
siderable importance to his denunciation of the Japanese
Siberian policy on January 21 as "more of a crime than a
failure," because he, being a politician and leader of the
Opposition, would not have made an attack, exposing him to
the criticism of playing into the hands of the foreign critics
of Japan, if there were not a strong liberal feeling in busi
ness circles, such as Mr. Lamont discovered, to warrant his
laying himself open to the charge of being a "little Japa
nese." Whatever his motives it is of good omen that there
is to be real political opposition to further aggressions in
Asia. Shantung has done Japan more financial and political
injury than could be offset by a hundred years of unlimited
exploitation. Eventually, the new Japan will rectify this.
And how about our own relations with Japan? Well,
The Nation can still see the beam in our own eye. We still
believe the attitude of California and her politicians to be
all wrong. We are proud that 222,000 Californians disre
gard the appeals of demagogues and voted against the new
land law which will be utterly ineffective. We are still of
the opinion that the United States does violence to its
noblest traditions when it forbids Japanese to become
naturalized citizens and otherwise discriminates against
them. We believe in no regulation of Japanese immigra
tion which is not applied to every other kind of immigra
tion. We feel that the menace to Japan of the American
battleship fleet will inevitably lead to serious conflict, if
there is not soon a universal disarmament. The very fact
that Japan is beginning to emerge from a feudal state and
that it has much further to go and much more to tear down
before it can begin to build the new social order than any
other nation of first rank entitles her people to the sym
pathetic and patient consideration of all Americans. We
ought to be the best friends in the world and we shall be if
only our American and Japanese imperialists do not prevent.
167
Home- and Highway women

IN the old days when the anti-suffragist used to walk
abroad in the land, she frequently terrified the more
timid of us by prophesying what would happen to home and
hearth after women got the vote. Even those of us who
had no home but a hall bedroom and no hearth at all used
to be worried when we heard that women would lose all
interest in their families and would stop bearing children.
That period seems far away. The anti-suffragists are for
the most part reconstructed into pretty passable citizens
and prefer to have their friends forget the past, or else
but that's another story. The interesting point of inquiry
is: What are the suffragists up to? How are the family and
the home getting on now? "Pretty po'ly, thank you"is
the verdict of some of our most modern novelists and play
wrights; but the reason, they will all tell you, is that the
home needs to be modernized, renovated, refurnished with
new ideas and several bay windows. And from all we can
learn, it is the former suffragists who are trying to do this
job for home and hearth. They have, for instance, sup
ported the Sheppard-Towner bill for maternity and infant
welfare and have forced it half way through Congress;
while the antisas we started to say abovehave been
opposing the measure. Doesn't it seem rather ironical for
them to abandon the mothers and babies to the mercies of
the suffragists?
The fact is that voting women seem to have an almost
pernicious interest in the home. Take, for instance, the bill
recently introduced in the Kansas House of Representatives
by Mrs. Minnie J. Grinstead, member from Seward County.
Mrs. Grinstead, in behalf of the women of her State, is
tired of spending a fourteen-hour day on manual labor and
receiving as pay three meals, which she must cook herself,
lodging, and the privilege of exercising her ingenuity, her
charms, or her strong right arm to get a little money now
and then from the Boss of the Home. Representative Grin
stead wants wives to have the more dignified and prosper
ous status of employees doing a day's work for a wage and
entitled to recover damages for injuries received while per
forming household duties. When the bill comes up for a
vote it will probably be defeatedthere are only two women
in the Houseand in the debate remarks will doubtless be
made about the "sanctity of wifehood" and the glory to be
discovered in a high pile of dirty dinner dishes. But Mrs.
Grinstead will, we are sure, merely smile. An even more
radical suggestion comes from Brooklyn, where a body of
women has composed a petition to Congress demanding an
eight-hour day for "the overworked, underpaid, dishwash
ing housewife," and suggesting a law to require childless
married women under sixty to do house work three days
a week for mothers with children. This might be rather
hard on childless married women who work eight or ten
hours a day in offices or factories, but perhaps some system
of exemptions could be arranged.
From these measures and proposals it is obvious that
women are still interested in the homeall except the antis.
But they want to improve the home; and they should cer
tainly be encouraged to do so, for as it is pointed out by
Cleopatra Hurtzman, the hardy young bandit captured in
Chicago, home life is an unprofitable and stale career when
an enterprising highwaywoman like herself can successfully
hold up five or six persons in one evening.
The Nation
168
Lost: Those Lower Prices

By ARTHUR WARNER
URING the past six months the public has been told
again and again that the cost of living was lower
than it had been.
Statistics of declining wholesale prices
have been quoted, and certain instances of lower retail

prices have been set forth, going to show that the consumer
was better off than formerly. This information (or shall
we call it propaganda?) has been used by employers not
only as a ground for refusing further wage advances, but to
justify extensive wage reductions in numerous industries.
It is in use by retailers to induce the public to call off the
buying strike and to help unload congested shelves.
Meanwhile the public has been puzzled; it has seen asser
tions of a lower cost of living in the newspapers, but it has
not felt them in the pocketbook. What is the matter?
The decline in wholesale prices is indisputable. One has
only to follow the record of the United States Bureau of

Labor Statistics. Taking 100 as the figure for 1914, whole
sale prices had advanced to 248 by January of last year.
They continued to go up until May, when the peak of 272
was reached. Then the tumble began, every successive
month carrying the figure down until it arrived at 189 last
December. Nearly all products, raw or finished, shared in
this decline, including food, which is the most important

of all items to the consumer. Bradstreet's for January 15
of this year reported that its weekly food index number,
based on the wholesale price of thirty-one articles, had

dropped from 519 a year ago to 342, a cut of 32 per cent.
The evidence of lower costs is undeniablefrom the
standpoint of wholesale prices.
In respect to retail prices,
which are what interest the consumer, it has been difficult

to get at the truth, but in January of this year the Bureau
of Labor Statistics made public figures which go far to
explain why the consumer has not felt the benefits of the
lower cost of living. One reason is that the lower cost of liv
ing has not arrived. It has been lost somewhere between the
producer and the consumer. The first figures from the
Bureau of Labor Statistics were limited to eight large cities.
In every instance an appreciable, although not an important,

reduction in the cost of living is indicated between June and
December of last year. This has been featured in the news
papers, but the real significance of the figures has been
ignored; that is, that although there was some reduction in
the cost of living in the last six months of 1920, it was just
about enough to compensate the consumer for the advance
that took place during the first six months. In other words,
during a year which saw a reduction in wholesale prices
from an index figure of 248 to 189, there seems to have
been virtually no change in the cost of living to the con

sumer. Below is the percentage of increase or decrease in
the cost of living for the periods stated:
June, 1920, to
December, 1920
December, 1919, to
8.2 per cent decrease

Chicago . . . . . . . 9.9 per cent decrease
Cleveland . . . . . . 5.9 per cent decrease
December, 1920
4.6 per cent increase
Detroit . . . . . . . . 7.4 per cent decrease

New York . . . . . 8.1 per cent decrease

Philadelphia . . . 6.0 per cent decrease

San Francisco... 5.6 per cent decrease
Baltimore
. .. . .
Seattle . . . . . . . . 7.8 per cent decrease

[Vol. 112, No. 2900
Thus it appears that while there was some decrease in

the cost of living in each instance between June and De
cember of last year, there was an actual increase for the
year as a whole in three of the eight cities, and in no case
was there a decrease sufficient to be noted by anybody but
an official statistician. These figures for eight cities have
since been supplemented by records from twenty-four

others, which still further accentuate the tendency noted.
Twenty-two of the total of thirty-two cities show an in
crease in the cost of living for December last over that for
the same month a year previous.
In its records of the eight cities the Bureau of Labor

Statistics divides the cost of living under six heads: food,
clothing, housing, fuel and light, furniture and furnish

ings, and miscellaneous. Food, which accounts for from 33
per cent (Seattle) to 42 per cent (New York and Balti
more) of the total, shows some decline in all cases for the
year 1920, but nothing comparable to the 32 per cent drop
in wholesale prices reported by Bradstreet's for the same
period. The retail cost of clothing shows declines every
where except in San Francisco and Seattle, but clothing is
only 15 per cent of the average budget. The other items
housing, fuel and light, furniture and furnishings, and mis
cellaneousshow increases for the year 1920. Indeed,
housing and miscellaneous show an advance in all of
the eight cities even for the period from June to Decem
ber; the same is true of fuel and lighting, except in San
Francisco and Seattle. Miscellaneous may sound unim
portant, but it is made to include from 18 per cent (Detroit)

to 25 per cent (Seattle) of the total budget, and is larger
than any other item except that of food.
Now, the importance of considering the change in the
cost of living for the entire year 1920, and not merely for
the last six months, lies in this, that almost all wage and
salary advances were obtained either during the war or
during the first year after the armistice. Only a few gains
were recorded during the winter of 1920 and virtually none
after the spring. Hence, reduction of wages is not justified
on the ground of any change in the cost of living to date.
Of course it is saidand with some justice except in regard
to foodthat declines in retail prices must inevitably lag
several months behind those in wholesale rates, since it
takes time to convert raw products into finished articles and
to get them on the market. This would be more reassuring
if it were not for the fact that wholesale prices are showing
a tendency at the moment to appreciate again. This ten
dency may be only temporary, but it gives pause to ones
hopefulness for the outlook of the consumer. Bradstreets
for January 15 says that for the first time in eight months
the number of articles advancing in price this week ex
ceeds those declining. Of eighty commodities at wholesale
twenty advanced over the week previous, while sixteen de
clined and forty-four remained unchanged. A New York
dispatch to the Philadelphia Public Ledger under date of
January 7 said: Prices for finished cotton fabrics ar.
taking an upward trend.
The situation of the consumer reminds one of the old bu
excellent story of the judge and the preacher. I can sen

a man to the gallows, boasted the judge. I can consig.
him to hell, retorted the preacher. Yes, said the judge
but when I send him to the gallows, he goes. When a!
employer reduces wages, they are reduced; when the propa
gandists reduce the cost of livingwell, thats anothe
story.
The Nation
Feb.2, 1921]
169
The Cable Control Controversy

By GEORGE T. ODELL
N the controversy now going on between representatives

of the United States and those of other governments
regarding the disposition of the German cables seized at the

beginning of the World War and since made a part of the
British, French, and Japanese systems, the point has been
raised whether any nation can successfully develop an
export business without controlling some means of tele

graphic communication that is protected against the espio
nage of its commercial rivals. This question has been raised
to build has either been shattered or dispersed among the

victors of the war, leaving England and Japan as our prin
cipal rivals in this field. American commercial agents are
scattering throughout the universe in search of trade, and
American banks are beginning to reach out into foreign
lands. But, in the apparatus of communication we are
almost entirely lacking.
Like Germany at the beginning
the news of the world, whether it originates in Europe,

in Asia, or in Africa, flows through the neck of
the bottle at London before it reaches the United States,
while American news-distributing agencies are forced to
of her commercial expansion, the United States is compelled

to conduct her secret trade negotiations with Europe and
Africa, and to a large extent with Asia and South America,
through this same neck of the bottle at London.
In discussing this handicap to America's foreign trade
before the Senate sub-committee, Newcomb Carlton, presi
dent of the Western Union Telegraph and Cable Company,
declared that it would be impossible for the British to main
tain an espionage over cable communication which would
acquaint them with the contents of all commercial messages
passing over their lines. Whether that is true or not will
be examined presently, but the obvious answer to Mr. Carl
ton's contention was made by Mr. Walter Rogers, one of the
American representatives at the International Communica
disseminate their reports through the same narrow orifice.
tions Conference.
This concentration of the means of communication has
resulted in clogged wires, frequent long delays in trans
It is not necessary for British censors to decode all commercial

messages or to examine closely their contents. The advantage
mitting press dispatches, and oftentimes emasculation if
which British commerce gains from having the cable communica
not actual suppression of news.
tions of the world pass under surveillance at London is much

more easily obtained. For example, a merchant in Buenos Aires
both in the International Communications Conference and

before a sub-committee of the United States Senate which
is considering cable,legislation. There the statements have
been made that Great Britain now has almost a complete
monopoly of cable communication throughout the world and

that a large proportion of the messages pertaining to the
export and import business of the United States pass under

the watchful eyes of our principal commercial rival. Even
First, however, it is necessary to give a very brief out
He said:
cables to an American shoe manufacturer in Massachusetts, and
line of Germany's experience in expanding her foreign

commerce and to show the analogy between her position
twenty-five years ago and that of America today. In pur
suance of the deliberate policy formulated by Bismarck of
transforming the German Empire from a self-supporting
agrarian state into an industrial nation, Germany began
enlarging her merchant marine to transport her manufac
;:
: 3D:
if :
g:
n:
sti:
d:
tured products and to insure a steady influx of raw ma

terials and to scatter agents throughout the world to solicit
eg:
ly 2
some one in London notes the names of the sender and the
addressee, which he immediately communicates to a competing

shoe manufacturer, who in turnknowing of course the char
acter of shoes made by the New England concern and the general
run of its pricescables to his representative in Buenos Aires
that such and such a merchant is in the market for shoes and is
negotiating with So-and-so in Massachusetts. Or a firm of elec

trical contractors in Cincinnati cables to some manufacturer of
electrical goods in Germany, indicating that the American firm

is in the market for German electrical machinery, and that word
eS 3.
trade. These things were done openly, of course, because

there is no way for a nation to keep the volume of its ship
sur:
ping or the fact that it has thousands of agents abroad
n: ,
actively seeking business from the knowledge of the rest

is te: of the world. Every merchant engaged in a highly com
low:
petitive enterprise knows, however, how important it is to
0 00:
stre: maintain secrecy in negotiations, and Germany was soon

mont to discover that this sort of secrecy she could not command.
ek & The weak points in her commercial armor were that her
Ioles: financial transactions abroad were conducted through the
>en d agents or branch banks of her rivals and her cable com
, Yo! munications passed through the neck of the bottle in Lon
ate " don. Both of these defects the Germans sought to remedy,
as a and in course of time she had her own
is immediately passed on to a competitor. A tip to the wise is

oftentimes sufficient in competitive commerce.
Of course these are elementary examples, although hun
dreds of messages passing over the cables daily are quite

as simple. But though some of the processes for main
taining secrecy are much more complicated they are none
the less intelligible to those under whose scrutiny such
messages pass. The practice of Great Britain during the
war of opening all mail, whether of ally, neutral, or enemy
origin and destination, and of censoring cables and inter
cepting wireless dispatches at receiving stations scattered
all over the world, has added vast sums to their knowledge
of commercial secrets, as we shall now proceed to show.
cables in both the
Atlantic and Pacific as well as her own fiscal agents and
ld bu branch banks at strategic points throughout the world.

1 sent Her rapid development as an exporting nation is too well
The documentary evidence consists of a report to the Brit

ish Foreign Office from the War Trade Intelligence Depart
ment, dated June 12, 1917. The covering letter is as follows:
The chairman of the War Trade Intelligence Depart
insigknown to require further comment.

judg:
In the matter of foreign-trade development the United

stands today upon the threshold where Germany
stood a quarter of a century ago. Thanks to the war a mer
chant fleet has been created in an unprecedented short space
of time, while that which it took Germany twenty-five years
pen a States
or
*
ment presents his compliments to the Under-Secretary of

State for Foreign Affairs, and begs to submit the inclosed
papers respecting German influence in the American
metal
market, which may prove of interest. This document

contains information of great value to the British metal
170
The Nation
trade which was obtained from "intercepted letters" and

from cable and wireless dispatches. It is not a revelation
of Germany's attempts to get contraband metals past the
blockade, but the purpose of it is to give in detail informa
tion concerning negotiations of mining and metal-producing
concerns in the United States and South and Central Amer
ica with German merchants, manufacturers, and financiers
for the rehabilitation of their industries after peace has
been declared. These negotiations occurred before the
United States or any of the South or Central American
countries had entered the war against Germany. This
document was printed and widely circulated among those
to whom such information would be extremely valuable. In
making these revelations of trade negotiations and agree
ments which were obtained largely through the interception
of letters, cables, and wireless messages, the War Trade
Intelligence Department makes no distinction between bona
fide American concerns and those owned outright by Ger
mans or in which they had an interest. For instance, the
opening paragraph states that
The following notes deal in detail with the recent activities of
the leading American firms of metal merchants with intimate
German connections :
1. The American Smelting and Refining Company;
2. L. Vogelstein & Co.;
3. Beer, Sondheimer & Co.;
4. The American Metal Company.
Concerning the American Smelting Company and its sub
sidiaries the report says:
It should be made clear at the outset that this group is on a
different footing from the rest of those dealt with in this memo
randum in that it consists of bona fide [italicized in the docu
ment] American concerns with headquarters in the United
States. The American ' Smelting Company's German associa
tions are due not to domination of German capital, but to the
importance which motives of a purely commercial character lead
it to attach to the German market.
This company maintained a European representative,
Paul Koning, who
remained in Berlin until his temporary removal to Zurich in the
summer of 1916, . . . and as a result of his efforts the com
pany is committed to playing an important part in the indus
trial rehabilitation of the enemy on the conclusion of peace.
The extent of these commitments can be clearly seen from the
mass of intercepted letters passing between Koning and the New
York head office.
The contents of these letters are given in an extended
summary with voluminous quotations. From this "mass of
intercepted letters" the War Trade Intelligence Depart
ment is able to advise its British connections as to the
amount of copper held by the American Smelting Company
for "enemy" purchasers and of the contracts made during
the war for post-war delivery. It also reveals the negotia
tions in progress for the purchase of certain German-owned
mines in Southwest Africa by the American company and
also the details concerning the methods for financing these
and other transactions. Even the transactions of this
"bona fide" American company in Peru, Chile, and Mexico
are exposed in this memorandum by summaries and excerpts
of letters and messages which passed through the "neck of
the bottle" at London.
The same intimate details gathered from letters and
cable dispatches are set forth in the memoranda on L. Vogel
stein & Co., Beer, Sondheimer & Co., and the American
Metal Company, and, while it is true that the Alien Prop
[Vol. 112, No. 2900
erty Custodian in his report of February 22, 1919, shows

that there were large German interests in these three con
cerns, the point involved here is that the system of espio
nage over communications, whether by mail, cable, or wire
less, maintained by the British Government, was so inclusive
and minute that the War Trade Intelligence Department is
able to report the contents of letters and messages originat
ing in all parts of the world and to link them all up with
the transactions of these four concerns so as to expose with
complete details their most intimate business secrets. Nor
is there anything in the entire document, save occasional
references to prize-court or other legal proceedings, to show
that any attempt was being made to furnish Germany with
contraband metals or ores during the war, but on the con
trary all of the transactions revealed have to do with the
plans of German merchants and manufacturers and their
American and other foreign correspondents to rehabilitate
their industries after peace has been declared. Thus it
appears that there was indeed a most minute examination
of all communications which fell into British hands, which
enabled this Department of the Government to expose in a
printed document of twenty-eight pages the plans of its
rivals in the metal industries in the United States, Mexico,
the South American republics, and Germany for rehabilita
tion after hostilities should have ceased. Such information
was of incalculable value to the British metal trade.
That Great Britain has not abandoned this policy and
system of prying into the trade secrets of her rivals in so
far as control of the means of telegraphic communication
enables her to do so was made graphically plain only a
few days ago by Newcomb Carlton in his testimony before
the Senate sub-committee. With the utmost reluctance,
"because it might make trouble," he explained the present
system of surveillance over the cables thus:
Ten days after messages have been transmitted our copies of
them are turned over to the British secret service which keeps
them for twenty-four hours and then returns them. No excep
tion is made and the American official dispatches like the dis
patches of all other countries to and from England are included,
but I have reason to believe that no examination is made of
them. I have been assured that the official messages are not
even inspected, but they are in the physical-possession of the
authorities while other messages are being inspected.
Mr. Carlton's explanation of this surveillance was that it
was necessary on account of the "disturbed conditions in
England and Europe," and he intimated that France and
Japan take more complete control of cables passing through
their territory than England does.
Admiral Benson, Walter S. Rogers, and Under-Secretary
of State Davis, the American delegates to the International
Communications Conference, deserve great credit for having
blocked the scheme which England, France, and Japan had
prearranged before the conference met, to take to them
selves the German cables, both in the Atlantic and Pacific
Oceans, thus leaving the United States practically without
any means of direct telegraphic communication with Central
Europe and the East Indies or Africa. The outcome of the
controversy is still uncertain, but whether the German
cables are returned to their former owners or, even if they
are turned over to the United States, the American Govern
ment will still have a serious international problem to solve
with reference to the privacy of commercial cable messages,
if its merchant-marine policy is to be successfully carried
out and American trade is to prosper in the competitive
markets of the world.
Feb. 2, 1921]
The Nation
The Japanese
171
Problem
By BRUCE BLIVEN
THE Japanese question probably exists for most Ameri
cans as a California problem. Some of us, it is true,
see it as a matter for the United States as a whole, and a
few realize that the British Dominions, and Australia in
particular, are also concerned. From time to time we hear
of it as affecting adjacent portions of the continent of Asia.
Yet the fact remains that the Japanese question is most
serious for the Japanese themselves.
With an overcrowded country, whose soil cannot by any
artifice be made greatly to increase its yield, with a popu
lation growing very rapidly in numbers, the Japanese are
forced, in sheer desperation, to emigrate and colonize. Yet
wherever they turn they find the doors closed or closing in
their faces. Their situation was summed up by one of their
statesmen at the Versailles conference who said one day
to a group of his Western colleagues: "We in Japan realize
with what unfriendly eyes you view our colonization upon
the continent of Asia. But, gentlemen, what is Japan to
do? Her territory is already incapable of producing enough
food to support her populationand that population is in
creasing at the rate of three-quarters of a million per
annum!"
The Japanese Empire has some 77,000,000 people in an
area of about 260,000 square miles. Japan herself has 56,000,000 in 148,000 square miles, giving a density of 380 per
square mile. The actual density is probably much greater
than this, for from the surface area must be deducted a
large proportion of uninhabitable mountain land. Even
that figure seems high enough, however, when you
realize that the average density of the United States is
only 35.
The Japanese are reported to be increasing at the rate of
about 12 per cent per decade, a growth with which even the
most intensified form of agriculture cannot cope. There
are only three solutions to such a problem. The first is
artificial limitation of the birth-rate, a doctrine at which
nearly all governments look askance, and which in any event
could hardly have much effect upon the situation in less than
a generation. The second is to do what England has done
become an industrial community, manufacturing products
to be exchanged for food from overseas. Japan is now in
the midst of a great industrial revolution which may eventu
ally assume such a character; but the hostility to the
Japanese and their goods, as evidenced in the boycotts in
China and Australia, make this process a slow one. The
third alternative, and the one with which the Japanese
Government has concerned itself most seriously, is
emigration.
By far the greater bulk of this emigration in recent years
has been toward the west, colonizing those parts of Asia
which are adjacent to Japan and similar in climate, for the
Japanese settler is not happy in extremely cold or extremely
hot countries. Some settlers, however, have drifted east
ward across the Pacific into South America, Mexico, the
United States, and Canada. It is the group, small in
proportion to the whole movement, which has settled
in California which has produced the present serious
situation.
That it is indeed serious, need not be argued to any care
ful follower of the daily press. Against the nationals of

one of the proudest races on earth, California has passed
legislation which is sharply and admittedly discriminatory.
The jingo press of Japan has been shrieking for years that
America's action could only be answered by war; and the
fact that the Japanese Government has up to now confined its
protests to official representations at Washington is a testi
monial as to its pacific intentions. The country, it is true,
is in no economic position to go to war with the United
States; but every student of history knows that when their
toes are stepped on with sufficient rudeness, nations have an
unpleasant habit of going to war whether they are eco
nomically prepared or not. And a war with Japan in
which the United States was victorious would be hardly
less a national calamity to our country than an unsuc
cessful one.
Most Californians who take any interest in the Japanese
question at alland there are plenty who do notwill tell
you that the conflict between the races is primarily eco
nomic, and not social. A short time ago I traveled through
California from end to end, talking with citizens in all parts
of the State about this question, and I found that every
where the belief prevailed that the Japanese are an over
whelming economic menace. Most of the hostility was based
upon this assumption. While it is far from my intention to
deny that there is an economic conflict between the races in
California, I am convinced that this factor is of less im
portance than most Californians will admit, and that the
antipathy of the white man for the yellow, skilfully en
gendered by politicians and by part of the press, is a prin
cipal element.
It is true that the Japanese in California are growing in
numbers; and they would certainly continue to grow in
influence were it not for the checks which have been put
upon them by hostile legislation. Twenty years ago the
Japanese population of California was negligible. Ten years
ago it was 41,000. Today, according to the estimate of the
State Board of Control, there are 87,000, which is more
than 80 per cent of the total Japanese population of the
United States. (The anti-Japanese propagandists in Cali
fornia claim that the figure is very much larger than this,
that the Japanese have systematically evaded registration
in the census, and that there are more than 100,000 in
California.)
It is worth noting that while the Japanese population has
doubled in the past decade, the acreage of agricultural land
they control has increased by more than 400 per cent. At
the present time the Japanese are operating about 450,000
acres. Even more striking is the great increase in the value
of the crops produced by Japanese farmers. In 1909 these
had a market value of $6,200,000. In eleven years the value
has increased more than one thousand per cent, to $67,100,000.
This great increase in acreage and the market value of
crops does not necessarily mean, however, that white set
tlers have been driven from this amount of land by the
Japanesethough one would get that impression from some
of the anti-Japanese documents issued in California. Dur
ing the last decade in particular, the Japanese have re
172
The Nation
claimed a large amount of swamp and arid land which had

been declared by American farmers to be unworkable.
Moreover, those California crops which are most profitable
to the American rancher have the smallest percentage of
Japanese participation. This is notably true of citrus
fruits, wheat, walnuts, etc. On the other hand, the produc
tion of berries, small vegetables, and the like is largely domi
nated by the Japanese, who raise from 80 to 90 per cent
of the annual total. The Japanese also declare in their own
defense, when they are accused of crowding the white man

out of the agriculture of California, that there is such a
movement of white men from the farms to the cities that
without Japanese aid agriculture could not be carried on in

California at present at all.
An important phase of the economic question has to do
with depreciation in the value of land in any community

where the Japanese are admitted. The racial antipathy ex
presses itself in a dislike on the part of white Californians

to having their children in school with the Japanese. As a
San Joaquin Valley rancher said to me, The Japanese just
wont neighbor. You might as well live alone in the middle
of a desert as to live with Japanese around you. I wont
let my children go to school with them, and I wont have
anything to do with them if I can help it. For this reason
the advent of even one Japanese settler in any community
means a prompt depreciation in the value of farm lands in

that neighborhood, just as the advent of one Negro in a
block in a Northern city means a lowering of real estate

values throughout the block.
What the ultimate solution of the Japanese question will
be, it is not my purpose to discuss here.
No one has ever
made a careful study of the biological side of miscegenation,
[Vol. 112, No. 2900
cultural holdings under various forms of personal employ

It is impossible for the State to
enact constitutional legislation prohibiting personal em
ment contracts.
ployment contracts with Japanese on account of various pro

visions in our Federal Constitution, recent decisions of the
United States Supreme Court, and also certain provisions of
the treaty between Japan and the United States.
This being so, there seems to be little point in leaving on
the statute books of the State of California a law which
provokes such bitter animosity. Within the past few weeks

many Japanese have left California to return to their native
land, and the reason given in at least some instances has
been their humiliation over the treatment given them by
the Californians. It is hardly fair to say that the Cali
fornia law works no hardship on the Japanese as long as
the Japanese have a similar law regarding land ownership
by foreigners; the obvious difference is that very many
Japanese do want to use land in California, and that no
American, practically speaking, has any desire to own land

in Japan.
I am suggesting annulment of the special legislation, not
because I think Americans ought to be afraid of the Jap
anese, and conciliate them, but because it seems to me to be
justas justice goes between races alien to one another. I
believe that Japanese statesmanship is sufficiently intelli
gent to prevent an attitude of belligerency toward the
United States because of the exclusion of new Japanese
immigration, provided only that the Japanese now in this
country be given treatment which is on an equality with
that given to other aliens. Failure on the part of the
United States to go this far along the road to justice seems
almost sure to lead to war. And we have had enough war.
though I believe competent authorities now declare that the

supposed weakness, mental and physical, of the half-breed
children has no basis in fact. As to what ought to be done
in the immediate present, however, it is easier to speak.
That the United States will join with the British Domin
ions in an anti-Asiatic pact seems extremely unlikely. It
seems equally clear that for purely practical and oppor
tunist reasons the Japanese must be excluded from the
United States for a long time to come. This exclusion,
however, should be made the subject of a new and definite
treaty, such as is now being discussed in Washington and

Tokio. The danger of having so important and contro
versial a subject left to the mercies of a Gentleman's Agree
ment is obvious.
Japanese immigration should, in my judgment, be flatly

prohibited, except in the case of students, business and pro
fessional men, and these should enter the United States for
a stipulated period of time, at the end of which they will
be liable to deportation. Those Japanese already in the
United States should, however, be given all the privileges
which are accorded to other aliens in this country. In
particular, the new law passed in California on November 2,
prohibiting even leaseholds on land to Japanese, should be
repealed. Thoughtful Californians already recognize that
this law can be evaded without much more difficulty than
The Two Japans

By THOMAS W. LAMONT
HERE are two schools of thought in Japan and the
cleavage is a deep one. In general the men of affairs
manufacturers, great merchants, and bankersare liberal
in their ideas. They believe, as we do here in America,
that a nations development, to be sound and sure, must
be along lines of peaceful trade and the cultivation of good
will. The other party in Japan, the militarists, have a
somewhat different philosophy. They might not admit it,
but if you study their actions you will realize that they still
think the world is ruled by force rather than by ideas. They
believe in a mighty army and navy. They are sincerely
convinced that Japan's safety and future lie in having a
dominating influence on the continent of Asia. They have
taken Korea and made it a part of Japan, incidentally im

proving its material condition distinctly. They hold Port
Arthur. They took Shantung from the Germans in the re
cent war and so far seem to have Japanized it far more
land and limited leaseholds to three years, and which had
completely than it was ever Teutonized during the years

that Germany held it. They have seized Vladivostok on the
Siberian coast; they control the mouth of the Amur River,
and they have recently occupied the Russian half of the
hardly been placed upon the statute books before it became
Island of Sakhalin.
a dead letter. Governor Stephens has himself declared that
I am merely summarizing what the newspapers have told us
he believes the new law will prove unworkable. It will not,
hundreds of times.
I fear, he says, forestall the ingenuity of legal counsel
Now the Japanese military party has pursued this policy

on the theory that in these measures lies the only sound
the famous act of 1913, which prohibited ownership of
in enabling the Japanese to remain in control of their agri
In reciting this I am not criticizing:
Feb. 2, 1921]
The Nation
defense of her national safety that Japan could devise. The

militarists sincerely feel that to make a food supply certain
for their growing population domination of a part of Asia
is necessary; ordinary trading is not secure enough. This
is a political philosophy which is perfectly understandable.
But in the pursuance of its policy, according to the liberals
in Japan, this military party seems to have overlooked cer
tain economic considerations. Their efforts in China, their
expeditions to Siberia have been enormously expensive.
Every year they have cost hundreds of millions of yen. And
the increase of the navy and the maintenance of the army
are a serious burden upon the people of Japan. Her na
tional debt is inconsiderable, but her taxes are heavy and
an extraordinary proportion of her budget is for the mili
tary establishment. Japan is not a rich country in the sense
that Great Britain or America or France is rich ; that is to
say, she is lacking in natural resourcescoal, oil, iron ore,
etc. And her people cannot afford these heavy outlays un
less they bring in compensating dividends.
They do not. On the contrary they seem to bring liabili
ties. For instance, because of Japan's Twenty-one Demands,
served on China in 1918, and because of her action as to
Shantung there has been an intense boycott of Japanese
goods throughout China. Japan has lostat any rate for
the momenta part of her most valuable foreign trade.
As one of her leading government officials said to me, in
Far Western slang, "We are in terribly Dutch in China.
By becoming partners in the new Consortium with Ameri
cans, who are popular in China, we hope now to fare some
what better."
Speaking in general, we American people have not a very
intelligent understanding of our relations with Japan. We
are apt to be strongly pro-Japanese or strongly anti-Japa
nese. We are apt, because the military party is power
ful, to criticize the Japanese as being a militaristic nation,
whereas, in my judgment, they are a nation loving peace
and ardently desirous of peace with the United States. We
criticize them for burdening their people with taxes for a
large army and navy, and at the same time we fail to look
at our own government estimates and note that this year
they provide that 40 per cent of our total Federal income
is to be used for our army and navy ; that we are planning
to spend on our own military establishment this year over
one and one-half times what our total government debt was
before the war. If we are to solve our outstanding ques
tions with Japan we must not forget that now and then we
have a beam in our own eye. We should be tolerant in our
judgment of nations as well as of men. Since the days of
Commodore Perry, Japan has looked upon the United States
as an old-time friend and helper. There is every reason
why the two nations should be on the closest and friendliest
footing. Even the perplexing immigration question is sus
ceptible of amicable settlement if only we Americans show
a little tact and a respect for Japanese susceptibilities. The
Japanese are one of the most ancient and proudest people
on the earth. Their manners to foreign visitors are a reve
lation of grace and courtesy. They expect in return a little
of that same deportment. It isn't so much what we do on
the immigration question as the way we do it. Certainly
to one who has gained an intimate glimpse of the Japanese,
it would seem certain that, with any ingenuity at all, we
ought to be able to devise a formula that would meet the
views of California and at the same time measurably satisfy
the Japanese.
173
California and the Japanese

By K. K. KAWAKAMI
MANY people in the Eastern States are no doubt sur
prised that California's anti-Japanese Land Initia
tive Law was adopted at the recent election by so large a
majority as 668,483 to 222,086, or about 3 to 1. Here in
California everybody is amazed that the majority was so
small. On the eve of the election it was a universal belief
in California that the Alien Land Law would be adopted
by an overwhelming majority. Its proponents had boast
fully announced that it would pass by a vote of at least 9 to
1, if not unanimously. The public accepted this prediction
with no dissenting voice. The Japanese, in calm resigna
tion, expected nothing better.
This universal forecast was supported by ample reason.
For two years or more, a coterie of politicians had con
ducted a vigorous propaganda against the Japanese. Up
and down the State they marshaled anti-Japanese forces.
They organized a dozen associations under various names,
all aiming at the persecution of the Japanese. The
American Legion, or at least many of its California posts,
rallied under their flag. That celebrated body, the Native
Sons and Daughters of the Golden West, accepted their
leadership. They had the solid backing of the press, with
Mr. Hearst's enterprising papers and the Sacramento Bee
in the forefront. Not a day passed but these newspapers
published vitriolic anti-Japanese news stories or editorials,
often absolutely groundless, always conceived to rouse sus
picion or resentment toward the Japanese. To incite public
sentiment against the Japanese and thus aid the passage of
the Alien Land Law, the newspapers, as the election drew
nigh, even published the stories of an alleged Japanese
attempt to poison a "society" woman in Los Angeles and
an alleged Japanese assault on an American girl in San
Franciscostories absolutely groundless. Of late the antiJapanese forces have summoned to their aid even moving
pictures and novels to rouse race hatred against the
Japanese.
In the early stages of this agitation Governor Stephens
openly and vigorously denounced agitators, attributing their
motive to political preferment. In those days the essential
facts concerning the Japanese were as well known to the
Governor as they have since become more widely known
through the report of the State Board of Control. And yet
this Republican Governor, on the eve of the Democratic
National Convention in San Francisco, proclaimed from the
housetops that he and his party were just as anti-Japanese
as the Democratic Senator from California and his party.
In the face of this propaganda, political and journalistic,
the "decent Christian" Californians sat still and watched
the performance of the agitators, with apprehension per
haps, but with folded arms. They were in sympathy with
the Japanese, but were too "decent" to go to the bat and
give battle to the agitators. As for the Japanese, they were
helpless and hopeless. To them the channel of publicity
was completely closed. If a Japanese association sent out
a correction to a falsehood issued by the other side and
given wide publicity by the press, it was completely ignored
by the editors. Very often the editors would print only
those parts of our statements which were favorable to the
other side. At times they would distort and garble our
174
The Nation
statements so as to convey ideas exactly opposite to what

we intended to convey.
Such was the atmosphere in which the Alien Land Law
was born and nurtured. Is it any wonder that the unani
mous adoption of the law was expected alike by the Japa
nese and by the Americans? Can it be wondered that Cali
fornia was amazed by the smallness of the vote which
passed that law? In the face of the vitriolic campaign
waged against the Japanese during the past two years, it
seems nothing short of a miracle that 222,086 votes were
cast against the law and in favor of the Japanese. When
California submitted the Chinese question to the popular
vote in 1878, only 880 voted in favor of the Chinese.
California has 1,360,000 registered voters, of whom
nearly 400,000 did not vote on November 2. It is reasonable
to presume that a great majority of these 400,000 were intel
ligent, fair-minded, and naturally sympathetic toward the
Japanese. They were disgusted with politics and politicians,
and went on a sort of political "hunger-strike." Had these
intelligent fair-minded voters voted, I am quite certain that
the vote in favor of the Japanese would have been much
larger. With these voters forfeiting their votes, with other
sympathetic citizens taking but lukewarm interest in the
Japanese, we have nevertheless seen 222,000 votes cast
against the anti-Japanese law.
True, on the eve of the election some public-spirited jus
tice-loving Californians became alarmed by the extreme to
which the anti-Japanese agitation had carried itself, and
voluntarily came to the rescue of the Japanese. These Cali
fornians not only had the courage of their convictions, but
made a considerable material sacrifice to place their argu
ments before the public. But this movement came too late.
It came after an anti-Japanese sentiment had been so
extensively and intensively cultivated by the propagandists
that the publication at the eleventh hour of a few arguments
in advertising columns in newspapers could have no material
effect upon the vote.
How, then, can we account for the failure of the universal
prediction that the Alien Land Law would be adopted by a
vote of 9 to 1? In the judgment of experienced observers,
the main reason lies in the fact that the present anti-Japa
nese feeling is not a spontaneous but a manufactured one,
founded upon neither the pressing need nor the real fear
of the people of California. Had the Japanese constituted
a real and imminent menace, half the agitation that was
directed against them would have been enough to set a race
feeling aflame and secure an undivided vote upon any such
proposition as the Alien Land Law.
The fact of the matter is that the growth of the Japanese
population or Japanese land holdings is yet far from a stage
wherein the bogy of the Japanese menace can be effectively
employed to scare the public or to stir up race hatred
against the Japanese. The situation may be summed up
somewhat like this: Most of the intelligent Californians,
who think about the question at all and who constitute the
minority, are with the Japanese. Most of the unthinking
Californians, who naturally constitute the majority of the
voters, are against the Japanese, not for any particular
reason, but because they are influenced by agitation.
There is no doubt that the political agitators and selfseeking newspapers have failed in their endeavor to rouse
race hatred against the Japanese. For the Japanese has the
innate capacity of getting along amicably with Americans.
Oriental only in the color of his skin, he is, in his mental
[Vol. 112, No. 2900
attitude and his temperament, essentially occidental. His

difference from other races is not so great as to create an
insurmountable barrier against him in a Western com
munity. Even in the present regrettable condition in Cali
fornia, engendered by persistent agitation, there is no trou
ble between Japanese and Americans who come in contact
with one another. Japanese employ,, and are employed by,
Americans. Americans are glad to employ, or to be
employed by, Japanese. Caucasian workers work side by
side with Japanese with no friction between them. At
hotels and cafes and at houses of amusement there is no
disposition to discriminate against the Japanese. No Japa
nese has suffered physical attack, no property owned by
Japanese has been damaged. And this in spite of all the
efforts of agitators and the press to foment antagonism
against the Japanese. But for such vicious efforts the Japa
nese and Americans can get along harmoniously.
If California is only disposed to apply reason and wisdom
to the Japanese question, its solution ought not to be diffi
cult. For Japan is but too anxious to dispose of the ques
tion if she can only do so without jeopardizing the dignity
and honor in which the Powers have by common consent
clothed her. He talks "through his hat" who says that
Tokio is scheming to perpetuate the California question,
utilizing it as a smoke-screen behind which Japan may
advance her interests in the Far East. Let us ignore such
twaddle, even though it has been voiced by the president
of a great university, and seriously consider the basis upon
which Japan and America may come to an agreement. This
basis, I think, can be found in the following propositions:
1. America must find a way to guarantee to the Japanese
the enjoyment of all privileges accorded to aliens coming
from the "most favored" country. This does not necessarily
mean the granting of citizenship to the Japanese, nor will
Japan ask for it as long as no individual State attempts
intentionally to discriminate against the Japanese under the
pretence of legislation applicable to all aliens.
2. Japan must agree to stop the emigration of her sub
jects to America with these three exceptions: (a) Japanese
who are lawfully here and who have established independent
business, commercial or agricultural, should be allowed to
send for wives whom they had married before they came to
America, or to go to Japan for marriage and return here
with wives within reasonable time, (b) Japanese lawfully
admitted and having established business in this country
should be allowed to send for their children under a certain
age, whom they had left in Japan, and who depend upon
their support, (c) Japanese lawfully admitted and estab
lishing domicile in this country should be allowed to go and
visit Japan with the privilege of returning.
This restrictive and discriminatory measure with regard
to Japanese immigration should be couched in plain terms
which permit of no misunderstanding, but should not be
included in a formal treaty of amity and commerce. It can
as well be provided in diplomatic notes to be exchanged
between the representatives of the two Governments and
to be made public in both countries. This will protect
Japan's dignity as a foremost Power, and will, at the same
time, prove far more effective than the present Gentleman's
Agreement. It is even more restrictive than the rigid immi
gration bill proposed by Representative Albert Johnson and
adopted by the House. "Live and let live" should be the
guiding principle not only among individuals, but among
nations and races.
Feb. 2, 1921]
The Nation
Japanese
175
Imperialism
By MILES M. SHEROWER
IS peace between America and Japan to be preserved? Ia
war inevitable? On both sides of the Pacific the jingo
press is "playing up" alarming stories that would seem to
indicate a widening rift between the two nations. Never
has there been such need of plain talking on international
relations, of a thorough understanding of the problems
involved, of the principles at stake, and of the forces
that are driving us toward the unspeakable calamity of war.
It is axiomatic that it takes two to make a fight. There
will be no war unless Japan wants it. Examining facts dis
passionately one cannot avoid the conclusion that the Japan
ese-American situation abounds with inflammable material
that needs only a spark to set off another world conflagra
tion. Let us examine the situation in Japan.
The Japanese ruling class faces an extremely complicated
situation at home. Prior to 1914 Japan was economically
a second-rate Power, without hope of ever rising higher.
Her war chests were depleted, her mercantile and industrial
progress was comparatively stagnant. The European War
brought a temporary flush to the cheeks of a nation that
had not yet recovered from the exhaustion of her struggle
with Russia. But in spite of vast fortunes made during
the war, seemingly ample reserves, Japan's economic posi
tion today is most unenviable. Unemployment is rife and
will become more acute as the present world-wide economic
slump hits bottom. Where only yesterday her factories
hummed to the whir of machinery, silence reigns. Japan's
reaction is undoubtedly more severe than is commonly sus
pected, for her depression set in eighteen months ago when
China launched the most effective commercial boycott
against her that the world has yet seen.
Besides, Japan is approaching the bursting-point from
overpopulation. Upon the shoulders of her leaders rests
the responsibility of caring for her surplus masses. The
country is not able today to produce sufficient food to sup
ply its immense domestic demand. Japan has been com
pelled to go to the Philippines, to French Saigon, to Austra
lia, to China and Manchuria in search of rice, wheat, and
other staples. Overpopulation is an immediate problem, and
outside of birth control, which would require a long educa
tional campaign, there are only two ways to meet it. One is
to send the surplus population abroad to shift for itself;
the other is to keep it at home and find means and methods
of feeding it.
The former involves colonization, and here Japan is faced
by a stone wall. Where can she send her millions? Austra
lia, Canada, the United States, and the other "white" coun
tries on the Pacific have effectively put up the bars. China
as a field for colonization is eliminated because she herself is
overpopulated and undergoes periodical famines. There has
been some emigration to Korea since its annexation to
Japan, but the Nipponese farmer finds it well nigh impossi
ble to compete with the hardy Korean, whose standard of
living is even lower than his own. Even if the Russians in
Siberia did not object to the Japanese, the latter would be
unable to endure the severe climatic conditions there. The
Japanese is unable to withstand either extremes of tempera
ture. Large-scale emigration appears impossible and at
best could only palliate an increasingly acute problem.
The latter alternative means keeping the population at

home and feeding it by importation of food from abroad.
But food must be paid for, and the bill can only be met in
international commerce by exports. Since Japan is compar
atively poor in natural resources and has practically no raw
products, she can pay for food only by "cashing in" her one
great resourceabundant labor power. She is thus forced
by inexorable natural and economic laws into the industrial
groove and in her search for markets comes into direct
competition with America, England, France, Germany, and
the other industrial states. With the exception of silk, in
which commodity conditions peculiarly favor her, Japan
must enter the industrial race on practically equal terms
with all competitors. Where can she sell her goods? Cer
tainly not in the home fields of her rivals. There she is
debarred by protective tariffs, her own industrial imma
turity, and other insurmountable factors. She must wind
her way into industrially undeveloped regions where her
rivals are as yet without preponderant influence and con
trol, and where the goods demanded by the native popula
tion are within her limited technical skill to produce.
These ideal conditions Japan finds in China, India, the
Philippines, and Java.
Still another important factor. Lacking largely the nat
ural resources which constitute the essential foundations
of an industrially powerful nation, with no iron ore and but
little coal, Japan is largely dependent for these essentials
upon her neighbor, China. She raises not a pound of cotton,
yet her spinning industry is a close rival to that of' the
United States or England. For much of her lumber she has
to go to Siberia. In short, Japan is economically self-suffi
cient neither in food supplies nor in the raw materials that
will keep her teeming millions at their benches in shop and
factory. Her economic status is almost wholly dependent
on China, which not only supplies Japan with food and raw
materials, but also furnishes a profitable market for Nip
pon's industrial output.
Japan is apprehensive of her national existence if her
sources of supply pass out of her reach. She knows that
her future and her prosperity are at the mercy of any Power
able to wrest from her the control of the regions she deems
vital to her industrial existence. She fears lest some Power
secure a point of vantage from which it may intercept her
line of communications with these localities. Yukichi Obata,
the present Japanese minister to China, in a recent inter
view said to the writer: "Japan cannot view with equa
nimity the encroachments of any foreign Power that will
menace her vital interests in this territory." The Japanese
is not enough of an idealist or is sufficiently practical not
to put his neck in a noose of which his friendly enemies
hold the other end.
Politically the country is in turmoil. Only a year ago
Japan was in the throes of a nation-wide agitation for adult
suffrage that threatened to carry the country to the brink
of revolution. The intense desire of the people for political
power is more than a hankering after representative gov
ernment; it springs from the hope that the mighty ballot
may relieve the economic distress from which they suffer.
Momentarily the agitation has subsided, but the fire is
176
The Nation
still smoldering and waits for the first puff of wind to

fan it into blazing fury. Significant and ominous is the
large and rapidly increasing number of political agitators
and avowed revolutionists who seem to thrive in the midst
of drastic persecution. The Japanese ruling class feels the
political situation becoming entirely too hot for it, and like
the ruling class in every other imperialistic nation it desires
to divert the attention of the masses from their domestic
ills by stirring their frenzy and passions against imaginary
foreign foes.
With these facts in mind we shall be able to understand
more clearly the motivations that have directed Japan's
policies for years past and which may bring her to the
threshold of war with the United States. The American
reader must sharply differentiate between the Japanese
people and the Japanese ruling class. He must realize that
in spite of her material development since the Shogunate,
Japan is politically still a century behind the times. By
no stretch of the imagination can she be described as a
democracy. Though she has all the trappings of con
stitutional government, she is really ruled by forces that
seldom come to the front. Probably the dominant of these
hidden powers is the military clique. Heirs of the Samurai
nobility which ruled Japan in feudal style up to a half
century ago, the militarists still retain and feed on the
glorious traditions of a bygone age, reinforced by the philos
ophy and institutions of the German Junker. Swashbuck
ling, swaggering snobs, they are animated by a profound
contempt for civilian government. Their motto is "Dai
Nippon fiber Alles"; their patriotic chauvinism and arro
gance know no bounds. Their policy is indiscriminate con
quest and aggrandizement, and though they are only indi
rectly interested in the ambitions of the Japanese indus
trialists they countenance them in so far as they offer op
portunities for action and military glory. These swordrattlers want to bring China under the banner of the
Rising Sun and are eager to seize a slice of Siberia purely
for the power and prestige in the enterprise.
The military clans in Japan today represent a supergovernment. They are above the law. Neither the War
Ministry nor the Naval Administration is accountable to the
Diet or even to the Cabinet for any activities on their part,
no matter how dangerous to the peace of the country. "Mili
tary secret vital to the defense of the country" is the answer
given to any member of the Diet bold enough to interpellate.
The Diet cannot compel the military clique to come to terms
by withholding necessary appropriations, for the wise men
who framed the Mikado's constitution inserted a proviso
that if the Diet refuses a vote of funds, or is dissolved
for any reason, the budget passed by the preceding session
automatically renews itself.
Closely allied with the military clans is the Big Business
plutocracy which relies for the realization of its vast
schemes on the sword. It, too, is intent on the conquest of
China by force of arms, by tactful diplomacy, or by eco
nomic penetration. It was this group that was responsible
for the Twenty-one Demands presented to Peking in 1915
the most brazen and daring attempt in modern times to ex
tinguish China as a sovereign state. Coveting a Japanese
protectorate in Eastern Siberia, this element has heartily
supported the wild exploits of the Japanese army in that
territory.
Then there is the great class of patriotic, yet peace-loving
lesser business men who thrill at the thought of controlling
[Vol. 112, No. 2900
China and Siberiavirgin fields chuck full of food, raw sup

plies and markets, ready for the hoe of intense Japanese
exploitation. They crave these prizes no less fervently
than the other groups, but would like to secure them
by diplomacy, economic pressure, and by peaceful under
standing. They resist the schemes of the military clique
because they wish to play safe and because a disastrous
military adventure may overwhelm their hard-won achieve
ments. They feel keenly that the military caste is largely
responsible for the foreign prejudice against the nation.
In reality, most of them are of a liberal turn of mind and
favor progress along sound democratic lines.
If we carefully survey the present outstanding differ
ences between the United States and Japan we can classify
them as follows:
1. The California question;
2. The principle of race equality;
3. America's resistance to Japanese aggression in China ;
4. America's interference with Japan's Siberian policy;
5. America's overt and covert sympathy with and assist
ance accorded to the anti-Japanese movement in China and
the Nationalist movement in Korea.
Though the first and second "causes" are not unknown
to the general public, scarcely any one realizes that
America's policy in the Orient has aroused the bitterest re
sentment in powerful Japanese quarters. America has
ignored Japan's pretentions to a Monroe Doctrineship over
China, in spite of the fact that Japan has steered a dip
lomatic course to impress the world that her interests in the
country were predominant. The outbreak of the war gave
Japan a rare opportunity to strengthen her position on the
Asiatic continent. With the tacit or secret acquiescence of
the leading Allied Powers, Tokio presented the infamous
Twenty-one Demands to China. The Japanese militarists
have not yet forgotten America's informal remonstrances
while the negotiations were under way, nor the bombshell
she threw into their camp by an official statement that she
would not recognize any treaty infringing her own rights
or China's sovereignty.
In Siberia, too, American diplomacy has been constantly
checking and thwarting Japan's ambitions. The State
Department's recent protest against Japan's officially an
nounced intention of occupying Sakhalin and Eastern
Siberia has been a bitter pill for the War Office to swallow.
It is not so much America's interference in the past, but
rather Japan's realization that America is likely to pursue
a vigorous, unswerving policy vis-a-vis China and Siberia, a
policy antagonistic to Japanese aggrandizement, which mad
dens the Nipponese imperialists.
Just recently Japan has had a convincing demonstration
of American sentiment on Far Eastern affairs. When the
Shantung decision of the Peace Conference was announced,
sympathy for China in her struggle against Japanese dom
ination became an important factor in the American political
struggle against the League and the Treaty. The knowl
edge of Japan's bloody excesses in smothering Korea's
pitiful cry for freedom did not strengthen Japan's cause.
In the Senate, China's rights were championed and the
Shantung reservation to the treaty was passed. Throughout
China and Korea American newspapers, missionaries, social
workers, and business men undeniably sympathized with the
anti-Japanese movement and even encouraged it.
As has been pointed out, Japan's Realpolitik centers on
the continent of Asia. She is not primarily interested in
Feb. 2, 1921]
The Nation
the colonization of California, or in the maintenance of the

rights of her citizens already established there. Japan will
never come to blows with America on the California issue,
no matter how onerous and taxing the provocation to her
"national honor." But the shrewd and wily diplomats at
Tokio have often blessed their lucky stars that there is a
California question. Japan knows that a war for her rights
in California would be suicidal, barren of fruit, and there
fore thoroughly impractical. But that does not lessen the
availability of California as a smoke-screen behind which
to hide more important but less popular schemes.
The same thing may be said of the race-equality issue.
It is a most valuable talking-point, behind which an infinite
number of platitudes and a great deal of moral pressure
can be mustered, but once realized it would become for the
Japanese a Pyrrhic victory. Should Japan by some chance
stroke of fate win this point no one in the world would be
more surprised and disappointed than the suave, posing Jap
anese statesmen who are fervently battling for this principle
at the diplomatic bargain counter and who at heart have no
desire to see their people assimilated by any other nation.
When Japan demanded the race-equality plank in the League
of Nations covenant, everybody in the Far East knew that
Japan had deliberately sacrificed this issue in order to force
the Peace Conference's approval of the Shantung theft.
Japan's big business and militarist combination which
for obvious reasons never appears in the forefront in tense
diplomatic negotiations stands ready to sacrifice and con
cede every point in these two seemingly vital issues if it
can secure its ambitious schemes embraced in the third and
fourth points and America's neutrality on the fifth question.
And there is in Japan a powerful element ready to wage
war for these ends if America does not yield. But to popu
larize the struggle and provide a moral background for
their cause, the Japanese ruling classes will bring about a
situation where their own people will seemingly compel them
to declare war. The California and race-equality issues will
be flaunted before the masses, incident upon incident will be
piled up, the press will work itself into a frenzy, and the
passions and fury of the people will be goaded to the point
from which there can be no retreat. Needless to say
America's jingoes will do their part.
It is Japan's demand for the unhindered exploitation of
China and Eastern Siberia for which the battle for the
supremacy of the Pacific will ultimately be fought.
America's policy in the Orient, to the extent that we have
had a consistent policy anywhere, has traditionally favored
the Open Door. It has been our aim to preserve China as
a poaching ground for free exploitation by all nations
on equal terms. China in the American school of diplomacy
is to be maintained as an open mart for the traders of the
world without let or hindrance from any Power which has
been there first and staked out "squatter claims" or "spheres
of influence." Japan, in spite of her lip-service to the Open
Door and her disavowal of any designs on China's terri
torial integrity or sovereignty, has for the last quarter of
a century pursued a very definite and calculated policy
that was bound eventually to bring China under her ex
clusive economic and political domination. Her ambition is
to secure her sources of supply in China not by the courtesy
and sufferance of the other Powers, but by the more tan
gible rights of ownership and control. Equally does Japan
desire China as a dumping ground for her own industrial
output; other nations may bring their surplus here, but
177
only after she has disposed of her own accumulated stores.

The point may be raised that it seems hardly likely that
Japan should choose the present moment for her passage
at arms with the United States. America today practi
cally controls the "sinews of war"financial power. She has
just emerged triumphant and proud from her decisive
share in the European War. Her navy is at its highest
pitch of strength and efficiency and her borders contain
four million men trained in arms. Japan's present haughty
course can be explained on only one groundthe AngloJapanese Alliance, which was to expire in 1921 but which
has been temporarily extended. Critical observers of Far
Eastern affairs profess to find in the continuation of this
alliance the clue for the present unwarrantably truculent
attitude of Japan, for it seems almost suicidal for Japan
to throw down the gage of battle to a nation that is
preponderantly more powerful than herself, unless she is
assured of foreign encouragement and possible assistance.
The Anglo-Japanese Alliance was originally consummated
in 1902 and was revised into an offensive and defensive
pact after the Russo-Japanese War. Its raison d'etre was
an open secret to the diplomatic chancelleries of Europe.
Aimed at Czarist Russia which at that time was very active
in Central Asia and which was a constant dread peril
to the security of England's Indian empire, it possessed the
virtue of a two-edged sword by restraining Russia from
interfering with Japan's expansionist dream on the main
land of Asia. Britain also desired naval protection for her
Eastern possessions against Germany's threatening armada.
With the defeat of Germany and the disintegration of
Russia, Britain's need for the alliance has certainly disap
peared. Not so Japan's. She wants the alliance as a
resource and security against America. There is no doubt
in the minds of Far Eastern publicists that Great Britain
was bludgeoned into a continuation of the alliance by Japan's
potential power to undermine British security in India. To
add point to the force of her argument Japan picked on this
most sensitive chord of British harmony by pointing to a
weapon which she has developed and at which she has
become very adeptpropaganda.
Japan certainly does not expect England to join her in
the event of war with America. Indeed, England has
recently specifically stated that the United States was not
aimed at in the treaty. But Japan figures on a benevolent
neutrality and through the alliance feels she commands it.
This much is certain. Should war come, it will be a
commercial war, a war of two rival capitalistic interests, and
the stake will be the privilege of exploiting the world's
prize undeveloped fields. And while tourists dote on cherry
blossoms and geisha maidens, while business men with their
tongues in their cheeks pledge each other enduring friend
ships, while "unofficial" missions desert these arid regions
for oases where the cup may yet be filled to overflowing,
and while "frank and open" deliberations are being held
behind closed doors, hidden master hands calculatingly move
their chessmen across the world's checkerboard, maneuver
ing for time and position, awaiting the flare that is to signal
the attack. It will be only through a truly full, frank, and
open discussion of these matters, the abolition of secret
diplomatic notes, maneuvers, agreements that the imminent
peril of another hideous world clash can be averted. And
this presupposes a fundamental change in the hearts, minds,
and methods of the dominant "statesmen" in both Japan
and America.
178
The Nation
For an Immigration Policy

By SIDNEY L. GULICK
[Vol. 112, No. 2900
and to enter wholesomely and happily into our political life.

There should be no race differential legislation, discriminat
ing between aliens here among us. All should be given
equal treatmentequal protection of the laws. Opportun
ity for citizenship should be given to every alien who quali
HE House of Representatives has passed the Johnson

bill. It suspends immigration for one year and is
confessedly an emergency measure. It contemplates the
preparation in the near future of another measure that
should embody a permanent policy. The present emergency
has been plainly in view for a couple of years. It should
have been provided for before this. Last January a one
year emergency measure was adopted extending till March
4, 1921, the passport vis system enacted as a war measure.
Are we to continue passing emergency-immigration legisla
tion?
Or shall we provide a policy suitable for permanent
application?
The National Committee for Constructive Immigration
Legislation has been at work on a permanent policy for
several years. Its proposals have been gradually taking
shape. Hundreds of thoughtful men have indorsed its
principles. Two slightly differing bills have been intro
duced into Congress embodying its general proposals, that
fies, and every alien who plans to stay here permanently

with his family should be urged to qualify and to become
an American citizen.
The Welty and Sterling bills seek to embody these prin

ciples in concrete form and technical language. Their prin
cipal features may be briefly described as follows:
1. The creation of a federal immigration board with

defined duties, responsibilities, and powers.
2. The gathering of certain facts by the board in regard
to economic conditions in each State of the Union and in
regard to the assimilation of aliens of the different peoples

among uS.
3. The determination yearly by the board of the number

of immigrants who may be admitted, regard being had to
the facts secured and to the general policy defined above.
4. The preparation of a federal text-book on American
citizenship to serve as the universal standard for naturaliza
tion.
All aliens applying for citizenship must be able to
by Representative Welty (H.R. 14196) introduced May 22,
read and to pass an examination on this text-book.
1920, and that by Senator Sterling (S. 4594) introduced

December 10, 1920.
In the formulation of its general principles and concrete
5. Amendment of the present naturalization law, open

ing the door to citizenship to every one who duly qualifies.
6. The repeal of all special laws dealing with Chinese,
proposals the National Committee has had in mind a num
many of which are in conflict with our treaties with China.
ber of objectives. Among these may be mentioned the con

viction that the permanent success of our democracy de
pends closely on the admittance of only so many and such
of a pledge of obedience to the laws of the United
aliens as will in due time become truly Americanized. We

must, moreover, admit even them only in proportion to our
capacity to employ them without endangering American
standards of living and labor. If we admit aliens faster
than they can, in a reasonable length of time, learn to speak

English and accept the general principles of fair and free
discussion, honest voting, and loyal acceptance of majority
decisions, we endanger our democracy. And if we admit
them more rapidly than our economic situation justifies, we
7. The requirement from all aliens entering America

States.
This policy is suited alike to hard times and to prosperous

times. It makes unnecessary all emergency legislation.
The board can lower or even stop immigration altogether
if and when the economic situation requires it. And when
prosperity returns it can open the doors in proportion to
our renewed capacity to take in more aliens. The plan is
flexible and scientific. It limits the power of the board to
a range of ten per cent in its decisions.
The board may exclude all immigration and it may admit

up to ten per cent for any given people, of those of that
people who have become American citizens including their
nomic justice. This, too, will be highly dangerous.
American-born children. The Sterling bill also provides
The fundamental principles back of the proposals of the
that the total immigration in any single year may not
National Committee, therefore, are to admit annually
exceed three-fourths of one per cent of the total population
* 1. Only so many as we can assimilate and Americanize,
and also
of the United States, nor may the immigration of any
2. Only so many as we can steadily and wholesomely W single people exceed one-fifth of one per cent of the entire
cannot give either them or our own industrial workers eco
employ without lowering American standards of labor and

living.
Another fundamental principle of the National Commit
tee is that in the regulation of immigration fair and friendly

and equal treatment must be granted to every people.
Aliens are not to be excluded from America from reasons
of prejudice, nor on mere a priori grounds. If complete

exclusion of any given people is required such exclusion
should be based on definite experience. The slowness or
impossibility of assimilation, tendencies to excessive con
ygestion, and economic difficulties are adequate grounds on

which to base a policy of rigid limitation or even of com
plete exclusion.
Distinction should be made between the regulation of

immigration and the treatment of immigrants already in
America. In regard to these latter every effort should be
made to help them learn English, to understand our ways,
population.
The necessary brevity of this paper prevents further

statement of other important features and advantages of
the proposed legislation. But the writer would suggest
that the reader send for copies of the Sterling bill (S. 4594)
and give it careful examination. If on the whole it meets
with approval, a suitable letter of indorsement sent to
members of the Senate and House would help to secure its

enactment into law.
The time surely has come for the adoption of a policy

for the scientific regulation of all immigration, free from
race discrimination, but admitting only so many of each
people annually as our developing experience shows we can
truly incorporate into our body politic and into our eco
nomic life. An immigration policy of this general character
is essential to the permanence and success of our American
democracy.
Feb.2, 1921]
The Nation
Our Armament Race with Japan

By HENRY RAYMOND MUSSEY
179
in this country, outside a few blatherskite editors and poli

ticians, really wants to attack the Japanese, despite the
tons of print paper annually misused in misinforming us
about that interesting people. The sins of the Japanese
Government in Korea and Manchuria and China are of a
HE Governments of the United States and Japan are

both suffering from an acute attack of navalitis. Both
sufferers greatly need a mild injection of common-sense.
During the past fiscal year we added to our navy one battle
ship, 96 destroyers, 18 submarines, and 109 other vessels;
and we had under construction on October 1, 11 battleships,
6 battle cruisers, and 123 other ships, practically all fight
ing craft. Meanwhile, Secretary Daniels and a train of
admirals go before Congress and talk profoundly about

rounding out the navy, whatever that may mean, winding
up with the genial recommendation that as soon as the capi
tal ships now under way are launched we enter upon a new
three-year program of 88 additional vessels, including

3 battleships and a battle cruiser.
What is the excuse offered for this amiable lunacy? Get
ting down from vague talk about the present state of the
world, protecting our commerce, having incomparably

the most adequate navy in the world, and other meaning
less phrases, we come to the brute fact that, unless we are
crazy, we are building against a potential enemy. At the
moment, despite anti-British propaganda, it can scarcely be
Great Britain; for the one-time mistress of the seas has

suspended all construction of capital ships until the Ad
miralty can determine whether the dreadnaught is of any
further use, until the Treasury can find money to build
ships, and until the Foreign Office can discover whether the
piece with the excesses of imperialism everywhere and al

ways, but they do not threaten us with attack or even with
serious injury.
Moreover, there is no possibility that we
can ever make the Japanese Government repent of those
sins by building warships, or even by using them. The wild

naval scramble of today on both sides of the Pacific is simply
dominated by the psychology of fear, not of reason.
Its consequences, however, will be none the less inevitable
and appalling on that account. We have sunk $735,000,000

in new naval construction since 1916, to say nothing of
special building during the war, while our naval appropria
tions for the same years have totaled $5,325,000,000. Ex
pecting 1922 to be a year of peace, Secretary Daniels thinks
he can worry along on $696,000,000a sum equal to our
entire naval appropriations from 1900 to 1907, and consid
erably more than we spent in building warships from 1900

until we entered the war.
Possibly we can stand such a
pace, but we shall certainly drive our rivals into bankruptcy

and bolshevism, unless war intervenes as the culmination
of the mad delirium.
And, meanwhile, what of the trade whose maintenance is
alleged on both sides as a necessary reason for the wild

armament race?
Curiously enough, more than a third of
Government of the United States is going utterly daft.
all our Asiatic imports come from Japan, and she takes
materially more than half of our exports to the greatest of
continents. Our Japanese imports rose from $66,000,000
in 1910 to $527,000,000 in 1920, and exports from $22,
Lord Rothermere points out that no nation will henceforth

enjoy naval supremacy and that Great Britain cannot afford
to spend any money on naval construction at present. It is
not Great Britain against whom we are building, but Japan.
000,000 to $453,000,000 (more than twenty-fold). Just how

we are to cultivate our best Asiatic customer by building
battleships and ultimately making war on her is hard to see.
But we are told that Japan is stealing our Chinese trade.
In that distant island empire our own folly is being
Therefore, by some mysterious logic, we must outstrip her
matched. The Japanese people are already taxed almost

beyond endurance. Yet the naval program finally authorized
(after years of discussion) in 1919 requires them to pro
vide the money to build during the next eight years 8 battle
ships and 8 cruisers, along with 75 destroyers, submarines,
and other fighting craft. Work already appropriated for is
to cost 584,000,000 yen (about $292,000,000), and when this
first part of the program is completed in 1923 it is expected
at once to go forward with the remainder of the plan, though
the funds are not yet appropriated. Japanese financial
yet further in warship construction. Yet while Japan was

stealing our Chinese trade, our Chinese imports stubbornly
rose from $30,000,000 in 1910 to $227,000,000 in 1920, and
our exports from $16,000,000 to $119,000,000. It is all very
odd. Somehow even the total figures of our Asiatic trade,
though running well over two billions in 1920, make the
two-thirds of a billion asked next year by the Navy look like
expensive insurance, especially as it is apparent that a war
would automatically cut off nearly half that trade.
The common-sense of the situation is plain enough. So
long as both Governments go on building battleships, we
may have polite speeches and international deputations ad
nauseam, but the underlying process of developing suspicion
and fear will go right onand the more fear the more
navy. Neither people, it is plain enough, has any reason
able ground for building a navy against the other, except
resources are strained to the breaking-point, yet the mad
race goes merrily forward. According to the Japan Year

Book, there is reason to believe that the authorities have
in mind a still more ambitious project. No intelligent man
will doubt it; naval authorities always have more ambitious
projects in mind. Fortunately they are not always realized.
And why must Japan build? Against us, of course. Can
did Americans must admit, certainly, that the Japanese Gov
ernment has more shadow of justification for its fear of us
than our Government for its fear of the Japanese.
Re
calling Hawaii, Guam, Yap, Samoa, and the Philippines

(now with their two naval stations), not to speak of Mr.
Washington Vanderlips concession in Kamchatka, and re
membering the loudly avowed plans of our Navy Depart
ment for expansion in the Pacific, it is not wholly strange
that public opinion in Japan is jumpy concerning the
future designs of our diplomats and financiers.
Yet no one
a desire to put battleships behind its foreign investors and

traders. If either people wants to do that, knowing the
cost and the consequences, such is its privilege. But neither
people need let itself be fooled with specious pleas of na

tional defense, protection of commerce, and like bosh that
covers the real meaning of the policy. If the peoples really
want national safety and commerce and peace they have got
to pierce through the veil of solemn humbug that enshrouds

this suicidal navy building and tell their governors, in
words that cannot be mistaken, to disarm.
Until that day
comes, it is vain to talk of peace. Has not the day arrived?
The Nation
180
Wanted: More Tolerance and

Understanding
By WARREN RYDER
THAT politics was a potent factor in creating the antiJapanese agitation in California seems to find com
plete proof in a statement issued by Congressman Isaac
Siegel, a member of the Congressional Committee on Immi
gration and Naturalization which concluded an investiga
tion of the Japanese situation on the Pacific Coast, appear
ing in the Christian Science Monitor in its issue of August
12, 1920. In that statement Congressman Siegel, speaking
of the Japanese situation as he found it in California, says :
"The very fact that they" [the Japanese] "cannot obtain
American citizenship is what is making them the 'football'
among many politicians in that State" ; and "it is to be re
gretted that a United States Senator is seeking reelection
mainly upon that issue." Mr. Siegel's statement would ap
pear to cover this phase of the subject very thoroughly.
Another factor in creating the anti-Japanese sentiment,
and in keeping it alive and growing after its creation, is
race prejudicesomething which, while sometimes dor
mant, is always existent in California, and which has been
fanned into an intense flame by an agitation that has been
continuous and most active for some time past. True, the
leading opponents of the Japanese, in testifying before the
Congressional Committee, usually prefaced their remarks
by an assertion that they held no race prejudice, but their
subsequent statements convicted them of being actuated,
unconsciously if not consciously, by race prejudice and noth
ing else. What other reason can be ascribed as the actuat
ing motive of a man or woman who testifies that the Japa
nese are loyal, are industrious, are sober, are frugal and
thrifty, are cleanly and orderly, are law-abiding and peace
ful, and still opposes them? And yet there was not one
witness appearing before the Congressional Committee who
did not declare or admit that these traitscommonly called
virtueswere characteristic of the Japanese. Nor did a
single witness, no matter what his arguments and final
deductions were, accuse the Japanese of being bomb-throw
ers, disturbers of the peace, law-breakers, drunkards, or
drones. Why, then, the bitter opposition? Why the con
demnation of this people for traits the existence of which
in others arouses nothing but commendation and praise?
Must it not be because they are Japanese? What other
answer is consistent or reasonable? Furthermore, although
the Committee's hearings were widely advertised and its
invitation to all persons interested to appear and testify
given wide publicity, not a single witness in the whole State
appeared to assert that a Japanese had deprived him of his
means of livelihood. Not a single artisan or mechanic or
common laborer, if you please, came to say that a Japa
nese had taken his position or had forced him out of work;
and to support the charge, made day in and day out in
California and heard all over the land, that the "whites"
were "being driven from the land," not a single farmer
or farm-laborer or former farmer or former farm-laborer
appeared to testify that he had been driven from the
land by a Japanese. Nor did any witness testify to
knowingof his own knowledgeof a single person who
had been driven from the land, deprived of his job, or
[Vol. 112, No. 2900
separated from his source of livelihood by a Japanese.

The main trouble is, it seems to me, that those who are
opposing the Japanese have been entirely too willing to make
broad, general statements upon the matter without taking
the trouble to prove them. Take, for instance, the statistics
submitted to the Congressional Committee relative to popu
lation increase and birth-rate of the Japanese in California,
statistics that have been given the widest publicity as tend
ing to show the "menace" of the Japanese. What do those
figures reveal? They reveal the fact that in ten years the
Japanese population of California has increased some forty
thousand, a purely normal growth in view of attending cir
cumstances, and that the birth-rate is probably as great as
that of the first generation of all immigrants, no matter of
what race, who have come to America. Regarding the
Japanese birth-rate, the report prepared by the California
State Board of Control ("California and the Oriental") has
these significant things to say: "While the Japanese birth
rate is far in excess of that of all other nationalities in this
State, this is not infrequently true of a new people immi
grating into a new land. Also among the Japanese, which
is a new race here, most of the adults are comparatively
young and of the family-raising ages, while among the
whites, a race long resident in California, there is neces
sarily the usual proportion of elderly persons."
It might also be stated, and very properly in this connec
tion, that no figures appear in the Board's report showing
the birth-rate of the "whites" by nationalities, i. e., of Ital
ian, French, Portuguese, Greek, German, Austrian, Swedish,
English, etc., but that all "white" births have been put un
der the one head, although it is common knowledge that
the birth-rate of certain of the nationalities named is much
higher than that of others. In this connection observation
leads one to say that the birth-rate among the first genera
tion of immigration Italians in San Francisco will doubtless
be found to be as great as that of the Japanese anywhere
in California or America. This statement is not intended
to criticize the Italian race, or to make a comparison of the
Italian and Japanese races in other respects, but solely to
show that certain things are alarming to certain men in
California only when those things characterize the Japanese.
Regarding the acreage of land operated by the Japanese
in California, it is negligible when compared to the total
in the State; and as the State has already enacted a law
denying to the Japanese the right to purchase land, and as
there is no law compelling anyone to lease his land to
them, the land question presents no real difficulty.
Thus, to any man who is impartial and who will take the
time to ascertain the real facts, the conviction must come
that the so-called "Japanese menace" is wholly imaginary,
and that in reality the Japanese are being condemned not
for any vices but for their virtues. There is a menace, how
ever, but it comes not from the Japanese. There is a menace
to tolerance, to truth, to justice and righteousness and
honor and international comity that comes from this wide
spread and, it would seem deliberate, excitement to race
prejudice. That, and not the Japanese, is the real menace.
In conclusion let it be said that this is not an attempt to
prove the Japanese to be paragons of virtue or without
faults. Nothing of the kind. Nor, indeed, is it a plea to
"let down the bars"; but it is an attempt to point out what
are considered injustices to the Japanese and an argument
against permitting race prejudice to enter into or influence
the arbitrament of the Japanese question.
The Nation
Feb.2, 1921]
181
What Japan Wants

By ADACHI KINNOSUKE
AID Confucius: Ishoku tatte reisetsu wo shiru. By
which he meant that enough food for the stomach and
enough raiment for the body are not only the beginning
of wisdom, but also of culture, politeness, and of honor.
This was said some four hundred years before the days of
Caesar: it has been tested down through the ages and never
has been found wanting. In the savage struggle for exist
ence and ascendancy, in the interplay of a million varied

and various human interests called civilization, the ancient
saying is proving truer and truer every day. Not only with
individuals but with nationsnations like Japan, which do
not happen to be of the favored children of Dame Nature.

For the premier problem of Japan of this year of grace
1921 is quite as elementary and as elemental as all that:

Japan wants, first of all, enough food for her empty
stomachsthe empty stomachs which are increasing at the
rate of 700,000 a year. If our American friends would
know the breadth and depth of this fundamental problem
of ours, let them look the following facts in the face:

The total area of Japan proper is 148,756 square miles.
There are 55,960,000 souls on this area today accord
ing to the figures of the census just completed, nearly 400

people to a square mile. The single State of California has
155,652 square miles and her population in 1920 was put at
3,426,536, about 22 to a square mile.
And half or even one-tenth of the story is not told in the
above comparison. For the arable area of Nippon proper
is about 15 per cent of its total area, while nearly 29,000,000

acres or 43,750 square miles of the total area of California
nearly 30 per cent of it, in other wordswere classed as
farm acreage in the 1910 census. Japan is a string of nar
row islands of volcanic origin which, if not quite as sterile
as Attica or as stony as some of the abandoned New Eng
do? What is to be her answer to the ever-increasing num

ber of empty stomachs among her people? A more inten
sive cultivation of her soil? Any observer who investigates
at first hand on the spot will have no trouble at all to
see that he or any other mortal cannot even conceive of a
greater degree of intensive cultivation than is being carried
on in Japan. Mountain sides are terraced like a garden and
every inch is utilized. It is a cultivation where every grain
of wheat is individually planted in a row and tended like an
onion bed, harvested with sickles by hand, the most inten
sive cultivation imaginable, are the words of Mr. Frank
A. Vanderlip who went there recently and saw for himself.
Emigration then? The attitude of our friends in Cali
fornia on the question of Japanese immigration is too well

advertised to need comment.
There to the south of us is
the great island continent of Australia. It must be a great

and glorious feeling for Australians, like Mr. Hughes,
to sit to a feast of superabundance, safe within their high
and forbidding stone wall of exclusion, utterly oblivious of
the starving millions whose corpses garnish the foot of the
stone wall outside, singing the hymns of white Australia
to drown any cry of distress that might float over the fence.
It has been said that some millionaires enjoy the warmth
of their palatial residences in spite of andsometimes be
cause ofthe unfortunates freezing to death outside.
What does Japan want? Japan wants a certain portion
of her people to emigrate and settle on the waste lands of
Australia and the Americas and become self-supporting.
Nothing can solve the food problem of Japan more quickly
and more effectively. The farmers of Japan know they can
cultivate the land quite as well as the farmers in any other
country. All they ask is to be given a piece of land and an

opportunity to work it. They are industrious, sober, frugal,
and law abiding. They still count these qualities among
the virtues, although they were denounced in California as
something akin to crimes. Anyway, they cling to the idea
that they are good farmersgood enough to be entitled to a
chance.
And that is precisely what the Japanese people
land farms, are broken up everywhere with rocky moun
want. But, of course, there are a few things to be consid
tains. All of which accounts for the small percentage of the
ered in connection with this question of emigration. And

we do consider them in a rather humble frame of mind.
Much has been said of the arrogant and dictatorial atti
productive area of the country. Now the eight million gods

of our honored ancestors may be able to tell the people in
Japan to roam up and down the rocky shores and be good
and content and sweet tempered and invite their empty
stomachs forth to feast on the superlative beauty of her
natural scenes and on the color and poetry of her far-famed

cherry flowers. But certainly not the people of California
with one square mile to every 22 of her peopleand that,
too, in one of the most favored fields in creation; certainly
not our Australian friends with their 1.5 humans to every
square mile of as promising a soil as any; nor the Canadians

who command one whole square mile to every 2 of her
population. In 1918, Japan imported 89,755,678 yen's worth
of rice from British India, French Indo-China, and other
countries. This fact is eloquent to anyone familiar with
the common people of Japan and their taste. They look
upon foreign rice with altogether unreasonable prejudice,
so much so that the home department of our Government
has had to send hundreds of its own officials to lecture all
over the country and show the people how to prepare foreign
rice and teach them how good it is.
Some anti-Japanese propagandists of China and America

try to argue these facts out of existence. But there they
stand, big as life and stubborn as truth. What can Japan
tude of the Japanese Government and its diplomats, more

especially its militarists, on the question of emigration.
The perpetual wonder to the people of Japan themselves is
just where and how such fanciful fiction could have been
conceived. Has their Government ever challenged the stu
pendous claim of the Australians for a white Australia?

Have any of her diplomatists or any of her militarists
breathed so much as a word against the injustice of such a
claim? History is entirely innocent of any such incident.
That is not allin fact far from it. After the door had been
closed and locked to the 3,000,000 square miles by something

like 5,000,000 Australians who are there and by Canada and
by the United States, our people turned to perhaps the only

places leftto South America and Mexico across the Pacific
and to Manchuria and Siberia. Then something happened
which is aptly described by Mr. Frank A. Vanderlip: But

we have got our hands raised; we sit back here occupying a
highly moral attitude and we do nothing. We put no money
into the situation, no force of troops. We put nothing into it
but criticism and we say to Japan our hand is up. You
must not go into China or Siberia. Keep your hands off the
continent of Asia.
182
The Nation
And what has the Japanese Government to say of all this?

It has just explained and is still explaining to the United
States innumerable things and conditions as though it were
a prisoner at the bar. It seems to be even afraid of offend
ing the delicate sensibilities of those California politicians
who have such splendid voices to shout their own conten
tions, but no ears to listen to what the Japanese have to say.
With a perfectly legal treaty entitling our people to enter
the United States, as freely as any other people, we offered
the United States the well-known Gentleman's Agreement.
More, as the Yorozu of Tokio declares: "We have the Gen
tleman's Agreement in force and have furthermore adopted
a policy of restricting emigration to Mexico solely to please
America." It should be stated that the people of Japan are
neither opposed to nor severely critical of the conciliatory
attitude of their Government toward the United States.
In the days when the California question was at fever heat,
the Chugai of Tokio urged the people of Japan "to act de
liberately by relying principally on the moral instinct of
the Americans and on their professed faith in justice and
humanity."
So far as America is concerned, all we ask is that she
deal with our people fairly. This is your country. We do
not say as some students of history have said that you
have robbed the American Indian of all this fair and fruitful
land; that it is no more yours than it is any one's else
who can claim it in the name of civilization and progress.
We are free to admit that the American Indian had never
and could perhaps never have made the great country blos
som as the State of California is blossoming today, and that
for the good of humanity at large and in the name of civili
zation your ancestors had a perfect right to come and occupy
it. And since this is your country, we shall be the last
people on earth to force ourselves on you. Our people do
not care to come to this country unless they are wanted,
all the anti-American vaporings of Tokio labor agitators
and politicians to the contrary notwithstanding. Emigra
tion as far as the United States is concerned is therefore
no longer a live issue with the people and Government of
Japan. It is dead. Its ghost is conjured up only by the
anti-Japanese propagandists in America and the third-rate
politicians of California. We ask of the United States
only this: that she keep her treaty faith with our people
that they do not turn into a "scrap of paper" the historic
document signed on 21st of February, 1911, by Knox and
Uchida, who happens to be the present Minister of State for
Foreign Affairs of Japan, which reads:
The subjects or citizens of each of the High Contracting
Parties shall have liberty to enter, travel, and reside in the
territories of the other ... to lease land for residential and
commercial purposes . . . upon the same terms as native
subjects or citizens. . . . The subjects or citizens of each of
the High Contracting Parties shall receive in the territories of
the other the most constant protection and security for their
persons and property and shall enjoy in this respect the same
rights and privileges as are or may be granted to native sub
jects or citizens on their submitting themselves to the conditions
imposed upon the native citizens and subjects.
No language could be clearer concerning the prop
erty rights of the Japanese in the United States, and
I presume that the State of California is still a part
of the United States. Now, the lands which the Japa
nese have purchased in California legally in the past can
never be argued away, can never be painted or powdered
into anything else but the property of the Japanese resi
[Vol. 112, No. 2900
dents in California, and as such should be entitled to the

same lawful protection enjoyed by all the native citizens of
California.
We ask also that the United States grant to those
Japanese now residing there and who desire to become
citizens the right of citizenship on precisely the same basis
as any other foreigner. In some sections of California
Americans ostracize the Japanese, discriminate against
them, deny them citizenship; they refuse them all oppor
tunities to become Americanized. Then they denounce the
Japanese for not becoming citizens of the United States and
as being incapable of assimilation. As a matter of historic
fact, no other race can equal the Japanese in their adap
tability. The Tokio Jiji is right when it says that "Japan
in the last fifty years has been adapting herself to Occi
dental civilization . . . hers is no doubt a living in
stance of the harmonization of the two civilizations."
Another thing: Whenever America is tempted to dictate
Japan's policy in China we would beg her to try to do a very
difficult thing, namely, to put herself in the place of Japan.
In other words, we would beg her to consider just how she
would feel and act and react if Japan were to take it into
her head to dictate the Mexican policy of the United States.
And even if only the responsible heads of the State Depart
ment at Washington would do this difficult thing for us, the
Yorozu would have no occasion for making such a comment
at this: "Americans in China seize every opportunity to
misrepresent Japan and to set the world against Japan in
favor of China. ... In short, America which sent a
warship to take part in the ceremony of unveiling the
Perry monument at Kurihama years ago has become a
thing of the past. Why? Because American economic
imperialism has found in Japan a stumbling block to its
conquest of the Far East."

George T. Odell is an experienced Washington correspond
ent now representing a number of newspapers.
Bruce Bliven is the managing editor of the New York
Globe and was for many years a resident of California.
Thomas W. Lamont is a member of J. P. Morgan & Co.
He was financial adviser to the American Peace Com
mission at Paris, and recently made a trip to the Orient
to negotiate the China Consortium.
K. K. Kawakami is an author and publicist of Japanese
birth and for many years a resident in the United States
who has made important contributions to leading publi
cations on contemporary questions.
Miles M. Sherower is an American journalist who has re
cently returned after residence in China and Japan,
where he made a special study of Far Eastern political
problems.
Sidney L. Gulick was for many years a missionary in
Japan. He is the author of numerous publications deal
ing with Japanese-American problems and is at present
Secretary of the National Committee for Constructive
Immigration Legislation.
Henry Raymond Mussey is the Washington correspondent
of The Nation.
Warren Ryder is a resident of California, who for the past
year has made a searching investigation of racial rela
tionships in his own State.
Adachi Kinnosuke is a Japanese journalist, resident in
the United States. He is the American correspondent
of the Tokio Jiji.
Feb. 2, 1921]
Facts and
The Nation
Fancies on the Coast
CALIFORNIA passed on November 2 the initiative land

law by a large majority (668,432 to 222,086). But
it really settles nothing. In fact it only aggravates the
situation. Governor Stephens said in his letter of June 19,
1920, to Secretary of State Colby that the law even if passed
would avail nothing and that the State by itself alone can
not solve the question. Chester Rowell affirmed (Septem
ber 15, 1920) that the new law would "have little effect.
Leases will be changed into contracts. . . . Nothing
will have happened except the impressive declaration of the
people of California that they do not want the Japanese."
This, however, is a superficial judgment. The enactment
of that law has already profoundly affected American-Japa
nese relations. International tension has been markedly in
creased. Another milestone has been passed by the two
nations on the road leading toward a fateful precipice. Un
less we can find a fork in the road along which we are
traveling, tragedy is in sight. The enactment of that law
shows that the people of California can be led by dema
gogues; and that personal and political interests have little
regard for facts and truth and international interests.
The majority of the people of California have been led
to believe that a serious menace faces the State because of
the presence of the Japanese now there; that Japan has
been flagrantly violating the Gentlemen's Agreement; that
large immigration has been steadily flowing into California ;
and that the Japanese birth-rate threatens to overwhelm
the white population in the near future. These popular
beliefs are quite without foundation. The beliefs are never
theless a fact, and a fact of ominous significance. Much
psychological dynamite has been manufactured. The peo
ple, for lack of knowledge, and correct information, cannot
exercise sound judgment on local, national, and international
issues of the greatest importance in which Japanese are
concerned. What then are the facts?
1. The Gentleman's Agreement stopped Japanese male
labor immigration in 1908. Immigration fell from 30,226
in 1907 to 3,111 in 1909. Since it got into working order
the total increase of Japanese population in continental
United States by excess of arrivals over departures (July 1,
1908, to June 30, 1920) has been 12,174. Of this sum 64.1
per cent has settled in California, namely 7,803. This fig
ure consists almost wholly of women and children who have
come to join their husbands and parents.
Agitators who seek to prove that Japan has been violating
the Agreement give statistics of arrivals only. They fail
to say that the vast majority of those admitted (92,606)
have already left America (80,432) ; that their figures in
clude the Hawaiian Islands, and also large numbers of mer
chants and clerks necessitated by the great increase in
American-Japanese commerce, which now exceeds $400,000,000 a year. Their figures also include all Japanese go
ing to and from Europe through the United States, being
counted twice on each trip. They fail to say that nearly
one-half of the figures they give deal with Japanese who
have been in America before and as "former residents"
(38,030) are returning after a short visit to Japan. They
imply that all arrivals are new "immigrants." The sta
tistics and arguments of the agitators are wholly misleading.
2. Japanese population in California is insignificant com
pared with the white population. The whole population *f
183
the Stats according to the United States census of 1920 is

3,426,861, while the Japanese population is 70,196 or 2 per
cent. During the past decade the population of the State
increased by 1,049,312, while the Japanese population in
creased by 28,838. In 1910 the Japanese population was
1.7 per cent of the whole population. In ten years, there
fore, it has increased on the whole population by threetenths of one per cent. Under free immigration the Japa
nese population increased from 10,151 in 1900 to 41,358 in
1910, or 307.4 per cent, while its increase during the next
decade under the Gentleman's Agreement from 41,358 to
70,196 was 69.7 per cent. This increase was due partly to
arrivals of wives and children and partly to births in Cali
fornia. The male population actually decreased.
3. The birth-rate ascribed to Japanese has been wildly
unscientific. "Five times that of the whites," "a baby every
year," "they breed like rabbits"are the hysterical current
assertions. In considering this question one should remem
ber that California is the Mecca of the rich, the old, and
the infirm from the whole United States. Its birth-rate is,
therefore, abnormally low. Japanese women in California,
on the other hand (some 15,000), are in their primefrom
twenty to forty years of age. Of course their comparative
birth-rate is high. But even so it is not what agitators say.
The most accurate available statistics of Japanese births
are given in the recent report of the California State Board
of Control. The records of 524 "picture brides" who landed
during 1918 are given in detail. Those who became mothers
within one year after landing numbered 120 or 22.9 per
cent. Within two years and two months for those longest
married and one year and two months for those married
for the shortest period, the number who became mothers
was 182 or 34.8 per cent. Would corresponding figures for
white families be materially different?
4. The legislative program of the Japanese Exclusion
League of California, even if adopted in its entirety, would
not solve the Japanese question. It would only aggravate
the situation. The new land law even before its enact
ment, as already stated, was not expected to avail anything.
It does not prevent immigration; it will not overcome the
present congestion of Japanese in certain sections; it will
not tend to Americanize them; it will not lower the Japa
nese birth-rate. Congressional legislation completely for
bidding Japanese immigration will make no material change
in the amount of immigration, for there has been no new
male labor immigration for twelve years and Japan has
already stopped the "picture-bride" movement. Denial of
American citizenship to American-born children of Japa
nese parentage will not prevent them from being born or
from living in America. Such a law would only create two
classes of Asiatics among usthose who are already Ameri
can citizens by birthright and those born after such a law
may be passed, constituting a permanent Japanese popula
tion forced by us into loyalty to Japan, generation after
generation. The policy is wholly un-American. It would
produce confusion and disloyalty. It is an ominous program.
5. The only solution for the California-Japanese question
is a program based on justice, fair-dealing, and truth. Im
migration not only should be stopped but for all practical
purposes has been stopped. If a law on the subject is to be
passed by Congress it should be courteous and honorable,
free from race discrimination. Japanese, moreover, who
qualify for American citizenship and desire it should be
admitted.
1 "V
184
The Nation
Lost
Anchors
By EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

Like a dry fish flung inland far from shore,
There lived a sailor, warped and ocean-browned,
Who told of an old vessel, harbor-drowned
And out of mind a century before,
Where divers, on descending to explore
A legend that had lived its way around
The world of ships, in the dark hulk had found
Anchors, which had been seized and seen no more.
Improving a dry leisure to invest
Their misadventure with a manifest
Analogy that he may read who runs,
The sailor made it old as ocean grass
Telling of much that once had come to pass
With him, whose mother should have had no sons.
Books
Profits, Wages, Prices
Profits, Wages and Prices. By David Friday. Harcourt, Brace
and Howe.
R. FRIDAY'S book is a striking demonstration of the primitive state of economic science, and of its trifling influence
upon the conduct of the nation's business. Everybody has been
talking at length about profiteering, high wages, high prices,
currency and credit inflation, booms and depressions, without
knowing the relevant facts from which conclusions may be
drawn. If an expert in medical research were so careless in
his generalizations about physical disease as are most financiers,
business men, and labor leaders about industrial troubles, he
would be barred from every scientific society in the country.
Most writers have been basing their reasoning upon a series of
so-called "economic laws" which were invented in the study
years ago by men without accurate knowledge even of the eco
nomic phenomena of their own time. Mr. Friday, merely by
collecting the information made available by a few war agencies,
incomplete as it is, and basing his conclusions on observed facts,
has been able to throw doubt upon some of the most respectable
conclusions of economists, to say nothing of the assumptions to
be found in current popular discussion.
His study of profits shows, of course, an enormous increase
during the war, but not a progressive or a uniform increase.
There were extremely wide variations, even among groups in
the same business, such as banking, where conditions are sup
posed to be nearly standard. The rate of profit does not center
about a normal point; it seems to have little to do with the
necessity of the service performed; capital seeking investment
shows little tendency to reduce or normalize excessive profits,
as the text-books tell us it will. In truth, many of the automatic
"laws" receive cold comfort from the facts.
What was done with the corporate profits? Most of them
were not distributed to the favored class of stockholders in the
form of dividends. A large part went to the government in tax
ation, and the rest was reserved for capital investment. The
dimensions of this kind of accumulation form perhaps the most
startling revelation of the study. It was this accumulation that
kept the rate of interest down when it was expected to rise dur
ing the war. "Saving" and "investment"those individual vir
tues which are ordinarily supposed to be the chief source of
productive capitalas a matter of fact contribute much the
smaller part of it. Even banks derive the major share of their
capital not from their stockholders, but from their earnings.
[Vol. 112, No. 2900
Bank credit is not based upon deposits arising from individual

savings so much as it is manufactured. The volume of deposits
itself does not indicate savings, since most deposits really repre
sent loans credited to the account of the borrower. The vital
question about profits is, therefore, not merely whether they
operate to distribute wealth unevenly in the present, but whether
they secrete too large a portion of it in the form of capital and
credit, and whether the power over production thus given to the
owners of capital is used for the best interests of the com
munity.
The facts also will disturb many of the theories about high
prices. They show, for instance, that the excess and warprofits taxes could have had little influence upon prices, since
prices rose the least when these taxes were heaviest. They
show that the large quantity of currency and credit did not in
itself inflate pricesthough it may have been a necessary ac
companiment of inflation. They show that high prices were
not the result of high wages or of underproductionexcept
possibly after the armistice. Wages did not rise until after
prices rose, and when prices were rising, production was at its
highest. High prices were the result of European war demand,
which began by bidding up certain war materials, thus affect
ing in turn profits, credit, production, materials, and, last of
all, wages.
Where the facts are fewest, Mr. Friday is most uncertain.
This is the case, for instance, in his discussion of wages. From
what facts were available, he tentatively concluded that wages
on the average eventually rose more than the cost of living, but
not much more. His figures are derived chiefly from reports
of corporations most of which were engaged in war produc
tion. They avoid wage scales, and deal for the most part with
yearly incomes, which account for overtime and for full-time
employment. Often they include the salaried personnel along
with the wage-worker. On this reckoning, he concludes that
the average wage in 1920 had become about 210 per cent of that
in 1914. But he makes no allowance for the smaller increases in
non-war industries, or for reductions in overtime and full-time
employment in the spring of 1919 and the fall of 1920, or for
the inclusion of inflated salaries of executive personnel. Fur
thermore, he assumes that the cost of living would not double,
while later information would have shown him that actually
it more than doubled. It would probably be more accurate to
scale down his 210 per cent to about 200, and the U. S. Bureau
of Labor Statistics places the cost of living in June, 1920, at
216.5 per cent of that in 1913. The most that could be said is
that for a very brief period the average rate of yearly wages
overtook and passed the cost of living, only to fall below it once
more. For now, though wage rates are not yet falling as
rapidly as prices, the volume of employment is dropping like
a plummet. And it should be remembered also that an average
of this kind includes as many wide variations as an average
of profits. Some skilled men in advantageous positions re
ceived a high percentage of advance, as did large groups of
unskilled who had been pitifully underpaid before the war.
Between them are groups who never caught up with their
former standards.
In another matter, which has little bearing on his main con
clusions, Mr. Friday accepts uncritically a common belief which
is as ill supported by facts as many of the others which he
rejects. Decreased productivity since the armistice, he thinks,
was one potent cause of the recent rise in prices, and this de
creased productivity he attributes to the "inefficiency of labor."
May not the decreased productivity have resulted from, rather
than have caused, the rise in prices? This sounds like un
orthodox economics, but a survey of the facts might easily
support it. Certainly there are reasons for thinking that at
least in building, in textile manufacturing, in leather, cloth
ing, and shoes, prices went higher than production cost necessi
tated, and that as a result of high prices people stopped buy
ing and production was reduced. Reduced production, what
ever the cause, would normally result in a higher unit labor
Feb. 2, 1921]
The Nation
cost, no matter what the energy and good-will of the individual

workman. And it is about time for informed students to cease
attributing high unit labor cost solely to "inefficiency of labor."
A man waiting at his machine, eager for work to do, will raise
unit cost as much as a man deliberately slacking on the job.
Why disregard the other factors in production, such as man
agement, capital, and the organization of production and dis
tribution itself? It may be that these factors became less
efficient after the war, because of the scrapping of war control
and the unleashing of competition and the profit motive.
Mr. Friday cannot be disputed when he concludes that the
surest way to raise real wages is to increase production. He
would perform an invaluable service if he would now go on to
inquire scientifically how production may be increased. He
might ask how the capital accumulation of the corporations is
actually being employed. He might discriminate in detail be
tween kinds of productionfor instance, between the capital
going into the manufacture of consumption goods for the pos
sessors of the larger incomes, such as high-priced automobiles,
and that going into the production of necessities for everyone,
such as homes, and that going into unproductive channels, or
even into the restriction of production. And he might also
estimate the factor of economic waste, tracing it to its causes
as far as possible. The field for such further investigation of
facts is almost unlimited.
George Soule
Psychology and Nationality

The Psychology of Nationality and Internationalism. By W. B.
Pillsbury. D. Appleton and Company.
The Psychology of Nations. By G. E. Partridge. The Macmillan Company.
NOTHING has been more disappointing in the reconstructive
mood than the haste to forget the recent past and to be
come absorbed as of old in the pursuit of an unquestioned rou
tine. The greatest of all wars, propounding the most momen
tous of all problems, has become a topic provoking ennui. A
fairer perspective will assert itself as incidents compose into
a picture, and far-reaching convictions emerge above political
stress. The historian, the economist, the statesman find a hear
ing in terms of the immediate problems that constitute the urge
toward reconstruction. The psychologist must be content with
a smaller audience. It is important that he should be placed on
record at the present juncture; this is ably done in the analyses
of Professors Pillsbury and Partridge, which are at once inde
pendent and complementary contributions.
While nationality is the theme, the mood of war is the incen
tive to its discussion; the nation at war shadows if not over
shadows the nation at peace. War is much more than an inci
dent or an institution or the claim of an instinct, in that it is a
social manifestation of high complexity. It roots deep in social
origins, and bears the marks of evolution no less in causes and
incentives and warrants and attitudes, than in the conduct of
warfare and its restrictions. The war-mind of nations enters
into national psychology as formatively as the peace-mind.
Mr. Pillsbury interprets the problem of nationality to include
an analytical inquiry into the basis of coherence of social groups
family, tribe, clan, nationand an historical survey of the
forms which these indispensable structures have assumed under
the stress of geography, trade, political rule, and culture gener
ally. The nucleus of psychological cohesion remains, but is
completely overlaid by the later products of social interplay, of
which the formation of ideals comes to be the dominant in
modern life, as it was in all ancient civilizations that furnish
parallel and guide to latter-day thought. Racial affinity and
local habitation, language, religion, and a body of tradition rein
force but do not constitute the essence of nationality, which is
that of community of thought and feeling indoctrinated and
deliberately maintained; and which is, therefore, also subject to
fairly rapid change under modern conditions of rapid spread of
185
ideas, customs, and the complex machinery of living. By the

same token the addition of a new sense, already well founded
in the economic interdependence, in the community of cultural
and particularly of moral precepts and ideals, seems the indis
pensable next step ; the international mind and the cosmopolitan
mood have appeared fitfully in ages past on the psychological
horizon, and now on the political horizon, with a promise await
ing the test of the future.
The theme is well emphasized in the psychology of hate. The
limitation of the sense of community to those within the tribe
engenders a sense of antagonism to those without. Hate would
seem to have a stronger efficiency and a deeper organizing
potency than sympathy; we cherish what we have fought for,
and fighting implies an enemy, as the enemy implies an object
of hate. We ally against even mor^ than with. Yet the modern
world has witnessed a shifting of national allegiance on an un
precedented scale; and the process called naturalization is so
obviously artificial that we regard Americanization of the most
heterogeneous folk as an attainable end within a generation or
two. The scale of the process renews attention to the animtis
of the corporate unit called the nation, and thus brings the prob
lem back to that of mass psychology. Mr. Pillsbury agrees with
his critical fellow-psychologists that the notion of the crowd as
a mob has been grievously overworked. The mob is really the
exceptional case in which the "slowly acquired and tested ideals"
are unfavorably situated for assertion. Mob action and senti- j
ment offer a dramatic theme attractive to the sociologist upon
simplicity bent, but in actual life represent but a fraction of the
true consolidation upon which nationality rests.
By Mr. Partridge the psychological clue to war is presented
as an "intoxication impulse," which political motives and the
upper-level psychological products utilize and employ. War
belongs to history more than to biology; its psychology, even at
primitive levels of expression, far transcends instinct, since it
depends upon deeper moods and rationalized and organized an
tagonismsthe product of generalization. War is "a great
ecstasy of the social life"; it is the war mood that must be
explained; as such it is related to allied ecstasies "of art, relig
ion, intoxication, love," and par exemple their common trend
toward mysticism. The dominant reinforcement of the mood
is the motive of power, delusive, it may be, in intoxication, but
real in the uprising of a people; and power socialized and insti
tutionalized represents- the aggrandizement political. The Ger
man attempt failed through failure to find the motive upon the
high level toward which twentieth-century nationalism is striv
ing. "The best motives of the old feudalism and the new indus
trialism tried to unite"; they failed because of psychological, as
well as institutional, incompatibility.
In the historical perspective the occasions and situations that
summon the great instincts and emotions and the mode of their
organization become far more significant than their original
nature. Yet it is a principle of evolutionary psychologyrein
forced by the Freudian point of viewthat the early trends
endure as a nucleus, however intricately overlaid by later
growths. Thus Germany's large army represents a compensa
tion motive for limited territory, and the appeal to God to pun
ish England is a confession of impotence, quite as the delusion
of superiority is the same Freudian betrayal of a sense of in
feriority. Through the same analysis is laid bare the aesthetic
appeal of warthe glory that enhances the call of duty, the
pomp and ceremony, the color and movement, the romance and
venture. But the poetry as well as the reality of patriotism
requires rationalized motives, notably the sense of honor, which
is capable of fusion with the complex forms of national life.
The formulated motives, dominantly political, still require the
fortification from the ancient reservoir of instinct, emotion, and
sentiment. "Causes" thus emerge as the occasions of war and
the supreme sacrifice; they are fusions of ideals and situations,
like the invasion of Belgium, and arouse indignation equally
through the violation of principle as of territory. "The ideal of
force is met by the force of the ideal."
The Nation
186
[Vol. 112, No. 2900
significantNietzsche, Bismarck, or Krupp? Are philosophies

explanations after the fact and fairly impotent to push toward
or away from fate? Doubtless cause and effect move in circles;
but there is something that shifts the center and gives the spiral
It cannot be said that Mr. Ford has failed to live up to this

purpose. He has made himself familiar with the subject; he
has not attempted to conceal anything; he has written a clear,
straightforward, well-proportioned account of Hamilton's
career. Although a great admirer of Hamilton, he does not in
general hesitate to apply to him a thoughtful and discriminating
analysis. In particular Mr. Ford holds the scales even in his
treatment of the Burr episode. In his account Burr appears
in a better light than Hamilton, whose intense hatred of his
political opponent was largely responsible for his own un
course to events.
timely death.
Mr. Partridge offers a masterly survey of the central arena

of contention, which is the course of rationalization by which
the leaders of nations justify policy and action. We can readily
name the orders of influence: philosophical, religious, moral,
economic, political, generally historical; we thus pose the prob

lem of their interaction and relative place.
Who is the more
The academic bias favors ideas.
The very
reason that they are expressed and circulated points to them

as the mechanism of power, while they may be only the mechan
ism of exchange, the real values lying elsewhere.
Mr. Partridge's solution is written in the second half of his
essentially two-volume book. The reply is education. The
sublimation of motives is an educational process.
The symbol
of democracy is the school. He agrees that the international

mood is in the ascendant and that in it lies the promise and the
In respect to the treatment of Jefferson, one feels, however,

that the scales have not been held quite even. Here Hamilton
is too much represented as the honorable and disinterested
patriot who had to contend with the unreasonable animosity of
a supple intriguer. Although more than any other man he

was establishing the new government on a solid and durable
basis, he was accused of planning its overthrow and was the
object of a vast concoction of fiction to that purport. No
hope of men. He investigates what the content and the spirit
doubt.
of the new nationalism must be that shall further this mood
unknown before Hamilton's time, nor has it disappeared since.
and stimulate its vitality. Education receives a richer and a

more practical meaning through the bloody handwriting of the
great war. The program seems vague, but is thoroughly prag
matic in temper and requires only the devotion and tact which
form the pedagogue's kit, when attitudes and not facilities are
the purpose of instruction. We are no longer to be satisfied
with natural progress. We have gone too far and too long, let
us say, upon a rising tide of biological forces, and we have not
yet realized what conscious evolution might mean. . . . A
world in which democracy is going to prevail can no longer live
In Hamilton's time a vast concoction of fiction was by no means

confined to the Jeffersonian press; and it is as easy to under
stand why Jefferson believed that Hamilton was a dangerous
in this way. It will not grow of itself in a state of nature. Its

principle, on the other hand, forbids program-making after the
manner of autocratic societies. Democracy, as the form in
which the youthful and exuberant spirit of the world now
But a vast concoction of fiction in politics was not
reactionary as it is to understand why Hamilton believed Jef

ferson to be a dangerous revolutionary.
Both parties were
planning to overthrow the governmentthat is understood; but

is there any reason for thinking one party more honest in its
belief than the other? That Hamilton was working to establish
the new government on a solid and durable basis is more appar
ent now than it was then; but if the work of Hamilton had
not been counterbalanced by the influence of Jefferson and all
that he stood for, one wonders whether that work would have
proved as solid and durable as it in fact turned out to be.
tion its new dominant. The translation of these influences into
If Mr. Ford may be said to show a certain bias in favor of

Hamilton and against Jefferson, I think it is due to the fact
that he is not occupied exclusively with the historical problem
of explaining Hamilton in the light of his time, although he
does occupy himself with this, too. But in addition he has always
in the back of his mind a pretty fixed standard, in the shape of
a political philosophy, by which he judges the statesmanship of
Hamilton; and it happens that, measured by this standard,
Hamilton is essentially right and Jefferson essentially wrong.
All his thought and effort were addressed to the great ques
tion which he propounded in the first number of The Federalist:
Whether societies of men are really capable or not of establish
practical forces is at once the work of the teacher and the states
man. A part of the new requirement is that the two shall no
are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions
makes ready for creating the next stage of civilization, will

advance, we may suppose, neither by nature nor by force. It
is the main work of our day to find for ourselves a new and
better mode of shaping history, by bringing to bear upon all the
social motives of the day the best and strongest influences.
It is a practical world, a world of politics and of busi
ness, but it is also a world exceedingly sensitive to many influ
ences, good and bad, a world in which, we may think, nothing
great and permanent may be accomplished unless moral, reli
gious, and aesthetic influences prevail and give to our civiliza
ing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they
longer practice in a temper of suspicion or indifference, but of
on accident and force.
a joint venture and responsibility. The correction of the nar

row political nationalism is the broadening and deepening of the
it is quite clear that the greatest contribution to political

method on the side of free agency is that which was made by
Alexander Hamilton. Anticipating biological principles un
known to the age in which he lived, he stated the law of politi
cal development to be that Every institution will grow and
flourish in proportion to the quantity and extent of the means
concentrated toward its formation and support. That prin
ciple . . . still remains the only safe principle that politi
cal theory has supplied to political practice, and his success in
discovering and applying it puts Alexander Hamilton among the
greatest statesmen the world has produced.
social structure through the humanities.

JOSEPH JASTROW
Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton. By Henry Jones Ford. Charles Scribner's
Sons.
EFERRING to the destruction of many of Hamilton's

papers, burned by a son of one of Schuyler's executors
because he regarded them as too personal to be exposed to the

risk of publicity, Professor Ford says that a Bowdlerized
style of writing history and biography was once in vogue that

made suppression of truth seem actually meritorious. . . .
Hamilton's reputation has suffered greatly by it. His career
was too vivid and salient, his statesmanship too incisive, his
self revelation too candid to admit of the Bowdlerizing process,
and he cannot be judged fairly unless all is brought out and

put into the scales. Such has been my aim in the present
Work.
The answer is not yet quite clear, but
I suspect that an adequate commentary on this would take

one farther than the limits of a review would permit; nor am I
sufficiently familiar with the history of political theory to

judge what safe principles, if any, political theory has supplied
to political practice. But as to the principle itself, which Mr.
Ford makes so much of, and which he says Hamilton discov
ered and applied, I confess that with the best will in the world
I can make nothing of it but a quite meaningless succession of

words.
Personally, I should have found Mr. Ford's book more
interesting if he had been more disposed to search out the in

fluenceseconomic, social, temperamentalwhich would help to
The Nation
Feb.2, 1921]
explain why Hamilton held the political philosophy which he

did hold, and less concerned with whether this political phi
losophy was a true or a false philosophy. This, however, is
only a personal preference, and in no way detracts from the
substantial merit of the work.
CARL BECKER
187
will feel their debt doubled as they read this remarkable survey
of our water resources and uses.
One would like to think of
this book among the required readings in a course on economics.

That would be one way of encouraging laymen to support the
efforts of the scientific men who desire to see the utilization of
the natural resources of the country for the common welfare

a hope expressed by Mr. Newell in his introduction.
CHARLES A. BEARD
Conservation
The United States Forest Policy.
sity Press.
Water Resources:
By John Ise.
Present and Future Uses.
Yale Univer
The Evolution of Religion

By Frederick
The Social Evolution of Religion. By George Willis Cooke. The
Haynes Newell. Yale University Press.
PR'o' ISE'S volume is mainly an historical
review of
Federal forest policies. In accordance with the logic of
events it falls into four parts. The first covers the period
Stratford Company.
HE author tells us that this book contains fifty years' study
of religion, but there is not the slightest suspicion in it of
previous to 1891the year of the forest reserve act which defi
an old man's conservatism.
nitely provided for national ownership. The second deals with
radical, more fearless, more resolutely faced toward the future
that act, the supplementary law of 1897, and the steps taken by
succeeding Presidents to develop our national forests and to
foster a systematic policy of conservation. A third part sum
marizes the rise and growth of the intense opposition to national
forests and conservation. A fourth part discusses results and
the future. The historical sections present minute accounts of
than this one designed to set forth the doctrine that religion is
a social product and that its end lies in the same plane as its
source. Consequently, in its historical survey it minimizes the
individual. Jesus, Confucius, and Zoroaster come in for only
brief mention, and Buddha and Mahomet fare but little better.
the important acts of Congressthe origin, progress, and con
terly ignored. The Hebrew prophets are alluded to but in mass.
gressional discussion of each bill being treated on the basis of
The treatment of Christianity is variously typical. We hear

at the outset the suggestive remark that no other religion has
been less influenced by its founder. He is then introduced thus:
We may accept it as probable, perhaps as certain, that there
original sources.
A rather depressing story it is, confesses
the author, a story of reckless and wasteful destruction of

magnificent forests, and of flagrant and notorious theft of valu
able landsa story that Americans will follow with little pride.
However, given a growing nation composed of indomitable and
acquisitive individuals engaged in the relentless pursuit of
private fortunes and a government that reflected their spirit,
nothing else was to be expected. There was no state or set
of opposing interests of such a character as to afford even a
rallying point of opposition. Nor can it be said that we are
entirely out of the primitive period of our history. As Mr. Ise

points out, three-fourths of our standing timber has gravitated
into the hands of a relatively few holders; there is a certain
element of monopoly in the lumber business; lumbering is a
precarious enterprise; and we are still without a reasoned and
accepted policy of conservation.
Nevertheless, there have been in the conservation legislation
of the past decade many signs of progress. The classification of

public lands urged by Mr. Ise has gone forward rapidly. The
policy of permanent national ownership coupled with develop
ment under lease had been recognized in several important acts
legislative and administrativesince 1910. When one considers
the character of the powerful interests aligned against such col

lectivism, it is really surprising that Congress has been able to
make any headway against the current. Books like this by Mr.
Ise will contribute to the growth of public sentiment.
Perhaps
it is not too much to expect that professional historians may

sometimes hear about it and include instruction in this phase of
our economic history along with carpet-bag scandals and opera

tions on President Cleveland's throat.
It is really too bad from the point of view of the plain citizen
that Professor Newell's book which disposes of legal and legis
lative problems in a few pages, does not go fully into the history
and public policies of irrigation and water storage. He knows
so much about the inside and outside of water politics that he
should be compelled by a statute or writ of mandamus to tell his
story; but, of course, it is wrong to quarrel with him. He has seen
Few books about religion are more
Paul is twice cavalierly mentioned, Luther and Francis are ut
appeared in Palestine at about the time of the origin of Chris

tianity a prophet or reformer who claimed to answer to the
Jewish conception of the Messiah. More than one such re
former and claimant appeared in Jewish history, and that a
certain Jesus or Joshua made such claim is by no means incredi
ble or that he should be an artisan. As we have seen, this was
a time in which the artisan world was awakening. Save for
a sentence which recounts the fact of his appeal to the poor,
Jesus then disappears. The center of gravity, we are assured,

has been transferred from a personality to the great social
forces operating in wide regions. It is they which have pro
duced the doctrines of the Incarnation, Atonement, Communion
with God, and the Resurrection. After the mythical character of

these doctrines has been established, the author excuses his
negative treatment of Christianity because of the necessity of
emphasizing its syncretist nature. And just as we are pre
pared to protest against this utter blindness to the value of a
great human personality, we read this unexpected sentence:
Stripped of his legendary and miraculous settings, the Christ

may be regarded as the purest, loftiest, and most human figure
in the history of religion. His moral teaching, his human sym
pathy, his fellowship with the poorest and meanest, his bound
less compassion, his fidelity to his own convictions even to the
bearing of the cross, give him a character above that of any
of the gods of the ancient world. Then, as though he had been
sufficiently magnanimous, the author pursues his social quest.
Equally unexpected is it to read in a book which insists that
religion is inevitably social in origin and development and
that what we have need of is not great men but great institu
tions, that were it not for the fanatic, the man of an intensely
egotistical thought, there would be no religion, at least in the
earliest ages of civilization.
are seeking a broad view of the subject as well as by young

engineers who may have occasion to wrestle with the larger
The main contention of the book may be briefly stated. The

best part of human experience is not congenitally but socially
transmitted. All early religions are expressions of the central
life of a group. The great sacred writings owe their sublimity
and authority to their communal authorship. Magic passes into
religion only through a communal ritual. Feudal religion em
phasizes sovereignty and personality. Animism yields to an
aspects of water problems. Those citizens who have long known
thropomorphism.
their obligation to Mr. Newell for his devoted public services
which, however, soon wane in importance.
fit to limit himself to the economic and technical side of water
storage, management, and uses. His volume will be gratefully
received by those legislative and administrative authorities that
Matriarchal relations suggest female deities,
Authority and com
188
"1
The Nation
mandments for individuals and the dread of eternal punishment

emerge. On the formation of nations, national religions with
their trend toward monotheism appear. Monotheism fails to
arise in Greece and India because of the diversity of life and the
weakness of national spirit. Migration and assimilation portend
international religions. The syncretist process on the Mediter
ranean culminates in Christianity. Universal religion is yet
to come; the nearest approach to it is patriotism, which should
be superseded by unification of the nations. The new tendency
of thought, save for an ebullition of occultism, is away from
the supernatural toward the human. Belief in God and im
mortality is declining. Religion has but three possibilities, to
die, to take refuge in sublimated nature-worship, or to become
consciously a religion of collective humanity. Materialism is
no more selfish than idealism. Under either philosophy there
may be, must be, an inner world of man's own creation. All
humanity has made it what it is. It has so real an existence
that many feel it to be the only world that has true meaning.
It is being constantly refurbished and made worthier of human
habitation. Heretofore man has been an unconscious creator
of religions. Now that he realizes his power, he will create a
religion far nobler than these which now are passing away.
A. W. Vernon
The Making of a Vers-Libriste

Development. By W. Bryher. With a Preface by Amy Lowell.
The Macmillan Company.
THIS brief and beautifully written book is the first instal
ment of an artist's autobiography. It gives us access to
a literary psychology which, in this special form, is both new
and important. The visible world has existed for other periods
and other men. But it was, even to Theophile Gautier, a dimen
sional world, a world of bodies and shadows, a world never
quite emptydid not Gautier write "Coquetterie Posthume?"of
the concrete fates of men and so of passion and its rhythms. To
the consciousness analyzed in "Development" the earth and its
fulness contracts to a jeweler's shop-window. The moonstones
are delicately pale, the rubies glow, and the jade lies richly
quiet. "Her whole vocabulary became a palette of colors, lu
minous gold, a flushed red, tones neither sapphire nor violet."
She saw in Sicily "a herd of brown and shaggy goats under a
geranium hedge." They do not really move, these goats, and
they evoke nothing. They are not fed or milked. They remain
a static image. Miss Lowell quotes with admiration in her
preface: "Sunset carved the eastern islands out of grape-blue
darkness with a gold knife." It is striking, but is it not a
mere conceit? Has it anything to do with the creative imagi
nation? There is a seeing eye. But what it saw has been
rearranged into a cold bit of decorative scheming and the word
"grape" is immensely calculated. "Picture after picture," we
are told, shaped in the mind of our vers-libriste, Nancy; "she
was shaken by a craving for color"not for rock or ruin, tree or
star, fur or flesh with their characteristic hues, but for color.
By her own confession, indeed, she found color in words rather
than in things. "She sought for vivid and original expression
of a color as another might have hunted for a moth or a rare
shell"not, be it observed, as another might have sought ecstasy
or liberation or even pain. The pure imagist is far more like a
collector than like a poet. Instead of communicating a rhythmic
interpretation of experience, he hands you a box of transfixed
butterflies with beautiful, dead wings.
Nancy was quite companionless, but she was never lonely.
People irked her, as they irk most sensitive souls. But she had
no need of them because the beauty that she sought had noth
ing to do with flesh and blood. She liked the Duchess of Malfi
as one likes somber tones in an old painting. She thought that
Keats was "too weak to satisfy her"; perhaps he was too
strong. She could glide contentedly along the endless stream
of images in Morris's "Earthly Paradise." She saw Italy and
[Vol. 112, No. 2900
Egypt, Spain and Sicily and Algeria, and played vaguely in

her earliest years with the gestures of dead heroes. But later
her world is utterly dispeopled. She is eighteen when we
leave her and enormously precocious on the side of her special
art; she has not prayed or loved or wept or thought. Neither
passion nor mystery have touched her. She is alone with her
palette of colors.
She finds her medium of expression by way of a curious and
widespread misconception. She reads the great French verslibristes and proceeds to write like H. D. and Miss Amy Lowell.
"Rhyme had already begun to grate harshly on an ear that
daily grew more sensitive to curve of rhythm and subtlety of
phrase." What has that to do with the stormy but elaborate
harmonies of Verhaeren or the suave, round melodies of Regnier? Both poets are among the most heavily rhymed in the
world; neither, except Regnier in his "Odelettes," dreamed of
discarding rhyme. Verhaeren's "L'Arbre" or Regnier's "Le
Vase" are no more free verse in the English sense than Dryden's "Ode on the Death of Mrs. Anne Killigrew" or Words
worth's "Intimations of Immortality." Their verse was called
free in France because they did not confine themselves to the
traditional stanzaic forms and did not always alternate mas
culine and feminine rhyme. Nancy writes no more like the
author of "Les Villes tentaculaires" than Carl Sandburg like
the poet of the "Ode Written in a Time of Hesitation." Her
"sensitiveness to curve of rhythm" makes her reduce that curve
as far as possible to the condition of a straight line. It is much
more to the point when she quotes, for its rhythmic quality,
a sentence from "Salammbo"; it is revealing that she delights
in the prose of Lodge and Lyly. Is not a good deal of verse in
unrhymed cadences a new and infinitely rarified sort of Eu
phuism?
Whenever the pulses beat or the mind confronts the dreadful
universe, man sings and does not only speak. Rhyme is non
essential, as we see in the ancients; rhythm is as integral to
expression as it is to the ebb and flow of the sea, the systole
and diastole of the blood. To tell us that "a poppy sail burned
on an umber ship," you can reduce your rhythms to the hush
of prose. But poetry, as Milton knew, is passionate and its
voice rises above such level murmuring. Perhaps in "Adven
ture," the promised continuation of "Development," Nancy will
meet the passions of life and find rhythm and thus pass from
imagism to poetry.
Books in Brief
If ISTORIANS of early twentieth-century British and Ameri* can verse will be glad that the anthologists of this genera
tion were numerous and busy. Hardly a month goes by during
which a collection of more or less important poems fails to
appear. "An Anthology of Recent Poetry: Compiled by L. D'O.
Walters: With an Introduction by Harold Monro" (Dodd, Mead),
incidentally issued also by Brentano's in elaborate holiday form,
with illustrations by Harry Clarke, contains British poems
selected for their simplicity, their innocence, and the absence
from them of anything which would "disturb." The result is a
golden treasury for the naive, something between "A Child's
Garden of Verses" and "Georgian Poetry." Thomas Hardy is
represented, but not, of course, by a characteristic poem. "Con
temporary Verse Anthology: Favorite Poems Selected from the
Magazine 'Contemporary Verse,' 1916-1920: With an Introduc
tion by Charles Wharton Stork" (Dutton) is aimed at a literary
audience that is neither radical nor conservative, but apprecia
tive of "normal and intelligible" young American poets. It has
a little that is very good, more that is very bad, and very much
that is mediocre. "American and British Verse from the Yale
Review: With a Foreword by John Gould Fletcher" (Yale Uni
versity Press) is remarkable for three good poems by John
Gould Fletcher, Maxwell Bodenheim, and Henry Adams. The
last, called Buddha and Brahma, is an interesting exposition of
the contemplative soul, and a valuable relic of its author's brain.
189
The Nation
Feb. 2, 1921]
Drama
Native Plays
A T the end of the first performance of "Miss Lulu Bett"
(Belmont Theater) it was difficult not to be persuaded that
here was the most genuine achievement of the American stage
since Eugene O'Neill's "Beyond the Horizon." One saw at once
that Miss Zona Gale had not mechanically dramatized her novel,
but had turned her original fable into a play and had given it
in its new form a weightier and severer ending. The dramatic
action which she had built up was, save for a single debatable
use of accident, the most inevitable that we recall in the work
of any American playwright. Almost immediately pressure was
brought to bear upon the author and the producer of the play
from two different sources. Because Miss Gale had hitherto
been known as a novelist, and because her play dispensed with
the flashy artifices of the theater, the critics, who are wedded
to a rigid and mechanical theory of technique and divorced
from any fellowship with that creative imagination which builds
its fit form anew every time it is exercised, promptly declared
"Miss Lulu Bett" to be undramatic and sighed that Miss Gale
had not called upon the assistance of, let us say, Mr. Owen
Davis or Mr. Willard Mack. The public, persuaded and abetted
by such criticism, agreed to find the play dull and in the second
week of its career a new third act was substituted for the orig
inal one. In this new act the unnecessary spouse of Ninian
Deacon obligingly dies and Lulu achieves respectable wifehood
interrupted only by such quite safe vicissitudes as excite but do
not trouble the all too tender heart. Her act of liberation is
thus stultified and with it the significance and strength of the
dramatic action sacrificed at one blow.
What still remains, especially for those who have the selfmastery to leave at the end of the second act, are Miss Gale's
people and the moral atmosphere she has created. The second
element is the rarer and the more notable. What differentiates
Hervieu from Bernstein, Hauptmann from Lindau, Galsworthy
from Jones, is, above all things, the feeling that the dense and
peculiar moral atmosphere of life must be brought upon the
stage if any interpretative illusion of reality is to be created.
The conventions of the theater may let the drama flare up for
an hour; they cannot make it live. Now it is not too much to
say that no other American dramatist has succeeded in so fully
and richly transferring to the stage the exact moral atmosphere
of a class, a section, and a period, as Miss Gale. That Deacon
family group on its front porch is magnificent and memorable.
The preaching and blustering and nagging of Dwight, the
prattling and posturing of his wife, the cold and weary resist
ance of Lulu, the crafty little rebellions of the child Monona,
the sentimentalized scorn and detachment of Dianathese things
that project the strain and tug and essential hollowness and
maladjustment of the lives involved, mark an enormous ad
vance in the American drama and ally this unpretentious little
play with such works as "The Father" and "Michael Kramer."
Mr. Eugene O'Neill's "The Emperor Jones," presented by the
Provincetown Players (Selwyn Theater), escaped, curiously
enough, the fate of being attacked as undramatic. Yet Mr.
O'Neill shattered the form of conventional stage technique much
more thoroughly than Miss Gale. His play is in eight scenes
and it is largely a monodrama. He pursued the method of the
genuine artist in molding his medium to the use of his specific
intention. And in his ability to do that lies half the power and
promise of his piece. We say promise with regret and yet with
certainty. The visions of the fleeing Negro do not wholly con
vince the imagination because they were not melted in a suffi
cient inner fire. They make the impression of having been
carefully and intelligently selected rather than of having leaped
from a creative necessity that could not be denied. The per
formance of the play is rendered of first-rate importance by the
acting of Mr. Charles S. Gilpin. He has stirring power and
yet leaves with one the sense of vast sources of energy un
tapped. Hence in moments of the severest strain he is never

even on the edge of violence. And he has a mellow ease of
execution which permits him to pass from mood to mood and
from passion to passion with so living a continuity that it blots
out all consciousness of his artistic skill. An uncommonly ex
pressive countenance aids him in the first scene and a voice of
equal range and richness in the succeeding ones. But these
natural advantages are to him only the materials of a re
creative process that is as intelligent as it is impassioned.
"Miss Lulu Bett" suffered theatrical revision after presenta
tion; it is apparent that "Wake up, Jonathan" by Hatcher
Hughes and Elmer E. Rice endured the same fate before it
saw the stage. Internal evidence, including the whole of the
brilliant second act, leaves little doubt that the theme was
selected not because it had been used before, in Mr. Samuel
Shipman's "First is Last," for instance, but through a clear
recognition of the fact that the stuff of authentic satirical
comedy in America is rightly to be sought in the contrast be
tween bigness and greatness, speed and direction, aimless mate
rial bustle and creative action. And this contrast is legitimately
embodied in a millionaire, a poet, and an acute feminine intelli
gence that has weighed and determined the value of each. Only,
unhappily, in the play as it stands, the millionaire is actedif
not conceivedas a man of straw, the poet is an ineffectual senti
mentalist, and the action is cluttered with pathetic children,
Christmas reunions, and young stage-love. The contrast is
weakened and the satirical intention blurred by the melodrama
of the first and third acts, despite passages of keen and pene
trating dramatic writing throughout the second. The character
of the woman, Marion Blake, is by far the best and offers Mrs.
Fiske a pliant and seamless medium for her artcrisp, dry,
incisive, yet not without touches of sunset warmth and glow.
Ludwig Lewisohn
Square
Herald Square
rJ^.r.v
New York
Maintains the
largest
and
most complete
Book Depart
ment in New
York
City.
Copyright. 1921, R. H. Macv & Co., Inc.
BOOKS BY KARL MARX

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of mutual banking and similar schemes. Cloth, $1.25.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. A brilliant history of
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Revolution and Counter-Revolution, or Germany in 1848. Cloth, 75 cents.
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of surplus value. Cloth, 75 cents.
The Communist Manifesto, by Marx and Engels. Millions of copies
sold in all capitalist countries. Cloth, 75 cents.
The Civil War in France. A history of the Paris Commune, written
at white heat just after the event. Paper, 26 cents.
At bookstores or by insured mail on receipt of price. Address
CHARLES H. KERR & CO., 347 East Ohio St., Chicago
International
Relations
Labor's Status in Japan

THE Japanese factory law, printed below, was put into
effect in 1916, after several years of discussion and
agitation. It is still in effect, but since the adoption by the
International Labor Conference at Washington of interna
tional standards of labor, it has been reported that the Japa
nese Government is planning a revision of the law to bring
its provisions more nearly in line with the standards of the
other civilized countries of the world. The following trans
lationthe first in the English languageis taken from
the East and West News (New York) for November 17.
I. This law is applicable to factories belonging to any of the
following classes: (1) Those which employ more than 15
workers at the time the present law goes into effect, and (2)
those which deal with dangerous and unsanitary materials (sul
phur, mercury, poison, explosives, gas, etc.). Those factories to
be exempt from the application of the law may be specified by
Imperial Ordinance.
II. Factory owners must not employ in factories children be
low the age of twelve. This does not interfere with the continued
employment of children above ten, if it happens at the time of
the enactment of this law. The administration authorities can
allow factory owners to employ children above 10 years of age
in factories for lighter kinds of work.
III. Children below the age of 15 and women shall not be
forced to work more than 12 hours a day. The Minister of Agri
culture and Commerce may, however, allow the extension of the
hours to 14 in certain industries (spinning, weaving, etc.) for
15 years following the enactment of this law.
IV. Children below the age of 15 and women shall not be em
ployed in factories between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m.
V. This, however, does not apply in the following cases: (1)
In industries whose nature necessitates immediate work (food
packing, printing, etc.) ; (2) in industries which require night
work as a necessity; (3) in industries which require continuous
operation, and in which, therefore, workers are shifted. After
15 years from the enactment of this law, children below 14 and
women below 20 shall not be employed between 10 p.m. and
4 a.m. under any circumstances.
VI. In case one or more shifts are made, provision IV will not
apply for 15 years following the enactment of this law.
VII. Factory owners must allow children under 15 and women
workers at least two days of rest each month. For all workers
employed at night work at least four days of rest each month
must be allowed. In case a day's work runs longer than 6 hours,
at least half an hour; in case it runs longer than 10 hours, at
least an hour of rest must be allowed workers during work.
When two or more sets of operators are employed in alterna
tion in day and night work, such alternation or shift must be
made at least once in ten days to the set of operators engaged in
the work between 10- p.m. and 4 a.m.
VIII. In case of natural calamity or other crisis or of appar
ent approach of it, the Minister in charge may temporarily
suspend the application of provisions III and V in localities or
industries affected. When factory owners are forced, from un
avoidable causes, to speed work, they may obtain permission
from the Administration Agent to prolong the working hours in
spite of provision III ; employ children and women in night work
in spite of provisions IV and V ; and abolish holidays, in spite of
provisions VII, within a limited period. In case of temporary
necessity, factory owners may, by notification to authorities, pro
long working hours for two hours during a period of seven days
per month. In seasonal industries, factory owners may obtain
permission from the Administration Agent to extend working
hours by one hour for a period not exceeding 120 days per year.
IX. Children below the age of 15 years and women shall not
Section
be employed for cleaning, oiling, inspecting, repairing, or han

dling any machine when in motion, or dangerous parts of a ma
chine, or for any other dangerous work.
X. Children under 15 shall not be employed in factories where
poisons, strong acids, explosives, auto-combustible elements, or
any other poisonous or harmful materials are handled; where
poisonous gases are emitted; where air is dusty and foul, and
where the nature of work is unsanitary.
XI. To what kind of specific industries and conditions the pro
visions of Articles IX and X shall be applied will be deter
mined by the Minister in charge. If the authorities deem it
necessary, these provisions may also include females above the
age of 15.
XII. The Minister of Agriculture and Commerce may issue
regulations protecting pregnant women or sick persons engaged
in factory work. [A regulation was issued prohibiting the em
ployment of women in factories for five weeks after the birth
of a child; of persons affected by such diseases as insanity,
leprosy, tuberculosis, syphilis, and other contagious diseases.]
XIII. The Administration Agent may order factory owners to
mend or refrain from using the whole or a part of any building
or equipment which he considers harmful to the welfare of work
ers and the public.
XIV. The Administration Agent reserves the right to investi
gate factories or annexes thereto from time to time. The in
spector shall carry with him a government certificate.
XV. In case a worker meets with an accident, becomes ill, or
dies, not from a cause he is directly responsible for, the factory
owner shall, according to the provisions of the Imperial Ordi
nance, support him or his family. [The Imperial Ordinance
makes detailed provision for employers' liability in industrial
accidents. Among others it provides that medical expenses of
the injured shall be paid by the employer; the employer shall pay
more than one-half of the actual earnings of the injured during
three months of illness and one-third thereafter; if injury
results in total incapacity, the employer shall pay the actual
earnings of more than 150 days; in partial incapacity or de
formity of women's features, the earnings of more than 100
days; in case the injured dies, the employer shall pay his fam
ily the wages of more than 170 days, etc.]
XVI. The Census Registration Officers shall furnish, without
fees, the necessary information, upon inquiry by employer, con
cerning employees or persons applying for work in his factory.
XVII. The Imperial Ordinance will order how the workman
and apprentice shall be employed and discharged, and set forth
the regulations for employment agents. [The Ordinance requires
permission from the authorities in case children not finish
ing elementary school are to be employed. It requires em
ployers to pay traveling expenses to minors and women to go
home when they are discharged. It provides detailed require
ments for the treatment of the apprentice.]
XVIII. The factory owner or owners may appoint a manager
and delegate to him all rights and powers. When the owner
does not reside in a region governed by this law, he must ap
point a representative with full capacity and responsibility.
Unless such representation be made by legally acknowledged
members of the firm, it is necessary to get a permit from the
Administration Agent for the appointment of the representative.
XIX. Such representative shall represent the owner in full
capacity except in dealing with matters specified in Article XV.
XX. Those who violate any provisions given in Articles II, V,
VII, IX, X, or refuse to submit to the provisions of Article XIII
shall be punished by a fine not exceeding 500 yen.
XXI. The factory owner or his manager who without proper
reason resists government inspection of factory conditions, or
who refuses to answer the questions asked by the inspector, shall
be fined a sum not exceeding 300 yen.
XXII. The owner or manager cannot escape responsibility for
the violation of the law even if such be caused by the ignorance
Feb. 2, 1921]
The Nation
of anyone connected with the factory. Exception, however, will

be made when this happens in spite of proper precaution. Ignor
ance of the age of workmen does not excuse the employer from
the charge of a violation of the law.
XXIII. Any one who has complaint against the government
agents enforcing this law, or who considers himself injured by
misapplication of the law, may appeal to the Court of Adminis
trative Litigation.
XXIV. The Minister in charge can apply, even to factories
exempt from the application of the law by virtue of Article I,
the provisions of the Articles IX, XI, XIII, XIV, XVI, XVIII
and XXIII of this law.
XXV. This law applies equally to the factories operated by
the Government, with the exception of provisions under Articles
XVIII and XIX.
Parties and Governments in the Far East

THE trials and difficulties of the small Vladivostok state,
hemmed in between Soviet Russia and Japan and torn
by disputing internal factions, are vividly depicted in sev
eral issues of the Vladivostok newspaper, Golos Rodini
(Voice of the Motherland), dated November 28-December
4, 1920. The chief question which has been agitating the
country has been that of affiliating with the new Far East
ern Republic at Chita, and the debates of the popular as
sembly reveal conflicts between Communist advocates of
union with Chita and ultimate amalgamation with Soviet
Russia, moderate Socialist advocates of union with Chita on
a democratic basis, conservative opponents of any union
whatever. And over the heads of the debaters is constantly
suspended the threat of Japanese intervention. This threat
is exemplified in the ultimatum addressed by the Japanese
diplomatic mission to General Boldirev, a member of the
Vladivostok Government. After denying that the Japanese
authorities are actively aiding the eastward retreat of the
reactionary forces of Semionov and Kappel, the ultimatum
continues :
It is reported that the Chita Minister of Transport, Shatov,
has sent communications to the local government. However, in
case the aforesaid communications concern the railroads, tele
graphs, etc., they violate and change the treaties existing be
tween the local government and the Japanese commission; and
therefore the latter cannot view such occurrences with indiffer
ence and will take the necessary measures.
There are rumors that silver, gold, and valuables which have
been returned by the Japanese mission are being transported
towards Chita. These articles must be left in Vladivostok. The
Japanese Government will check their transportation.
This attitude on the part of Japan is further illustrated
by another communication to General Boldirev from the
General Staff of the Japanese Expeditionary Forces in
Siberia.
In view of the present political situation and being desirous
of peace, I have the honor of calling to your attention the
following considerations: The head of our diplomatic mission
here in Vladivostok has lately called the attention of the Vladi
vostok authorities to the effect which the relations between
them and the so-called United Government [of the Far Eastern
Republic] at Chita will have upon the Japanese army. At the
present time the People's Assembly [at Vladivostok] is dis
cussing the resolution passed by the United Conference at
Chita. If the assembly accepts this resolution without amend
ments, the Maritime Government will be reduced to a pure local
administrative organ, subordinate to the so-called Chita United
Government, and all its governmental institutions will be trans
191
ferred from Vladivostok to Chita. In this case the connections

between the Maritime Government and its former institutions
on the one hand and the Japanese authorities on the other will
be completely interrupted, as official relations have not yet been
established between the Japanese military authorities and the
Chita Government. One may entertain some fear that the
orders and instructions issued by the United Government at
Chita may be in conflict with the agreements formerly con
cluded between the Japanese army and the various Russian
authorities and that these agreements, which have been in force
until now, may violate the legitimate rights of Japan and its
army. Even now, before the Vladivostok Government has rec
ognized the authority of the Chita United Government, cases
have arisen which justify such a fear. It is not difficult to
prophesy what such a recognition will produce. If this should
come to pass, the Japanese army, notwithstanding the position
which is taken by the Chita Government, having in mind only
its vital interests, would be forced to have recourse to suitable
measures for direct relations with the Maritime local authori
ties and their institutions. One may fear that under these
circumstances some regrettable results are liable to arise, for
which the Japanese army will not hold itself responsible.
A vigorous statement of the Communist viewpoint is
made by Deputy Zeitlin in the popular assembly. Here are
extracts from his speech, as reported in the Golos Rodini:
Our party has always said that the state is an instrument of
class rule; and we have always declared that the period of the
class rule of the bourgeoisie is ended; and in its stead has come
the period of the class rule of the proletariat. The actions of
the Communist Party are sincere and honest. In Soviet Russia
it has brought to pass a practical rule of the proletariat. Here
in the Far East the Communist Party has been and is working
for the creation of a purely democratic state; but does so only
in view of the internal situation in the Far East.
The Communist Party proposes the following program: Ac
ceptance of union with Chita, recognition of the Far Eastern
Republic, no autonomy for the Vladivostok popular assembly.
To create an anti-Soviet buffer means to create an anti-Russian
buffer; and this cannot and will not be.
The case for the anti-Bolshevik advocates of union with
Chita on a democratic basis, with autonomy for the Vladi
vostok assembly, is put by Deputy Vinogradov:
The entire political situation in the Far East may be summed
up as follows: Two forces face each otherSoviet Russia and
Japan. The Japanese wish to prevent the movement of the
communist system to the Far East. If Soviet Russia cared to
break with Japan it would not agree to a buffer state; in mak
ing a concession about the buffer state it makes a concession to
the political situation in the Far East. It discounts the actual
state of affairs and the relation of forces in the Far East.
Denying the charge of the Communists that the Right groups
desire to create a "black" buffer in the Far East, I wish to say
that such a project is absurd. It is impossible to create here
a new anti-Bolshevik front, because, even if there should be
found advocates of the creation of such a front, no real forces
would follow them. The peasants, who have here not yet tasted
all the beauties of the Communist heaven, would not follow such
advocates. There can be no guaranty of the cessation of civil
war and intervention without a popular assembly.
The propertied classes in Vladivostok are apparently
strongly opposed to the project of union with Chita. At a
meeting of the Merchants' and Manufacturers' Association,
held on November 28, a resolution against union with the
Chita Government was passed with only four dissenting
votes. The resolution read in part as follows:
The Chita conference [between representatives of the Vladi
vostok and Far Eastern governments] was not a freely formu
lated agreement, but a mechanical adoption of the proposals
made by Krasnoschokoff, who is an absolutely open agent of the
192
The Nation
tyrannical Soviet Government which now dominates the larger

part of Russia. The resolutions of this conference would inev
itably lead to usurpation of power by the Communists. The first
action of this (Chita) government had for its aim the destruc
tion of the best sons of Russia, represented by the valiant Kappel army, which is the only organized, democratic, military force
in the Far East and the only obstacle to the unlimited tyranni
cal rule of the Communists over the weary population of the
Far East. The law promulgated by .this government for the
seizure and exportation of gold from the Maritime Province, as
well as other orders, are deliberate attempts to carry out a Bol
shevik system of government, which is directed to the destruc
tion of the normal course of life and inevitably leads to the
ultimate ruin and impoverishment of the people. It would be
unwise to place hopes in the deliberations of a freely elected
constituent assembly, whose makeup and tendency would have
been already predecided by the action of the Bolshevik authori
ties and their party committees. All the misfortunes of the
Russian state which have been experienced by the people dur
ing the last three years of tyranny by the internationalist gang,
which is pushing the ignorant elements toward the road of de
struction of their own faith, together with the impoverishment
and dying out of the people, absolutely exclude any possibility
of cooperation with these dark forces, which trample under foot
all laws, human and divine, and all fundamental principles of
morality and justice.
The Association further urges its members to refuse obedi
ence to the united government, if unity is achieved, to take all
measures to resist its authority, and authorizes the Vladivostok
Chamber of Commerce to call a mass meeting and to resort to
every means, including the taxation of the mercantile class, to
protect the integrity of the free Maritime Province.
The cordial relations existing between the bandit chief
Semionov and the Japanese, together with the Japanese de
sire to find an excuse for occupying the Chinese Eastern
Railway are strikingly illustrated in the following published
order of Semionov, which seems to be political rather than
military in some of its implications:
This is the present political situation: The Japanese com
mand, represented by Colonel Isome guarantees the movement
of the Far Eastern army to the Maritime District; but unfortu
nately Colonel Isome has not at his disposal sufficient armed
forces to cover our retreat. The Chinese command promises
definite assistance only in transporting our families and rela
tives. The Chinese troops in the Maritime District are not
numerous enough to prevent our retreat. Therefore, in order to
create an international precedent; in order to give the Japanese
command a pretext to move their troops decisively, to remove the
Chinese from the railroad, and to close the frontier to the Reds,
it is necessary, if the conditions at the front constrain us to do
so, to penetrate as close as possible to the railroad right of
way, without regard to the Chinese troops on the frontier.
Then follow some military instructions for the practical
execution of this ingenious scheme for violating Chinese
neutrality and provoking Japanese intervention.
Subsequently we find in the Golos Rodini a complaint that
the Semionov troops had murdered a Russian, two Greeks,
and a Jew, and were robbing passengers on railroad trains.
On December 4 the paper contains an item to the effect that
Semionov had departed on a Japanese transport. It adds
the caustic comment that, like Denikin, he had run away
ahead of his troops. Perhaps with a view to obscuring his
somewhat ignominious withdrawal from the scene, Semionov
put forth this grandiloquent proclamation to the Buriat
tribesmen :
Valiant Buriat warriors: Years have already been spent in
the struggle for the motherland, for the welfare of the people,
for Buriat freedom. The severe climate of our own Buriat
[Vol. 112, No. 2900
region has temporarily stopped the struggle for our sacred

cause. But spring will come; streams will begin to flow from
the mountains; the fields will become green. And we will strike
the Kahal of our enemies, who have desecrated your holy places,
robbed your huts, and consigned your relatives to poverty.
Those who have trampled upon the rights of the Buriat people
cannot be rulers over you. No matter where I may be, I will
always help you; and in a difficult moment I will come to you.
May Holy Buddha hear the prayers of the llamas and of all of
us. May He help us.
China and the Far Eastern Republic

THE following note addressed by Mr. Yourin, head of
the Economic Mission of the Far Eastern Republic, to
the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of China,
on November 30, is taken from the news letter of the Dalta
News Agency dated at Peking, December 3.
To His Excellency the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Re
public of China.
In the course of constructing new forms of government and
society, the people of the Russian Far East have endured all
the horrors of the two-year rule of usurpers and bandits in the
persons of reactionary rulers and atamans, as they were called,
who made their way one stream of blood, and brought ruin.and
famine to a region previously known for its prosperity and
richness.
Brutal atrocities and indiscriminate executions, however,
proved futile to thwart the irresistible aspirations toward free
dom and peace of the people of the Far East. The desire to put
an end to the civil strife in the shortest possible time and to
establish law and order on the firm basis of democracy, with a
strong craving for the furtherance of cordial and amicable re
lations with all foreign countries seem to have combined to
cause the people of the Far East to overthrow the reactionary
rule hated by the people and to form, after all the provinces
in the territory extending from Lake Baikal to the Pacific are
united, the independent commonwealth of the Far Eastern
Republic.
With a territory greater than that of any of the European
Powers and containing inexaustible natural resources, the new
Republic is preserving in full the institution of private prop
erty and offers immense possibilities for development to private
capital and private initiative. Striving for an economic and
industrial rapprochment with all foreign Powers, the Govern
ment of the Far Eastern Republic will gladly welcome any offer
by foreign capital and will afford it every possibility of a vast
participation in the exploitation of natural resources, pledging
it their special consideration and protection.
First of all the people of the Far East will endeavor to main
tain and increase friendly relations with China, with which
country they have for many centuries been connected by the
closest bonds of friendship and commercial intercourse. The
two nations long ago appreciated the greatness of the reciprocal
advantage of their economic relations, which naturally resulted
from the contiguity of their boundaries extending almost
throughout the entire length of the great Asiatic continent.
During the last three centuries more than fifty treaties and
agreements have been entered into by China and Russia, and
this fact alone is sufficient to show how essential and natural
are the bonds of friendship between the two countries.
It is true that traces of the imperialistic policy of the deposed
Czarist Government are manifest in many of these treaties.
But the Chinese people are well aware that whenever the
sincere friendship and traditional neighborly spirit of the two
nations were injured it was not the Russian people at large
who were to blame. The Russian people at present follow quite
a different path; they are now heart and soul for the redress
of those gross injustices.
Feb. 2, 1921]
The Nation
The urgent necessity for China and the Far Eastern Republic
aging trade between the two countries. The question of trans
to maintain a close and uninterrupted relationship was suffi
port and customs tariff policy must also be given deepest con
ciently proved by the one fact that even during the most diffi
sideration.
cult years of the world blockade of Russia, at the time when
While touching in this declaration upon the most outstanding
China had officially severed connections with Russia, her com
questions which are to be solved first, and having defined the
mercial relations with Russia were as a matter of fact never
principles which are to be built into the foundation of further
interrupted. During the last decade prior to the World War,
relations between the two nations, this Mission firmly believes
China's trade with Russia had increased from 20,000,000 taels in
that the question of an early restoration of normal relations is
1907 to 100,000,000 taels in 1916, with China's exports five times
of as much importance to the Government and the people of
the great Republic of China as it is to the new Far Eastern
aa great as her imports. This trade, carried on either through
the Far Eastern ports and the Chinese Eastern Railway, or via
Republic. Therefore an early solution of all these questions
will undoubtedly serve as a durable basis for the advancement
Kalgan, Urga, and Kiakhta, was almost entirely with the Rus
and stabilization of cordial relations between the two nations
sian Far East, now united in the independent commonwealth
for the good and prosperity of the two Republics.
of the Far Eastern Republic.
The Mission of the Far Eastern Republic, in its effort to
Ignatius L. Yourin,
President of the Far Eastern Republic Mission to China.
stabilize, promote, and regulate this intercourse, contemplates
carrying it on in the spirit of the principles which the Russian
M. Kassanin, Secretary.
Peking, November SO, 1920
people have, since the overthrow of the Czarist Government,
made the fundamental law of their foreign policy. Therefore,
this Mission considers it necessary that the question of a radi
cal revision of all treaties and agreements made between China
China Explains to the Diplomats
and the former Czarist Government be raised first of all. All
privileges which contain no element of reciprocity must be
APPARENTLY in response to Soviet Russia's abandon
eliminated from those treaties. Anything that contains the
ment of special privileges in China acquired under the
element of imperialistic aggression alien to the principles of
Czarist regime, the Chinese Government recently withdrew
equal opportunities and equal rights, anything that may have
recognition of the former Russian Minister and other Rus
any connection, however slight, with the outrages committed
sian officials of the old regime, and temporarily annulled
against China by the former imperialistic Government, and,
certain special privileges enjoyed by Russians in China under
finally, anything that may be derogatory to the dignity of a
treaties made with the former Russian monarchy. The dean
nation and its sovereignty must be unconditionally withdrawn
of the foreign diplomatic corps at Peking thereupon made
from the future dealings between China and the Far Eastern
Republic. New agreements defining mutual relations between
representations in behalf of the Russian officials, to which
these two republics should be based entirely upon the principles
the Chinese Foreign Minister, Dr. W. W. Yen, replied as
of equal opportunities with the object of developing and
follows, according to Millard's Review (Shanghai) for De
strengthening the interrelation of the two nations.
cember 18.
Any normal and regular exchange of commodities on a large
Your Excellency:
scale is, of course, impracticable unless adequate protection of
I have the honor to note your communication of November
a judicial nature to legalize every economic transaction has
18,
1920, and to state that all the arrangements now in prog
first been established. Therefore, among the most outstanding
ress that have been adopted by the Chinese Government in
questions which are intrinsically connected with the relations
regard to the Russians in China are not in any way incon
in question, that which demands first attention is the one rela
sistent with what was stated in my communication of October
tive to the restoration of economic representation in the form
22. Both civil and criminal cases in which Russian residents
of authorized organs of consular service as adopted everywhere
are involved, by treaty come under the jurisdiction of Russian
in international practice.
consuls, but in consequence of the withdrawal of recognition of
The Mission of the Far Eastern Republic holds that the Rus
the Russian consuls, there are now no persons capable of exer
sian consular service in China, after having been suspended
cising
this function, therefore the jurisdiction over civil and
two and a half years ago, should now be reestablished in the
criminal cases in which Russian residents in China are involved
spirit of the above-mentioned principles. In compliance with
cannot but be temporarily taken over by the Chinese Govern
this, Article VII of the Tientsin Treaty of 1858, Articles VIII
ment, it being only a logical result from actual circumstances.
and X of the Supplementary Peking Treaty of 1860, and, finally,
Since the Russian courts in the Chinese Eastern Railway area
Article XI of the St. Petersburg Treaty of 1891 should be
were based neither on the Chinese Eastern Railway Agreement
revised.
nor on the treaty provisions relating to consular jurisdiction
Confident that the Chinese and their Government are able
between China and Russia, but were established at the time by
to insure a jurisdiction to the Russian citizens in this country
the
Russians independently and without the permission and
such as is in keeping with their judicial conscience, this Mission
recognition of the Chinese Government, and therefore in con
holds that the whole series of regulations referred to above and
travention of treaty provisions, their existence constituted an
pertaining to the jurisdiction of the Russian consular service
act of encroachment on the sovereign rights of China. Even
in China may be abolished.
before the withdrawal of recognition of the Russian Minister
Next in the series of the most important and outstanding
and consuls the president of the Chinese Eastern Railway and
questions is that of the Russo-Chinese relations regarding the
the local officials had already negotiated and successfully ar
Chinese-Eastern Railway. The great and undisputable part
ranged with the Russian Consul for their abolition. Thus this
this railway has played in the history of the two nations must
measure is not adopted in consequence of the withdrawal of
unconditionally be recognized by an adequate agreement wherein
recognition but is entirely a separate question.
the interests, rights, and obligations of the two sides should
The Chinese Government has always dealt with Russian
be fully guaranteed in accordance with the principle of mutual
affairs
with due care and concern. Only recently the Vicejustice. As regards the illegal claims to this railway by the
Minister of Justice made a trip to Harbin for the purpose of
Russo-Asiatic Bank, these must once and for all be discouraged
making investigations on the spot, and with the view to safein a most decisive way.
Apart from this, due consideration must be attached to the ' guarding the interests of Russians in China. The Chinese East
question of surveying new routes as well as of improving rail
ern Railway area has been constituted a special area in which
way and water transportation facilities with a view to encour
special courts have been established. Both the local and the
194
The Nation
high court as well as the local branch courts may employ for
eigners as counselors or inquisitors, and in the adjudication of
cases brought up by Russians the branch courts may even have
the assistance of the counselors or inquisitors. Besides for
eign counsels are allowed to appear in the above-mentioned
special courts, while Russian notaries public are allowed to
function as hitherto. As to the application of Russian laws,
they are naturally to be applied as long as they are within the
provisions of the Rules Governing the Application of Laws
promulgated by the Chinese Government. Therefore this ques
tion does not call for mention in the rules governing the crea
tion of the special courts. . . .
I have now the honor to explain further the arrangements
suggested by the Diplomatic Corps.
1. The Municipal Council of the Concession will continue
to function in accordance with the present arrangement. With
regard to the police, which has close connection with the main
tenance of peace and order, the Chinese Government by legal
principle certainly bears the necessary responsibility, but what
ever is within the sphere of local government by the Municipal
Council will not be interfered with at all.
2. Although the old Russian courts had never received the
recognition of the Chinese Government, yet in the interest and
for the convenience of Russians they have been reconstituted
in accordance with their former grading and in the same places
within the special area of the Eastern Provinces. Moreover,
some of the former judicial officers of the different grades of
the Russian courts have already been appointed counselors
and inquisitors, and it is proposed to continue to appoint more.
The Russian clerks and interpreters have also been employed
and those who have already assumed office now number seven
teen, and it is proposed to employ more.
3. The former Russian notaries public have already been
allowed to continue their functions.
For the purpose of giving to Russian affairs their due con
sideration this Ministry has created within itself a Commis-
[Vol. 112, No. 2900
sion on Russian Affairs composed of important men familiar

with Russian affairs now in the different departments of the
Ministry, and Mr. Lin Ching-jen, formerly Minister to Petrograd, has been appointed its chairman. In the offices of the
Commissioners of Foreign Affairs of such places as Hankow
and Hailar where Russian residents are comparatively numer
ous, Russians have been engaged as advisers. If necessary,
advisers will also be engaged in other places.
The points referred to above all concern the internal admin
istration of the Chinese Government. If any of the Russian
organizations in China desire to express their opinion they are
at liberty to communicate with the Commission on Russian
Affairs, and such opinion will undoubtedly receive the due con
sideration of the Chinese Government. As to the summoning
of a mixed council it is hoped that the Diplomatic Corps will
appreciate and understand not only the fact that at this time
when there are so many Russian political parties such a step
will certainly give rise to undesirable consequences and create
many difficult problems, but also the fact that it is a question
which properly concerns the matter of Chinese sovereignty, and
which the Chinese Government does not feel able to accede
to. . . .
Furthermore, for the information of the Diplomatic Corps, the
Russians have violated China's frontiers, outraged her mer
chants, confiscated their property, and done many other acts of
a similar nature. In fact on the part of the Russians they have
for a time failed to fulfil their treaty obligations. Nevertheless,
China, appreciating the distressing condition of Russia and de
siring to strengthen her friendship for Russia not only has not
reduced, but quite on the contrary has increased the burdens of
the Chinese Government and people in their favor. Such cir
cumstances and conditions do not obtain in any other country
than China.
Since the Diplomatic Corps has made some proposals in regard
to Russian affairs, I make bold to request that it put itself in
China's position and consider the whole question in that light.
rpvHIS half-page is an expression from a Japanese

friend
of
his
devoted work of
appreciation
The
of
the
earnest and
Nation in crusading for freer
and fairer trade relations the world over, for just and
more
generous
within and
social
between
and
political
nations,
and
relations
especially
both
for
its
brave and earnest labors to keep the peace between

the United States and Japan.
The Nation
FOUNDED 1865
Vol. CXII
NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 1921
Contents
EDITORIALS:
Are Women a Menace?
Why Tariffs Will Not Stay Revised
Scholars and Their Bosses
Enter Trillions !
PRINCE KROPOTKIN. REVOLUTIONIST. By Ahraham Cahan
THE STREET RAILWAYS TANGLE. By Louis Budenz
THE ALTERNATIVE TO REVOLUTION IN ENGLAND. By Harold
J. Laski
CRIME WAVES AND REMEDIES. By George W. Kirchwey
LABOR FINDS OUT FOR ITSELF. By Evans Clark
A FRANCO-SWISS DISSENSION. By Robert Dell
OASES OF FREEDOM. By Norman Hapgood
CORRESPONDENCE
"Sovietizing" the Schools in Mexico
Mexican Land Reform
A Protest from "JE"
MIDWINTER BOOK SUPPLEMENT
THE NATION'S POETRY PRIZE:
Prelude: When We Dead Awaken. By James Rorty
May Jones Takes the Air. By Roy Helton
MR. WELLS DISCOVERS THE PAST. By J. Salwyn Schapiro
THE PROGRESS OF POETRY: FRANCE. By Ludwig Lewisohn
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVELISTSII: BOOTH TARRINGTON. By Carl Van Doren
DISSERTATION ON MODERN PAINTING. By Marsden Hartley
BOOKS:
Psychoanalysis. By H. W. Frlnk
Mr. Justice Holmes. By Thomas Reed Powell
Is Business a Game? By R. J. Walsh
Concerning Poetry. By Mark Van Doren
Civil War Adamses. By David Saville Muzzey
Cosmography and Cats. By J. W. Krutch
Wood Cuts) and Lithographs. By Glen Mullin
Sunrise and Red Earth. By D. M
Books in Brief
DRAMA:
Loaded Dice. By Ludwig Lewisohn
196
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202
206
206
208
200
211
21S
214
216
218
221
228
22S
224
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241
242
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244
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260

Associate Editors
LEWIS S. GANNETT
FREDA KIRCHWEY
ARTHUR WARNER
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
ERNEST H. GRUENING
CARL VAN DOREN
Managing Editor
Literary Editor
Subscription RatrsFive dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and
Mexico; to Canada, $5.50. and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00.
THE NATION, 20 Vesey Street, New York City. Cable Address : Nation. New
Sork. Chicago Office : 1170 People's Gas Building. British Agent for Subscriptions
ud Advertising: Ernest Thurtle, 36 Temple, Fortune Hill, N. W. 4, England.
DISARMAMENT is the overshadowing issue today. Yet
Congress dawdles on. Without drastic cuts in the
ten-cipher appropriations for army and navy there can be
no reduction of the tax burden and high costs under which
the country is groaning. Yet Congress chatters and merely
prunes trifles. While the maimed world gropes to rise from
the abyss, the mill-stone which plunged it into unending
catastrophe still hangs around its neck. Yet Congress con
tinues to drivel about "a well-rounded navy," views with
alarm, tiddles with "experts" about "coming types" of ships,
guns, and air-craft. With the backing of Senator Borah
and a few others, pathetically moderate proposals supply at
least the preliminaries to the move which the world craves.
Yet somewhere in the halls of Congress, between the intro
duction of bills and their passage, well-oiled brakes are ap
plied. What are the powers that halt disarmament? This
session will end in a few days with nothing accomplished.
Cannot the duly elected representatives of the people sense
the cry welling up in the hearts of the millions to call a
halt to all this piddling and pruning, this hemming and
hedging, this measuring and comparing, which overlooks
No. 2901
the vital issue and gets us nowhere? Disarm 1 Let the ex

pression of the popular will become thunderous. Not an
other dollar for new construction! Scrap, not build, should
be the watchword. Let the common sense and the common
peril of the world call for what the Congressional pettifog
gers scarcely dream ofcompetition in disarmament.
ACTION by the Supreme Court of the United States set
ting aside the conviction of Victor Berger and four
fellow-Socialists is a welcome sign of the changing spirit
of the times. For even Supreme Court justices, with the
notable exceptions of Justices Holmes and Brandeis, have
not shown themselves able to live in an abstract world of
legal justice untempered by contemporaneous popular preju
dice, and there is little doubt that had the appeal been de
cided a year ago Berger and his friends would now be in
prison. We may hope for more indications of a return to
sanity. The ninety Industrial Workers of the World who
were railroaded to long prison terms at Chicago without in
dividual consideration of their cases were sentenced in the
same prejudiced court-room under the same prejudiced and
demagogic Judge Landis. By a curious coincidence, At
torney General Palmer recommended release of Eugene
Debs, and Woodrow Wilson refused to act on the recommen
dation, on the same day that the Supreme Court handed
down its decision calling for a retrial of the Berger case.
His action only brings new proof of the isolation of the sick
man in the White House from the American people and its
new temper. Yet it was he who, on May 13, 1919, declared
that he had "always been among those who believe that the
greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety."
IT is a hard life for an old man like Giovanni Giolitti,
who, at the age of 78, is trying to steer a middle course
between D'Annunzio's fanatical fascisti and the equally fa
natical Communists and to bring the sorely tried Italian ship
of state into a safe port. His proposed bill for reorganiza
tion of industry, promised at the time when the workers had
seized and were operating the factories, is drafted, but in
evitably it satisfies no one. It provides a new degree of re
sponsibility for the workers; but the word "control" which
so frequently creeps into the cable reports is an inaccurate
translation of the Italian word controllo, which means
merely supervision. The workers' councils which are to be
elected in certain factories of certain industries will have
the right to know how the capital of the firm is constituted,
what are the profits, what the salaries of officials, etc., but
not to control, in the English sense of the word, these mat
ters. The organized workers, thoroughly radical in Italy,
want more than this; the employers are bitterly opposed
to granting this much. The exclusion of state-owned estab
lishments, of factories employing less than sixty workers
or less than four years in operation, from the working of
the law, is another bitter bone of contention. And mean
while the irresponsible Nationalist minority is busily en
gaged in burning down labor halls and sacking the offices of
Socialist newspapers, as at Bologna and Milan.
196
The Nation
WITH Lord Dunsany under court martial, and Father

Dominic, the eminent priest who attended Mayor
MacSwiney, under a five-year sentence for "causing dis
affection to his Majesty," with ambushes and arrests con
tinuing daily, and Sir Hamar Greenwood's "custodians of
civilized government" burning and demolishing according
to the rules of "official reprisal," Ireland has been enjoying
a period of merely normal activity. The English are seek
ing to prove their benevolence and forbearance, and Major
General Strickland, Military Governor of the martial law
area of southern Ireland, has explained that it is wrong to
assume that every house within sight of an ambush is
destroyed; "it is only when a resident refuses to give in
formation, as many of them do, on the ground of Repub
lican sympathy, or is known as a Republican, that we
destroy his house." In the martial law area of southern
Ireland it would seem probable that even with this limitation
the forces of the Crown find ample scope for their talents.
The resignation from Dail Eireann of Roger N. Sweetman,
who has been advocating a policy of compromise and con
ciliation between England and Ireland, seems to put an end
to any immediate hope of peace. We print in this week's
International Relations Section a statement from "JE" which
shows how far England has gone in alienating the best men
in Ireland. "M" is not a Sinn Feiner and he speaks not for
the Republican cause but for the cooperative movement
which he has nursed from its beginning and which he now
sees being deliberately broken up and destroyed by Eng
land's army. Irish unity, if it exists anywhere, exists in the
cooperatives, and England is doing its best to crush that
possibility of union while it crushes also the economic life
of the Irish people.
SOCIALISTS and Communists in Italy have followed the
lead of their comrades in France and Germany, and
split into separate parties. The doctrinaire Third Inter
nationalists of Moscow who virtually ordered the split look
to a withering of the Socialists and a strengthening of the
Communists as the product of scission, but they may learn
otherwise. The kaleidoscopic course of Socialist politics
is indicated by the fact that Jean Longuet, who led the
radical internationalists in the French party during the
war, is now rejected by his own party, and forced to organ
ize a new, more moderate group; and Serrati, who only
last summer was elected a member of the Executive Com
mittee of the Moscow Internationale, now finds himself
read out of that body, and becomes a member of the Ex
ecutive Committee of the Italian Socialist group which
refuses to accept orders from Moscow. In Italy the Simonpure Communists found themselves in a minority ; in France
the proportions were reversed, and the Communists had a
two to one majority. The older leaders in both countries,
those whose names are best known abroad, hesitate to avow
Communism; but the fire and enthusiasm and definiteness
of the Communist dream, while its violence repels the
workers who are not party-conscious, carries with it
those masses who think of themselves as revolutionaries.
OFTEN we have heard from employers and their pub
licity men of labor "agitators" who play upon the feel
ings of contented workers and rouse them to useless battle.
It is strange to be told of an outside agitator projecting
himself into the leadership of a group of employers, and
stirring them into an anti-union fight which they did not
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
want. But the charge comes from Dr. William M. Leiserson,

who was impartial chairman presiding over industrial re
lations in the New York men's clothing market before the '
present lockout-strike began. Dr. Leiserson, in a full re- '
view of the controversy, reports that the difficulties were
on the point of being adjusted when a lawyer notorious for
his union-breaking activities was injected into the situation
by a few disingenuous employers prompted by "outside
influence," and that he maneuvered the association into an
open break. "The employment of Mr. Gordon as counsel was
not sought by the Market Committee. He was imposed on
the committee by a small group. He is an eloquent agitator,
and just as the I. W. W. agitator seizes on the disagreeable
things in the wage-earner's life to stir up discontent, so he
seized on the irritations caused by union members and busi
ness agents in the shops to stir up discontent and class feel
ing among the employers. . . . Nevertheless the ma
jority of the manufacturers do not approve of his methods
even now." Meanwhile, under Mr. Gordon's guidance, the
Clothing Manufacturers' Association of New York has insti
tuted a suit for the dissolution of the Amalgamated Cloth
ing Workers of America in New York State, on the ground
that it is an unlawful combination and a conspiracy.
""OUSINESS Revives in Many Plants," writes the alert
13 copyreader of the Washington Star. "Clothing,
Automobile, and Textile Workers are Busier." It is a pity
that the frantic statesmen in Washington who so eagerly
revived the moribund War Finance Corporation and stirra
up a hasty emergency tariff, could not restore prosperit
as facilely as this capable journalist. What do the Assr
ciated Press dispatches, read carefully, say? That '
Baltimore 500 non-union clothing workers have been
employed, while 19,000 union men of various industr
remain unemployed; that there are, as the copyreader
it in a sub-heading, "1000 More Men Busy in Detroi
making a total of some 50,000 automobile workers emplc
with 250,000 out of work; that the carpenters of Shrt
port, La., have voluntarily reduced wages (outrageous B<
sheviki, these labor men!); that the Akron rubber sho,
are not reopening as had been rumored; that 50 per ce'
of Chicago's clothing workers are idle; that some Nt
England mills are reopening on half time with wages
reduced. "Business Reviving," the Star's copyreader glibly
scribbles, as he makes prosperity in the headlines. Would
that the task of statesmen were as simple!
SENATOR JONES has created a mild furor by digging
up an agreement, which to him and most other persons
appears to be new, between the International Mercantile
Marine and the British Admiralty, whereby the former,
back in 1903, bound itself for twenty years "to pursue no
policy injurious to the interests of the British mercantile
marine or of British trade." In point of fact the agreement
was debated in the British Parliament at the time of its
inception, and has ever since been familiar to the shipping
trade. That the United States Shipping Board was not
aware of the contract is quite plausible, since that body has
been unaware of many things going on about it, not to say
within its own offices and among its own employees. Ques
tioned by the Shipping Board in regard to the covenant,
P. A. S. Franklin, president of the International Mercantile
Marine, insisted that the company was "100 per cent Amer
ican," and presented a list of shareholders, showing that 94
Feb. 9, 1921]
The Nation
per cent of the stock was owned by Americans living in the

United States. At the same time he was obliged to admit
that 87 per cent of the total tonnage was under foreign
registry and subject to foreign requisition in case of war.
THE truth is that the International Mercantile Marine
is, and always has been, amorphous in character. It
does not represent the growth of an American industry, but
is rather an instance of modern mushroom finance, one of
several great coups executed by the house of Morgan some
twenty years ago. A great group of foreign ships, with
their operating and managing personnel intact, was brought
under a single American control by the expedient of buying
into the stock ownership. That is the only sense in which
the great bulk of this tonnage has ever been American. In
any event the point is sentimental rather than practical. A
curious idea of "patriotism" clings to shipping which we
associate with no other business. In reality there is no
more national honor or advantage in the ownership or opera
tion of shipping than of steel mills, oil wells, or wheat fields,
j Shipping, like any other industry, can justify itself only as
it proves a benefit to its employees, its investors, and the
public Of itself, the American flag flying at the stern of a
steamship means little more than the same emblem hoisted
above a factory, a lighting plant, or a railway roundhouse.
THE illuminating housing inquiry of the Lockwood com
mittee in New York State has run into one of those
ind alleys of business-controlled politics which usually
x;k such investigations when they threaten possible usehiess to the public and probable disadvantage to some
icial interest. Samuel Untermyer, counsel for the com>ee, was allowed to expose graft in the building trades
ons and to put Boss Brindell on trial; before anybody
1 stop him he also brought out some striking evidence
mopoly and of price control by makers and merchants
.rious building materials. When, however, he sought
iority to investigate savings banks and insurance comlies to learn why it was so difficult to obtain loans for
ilding purposes, strings were pulled at Albany, and the
Islative committees to which the question was referred
ported against permitting any inquiry in that direction,
t is said that opposition came chiefly from fire insurance
md casualty companies which, having invested heavily in
loubtful stocks, were much averse to letting their situation
oe exposed. The moral is that the public will never get far
in eliminating any but surface abuses until it puts men who
represent it into office, instead of continuing the regime of
the two old political parties, which jointly and individually
serve the privileged few as the price of existence.
FOREIGN exchange rate fluctuations recently have been
particularly violent while appreciable improvement has
occurred in the quotations for the British pound sterling,
the French franc, and the German mark. With the pound
sterling now above $3.80nearly 80% of parit is pre
dicted in responsible quarters that 1921 will see a recovery
to at least $4.00, while some experts hazard $4.50 as prob
able. But the United States has usurped Britain's prewar
status as the world's chief creditor nation. Our 1920 for
eign trade showed an excess of exports over imports of
$2,950,000,000, a favorable balance only a billion dollars
less than in 1919; incoming gold exceeded outgoing by
$107,000,000, which contrasts with a $291,000,000 excess of
197
outgoing gold in 1919; foreign governments still owe us

nearly $9,600,000,000 which we advanced between April,
1917 and November, 1920, and on which we have received
no interest to date although these accruals now total more
than $700,000,000; and among the so-called "invisible"
factors in our favor there is now income at an annual rate
of about $1,000,000,000 from shipping freights collected
on foreign-bound cargoes.
EXACTLY to explain the movements of exchange rates
is as difficult as to determine definitely why the stock
market moves this way or that. But it is noticeable that
exchange rates, at this stage of the world's financial and
economic readjustment to peace conditions, are depreciated
most in proportion to the present degree of inflation in the
various countries. In Italy, for instance, sky-rocketing ex
pansion in note circulation, loans, prices, etc., is still raging,
and the measure of these phenomena is the current
lira quotation of about 3.65, or twenty-eight lire to our
dollar. The lira has lost about 72% of its normal value.
To Italy, however, this apparently ruinous depreciation in
its currency is not without a bright side. A cable from
Rome points out that Italy's present debt of 170 billion paper
lire at the current rate of exchange is equivalent to some
thing over $6,000,000,000, whereas, were the lira to return
tomorrow to normal, this Italian indebtedness would repre
sent close to $35,000,000,000. Some of Germany's astute
financial minds have been and are moving heaven and earth
to depress the quotation for the mark because Germany can
thus undersell competitors engaged in exporting. It ia
obviously to German advantage to sell a bill of goods here
and be paid in dollars which will now buy nearly sixty
marks as against a par of 4.2 marks. Of course, in buying
things here the German is handicapped. In Britain indus
trial deflation proceeds apace; imports are cut and every
effort is bent toward increasing exports; plans are afoot to
refund British debts to America and to stabilize or "peg"
the pound.
HERE and there in the wicked world little nooks of
purity persist. There is Zion City, for instance, no
more than a tripper's journey from Chicago's breezy boule
vards. Dowie was its Elijah and he has left a fit Elisha in
Overseer Voliva, who sees to it that this little Zion entertains
no alcohol, no nicotine, no cards, no secret societies, no pro
fanity, no idleness, no Sabbath slackness, no Sabbath gaso
line. The stockings of the females in that Spartan republic
must be thick, their heels low, the necks of their gowns high,
their skirts long, their shirtwaists inviolably opaque. Vacci
nation may not enter there, nor antenuptial tendernesses,
nor chop suey, nor jazz. And like all nooks of purity, this
one is militant. Not enough for Zionists to be pure and to
lean out over the battlements of their own private paradise
and to witness the wretchedness of that other world which
wriggles in its sins. No, the Zionists go out, two by two,
like the primitive apostles or like the primeval animals from
the ark of Goodman Noah, to make the world different. Just
now it is New York that interests them, and a pair of sober
sisters of Zion are playing missionary in that fertile field.
Well, as the Zionists probably say, you never can tell till you
try; great oaks from little acorns grow; if you lift a calf
every day you can by and by lift a cow; patience performs
the only miracles ; small beginnings make big endings ; try
everything once.
198
The Nation
Are Women
FEOM the beginning the League of Women Voters in
both its State and its national organizations set out
to be a "good" organizationgood, that is, in the sense that
the American Federation of Labor is good, or that the Na
tional Woman's Party is not good. It determined to be non
partisan as a body, and partisan as individuals; to initiate
and support measures of reform through the medium of
the regularly constituted political parties ; to avoid even the
appearance of a "woman's party." It believed in tried and
true methods of procuring untried and, from the conserva
tive point of view, dubious changes in society. And al
though many of its members are good Republicans and
deserving Democrats, the League of Women Voters placed
itself squarely behind a program of change that included
many measures not to be found in the Republican or the
Democratic book of common prayer. So far, at least, women
in politics appear able to support a gentle heresy without
fearing the near approach of excommunication. But just as
a new bishop may suddenly decree an end to all heresies in
his diocese, so a new governor may frown on the undeserv
ing in the political ranks. And Governor Miller has, with a
frankness that deserves admiration, frowned all over the
heresies of the New York State League of Women Voters
and firmly excommunicated the League itself. At the an
nual State convention of the League, the Governor delivered
an address in which he called it "a menace to our institu
tions" and used other words that should have a tonic effect
on its membership.
Governor Miller's attack fell into two parts. He declared
himself against all organizations outside of the regular
political parties which seek to exert political power; and he
opposed the specific social welfare program of the League
of Women Voters. It is fair to entertain certain suspicions
of a public official who opposes on general governmental
principles the existence of an organization and then adds
that he doesn't like its program. One is forced to wonder
whether Governor Miller will oppose with equal vigor, as
partisan and dangerous, such extra-party associations as the
National Security League, or the National Association of
Manufacturers; or, in New York, the Union League Club,
which is certainly not a political party, but is admittedly
political in its purposes, and partisan. We have not heard
that Governor Miller has notified the Union League Club
that good government and Republicanism would be better
served if its members should disband.
But the League of Women Voters does not stand for the
same principles as the Union League Club. It has never
financed an investigation of bolshevism ; it has never let an
Archibald Stevenson loose in the land. Instead it has sup
ported measures for the protection of maternity and infants,
for direct citizenship for women, for equal obligations in
jury duty for men and women, for measures that represent,
not radicalism, to be sure, but enlightened liberalism and
a desire for larger opportunities for women. The League
of Women Voters, nationally and in the States, has pursued
its objects by the methods that other organizations com
monly useby circulating literature, by enlisting the
women's clubs, by speaking and lobbying. Dominated for
the most part by those women who were classed as "moder
ates" in the suffrage fight, the League has never gone in for
more militant activities; it has shunned spectacular tactics
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
a Menace?
and has refused to be drawn to the support of any party or
driven to the formation of a party of women. Its members
have, it is true, flung their organized power against certain
individual candidates whose record looked too black, and by
doing so they have allowed an entering wedge of more mili
tant activity.
Will they not need to go further? It is manifest that the
women should not and can not form a separate political
party. Women who agree on social welfare programs and
equal citizenship rights may well disagree on the tariff and
the League of Nations. But women have, unfortunately,
certain jobs to do that will never be done through the direct
initiative of the political parties. Until the citizenship laws
are changed ; until maternity is protected and compensated ;
until illegitimacy is abolished and the care of all babies
assured; until birth control is legalizeduntil these ques
tions and a dozen more are attended to, there must be a vig
orous, nonpartisan organization of women. By his fearful
opposition, Governor Miller has only emphasized the need.
But such an organization must not be too squeamishly non
partisan. It must force the attention of all the political
parties upon its program and must be ready to threaten and
punish and support. It will discover presently that as its
power grows it will be met with the whole force of in
trenched reaction. Governor Miller opposes the League of
Women Voters not because he is "against the women," but
because he is against change. Reactionism such as his is a
well-rounded philosophy; the progressivism of the women
will tend to become well-rounded, too, if it survives, and
their tactics will have to equal in vigor the methods that will
be used against them.
In the middle of this month the National Woman's Party
will meet at Washington to decide what its future shall be.
Temperamentally it is opposed to the tactics of the League
of Women Voters. Hardened by years of persecution and
militant opposition, the Woman's Party looks askance at an
organization which protests its impartiality and exercises
too much politeness. As a matter of fact, however, the two
organizations stand for much the same program; they are
the Right and Left of the political feminist movement. The
League of Women Voters has got a headstart as a working
organization, and with every fight it makes, every time a
public official condemns it, the League is likely to become
more resolved in its purpose, more radical in its methods.
The Woman's Party, on the other hand, has equal political
experience and organizing ability, and an amazing command
of the columns of the American press. This ability to domi
nate popular imagination is useful in any public cause; and
the leaders of the National Woman's Party are strategists
enough to see that it should not be overdone. The organized
women of the country should get together on a strong pro
gram of women's rightswhich are nothing but human
rights. They should stick together on that issue even
though on other questions they fly as far apart as Repub
licans and Socialists. They would do well to study the
tactics of the Nonpartisan League, which has made its
innocuous name a symbol of enormous significance. Farm
ers may split on the tariff or blue Sunday lawsbut they
stand together on the question of farmers' rights! The
women should do the same for theirs even though they may
find life difficult within the fold of the old parties.
The Nation
Feb. 9, 1921]
Why
Tariffs Will
Not Stay
Revised
THE President-elect has merely followed normal party
precedent in promising to the interests that have waxed
fat through the Republican sale of tariff favors a new deal
which, for the public, is bound to be anything but a square
deal. A tariff which the Democrats revised downwards
under Mr. Wilson is to be revised as the McKinley tariff was
written and the Dingley tariff was drawn and the PayneAldrich changes were made. Mr. Harding is not deterred
by the example of what happened to Mr. Taft, whose praise
of the Payne-Aldrich bill at Winona in 1910 sealed his polit
ical downfall. He could not see that there was a moral issue
involved which was the mainspring of the entire political
agitation of that period: "Thou shalt not enrich some at
the expense of all."
There can be no permanent revision of the tariff, and
despite many learned professors there can never be a scien
tific revision of the tariff, because its cornerstones are cow
ardice, greed, ignorance, and national selfishness. Since it
is a law in restraint of trade, a tariff is bound to become
odious. Because every form of tariff taxation, save that
imposed for revenue only, is the extortion from the public
of gratuities to favored interests, it is impossible to hit
upon any set of schedules which will stifle public discontent.
Inequality is certain to remain, as well as injustice; these
are the twin snakes that inevitably coil about the cradle of
a protected "infant" industryever a Herculesmenacing
the industry itself as well as all affected by the tariff. For
the selfishness of such protected industries as the iron and
steel trades hurts those responsible far more than those
against whom the tariff is aimed, as has repeatedly been
proved by the revelations as to conditions in and about
Pittsburgh, that highly-protected center of the industry.
To revise a tariff downward through tinkering with indi
vidual schedules at the suggestion of a tariff board is as
valuable as attacking a cancer by slicing off a portion of the
obnoxious growth. As for revising upward, that is merely
giving the favored interests more room in the trough and
bestowing more favors upon the privileged few at the
expense of the whole country. Nor will it avail any poli
tician to point with pride to an increased free listhogs'
bristles, works of art twenty years old, marshmallows, life
boats, silk worms' eggs, stilts, skeletons, turtles, and leeches,
as Mr. Dooley once described itwhen he has sold to inter
ested individuals the right to fix the price of a single neces
sity or of a single commodity. "A privilege," said Louis
Kossuth, "can never be lasting." The new Republican tariff
can never be lasting because it will be but further privilege
of the rankest kind, and a privilege is as odious by any
other name as by its own.
Curiously enough, we in America have been among the
last to understand just what the tariff really means and
how directly it is affiliated with many of the evils against
which there has been a popular outcry. It has become diffi
cult or impossible to tax one citizen directly to give bounty
to another ; to make by law one poorer and the other richer ;
to draw a class distinction along lines of trade. But legal
ized robbery through protective-tariff schedules is robbery
none the less and its essential immorality is no more to be
concealed than was that of slavery by all the State and Fed
199
eral, legislative and judicial, safeguards with which the own

ership of human beings was buttressed and fortified. When
the essential equality before the law of all the citizens of
this country is menaced by any economic system there is a
state of war which can never be ended until that false
structure comes crashing to earth. Every tariff does vio
lence to democracy, and the increasing of tariffs was never
less excusable than today when we are inextricably involved
with the other nations of the earth in the chaos following
upon the war. Never was free trade as much needed for
the sake of peace, for the interest of producers and con
sumers the world over, for the sake of all humanity. It is
the very time that the bars should be thrown down, when
we in America are suddenly confronted with surplus prod
ucts in search of a market.
The natural fruit of our own tariff at home has been an
aristocracy of favor and of wealth. We cannot revise with
justice any tariff which the Republicans may set up because
a tariff is as far removed from justice as the moon from the
earth, because no amount of science and no amount of skill
and no amount of democracy can legalize tariff iniquity and
corruption and the buying and selling of legislative favors.
The natural fruit of a higher tariff abroad means additional
suffering and difficulties for the stricken nations of the
earth. The Republicans fool themselves if they believe that
they may now revise the tariff and long enjoy the fruits
thereof. It will react upon them to their political injury
precisely as the Payne-Aldrich tariff grafting in 1910 led
up to the Progressive movement of 1912.
Scholars and Their Bosses

PRESIDENT LOWELL in his report for the academic
year 1919-1920 draws a valuable distinction between
the university as properly conceived and the university as
conceived by that majority of persons who can think of such
an institution only in terms of modern industrial enterprise
that is, can think of the teachers only as employees of the
trustees. The trustees of colleges and universities, says
President Lowell, are in no such position. They do
not represent private owners of capital in the universities,
for there are none ; they are not responsible for the making
of profit, for in the obvious sense there is no profit to be
made; they occupy no position of superiority with respect
to the teachers, but are jointly engaged with them in the
task of carrying out the functions and purposes of learning.
"The best and most fruitful conception of a university or
college is the ancient one of a society or guild of scholars
associated together for preserving, imparting, increasing,
and enjoying knowledge." And as to the governing board :
"Its sole object is to help the society of scholars to accom
plish the object for which they are brought together. They
are the essential part of the society ; and making their work
effective for the intellectual and moral training of youth
and for investigation is the sole reason for the existence of
trustees, of buildings, of endowments, and of all the elabo
rate machinery of a modern university."
Trustees, indeed, according to President Lowell, are essen
tial for three reasons: first, because non-professional ele
ments are indispensable in the management of any special
ized occupation; second, because there must be responsi
bility for financial administration; and third, because with
out some disinterested body to act as arbiters the depart
200
The Nation
ments of a university would waste their time and strength

in violent struggles for survival. Surely this is enough
power for the trusteesthat of being, on three grounds, the
final authority. Yet in President Lowell's general position
there is that admirable note of liberalism which he almost
alone among American university presidents during the past
five or six years has had the courage to strike. In effect he
speaks for a sort of guild socialism in university administra
tion. Where he comes to draw the line between the kind
of jurisdiction the trustees of a university may exercise and
the kind they may not, he enunciates a general principle
which, so far as it goes, is thoroughly sound. "Laymen
should not attempt to direct experts about the method of
attaining results, but only indicate the results to be
attained."
To the credit of Harvardwhich means in large measure
to the credit of President Lowellthe Overseers of late
years have employed little of the tyranny which it has lain
in their legal power to use. By comparison the trustees of
Columbia, for instance, make a lamentable showing. It
may, of course, be said of Columbia that that university
has risked more than Harvard, by engaging teachers not
so "safe" as the Harvard tradition demands, and has con
sequently found itself more frequently in hot water under
the eyes of the public than has Harvard, where they order
matters more discreetly. But the difference between these
two sorts of universities may not unfairly be indicated by
a comparison of the remarks of President Lowell here
quoted with a sentence from the latest report of President
Butler, who is engaged, as usual, in accusing liberal ideas,
and those who hold them, of being merely mad. "With all
the good will in the world toward an individual who might
dissent from the multiplication table or insist that he had
solved the problem of perpetual motion, the teachers of
mathematics and of physics would not be able to find a place
for him in their teaching ranks." Imagine President Lowell
stooping to such an analogy !
The difficulty with the system of university administra
tion as now constituted is particularly that it makes as much
room for the Butlers as for the Lowellsand generally
more. Trustees are as a rule more easily led than the pub
lic suspects. On most matters of policy they can be outargued by almost any one who is reasonably expert. But
given the least encouragement from a president of the re
actionary stamp, the cause is hopeless, for the trustees of
American universities are overwhelmingly on the side of
reaction and there they may be expected to remain as long
as the present system prevails. They say, in self-defense
now and then, that they have to preserve sanity and de
cency in their faculties, and to that end must now and then
reluctantly lop off a liberal or radical professor. Well, a
question or two will answer all that. What professor in a
theological seminary heaping fierce reactionary wrath
upon the head of progressive theologians has ever been disci
plined? What professor of economics for upholding high
protection or assailing the income tax or maligning social
ists has ever felt the curb? What professor who during the
war sang loud hymns of hate, raved at the enemy till he
grew purple, or defended all the barbarities of war if prac
ticed by the Allies, ever heard the restraining voice? Do
these trustees really mean that sanity and decency are al
ways in the sole custody of reaction? More voices than
President Lowell's will have to be heard before much real
humility will enter the head and bosom of the typical trustee.
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
Enter Trillions !
SOME day a French Prime Minister will stand up boldly
before a hostile Chamber and tell the deputies that the
reparations proposals of his predecessors have been glitter
ing frauds, and that France will have to adjust herself to
the fact that in this war there are no victors and that full
reparation can never be made. That Prime Minister will
be defeated in the Chamber; but his speech will shake
France, and on the structure of his courage and honesty
a healthy Europe may be built. Short of that there is no
health for Europe. The proposals just launched by the
Allied Premiers at Paris may seem to the historian of the
future merely laughable unrealities; to the observer of
present-day Europe they are an act of gruesome and de
ceptive cowardice. They condemn France to more paper
financing, and the people of her still unreconstructed north
to more chill delay; and they condemn Germany to more
months and perhaps years of hunger and hopelessness.
These proposals are, briefly, for the payment of gradu
ated indemnities mounting from two to six billion gold
marks per annum, totaling 226 billion gold marks, or about
$56,000,000,000, in forty-two yearly instalments. In addi
tion Germany is to be asked to pay twelve per cent ad
valorem on her exports, and to make no change in her cus
toms regulations, nor seek to finance national, state, or
municipal loans abroad without consent of the Allied Sepa
ration Commission. This is the Commission which is at
present engaged in the task of reckoning what Germany
might be asked to pay in reparation for damage done if
there were any chance that even a French statesman might
think her able to pay ita sterile exercise in higher mathe
matics.
Germany probably will refuse the proposals, and bargain
for whatever she can get. They are not even in accord with
the Treaty of Versailles, which, while it admits a higher
total liability than any which can possibly be paid, instructs
the Reparation Commission to draw up a schedule for pay
ment within thirty years. No doubt the German diplomats
will make the most of this departure from the letter of the
treaty to demand other departures. But this proposed visi
tation of the sins of the old men of the passing generation
upon children yet unborn is not the most distressing feature
of the proposals; it is their cowardly unreality. French
statesmen will admit in private that the sum is too large
translated into the current exchange value of the Ger
man mark, it runs the indemnity up into the astral realm
of trillionsbut they refuse to face facts in public. And
when the Germans know that the. things demanded of them
are fantastic dreams, they are naturally not moved to get
down to the harsh bread-and-butter task which we hope they
will some day face, of paying all that Germany possibly can
to compensate, in so far as that is humanly possible, for
the ruins in northern France. French statesmen do their
own people a cruel injustice. Such terms as those proposed
can arouse only two moods in Germany: one of mere de
fiance, the other of hopeless despair; and neither conduces
to the productivity required for reparation. Bullying gets
nowhere; bullying with trillions as a war-cry only discredits
the demand for disarmament of the eastern fortresses and
of the security police which the Allies must and will press.
The world is tired of symbols and ciphers; it needs frank
facing of facts.
The Nation
Feb. 9, 1921]
Prince
Kropotkin,
201
Revolutionist
By ABRAHAM CAHAN
London, January 29.Prince Peter Alexeivich Kropotkin, Rus
sian geographer, author, and revolutionary leader, is dead in
Moscow, says a Copenhagen dispatch to the Exchange Tele
graph Agency.New York Times, January 30, 1921.
PRINCE PETER KROPOTKIN, anarchist and revolu
tionist, was a greater aristocrat than the czars who
reigned in his time. They were Romanovs, while he was a
descendant of the Ruriks, the first reigning family of or
ganized Russia. As a boy he was a frequent visitor at the
Winter Palace, and Nicholas I, the great-grandfather of the
last of the Romanovs, was very fond of him. Later when
he was old enough, he joined the corps of pages, and be
came a member of the large suite of the Czar's entourage.
But even there he felt the ferment of his age, and the con
tagion of the revolutionary idealism typical of those days
penetrated into aristocratic homes and military schools.
The intellectual class of Russia, almost exclusively made up
of children of the nobility, was coming under the influence
of the ideas promulgated by the socialist critic Chernishevski. Those were the golden days of Russian literature
when Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Pomialovski, Goncharov, and Chebrin were at the height of their success.
Russian fiction was permeated by an idealistic conviction
that the nobility owed a great debt of gratitude to the
peasantry, and that they who have enjoyed education owed
the fruits of that education to the people who had fed them,
who had made it possible for them to go to school, to have
leisure for writing novels, or for reading them. The formal
abolition of serfdom had come in 1863, when Kropotkin was
still in the corps of pages, but the peasant was far from
being free. Economically he was still a slave, having been
left without land. These intellectuals were aware that
emancipation without economic resources was an empty
phrase. These dreamers gave up the luxury of their fami
lies, donned peasant garb, mixed with the common people,
taught them to read and to write. That was the movement
known in the history of the Russian struggle as "going
among the people." Its spirit pervaded Russian literature
of those days.
Prince Kropotkin was caught by that spirit when he was
a student. His experience as an officer in Siberia deepened
it; it determined his abandonment of the career as a geog
rapher which was opening to him ; and his visit to Switzer
land in 1872 brought him into vivid contact with the young
international workingmen's movement in which socialist
Marxians and anarchist Bakunists still associated. On re
turning to Russia he joined one of the propagandist "cir
cles." He was arrested, and one of the most picturesque
stories of his early life is the visit which Grand Duke
Nicholas, brother of Alexander II, paid him in his cell. The
Grand Duke asked, "How is it possible that you, a sergeant
of the corps of pages, should mix with all these fellows,
peasants and people with no name?" Kropotkin simply
turned his back on him. There are few more dramatic
stories than that of Kropotkin's escape from the fortress
of Peter and Paul, the formidable dungeon devoted to
Political prisoners, as told in his "Memoirs of a Revolu
tionist."
He slipped away to England, then back to his watch
maker friends in Switzerland, and soon took a leading posi

tion among the anarchists of Western Europe. He was ar
rested again in France, and spent more years in prison.
They were not the only days marked by keen physical suf
fering. Throughout, he led a life of privation, always at
the heart of the idealist revolutionary movement. His home
in London was the Mecca of Russian idealists. He made a
living by contributing scientific articles to magazines like
the Contemporary Review, and more strictly technical re
views. He also delivered lectures; like all educated Rus
sians, he spoke several languages fluently. And like many
other Russians in the movement, like his friend Stepniak,
like Plechanov, he married one of the Jewish girls who
threw themselves into the cause.
It is curious that both of the great leaders of European
anarchism have been Russians, yet Russians of profoundly
different types. Bakunin was in a sense Kropotkin's in
tellectual father, but he was a violent, angry, hot-tempered
man. Kropotkin, on the other hand, was mild and meek,
kindly, and his formidable beard was something of a joke
to me. He was so warm-hearted and so naive in spite of
being so wise, so full of learning. There is the same sort
of naivete in all his pamphlets and speeches. Running
through them is a childlike belief in humanity. The core
of his doctrine was that you must not touch a fly on the
wall, that you can leave everything to humanity, to the
good will and good sense of the average human being. He
did not believe in government because he believed that in
dividuals, even today, under modern conditions, are too good
to be in need of control. He considered humanity as a class
of good boys who could be trusted, and to whom no discipline
need be applied. As a natural scientist he was usually
sound and often profound, but in his sociological doctrines
he struck me as a man whose inherent kindness overcame
ordinary common sense. He was a dreamer. I do not think
that his literary criticism was great or important, but he
was a born artist, his autobiography particularly con
taining many a page that might well bear the name of a
Turgenev.
When it was reported that he was going to Russia, his
native country that he had not seen for more than forty
years, we all wondered what attitude he would take toward
bolshevism. He never was a Socialist, and it was natural
that he should find himself ill at ease in a state run under
so rigid a system of discipline as Soviet Russia's. The basic
doctrine of socialism and whatever science there is in
Marxism as a clear-cut and thought-out system of govern
mentall that ran counter to the make-up of Kropotkin.
With human beings he was a dreamer and a poet, an
idealist and a prophet. Being a man himself he could never
become objective enough to apply the scientific method to
other human beings. The stories of his ill-treatment at
the hands of the Bolsheviki are not true. The last in
formation that reached me was that in answer to an in
quiry whether he wanted to leave Russia and had been
refused a passport by the Government, he said: "I never
meant to leave Russia. I have no reason to wish to leave
Russia. My daughter, however, does wish to visit Eng
land, and she was immediately granted her .passport."
202
The Nation
The Street
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
Railways Tangle
By LOUIS BUDENZ
THAT bad boy of American city government, the electric
railway problem, is once more disturbing the peace of
Father Knickerbocker. When Governor Nathan L. Miller
went before the legislature at Albany last week with a
special message on the New York City transit situation, he
stirred the Greater City to alarm at the prospect of losing
the uniform five-cent fare.
The Governor's message contained some remarkable
statements for these reactionary days. That did not serve,
however, to reassure the car riders of New York City.
He stated that he favored "ultimate municipal ownership"
of a unified traction systema goal which progressive
forces and public-minded experts have been pointing to for
a number of years. At the present time the transit lines
of the city are carried on by about thirty-five separate
operating companies. Most of these are now in the hands
of the interests controlling the three big outstanding sys
temsthe Interborough Rapid Transit Company, the
Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, and the Third Avenue
Railway Company. But the financial condition of each
company depends solely upon its own revenues and operat
ing expenses, irrespective of the revenues or expenses of
any other company. This leads to wastes in operation that
help to plunge the companies into financial difficulties, and
robs the car rider of the transfer privileges and improved
service that go with a unified system of transportation.
On several of the New York City surface lines this situa
tion has led to almost complete paralysis. The Governor
also pointed to the shattered value of the companies' stocks
and bonds, and said that at this hour the public could well
take advantage of this condition to drive home demands of
its own.
But these were mere words, and the Governor's recom
mendations did not conform to them. He did not specify
a means of unification that would be satisfactory to the
people of New York City. The heart of his proposal would
take away from them all power to decide the future of their
transit service and the rates of fare charged. It would
place absolute authority in a State commission of three to
readjust or nullify all existing franchise contracts under
the police power of the State. It is this authority, and par
ticularly the control over rates, which the car riders do not
wish to surrender. They voted the u3e of $250,000,000 of
public money to the Rapid Transit companies in order to
assure themselves of the five-cent fare. They went further,
and contracted that they would not expect a return for the
city on this huge investment until all operating expenses
and the companies' own rate of return had been paid.
The news of this proposal, however, is not at all surpris
ing. All over the country there has been a movement for
increased fares, and for the elimination or readjustment
of franchise contracts so that such increases could be made.
New York is almost alone among the larger cities of the
country in its continuation of the old standard five-cent
charge. The street railways, not only in New York but
throughout the country, find themselves in a bad way and
are taking this means to secure a new lease of life. A little
over a year ago, with almost unanimous voice, the repre
sentatives of this great industry confessed before the Fed
eral Electric Railway Commission that their credit was

gone. About the only exceptions were the electric railways
of Cleveland and Philadelphia, the former of which was
operating under the celebrated Tyler service-at-cost plan
and the latter with the unique record of having gone
through the war period with a straight five-cent fare. This,
despite the fact that patronage on the transit systems had
increased greatly during the preceding five years and that
practically little working capital is needed in this industry
because the revenues are collected before the operating
expenses are paid.
Cities were demanding extensions and property was
needing rehabilitation, and yet the companies could not
induce capital to flow into the industry. Numerous com
panies had confessed bankruptcy and were in the hands of
receivers. Others were struggling on the rocks. The war
had brought about a crisis in the street railway business.
The cost in material and labor had increased, and it was
to this fact that the representatives of the companies laid
the blame for most of their troubles. Motormen and con
ductors had always been among the lowest paid of any class
of labor. With very little skill required for their work,
there was a great shifting in and out of workers, with a
consequent lack of effective trade-union organization. The
war changed this condition radically. Labor became scarce
and the street railway workers found they could demand
much more than ever before. Strikes were won with great
ease. The National War Labor Board, finding that the men
were not paid a living wage, granted numerous awards,
greatly increasing previous wage schedules. The cost of
labor jumped up almost over night. In Cleveland, for
example, from June 15, 1910, to May 1, 1915, which includes
the first nine months of the war, the wages of motormen
and conductors were 27 cents per hour for the first year
and 30 cents per hour thereafter. In May, 1920, under a
new agreement, the wages went up to 70 cents per hour for
the first three months, 73 cents for the next nine months
and 75 cents after the first year. The Interborough Rapid
Transit Company stated in 1919 that wage increases made
effective on that system during the three years preceding
meant ah increase of a cent and a half for each revenue
passenger carried. The National War Labor Board took
the only position which it found it could take and considered
the wages as an operating expense of the industry, which
it must award regardless of whether the companies could
show that they were financially able to pay or not. The
price of materials needed for the maintenance and opera
tion of street railways also went up. According to testi
mony presented to the Federal Electric Commission the
increase of this item was as high as 100 per cent.
That, of course, is only the beginning of the story. Other
lines of business were faced with these increased costs and
did not feel the pinch. The street railways had to face
many other factors. For one, there is the increase in
private automobiles and jitney bus competition. From Los
Angeles, where the jitney business was first launched, to
Newark and New York, the number of these cars has
doubled and trebled with each year. In Newark, which is
really a suburb of New York City and part of its metro
Feb. 9, 1921]
The Nation
politan district, the number of passengers carried by

jitneys, as reported to the city treasurer, increased from
something over six million in the year ending May, 1917,
to almost forty million in the year ending 1920. This
means over one hundred thousand passengers a day and
represents a big hole in the revenues which the street rail
way might expect. When the use of the private automobile
is considered, the situation grows even darker for the com
panies. This competition in every city of any size runs
into the thousands, meaning just that many passengers
diverted from the transit systems. The Special Street Rail
way Investigation Commission of Massachusetts in its 1918
report states that privately owned automobiles in that State
had increased from thirty-one thousand in 1910 to one hun
dred and seventy-two thousand in 1917. Of this number
one hundred and forty-seven thousand were passenger cars,
with trucks and vehicles excluded.
The war and the jitney were not, however, the chief
causes of the companies' difficulties and of their lack of
credit. These but served to bring to a head conditions that
already had existed under the surface for years. The com
panies, by the admissions of their representatives before
the Federal Commission, were suffering from the sins of
their early days. In many cases the old sinners had not
been converted, but had merely adopted new forms of vice.
Those early days, when the wild oats were being sown, were
the days of stock inflation and franchise grabbing. Street
railway stocks and bonds do not have much value today
because they do not represent actual property or actual
earning power. They represent to a great degree the past
capitalization of future hopes. An authority for this is no
less a person than Gen. Guy E. Tripp of the Westinghouse
Electric Company, chairman of the Committee of 100, which
represented the American Electric Railway Association
before the Federal Commission. General Tripp was frank
in stating that the Metropolitan Street Railway Company
of New Yorkwhich he assisted to reorganize"was
largely overcapitalized," and that overcapitalization was
one of the chief reasons for the public prejudice against
the companies everywhere.
The "water" represented by this overcapitalization has
never been effectively squeezed from the stock of the com
panies in the great majority of the States. Massachusetts
seems to be the only commonwealth that can claim to be a
possible exception. In 1912 the street railways of the
United States generally were capitalized at an average of
$104,930 per mile, while the figure for Massachusetts was
only $57,586 per mile. Yet, out of Massachusetts came the
first cry for help, back before war time when the six-cent
fare was first introduced. This was due, partly to over
building of lines into territories which could not support it,
a favored pastime in the beginning of the electric railway
business. It is also due to incorrect financial policies and
bad management. But, perhaps above all, it is to be
charged to another evil of even greater significance. This
is the holding company, which is to be found in Massachu
setts and in all other States, New York included. This
arrangement has been devised to evade State regulation
and to create overcapitalization in spite of the rather feeble
efforts of State commissions to curb this source of weak
ness. Approximately 75 per cent of the public utilities of
the country are controlled by these holding companies,
according to the electric railways themselves. The scheme
is inseparable from banker control and is the new method
203
used to make the business a matter of speculation and not

of transportation for service. When the early days of
frenzied financiering had passed, and the tricks of Yerkes in
Chicago, of the Central Traction group in St. Louis, and the
Widener-Elkins-Dolan-Whitney-Ryan syndicate all over the
country could not be repeated, the holding-company device
was trotted out. Company on company is formed, buying
out preceding companies, and levying tribute on the reve
nues of the operating companies in turn. Under the present
state of our legislation, no effective means is at hand to
get rid of these old men of the sea. State commissions are
not empowered to deal with them, but only with the operat
ing companies. The extent to which overcapitalization and
bad management are responsible for the condition of many
systems is strikingly shown by a comparison of the finan
cial conditions of the New York Electric Railways with the
Cleveland system. The ratio of total operating expenses to
operating revenues of the New York companies ranged
from 52 81/100 per cent in 1913 to 68 92/100 per cent in
1919; the Cleveland operating ratio ranged from 70 per
cent in 1913 to 76 per cent in 1918. And yet, the Cleveland
system has gone through the war with a five-cent fare or
less, earning a 6 per cent return for its investors, while
the New York companies were crying for help and showing
fluctuating and uncertain returns.
With the bad boy as ill from overeating as the street
railways confess themselves to be, what do the doctors
suggest for remedy ? The American Electric Railway Asso
ciation has a remedy which it has pushed forward with
vigor. This is the service-at-cost idea. It is proposed
everywhere as a substitute for municipal ownership. The
Public Utilities Committee of the United States Chamber
of Commerce has indorsed it, various State conferences of
mayors (New York's among them) have favored it, and the
Federal Electric Commission has given it governmental
sanction. Its essential points are a flexible fare, going up
or down as the "cost" increases or decreases, a guaranteed
return, and private operation under public regulation. The
service-at-cost idea can be made effective through control
by State commissions, using the police power to change
rates. Or, it can be effected by local contract arrange
ments with cities themselvesthe service-at-cost plan
proper.
Both of these methods originated with opponents of the
public utility companies. Both have now been adopted by
the companies themselves, which have fallen back on rear
trenches and now champion that which they formerly
opposed. Through the former method increased fares have
been obtained in 400 cities all over the country since the
war began. The celebrated decision of O'Connell vs.
Chicago, handed down in April, 1917, by the Illinois
Supreme Court, has served as the tocsin cry for the street
railways everywhere to launch an attack on the old fran
chise contracts under which they were obliged to charge
only a five-cent fare or less. The theory of the use of the
police power in this connection is this: the safety, health,
and convenience of the public depend on the continuous
operation of the street railways. The railways claim, and
make show of proving, that they cannot give the necessary
service under the lower fare. Therefore their rate con
tracts are against public policy and should be abrogated.
It was this point which Governor Miller stressed in his
message. As early as 1914 an extensive study by the
Minnesota Home Rule League showed that the State com
204
The Nation
missions were more inclined to grant "relief" to the public

utility companies than to reduce rates for the public. Dur
ing the war this tendency was increased, and has reached
such a point in New Jersey as to lead to the removal of the
commissioners by the Governor for alleged misfeasance in
office.
Service-at-cost by arrangements with cities originated in
Cleveland in 1910, concluding Tom Johnson's long fight for
a three-cent fare. It has spread rapidly since, being adopted
in Dallas, Montreal, Cincinnati, Rochester, and other places.
Toledo's name was added to the list on Monday, January 31,
after a fifteen year's controversy between the city and the
company. The State of Massachusetts applied it to the Bos
ton Elevated Railway and Bay State Street Railway Sys
tems in 1918, under a system of public operation through
State trustees. In Cleveland it worked well during the war,
but has since begun to show signs of weakening. In 1919
the company requested that the 6 per cent return which had
been guaranteed in the contract should be increased to 7 per
cent. An Arbitration Board agreed with the proposal, but the
citizens voted it down overwhelmingly in a referendum
election. The company now declares that this defeat spells
disaster. In the Cleveland plan there is a limit over which
the fares cannot go, but in most later plans this limit has
been dropped. In the Cleveland plan, also, the capitalization
was cut deeply. In subsequent plans this has not been
done.
In other words, the companies have used the success of the
Cleveland idea to secure the adoption elsewhere of a carica
ture of it which gives them all that they desire and guar
antees but little to the cities. In the Jenks bill, for example,
introduced at the request of the companies in the 1919 ses
sion of the New York legislature, the rate of return was
fixed at 10 per cent. Numerous provisions were also incor
porated which would have seriously handicapped the cities
had the bill passed. Even in Cleveland, the city officials
maintain that the company has a tendency to overlook effi
ciency in service, because its return is always guaranteed
under the contract. Such incentive as is secured from pri
vate operation is destroyed by this guaranty. Also, the
arrangement has been found to make almost impossible the
needed expansion of new lines into new territory.
But now a new dilemma appears, or rather a series of
dilemmas. In order to show cause for increasing rates and
to secure an O.K. on their inflated stock, the companies
attempt to prove sky-high valuations. They are no longer
satisfied to have commissions or cities agree that the valua
tion on which they should earn should be based on present
high prices of materials instead of on what was really
invested in the property originally. They have now come
forward with a claim that in their valuation should also be
included much of the value which they have created in the
community. This reverse single-tax idea is contained in
the valuation report of the American Electric Railway As
sociation and was solemnly put forward in the recent hear
ings before the New Jersey Public Service Commission. They
want no limit to their valuation in order to assure an un
limited increase in rate. In fifty cities this rate now stands
at ten cents, and one hundred and forty-one cities will be
added to the list in April when all the New Jersey munici
palities served by the Public Service Corporation will enjoy
that new rate. This unbounded claim for unlimited valua
tions, which step by step is being recognized by the State
commissions, is also making nil the possibility of public
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
ownership by purchase, and is nullifying those provisions in

franchises which were thought to be real safeguards for
the publicthe guaranty of the right to purchase on the
part of the city. It is here that the companies' troubles
begin anew. Their efforts to blow up the values of present
securities only make more difficult the effort to secure new
credit. Cautious investors will not put money into an
industry which is already giving to the present investors
more than the physical plant can produce. Each sanction
ing of higher capitalization by commissions or cities makes
the effort to secure more capital more difficult. That is
dilemma No. 1.
Dilemma No. 2 is more serious. Dr. Delos F. Wilcox, in
his analysis of testimony for the Federal Electric Commis
sion, threw interesting light on this. He obtained data
from systems which carry more than 75 per cent of the
passengers carried by the street railways of the country,
showing the effects of fare increases on their traffic and
revenues. What does he find as a result? That in thirteen
cities, which showed an average fare increase of only 4/10
per cent, the traffic increased 15 per cent and the reve
nues nearly 16 per cent. In eleven cities, whose fares
increased 6.33 per cent, the traffic increased 10 per
cent and the revenues 18 per cent, while in 29 cities, whose
fare increased 17 per cent, and in 15 cities, whose fare
increased 41 per cent, the traffic increased in the one
case only 6 per cent, and in the other decreased 7 per cent,
while the revenues increased 25 per cent and 30 per cent
respectively. This means that as fares increase the com
panies cease more and more to exercise their functions as
public utilities. They no longer serve all the public. It
also means that there is a limit beyond which fare increases
cannot rise, to produce a profit for the investors. There is
such a thing, even in this game, as killing the goose that
laid the golden egg. No way has yet been devised by which
the companies can compel prospective patrons to quit strik
ing against their rates and to ride on the cars.
With the sky limit claimed by the companies in capitali
zation, in rates, in rate of return, and in fares, and yet
with no permanent relief in sight for them as a result,
either in obtaining credit or in placing them on a basis
where they can serve the publicwhat is to come next?
Dr. Wilcox suggested to the Federal Electric Commission
in an exhaustive analysis of the testimony before it that
municipal ownership was the only way to get credit and to
make the railways real agencies of public service. The
Commission complimented his analysis, turned down his
suggestion, and found that they could not print it for public
information. Instead, they fell in with the companies'
claims as far as a suggested program is concerned. But
a solution on the basis of municipal ownership, none the
less, appears inevitable. Needless to say, under such own
ership they will have to be and can be protected from
the corrupt rings which usually dominate our munici
palities.
Indeed such rings generally derive their sources of strength
from the financial groups interested in the private control
of municipal utilities. The public ownership of the local
transportation system would lead to a deeper interest on
the part of the citizens in securing the proper men for
public office. The great improvement which has come
about in city water-works over the country since publicly
acquired points eloquently to the possibilities of such action
in unraveling the street railway tangle.
Feb. 9, 1921]
The Nation
The Alternative to
205
Revolution in England
By HAROLD J. LASKI
London, January 8
FEW statesmen have so far realized how far-reaching is
the challenge that has been flung to existing institu
tions. A century ago revolution was discredited by the
defeat of its legions in the field; today revolution is the
consequence of defeat. And it has come at a time when the
dominant mood is one of suspicion and disillusion. The
classic structure of representative government is every
where in disrepute. The industrial organization of even the
victorious Powers is, at the best, in dubious case. No
working class the world over believes any longer in the prin
ciples of prewar civilization. That to which we are driven
is at the least a revision of our foundations.
That revision has, broadly speaking, taken two forms.
With Russia it has assumed an attitude of complete denial
to the whole ethos of the social order. It demands a world
wide catastrophe that the evil thing may be torn up by the
roots. Whatever the difficulties of transition, they are ac
counted nothing beside the wickedness of the existing sys
tem. With others as, in the main, with English labor, what
is demanded is less catastrophe than revolution by instal
ment. The experimental nature of social policy is admitted
even while the premise of ultimate revolution is affirmed;
and there is a momentary willingness to engage in piecemeal
revolution as long as the proof of consistent movement can
be proffered.
It is the main tragedy of the present time that it is be
coming increasingly difficult for that proof to be given. The
Peace of Versailles has disintegrated Europe, and to the
defeated nations it has offered no prospect save the vision
of deepening despair. France is the parent of a reaction of
which the deliberateness does not conceal the insanity.
Germany has the alternative of economic subjection or civil
chaos. Austria is being rapidly destroyed. The Latin peo
ples of the South tremble each instant upon the precipice of
revolution, and if America be at the moment financially
sound, it is patent to every observer that she has merely
postponed without averting the problems she will ultimately
have to face. With financial chaos and industrial revolution
the proletariats of Europe and, not remotely, of America,
face a condition in which the price of supporting existing
institutions may well be the surrender of the safeguards
they have evolved for the protection of their standard of life.
Nor are we ourselves in much better case. The idealism
of the war has everywhere disappeared; and the wanton
cynicism of our policy is only the more apparent the more
closely it is scrutinized. Deliberate terrorism in Ireland; a
reckless and unconstitutional imperialism in the Near East ;
Egypt and India seething with a sullen discontent: these
are the inevitable prelude to a tune of domestic misery. We
have destroyed our best market in Europe; and a tenth of
our population stands as a consequence upon the brink of
starvation. We discuss the technique of naval warfare and
subsidize the industry which is to supply the poisoned weap
ons of the next international struggle; meanwhile we tear
into pieces that lone educational reform from which some
measure of enlightenment might one day have come. The
House of Commons has ceased to influence the course of
policy; and the Prime Minister has ceased to pay it even the
hypocritical homage of an interested attendance. The

Cabinet has dissolved into a discrete series of committees;
and in full meeting it is less a Cabinet than a levee. Our
institutions, that is to say, at the one moment when their
vigorous function was essential to our well-being, are
neither intelligible nor active. Our policy is not the child
of public need, but the creature of private interest. Nor
does the mischief stay in the political field. Religion has
ceased even to interest the mass of men; and the ethical
sanctions upon which social conduct was once based suffer
destruction at the hands of their own priesthood.
All this, perhaps, would be less urgent than it is if it
awakened in the peoples of Europe some sign of creative
opposition. There was indeed a moment when that seemed
likely to be the case. In the last years of war the British
Labor Party undoubtedly awakened a flame of eager ideal
ism. But that has largely died down ; and in the most undis
tinguished House of Commons since the days of George III
their protagonists cause no ripple of dismay. The forces of
positive movement seem, therefore, dumb. They wait upon
the actions of those who deepen the suspicions and sharpen
the hatreds of those by whom our civilization is being chal
lenged at its source. For, after all, the cement of civiliza
tion was mutual respect for ideals; and no man with an
instinct for right can respect the blustering insolence which
Mr. Churchill calls a creed. We are led, accordingly, to
disaster; and the protest made is always too weak or too
late to affect an audience wearied beyond effort of calls to
an active idealism which has materialized into nothing.
In the general result, we are unfortunately today moving
swiftly to a stage where Moscow, and Moscow only, can offer
to the peoples a policy that will be intelligible to their situa
tion. Lenin and his coadjutors may seem to most of us
little better than the facile architects of ruin ; but ruin after
all is historically no more than the eldest child of despair.
And beyond the ruin that they promise there is, however
remotely, the prospect of an ultimate creativeness which to
any people disillusioned of the present order must inevitably
become attractive. Disguise it how we will, there is to the
credit of Moscow achievement of which the workers have
taken a conscious, even a proudly conscious, note. And
whenever despair has taken root, the missionaries of Mos
cow have preached to a willing audience. If they have failed
to capture the working classes of Europe at least they have
divided them. Nor do those who enlist under their banner
recant; so that if the advocates of reaction press too far, it
may well be that the division will be forcibly healed in the
interest of a united front. The prospect of a victory for
Moscow must be faced by anyone who takes a candid view
of the present temper.
Nor are the means of defeat obviously at hand. We have
tried the experiment of conquering Moscow by force of
arms; and not even alliance with every sinister and dis
honorable element in Europe has proved successful. The
reason is simple enough. Moscow represents an idea; and
ideas can be destroyed only by ideas. The answer to Moscow
is not the bayonet, but the proof that the present order is
capable of adaptation to new hopes and new demands. In
England, for example, Prussianism in Ireland and a delibe
The Nation
206
rate subservience to selfish economic interests is no answer;

yet it is all of which the present Government has proved
itself capable. That an alternative policy is possible may
be a legend, but it is a legend to which men will cling the
more desperately the greater the shrinkage of their hopes.
In all this there is room for a creed of splendor if men
could be found to preach it. The old liberalism is dead in
any creative sense. To live again it must be reborn in
terms of an age which has made the period of war already
seem antiquity. It must realize that what is definitely
challenged is a concept of property and it must transform
that concept to meet a novel situation. Broadly the prime
need is equality and a faith among the masses that those
who preach equality genuinely conceive it in terms of the
happiness of common men. It involves a society in which
wealth is derived from service only and so distributed as at
no point to confer power over the lives of other men. It
involves also the abolition of the impersonal power of
capital and its replacement by the common direction of
those engaged in service. It will dissolve the legal subtleties
by which the present social order has been maintained. The
technique of such change is obvious enough. What the
working class demands is the proof that a new spirit is
abroad. It desires the translation of that spirit into the
terms of a concrete experiment.
Crime
Waves
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
If the Liberal Party were today to demand as a party

the nationalization of the mines it would introduce a new
spirit into the temper of our public life. It might offer
to caution all the hostages it pleased. It might insist that
the industrial revolution be spread as with the franchise
over two generations. It might insist that the coal mines
be the test upon which the socialization of industry be
judged. Any party today which can by its policy demon
strate that the present institutional system is capable of
life is assured of warm support. It may experiment slowly
and even with skepticism. But let it once display that
temper which is willing to investigate novelty, and the sullen
acquiescence of the present time will be changed into an
eager demand for the dismissal of this Government.
And that is the sole condition upon which the policy of
Moscow may be contemplated with equanimity. "Reform
in order that you may preserve" is, as Macaulay said, "the
watchword of great events." But reform does not mean
protest; reform means innovation. When men contemplate
without emotion the destruction of time-honored institutions
it is no moment to spend energy upon eulogizing them.
Events far greater than ourselves are enforcing the adjust
ment of our perspective. The world, inevitably, is to be a
different world. We shall not long be given the present
opportunity to be the molders of that difference.
and
Remedies
By GEORGE W. KIRCHWEY
THERE must be more than one kind of crime wave,
though I know only onethe kind that I find on my
visits to The Country Where Nothing Ever Really Happens
But Where Everything Is Possible. There it is, the most
blood-curdling crime wave you ever dreamed of (I mean,
there it is if you go there to look for it) , with hold-ups hap
pening every minute just around the corner, and guns pop
ping and sinister automobiles racing by till you lose your
breath, with master-minds calmly managing everything and
the most wonderful French detectives insouciantly appear
ing and looking right through everybody.
You needn't be afraid to ask anybody what it's all about.
Everybody will be glad to tell you. One will assure you
that it's the rotten drink, another that it's the last resort
of generous spirits who miss the stuff; one will declare that
it's the natural reaction from the hardness of military
discipline, and another that it's what you might expect from
the softness of the laws ; one is convinced that it's only the
Christmas spirit run riot, and another will swear that it's
all due to old Tom Osborne. This will puzzle you till you
are told that old Tom Osborne is a chap who messed things
up once bywell, by messing them up. As this is the
country where everything is possible you will have no diffi
culty in believing all these explanations, but as it is also
the country where nothing ever really happens, of course
nothing is ever done about it and the crime-wave just keeps
on waving till you wake up.
After this thrilling dream it is a bit disconcerting to find
one's self back in the old familiar world where something
is always happening and nothing is really possible; where
instead of the lurid melodrama that enthralled your senses,
there is the usual kind of sordid criminality going on and
everybody proposing to do something about it. It is even
more disconcerting to find that what everybody is proposing

to do is what they have always been doing and with no
perceptible effect on the wave of crime that rolls on un
ceasinglyonly more of it. They know of courseat least
the judges, who are the leading Do-Somethings, knowthat
this business of increasing the phantom terrors of the law
has been tried again and again and that it has failed as
often as it has been tried; that the more horrendous they
make their phantom terror look, the less power it has to
ward off the evil spirits. And the reason is only too obvious.
It doesn't make good. And nobody knows this better than
the judges, unless it be the criminal gentry. The great
mace of justice is held aloft to smite the wrong-doer, heavier
and more unwieldy than ever, and ever and anon it falls
and strikes down a victim. The evil play goes on in its
portentous shadow and again it falls and strikes, and so on
ad infinitum. It is a great and terrible game, but is it any
thing more? How can a terror be a real thing, an actual
force for restraint, that strikes only one in five or one in
ten of those at whom it is aimed? It takes some nerve
to pull off the jobs that are daily and nightly being perpe
trated in our crowded streets. The hold-up man and the
burglar take their lives in their hands every time they ply
their trade and, whenever necessary to accomplish their
purpose, shoot and risk the electric chair. Is it to be ex
pected that the lengthening or even the doubling of an
unlikely term of imprisonment will worry such as these?
If punishment for crime were certain or even probable
it would be another matter, but in that case there would
be no need of increasing the term of imprisonment;
generally a year or two would be enough and in most
cases more than enough.
But let us look at the
figures. Mr. Raymond B. Fosdick, in his recent work
Feb. 9, 1921]
The Nation
on "American Police Systems," quotes statistics which

should make very interesting reading for our judges. In
New York City in 1917 there were 236 homicides reported
(how many there were in fact we have no means of know
ing), 280 arrests and 67 convictions, of which nine resulted
in death sentences. There must be more than one screw
loose in the machinery of justice. When President Taft
in 1909 declared that "the administration of criminal law
in this country is a disgrace to our civilization" he wasn't
referring to police delinquency nor to the ethereal mild
ness of our present penalties (illustrated in New York City
the other day by a sentence of 30-60 years for robbery) but
to "the failure of the law and its administration to bring
criminals to justice." I suspect that ex-President Taft in
this year of grace would beg the judges not to despair of
the law they already have before they have really tried it
on. In 1917 there were 19 premeditated murders com
mitted in London. Three cases remained unsolved, five of
the accused committed suicide, eleven were arrested and
eight convicted. Our system of penal justice is substantially
the same as that of England but with what a difference in
its administration and results. The technicalities, delays,
and appeals which attend the processes of criminal justice
in this country have so outgrown their original purpose
of safeguarding the innocent that they have become the
chief reliancein numberless cases the sure relianceof
the guilty. If our judges were to take advantage of the
present popular interest in the subject by securing and en
forcing as swift and simple a procedure in criminal cases
as that which the English bench and bar have developed
they would be getting nearer the heart of the problem
as near to it, that is to say, as any system of punitive
justice can hope to eome.
What is becoming clearer every day is that no system of
punitive justice, however drastic and however efficiently
administered, gets us anywhere. It punishes a larger or
smaller percentage of evil-doers, it drives others to cover,
it may even have the effect of discouraging an unknown
number from yielding to their criminal impulses, but the
fact remains that in every civilized community crime, in
quantity and in its worst forms, continues a constant or an
increasing menace. Doubtless there are people who regard
this condition of affairs with a certain satisfaction. These
are the folk of a legalistic turn of mind, who can see no
form of social control but force and no power for personal
control but fear; who believe that this indissoluble union
of States is kept from flying apart in fifty separate frag
ments by the nine learned gentlemen who compose the Su
preme Court at Washington, and that the five and one-half
millions of people comprising the city of New York are kept
in the service of law and order and religion and decency by
Commissioner Enright and his 10,000 policemen. To such
as these, our system of punitive justice is vindicated by the
fact that we do not all of us fall to shooting and robbing or
at least to mauling and cheating one another. For the bene
fit of these peoplethat they may sleep o'nightslet us
keep up this heavy-handed justice that actswhen it acts
at alltoo late, and meanwhile turn ourselves to the study
of our problem.
I suppose it is safe to say that in no other sphere of social
control have we proceeded as ignorantly and yet as confi
dently as we have in the sphere of criminal legislation. Our
sanitary code is based on a body of scientific knowledge
regarding the nature of infectious disease and the condi
207
tions which make for its spread. Upon what body of

knowledge concerning the nature of crime and the condi
tions which cause it to spread in the community is our
penal law based ? We have thought it worth while to study
the mental and social conditions that have made for the
survival of the war system in our international life, and we
are striving to devise a solution in accordance with the
conceptions to which that study has led. In the same way
we are by patient investigation of causes seeking to find
remedies for the inhuman and wasteful industrial conflict
which is paralyzing our productive energies. But when it
comes to this civil war which crime has for ages been waging
against the very foundations of our social order, here and
here alone we are content with assumptionsassumptions
as to the nature of the criminal, assumptions as to the con
ditions that breed crime, assumptions as to the deterrent
effect of legal penaltiessome of them as old as paleolithic
man, some of them incrusted superstitions derived from
outworn theologies, and all the while we have the vast
material for a scientific study of the problem right at hand
in our hundreds of penal and correctional institutions.
What Freudian stuff is there in our social psychology
that has put an anti-scientific taboo on the business of deal
ing with crime and has kept us all this while, deep in the
heart of this scientific age, muddling with it by the primi
tive methods of trial and error? Isn't it about time that
we stopped guessing and legislating to fit our guesses and
turned our energies to the accumulation of knowledge
wherewith to light our way? Is it a subconscious dread of
what this light will disclose and its possible threat to the
sacrosanct system which finds expression in our present
penal code that makes us wary of embarking on such an
enterprise?
Professor Roscoe Pound, in his address on The Future
of the Criminal Law, delivered at the recent meeting of
the American Prison Association, commenting on the alter
nations of severity and mildness that have characterized the
legal attitude toward the criminalthe excessive solicitude
for the technical rights of the accused, followed in a time
of transition and unrest by "an orgy of drastic penal legis
lation"says :
Surely we are not bound to go on forever in the vicious circle
of the past. We are told that the native inhabitants of British
India, holding that disease is an infliction of the gods, not only
refuse to take sanitary precautions of their own accord, but
resent the precautions to which the British Government compels
them. To them an epidemic is a natural phenomenon as much
to be left to itself as the succession of day and night. We
have been treating criminal law in much the same fashion.
. . . Scientific study of law is no less important to the com
munity than scientific study of medicine. Few diseases threaten
civilization more persistently than the manifold forms of anti
social action that we call crimes. Some part of the millions
that are annually devoted to study of the former might be
made to yield rich results if used to endow study of the latter.
The faith in legislatures that leads us to commit this subject
to time and chance is as naive as the faith of the Hindu who,
when an epidemic of cholera is raging, can see no harm in
using the same tank for drinking purposes and for bathing
and washing his clothes.
If we may venture one more guess, before dropping the
guessing game entirely, it is that the knowledge of crimi
nality that will be won by research will open more promising
ways of combating the evil than that of punitive justice.
As medicine, through the systematic accumulation of knowl
edge regarding the nature of the human body and of
The Nation
208
disease and disease-breeding conditions, has in the last

generation shifted its emphasis from cure to prevention,
so, it seems safe to predict, will any real knowledge of the
criminal and of crime-breeding conditions bring the saving
forces of society unitedly to a direct attack on the sources
of the eviL Here, too, as in medicine, it will be found
that an ounce of prevention is worth a thousand pounds
of cure, especially of such cure as our penal system
affords. And let no one fear that our judges will awaken
from uneasy dreams to find their occupation gone. It must
be that offenses will come, and there will be weal or woe for
him by whom the offense cometh, and not less for the com
munity whose "peace and dignity" he has outraged, ac
cording to the insight and intelligence with which he is
judged. Working from knowledge and no longer from un
verified assumptions, the courts will become an essential
and, happily, an effective part of the larger process of social
control. Beginning with the juvenile court many of our
courts of criminal jurisdiction have already become or are
by way of becoming delinquency clinics, , whose chief con
cern is the safeguarding and restoration to normal life
of the youthful offender through the painstaking study of
his personality and of the mental and social conditions by
which he has been molded to what he is. Here are the
hopeful beginnings of a new era in criminal legislation and
practice, which only needs the wisdom that comes not by
inspiration, but from wider knowledge to transform our
entire system of punitive justice into one of preventive and
remedial justice.
Labor Finds Out for Itself

By EVANS CLARK
THE anti-union campaign of the Philadelphia Chamber
of Commerce has been a great thing for organized
labor in Philadelphiaat least in one respect. It has
forced labor to find out for itself some very useful facts.
What labor has found out in Philadelphia it will find out
elsewhere. Of that there is little doubt. Philadelphia
labor has found out that the textile mill owners of that
city in the year 1918 could have paid an average wage of
$1,632 to the 60,500 workers in the mills and at the same
time could have reduced the price of their product 21 per
cent in one year to the public and yet made 6 per cent
return on the capital invested in their business. Philadel
phia labor has found out that instead of this, the mill
owners in 1918 were paying an average wage of $792 per
year to the workers$840 less than the minimum amount
necessary to maintain a family of five in health and decency
were boosting prices some 210 per cent above the 1914
level, and pocketing for themselves profits that were ap
proximately 117 per cent of their invested capital.
These facts are useful for labor to know, especially when
it is faced with lockouts, reduction of wages, and mass
attacks on its organizations. This is precisely what
labor has been faced with in Philadelphia. The Chamber
of Commerce early in the fall announced its 100 per cent
allegiance to the open shop, "American" plan of personnel
management. Long stories were carried by the Philadel
phia papers praising the virtues of doing business that
way. Soon after, the textile mill owners, most of whose
plants had been shut down completely for weeks and even
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
months, began to announce that they would reopen the

mills with wage cuts of 20 to 30 per cent and that they
would take back their employees as individuals, but not as
members of any union. Long standing wage and shop
agreements between manufacturers and labor organizations
were not renewed, although the unions themselves urged
the continuance of peace by mutual agreement in the indus
try. In short, the mill owners, encouraged by the stand
of the Chamber of Commerce, declared war on union labor.
Labor was quick to rally its forces in defense. The Cen
tral Labor Union, embracing representatives from all local
unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor,
elected a committee of 25 charged with the duty of main
taining the ranks of organized labor against the attacks
of the employers. As the textile workers were bearing the
brunt of these attacks the Committee of 25 came first to the
aid of the textile organizations and ordered an investigation
to find out how the textile industry was run and what excuse
there was for the action of the owners of the mills.
The picture which the report of this investigation pre
sents of the textile situation in Philadelphia is the picture
of the employers intrenched in financial security using a
period of temporary business depression to beat down wages
never high enough to give the workers the least financial
security; and to break up the organizations by which the
workers have raised their standards of living to the inade
quate level already attained.
Philadelphia is the largest textile center in the United
States, producing twice the volume of goods of its nearest
competitorLawrencetotaling about one-quarter of the
total output of the entire country. The mills, however, are
mostly family affairs: close corporations or partnerships
that have come down from father to son since the time when
the English mill owners founded the industry there in the
early 1800's. The workers, too, have come into their estate
in much the same way. Most of them are sons of mothers
and fathers who worked in the mills. Most of them are
Americans born of Scotch-Irish and English descent. Only
14.8 per cent of the 60,500 are foreign born.
What the heritage of the owners and workers has been,
however, the figures show in concrete terms.
The wage of the average textile worker in 1915 was only
$411 per year$542 below the minimum amount necessary
to support a normal family in health and decency at that
time. In 1919 the average wage had increased to $943, but
the prices of necessities had increased faster and the living
wage level had reached $1,803. In other words, the tex
tile workers were $328 farther from the possibility of
healthful and decent living in 1919 than they were in 1915.
The year 1920 only made things worse for the workers.
The living wage level climbed to $1,988, but the wage aver
age dropped to approximately $900. Complete figures for
1920 are not available, but investigation among the textile
workers reveals the fact that 1920 wages were considerably
less than 1919 owing to the shut-down of the mills in the
late summer and fall and the consequent widespread unem
ployment. From 80 to 90 per cent of the workers are out
of work at present. The universal story is : "We haven't
had such hard times for ten years as we have today." The
situation for the workers is highly critical. They are al
ready suffering from serious under-nourishment, lack of suf
ficient clothing, and wholesale evictions from their homes.
The mill owners, however, have prospered vastly during
the past few years. The exact figures are secrets jealously
The Nation
Feb. 9, 1921]
guarded, for obvious reasons, by the manufacturers.
209
From
operating income and expense figures available in State

records, however, a close approximation can be made.
In
A Franco-Swiss Dissension
1915 the total net profits of the 605 plants were $30,169,700
By ROBERT DELL
36 per cent on invested capital and 28 per cent on cost
of production. In 1916 profits jumped to 73 per cent on the

capital; in 1917 to 89 per cent, and in 1918 they totaled,
for 636 plants, $148,235,700 or 117 per cent on the capital
and 81 per cent on cost of production.
The 1919 figures
were slightly lower95 per cent on capital and 59 per cent

on cost of production.
In the five-year period for which complete statistics are

available the average net profit per plant had increased 327
per cent, while the average wage increased but 128 per cent.
Perhaps the most interesting figures are those which
show the amount of wage increases which the mill owners
might have granted the workers had they shared their
prosperity with those who helped create it, and how much
prices might have been reduced if the mill owners had been
content with only a fair return on investment. In 1918,
for instance, the mill owners might have given each worker
an average wage of $3,949 or about $62 a week for 52
weeks and yet have had enough left out of the profits of that
year to keep for themselves 6 per cent on the capital they in
vested in their business. In other words, the mill owners
might have lifted the workers well over the health and
decency level into a wholesome and normal life.
Instead
of this, however, they pocketed among themselves some

$148,235,000 and gave each worker $792, or about $15 a
week. Or, as stated before, the owners might have raised
the wages of the average worker merely to the living wage
level of $1,632 and then have reduced the price of textile
products to the consumer an average of 21 per cent and
still received their six per cent in dividends. As a matter
of fact clothing in Philadelphia advanced in price, according
to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, some 40
per cent during the year 1918.
The Philadelphia textile workers have long suspected the
mill owners of responsibility for most of their troubles.
Every time the weekly pay envelope produced less than
enough to buy the childrens' stockings and suits the mill
owners were blamed in a general way for both horns of
the dilemma. The mill owners have been the object of a
vast amount of vague distrust and dislike in Kensington
and Manayunk. Now, however, the workers know, and
there is nothing vague about their understanding. They
know now that the mill owners talk of high wages and
low treasuries is pure propaganda, and they know just

how exaggerated that propaganda actually is. They know
Geneva, January 6
T: question that above all others preoccupies the peo

ple of Geneva at this moment is that of the free
Zones. It is the subject of a controversy between France

and Switzerland which is likely, if it continues, to cause
bad blood on both sides and which has already considerably
modified the strong Francophile tendencies of the Genevese,
as one soon finds out by conversation with the man in the
street in Geneva. The question is a very small one in com
parison with the vast problems bequeathed to Europe by

the warand the peace. But it is of great importance to
Geneva, and not without importance to Europe.
The zones are certain portions of French territory situ
ated in the Departments of Ain and Haute-Savoie and ad
joining the Canton of Geneva, into which all Swiss prod

ucts are at present imported free of duty. The French cus
tom houses, instead of being on the political frontier be

tween France and Switzerland, are moved back to the boun
daries between the zones and the rest of France, so that the
Zones are economically attached to Switzerland.
There are three free zones: (1) The zone of 1815, con
sisting of the Pays de Gex (nearly identical with the Arron
dissement of Gex) in Ain; (2) the little Sardinian zone
of 1816 in Haute-Savoie; (3) the annexation zone of
1860 in the same department. The last, which is much the
largest, is not in the same category as the other two, which
were secured to Switzerland by an international agreement
and to which Switzerland has treaty rights more than a
century old. France was obliged by the Treaty of Vienna
to make the Pays de Gex a free zone.
It should be said
that this was merely a revival of a concession voluntarily

made by Louis XVI in 1775. In 1798 Geneva lost its inde
pendence and remained part of France until 1814. When
the independence of the Republic of Geneva was restored,

and it was federated for the first time with the rest of Swit
zerland, it was only natural that the privilege of the free

zone in the Pays de Gex should also be restored, especially
as Geneva had been forcibly deprived of that territory by
Henry IV of France, in spite of his solemn undertaking to
respect it.
The Sardinian zone also came into existence as a result
of the Congress of Vienna, but it was formally created by

the Treaty of Turin in 1816. It was then part of the King
tions are at the present time from every point of view
dom of Sardinia and passed to France in 1860 with the rest

of Upper Savoy. It was at the latter date that the annex
ation zone was voluntarily created by Napoleon III as a
except profits.
concession to the wishes of its inhabitants.
now just how indefensible and unnecessary wage reduc

They know now in concrete detail how the
whole policy of the textile industry in Philadelphia is and

has been dictated with this one end in viewprofits for
the owners of the mills. And, finally, they know now just
how far this policy has damaged them both as producers
and consumers, as well as the public at large.
What the textile workers have found out about the tex
tile industry has already made a deep impression in Phila

delphia labor circles. The textile report has been widely
distributed among the other trades represented in the Phila
delphia Central Labor Union. Workers in other pursuits
are asking: What could we find out for ourselves about our
own industry? Undoubtedly time will tella great deal.
The cession of
Upper Savoy by Sardinia to France was approved almost

unanimously by a plebiscite of the inhabitants, but the
inhabitants of the provinces of Chablais and Faucigny and
of part of the district of Saint-Julien would have preferred .

annexation to Switzerland, and their consent to annexation
to France was obtained only by Napoleon's concession.
They voted oui, et zone. Switzerland has, therefore, no
standing in regard to this zone; the matter is one between
the inhabitants of the district and the French Government.
The geographical situation of the Canton of Geneva is

such that the zones are almost necessary to its existence.
Before its annexation to France in 1798 the Republic of
210
The Nation
Geneva consisted of three separate scraps of territory iso

lated from one another and from the rest of Switzerland
by foreign territory. In 1815 France and Sardinia made
very small territorial concessions to join together these
three islands, if one may so call them, and connect the Can
ton of Geneva with that of Vaud. But even now the "Re
public and Canton of Geneva" is wedged in at the end of
the lake, with French territory all round it except in one
corner where a narrow strip of land, nowhere more than
two and a half miles wide, connects it with Vaud. With
that exception its only connection with the rest of Swit
zerland is by means of the lake. The Department of HauteSavoie, which borders one side of the lake, projects into
Switzerland, cutting Geneva off from Valais. All the terri
tory that now forms the three zones is, geographically, part
of Switzerland, and its inhabitants are of the same race as
the Swiss. It is too late now to repair the mistakes made
in 1815 and 1860, but at least they should not be aggra
vated by depriving Geneva of the advantage of the free
zones.
The Canton of Geneva is extremely small; it depends for
its supplies chiefly on sources outside the Canton. For in
stance, it produces no butter or cheese and little more than
one-third of the milk that it consumes. So small is the
Canton that, although the town of Geneva is in a corner of
it on the lake, it is only about ten miles from the furthest
point of the French frontier and two miles from the near
est. The absurdity of the artificial barriers that have been
erected between peoples is nowhere more apparent than in
Geneva, where one has to carry a passport if one takes a
tram two or three miles out of the town or goes for a walk
up the Grand Saleve. And the people that live on the two
sides of the frontier belong to the same Savoyard race,
speak the same language, intermarry, and live in close and
constant contact with one another. So close are the rela
tions between Geneva and the zones that 700 inhabitants of
the latter own agricultural land in the Canton of Geneva,
amounting in all to 1,750 acres; and about 4,075 acres in
the zones are owned by 534 inhabitants of Geneva. These
people, of course, have to cross the frontier daily to go to
their work, and it is essential to them to have free com
munication for their produce. The French Government has
recently seriously injured them by various prohibitions of
exports, the application of which to the free zones is of
doubtful legality.
The French Government is now trying to force Switzer
land to agree to the entire suppression of the free zones,
on the strength of Article 435 of the Treaty of Versailles,
one of the minor injustices of that treaty. The desire of
Switzerland to join the League of Nations and at the same
time retain her neutrality gave an opening for putting pres
sure on her in regard to the zones, which M. Clemenceau
naturally took, with the acquiescence of Mr. Lloyd George
and Mr. Wilson. Article 435 is as follows :
The High Contracting Parties also agree that the stipulations
of the Treaties of 1815 and of the other supplementary Acts
concerning the free zones of Upper Savoy and the Gex district
are no longer consistent with present conditions, and that it is
for France and Switzerland to come to an agreement together
with a view of settling between themselves the status of these
territories under such conditions as shall be considered suitable
by both countries.
Switzerland was not a signatory of the treaty, but the
Swiss Federal Council accepted Article 435 with reserva
tions. The two zones of Haute-Savoie have hitherto been neu
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
tralized politically. The French Government was bound not

to keep troops in them in time of war. This obligation,
inherited by France from Sardinia, Switzerland has agreed
to cancel, and the concession is a large one, in view of the
geographical situation of the territory in question. Swit
zerland also abandons the zone of 1860, which is much the
largest, having an area of about 1,200 square miles (seventenths of the department of Haute-Savoie) and a popula
tion of about 160,000. But in its communication of May 5,
1919, annexed to the Treaty of Versailles, the Swiss Federal
Council explicitly refused to agree to the suppression of
the economic privileges of Switzerland in the two other
zones. The French Government insists on their suppres
sion, and the negotiations have reached a deadlock. Since
the other signatories of the Treaty of Versailles have
washed their hands of the matter, Switzerland cannot ap
peal to them. It is, however, doubtful whether Article 435
of the Treaty of Versailles deprives Switzerland of her
international guarantee for the freedom of the zones of
1815 and 1816, for Russia, Austria, Spain, Portugal, and
Sweden were parties to that guaranty as signatories of
the Treaties of 1815, and they have not been consulted about
the matter. Great Britain, France, and Germany have no
right to abrogate any provision of the treaties of 1815 with
out the consent of the other signatories.
One argument used in France in support of the suppres
sion of the free zones is the fact that their products have
not free entry into Switzerland. But, although perhaps
Switzerland should never have levied duties on imports
from the zones, she was within her technical rights in so
doing, and many products of the zones have for some years
been admitted into Switzerland duty-free, or with reduced
duties. Moreover, Switzerland in the course of the present
negotiations has offered complete reciprocity. France has
refused the offer of complete free trade between the zones
and Switzerland.
The present system is to the advantage of the inhabitants
of the zones in many ways. One result of it is that the
French state, having to compete with Swiss products, is
obliged to sell its tobacco and matches much more cheaply
in the zones than in the rest of France, where it has a
monopoly. The inhabitants of the zones are also exempt
from several indirect taxes levied in the rest of France.
Moreover, Geneva is their natural market. Nor does
France suffer from the present system. Before the war
the imports into the zones' from France were more
than double those from Switzerland, whereas the exports
from the zones into France and Switzerland were about
equal.
The Genevese are profoundly hurt by the attitude of
France which they cannot help feeling to be a little un
grateful in view of all that Geneva did for French prisoners
during the war and of the intense attachment of the Gene
vese people to the French cause. There is some fear in
Geneva that, since agreement has been found impossible,
France will force matters to a head by simply moving the
French custom houses to the political frontier. Should that
happen, it would mean a serious quarrel between France
and Switzerland, and the Swiss Federal Council would
no doubt appeal to all of the signatories of the Treaties
of 1815.
In the general interest of the world such a crisis must be
averted somehow. Friendly representations to France by
the Government of the United States might help.
Feb. 9, 1921]
The Nation
211
Oases of Freedom
By NORMAN HAPGOOD
NOT Pangloss himself could say much for American
morale in the first months of 1921. The party coming
into power is drafting plans for a tariff built to put up one
more obstacle for a tottering Europe. The party going out
of power celebrates peace by keeping Debs in prison and
propaganding violently, with all its machinery, about red
hobgoblins, a course of action which sooner or later, if
continued, will bring results such as we are now seeing in
France. At home is reaction, in greater intensity than
several decades have seen. Abroad are confusion and dis
trust blocking the path.
Disillusion, nevertheless, and disappointment, do not
excuse discouragement. However evil the circumstances,
the work of rebuilding must be carried along. What com
mon denominator exists to the many elements of our task?
Just onethe mind must be free. Unless there is free
thought our efforts are almost sure to be in the wrong direc
tion. In the modern world of machinery and rapid com
munication, changes happen suddenly. The signs of right
thinking at present are few, but they may any moment burst
into a blaze. One book alone, for example, Professor
Chafee's "Freedom of Speech,"* if it could be read in every
home in this land, might do much to put us again on the
right course.
That book is not the argument of a radical, for Professor
Chafee calls himself a conservative. It is the loyalty of a
scholar, who cannot forget the history of England and the
United States, or the specious defenses of Czars and
Kaisers. Freedom of speech to him means something clearly
outlined, essential, resulting from centuries of thought and
experience in many lands. It builds the basis on which we
can think about deportations and convictions, about Debs
and Martens, about the French Revolution and Russia,
about what Jefferson and Lincoln would have thought today.
A powerful application of the traditional principles of
American freedom has again just been made by Justice
Brandeis. In his latest dissent on free speech he stands
alone, not even the brilliant Holmes by his side, but this
happily does not mean that the two distinguished minds
who have been defending freedom have parted company.
Holmes "concur* in the result" reached by the majority, in
the case of Gilbert vs. Minnesota, and the Chief Justice
dissents, neither of which would have happened presum
ably if it had been an unmixed freedom-of-speech case.
Justice Brandeis, writing a dissenting opinion for himself
alone, disagrees with most of the Court on the technical
question of jurisdiction involved, but he also gives a sharp
expression to his views on the degree of freedom assured
by the Constitution.
John Gilbert was manager of the organization department
of the Nonpartisan League. He was sentenced to fine and
imprisonment for speaking, on August 18, 1917, at a public
meeting of the League, words held to be prohibited by a
Minnesota law approved April 20, 1917. This law Justice
Brandeis declares to be "in fact an act to prevent teaching
that the abolition of war is possible." It is not limited to
the war emergency. "It bridles freedom of speech and of
* Published by Harcourt, Brace and Howe.
the press, not in a particular emergency, in order to prevent

a clear and present danger, but under all circumstances. It
prohibits teaching or advocating by printed matter, writing
or word of mouth, that men should not enlist in the military
or naval forces of the United States. . . . The statute
aims to prevent not acts but beliefs." It "invades the pri
vacy and freedom of the home. Father and mother may
not follow the promptings of religious belief, of conscience,
or of conviction, and teach son or daughter the doctrine of
pacifism."
In the course of discussing the rights of Congress Jus
tice Brandeis says:
Congress, legislating for a people justly proud of liberties
theretofore enjoyed and suspicious or resentful of any interfer
ence with them, might conclude that even in times of grave
danger the most effective means of securing support from the
great body of citizens is to accord to all full freedom to criticize
the acts and administration of their country, although such free
dom may be used by a few to urge upon their fellow-citizens not
to aid the Government in carrying on a war, which reason or
faith tells them is wrong and will, therefore, bring misery upon
their country.
The right to speak freely concerning functions of the Federal
Government is a privilege or immunity of every citizen of the
United States which, even before the adoption of the Fourteenth
Amendment, a State was powerless to curtail. . . . Full and
free exercise of this right by the citizen is ordinarily also his
duty; for its exercise is more important to the nation than it is
to himself. ... In frank expression of conflicting opinion
lies the greatest promise of wisdom in governmental action; and
in suppression lies ordinarily the greatest peril.
After further discussion of technical points Justice Bran
deis concludes:
As the Minnesota statute is in my opinion invalid because it
interferes with Federal functions and with the right of a citizen
of the United States to discuss them, I see no occasion to con
sider whether it violates also the Fourteenth Amendment. But
I have difficulty in believing that the liberty guaranteed by the
Constitution . . . does not include liberty to teach, either in
the privacy of the home or publicly, the doctrine of pacifism; so
long, at least, as Congress has not declared that the public safety
demands its suppression. / cannot believe that the liberty guar
anteed by the Fourteenth Amendment includes only liberty to
acquire and to enjoy property. [The italics are mine.]
Gilbert had said:
We are going over to Europe to make the world safe for
democracy, but I tell you we had better make America safe for
democracy first. You say, what is the matter with our democ
racy. I tell you what is the matter with it: Have you had
anything to say as to who should be President? Have you had
anything to say as to who shall be Governor of this State?
Have you had anything to say as to whether we should go into
this war? You know you have not. If this is such a good
democracy, for heaven's sake why should we not vote on con
scription of men? We were stampeded into this war by news
paper rot to pull England's chestnuts out of the fire for her. I
tell you if they conscripted wealth as they have conscripted men
this war would not last over forty-eight hours.
It is not up to me to decide whether this last sentence is
true or not. Mr. Justice McKenna conceives that it is up
to him, and he asserts that the war was declared "in defense
of our national honor." On the exact question of why we
212
The Nation
went to war, I do not happen to agree with Justice McKenna, any more than with Mr. Gilbert, but I think Mr.
Gilbert a more wholesome element in our democracy than
the justice. Nevertheless, I have no desire to imprison Mr.
Justice McKenna.
Since the United States went to war Justices Holmes and
Brandeis have stood for the traditions of freedom, and in
the lower courts there has also been some effort to draw the
lines so as to preserve as much freedom as possible, notably
by Judge Learned Hand, Judge George W. Anderson, and
Judge C. F. Amidon, but on the whole the judges have taken
an attitude of patriotic fury, fanning the ire of juries
already savage. Perhaps the most extraordinary case of
judicial passion has been the crass jesting and orating of
Judge Clayton in the Abrams case, in which he declared
that Lenin and Trotzky were carrying out the plans mapped
out by the Imperial German Government, that he had
"heard of the fate of the poor little daughters of the Czar,"
that the defendant Lipman understood nothing except "the
hellishness of anarchy," and that no one of the prisoners
had ever produced anything, not "so much as a single
potato," although two defendants actually bound books, one
produced furs, one hats, and one shirt-waists. His conduct
of the case was highly praised by the New York Times,
which was so zealous a defender of civilization about that
time that it said Countess Tolstoy's novels far surpassed
those of her anarchist husband.
In the Debs case Justices Holmes and Brandeis concurred.
It must be conceded, therefore, that there was in it no
breech of the Constitution. Concerning Debs the only
things to criticize are the sweepingness of the Espionage
Act, the war mania, and the failure of the President to meet
his responsibilities. Never can a legal conviction have
called more clearly for the use of the pardoning power. The
case was a close one, even from the legal standpoint. From
the point of view of morals and political intelligence it was
a crime. The war has been ended over two years. The men
in England, France, and Italy who were in prison for
pacifism were promptly freed, partly by proclamation, partly
through brevity of sentence. Our country alone can boast
that it now possesses, safely shut up in a penitentiary on a
ten-year sentence, a noble old man, who never in his life has
counseled violence, but who confessed to the crime of think
ing it wrong to kill his fellow-men, even in war. One admin
istration goes out on this note and another comes in on Mr.
Harding's statement that Debs is not different from an
ordinary safe-cracker.
When the Abrams case, in the trial of which Judge Clay
ton so distinguished himself, reached the Supreme Court,
the dissenting opinion was written by Justice Holmes, Jus
tice Brandeis concurring. It was in that stirring opinion
that Justice Holmes said the defendants had as much right
to distribute their leaflets as the Government of the United
States had to print and distribute the Constitution. "I
regret," said the justice, "that I cannot put into more
impressive words my belief that in their conviction upon
this indictment the defendants were deprived of their rights
under the Constitution of the United States." It was of
this case that Professor Chafee said the trial judge
ignored the fundamental issues of fact, took charge of the crossexamination of the prisoners, and advised the jury to convict
them for their Russian sympathies and their anarchistic views,
. . . The injustice is none the less because our highest court
felt powerless to wipe it out. The responsibility is simply
shifted to the pardoning authorities . . . and to Congress,
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
which can change or abolish the Espionage Act of 1918, so that

in future wars such trial and such sentences for the intemperate
criticism of official action shall never again occur in the United
States.
The language used by these young radicals was indeed
intemperate, but it was not a half-educated immigrant who
said, apropos of our Russian policy, "if any nation were to
do any of these things to the United States, we should not
doubt that it was making war on us." It was Mr. Moorfield
Storey.
In Schaefer vs. United States, the dissenting opinion was
written by Justice Brandeis, Justice Holmes concurring, on
violation of the First Amendment, guaranteeing freedom
of the press, and Justice Clarke concurring on the ground
that the charge of the trial court was misleading. Five
owners of the Philadelphia Tageblatt were convicted and
six supreme judges confirmed the conviction of three of
them. Here again Justice McKenna was eloquent. He said
"there could be no more powerful or effective instruments
of evil than two German newspapers organized and con
ducted as these newspapers were conducted." He talked
about "anarchy" and "the immeasurable horror" of defeat.
As in the Gilbert case he was excessively annoyed at the
view taken by the culprits of why we went into the war. Of
their newspaper he says : "Its statements were deliberately
and wilfully false, the purpose being to represent that the
war was not demanded by the public," etc. Again we may
agree that it would be a pity to shut up Justice McKenna
because he thinks the majority of the American people
wanted to go into the war. He should freely argue for war,
for increased influence of property, or for any other cher
ished conviction. As Justice Brandeis put it, in Pierce vs.
U. S.:
The fundamental right of free men to strive for better condi
tions through new legislation and new institutions will not be
preserved, if efforts to secure it by argument to fellow-citizens
may be construed as criminal incitement to disobey the existing
law, merely because the argument presented seems to those exer
cising judicial power to be unfair in its portrayal of existing
evils, mistaken in its assumptions, unsound in reasoning, or
intemperate in language.
How right Justice Brandeis was in connecting freedom
of speech in principle with the great industrial struggle was
not long in having confirmation. As recently as January 3
he had to write an opinion, concurred in by Justices Holmes
and Clarke, dissenting in Duplex Printing Press Company
vs. International Association of Machinists on an aspect
of the right to strike. The Solid Six, who can always be
relied on in industrial questions, are the same Solid Six
who can always be relied on in cases of suppressing opin
ions. They are also the phalanx that in matters like the
stock dividends case can be relied upon to reach conclusions
satisfactory to property. It is frequently surmised that
when the first vacancy occurs on the Supreme Court Mr.
Taft will be appointed. During the campaign just closed
Mr. Taft attacked President Wilson for putting on the
Court a man with the property ideas of Mr. Brandeis. The
oldest man on the Court is Mr. Justice Holmes, one of the
three liberals, one of the two unfailing liberals; and the
youngest man on the Court is the most determined reaction
ary of all, Mr. Justice McReynolds. Such is the outlook for
the most powerful judicial tribunal on this earth.
Facing our materialism, our intrenched government by
plutocracy, many of my friends are inclined to turn away
from politics altogether, to seek progress in cooperation, in
Feb. 9, 1921]
The Nation
the slow processes of fundamental education, or in some new

spiritual impulse. They point to the big employers getting
ready to fight for shops from which unions have been
excluded; to the national legislature preparing a tariff to
help our big trusts survive against the needs of Europe;
to the fundamental law deflected by six of the most con
servative old gentlemen on the planet; to the outgoing
administration not only punishing opinion at home, but
trying to remove the symptoms of Russian distress by
increasing the distress; and one can scarce be surprised at
the loss of hope. Yet it is in the determination of judges
like Holmes and Brandeis, Hand and Anderson, in the sup
porting comments of professors like Chafee, Pound, and
Frankfurter, that there is kept alive the tradition that has
made of government so noble an instrument of progress in
the early part of our own history, and in the history of the
country from which so many of our conceptions have been
taken. The points from which light is spread just now are
few, but the difficulties ahead of the materialists and reac
tionaries are many, and sudden change is indeed likely. It
may come in the political field in one of several ways:
through a split on industrial policy between the Penrose and
the Borah wings of the Republican Party; through the dis
placement of Gompers and the forming of a live party
around the American Federation of Labor as a nucleus;
through a change of national temper similar to the one so
suddenly brought about by Mr. Taft's errors in choosing
his advisers and by his errors on the tariff and on conserva
tion. It seems to me exciting to live while reaction is in
control, while despotism is increasing, but while all the large
circumstances mean that despotism and reaction cannot last,
and while one may guess at the manner of their fall, and
help to think out what exactly ought to take their place.
For what Brailsford says of Russia holds of our country
also. He points out that despotism that teaches people to
read, as Bolshevism does, is digging its own grave. So
with our present disheartenment. Something whispers that
there are seeds of better things: that if they do not come
in the way provided for them they will come with catastro
phes. I am a fairly prosperous bourgeois; my whole tem
perament is timid, and alarmed by Jefferson's belief that "a
revolution every once in a while is a good thing"; and yet
my mind, overcoming temperament, declares it well for the
human race that forces are at work condemning politics to
destruction if those politics are too cowardly or too blind.
The choice is clear. Either the grand old traditions repre
sented by Brandeis and Holmes will come back into general
acceptance, and we shall all work out the future together,
or sooner or later the flood will burst, in the conquering
countries as it has already burst in Central and Eastern
Europe. The only thing that can preserve us from revolu
tion is a return to freedom.

Louis Budenz, formerly secretary of the St. Louis Civic
League, is now making a survey of municipal transpor
tation.
Harold J. Laski, of the University of London, was for
merly at Harvard and the School for Social Research.
George W. Kirchwey is the noted criminologist.
Evans Clark is a director of the Labor Bureau of N. Y.
Abraham Cahan, author of "The Rise of David Levinski," is founder and editor of the Jewish Daily Forward.
213
In the Driftway
THE Drifter does not like to take issue with the editor
of The Nation. The editor gets so many knocks that
it is difficult to find a new place to hit, and the Drifter prides
himself too much on his originality to thump the spots that
others have already worn black and blue. Besidesand
more practicalin this day when bosses are cutting wages
and laying off hands the Drifter hesitates to irritate any
one from whom he draws even a slender stipend; even a
scrivener for The Nation must sometimes be diplomatic.
And yetand yet if he were bold enough to take issue with
the editor, he would do so in respect of the latter's praise
of Mr. Harding's simplicity. For just before reading the
kind words in regard to Mr. Harding's plea for a simple
inaugural, the Drifter had seen a census of the wardrobe
that a Toledo tailor is preparing for the next President.
Here is the enumeration:
Two cutaway coats, one frock coat, two dinner coats, two
dress suits, one frock overcoat, two spring overcoats, six pairs
of flannel trousers, twelve silk waistcoats, eleven business suits,
three overcoats, six pairs of trousers, and six fancy waistcoats.
The two dinner coats sound all right, because a President
has to do a lot of eating, and may sometimes have to dine
twice in a single evening. No objection is made, either, to
the frock overcoat; the Drifter doesn't know what a frock
overcoat is for, and would rather approve it than reveal his
ignorance. Also he welcomes the two spring and the other
three overcoats, because he has spent the month of March in
Washington himself and is sure that there will be days
when Mr. Harding will not be too warm with all five gar
ments on his back at once. Twelve pairs of trousers seems
excessive, but, of course, Mrs. Harding is likely to give away
a pair now and then to some tramp who rings at the White
House back door while the President is too busy with a mes
sage to Congress to notice the occurrence. Eleven business
suits are perhaps necessary for what we are assured is to be
a business administration, but the Drifter must regard as
extravagant, unnecessary, and prodigal, the twelve silk and
the six fancy waistcoats mentioned in the list. Even if Mr.
Harding is taking advantage of the midwinter reduction
sales to lay in enough waistcoats for a possible eight years
in the White House, the supply seems excessive. Surely
Mr. Harding is not planning a shirtsleeve administration
which would, of course, entail extra wear and tear on his
waistcoats. At any rate the Drifter hopes nobody will
either spell or pronounce it "waste-coat." In that case the
eighteen would quite overbalance the eleven business suits
and dissipate all his hopes of national economy. But in all
this, it must be understood, the Drifter is not taking issue
with the editor of The Nation. He is merely suggesting
what he might say if he dared to do so.
*
*
#
*
*
THIS is an age of minutiae. The Drifter leans toward
the big and spacious ; and what could be bigger or more
spacious than this transatlantic yacht race proposed by
King Albert? Some people wax enthusiastic over chess or
dominoes ; the Drifter's blood is more stirred by the thought
of a 3,000-mile sail, without handicaps and open to the
world. If any owner of a barely seaworthy piece of wood
entering the contest is looking for a cabin boy, cook, or skip
per, the Drifter stands ready to ship in any or all of those
capacities. Telephone, write, or call
The Drifter
[Vol. 112, No. 2901

214
Correspondence
The Issue of German Reparations
Sir: May I take advantage of the fact that my name was
used by Mr. Pierrepont B. Noyes, in his otherwise excellent
article in your magazine, recently, to make certain observations
on his thesis? At the outset I take the liberty of suggesting
that he mildly exaggerates my enthusiasm for the President's
Paris efforts, as the mass of letters of protest written to me
by Mr. Wilson's followers perhaps best demonstrate.
But this is after all a trivial circumstance, the more so since
I am heartily in accord with Mr. Noyes on all of his major pro
posals. To me the question of the restoration of economic
order in Europe seems to turn upon certain perfectly welldefined circumstances and in reality upon twothe assurance
to France of security and of the maximum of possible repara
tion from Germany. The present chaos, failure, and paralysis
in Europe are due to the inability of the English-speaking
countries to appreciate the true bearing of these circumstances.
Most of the discussion, so far, most of the criticism of the
various Paris treaties, has turned upon the contrast between
what was done and what should have been done and the con
sequent conjunction of Utopia and Bedlam. What has beenneglected has been an examination of the possible, both at
Paris and since. Yet, after all, statesmanship in every age
has disclosed itself by its capacity to deal with the possible.
Moreover, in the United States the gravest conceivable mistake
has been made in constantly laying emphasis upon the moral
aspects of our relation to the European situation.
The true concern of the United States and Great Britain in
the present European crisis is material, not moral. And
whereas you can exploit a moral issue only for a limited period
of time and under unusual conditions, a material concern can
always be exploited, that is to say, you can always talk business
with people who have something to sell and a necessity to sell
it. And that is the precise situation of the people of the United
States and Great Britain today.
Anyone who has followed recent events in Washington knows
that the present Congress is wrestling in agony with the prob
lems presented by the fact that our farmers and cotton growers
at the present hour have on their hands vast accumulations of
wheat and cotton which they cannot sell, despite the fact that
Middle Europe is starving and out of employment for the want
of these products. Our concern with the European situation
is just here, and to bring home to the American people the
fact that they can dispose of their products only by assuming
certain responsibilities in Europe, for a limited period, is the
single way to achieve persuasion.
Moreover, the one possible way to European rehabilitation
lies through the proper recognition of French demands for
security and reparation. Unless these two demands are recog
nized France will block all Anglo-American attempts to solve
the European mess to our own profit and to the utter neglect
of French interests. This is the fact; a discussion of the moral
aspects is idle. An argument over the wisdom or unwisdom of
French policy is futile. Two years has demonstrated this. As
well undertake to compel the French people to speak English
as to strive to force them to take the English or American
view of the situation.
What is the alternative, for we still have our foodstuffs and
raw materials to sell and the British unemployment mounts
into the millions? Obviously, the recognition of the basic facts
and an attempt to deal with them, not to eliminate them by
pious incantation or by economic homilies which to French ears
betray hypocrisy rather than sincerity. Some such program
as the following seems to me not only necessary, but inescapable :
1. Fixing the total of German reparations, exclusive of pay
ments already made in materials, etc., and of payments for the
army of occupation at $16,000,000,000. This is a figure about
midway between the two extremes contained in all conserva

tive estimates of what Germany can pay.
2. Agreement by Great Britain to follow the example of the
United States and resign in favor of France all claim upon
German reparations, so far as the $16,000,000,000 is concerned.
This would assure to France $12,000,000,000.
3. Agreement by the United States and Great Britain to
accept in payment for loans to France still outstanding and
amounting to approximately $5,000,000,000, German bonds, con
stituting a portion of the French share of the $16,000,000,000.
And, if possible, American cancelation of the French debt,
which amounts to about $2,500,000,000. France would then re
ceive either a net sum of $7,000,000,000 or of $9,500,000,000
from Germany, sufficient in any case to complete the actual re
construction of the devastated area and in addition would be
able to extinguish her foreign debt.
4. Ratification by Great Britain and the United States of
the separate Treaty of Paris, guaranteeing Anglo-American
aid to France in case of German aggression, this treaty ex
tended to insure specific Anglo-American assistance provided
Germany fails to carry out the disarmament clauses of the
Treaty of Versailles.
5. Evacuation of all of the occupied regions of Germany not
later than December 31, 1921, save only the Saar Basin.
6. Agreement by France to abandon the project of a plebi
scite in the Saar district at the end of a fifteen-year period
and consent to the unconditional return of the territory to
Germany at the close of that period.
7. Agreement on the part of Germany to a further delivery
of coal to France until 1925, when the Lens district will be
almost completely restored to exploitation.
8. The calling of an international conference of the Great
Powersthe United States, Great Britain, France, Germany,
and Italy to be represented and Japan as wellto consider the
economic restoration of Europe by joint action, territorial and
purely political questions to be expressly excluded from the
discussion.
For myself I have rejected the League of Nations because it
carries with it unlimited responsibilities in European questions
in which we can have no concern and involves us in an agree
ment which the people of the country would never consent to
honor when it came to a question of sending thousands of
American troops to Rumania or Poland to defend frontiers or
maintain the integrity of these or other states. But the ques
tion of the Anglo-American guaranty to France is quite dif
ferent. It is a specific responsibility undertaken like the last
war for a definite end, namely, to restoration of the European
market to the American producer.
The alternative is a prolongation and extension of European
chaos and the increase of domestic economic paralysis in the
United States, with the very clear possibility that we may
ultimately have to send troops to Europe after all. I agree
with Mr. Noyes that the army of occupation ought to be re
moved, that it makes for new wars and further economic chaos.
I agree with many critics of the treaty that the Saar Basin
should remain German, despite the historical claims of France
and the fact that Germany stole it in 1814 and 1815. I agree
that Franco-German relations unless ameliorated are tending
toward new conflicts which must bring the ruin of European
civilization.
But for two long years Anglo-American policy or lack of
policy has served to push France further and further along the
road which leads to independent action and ultimate ruin not
only for France and for Germany, but for Europe, Great Brit
ain included, with unmistakable repercussions in the United
States. Unless British and American policy be changed, the
end is already in sight. Whatever else happens, Germany will
be smashed beyond any hope of early recovery. This is the bot
tom fact in the situation.
Keynes saw the economic facts clearly enough, but he under
took to put all the burdens on American and French shoulders
Feb. 9, 1921]
The Nation
and to eliminate the political facts by invoking moral issues.

One must say in justice to him, however, that he has already
advocated the surrender by the British of their claims upon
the German indemnities, which brings him into accord with
Mr. Noyes.
It seems to me about an even thing now whether Europe
can be saved or will sink into anarchy and chaos. At all events
who would care to forecast what will be the consequences of
another year of increasing misery and disorder, such as the
last two? The worst enemies of the Treaty of Versailles would
hardly desire to see substituted the conditions of Russia, yet
so far that is the only visible alternative. And unless British
and American statesmen and publics, alike, perceive that the
road to their own goals runs through Paris, it is likely to re
main the only alternative.
Washington, D. C, January 20
Frank H. Simonds
How to Restore Civilization
To the Editor op The Natiojlv'
Sir: I have just read with interest "Justice to Germany and
France," published in your issue of January 19. This able dis
cussion is in large measure wholesome and valuable, but a small,
though vital, part of it is based on a biased trend that will
not stand analysis from neutral approaches. One is reminded
of the fine declaration of neutrality issued by President Wilson
at the opening of the World War and the way that declaration
actually functioned throughout the war. The mind that does
not clearly see and deeply feel America's moral failure during
the first years of the war, and especially at the Peace Confer
ence, cannot represent her ideals and purposes today. It is, I
believe, due to a similar moral deficiency, though with wholly
different purpose, that such a movement as that represented by
the Committee of 48, in spite of its claims to achievement, was
given but little serious consideration even by those to whom its
appeals were primarily addressed. Little wonder that we have
become somewhat callous to the cry of "Wolf, wolf." To win
the wholehearted support of America it must be clear, beyond
the shadow of doubt, that truth and unselfishness are the goal.
When Great Britain shows by deeds that she has this as her
goal and begins by making self-determination a living reality in
Ireland and Egypt; when France purges her soul of hatred and
revenge and demonstrates her faith in the superior power of
conciliation and cooperation; and when the Entente Allies as a
whole frankly face and accept their share of the guilt that cul
minated in the Treaty of Versailles, the United States will, with
out previous treaty or alliance, give them such friendly and
hearty cooperation and aid, and be such a formidable foe to in
justice and vaulting national ambition that neither Germany
nor any combination of nations will venture to antagonize her
stand. Confident that truth is the first great quest of the human
race and that the benevolent emotions must and will come to
dominate the malevolent feelings America can best fulfil her
own great mission and best aid a sorely maimed world by her
self personifying active non-resistance in international affairs,
the most powerful of all forces operative in the shaping of a
higher civilization.
Spring Grove, Virginia, January 21
0. J. Schuster
Why Soup Kitchens?
Sir: The soup kitchen has arrived. The Toledo Social Service
Federation fed 1,200 at the first breakfast, and announced that
one wealthy citizen had donated 15,000 loaves of bread and
5,000 quarts of milk for the needy. The Detroit City Council
has appropriated $250,000 for unemployment relief.
What about increased production? Six months ago we were
told that this was the world's greatest need. Have these needs
been met? Is the world supplied? The trouble is that industry
is not organized for production; the basis of organization today
215
is profits. What we need now, is to organize for service. Or

ganized for service we would proceed at once to rehabilitate the
railroads, we would build new cars, repair the old cars, build
and rebuild the motive power, put the railroads in condition to
render the maximum of service with the minimum of labor. If
service were the purpose of life, we would proceed to utilize our
vast hydro-electric facilities.
Gantt, in "Organizing for Work," says: "The community
need service first, regardless of who gets the profits, because its
life depends upon the service it gets. The business man says profits
are more important to him than the service he renders; that the
wheels of business shall not turn, whether the community needs
the service or not, unless he can have his measure of profit."
Brann once described the situation as it is today: "People
starve while the granaries, bursting with grain, yield no food;
they wander houseless through summer's heat and winter's cold,
while great mountains of granite comb the fleecy clouds and the
forest monarch measures strength with the thunderstorm; they
flee naked and ashamed from the face of their fellow-men while
fabrics molder in the market-place and the song of the spindle
is silent; they freeze while beneath their feet are countless tons
of coalincarnate kisses of the sun god's fiery youth: . . .
yet the common heritage in the human race lies fair before them
and there is room enough." Why soup kitchens?
Rochester, Pa., January 26
Charles B. Baldwin
A Plea for Free Credit
Sib: As the unemployed crisis grows more acute men are
everywhere asking, How can we make demand equal supply
that overproduction (under-consumption) may be overcome?
The fact is that demand is everywhere greater than supply,
but this demand is not permitted to function, thanks to the
monopolistic control of credit, the life-blood of commerce.
The right to convert business credit into a medium of ex
change is held by the banks of issue. They see to it that the
needed medium is furnished the business world in insufficient
quantity. This insufficiency has two effects. On the one hand
it imparts to money the power of returning enormous unearned
incomes to a few men, and on the other hand it impedes com
merce and with it the production of wealth.
Our currency may be described as a reissue of "commercial
paper," that is, the promissory notes of business men. If the
right to convert such business credit into a medium of exchange
were not monopolized but were open to the business world with
out the payment of interestjust as the banks of issue now
receive the currencythe rate of interest would at once fall to
insurance plus labor cost and money would, through competi
tion, soon lose the power of returning unearned incomes. Ob
viously the purchasing power needed by the workers to buy the
things they need is in the banks, and there is but one way to
transfer this purchasing power to the consumer, and that is by
the abolition of speculative interest.
Apply this principle to the house shortage. If house owners
could borrow money at practically no interest by mortgaging
their unincumbered houses for currency, they would borrow
money and build more houses. Competition among house own
ers would bring house rent down so as to afford no, or little
more, income than money loaned. The same would be true of all
forms of invested capital.
The business world may be represented by the picture of two
insatiable demandsthe insatiable demand of capital for labor
and the insatiable demand of labor to be employed by capital.
These demands could get together and function but for the fact
that our currency system compels them to approach one another
through the narrow causeway of monopolized credit. It is as if
you tried to bring all the waters of the Pacific Ocean into con
tact with all the waters of the Atlantic Ocean through one nar
row isthmus.
Xenia, Illinois, January 25
John Basil Barnhill
International
Relations
"Sovietizing" the Schools in Mexico

THE proposed Mexican education law, which has been
submitted to the legislature for action, was drawn up
by Jose Vasconcelos, Dean of the National University.
When the text of the law was first published there was
much newspaper discussion of the "sovietizing" of the
schools through the appointment of local councils of educa
tion made up of representatives of parents, teachers, and
the public authorities. It is also interesting to note the
provision that directors and faculties of high schools are
to be nominated by the students and teachers in each insti
tution and by independent scientific bodies.
Chapter I
Establishment and Functions of the Federal Department of
Public Education
Article 1. There shall be established a department in the
Government to be known as the Federal Department of Public
Education.
Art. 2. The duties of the Federal Department of Public
Education shall be:
(1) To promote the organization and functioning of public
education throughout the national territory;
(2) To develop culture and the fine arts.
Art. 3. The education given in the institutions under the su
pervision of the Federal Department of Public Education shall
be free and secular ; the primary shall, moreover, be compulsory.
So far as the resources of the treasury permit, the Government
shall be obliged to feed, clothe, and educate all children in the
Republic under fourteen years of age who are orphans or des
titute and who are dependent upon fathers incapacitated for
work.
Chapter II
Matters Under the Control of Federal Department of Public
Education
Art. 4. The Department of Public Education shall have
control over the following matters in the form determined upon
by this law:
(1) The National University of Mexico with all its present
subsidiaries, also the National Preparatory School, which shall
form part of it, together with the National Institute of Scien
tific Research, which was under the supervision of the Depart
ment of Public Instruction and Fine Arts until it went out
of existence, as well as others which in future shall be estab
lished ;
(2) The direction of primary and normal education;
(3) All public primary and high schools in the Federal Dis
trict and Territories, including those under the control of the
city council;
(4) The high school of commerce and administration and
the national industrial schools.
Art. 5. The Federal Department of Public Education shall
comprise the above mentioned institutions, together with those
which shall in future be created, and all of which shall consti
tute three main branches or departments, viz.:
(1) The Scholastic Department, which shall include schools
for natives [Indians]; rural schools; primary, high, normal,
special, preparatory, industrial, and commercial schools; and
the universities, which by virtue of their federal character shall
be under the control of the same department;
(2) The Department of Libraries and Archives, which shall
be responsible for the creation and operation of public libraries
throughout the country, the care and administration of the
national library and of special libraries established by the de
partment, as well as the general archives of the nation;
Section
(3) The Department of Fine Arts, which shall have under its
supervision official institutions of fine arts, the museums, and
historical and artistic monuments, archeological monuments,
theaters and theatrical productions, conservatories of music,
propaganda by means of moving pictures, and all other similar
institutions.
Chapter III
Scholastic Department
Art. 6. The Federal Department of Public Education as
soon as it begins operation shall concern itself with:
(1) The establishment of special schools for the education
of the Indian to be distributed in regions densely populated
by Indians and in which the Spanish language shall be taught,
together with those rudimentary subjects necessary to assimi
late them into our civilization, so that they may pass succes
sively to the rural schools, the primary schools, the preparatory,
professional, etc., according to their aptitudes and potenti
alities.
(2) The establishment of rural schools throughout the Re
public suited to the needs of the community and the resources
available. With this object in mind use shall be made of the
institutions now in operation in different parts of the country,
so that if it is not possible to create new schools those existing
shall be developed. In organizing rural schools, care shall be
taken to give instruction especially in subjects of practical
utility so as to perfect the manual and industrial crafts and
trades of each region.
(3) The establishment of primary and advanced primary
schools in all cities of the Republic and the development of those
already existing.
(4) The establishment of preparatory schools as annexes of
the federal universities of a standing equal to that of the
National Preparatory School of Mexico City. In these pre
paratory schools, adequate instruction shall be provided to
prepare pupils for entrance into the faculties of the universities.
(5) The establishment of industrial schools or technical
schools to the number of at least one in each State of the Re
public either through the creation of such institutions or the
perfecting of those already existing. In each case, care shall
be taken that the school meets practical needs, so that, for
example, in mining regions, institutions shall be established
to teach the working and assay of minerals; in industrial re
gions, applied mechanics and metal work; in live-stock regions,
tanning, and so forth; so that the pupils may maintain them
selves in their home communities, instead of moving on to others
and becoming charges on society.
(6) The establishment and perfecting of at least three great
universities, which besides the one in Mexico City, shall be
founded in Guadalajara, Monterey, and Merida. These insti
tutions shall be created, taking advantage of the plants and
faculties already existing in those places, but perfecting them
as may be necessary. Oversight to insure the proper opera
tion of all these educational institutions and other similar
ones under the control of this department, granting them all
the independence and autonomy compatible with the necessity
of coordinating into a single whole the special ideals of each.
Chapter IV
Department of Libraries and Archives
Art. 7. The Department of Libraries and Archives shall
have its principal office in Mexico City, and in accordance with
the annual budgets approved by Congress shall extend its
sphere of influence throughout the Republic, until a library shall
exist in every community of more than 3,000 inhabitants,
whether founded with local funds or with federal subsidy.
Art. 8. The department through its agents shall travel
through the country seeking means of levying funds in each
region, or supplying local needs, so that these libraries may be
established as soon as possible.
Feb. 9, 1921]
The Nation
Art. 9. Care shall be taken to have these libraries consist

mainly of books of applied science, literature, ethics, art, and
trade, all in the Spanish language, whose zealous cultivation
is recommended as one of the highest forms of patriotism.
Art. 10. In order to obtain the necessary books for these
libraries, as well as to extend general culture throughout the
country, there shall be created a section on translations and
an editorial office under the control of the Department of Public
Education, with the sole limitation that no works on "militant
politics" may be edited.
Art. 11. The Department of Public Education, through a
technical commission, appointed for the purpose, shall select
the works to be distributed throughout the Republic.
Art. 12. Federal libraries may receive all kinds of donations.
Art. 13. The libraries under the control of this department
shall install a system of loaning books to homes, and for this
purpose shall secure all works in duplicate. The councils of
education, to be referred to later, shall be charged with finding
premises for the establishment of these libraries and levy funds
for their maintenance. Only where it is impossible to secure
local funds, the department shall provide a corresponding sub
sidy.
promulgate necessary regulations for the operation and devel
opment of the general archives of the nation.
Chapter V
Department of Fine Arts
Art. 15. The Department of Fine Arts shall have under its
supervision :
(1) The National Academy of Fine Arts;
(2) The National Museum of Archeology, History, and Eth
nology;
(3) The National Conservatory of Music;
(4) The academies and institutes of fine arts which shall be
established in the various States, either through federal re
sources or sums allotted by it;
(6) The conservatories of music which shall be created in
the various States, with federal funds or subsidy;
(6) The museums which will be established either in the Fed
eral District or in the States, with federal funds or subsidy;
(7) The general inspection of artistic or historical monu
ments;
(8) Inspection of archeological monuments;
(9) The development of the national theater;
(10) In general the fostering of the artistic education of
the people, by means of lectures, concerts, theatrical or musical
productions, or any other method;
(11) Copyrights: literary, dramatic, and artistic property;
(12) Exhibitions of works of art and cultural education
through moving pictures and all similar means, and theatrical,
artistic, or cultural productions and meetings in all parts of the
country.
Chapter VI
Powers of the Federal Department of Public Education
Art. 16. The three branches of the department shall be sub
divided into the bureaus and sections necessary for the effi
cient conduct of its affairs.
Art. 17. The department shall be under the direction of a
secretary with a seat in the Cabinet, who shall work directly
with the President of the Republic, a sub-secretary, a chief
clerk, and three department heads in charge of the three prin
cipal divisions: scholastic, libraries and archives, and fine arts.
Art. 18. The department shall appoint agents, who sha^l
travel to the different parts of the country to organize the
activities set forth in the present law.

appoint the directors of all high schools and the faculties there
in, preferably in the following manner; one candidate to be
chosen by their respective students, another by their teachers,
217
and another by independent scientific societies or organizations.

Art. 20. Powers of this department to appoint, remove,
grant licenses, or order changes in the administrative or teach
ing staff, may be delegated to the local councils, with the fol
lowing limitations:
(1) No employee of public education may be removed from
his position for political reasons or for the profession of re
ligious belief.
(2) In case of removal, the council or department must show
cause to the party interested, and he may present his defense.
(3) Members of the teaching force who hold chairs or pro
fessorships in accordance with the rules of competitive examina
tion, may not be removed, except in cases specially provided
under these regulations or for conviction for a common crime.
(4) Employees of public education shall have the right to
pensions under the conditions prescribed by law.
Chapter VII
Funds Provided for the Maintenance of Public Education
Art. 21. In the Federal District and Territories, the ex
penses of public education shall be met by the federal treasury,
or by funds which each institution may itself obtain. Public
education in the States shall be maintained with funds actually
provided for this purpose in each locality, with the taxes and
other duties which may in future be locally imposed, and with
funds which the Federal Government grants each year, either
for the maintenance of federal plants or for the development
of local institutions.
Art. 22. The Department of Public Education may propose
laws relative to taxes for its branch of the government, either
before the Federal Congress, through process of law, or before
State congresses, through representatives of that department.
Art. 23. Both in the Federal District and Territories, and
in the States, care shall be taken that the major part of the
income assigned to education shall be applied to elementary in
struction, secondary, industrial, commercial, normal and pre
paratory, and. then professional.
Art. 24. The Universities of Mexico shall be maintained by:
(1) The fees of students which may be fixed, those students
alone being obliged to pay who are able to do so;
(2) The income of their properties, if such exist, and by
donations and foundations they receive;
(3) The subsidies which the Federal Congress or the local
legislatures may assign them.
Art. 25. So long as they cannot maintain themselves with
their own funds, the federal universities shall receive as a
minimum subsidy a sum necessary for the activities now ex
isting, which must be placed entirely at their disposal to dis
tribute and manage for themselves. Surpluses, if there be
any, in each of these institutions shall remain to their credit
to create funds which may be invested or used for their im
provement as may be agreed upon by their executive staffs.
Chapter VIII
Councils of Education
Art. 26. *, Councils of education shall be in operation through
out the Republic made up in the following manner:
In each place of more than 500 inhabitants, there shall be
established a council of education made up of three members,
viz., one representative of the parents, one representative of
the local city council, and one representative of the teaching
force. The parents shall choose by vote from among them
selves tjhe person to represent them on the council; the city
, council, by vote from among its members, shall choose a member'of the council; and the teachers shall choose a third member.
Should there not be enough teachers in a community, the
choice of the teacher to sit 'in the council may be made by the
city council.
Art. 27. All the members of the councils jhall meet, each
year, either personally or through delegates, at the capital of
each district, section, or canton, including the members of the
218
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
The Nation
council of the capital of said district, so as to organize a dis

trict council, composed of three members chosen by the coun
cilors of the communities which make up the district, section,
or canton. This district council shall have general oversight
of all educational affairs under its jurisdiction, and may come
to have the direction of these affairs when so ordered by the
authorities controlling the respective schools, when the law goes
into effect
Art. 28. In the capital of each State of the Republic, in the
capitals of the Territories and in the Federal District, there
shall be organized besides the local council, a council of edu
cation, composed of five members chosen by vote by the coun
cilors of the districts, sections, or cantons, who, to make this
choice, shall meet each year in the capital of the respective
State or district.
Art. 29. The local councils shall propose to the authorities
controlling the elementary and primary schools the nomination
and removal of the teaching force, and they themselves may
choose and remove the staff on the approval of the authorities
controlling the schools.
Art. 30. The council of each State shall propose to the au
thorities in charge of the primary, high, and special schools the
nomination of the staff, and shall suggest what appears proper
for making up the school budget of each community. They
shall do all this providing the said authorities give them powers
to do so. The central council of the Federal District shall have
the right to propose to the Department of Public Education
the nomination of teachers and directors of the primary schools,
but it shall remain the duty of the department to accept or
reject these proposals and in general all definite decrees regard
ing the organization and management of their respective affairs
unless it delegates these duties to the council.
Art. 31. The councils of education of each State of the Re
public shall elect two members to go to the capital of the Re
public to become part of the Federal Council of Public Educa
tion, which shall sit in the capital during the month of Novem
ber each year.
Art. 32. The duties of the Federal Council of Public Educa
tion shall be:
(1) To discuss means of developing and improving public
instruction in Mexico, adopting measures which, where ap
proved by the Federal Department of Public Education, shall
be binding throughout the Republic;
(2) To discuss the unification and uniformity of school pro
grams and plans throughout the country;
(3) To discuss and express their views on the suggestions
made by the Department of Public Education to promote and
develop education throughout the Republic.
Art. 33. In order to effect unity of action, members of the
Federal Council of Public Education may submit reports so
that the corresponding department may take them into con
sideration in making decisions on matters recommended to it
for action. Only, in measures relating to the investment of
funds of the Federal Government for the development of edu
cation in the States, it shall be necessary that the majority of
the councilors approve of the project in general terms before
the Department of Public Education shall feel itself author
ized to go ahead.
Art. 34. The period of the sessions of the Council of Edu
cation shall not exceed the month fixed by the present law and
except for the purposes specially named in the text of this
law the Council shall have the character merely of a consulting
body for unifying methods and programs, so as to guide the
action of the Department in public educational matters.
Chapter IX
Plants Which Exist in the States
Art. 35. The States of the Republic shall organize their sys
tem of schools in such a way that they shall be adapted to the
Councils of Education which may be established by virtue of
the present law. They shall see to it that in the briefest pos
sible time the supreme authority in matters of education in

each State shall be placed in the hands of the Council of Edu
cation, organized as directed by the present law.
Art. 36. Educational institutions, whether public or private,
actually in operation in the States, shall continue to exist as
heretofore, and the Department of Public Education shall bear
only such a relation toward them as may be voluntarily agreed
upon by those interested. The action of the department shall
never tend to put such institutions out of business, but only
to develop and improve them.
Art. 37. The various States of the Republic shall continue
to contribute, as heretofore, to all the needs of public education,
and the Federal Government shall merely assist them as much
as possible and in conformity with the plans agreed upon be
tween the department and the Federal Council of Education,
for the development of the institutions in the States. The
Federal Government shall have direct charge of the establish
ments which it may found with its own funds, such as schools
for Indians, rural schools, industrial schools, universities, mu
seums, libraries, academies of art, conservatories, etc., with the
exceptions designated in this law.
Art. 38. Should there be established in any State of the
Republic a new educational institution made up partly of ele
ments supplied by the Federal Government and partly by the
community, the Department of Public Education shall arrange
with the council of education of the State the degree of con
trol of the federal powers and the local powers in the manage
ment of the new institution.
Chapter X
General Provisions
Art. 39. Points not foreseen by this law, which refer to
education, shall be decided by the Department of Public Edu
cation and all other administrative functions, or any other
kind, not assigned in the present law to any given institution,
shall be performed by the Federal Department of Public Edu
cation.
Art. 40. All laws and previous decrees relative to public
education contrary to the precepts of this law, and the regula
tions arising from it, are hereby repealed.
Provisional Decrees
Art. 1. Pending the establishment of the institutions re
ferred to in the present law, all institutions in all parts of the
Republic shall continue to exist under their own regulations.
Art. 2. In order to establish the Federal Department of
Public Education, and so that education may immediately re
ceive the impulse which it needs, the Executive of the Union
is granted extraordinary powers to prepare the budgets of the
new department and to dispose of a sum up to $15,000,000,*
besides the ordinary budgets granted heretofore for public edu
cation, the Executive being obliged to render an accounting of
the use made of these powers.
Mexican Land Reform

THE projected Agrarian Law, printed below, fixing the
methods by which rural estates in Mexico are to be
distributed, is an embodiment of the ideas expressed by the
President-elect, General Alvaro Obregon, in a recent dis
cussion with a group of Deputies. The project has been sent
to the Chamber of Deputies for study and discussion.
Considering that the time has come for carrying out just
revolutionary desires, including an agrarian law, for the ef
fective improvement of the land, for the abolition of the politi
cal and economic slavery of our proletariat, and for the subse
quent attainment of peace and harmony in Mexico;
$7,500,000 in American money.
The Nation
Feb. 9, 1921]
Considering that, although the native soil is capable of pro
219
cient to satisfy his personal needs and those of his family.
viding the necessities of life for more than ten million inhabi
ART. 2. Therefore, in order to realize this right, there will be
tants, and although it can furnish the foundation for a strong

and progressive nation, its scanty population live subject to
extreme poverty and constitute an undeveloped citizenship, weak,
expropriated to the necessary extent and in accordance with

the provisions of this law the following lands: (a) rural estates;
(b) land held uncultivated for the past five years; (c) land
cultivated by methods which are judged crude and antiquated
anarchistic, and a constant menace to the nation, all because

of the monopoly of the land, which impedes its cultivation and
discourages the utilization of its fertility. In fact, this com
plete monopoly of the native soil has been responsible for the
enormous extent of the unimproved land, which can be esti
mated, without exaggeration, at 90 per cent of the territory in

the Republic suitable for agricultural purposes.
Such a state
of affairs was the cause of the amortization of church property

during the reform period, and would at present amply justify
a similar measure in favor of the rural and city proletariat,
which lacks property of any kind, and which is eager to use and
reap the benefits from even a small part of the land which
legally belongs to it;
Considering that the fraternal union of all Mexicans and the
rule of a true democracy cannot be realized while the majority

of the population is economically dependent upon the privileged
minority, which has monopolized the land and which, whenever
it gives wages to the needy, imposes its will as the only law;
Considering that, whatever may be the ideas expressed con
cerning social justice and the rights of man, his inherent and
inalienable right to the land for its cultivation and for the
enjoyment of the whole product of his labor must be recognized,
since the soil which sustains him constitutes the natural field
by the Secretary of Agriculture.
ART. 8. Rural lands which have established modern methods

of cultivation, sufficient in the judgment of the Secretary of
Agriculture to be characterized as agricultural units, will not
be expropriated.
ART. 4. The extent of the land granted to each individual can

not be less than five hectares, nor more than twenty.
ART. 5. Parcels of land cannot be granted for the purpose of
contracts, bargain, sale, mortgage, profit, or for any other pur
pose which limits the use of the property, nor can they even be
attached. The customs already established will exist, but modi
fied in accordance with the terms of the law.
ART. 6. The rights which this law concedes to those who have
been granted parcels of land become void by lack of cultivation

of the land for one year.
ART. 7. The local agrarian commissions are empowered to
receive and transfer, and the National Agrarian Commission
shall make decisions regarding, the petitions of those who are
interested in taking advantage of the rights which this law

grants; the latter shall determine upon, and request the Execu
tive for, the expropriation of the land needed for the develop
ment and improvement of small property.
for his productive activity and the sole origin of all wealth,
both for the elements most essential to his subsistence and for
The Grantees
the raw materials of industry. Such being the case, the privi
leges which the law grants to the monopolists of national terri
tory can reach such a point, in accordance with these same
laws, as to bring absolute privation to those who lack such
privileges; and even though such an extreme situation has not
arisen as yet, there is no doubt that as long as the present state
of rural proprietorship remains unchanged the workers will
be faced by the imperative necessity of accepting the condi
tions imposed upon them in exchange for permission to use the
land which is absolutely necessary for their existence;
Considering that the majority of our land-owners have taken
no interest in the development of agriculture and have persisted
in retaining antiquated methods of cultivation, thus disqualify
ing themselves for the struggle for commercial advantage; and
that, since it is an obligation of the state to secure by any direct
or indirect methods within its reach the progress of national
agriculture, which is one of the principal sources of wealth, it
ART. 8. The rights which this law concedes can only be exer
cised by Mexican citizens, by birth or naturalization, with full
is therefore not desired that the present law should unjustly

dismember large estates using modern methods of cultivation
and constituting true indivisible agricultural units and schools
of constant encouragement to determine eventually the develop
ment of our crude agricultural system;
Considering that, in order to realize the rights which this
law recognizes for all Mexicans, it should institute rapid methods
and practices worthy of the just aims of the Government, not

only for giving land to all those who desire it for the fulfilment
of their needs, but also to attend to and indemnify those af
fected by the expropriation;
Guided by the preceding considerations, and by the sincere
conviction that they are, on the whole, in accordance with the
ideals which have inspired the revolutionists of good faith, and
those who, even though they have taken no part in the armed
conflict, ardently desire the well-being and prosperity of the
Republic, the undersigned has the honor to submit for the
approval of the Congress the following
AGRARIAN LAW
General Provisions
ARTICLE 1. The Government recognizes the inalienable and
inherent right of every man to possess and cultivate for him

self a piece of land, which, with reasonable care, shall be suffi
civil rights.
ART. 9. The law excludes from its benefits those Mexicans
who own land amounting to more than twenty hectares.

ART. 10. Those receiving grants must first give proof of
habits of industry and of the ability necessary for cultivating

the land.
ART. 11. Other things being equal, preference must be given

to those living in the immediate vicinity of the land in question
rather than to outsiders, and to married men rather than bache
lors. Among those living in the vicinity, the tenants, copart

ners, and peasants of the land to be shared will have preference.
Elderly Mexican women and widows will also have the right
to acquire pieces of land for their own benefit and not for the
benefit of other persons.
ART. 12. Each grantee will be entitled only to the amount of
land granted him.

ART. 13. For all legal purposes it is considered that the par
cels form indivisible property; and in the same way, in cases

of hereditary succession, must be granted to a single heir desig
nated by mutual consent of all the coheirs. If such a selection
is not made out of court within four months, the judge of the
proceedings will make a public decision.

ART. 14. The grantees will work their land with entire free
dom, making those improvements which seem most convenient,
and which they judge most adequate; and only when the ex
ploitation of the forests and the use of water are involved, must
they be subject to the respective laws.
ART. 15. The right to the parcels of land is perpetual and in
violate, without restrictions other than those established in

harmony with the public interest; but in cases where the grantee
neglects the cultivation of his plot for a year, his rights be

come void. He is permitted, however, to retain the profits which
he has realized.
ART. 16. By the single act of occupation of lands, by means

of judicial order or consent of the owner, on the part of the local
agrarian commissions, claims of the public treasury against
expropriated lands will be completely annulled, whether they
be imposts or taxes or whether they have their origin in the
laws of amortization, nationalization, waste land, or any other
220
The Nation
matter affecting rural property, with the single exception of

the right of eminent domain which belongs to the nation and
which can never be renounced.
Art. 17. Contracts of any kind, real or implied, will be held
as non-existent in so far as they prevent operation of the present
law. However, those who have made contracts in good faith
will be indemnified out of profits already made, and will have
the right to levy from the harvests of the land in question, if
planted by them. The tenants may demand a proportionate de
crease in the rent named in their respective contracts with the
owners.
Art. 18. Those who had claimed possession of their plots by
the action stated in Art. 33 of this law will not be troubled by
judgments of recovery, nor by the exercise of possessory ac
tions founded in cases begun prior to the enactment of the same
article; and its presentation will render the judgment void.
J Art. 19. The price paid by the grantee for his plot will be the
same as that which the nation will have to pay to those ex
propriated, plus 5 per cent for organization and distribution;
the grantee will pay this price in twenty annual instalments,
which will begin on the day he takes possession of the land.
/ Art. 20. Owners of seized land must be recompensed for the
value of their land as set forth in the official real estate rec
ords, plus 10 per cent increase.
Art. 21. When the records fail to contain data concerning
the value of the land in question, a special appraisement of the
property subject to expropriation will be made by the engineers
of the local agrarian commission in the federal district or terri
tory, according to circumstances.
Art. 22. Payment must be made with bonds of the National
Agrarian Debt, payable twenty years from date, in annual in
stalments which refund capital and interest. The interest will
in no case exceed 5 per cent yearly.
Art. 23. On payments of the said bonds issued in favor of
the proprietors the revenues from the expropriated lands will
be subject to charge as payment to the nation. The funds,
which constitute a guaranty, cannot be converted by the Gov
ernment.
Art. 24. In case of expropriation the owners of land must
present their titles and plans for examination by the local
agrarian commission of the corresponding federal district or
territory. They are also to present a certificate showing the
official value of the lands, with the value, per hectare, of each
of the various kinds of soil constituting these lands.
Art. 25. The proprietors who attempt to obstruct the opera
tion of the present law by legal evasions, or by methods mani
festly contrary to law, will pay a sum equal to 10 per cent of
the official value of the property in dispute. Those who take
up arms contrary to the constitutional government of the Re
public, or to the local authorities, to provoke, aid, or incite the
rebellion of others; or who in any violent manner pretend to
obstruct the initiation of the agrarian reform, will lose their
citizenship for ten years, and will pay to the national treasury
a sum' equal to 20 per cent of the value of the lands concerned
in the judgment. Those who, with the same object, provoke
foreign intervention, or who in any other way seek the support
of foreign governments or aliens in order to exert diplomatic,
military, or economic pressure- upon the people or Government
of Mexico, will be deprived of their citizenship, and will pay a
sum equal to 40 per cent of the value of their property. The
Federal Ministry will bring up before competent courts the
penal action in accordance with this article, without interfering
with the expropriation proceedings.
Procedure
Art. 26. When expropriation of land proceeds according to
this law, the owners must state within ten days whether they
agree to the decision or formally oppose it. If after this time
has elapsed no contest has been made they will be obliged to
conform, and the case will consequently proceed.
Art. 27. In case of opposition, the dispute will be submitted
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
to federal courts, which should make decisions by summary pro

ceedings, thus preventing delays which might cause serious
damage to the operation of the Agrarian Law.
Art. 28. As soon as it has been decided that lands are to be
occupied, whether because of consent of the owners, expressed
or understood, or by judicial order, the local agrarian commis
sion will take possession of them, and will proceed to fix the
location and boundaries of the parcels according to the fol
lowing regulations:
a. A plan of each plot will be made, showing its exact size
and boundaries, for registry in the official records.
b. As far as the topography of the land permits, a regular
and uniform demarcation will be given to the parcels of land.
c. The boundaries will be exactly fixed.
d. No plots shall be penetrated to provide access to the
public highway, avoiding as far as possible questions of right
of way.
e. Each plot shall have its drain to public canals and aque
ducts.
f. The plots shall be numbered consecutively, according to
the manner in which the title was given to the grantees; plots
designated as "Parcel number
of the real estate called
, Municipality of
, Federal District or Territory
."
Without affecting this arrangement, grantees may give their
plots whatever name they wish.
Art. 29. In order to fix in each location the size of the plot
which must serve as a basis for decisions, the following con
siderations will be taken into account:
a. The size of the plots should be inversely proportional to
the value of the land of which they are composed; computing
this value as much by the intrinsic quality of the soil as by the
location with respect to the highways of traffic and the con
suming centers.
b. On this basis, and keeping in mind the maximum and
minimum limits indicated by the present law, the area of the
parcels should be sufficient to maintain a farmer with his
family, permitting in addition the accumulation of small sav
ings in order to pay for the land and to face future difficulties.
Art. 30. Knowing the official value of the parcel from the
standpoint of expropriation, or valued according to the terms
of the law when official values are missing, payment to the pro
prietors will be made as below, the following preferential debts
having been deducted:
a. Taxes must be paid to the national treasury.
b. To hypothecary creditors and those to whom reparations
are due, a part proportional to their credits must be paid, pref
erence given according to their registry. For this purpose
creditors will be obliged to divide with those owing them.
Art. 31. When owners of lands refuse to accept the price
determined upon, and when persons to whom mortgages and
reparations are due will not accept payment of their credits, the
bonds will remain at the disposition of the national treasurer
for one year, at the end of which time they will lose all right
to claims.
Art. 32. When the lands to be allotted are waste lands or
government territory, the price will be that fixed by the tariff
approved by the Secretary of Agriculture, to be paid by the
Government with agrarian bonds.
Art. 33. When the owner consents to the expropriation, or
when judicial decision results, the local agrarian commissions
must give the parcel to the beneficiary with an exact statement
of its boundaries. In connection with this proceeding, which
will be equivalent to legal possession, there should be a certifi
cate signed by all those in agreement, an authorized copy of
which will be given to the interested party, to serve as a
guaranty.
Art. 34. The adjudicated titles of the plots must be signed
by the Secretary of Agriculture, in his capacity as president of
the National Agrarian Commission, and by those interested. As
long as the price of the plot is not entirely paid to the nation,
the title for the respective property will not be given over.
Feb. 9, 1921]
The Nation
Further Regulations
1. This law will take effect from the date of its promulga
tion.
2. All laws and regulations which are contrary to the present
law are repealed.
3. The National Agrarian Commission, by means of circu
lars, will adopt by-laws whenever necessary.
[Signed] Alvaro Obregon
Mexico, December 1, 1920
A Protest from "JE"

THE list of reprisals on cooperative creameries printed
in the appendix to the report of the British Labor
Commission to Ireland, has been made the basis of the fol
lowing earnest demand by George W. Russell, "JE," for a
public inquiry into these reprisals and attacks. Mr. Russell
is one of the leaders of the cooperative movement in Ireland.
I do not know if the doctrine of reprisals has been accepted
by the British people as an essential part of their scheme of
justice to be applied when more traditional methods have
broken down. I have no legal guidance and can only speak
from a layman's knowledge of the application of the policy of
reprisals as I have watched it in operation in Ireland and in
relation to one movement. I write, choosing my words with
the greatest care, trying to explain the working of this new
doctrine of justice which has been openly avowed and de
fended by ministers of the Crown. Human nature is imperfect,
as we too well know, and there are few who have not seen
how often a man made angry by real or imaginary grievances
will, while his anger lasts, make life a hell for those about him,
persons who may be unconnected with the cause of his anger
or unable to remove it. The man wants to make somebody
suffer because he suffers ; and if he is unable to get at the real
offender he may beat his wife and children or pick a quarrel
with the first person he meets. Our moral being is revolted
when we see this spirit in the individual. How much more
should we dread any extension of this spirit to government,
lest it set in motion the vast organizations and physical forces
under its control? That spirit has for months past dominated
the Irish administration. The armed forces of the Crown,
unable to capture those guilty of offenses against it, have
burned down factories, creameries, mills, stores, barns, and
private dwelling-houses. How one Irish movement, economic
and non-political in character, has been affected may be seen
in the statement following what is here written.
The cooperative movement in Ireland has gained world-wide
recognition as one of the sanest and most beneficent of national
movements. Its membership includes men of all parties and
creeds in Ireland, and it is as popular and widely-spread in
Ulster as in other provinces. Its constitution and the rules
of its societies forbade the discussion of political and sectarian
matters. On this basis many thousands of Unionists were able
to join with their Nationalist fellow-countrymen in an AllIreland movement for their mutual benefit. Over one thou
sand societies have been created with an annual turnover now
exceeding eleven million pounds. The creameries, bacon fac
tories, mills, and agricultural stores created by cooperative
societies are a familiar feature in the Irish countryside. Up
to the moment of writing forty-two attacks have been made
on cooperative societies and it is alleged that these attacks
were made by the armed forces of the Crown. In these attacks
creameries and mills have been burned to the ground, their
machinery wrecked; agricultural stores have also been burned,
property looted, employees have been killed, wounded, beaten,
threatened, or otherwise ill-treated. Why have these economic
organizations been specially attacked? Because they have
hundreds of members, and if barracks have been burned or
police have been killed or wounded in the lamentable strife
221
now being waged in Ireland, and if the armed forces of the

Crown cannot capture those actually guilty of the offenses, the
policy of reprisals, condoned by the spokesmen of the Govern
ment, has led to the wrecking of any enterprise in the neigh
borhood the destruction of which would inflict widespread in
jury and hurt the interests of the greatest number of people.
I say this has been done without regard to the innocence or guilt
of the persons whose property is attacked. It is not only
wicked this indiscriminate justice, but it is the most foolish
of all policies if its object be to make people cling to the donor
of the justice so dispensed. Every innocent person whose
property is attacked, whatever were his political feelings before,
becomes naturally an antagonist to the power which has injured
him.
In two cases it has been alleged that cooperative creameries
were used as a basis of attacks on military or police. These
exceptions are the Newport and Ballymacelligott societies. It
was stated by General Rjrcroft, of course on the report of
some subordinate, that shots were fired from the Newport
Creamery on a party of soldiers. The Irish Agricultural Or
ganization Society was most anxious to get at the truth of
these charges, which involved a violation of the non-political
character of the associations it created. Sir Horace Plunkett
investigated the case on the spot, seeing witnesses and attend
ing the Quarter Sessions when the case was heard. Before
this a claim for compensation under the Malicious Injuries
Acts was made by the Newport Society. General Rycroft was
informed that the claim was to be considered by the county
court judge and the military authorities were asked to give
evidence. They did not summon any witnesses. They did
not employ counsel to cross-examine the society's witnesses.
They actually withdrew from the district the soldiers
who were implicated in the attack. I believe this was
done because on deliberation it was found that the charge
of shooting from the creamery could not be sustained. The
second case, that of Ballymacelligott, has been given wide
publicity by the Chief Secretary. Most careful inquiries have
been made by the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, and
from a study of the affidavits made by eye-witnesses I am
convinced the statement made by Sir Hamar Greenwood, on
what authority I know not, is a travesty of the facts; that
there was no ambush at the creamery, but there was a most
wanton attack by the armed forces of the Crown on employees
of the society and others present during the normal working of
the creamery. In this attack two men were killed and two
wounded. It may be said my denial is of no more value than
Sir Hamar Greenwood's affirmation. Be it so. It brings me
to the purpose of this article, which is to demand, on behalf
of the Irish cooperative movement, an open and impartial
inquiry into these attacks on cooperative societies. We cooperators have nothing to fear from the result of such inves
tigation. The Government may have, for it has hitherto re
fused to set up any tribunal to inquire into the wreckings. I
believe refusal was made because the Government knows only
too well the outcry which would follow an exposure of the
horrors which have taken place in Ireland, to which thousands
of witnesses of high character could testify. I appeal from
the British Government to the British people. I appeal to
their sense of fair play and justice to judge between Irish
cooperators and the Government. We charge certain unknown
agents of the Crown with indiscriminate wreckings and burn
ings of our societies. The Chief Secretary retorts by saying
they are centers of revolutionary propaganda. Let him prove
his charge if he has evidence. We declare we have nothing to
fear from any investigation. The whole character and repute
of our movement is involved. If our defense breaks down, a
long and honorable record is broken and our character is ruined.
Knowing all this, we press for the fullest and most public
inquiry.
The Government stands charged, through the acts of its
agents, with arson, with the wrecking of property and the
222
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
The Nation
ill-treatment of Irish citizens, without due trial by processes

of law. It shrinks from publicity. It refuses open inquiry.
We ask for investigation. The Government denies it. Which
shows the worse conscience? Which behaves as the guilty
party?
The leaders of the cooperative movement in Ireland, Sir
Horace Plunkett, Lord Monteagle, the Rev. Thomas Finlay,
and Mr. R. A. Anderson, are publicists whose character and
work have been known for over a quarter of a century. Are
they men likely to make irresponsible or unfounded accusa
tions, men with long and honorable careers of public service
behind them? They, I assert, are men of honor with a knowl
edge of Ireland a thousand times greater than the Chief Secre
tary could possibly have, a knowledge gained by lives spent
in philanthropic work. When such men ask for open inquiry
public opinion in Great Britain, if there be any sense of justice
there, would insist on this being granted. It cannot allow the
fountain of justice to lie under the> imputation of being fouled.
What is being done in Ireland today may be done in Great
Britain tomorrow.
On behalf of the Irish cooperative movement I demand the
setting up of an impartial tribunal to investigate the illegal
destruction of cooperative property by the armed forces of the
Crown. I claim for these societies full compensation out of
Crown funds for the property destroyed if the charge is proved.
It is futile saying there are county courts and that claims can
be made there under the Malicious Injuries Act. That act
was never intended to lay upon the ratepayers in any district
the burden of compensation for property wrecked by the forces
of the Crown. No County Council will levy a rate to compen
sate persons where property has been destroyed by those whose
ostensible reason for employment by the Crown is the defense
of life and property. The Irish Agricultural Organization So
ciety has indeed urged its societies to make claims under the
act before the judges in the county courts, not in the belief
that the compensation awarded would be levied by the county
council or paid by the ratepayers, but because by doing so
sworn evidence about the cause of the wreckings was available.
On this sworn evidence county court judges have already as
sessed damages and one of them declared the Crown ought
to compensate for the acts of its agents, as it did in
Fermoy.
The actual injury inflicted on the cooperative movement and
the property of poor farmers is estimated by experts to be
between 250,000 and 300,000, while the annual trade dis
turbed is almost 1,000,000. I say if the British people, because
of their natural anger over the shooting of police and soldiers
condone without inquiry indiscriminate vengeance inflicted on
persons and movements which are innocent they will lay up a
hell for themselves in their own country. They will be tearing
up all the safeguards of justice won through centuries of
struggle, and there are too many interests minatory to democ
racy in power to allow them the advantage of such precedents.
If we trust the judges and the courts the Government should
not fear to do so. Do not trust those who are afraid of courts
of inquiry and who, to every demand for justice, respond by
attempts to excite hate and rage among the people. It may
be we Irish are scoundrels, but if we are let us be tried openly
for our crimes and not penalized without trial either by order
of the Secret Service or without orders by military or police
forces out of hand. I ask for the Irish Agricultural Organi
zation Society the support of all fair-minded men in order that
it may get the public inquiry it demands. Do not let a great
movement which has hitherto won praise from all parties in
the state and from visitors all over the world be condemned
to destruction on the word of a man whose sole personal knowl
edge of Ireland is derived from brief visits, protected by the
military, to Dublin Castle, and whose sole source of informa
tion about the matters in dispute is the word of the persons
who are charged with committing the crimes.
George W. Russell ("M")

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The
Book
Nation s
The judges of The Nation's Poetry Prize have agreed to divide

the prize between the two poems here printed. Several others
which, though not awarded a prize, seem of notable merit, will
appear in The Nation for February 16.
Prelude : W hen We Dead Awaken

By JAMES RORTY
On that day
The postman will blow a shrill whistle down the street
And the white faces of a hundred million sleepers will
brighten and smile in their sleep,
And the bells will ring in the church steeples and the high
towers rock, and the newsboys will run crying the
wildest extra since life began;
And the world will wake sweetly to the smile of a bluebird's
warble and the gold-blue morning bugles of a thousand
cock-crows chanting "Victory."
0 that day!
1 can see four generals goose-stepping down the Main
Street of the world doing a burlesque,
And two of them are happy-drunk, and they sit in the street
with mud on their uniforms that was never there before ;
And one of them gets down on his hands and knees like
a seventy-five and barks:
Blah! . . . Blah! . . . Blah-blah!
And the other squats down opposite him in the mud and
barks :
Blah! . . . Blah! . . . Blah-blah!
And suddenly they stop arguing and weep as if their hearts
would break, and kiss each other;
And the generals love the world and the world loves the
generals and the bells tear themselves loose in the
church steeples, and the newsboys pant as they run
crying the wildest extra since life began.
Supplement
Poetry
Prize
O that day!
The music will ache in my heart on that day, and I shall say :
Old man, give me the bow.
And I shall want a thousand cellos and ten thousand violins
and a hundred piccolos, and how I shall caper and
smash among the kettle drums!
And I shall play a dawn prelude over the white faces of the
hundred million sleepers till they brighten and smile
as the violins shimmer and sweep;
And the bells will ring out in the steeples, and the tall
towers rock, and the light will come blowing high
horns out of the east, and the world will wake sweetly
to the smile of a bluebird's warble and the gold-blue
morning bugles of a thousand cock-crows;
And I shall caper and smash among the kettle drums until
not one sleeper is left asleep, and the laughter of all
the gods will roll out with the sunrise, and we shall
live, we shall live, we shall live!
'
0 that day!
May Jones Takes the Air
By ROY HELTON
May Jones of Filbert Street is walking into town.
Dead Czar Nicholas, wailing for your crown!
Live Bill Hohenzollern chopping cedars down!
Turn heads, bow heads! Divers of the sea,
Rise from your pearl beds and twist your backs with me!
Bent backs, flayed backs, backs of black and brown
May Jones of Filbert Street is walking into town !
Silk worms crawling for her dimpled knees!
China winds that twist the berry trees!
Lilies of the valleyhiding from the bees
Saving up a drop of gold to kiss her silver gown !
May Jones of Filbert Street is questing into town!
Eve in the garden talking to the snake,
Spare a bite of apple core, for your daughter's sake!
Caesar, spare the men of Gaul lest time's heart should break !
David King, be heedful what dark-haired wives you take,
What proud sons and girls you get to pass your beauty
down!
May Jones of Filbert Street is walking into town !
0 that day!
1 can see a statesman that has found his soul, and there is
no holding himhe runs off shouting "Hallelujah! you
shan't take it away, you shan't take it away."
And he gets a gown and a crown and a star to himself, and
there he sits and plays on the harp through all
eternity
0 that day!
1 can see a magnate sitting on a heap of broken machinery,
and he is singing like a nightingale and washing his
hands in the moonlight, and he is mad with loving the
moon, and he lifts his arms like a Druid and chants
as no nightingale ever chanted since the world began.
Proud queens, old queens, pale and dead and fair,

Who will be waiting to match her beauty there?
The night is nailed aloft with goldthe wind is on her hair.
And love is searching through her eyes; if time has love
to spare
Bring love ! Show love ! Raise it like a crown !
May Jones of Filbert Street is walking into town!
0 that day!
1 can hear the deep contralto singing of the Rat-Wife; I
see her weaving pity with her hands until the multi
tudes of the maimed and the halt and the deathdesiring follow her rejoicing down the valleys to the sea.
Nations are marching. Cities yet unseen

Roar on the pavements where her feet have been:
New worlds! Wise worlds! Worlds all gold and green!
This is your birth night. Rain your splendors down!
May Jones of Filbert Street is walking into town.
The Nation
224
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
Mr. Wells Discovers the Past

By J. SALWYN SCHAPIRO
I
Wells's own. Briefly, it is this: All mankind has a common
N The Outline of History (Macmillan: 2 vols.) Mr.

Wells has performed at least one remarkable feat: he
has interested the average intelligent reader in history. No
professional historian now living has ever done it or could
do it. The average intelligent person will read fiction,
essays, philosophy, science, and sometimes even poetry; but
he will not read history. And the reason for this is obvious.
History has recently been written for one of two audiences.
origin and heritage, has traveled along a common path, and

is nearing a common goal. Being conscious of this, it has
One of these audiences consists of students in school and
college to whom history is presented as an endless and

tiresome succession of dates, battles, political parties, the
heroic dead, politicians, kings, and generals. Examina
tions once over, these students promptly proceed to forget
all about it. But the memory of horrors associated with
studying history lingers, and in after life nothing will in
duce them to open a book on this subject. Or history has
been written by the Ph. Deified for the Ph. Deified, gen
erally in a language unknown to living men. When an ordi
nary person happens across a volume of this type and begins
reading it, he is at first mystified, then dismayed, and ends
by giving the book as a gift to a deserving nephew. Now
and then a Macaulay, a Green, a Michelet, a Treitschke, a
Mommsen, a Bancroft comes along and writes a history so

vivid, so full of the life and color that characterize man
even at his lowest and stupidest that the reader overcomes
his antipathy for the subject and pursues it with avidity.
Mr. Wells, by profession a novelist and by temperament
a reformer, has now essayed the task. In spite of the fact
that he is not a member of the guild of historians and has
therefore received no training in what is termed scientific
history, he is nevertheless in many ways remarkably well
qualified for it. In the first place, he has a strong, subtle,
and profound sense of human relationships. Few men of
our day have so keen a realization of the forces in life that
make or mar individuals and societies. In the second place,
Mr. Wells possesses unusual powers of imagination, an
essential gift in one who essays to write history, for it
takes imagination to see reality. The unimaginative see
only forms, appearances, and semblances, never reality.

Finally, Mr. Wells can write superlatively well. A reader
can rest assured as he takes up these two rather large vol
umes that they will hold his attention throughout.
To Mr. Wells, as to many other thoughtful men, the World
tried to create and develop a common consciousness and a

common stock of knowledge which may serve and illuminate
that purpose. History in this sense becomes the common
adventure of all mankind in search of social and interna
tional peace through a mitigation of the rights and privi

leges of nations and of property. Mr. Wells's history deals
with ages, and races, and nations where the ordinary his
tory deals with reigns and pedigrees and campaigns. No
people, no religion, no country, no period, is overlooked.
The Outline is in spirit and in fact a universal history.
It concerns itself with Asia and Africa no less than with
Europe and America;* with Buddhism and Mohammedan
ism no less than with Judaism and Christianity; with

primitive life no less than with modern; with Hindus,
Chinese, Persians, and Egyptians no less than with Eng
lishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans.
According to Mr. Wells there have been three structural
ideas in the life of mankind on which the great society of

the future will be built: (1) science, first identified with
Herodotus and Aristotle; (2) a universal God of righteous
ness, the contribution of the Semites; and (3) a system of
world polity, first suggested by the empire of Alexander the
Great. Mr. Wells has envisaged the path of civilization.
Civilization arose as a community of obedience, subject
to priests, lords, and kings, and has progressed towards a
community of will, self-determining, democratic, free.
The American revolution, he declares, was the first great
positive and successful step toward the foundation of a
community of will, for it repudiated the ancient forms
of authority, king, priest, and lord. The great repudiation

was of course the French Revolution.
So gigantic a task as Mr. Wells set before himself would
require the industry of a Ranke, the versatility of a Leo

nardo da Vinci, the learning of a Mommsen, and the style of
a Macaulay; in short, universal genius of the highest order.
Mr. Wells, having a sense of humor, knows his limitations.
He has modestly avowed them and has sought advice and
assistance from many experts in various fields, the chief be

ing Mr. Ernest Barker, Sir E. Ray Lankester, and Professor
Gilbert Murray. The Outline is profusely illustrated with
interesting and original maps, diagrams, and drawings by
War and the class wars that followed in its wake revealed
Mr. J. F. Horrabin.
a civilization sick unto death. A true lover of mankind, he
book is the heckling, in true English fashion, of the text

by the footnotes. It is the tradition for footnotes to mur
mur approval to whatever the text is pleased to say; in
this history they shout defiance at the text. Mr. Wells's
advisers, who wrote and signed most of the footnotes, use
this method of disagreeing with him. Sometimes he de
scends to the footnotes to engage in a bout with his critics.
All this is quite diverting and gay, and for once the reader
will enjoy reading footnotes.
The Outline contains nothing original except the point
was moved to inquire into the origin of the dreadful disease

that brought about the world tragedy. He came to the
conclusion that the trouble lay primarily in the fact that his
tory has been the handmaid of narrow nationalisms, re

ligious bigotry, stupid racialism, and cultural arrogance
that fostered suspicions and bred hatreds; and that there
can be no common peace and prosperity without common
historical ideas. Thereupon Mr. Wells determined to be
come the propagandist for mankind by writing a universal

history from the time, about half a million years ago, when
the earth was a flaring mass of matter without life, to the
present day.
The Outline is a history with a new point of view, Mr.
One of the unusual features of the
of view and method of treatment.
Mr. Wells does not claim
* Mr. Wells completely omits Africa south of the Sahara

previous to the middle of the nineteenth century.E. H. G.
Feb. 9, 1921]
The Nation
225
to have discovered new material or to have discredited old

material. Everything in his book is accessible elsewhere.
Universal histories, too, are not new; they were the fashion
in the eighteenth century and even earlier. But his is the
first book, and, so far as I know, the only one, that is a
universal history with a distinctly modern point of view
and that has utilized and has brought to bear upon its thesis
the accumulated riches of modern scholarship in the related
sciences of geology, biology, archaeology, ethnology, soci
ology, comparative religions, economics, and political
science.
At this point it is important to inquire on what basis
Mr. Wells solved the problem of selection. Every writer of
history is confronted with this vexing problem. What shall
he select from the enormous mass of material that consti
tutes human history? What shall be excluded? What shall
be emphasized? What shall be minimized? The manner in
which historians react to these problems varies with their
point of view, their traditions, their education, their milieu,
their temperament, and especially with the spirit of the
age in which they live. Every age rewrites history to suit
itself, because interpretation of history changes with in
crease of knowledge and with a better understanding of that
curious being called Man. We of today understand the
ancient Greeks far better than did Pericles because we know
more of human psychology than he did.* In a sense the
historian may be considered a social psychoanalyst, for he
brings to the surface the unconscious motives and forces
that have caused profound changes in human affairs. Those
who write history with the view to merely explaining the
past are not historians but antiquarians. A true historian
studies the past with a view primarily to explaining the
present, and not infrequently does he use the present to
throw light on the past. Now, what was Mr. Wells's basis
of selection? In his case the question is all the more im
portant because he had to encompass half a million years
of world history in two volumes. His answer is in itself
no small contribution. His purpose is to include and to
emphasize only those events in the past that have a bearing
on the future. Readers of Mr. Wells's books know that, in
his great quest to fathom the mystery of life, his eyes have
always been turned toward the future. He never tires of
reiterating the sentiment that the chief business of mankind
ought to be to prepare itself, its ideals, and its institutions
for the great future that is approaching. This point of
view animates and distinguishes the "Outline."
The book possesses another unique quality, its intimacy.
Mr. Wells is the one writer of history who takes the reader
into his confidence and discusses with him frankly the sig
nificance of the great events of the past. History as seen
through the temperament of Mr. Wells is novel, piquant,
and entertaining. In reading the "Outline" one seldom
gets the idea that what is narrated occurred far away and
long ago. Mr. Wells has no sense of time, for he discusses
events in the remote past as if they were still happening.
All ages are contemporary with Mr. Wells. This gives
vividness to his story and truthfulness, too; for let it not
be forgotten that the dead we have always with us.
II
Book I tells the story of the origin of the world. In a
style so simple and lucid that a child can understand it, he
describes the Record of the Rocks, the changes of climate,
the formation of the earth's surface, the first appearance
of life, the origin of species, and finally the Age of Mam
mals. Mr. Wells's early scientific training has stood him
in good stead. He has evidently read widely and deeply
in this field, for he moves easily among his materials. The
reader is held in breathless suspense as the thrilling tale
is told of thousands of years of which the record, though so
slight, is yet so significant.
Book II is, if anything, still more fascinating. It alone
is worth the price of the two volumes. It tells the story of
the origin and development of the human race, from our
ape-like ancestor through the Heidelberg, Piltdown, Nean
derthal, and Cro-Magnon types to present man. Mr. Wells
possesses a scientific imagination of a high order. He re
constructs in a marvelous way the Paleolithic and Neolithic
Ages with their inhabitants, tools, architecture, and art.
He then tells of the origin of races, of agriculture, of herd
ing, and of trade. Finally he reconstructs the mind of
primitive man, and describes the origin of thought, of sym
bols, of legends, of religion, and of the various languages.
Book III, on the Dawn of History, keeps up the pace.
It deals with the first civilizations, Sumerian, Assyrian,
Chaldean, Egyptian, Hindu, and Chinese; with the mari
time and trading people of the Aegean, the Cretans, Tro
jans, Phoenicians, and Homeric Greeks. There is a short
but remarkably clear chapter on the origin and importance
of writing. Mr. Wells traces writing through the picture,
the syllable, and finally to the alphabet stage. With the
coming of the written word, "verbal tradition which had
hitherto changed from age to age, began to be fixed. Men
separated by hundreds of miles could now communicate
their thoughts. An increasing number of human beings
began to share a common written knowledge and a common
sense of a past and a future. Human thinking became a
larger operation in which hundreds of minds in different
places and different ages could react upon each other."
How the priest and king came into history is the next
theme. There is a bare suggestion that the forerunner
of both was the Paleolithic Old Man of the Tribe,* dreaded
not only in life as the master but dreaded as well after
death, so that his spirit had to be propitiated. He had cared
for the tribe when alive; he no doubt would care for it
when dead! He was the spirit of authority. Perhaps a
god ! Ideas that once have lived never really die. They live
on as taboos, conventions, traditions, reverences, and "sweet
remembrances." Book III ends with the story of the com
mon man. It tells the origin of castes, trades, professions,
guilds, slavery, and free labor.
With Book IV, on Judea, Greece, and India, the "Out
line" enters the field of history proper. Here Mr. Wells
treats of familiar things in a quite unfamiliar manner. He
has no great admiration for David and Solomon, both of
whom are pictured as cruel, treacherous, and bloody Eastern
monarchs. "It is," he writes, "a startling tribute to the
power of the written assertion over realities in men's minds
* Doubtless we understand what we now want to know about

the ancient Greeks better than Pericles would if he returned to
this fantastic planet. But I suspect we might find it as difficult
to manipiilate an election in ancient Athensif we had a chance
as Pericles ever did.C. V. D.
* Carveth Read argues that magic was originally employed

by the leaders of the human hunting pack when they had bocome too feeble to run with the pack but still desired to keep
up their prestige.C. V. D. The Middle Ages employed priest
craft, more recent times employ propaganda. The processes
and motivations are identical.E. H. G.
226
The Nation
that the Bible narrative has imposed, not only upon the
Christian, but upon the Moslem world, the belief that King
Solomon was not only one of the most magnificent but one
of the wisest of men."
Four chapters are devoted to the Greeks, whom Mr.
Wells greatly admires as the first truly modern men be
cause they were scientific and skeptical. Much valuable
pace is given to the struggles between the Greeks and
Persians. Many trivial incidents and personalities are
dwelt upon because of their picturesqueness. Croesus gets
fully six pages and Socrates only two.* On the whole the
chapter on Greek thought is not up to the mark. Of Alex
ander the Great Mr. Wells has a low opinion. Demoralized
as a child by his mother, Alexander grew up to be insanely
egotistical. He did nothing directly of any permanent
value. As for Hellenizing the East, all he did was to wander
aimlessly through the region, fighting any one who came his
way and for no particular reason. Both as statesman and
soldier, Alexander's father, Philip, was much his superior.
Alexander is "nothing but a personal legend," his greatness
an invention of historians. About the only thing that he
did bequeath to posterity is the custom of shaving one's
face, which he initiated because he was enamored of his own
youthful loveliness. Mr. Wells has small respect for "Heroes
of History," especially if they happen to be conquerors,
and his opinion of Alexander, just stated, is certainly enter
taining and perhaps correct.
Alexandria as the seat of culture achieved, for a time,
notable intellectual triumphs. Soon, however, wisdom fled
from the great city on the Nile "and left pedantry behind.
For the use of books was substituted worship of books";
and a new type of man appeared, "shy, eccentric, imprac
tical, incapable of essentials, strangely fierce upon triviali
ties of literary detail, as bitterly jealous of the colleague
within as of the unlearned without, the bent Scholarly Man.
. . . He was a sort of by-product of the intellectual
process of mankind." Alexandria's degeneracy proceeded
apace; and from being a beacon light of learning she be
came a "factory of religions."
One of the best chapters, if not the best, in the "Outline"
is that on Buddhism. Strangely enough, Mr. Wells is at his
best when dealing with science and religion. The story of
the life of Gautama is told with thrilling eloquence and
fine appreciation. Gautama's teachings, Mr. Wells declares,
are in "closest harmony with modern ideas" and are indis
putably "the achievement of one of the most penetrating in
telligences the world has ever known." He corrects the com
mon misconception that Nirvana is a state of complete an
nihilation by explaining that it is a state of serenity of soul
which comes to one who is absorbed in something greater
than himself. Mr. Wells is lost in admiration for Gautama's
doctrine, which he identifies with the teaching of history as
presented by the "Outline." However, Buddhism gathered
corruption as it spread, so that today the ideals of Gau
tama are fairly smothered in a hideous mass of idolatry,
superstition, and sacerdotalism. The teachings of a master
are generally corrupted by his disciples, who are apt to be
enthusiastic and undiscriminating propagandists, eager to
spread the faith at all costs. "Men who would scorn to tell
a lie in everyday life," writes Mr. Wells, "will become un
scrupulous cheats and liars when they have given themselves
But Socrates was surely picturesque enough.C. V. D.
up to propagandist work."
last years!
[Vol. 112, No. 2901

Who has not met them these
Ill
With the chapter on Buddhism the "Outline" reaches its
high-water mark. From thence on, a startling change is
noticeable. And the change is for the worse. There is no
longer, as in the first volume, the sure touch and firm grasp
that comes from knowledge accumulated and digested.* Mr.
Wells now moves uneasily among his materials, which he has
annexed from encyclopedia articles and a few simple manu
als. Although he makes comparatively few downright errors,
his story of the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, and Mod
ern Times is tragically disappointing in view of the hopes
he has raised in the earlier sections. The second volume is
disfigured by insufficient knowledge and bad judgment,
gaucheries, prejudice, and even pettiness, sometimes to a
degree that is positively shocking.f There seems to be no
rhyme or reason for the inclusion of some things and the ex
clusion of others except the author's whims. In short, there
is no basis of selection of any kind that I can see. The
various periods and countries are badly integrated, and the
reader loses sight completely of the great path that humanity
has traveled since its appearance on the earth.
Book V is the history of the Roman Empire. As may be
expected, the children of Mars fare badly at the hands of the
anti-militarist Mr. Wells. The Romans were brutal "Nean
derthal men," incurious, unimaginative, and intellectually
far inferior to the Greeks. The Roman Empire was "a
colossally ignorant and unimaginative empire." It foresaw
nothing. It had no conception of statecraft. It was a gi
gantic bureaucracy only, that taxed and kept the peace. Its
inhabitants, both rich and poor, led dreary lives, which ex
plains their delight in the savage conflicts of the arena.
Even though one may dislike the Romans, the fact neverthe
less remains that, during a period of six centuries, they did
unify the Western world and did create a world polity
that thing so much desired by Mr. Wells; they did create
the system of private law upon which modern jurisprudence
is largely based; they did create an administrative system
which functions to this day in Latin Europe.
According to Mr. Wells, the most significant fact in Roman
history is the increasing use of money, making capital fluid
and free. This led to speculation and the rise of a money
power, which became the efficient helpmeet of the military.
Mr. Wells thinks the Roman system was "a crude antici
pation of our own," with its machine politics and profes
sional politicians, class conflicts, mobs, wire-pullers, "com
mon people," reformers, political corruption, capitalism, and
the "science of thwarting the common man." He tells the
story of the Gracchi, and of how they were energetically
massacred by the "champions of law and order." All this is
highly suggestive.
Mr. Wells's judgment of famous Romans is amusing, to
say the least. The picture that he draws of Cato the Censor
would lead one to believe that that austere worthy fairly
reeked with morals and was therefore full of hatred and all
uncharitableness for the gentle and joyous things of life.
Julius Caesar's greatness, Mr. Wells firmly believes, is
purely the invention of historians, who magnify and dress
him up "for the admiration of careless and uncritical read* The mass of material is of course greater and more conflict
ing.E. H. G.
t This is an overstatement.E. H. G.
Feb. 9, 1921]
The Nation
ers." According to our author, Caesar was a Roman poli

tician, rich, corrupt, and dissolute. Like Clodius and Cati
line he was a vulgar schemer and conspirator, only shrewder
and more crafty than they. At no time did he show any
symptoms of greatness either of mind or character. At the
very zenith of his power, Caesar was much more interested
in Cleopatra than in Romanizing the world.* This belittling
of Caesar, as of Alexander, is due to Mr. Wells's intense
dislike of conquerors and the homage that is paid them.
I was astounded to find that Mr. Wells has swallowed
hook, worm, and sinkerthe legend of the "Fall" of Rome,
now long exploded. t He characterizes the invasion of the
German barbarians as a "conquest of the Empire" which
"crumpled up." He does not seem to understand that what
he calls the "Fall" was a long process of decay and absorp
tion. The cause of the "Fall," he writes, was the stupidity
and "incuriousness" of the Romans. He gives us no evidence
of being aware of the vast social changes that were taking
place during the fourth and fifth centuries, the silent eco
nomic massacre of the lower middle classes, the sinking of
the free laborers to a condition of serfdom, the race suicide
phenomena that surely offer some explanation for the decay
of the Roman world.
Book VI deals with Christianity, Islam, and the Middle
Ages. Naturally one is interested in what the author of
"First and Last Things" has to say on the religion of his
fathers and of his contemporaries. The "Outline" narrates
the life of Christ in a tone that is reverent and "correct."
There is no such thrilling eloquence, however, as there is in
the description of Gautama.^ Jesus, according to Mr. Wells,
was a social revolutionist who attacked the rights of prop
erty. Did he not say that it was easier for a camel to go
through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter
Heaven? Jesus was therefore a Christian Socialist, His
vision of the Kingdom of God on earth, communism. This
view is held by many devout Christians whose conscience is
disturbed by the jungle morality of the present social order.
They are those naive and wistful social reformers who would
fain enfold hard and cold economics in the soft and warm
arms of religion. Yet nowhere in the Gospels can one dis
cover that Christ was opposed to property rights as such.
He realized clearly enough that the possession of wealth en
tails many duties, responsibilities, and petty annoyances
that devour time and thought and thereby hinder one's
spiritual development. It was therefore easier for those
free from such hindrances, the poor, to gain salvation.
Christ believed, too, that all those who had relatives would
find difficulty in gaining the Kingdom of Heaven. Did He
not say "And everyone that hath forsaken houses or
brethren or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or chil
dren, or lands for my name's sake shall receive an hundred
fold and shall inherit everlasting life"? Does this mean
that Christ desired the abolition of relatives? It simply
means that a man who is burdened with family cares is
annoyed and distracted in so many ways that he is hindered
in his spiritual development.
* I would rather trust Mr. Shaw on this point than Mr. Wells.
C. V. D.
t Yet he appears to know the work of James Harvey Robin
son, who helped set off the explosion and bury the remains.
C. V. D.
t Any teacher will understand that Mr. Wells talks eloquently
about Buddha and less so about Christ because Mr. Wells has
just discovered Buddha in the preparation of this book, whereas
in a general way he must have long been familiar with Christ's
words and deeds.C. V. D.
227
Christianity, says Mr. Wells, diverged from the pure

Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth almost from the beginning. He
has severe things to say of St. Paul as a preacher "of the
ancient religion of priest and altar and propitiary blood
shed." Soon there came accretions from Mithraism and
from the Isis cult of Egypt. Finally there came the dogma
of the Trinity which to Mr. Wells was "a disastrous ebulli
tion of the human mind" leading to bitter schisms that rent
the Church. "Men who quarreled over business affairs," he
writes, "wives who wished to annoy their husbands, de
veloped antagonistic views on this exalted theme." Further
on in the book he goes on to say that in time "the gory fore
finger of the Etruscan pontifex maximus emphasized the
teachings of Jesus of Nazareth; the mental complexity of
the Alexandrian Greek entangled them." So deeply hostile
is Mr. Wells to Christianity that when he does say some
thing nice about it he says something which is erroneous.
He repeats the common fallacy that Christianity was opposed
to slavery and brought about its abolition.
The story of Christianity's rival as a world religion, Mo
hammedanism, is told next. Mr. Wells's opinion of Moham
med is that he was "vain, egotistical, tyrannous, and a self
deceiver." Although not an impostor, he was "diplomatic,
treacherous, ruthless, or compromising as the occasion re
quired." But though its founder was at once a knave and a
fool, Mr. Wells assures us that Islam was superior to both
Judaism and Christianity. "Against it," he writes, "were
pitted Judaism, which had made a racial hoard of God;
Christianity talking and preaching endlessly now of trini
ties, doctrines, and heresies no ordinary man could make
head or tail of." Islam, we are assured, "was full of the
spirit of kindliness, generosity, and brotherhood; it was a
simple and understandable religion ; it was instinct with the
chivalrous sentiment of the desert." It was truly a pure
religion, "without any ambiguous symbolism, without any
darkening of altars or chanting of priests." Allah was cer
tainly more successful than Jehovah, Christ, or Buddha in
keeping his followers to the pure and holy path, for "no
loophole was left for the sacrificial priest of the old dis
pensation to come back into the new faith." Mr. Wells's
ideas of Mohammedanism are what Alice in Wonderland
would call "imaginotions." His enthusiasm for Islam ia
understandable, however, for its vast embrace of millions
of all sorts of races and tribes marks a great step in the
advance of the unity of mankind, the goal of all human
history.
Mr. Wells then betakes himself to the Middle Ages. The
greatness of the hero of the period, Charlemagne, another
warrior-statesman, posterity has greatly exaggerated, Mr.
Wells assures us. Charlemagne was the first of the imita
tion Caesars of which William II was the last. Nowhere
in this chapter, or in any other, is there an adequate de
scription of feudal society; there are a few loose para
graphs about it. The Crusades, on the other hand, receive
adequate treatment. Mr. Wells has a sense for movements,
and he describes these romantic popular outpourings with
spirit and insight.
In the Papal Empire of Innocent III our author sees
two things that attract him mightily: (1) the effort to
unify Western Europe on a spiritual basis and bring into
being the world City of God; and (2) the conception
of a government "ruling men through the educated co
ordination of their minds in a common conception of
human history and human destiny." But the Church
The Nation
228
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
failed to realize these ideals, partly because she was not
IV
whole-hearted and persistent in her efforts; and partly be
Book VIII concerns itself with the period from the seven
teenth century to the year 1920. The leading theme is the
development of the Great Power idea and its evil influence
cause those in control desired worldly power too much and
became tyrannical. The Church was governed by old men,

habituated to a political struggle for immediate ends and
no longer capable of world-wide views. These rulers were
shrewd, pompous, irascible, and rather malignant old

men, who frowned upon all knowledge and all thinking
except their own. Their intolerance was not inspired by
conviction but by a scarcely disguised contempt for the
intelligence and mental dignity of the common man. But,
one might add, the Catholic Church was not the only insti
tution of that time, or for that matter of any time, that
was afflicted with irascible old men.
Book VII contains two surprising chapters. The one on

the Mongols is surprising because it is dull. It is the only
dull chapter in the two volumes. It is a tedious recital of

Tartar raids and Tartar dynasties. The other chapter deals
with the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolution.
It is
surprising because there is so little of the Renaissance and

of Protestantism in it.
Petrarch, Erasmus, Sir Thomas
More, and the great artists remain unhonored and unsung:

for they are barely mentioned. There is a poor description
of medieval scholasticism, little or nothing of humanism,
and a fairly good account of the scientific aspect of the

Renaissance.
I searched for the origins of Protestantism,
and after a great effort I found a few lines about Martin

Luther tucked away in the corner of a long dissertation on
Charles V, a monarch whom Mr. Wells considers common
place, with a thick upper lip and long clumsy chin.
Scarcely a word is to be found about Calvin, Knox, Zwingli,
and Cranmer. All the space that poor Queen Elizabeth
gets is that she is among those present in a list of Tudor
monarchs.
But let that good lady not worry.
has escaped Mr. Wells's notice altogether.
Shakespeare
Much space is
devoted to Machiavelli, Charles V, Francis I, and Loyola.

The reader now encounters long digressions that point
in every direction. One of these is interesting and impor
tant. It is on education. Because the Roman Empire failed
to establish a system of popular education, it did not de
velop what Mr. Wells suggestively calls educational gov
ernment; and therefore it had to rely upon political and
military government. The written word meant nothing to
the average man of ancient times. Owing to this lack of
popular education, ancient civilization was a light in a
dark lantern. It was Christianity that first relied suc
cessfully upon the power of the written word to link great
multitudes of diverse men together in common enterprises.
Islam later imitated Christianity. By establishing schools
for popular teaching the Catholic Church grasped the idea
of educational government, the ideal of the future. What
was lacking was the means to get knowledge and informa
tion so that this new type of government could function.
That came with printing. Mr. Wells cannot overemphasize
the importance of printing. In a highly interesting and
instructive manner he explains how paper liberated the
human mind, causing the spread of knowledge so that it
ceased to be the privilege of a favored minority. All mod
ern progress and all hope for the future are inevitably
bound up with the printed page.
* Except in a footnote by another hand.
So, however, has
Dante, and so has Tolstoy; Cervantes is barely mentioned as

among those present at the battle of Lepanto; and Goethe ap
only
onceas an admirer of the scientific attainments of
arat; Rabelais and Spinoza do not appear at all.C. V. D.
upon humanity.
It was, Mr. Wells believes, responsible
for the dynastic wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries, the English, American, and French Revolutions,
the nationalistic wars of the nineteenth century, and the
World War of 1914. According to Mr. Wells the modern
state was a disastrous humbug that ousted Christianity as
the chief religion in the Western World. At every oppor
tunity he fires volleys of destructive criticism and withering
sarcasm at the cult of nationalism, man's real, living god.
A nation he defines as in effect any assembly, mixture,
or confusion of people which is either afflicted by or wishes
to be afflicted by a foreign office of its own in order that
it should behave collectively as if it alone constituted hu
manity. He denounces this megalomaniac nationalism,
and pleads for a natural political map of the world. This
should be drawn by a commission of ethnologists, geog
raphers, and sociologists instead of by scheming and in
triguing diplomats, who settle little and unsettle much. To
Mr. Wells nationalism is reactionary because the idea of a
world state was already in the world two thousand years
ago, never more to leave it. Mr. Wells utterly fails to see
that nationalism is not an idea that one can eliminate by
merely taking thought. It is a sentiment that expresses
the desire of a community to live its own life in its own
way, unhampered by restrictions imposed by autocrats or
by outsiders. (By the way, was not Mr. Wells himself a
hundred per cent Britisher during the War??) National
ism and democracy are one and inseparable. Had there
been no subject nations there would have been no national
ism.: Instead of being reactionary, it was the revolutionary
force of the nineteenth century; and it is one of the great
progressive forces of our day. Consider India, China, Ire
land, Egypt. Imperialism, the very antithesis of national
ism, is what has brought so much woe to the world.
Incomparably the worst part of the Outline is that
which deals with the French Revolution. Being totally de
void of any knowledge or understanding of this great move
ment, Mr. Wells naturally turns for support to Carlyle's
French Revolution. Six precious pages are given to Car
lylian gabble about marching women, Marat-in-the-bath
tub, and similar sensational episodes; and only a few para
graphs to the tremendous work of the National Assembly
that completely transformed France from a feudal to a
modern state. Why is Carlyle's French Revolution con
sidered a great work of literature? I am sure that I do
not know. I have tried several times to read it, but I have
never got very far. This famous book is hardly more than
an endless series of disconnected ejaculations, emitted by
the dyspeptic philosopher who was the greatest bore in all
Christendom. Mr. Wells actually says that England was
a prospective ally of the French Revolution because of the
sympathies of the English liberals with the movement, but
the French lost this prospective ally by foolishly declaring
war upon England. Could there be any poorer judgment?
Of course the true cause of the French Revolution was the
* This and enough other definitions in the book have a strangely

eighteenth-century ring. Both Dr. Johnson and Voltaire knew
how to make definition a method of argument.C. V. D.
+ He was.C. V. D.
# This is too broadly stated.C. V. D.
But Hegel lived in Christendom.C. W. D.
____ "
Feb. 9, 1921]
-"
The Nation
Great Power game. It would take real ability to write a

chapter on the French Revolution worse than this.
Mr. Wells's description of Napoleon is the most enter
taining part of the Outline. There is a laugh in every
line. The reader must not expect a study of the Napoleonic
period, military, political, or social. There is nothing there
worthy of serious notice. The interest in the chapter lies
entirely in Mr. Wells's view of Napoleon himself. He is
down on the Man of Destiny, obviously for the same
reason that he is down on. Alexander, Caesar, and Charle
magne. Napoleon was a soldier and no soldier could possibly
have been a truly great man. Mr. Wells considers Talley
rand an abler statesman than Napoleon; Moreau and Hoche,
abler generals; Czar Alexander I had finer imagination.
Mr. Wells also opines that Napoleon III was a much more
supple and intelligent man than his uncle. This is too
much for Ernest Barker, who shouts from the footnotes
that this is a paradox to which I cannot subscribe. Please
put me down as convinced of the opposite. Even re
garded as a pest, pursues the imperturbable Mr. Wells,
Napoleon was not of supreme rank; he killed far fewer
people than the influenza epidemic of 1918. His victories
were due to the fact that he was marvelously lucky in his
flounderings; his diplomatic triumphs were due to good
fortune. Napoleon's career was the raid of an intolera
ble egotist across the disordered beginning of a new time;
his little imitative imagination was full of a deep cunning
dream of being Caesar all over again. He had wonderful
opportunities for creating a new world; and there lacked

nothing to this great occasion but a noble imagination, and
failing that Napoleon could do no more than strut upon the
crest of this great mountain of opportunity like a cockerel
on a dunghill.
Moreover, nobody loved Napoleon. And he loved nobody.

Why is there the enormous cult of Napoleon, asks Mr.
Wells. Because he was, as few men are or dare to be, a
scoundrel, bright and complete. Mr. Wells thereupon pro
229
The account of the nineteenth century opens with a de

Scription of the Industrial Revolution which is good; but it
is not as good as might be expected from Mr. Wells, who
all his life has been interested in matters social and eco
nomic. What follows this account it is hard for me to state
exactly. There is little in it, political, economic, or cul

tural, that I recognize as nineteenth-century history. The
unification of Germany and of Italy get a nonchalant page
or two; the reform movements in England hardly a mention;
the United States barely a page. Of France, Russia, Aus
tria, and Spain, there is little that is worth noting; not a
word of industrial Germany or England; nothing about so
cial legislation; nothing about the relation of church and
state; nothing of literature and art. For Mr. Wells, Maz

zini, John Bright, and Gambetta never lived; and Bismarck,
Disraeli, and Cavour barely existed. There is not a word
about the woman's movement; and for this omission I leave
the author of Ann Veronica to the tender mercies of the
psychoanalysts.
What then is the chapter, a hundred pages long, about?
It is all about Mr. WellsMr. Wells's view of this, of that,
and of the other person or thing. Digressions and digres
sions from digressions devour most of the precious pages.
As I am especially interested in the nineteenth century I
was dismayed. I read the chapter over again and finally
came to the conclusion that Mr. Wells did have in mind an
original way of treating this period: to make a study of

Darwin, Marx, and Gladstone as the truly great personali
ties of the century. The selection is a happy one. With
these personalities as a basis he could have written a study
of the scientific, the revolutionary, and the liberal move
ments of the period that would have been original and pro
found. But he fails utterly.
There is a fairly good description of the influence of
Darwinism, though it is not brought up to date. For ex
ample, Mr. Wells wholly overlooks the recent criticisms of
ceeds to develop a theory of human nature that would have

brought a smile of satisfaction to the thin, sardonic lips
winism was perverted by Kiplingism; and he actually de
of the Corsican.
It is this:
the doctrine of natural selection.
He shows how Dar
Most men are scoundrels at
votes a whole page to Stalky and Co. to explain how Kip
heart. They regret their good deeds and find secret satis
faction in their unpunished bad ones. They havent the
courage to proclaim their wickedness openly but cover it
up with moral self-justification. But Napoleon was direct.
He did outrageous things openly, shamelessly, and he ac
tually boasted of his lack of scruple. There lies his fasci
ling led the children of the middle and upper class British
public back to the Jungle to learn the law. Nothing
nation. The average man beholds in Napoleon the one per
and not a word to Saint-Simon or Fourier!
son in history who dared do evil. And so the average man

is lost in admiration for one greater and worse than himself.
and his ideas he devotes a page, and a very poor page. From
the Outline one can get almost no idea of the meaning of
Marxism, now of overshadowing interest to the world.
Mr. Wells fights shy of Marx. For a moment he hovers over
Marx's beard, and then flees, fearful of being entangled in
Doubtless historians are much to blame for the glorifi
cation of military heroes. To an extent not realized by the

average person it is the historians who make history. And
they have elected to glorify conquerors and to endow them
with virtues and abilities that these great ones did not
possess. In this the historians have sinned grievously, and

the evil that they do lives after them. So one can almost
sympathize with Mr. Wells's violent belittling of Alexander,
Caesar, and Napoleon. But he carries it to absurd lengths,
and his judgment of these worthies is even more fantastic
and unreal than that of their glorifiers.
more does the author tell us about the progress of science

during the nineteenth century.
The explanation of socialism is scrappy and totally in

adequate. Mr. Wells devotes four pages to Robert Owen
To Karl Marx
that vast, uneventful growth.

No sooner does the Outline mention the name of Glad
stone than the author lashes himself into a fury and falls
upon that mirror of Christian statesmanship with hammer

and tongs. He calls Gladstone a profoundly ignorant man,
who was educated at Eton College, and at Christ Church,
Oxford, and his mind never recovered from the process.

The description of Gladstone is unforgetable: He was a
white-faced, black-haired man of incredible energy, with
*What Mr. Wells means is that these great conquerors were
eyes like an eagle's, wrath almost divine, and the finest
nuisances. This is largely true. But he cannot see that they

were also great men, because he has the quaint moralistic way
of belittling things he himself does not like.C. W. D.
baritone voice in Europe. Mr. Wells brings a strange

accusation against Gladstone, namely, that he made na
230
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tionality his guiding political principle." In spite of the

fact that, at this charge, Ernest Barker and Gilbert Murray
fire volleys of protests from the footnotes, Mr. Wells con
tinues to belabor Gladstone with undiminished zeal.
We now come to Ireland. At the hand of Mr. Wells Ire
land fares badly indeed. His treatment of the Irish Ques
tion is pervaded by a marked anti-Irish bias. Whenever
Ireland comes into the "Outline" she comes in for a sound
drubbing. Mr. Wells reproaches the Irish for having "a
long memoiy for their own wrongs" and actually condones
England's indifference. He slides over and even excuses
Cromwell's massacres. The great loss of population in Ire
land during the nineteenth century he lays to the overcultivation of the potato; and he says nothing of English
landlordism with its "rack-renting" and of the savage perse
cution of the Irish. Now and then the readers of the "Out
line" will be astonished at exhibitions of prejudice, strange
indeed in a man like Mr. Wells, whose outlook is as wide as
the world itself.* He unmistakably dislikes the "dark
whites," or Mediterranean peoples, and greatly admires the
"Nordic" races, or northern Europeans. This comes out very
strongly in his treatment of the Irish who, he says, are "of
the dark 'Mediterranean' strain, pre-Nordic and preAryan." The "dark whites" are inclined to be superstitious,
but the "Nordics" are free, bold, and rational. "The English
were naturally a non-sacerdotal people; they had the North
man's dislike for and disbelief in priests"; but the Irish
"found the priest congenial."
Mr. Wells's hostility to the Irish is evident in his com
ment on the first Home Rule Bill. "In many respects," he
writes, "it was a faulty and dangerous proposal, and it
provided no satisfactory assurances to the Protestant Irish,
and especially the Ulster Protestants, of protection against
possible injuries from the priest-ridden illiterates of the
south. This may have been a fancied danger, but these fears
should have been respected." "Priest-ridden" is a term
of reproach that Mr. Wells more than once hurls at the
Irish. His deep dislike of the latter prevents him from
understanding the true nature of the influence of the Cath
olic Church in Ireland, which is as much . national as re
ligious. For many centuries the Irish were a mutilated
people, mutilated alike in body and in mind. In the dread
ful Irish past it was the Catholic priesthood that kept alive
among them the consciousness that they were human beings
with immortal souls. That the Irish emerged in the nine
teenth century in recognizable human form was in no small
degree due to the Church.f
At last we come to the World War. The fundamental
cause was the "Great Power" game that Europe had been
playing since the seventeenth century and which now culmi
nated in universal slaughter. "All the great states of
Europe before 1914," declares Mr. Wells, "were in a condi
tion of aggressive nationalism and drifting towards war;
the government of Germany did but lead in the general
movement." He gives a brief and spirited account of the
war, which he believes could have been ended before 1916,
had the Allied army chiefs consented to use the tank sooner.
"But the professional military mind is by necessity an
* No. Mr. Wells has always had a hundred prejudices. A
good deal of his brilliant color comes from them.C. V. D.
t It is only fair to add that Mr. Wells does better by the Irish
when it comes time to record the activities of the unspeakable
Sir Edward Carson and the unbelievable Sir F. E. Smith.
Hatred of these unworthies here brings Mr. Wells nearer to the
Irishand to the truth.C. V. D.
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
inferior and unimaginative mind; no man of high intellec

tual quality would willingly imprison his gifts in such a
calling." Mr. Wells's judgment of the Peace Conference
follows closely that of Mr. Keynes; for the story of the
Conference he relies mainly on Mr. Dillon's gossipy book.
In Book IX the historian becomes prophet. He climbs to
the top of a high mountain to view the Promised Land of
Future Humanity. In the distance, he sees humanity at
taining its goal after the long, dreary march through the
centuries. In one of the most eloquent chapters of the book,
Man's Coming of Age, he describes this goal, "a world
league of men," peaceful and happy. What does Mr. Wells
the prophet see?
(1) A world with a common religion, neither Chris
tianity, Islam, nor Buddhism, but "religion itself, pure and
undented."
(2) A system of world education.
(3) A world in which there are no armies, no navies,
and no unemployed.
(4) A universal organization for scientific research.
(5) A democratic world government.
(6) An economic order in which private enterprise ex
ploits natural resources no longer as a "robber master" but
as "a useful, valued, and well-rewarded servant."
(7) An honest and efficient electoral system.
(8) An honest and efficient currency system.
This world order must inevitably come, for "human his
tory becomes more and more a race between education and
catastrophe." The element in the population that will lead
mankind to the World State is that between the upper and
the working classes, an element "capable of being aroused
to a sense not merely of wickedness but of the danger of
systematic self-seeking in a strained, impoverished, and
sorely tried world." This bourgeois eclaire must inaugu
rate an educational and religious revival to enlighten all
classes "by pen and persuasion, in schools and colleges and
books, and in the highways and byways of public life."
VI
Is Mr. Wells one of the immortals? It would hardly be
an exaggeration to say that he has been the most influential
writer in English of our day. And his influence has not
been merely literary. He has the power, rare in a novelist,
of affecting directly and profoundly the political and social
views of his readers. Then there is that manner of his,
that spiritual-romantic manner, that invites you to go with
him in the search for the Holy Grail of social salvation.
If ever there was a man who viewed society as a spiritual
organism, that man is Mr. Wells. It is not surprising,
therefore, that the fine spirits among the rising genera
tion have looked to him as the prophet of a new and nobler
order of society. And yet I say, and I say it regretfully,
that in my opinion Mr. Wells is not an immortal. He will
not pass into future generations. My reading of the "Out
line" has convinced me of it more than ever. In this book,
as in his others, he shows his fatal weakness. The begin
nings of a Wells book are superb, wonderful, inspiring. The
problem presented is a universal one, and the characters
approach it with magnificent strides. The reader feels that
he is about to see a solution of the problem worthy of its
greatness. Or perhaps Mr. Wells, like Michelangelo and
Rodin, will leave his creation superbly unfinished, because
he feels himself inadequate to express the greatness of his
concepts. But what does take place? When you are about
Feb. 9, 1921]
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half way through, there is a break; a sudden descent be

gins; and the book fizzles out completely in the end. Over
and over again have I had this sad experience. "Ann
Veronica" is in revolt against her family and society. She
runs away from home to live her own life, to save her own
soul, to earn her own living. In the end, she marries and
lives happy ever after. Remington in "The New Machiavelli" is appalled at the human waste and confusion of
present society. In a "white passion of statecraft" he
dreams of a new statesmanship that will end this muddle.
What does he do? He establishes institutions for the En
dowment of Motherhood. Stratton in "The Passionate
Friends" desires to be truly a "world man." He goes to
Africa, to Asia, to America to study world problems in
order to deal efficiently with them. At last he finds a way.
He establishes an international publishing house that sells
cheap editions of good books. Trafford in "Marriage" is a
great scientist who is driven into commercialism by the
needs of an extravagant wife. He is distraught, so he and
his wife go to the wilds of Labrador to think it over. There
he finds that he cares more for his wife than for anything
else. He returns home happy, and doesnothing. Lady
Harman in "The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman" resents the
possessive attitude of her wealthy husband. She has dreams
of beauty and of freedom, and falls in love with an artistic
and intellectual friend. She has several daring adventures.
Suddenly her husband dies. Now she is free. What does
she do? She devotes her life to the establishment of co
operative apartments for the deserving middle class. Job
Huss in "The Undying Fire" is stricken with misfortune.
He is ill of cancer; his school burns down; his son is re
ported dead. The problem of human suffering is presented,
truly a great problem. In the end Job Huss recovers; his
school is rebuilt; and his son turns up alive. Desiring to
devote his life to the cause of humanity, Huss builds an
Imperial Institute that will teach people history, geography,
and ethnology. "The Outline of History" begins in the
magnificent way that I have described. The plan of the
book is given in bold strokes. It is to rewrite history so
that the great purpose of the life of man on earth shall be
come evident. At last history ha3 found its true use, to
discover the future. And what is humanity's future, ac
cording to Mr. Wells's prophecy? It is a vague, sentimen
tal, middle-class, middle-age, Mid-Victorian vision of peace
and prosperity. What is there in this vision to which
Samuel Smiles would have objected! Was it for this that
the hairy ape-man shambled into full humanity! Was this
to be the outcome
Of Caesar's hand and Plato's brain,
Of Lord Christ's heart and Shakespeare's strain!
What ails Mr. Wells? What is the disease that proves
him mortal? This is what I now propose to diagnose. Mr.
Wells is a man of extraordinary imagination, extraordinary
both for its vividness and versatility ; it is poetic, scientific,
religious, social, political, literary. In my opinion he is the
most highly imaginative* human being now living. But his
intellect is not extraordinary. Towards the great problems
of the world his imagination makes a magnificent stride;
but his intellect cannot keep pace with it. Hence in the
* This is an historian's use of the word "imaginative." A
critic of any one of the arts would probably use another term.
Mr. Wells has an enormous fancy, but he lacks the sort of
creative imagination which can follow a great theme to a great
conclusion. For this, what is needed is essentially a great
character. And that Mr. Wells has never exhibited.C. V. D.
231
realm of ideas he is suggestive, not creative. He arouses,

he stimulates, he throws out fine hints, he suggests new
ways of looking at things; but he is utterly incapable of
being the architect of any new system of thought, be it
political, social, moral, or philosophical. Condemned to
sterility, he becomes sentimental and half-mystical. When
ever he does succeed in giving birth to an idea, it imme
diately expires in a sigh. What political theories has he
fashioned comparable to those of Rousseau, Locke, or Mill?
What social theories, comparable to those of Comte or
Saint-Simon? What interpretation of history comparable
to that of Buckle or of Marx? Indeed, what characters in
fiction has he created that have the immortality of Emma
Bovary, Pere Goriot, Pickwick, Anna Karenina, Rodin,
Becky Sharp, Bergeret, Raskolnikov, Pecksniff, or Tess of
the D'Urbervilles?
The "Outline," with all its shortcomings, is nevertheless
a tour de force such as only a remarkably versatile man
like Mr. Wells could have accomplished. It gives a new
model for the writing of history, with its magnificent sweep,
wide range, deep sympathies, and progressive viewpoint.
Once immersed in these volumes, students of history no
less than others will gain an indelible impression of going
through a great and abiding experience. To read the book
is in itself a liberal education.*
The Progress of Poetry: France

By LUDWIG LEWISOHN
THE effect of war upon creative literature has long been
debated among those who think in formulas. Here,
as elsewhere, facts must be disentangled from words. The
actual occupation of human slaughter must always enfeeble
or corrupt. But a victory won at moderate cost and with
a limited national participation in battle and disease may,
especially if it unites or sets free a gifted people, be fol
lowed by an expansion of the creative energies. Defeat,
on the other hand, if it be not too disastrous, need not
interrupt a fertile development of the arts. French litera
ture, in the years between 1871 and 1905, is marked by an
uninterrupted productivity of the highest character. De
feat neither silenced the older men nor prevented new
talents from springing up on all sides. The novel flourished ;
the drama held its own; in poetry the Symbolist movement
succeeded the Parnassien. Today, unhappily, that experience
counts for little. National participation in war is now
universal, the exhaustion of victory greater than that of
many historic defeats, and all Continental literature comes
to us from a confused and desperate world.
Another factor which the discussion of the interrelation
of war and art has steadily neglected is that of the state
of a given literature immediately before the conflict. In
1914 France was able to look back upon the most glorious
period in the entire history of her poetical literature. From
the publication of Victor Hugo's "Orientales" in 1829 to
that of Henri de Regnier's "La Sandale ailee" in 1906 few
years had passed without the appearance of some volume
of permanently memorable verse. Three great movements,
the Romantic, the Parnassien, the Symbolist, had followed
and overlapped each other. No new one of equal import
* It is ne of the great English pamphlets.C. V. D.
232
The Nation
was in sight A great period was closing; the tide was

going out.
There was, it may be urged, the poetry of the NeoCatholic reaction. Brunetiere had been followed into the
Church by Charles Peguy, Paul Claudel, and Francis
Jammes; students in the lycees, we are told, were cooling
toward Michelet and Renan and inspired by "Tete D'Or"
and by "Clairieres dans le Ciel." And there is no doubt
that Jammes, at least, is a poet of delicate originality, of
exact and simple beauty, and also that Peguy's chant,
"Heureux ceux qui sont mort," is the most massive achieve
ment in pure poetry that the war wrung from France.
But it remains true that the Neo-Catholics, whatever their
popularity with the followers of Delcasse or Barres, scarcely
touched with their influence the wider world of French
poetry. That world waited and experimented and became
more and more eclectic. It seemed to be as unconscious
of the lithe charm of Paul Fort's frail Paganism as of the
obscure, long rhythms of Claudel. It had forgotten the
resonant humanitarian hope of Verhaeren:
Heros, savant, artiste, apotre, aventurier,
Chacun troue a son tour le mur noir des mysteres;
it seemed not to hear the noble, elegiac harmonies of
Regnier.
In all collections of the men who were young in 1914
the dominant influence is that of older poets. Rhythm and
imagery betray over and over again the music and the
vision of Verlaine, of Samain, and even of Rodenbach.
There are revolts against the pervasive Symbolist influence,
but they result neither in a new manner nor in a new way
of seeing things. In 1903 M. Joachim Gasquet announced
the dawn of a "renaissance classique"; in 1910 M. Jules
Bois issued a manifesto against "verslibrisme." Both are
solid and eloquent writers. But their return to classicism
stopped at the eighteen-sixties. They are as grave and
sonorous and pessimistic as Leconte de Lisle himself. We
hear of an "ecole de la grace" and discover in its founder
a quite minor Symbolist; of a new "idealisme musicale"
and find M. Paul Castiaux to have indeed written some
exquisite and exotic verses. But when we learn that he
"ne s'interesse qu'aux harmonies de son reve," we know
that we are back in the dim twilight of the Symbolists.
The clearer-eyed poets did not deny their literary origin,
neither the quaintly fantastic Tristan Klingsor nor the
profoundly reflective Theo Varlet. M. Tancrede de Visan,
finally, sought to explain the prevalence of a single poetic
method by declaring that there was no longer any Sym
bolist movement, but that the general lyrical attitude
created by it happened to be in exact conformity with the
demands of contemporary idealism. He appeals to Bergson
for proof of the fact that images borrowed from different
orders of things may converge and direct the consciousness
to the point at which a new intuition arises, and insists on
the fact that the phenomena of the inner life can be com
municated only in terms of images taken from the world of
sense. But that is true of all lyrical poetry and leaves un
accounted for that precise dwelling with reverie, the passion
of one's dreams, never of blood or brain, which characterized
the greater portion of French poetry as certainly in 1913 as
it had done in 1895.
To introduce a new strain into French verse it was
necessary, then, to turn from dreams to things and from
one's self to the world. And such was, in fact, the aim of a
small group of poets who in 1906 withdrew to the Abbaye
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
de Creteil to found and promulgate a new poetry. The

poets were Charles Vildrac, Rene Arcos, Georges Duhamel,
Albert Mercerau, and Henri Martin Barzan. Their prin
ciples and their experiment were supported by Georges
Cheneviere, P. J. Jouve, and, above all, by Jules Romains.
The Abbaye, a kind of Brook Farm, was abandoned within
two years. But the now famous doctrine of "unanimisme"
had been definitely established and was fully illustrated by
Jules Romains in "La Vie unanime" in 1908. The principles
of the new movement constituted a complete theoretical
reversal of the lyrical attitude as defined by Tancrede de
Visan. Poetry was now to glorify the group-life of man
kind, to celebrate the absorption of the individual in the
mass consciousness. A study of "the great human conflict*"
was to be substituted for impressionism; the poets turned
from Bergson to Le Bon and from Verlaine to Whitman and
Verhaeren. They sought to strip their language and
gradually to abandon rhyme which "explains tirades in verse
but does not excuse them." At first the "unanimiste" poetry
expressed its specific ideals in delicate rhythms not easily
distinguishable from those of the Symbolists. Thus Jules
Romains wrote:
Je cesse lentement d'etre moi. Ma personne
Semble s'aneantir chaque jour un peu plus,
C'est a peine si je le sens et m'en etonne.
Nor can it be said that this school has since achieved, in
rhymed or rhymeless measures, a new and great and
authentic music. It did, however, from the point of view of
the French verse of the period, express a new passion, a
passion for the objective, the concrete, the humblea pas
sion rising so high that it created a mysticism and a worship
of its own :
II faut des dieux charnels, vivants, qui soient nous-memes
Dont nous puissions tater le substance.
Subjects were chosen from the things men know and experi
ence in common. The solitary soul was abandoned. Poems
were written on "An Inn," "A Church," "A Barracks."
Then the war came and all the older poetsRichepin and
Verhaeren, Regnier and Gregh, Fort and Claudellike the
elder poets in every country, were swept along on the tide of
a collective passion. "Tout notre passe, tous ce que nous
sommes!" It was the universal cry. "Je crois en mon pays
comme je crois en Dieu." And there were vows and songs
of imprecation and hate, and Paul Fort wrote: "Qui sur
terre est de trop? La culture latine egorge la germaine."
Only one group of poets stood aside. And it was, of all
others, the group that had deliberately forsworn the intense
individualism of the Symbolists. Perhaps these poets, in
pursuit of their specific objects, had studied the psychology
of crowds so closely that they were utterly beyond its power.
An intricate and fascinating problem of the spirit is in
volved here. The fact remains that the men who in 1913
were the acknowledged hope of the future of French poetry
saw in the war only the tragic collapse of the entire struc
ture of European civilization. Vildrac and Duhamel ex
pressed themselves in prose. But Jouve wrote his "Poeme
contre le grand crime," Rene Arcos "Le Sang des autres,"
Georges Chenneviere "Appel au monde," and Jules Romains
"Europe." To these volumes may be added Marcel Marti
net's "Les Temps maudits" and Paul Vaillant-Couturier's
"Danse des morts."
It cannot be said that any of this poetry impresses one
today as reaching that finality of expression which means
permanence. Its subject is a great and immediate despair;
Feb. 9, 1921]
The Nation
often the verses roar and foam like the waters of a torrent.
But often like those waters they sweep indistinguishably by.
The torrent itself remains, the historic memory of a great
passion and a great protest. The poetry is firmest in tex
ture when, like Siegfried Sassoon's, it is gravely or grimly
ironical. In its dithyrambic hours it has too rarely waited
for perfection, for transparency, for some form of beauty,
however bitter. Romains's "Europe" is the most notable
as it is the most famous of these volumes. It avoids the
violence of others, but there is in it something dry and
frigid. It is finest on the purely intellectual side: "Nous
avons cru en trop de choses"; it is moving in its gentle
insight into the justly troubled souls of common men ; it has
firm and sometimes massive imagery. But the pervasive
note of these rhymeless verses is, at best, a little constricted
and thin:
lis auront beau pousser leur crime;
Je reste garant et gardien
De deux ou trois choses divines.
Solitary and allied to no movement or cult, there stands
one poet of the younger generation whose work, so far as
we know, has received no critical attention beyond the boun
daries of France. Nor is the poetry of Guy-Charles Cros
likely to commend itself at all immediately or widely. For
men are fond of being pontifical and sentimental and of
seeing their false dignities and unnecessary emotions re
flected in the verse they read. But Cros is a man in whom,
together with all the allurements of modern nerves and
modern music, the great classical sanity of France finds
renewed utterance. He can write enchanting, moon-lit
lyrics and morbidly beautiful free verse. He commands the
subtlest resources of contemporary technique. But he is
the authentic descendant of Montaigne and Moliere. To
him life is beautiful if only one will regard it honestly as it
is and not corrupt and cripple it with vain imaginings. The
gods have provided many goods. The great thing is to be
both sensitive and candid and neither defile nor distort the
beauty that is ours. Cros possesses the virtues that he
demands. Out of his sensitiveness he shapes lyrics that steal
into the soul; out of his candor, poems both sensuous and
cerebral that have the firmness and the justness that belong
to permanence. Nor is he hard because his vision is so
unclouded and his heart so disciplined. But he reserves his
pity for the foundation of all human pitiableness, for the
poverty that is born of moralistic abstention and cowardice :
My God, I shall pray unto Thee tonight
For all poor men and women in the world
Who have known neither youth nor beauty nor delight,
Neither Thy grace nor any earthly graces,
And who, poor tragic caricatures, bear not
Thy holy imprint on their faded faces.
He himself neither rebels nor strives vainly. He has ex
pressed profound sadness but no despair. He is at the
clean center of the moral world and knows what such a being
as man may expect. It was in no idle spirit that he called
his maturest volume "Les Fetes quotidiennes." Days may
be festive in no ignoble sense. They may be grave and not
joyous at all. But they must be full of beauty and of the
courage to possess and adore beauty. We read the verses
of Cros and the dim inner chambers of the Symbolists fade;
the stormy or plaintive cries of the "unanimists" fall silent ;
temperate sunshine floods a summer garden and the statues
flush into life and leave their pedestals and come to meet us
calmly and unashamed.
233
Contemporary American Novel

ists
By CARL VAN DOREN
II. BOOTH TARKINGTON
BOOTH TARKINGTON is the glass of adolescence and
the mold of Indiana. The hero of his earliest novel,
Harkless, in "The Gentleman from Indiana," drifts through
that narrative with a melancholy stride because he has been
seven long years out of college and has not yet set the
prairie on fire. But Mr. Tarkington, at the time of writing
distant from Princeton by about the same number of years
and also not yet famous, could not put up with failure in a
hero. So Harkless appears as a mine of latent splendors.
Carlow County idolizes him, evil-doers hate him, grateful
old men worship him, devoted young men shadow his unsus
pecting steps at night in order to protect him from the
villains of Six-Cross-Roads, sweet girls adore him, fortune
saves him from dire adventures, and in the end his fellowvoters choose him to represent their innumerable virtues
in the Congress of their country without his even dreaming
what affectionate game they are at. This from the creator
of Penrod, who at the comical age of twelve so often lays
large plans for proving to the heedless world that he, too,
has been a hero all along! In somewhat happier hours Mr.
Tarkington wrote "Monsieur Beaucaire," that dainty
romantic episode in the life of Prince Louis-Philippe de
Valois, who masquerades as a barber and then as a gambler
at Bath, is misjudged on the evidence of his own disguises,
just escapes catastrophe, and in the end gracefully forgives
the gentlemen and ladies who have been wrong, parting
with an exquisite gesture from Lady Mary Carlisle, the
beauty of Bath, who loves him but who for a few fatal days
had doubted. This from the creator of William Sylvanus
Baxter, who at the preposterous age of seventeen imagines
himself another Sydney Carton and after a silent, agoniz
ing, condescending farewell goes out to the tumbril!
Just such postures and phantasms of adolescence lie be
hind all Mr. Tarkington's more serious plotsand not
merely those earlier ones which he constructed at the begin
ning of the century when the mode in fiction was historical
and rococo. Van Revel in "The Two Van Revels," con
vinced and passionate abolitionist, nevertheless becomes as
hungry as any fire-eater of them all the moment Polk moves
for war on Mexico, though to Van Revel the war is an evil
madness. In "The Conquest of Canaan" Louden plays
Prince Hal among the lowest his town affords, only to mount
with a rush to the mayoralty when he is ready. "The Guest
of Quesnay" takes a hero who is soiled with every vileness,
smashes his head in an automobile accident, and thus trans
forms him into that glorious kind of creature known to
poets and women as a "Greek god"beautiful and inno
cent beyond belief or endurance. "The Turmoil" is really
not much more veracious, with its ugly duckling, Bibbs
Sheridan, who has ideas, loves beauty, and writes verse, but
who after years of futile dreaming becomes a master of
capital almost overnight. Even "The Magnificent Ambersons," with its wealth of admirable satire, does not satirize
its own conclusion but rounds out its narrative with a hasty
regeneration. And what can a critic say of such blatant
nonsense as arises from the frenzy of propaganda in "Ram
say Milholland"?
The Nation
234
Perhaps it is truer to call Mr. Tarkington's plots sopho
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
whole, as any possible world. His satire, at least, is on the
moric than to call them adolescent. Indeed, the mark of the
side of the established order.
undergraduate almost covers them, especially of the under

graduate as he fondly imagines himself in his callow days
and as he is foolishly instructed to regard himself by the
rightness of feeling, a natural, hearty democratic instinct,

which appears in the novels, must not be allowed to mis
lead the analyst of this art. More than once, to his credit,
more vinous and more hilarious of the old graduates who
he satirically recurs to the spectacle of those young Indi
annually come back to a college to offer themselvesthough

this is not their conscious purposeas an object lesson in
the loud triviality peculiar and traditional to such hours of
reunion. Adolescence, however, when left to itself, has
other and very different hours which Mr. Tarkington shows
almost no signs of comprehending. The author of Pen
rod, of Penrod and Sam, and of Seventeen passes for
an expert in youth; rarely has so persistent a reputation
been so insecurely founded. What all these books primarily
recall is the winks that adults exchange over the heads of
children who are minding their own business, as the adults

are not; the winks, moreover, of adults who have forgotten
the inner concerns of adolescence and now observe only its
A certain soundness and
anians who come back from their travels with a secret con
descension, as did George Amberson Minafer: his polite

ness was of a kind which democratic people found hard to
bear. In a word, M. le Duc had returned from the gay life
of the capital to show himself for a week among the loyal

peasants belonging to the old chateau, and their quaint
habits and costumes afforded him a mild amusement. Such
passages, however, may be matched with dozens in which

Mr. Tarkington swallows Indiana whole.
That may have been an easier task than to perform a
similar feat with the State to the east of Indiana, which
has always been a sort of halfway house between East and
age of man, has its own passions, its own poetry, its own
tragedies and felicities; the adolescence of Mr. Tarkington's
tales is almost nothing but farcestaged for outsiders.
West; or
tures; or
colony of
in large
genius.
Not one of the characters is an individual; they are all
indigenous population, not too daring or nomadic; it has
little monstersamusing monsters, it is truedressed up
been both prosperous and folksy, the apt home of pastorals,

the agreeable habitat of a sentimental folk-poet like Riley,
the natural begetter of a canny fabulist like George Ade.
It has a tradition of realism in fiction, but that tradition
descends from The Hoosier School-Master, and it includes
a full confidence in the folk and in the rural virtuesvery
surface awkwardnesses.
Real adolescence, like any other
to display the stock ambitions and the stock resentments

and the stock affectations and the stock perturbations of
the heart which attend the middle teens. The pranks of
Penrod Schofield are merely those of Tom Sawyer repeated

in another town, without the touches of poetry or of the
informing imagination lent by Mark Twain. The sighs of
Silly Bill Baxterat first amusing, it is also trueare
exorbitantly multiplied till reality drops out of the sem
blance. Calf-love does not always remain a joke merely
because there are mature spectators to stand by, nudging
one another and roaring at the discomfort which love causes
its least experienced victims. Those knowing asides
which accompany these juvenile records have been mis
taken too often for shrewd, even for profound, analyses of
human nature. Actually, they are only knowing, as sopho
mores are knowing with respect to their juniors by a few
years. In contemporary American fiction Mr. Tarkington
is the perennial sophomore.
If he may be said never to have outgrown Purdue and
Princeton, so also may he be said never to have outgrown

Indiana. In any larger sense, of course, he has not needed
to. A novelist does not require a spacious neighborhood in
which to find the universe, which lies folded, for the suffi
ciently perceptive eye, in any village. Thoreau and Emer
son found it in Concord; Thomas Hardy in Wessex has
watched the world move by without himself moving. But
Mr. Tarkington has toward his native state the conscious
attitude of the booster. Smile as he may at the too em
phatic patriotism of this or that of her sons, he himself

nevertheless expands under a similar stimulus.
with that to the north, with its many alien mix

with that to the south, the picturesque, diversified
Virginia; or with that to the west, which, thanks
part to Chicago, is packed with savagery and
Indiana, at least till very recently, has had an
different from that of E. W. Howe or Hamlin Garland or
Edgar Lee Masters in States a little further outside the

warm, cozy circle of the Hoosiers. Indiana has a tradition
of romance, too: did not Indianapolis publish When
Knighthood Was in Flower and Alice of Old Vincennes?
They are of the same vintage as Monsieur Beaucaire.
And both romance and realism in Indiana have traditionally
worn the same smooth surfaces, the same simplenot to
say sillyfaith in things-at-large: God's in His Indiana;
all's right with the world. George Ade, being a satirist of
genius, has stood out of all this; Theodore Dreiser, Indi
anian by birth but hopelessly a rebel, has stood out against
it; but Booth Tarkington, trying to be Hoosier of Hoosiers,
has given himself up to the romantic and sentimental ele
ments of the Indiana literary tradition.
To practice an art which is genuinely characteristic of

some section of the folk anywhere is to do what may be
important and is sure to be interesting. Now, Mr. Tark
ington no more has the naivete of a true folk-novelist than
he has the serene vision that can lift a novelist above the
accidents of his particular time and place.
Mr. Tarking
ton constantly appears, by his allusions, to be a citizen of
the world. He knows Europe; he knows New York. Again

and again, particularly in the superb opening chapters of
The im
The Magnificent Ambersons, he rises above the local
pulse of Harkless in The Gentleman from Indiana to clasp

all Carlow County to his broad breast obviously sprang
prejudices of his special parish and observes with a finely
from a mood which Mr. Tarkington had felt.
And that
impulse of that first novel has been repeated again and

again in the later characters.
In the Arena, fruit of
Mr. Tarkington's term in the Indiana legislature, is a

study in complacency.
Setting out to take the world of
politics as he finds it, he comes perilously near ending on

the note of approval for it as it standsas good, on the
critical eye. But whenever he comes to a crisis in the build
ing of a plot or in the truthful representation of a char

acter, he sags down to the level of Indiana sentimentality.
George Minafer departs from the Hoosier average by being
a snob; timeand Mr. Tarkington's plotdrags the cub
back to normality. Bibbs Sheridan departs from the
Hoosier average by being a poet; timeand Mr. Tarking
ton's plot-drags the cub back to normality. Both processes
The Nation
Feb. 9, 1921]
are the same.
235
Perhaps Mr. Tarkington would not delib
erately say that snobbery and poetry are equivalent offenses,

but he does not particularly distinguish. Sympathize as he
may with these two aberrant youths, he knows no other
Dissertation on Modern Painting

By MARSDEN HARTLEY
solution than in the end to reduce them to the ranks.
He
accepts, that is, the casual Hoosier valuation, not with pity
T is for everyone to comprehend the significance of art
because so many of the creative hopes of youth come to

naught or with regret that the herd in the end so fre
who wishes so to do. Art is not a mystery, never has

been, and never will be. It is one with the laws of nature
and of science. Art is the exact personal appreciation of a
thing seen, heard, or felt in terms of itself. To copy life is
merely to become the photographer of life, and so it is we
quently prevails over individual talent, but with a sort of

exultant hurrah at seeing all the wandering sheep brought
back in the last chapter and tucked safely away in the good
old Hoosier fold.
have the multitude in imitation of itselfone in the unde
Viewed critically this attitude of Mr. Tarkington's is of

course not even a compliment to Indiana, any more than it
is a compliment to women to take always the high chivalrous
tone toward them, as if they were flawless creatures; any
more than it is a compliment to the poor to assume that
they are all virtuous or to the rich to assume that they are
all malefactors of a tyrannical disposition. If Indiana plays
microcosm to Mr. Tarkingtons art, he owes it to his State
niable position of copying another one, without reference to

the synthetic value of imitation. It is the privilege of the
to find more there than he has foundor has cared to set
down; he owes it to his State now and then to quarrel with

the dominant majority, for majorities occasionally go
wrong, as well as men; he owes it to his State to give up
his method of starting his narrative himself and then calling
in popular sentimentalism to advise him how to bring it to
an end.
According to all the codes of the more serious kinds of

fiction, the unwillingnessor the inabilityto conduct a
plot to its legitimate ending implies some weakness in the
artistic character; and this weakness is Mr. Tarkington's
principal defect. Nor does it in any way appear that he
excuses himself by citing the immemorial licence of the
romancer. Mr. Tarkington apparently believes in his own
conclusions. Now this causes the more regret for the
reason that he has what is next best to character in a
novelistthat is, knack. He has the knack of romance,

when he wants to employ it: a light, allusive manner; a
sufficient acquaintance with certain charming historical
epochs and the properties thereto pertainingfrills, ruffs,
rapiers, insinuation; a considerable expertness in the ways
of the world; gay colors, swift moods, the note of tender
elegy. He has also the knack of satire, which he employs
more frequently than romance. With what a rapid, joy
ous, accurate eye he has surveyed the processes of culture in
the Midland town! How quickly he catches the first
gesture of affectation and how deftly he sets it forth, enter
tained and entertaining! From the chuckling exordium of
The Magnificent Ambersons it is but a step to The Age

of Innocence and Main Street.
Little reflective as he
has allowed himself to be, he has by shrewd observation
alone succeeded in writing not a few chapters which have

texture, substance, thickness. He has movement, he has
energy, he has invention, he has good temper, he has the
leisure to write as well as he can if he wishes to.
And,
unlike dozens of writers who about a score of years ago

each wrote one good first book and then lapsed into dull
oblivion or duller repetition, he has traveled a long way

from the methods of his greener days. Why then does he
artist then to reform his own sensations and ideas to corre
spond according to a system he has evolved, with the sensa

tion drawn out of life itself. It is a matter of direct con
tact which we have to consider. There can be no other means
of approach. To illustrate externals means nothing, because

the camera is the supremely edifying master of that. It
means nothing whatsoever for a painter to proceed with
ever so great a degree of conventional flash and brilliancy
to give sensations which nature or the mechanical eye of the
camera can much better produce. The thing must be brought
clearly to the surface in terms of itself, without cast or
shade of the application of extraneous ideas. That should
be, and is, it seems to me, the special and peculiar office of
modern art: to arrive at a species of purism, native to our
selves in our own concentrated period, to produce the new
ness or the nowness of individual experience. The prog
ress of the modernist is therefore a slow and painstaking
one, because he has little of actual precedent for his modern
premise. It must be remembered that modern art is, in its
present so-called ultra state, not twenty years old, and it
must likewise readily be observed that it has accomplished
a vast deal in its incredibly prodigious youthfulness.
Art in itself is never old or new. It began with the first
morning. That the eye trained accurately to observe its
essence is of such recent existence, may be the real object
of surprise. All the great races had a mission to perform.
They had race psychology to perfect, and, therefore, art with
them was allied with all the elements of symbolism. Sym
bolism can never quite be evaded in any work of art because
every form and movement that we make symbolizes a con
dition in ourselves.
We derive our peculiar art psychology from definite

sources, and it is in the comprehension of these sources, and
not in the imitation of them, that we gain the power neces
sary for the kind of art we as moderns wish to create. We
are intrigued into the consideration of newer qualities in
experience, which may or may not be eternally valuable,
yet may hold contemporary distinction. We must think our
selves into the Egyptian consciousness in order to under
stand the importance of art to the Egyptians, and we must

likewise perform the same function as regards our own
appreciation of art, the art of our modern time.
It will be found that there is a greater interest in this
newer type of pristine severity than in the more theatric
were afraid to write candidly about his coevals? Why

does he drift with the sentimental tide and make propa
ganda for provincial complacency? He must know better.
and dramatic tendencies of the romanticists. It is no way

to disparage a romanticism as fostered by Delacroix, but
we are finding a perhaps greater degree of satisfaction in
the almost flawless exactitudes of an artist like Ingres,
whose influence in his time was doubtless considered (cer
He can do better.
tainly was considered by Delacroix and his entourage)
continue to trifle with his threadbare adolescents, as if he
236
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
The Nation
detrimental in its coldness and its seeming severity and

lifelessness. Art is not a comfortable or an emotional
issue. It is a stimulating intellectual one. We have learned
that Ingres was not cold, but clear and durable as crystal,
and we in our day are made to admire the indescribable
loveliness of steel and glass for the strength and unadorned
splendor they contain in themselves, devoid of the exces
sively ornate incrustation of art as applied by the Orientals
and by the artists of the Renaissance. With them it was
worship of ornamentation. Surfaces were made to carry
heavy burdens of irrelevant beauty. Today we have admira
tion for the unadorned surface itself. We have a timely
appreciation for the mechanistic brilliance and precision of
this era; we care for the perfect line and mass, the unornamented plasticity of workable objects, such as the dynamo
and the steam drill, as well as the cool and satisfying dis
tinction which electricity contains.
We may say then that in matters of experience generally
all progress is a plunging toward discovery. With amazing
yet typical rapacity the world of Europe, that is, the major
part of it, has turned to art for its speedy salvation, and
the revival of modern painting alone in Europe is, while
utterly characteristic, nevertheless startling in its reality.
The peoples of Europe know through the experience of a
majestic background the importance to racial development
of the development of art. They are perfectly aware that
the only solution of their civic problem is to come through
the redirection of public interest toward matters of taste
and cultivation. For it is through art and art alone that
peoples survive through the centuries. Their arts have been
their most important historical records.
The question on the lips of the rest of the world is nat
urally: Why is there no art in America? There is already a
well-defined indication that America may one day possess
a literature of its own. We need not depend entirely upon
our own private exotics such as Emerson, Poe, and Whit
man, who, it can be said, would never have sprung from
any other soil. The last few years have shown that America
has a type of poetry all its own, a poetry that is as peculiar
to it as the Acropolis to Athens. There is an indication
that the art of painting is quite conspicuously on the ascen
dant in America. Of these two arts in our own country
much more indeed can be said than can be said for music
and for the drama, in which we seem but for a small and
slowly emerging group to be practically negligible as cre
ators. It is because we have not yet learned the practical
importance of true artistic sensibility among us. Yet there
is possibly more hope for the arts of painting and poetry
because they are the last to be bought and sold as valuable
merchandise. It is in this, possibly, that their salvation lies,
as it is in freedom that all things find perfection, in freedom
that all functions find their truest gifts for expression.
Contributors to This Supplement
James Rorty is a poet, dramatist, and journalist who,
though a native of New York State, is now living in
California.
Roy Helton is a poet who lives in Philadelphia.
J. Salwyn Schapiro is associate professor of history in
the College of the City of New York and author of
"Modern and Contemporary European History."
Marsden Hartley is a painter and art critic particularly
associated with the Society Anonyme in New York City.
Books
Psychoanalysis
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. By Sigmund Freud.
Boni and Liveright.
THE struggle of the science of psychoanalysis for recognition
has been attended by unusual circumstances. There has
been extraordinary prejudiced resistance on the one hand, and
much foolish enthusiasm on the other. For the material that
comes under survey is in great measure the common property
of every man. And because he finds himself involved in some
of its disclosures, he feels qualified to pass upon its merits.
Throughout, Freud's doctrines have thus had to contend with
judgments growing almost entirely out of subjective factors;
truly scientific opposition, criticism, or, indeed, indorsement, has
been rather rare.
The period in which almost universal opposition to psycho
analysis was the rule is now merging into one of equally un
fortunate popularity, which has resulted in uncontrolled dis
tortion of its data, and abuse of the purposes for which it was
originally conceived. Happily, the abuse and misconception to
which Freud's doctrines are now subject can hardly be laid
to the blame either of those who originated the method or of
those who have taken it seriously. Rather is it due to the
large amount of pseudo-scientific literature that has grown up
about the subject, and more especially to the freedom with
which the journalist and the dilettante have appropriated its
material. The number of popular expositions of analysis has of
recent years become very large indeed. Few of these books
have any merit. Most of them are written by individuals who
have had no opportunity for personal experience with the
method and possess none of the training essential to its mas
tery. This literature has, moreover, given a controversial
aspect to the matter, which has no bearing on actual practice,
and has served only to confuse the public and to spread the
many misconceptions that prevail.
It is, therefore, a great relief to have at last a systematic
presentation of psychoanalysis from Freud himself, with whose
authority no man can compete while he is alive. The new
book is a translation of a series of twenty-eight lectures, cover
ing in an introductory way the main essentials of psychoanalytic
theory. Undoubtedly it is the finest exposition of the subject
yet written, while in addition it gives us a personal touch with
the author which none of his earlier works afford. Those who
have followed Freud's later writings closely will find little
that is new in this book, for it contains almost nothing that he
has not discussed more fully elsewhere. On the other hand,
those who have read only such of Freud's works as have been
translated into English, or have relied upon expositions by other
writers to give them an acquaintance with his teachings, will
find much that is new to them, and much, perhaps, that to a
certain class will be distasteful and disappointing. For the
very ease and simplicity of this presentation make even more
apparent than do the author's most technical writings the
intricacy, the difficulty, and the seriousness of his subject, and
make apparent to what a wide extent the superficial notions
current about it depart from what Freud has actually at
tempted to teach. Those, therefore, who have looked upon
psychoanalysis as a plaything, as a philosophy for the parlor
radical, or as a means of imparting thrills and color to studio
life, will find this book greatly disappointing and little to their
taste.
The book is divided into three parts, the first of which deals
with the Psychology of Errors, the second with the Dream, and
the last with the General Theory of the Neuroses.
The first part is devoted to the proof of the hypothesis that
the slip of the tongue, the seemingly "chance" act and error
are psychologically determined by motives which cannot enjoy
free conscious exercise. These phenomana ordinarily are symp-
Feb. 9, 1921]
The Nation
toms of the mutual interference of two opposing intentions, one

of which usually has undergone repression. Part Two dis
cusses the dream as a psychic phenomenon. It is in the study
of the dream that Freud gives his theory of wish fulfilment
and acquaints the reader with the phenomena of resistance and
censorship, and with some of the specific mechanisms to which
the dream is subject that make it apparently unintelligible to
the waking mind. The dream is a type of thinking, governed
by certain dynamic forces, the source and function of which
are more fully discussed in the latter portion of the book. The
dream is moreover amenable to interpretation in the light of
the individual's experiences, aims, and conflicts: it is a mani
festation of desire, and affords an outlet to the impulses which
have been rigidly repressed in conscious thinking. In this
latter regard it resembles the neurosis, and hence it is that the
dream is one of the central points of interest in psychoanalysis.
From these considerations drawn from phenomena common
to normal and neurotic alike, Freud takes us to the study of
the neuroses. He selects sufficient material to convey a fairly
complete exposition of his Libido Theory, its development and
relation to symptoms. He also discusses very frankly both the
scope and the limitations of his method.
It must be pointed out here that most of the opposition that
psychoanalysis has encountered was not directed toward the
method itself, but to some of the explanations concerning the
source of neurotic conflict. And those who are accustomed to re
gard the freedom with which an author discusses the sexual life
of man as a sign of his depravity will find much they can find
fault with in this book. These individuals do not for the most
part understand their own prejudices, and forget that psycho
analytic theory was deductively evolved. Psychoanalysis was a
bold departure in method, but the results of its application have
demonstrated the insufficiency of the premises and methods cur
rent in introspective psychology. It alone furnished an ap
proach to the forces that maintain the continuity of personality
and govern its economy in normal and diseased alike. It, for the
first time, clearly revealed a vast aspect of psychic life hitherto
unexplored, the Unconscious, and supplied psychology with the
much needed dynamic unit, the urge for gratification, the "un
conscious wish."
The average person who readily acknowledges the existence
of physical phenomena beyond his immediate perception is not
conscious of the entire series of sense and apperceptive inte
grations which began to form on the day of his birth, and which
furnish him with the conditions in which all phenomena in the
physical world are placed. Yet consciousness or awareness is
the only criterion he has for the existence of occurrences in his
psyche; he is at no time aware of the great mass of former
experiences, feelings, and efforts which make him a distinct per
sonality, and which are now part of the thinking mass, though
it has no direct access to consciousness.
This simple fact, that unconscious memories and motives exist,
is the vital premise of psychoanalysis. And it is not a premise
valid only for the neurotic. It is the product of man's adapta
tion to social life, as a result of which his every impulse and
wish cannot be gratified without censorship from educational
and moral influences. If an impulse is subservient to an ele
mental need of the individual, its energy is indestructible and
seeks some manner of gratification. But in the course of life,
memories, impulses, and motives become subject to a selective
principle, namely quality, in relation to the elemental needs and
desires of the personality and their possibility of gratification.
The material on which repressing forces operate is more or less
uniform; the most elemental needs of life are hunger and love.
In man's present state of organization, the needs of hunger
do not entail great struggle for the individual until maturity.
His love needs, however, appearing far earlier than was once
supposed, are gratified at first quite independently of environ
ment. The first activities of feeding and alimentation make
the organs which serve these ends the first receptors of pleas
urable stimuli, and activities connected with them are, inde
237
pendent of their usefulness, indulged in for the pleasure they

yield. These activities are abruptly checked by the earliest edu
cation instituted, and the individual must learn to associate
qualities with them other than those previously entertained.
Hereafter, in the gratification of his erotic needs the indi
vidual encounters the greatest struggle. The long latent period
between the time he appreciates erotic pleasure and the time
when opportunity is given for permissible gratification is thus
filled with many possibilities. The interaction of individual
desire and environmental conditions is the seat of constant
strife, and the type of adaptation is determined by factors in
constitution and character which are as yet not clearly under
stood. The neurosis is one form of adaptation, and despite its
glaring departures, its devious and costly procedure, it is pur
poseful, and true to the principle that directs all effort, and
consistent with the laws that govern all thought.
It is much to be regretted that Freud has intrusted the trans
lation of this new book, intended for widest appeal, to those
who have proved so unequal to the task. The translation is in
itself a demonstration of the misrepresentation which psycho
analysis is made to suffer at the hands of those who would
approach it as a subject divorced from medical problems. Quite
evidently the translators were woefully ignorant of medical and
psychiatric terminology, and completely unappreciative of the
meaning of the text. Thus, for example, the German word
meaning delusion is translated obsession, and Freud conse
quently is made to say that obsessions are incurable, despite
the fact that in the treatment of obsessions psychoanalysis has
achieved some of its most brilliant curative results. This is
only one of the numerous ignorant and ridiculous mistakes which
render many passages in the book either devoid of meaning or
hopelessly ineffectual.
H. W. Frink
Mr. Justice Holmes

Collected Legal Papers. By Oliver Wendell Holmes. Harcourt,
Brace and Howe.
IT seems ungracious to make the dominant note of one's ap
preciation of these papers a note of dissent. Perhaps it
was a careless moment when the author told the Harvard under
graduates: "Of course the law is not the place for the artist
or the poet. The law is the calling of thinkers." If Mr. Justice
Holmes wished us to believe him, he should not have proved
himself the artist and the poet in this volume and in his many
almost magic opinions. He should not have put in the preface
his thanks to Mr. Laski "for gathering these little fragments
of my fleece that I have left upon the hedges of life." He
should not have let the Suffolk Bar hear him speak of the law
as "a princess mightier than she who once wrought at Bayeux,
eternally weaving into her web dim figures of the ever-length
ening pastfigures too dim to be noticed by the idle, too sym
bolic to be interpreted except by her pupils, but to the dis
cerning eye disclosing every painful step and every worldshaking contest by which mankind has worked and fought its
way from savage isolation to organic social life." His opinions
have many poetic images. "The common law is not a brooding
omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sover
eign or quasi sovereign that can be identified." "A word is not
a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living
thought and may vary greatly in color and content according
to the circumstances and the time in which it is used." He often
makes his point by a picture or by personalization. "Consti
tutional law, like other human contrivances, must take some
chances." "A horse car cannot be handled like a rapier." "A
trespasser is not caput lupinum." North Dakota was told that
the purpose of a principle she invoked "is not to expose the
heel of the system to a mortal dartnot, in other words, to
open to taxation what is not within the State." St. Louis
learned that her way of assessing property was "a farrago of
irrational irregularities throughout." Holmes rivals Rodin
238
The Nation
when he tells us that "the mark of a master is, that facts which
before him lay scattered in an inorganic mass, when he shoots
them through the magnetic current of his thought, leap into
an organic order, and live and bear fruit." Here is a thinker,
not bowed and passive, but alert and vital. Such a thinker is
Mr. Justice Holmes. Within the limits of his medium he is
artist and poet, too. Many may prefer the art and the poetry
that speak spontaneously from legal papers and judicial opin
ions to all the carefully chiseled or tinted niceties of those who
can neither shape nor color thought.
Indeed, the joy of Mr. Justice Holmes is that he is that rare
thinker who is the seer and the creator. Other judges now and
then are master builders, choosing solid foundations and sound
materials, making walls straight and joints true. Mr. Justice
Holmes gives us etchings. One who takes pains can see the
solid structure from the lines that sketch its essentials. One
responsive to suggestion can see much morehints of ancient
lineage, the remolding of old forms to meet new needs, a grasp
of what forerunners were aiming at beyond what they touched,
a line here and there prophetic of what is yet to come. Mr.
Justice Holmes writes opinions that fascinate and puzzle
puzzle, not because of contradiction or confusion as do so many
of their companions, but because of overtones that hint at more
than our lesser faculties can hear. The same genius flashes in
the articles and speeches now happily summoned from their
scattered places. There are pages which the lay reader will
pass over quickly; but he will hesitate to turn the leaf without
running his eye down the lines to make sure that he does not
miss some gem. There are speeches which he will read with
that delightful dread that the next page may be the end and
with that mysterious incomplete emerging from the shadow of
the thought that he might never have come upon the book at
all. "Some views of law and life that I have not expressed
elsewhere so fully," the author calls them in his brief preface.
He looks at the law as an expression of life and so he writes
of law in terms of life. All of us are continually rendering
verdicts on the issues of life. In our problems and our processes
we do not greatly differ from those who wear the robe. What
Holmes has to say of these problems and these processes belongs
to the literature of life. Those who have read the letters which
over fifty years ago William James at twenty-five wrote to
"My dear Wendle" will have a clear hint of what the world
lost and gained when it let Holmes turn to the law for "dis
coveries regarding our dilapidated old friend the Kosmos."
It is not pleasant to reckon the loss. The wider audience
that would have rejoiced had Holmes devoted himself directly
to literature or philosophy or history may well envy the initiated
who can revel in the contributions to literature, philosophy, and
history which he makes through the medium of the law. It may
be a comfort, if only a delusive one, to think that Holmes may
have needed the law to spur him to his best. His imagination
never would have thrived in thin air. The challenge of reality
is the one that gives him zest. In his meeting of this challenge
we have kept the philosopher and have gained the statesman.
To him more than to any one else we are indebted for the recog
nition that it is the function of a judge to be a statesman. This
appears over and again in his earliest book, "The Common Law";
it is articulate in many of his opinions, and is the inarticulate
premise of the rest; it is made clear in the volume now given
us. "But inasmuch as the real justification of a rule of law,
if there be one, is that it helps to bring about a social end which
we desire, it is no less necessary that those who make and de
velop the law should have these ends articulately in their minds."
When the law is clear, it is the province of the judge to follow
it and not to undertake to renovate it. The judicial question
is narrower than the social one, because one or the other of the
competing social desires "may have been expressed in previous
decisions to such an extent that logic requires us to assume it to
preponderate in the one before us. But if this be clearly so, the
case is not a doubtful one. Where there is doubt the simple
tool of logic does not suffice, and even if it is disguised and
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
unconscious, the judges are called on to exercise the sovereign

prerogative of choice." Or as he puts it in the Jensen case: "I
recognize without hesitation that judges do and must legislate;
but they can do so only interstitially; they are confined from
molar to molecular motions." These are not the words of an
iconoclast, but only those of a man who knows what is going on.
Those who bless and those who curse Holmes as a radical are
mistaken. His title to distinction is rather that he is intelligent.
It is not a radical who says: "I have no belief in panaceas and
almost none in sudden ruin. I believe with Montesquieu that if
the chance of a battleI may add, the passage of a lawhas
ruined a state, there was a general cause at work that made
the state ready to perish by a single battle or a law. Hence
I am not much interested one way or the other in the nostrums
now so strenuously urged. . . . For most of the things that
properly can be called evils in the present state of the law I
think the main remedy, as for the evils of public opinion, is for
us to grow more civilized." One should not miss the signifi
cance of the phrase "one way or the other." Ideas and pro
grams that leave Holmes skeptical do not rouse him to wrath.
They leave him calm to consider. Wherever there is heat in
his opinions, it always contributes to their light.
From these intellectual qualities springs the supreme states
manship of Mr. Justice Holmes. This finds its farthest reaches
in his great opinions on constitutional law. He knows too much
of life to think that judges can control the destinies of a nation
by putting their preferences into a formula and fusing the
formula with the vaguenesses of the Constitution to make it a
barrier to the desires that get expressed in legislation. Here
again what is sometimes thought to be radicalism is merely a
statesman's conception of the restricted function of a judge
when called upon to decide whether a statute is "forbidden by
some invisible radiation from the general terms" of the Consti
tution. In one of the latest of his published addresses Holmes
said: "It is a misfortune if a judge reads his conscious or un
conscious sympathy with one side or the other prematurely
into the law, and forgets that what seem to him to be first
principles are believed by half of his fellow men to be wrong.
I think that we have suffered from this misfortune, in State
courts at least, and that this is another and very important
truth to be extracted from the popular discontent. When twenty
years ago a vague terror went over the earth and the word
socialism began to be heard, I thought and still think that fear
was translated into doctrines that had no proper place in the
Constitution or in the common law. Judges are apt to be naif,
simple-minded men, and they need something of Mephistopheles.
We, too, need education in the obviousto learn to transcend
our own convictions and to leave room for much that we hold
dear to be done away with short of revolution by the orderly
change of the law." The fallibility of any one man's opinion is
a frequently recurring theme. It is put most forcibly in the
concluding paper on Natural Law. "Certitude is not the test of
certainty. We have been cock-sure of many things that were
not so." It appears eloquently in the dissent in the Abrams
case: "But when men have realized that time has upset many
fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they
believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ulti
mate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas
that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get
itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth
is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be car
ried out." As Holmes cherishes his own opinion for himself,
so he respects the opinions of others for them. In the essay
on Natural Law he tells us: "But while one's experience thus
makes certain preferences dogmatic for oneself, recognition of
how they came to be so leaves one able to see that others, poor
souls, may be equally dogmatic about something else. And
this again means skepticism. Not that one's belief or love does
not remain. Not that we would not fight and die for it if im
portantwe all, whether we know it or not, are fighting to
make the kind of a world that we should likebut that we hav
The Nation
Feb. 9, 1921]
learned to recognize that others will fight and die to make a

different world, with equal sincerity and belief." Thus his
tolerance is not because truth is not important but because it
is. No one has less of the pacifist in his make-up than has
Mr. Justice Holmes. He would fight and die for what he holds
important. He believes in the virtues of the first-class fighting
man'. It is a safe surmise that he wears his soldier's wounds
more proudly than any academic hood. But when the battle
is one of ideas, he puts his trust in the weapons of ideas and
scorns to close the arsenals of those whom he would fight.
However firm his convictions, he knows that he is not alone in
the world and that his convictions are the product of his envi
ronment and his desires as those of others are of theirs.
This is the mainspring of his reluctance to declare a statute
unconstitutional. The gift of recognizing his preferences as
his preferences saves him from the stupid conceit of assuming
easily that they are shared by the Constitution of the United
States. The lesser understanding of enough of his colleagues
requires him frequently to dissent. Yet he is sincere when he
expresses his reluctance to announce his disagreement. He
usually refrains from showing disapproval of reasons that
quite clearly are remote from those that he would adduce in
support of the result. A rare blend of cockiness and tolerance
characterizes his intellectual relations with his fellow law
makers. An opinion, however foolish it may seem to him, is
still significant because others hold it It is not all in irony
that he begins his dissent in the Adair case by saying: "I also
think that the statute is constitutional, and, but for the de
cision of my brethren, I should have felt pretty clear about it."
Seldom, if ever, does Holmes trouble to dissent about triviali
ties. But because he believes that "judges should be slow to
read into" the Constitution "a nolumus mutare as against the
lawmaking power," he is not slow to protest when they do.
Magnificent protests he has given us. When this transition
period has succumbed to another and the judges of the next
generation see the folly of the fetters which the decisions of
the last twenty years have bound around legislative power,
they will go to the opinions of Mr. Justice Holmes for the drum
beats and the banners of their forward line of march.
Thomas Reed Powell
Is Business a Game?
The Great Game of Business. By J. George Frederick. D. Appleton and Company.
The Literature of Business. Selected and edited by Alta Gwinn
Saunders and Herbert Le Gourd Creek. Harper and Brothers.
Business Research and Statistics. By J. George Frederick.
D. Appleton and Company.
Making Advertisements. By Roy S. Durstine. Charles Scribner's Sons.
'X'HERE is no doubt that the business game is played more
* honorably than it used to be. Sixty years ago Herbert
Spencer, in his essay on "The Morals of Trade," wrote: "It has
been said that the law of animal creation is 'Eat and be eaten';
and of our trading community it may be similarly said that its
law is 'Cheat and be cheated.' A system of keen competition,
carried on, as it is, without adequate moral restraint, is very
much a system of commercial cannibalism." To show that pre
vious generations had been even worse, he cited Defoe's "Com
plete Tradesman," in which it appeared that retailers formerly
used false lights to make their goods look better than they
really were, and kept bags of counterfeit money handy under
their counters. Today business men have agreed on certain
fundamental rules for mutual protection, although Mr. Fred
erick's useful summaryin "The Great Game of Business"of
61 rulings on unfair practices by the Federal Trade Commis
sion show how much debatable ground yet remains. But play
ing fair within the rules is not enough. The whole game of
Buyer versus Seller is increasingly in danger of being broken
239
up by a riot started by non-participants who object to the use

of their premises for a playing field.
In the same year in which Spencer was bewailing the morals
of trade, John Ruskin was setting up in the Cornhill Magazine
a new ideal of business. "The public," he wrote, "will have to
discover a kind of commerce which is not exclusively selfish.
. . . The merchant's (and the manufacturer's) function is to
provide for the nation. It is no more his function to get profit
for himself out of that function than it is a clergyman's func
tion to get his stipend. ... It becomes his duty, not only to
be always considering how to produce what he sells in the
purest and cheapest forms, but how to make the various em
ployments involved in the production, or transference of it,
most beneficial to the men employed."
How have we progressed in two generations toward this
ideal? That American business had been gradually evolving
into a profession, was the conclusion of Glenn Frank in an
able paper on Anonymous Liberalism in the Century Magazine
for April, 1919. He was convinced that "business men have
come to believe that a business man's most important oppor
tunity to serve society comes not after he has made his money,
in giving it away, but rather while he is making money, in the
way he makes it. . . . The gap between the ideals of the
profession and the ideals of business is rapidly narrowing."
Business today calls for an intellectual preparation, distinct
from the mere skill learned by experience. Mr. Justice Brandeis
in an address in 1912 pointed out that the field of knowledge
required by business has been greatly widened by the applica
tion to industry of chemical, mechanical, and electrical science,
by the science of management, by the increasing need of adjust
ing the relations of labor to capital, by the intertwining of
social with industrial problems, by the increase of government
regulation, and by the size and territorial expansion of business
itself. "Few, if any, of the recognized professions," said Mr.
Frank, "make as sweeping challenge to the intellectual ability
and acquirements of a man as does modern business. . . .
Forward-looking business men see that business, in addition to
the making of profit, and indeed, in order to make profit perma
nently, should contribute toward the realization of three large
ends in American life: namely (1) greater efficiency in the
production of wealth, (2) greater justice in the distribution of
wealth, and (3) greater wisdom in the consumption of wealth."
Critics of business may doubt with some reason whether the
number of business men who hold these ideals is large. There
can be little question, however, that they will prevail in the
new generation of business men now forming. For we are at
last schooling business men as we have for many years schooled
professional men. The leaders of commerce and industry
tomorrow will be the graduates of colleges and schools in which
they have been taught to know and meet their responsibilities
not only to their business, but also to the public.
Evidence of the kind of training being offered to students
of business is found in the text-books now in use. An excellent
example is "The Literature of Business" from which have been
taken several of the extracts quoted above. The book is an
anthology, the selections having been made by teachers of busi
ness English in two Middle Western universities. Its declared
purpose is to help students of commercial letter-writing.
Nearly half of its 500 pages are taken up with "practical"
matters, the handling of credits, collections, claims, adjust
ments, applying for a job, and writing sales-letters. Edward
Bok's sad adventure with the grammar of college graduates is
recounted. Benjamin Sherbow's incisive monograph on the use
of type is included, as is John B. Opdycke's stirring plea to the
business man to "concretize the letter situation by othering
himself," thus avoiding letters which are "unpepified, unpowergraphed, and unpunchuated."
It is the first half of the book, however, which is most en
couraging because of the obvious recognition by the compilers
of the need of cultural and ethical training for business. We
may quarrel with some of the selections, exercising the priv
240
The Nation
ilege of the critic of an anthology. We may regret that the lifestories of success happen to be those of John D. Rockefeller,
Frank W. Wool-worth, and Henry P. Davison. We may believe
that we could have chosen better discussions of the relation of
employer and employee than those of Miss Tarbell and the
younger Rockefeller. There are some who will think Charles
M. Schwab's views on the college man in business and Roose
velt's on "realizable ideals" somewhat limited, or who would
rather not reread Elbert Hubbard's "Message to Garcia." And
some of the selections are really not well written. On the whole,
however, the book can be cordially recommended for classes in
business English, and for executives and correspondents.
One of its most refreshing pages is that on which Frank A.
Vanderlip so far defies tradition as to say: "With the limitless
wealth of resources which we have had in America, the success
ful conduct of a business enterprise has been a comparatively
easy matter. Nothing short of egregious error has been likely
to lead to failure. . . . We are easily inclined to believe
that we have the best business men in the world. I am dis
posed to agree with that view. But one should not lose sight of
the fact that the lavishness of opportunity has brought commer
cial success to many who have come into the field ill prepared
and with small ability."
Business success is not going to be so easy in future. That
the American business man is the best in the world is at least
questioned by those who have seen him under fire in foreign
markets. Even on the home grounds, in the present period of
depression, he has little reason to be proud either of his cour
age or bis resourcefulness. When the hail of cancelations fell
in September, most business men cried for the game to be called
on account of wet grounds, and ran for shelter. The great
majority of our "leading business men" are actually not leaders,
but followers. They take their opinions from those of a few
a very fewactual leaders. They are ardent readers of "inter
views" and listeners to after-dinner speeches. They are addicted
to trade journals and commercial bulletins. They make snap
judgments on hearsay and insufficient evidence. They urgently
need to learn how to gather facts and form opinions of their
own.
Mr. Frederick ably tells them how to do so in "Business Re
search and Statistics." In this book the author cuts a much
better figure than in the slighter volume in which he told us
that "business is a great game, my masters." Here we find
clear recognition of the responsibility of the business man for
economic progress. There must be a new profession of com
mercial research. In the broad outline which Mr. Frederick
draws, some of the more pressing questions for study are indi
cated.
In the year 1860, two per cent of our population was engaged
in distribution; today, seven per cent. Should the present rate
of change be maintained, there will be in 1990 one non-produc
tive distributor for every producer. Both jobbing and retailing
"are in a muddled state, with both functions perverted widely
by units large enough to make the chaos stultifying and wide
spread."
Could there be a more sharp indictment of the American
business game than the actuarial statistics (which Mr. Fred
erick quotes, though not with intent to indict) that "out of
every 100 men, twenty-five years of age, one will be rich, four
will be well-to-do, five will be earning their living, and 54 will
be dependent upon friends or charity, when they reach the age
of 65," and that "a majority of those who have money at 35
years of age will have lost their money by the time they are 65"?
That management is a failure the world over, that labor has
ceased to be a commodity, that there must be greater participa
tion of labor in control, that the world has become a single and
delicately adjusted economic unit, are accepted and presented
as facts imperatively calling for constructive research. Mr.
Frederick offers many useful and suggestive schemes for such
research, from the analysis of a single company, industry, or
market to plans for commercial and sociological studies by the
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
United States Census, the Department of Commerce, and the

League of Nations. He justly points out that our failure in
reconstruction since the war has been largely due to lack of
correct and complete information, which might have been had
through timely research.
After so much good sense touched with sound idealism, it is
regrettable to find the author at the end of his book lapsing into
the jargon and saying "A research worker is first of all a
business man and then afterwards a member of a profession."
We may hope that when next he writes, Mr. Frederick will be
ready to declare the belief, which the character of his work
implies, that the time is past when any one can be first of all a
business man.
Perhaps no one kind of business, except banking, touches and
affects so many other kinds of business as advertising. There
fore the views of an advertising man, like those of a banker,
are always valuable, if sincerely expressed, especially when
they come from one who does not believe that advertising is
either a panacea or the hope of the world. Roy S. Durstine
has no such illusion. "The advertising game," he states, is not
a game. Neither has it been reduced to a science; in spite of
much progress, it has hardly begun.
Almost anybody can read "Making Advertisements" with
profit. Those sly laymen who think that the rapid increase in
the use of advertising is due chiefly to the excess-profits tax
are completely answered by Mr. Durstine. He is good-natured
about it, too. "The advertising man who would urge the tax aa
a reason for advertising would be in the position of the under
taker who urged a friend to smoke himself to death in order
to collect enough coupons to get a coffin."
The author has wisely refrained from trying to tell just how
to construct advertising and from taking too seriously the busi
ness in which he himself is notably expert. He gives us instead
suggestive and witty comment upon its daily practice. To the
copy-writer his chief message is "be sincere." "If copy is to
talk, it must talk like people. Many of our magazines show
Mrs. Housewife entertaining a caller with a description of the
household device in the corner. She is saying: 'Yes, Edith,
like you for years I failed to see the advantage of the House
hold Helper, with its superior workmanship, quality materials,
and eight points of advantage. Then on our wedding anniver
sary, John brought it home, and now I have plenty of time for
calling, shopping, going to the movies, embroidery, basketweaving, skating, golf, playing the saxophone, and reading
snappy novels." To the advertiser, his message is "common
sense." The professions have precedents. The advertising
man still has to answer a lot of questions by ear. The beat
guide he has is his common sense.
This is a welcome contrast to the usual advertising book with
its list of "impulses," "appeals," "emotions," and "reactions."
The danger of laying down rules for a vocation so new is shown
by the ease with which Mr. Durstine falls into it. In illustrat
ing the use of common sense, he states that it is obvious that
an advertisement about typewriters would require more details
than an advertisement about yeast, because more people know
how yeast works. Yet his book was hardly off the press before
a new advertising campaign appeared in which many words
were required to tell what few people knew beforethat yeast
may be eaten raw, a cake at a time, as a tonic.
The need of investigation and research is as clearly seen by
Mr. Durstine as by Mr. Frederick, but not the half-baked study
to discover "whether more blondes are left-handed in Kansas
than brunettes in Connecticut." He has no patience with the
"merchandising experts" who want to run the manufacturer's
business for him. The part of advertising is not to replace a
sales organization, but to supplement and aid it. "In the adver
tising business we have some excellent fundamentals. We have
many trustworthy practices and a growing set of proved truths
and an accumulating code of ethics. But goodness knows we
haven't a science!"
Only those who have heard the sort of conversation and writ-
Feb. 9, 1921]
The Nation
ing put forth by advertising men of the older school can fully
catch the new light that shines through Mr. Durstine's spirited
chapters. Honesty and integrity are taken for granted, as
they should be. No attempt is made to claim for a single
branch of business merits and powers which the whole of busi
ness has yet to acquire. Advertising is not the greatest force
for good in the world, not yet. But advertising is one of the
younger businesses in which we are already seeing the rise to
control of trained men and women with the instincts and ideals
of the professional man, and with the ability and readiness to
make business a public service.
R. J. Walsh
Concerning Poetry
Malherbe and the Classical Reaction in the Seventeenth Cen
tury. The Taylorian Lecture, 1920. By Edmund Gosse.
The Clarendon Press.
Naturalism in English Poetry. By Stopford A. Brooke. E. P.
Dutton and Company.
Rupert Brooke and the Intellectual Imagination. A Lecture.
By Walter de la Mare. Harcourt, Brace and Howe.
A Study of Poetry. By Bliss Perry. Houghton Mifflin Com
pany.
The Kinds of Poetry, and Other Essays. By John Erskine.
Duffield and Company.
Poetry and Commonplace. The British Academy. Warton
Lecture on English Poetry. By John Bailey. Humphrey
Milford.
The Art of Poetry. Inaugural Address delivered before the
University of Oxford 5 June 1920. By William Paton Ker.
The Clarendon Press.
THERE is not very much that can be said with permanent
truth and effect about poetry. Out of a past dreary with
unimportant theories and outgrown treatises only a few sig
nificant sentences about the profession or the thing persist, and
most of them were spoken by accident rather than by design.
Poetry survives all designs, even the most fearful and unimagi
native, upon her secret spirit.
There never was, for instance, and there probably never will
be such a thing as the history of poetry, though the generation
of Mr. Gosse and the late Mr. Brooke sincerely thought there
might be. Mr. Gosse, whose lectures at Cambridge thirty-five
years ago on the progress of sobriety in English poetry "From
Shakespeare to Pope" were so charming and inaccurate, has
recently attempted a parallel discourse upon poetry in France
from Ronsard to Boileau. His history, now as then, is without
value, and his generalizations, being at once naive and over
ripe, are unsafe, but he still is charming because of a gift of
portraiture which he has. As Edmund Waller, civilizer and
simplifier of English poetry, was the hero of the earlier essay,
so Francois Malherbe, civilizer and simplifier of French poetry,
is vividly and picturesquely the hero of this. For Mr. Gosse,
Malherbe is a hero in the additional sense of being worthy of
emulation: "In this University, where the practice of poetry
is now conducted with so much ardor and with such audacity of
experiment, you may or may not, as you please, see any parallel
between the condition of France in 1595 and your own condition
today."
As the chronicler of an art the late Mr. Stopford Brooke, in
the lectures which he delivered in 1902 at University College,
London, on English poetry from Dryden and Pope to Shelley
and Byron, was equally platitudinous with Mr. Gosse, and
equally ineffectual. There is not a historical judgment in his
book which had not become tiresome, even before it was spoken,
through dull reiteration and duller acceptance. The burden of
the lectures is that poetry after Pope needed to become more
"natural" and did sowhich, until we know what nature is,
and we do not learn it here, means precisely nil. But Mr.
Brooks, like Mr. Gosse, could talk very well about specific per
sonalities, so that his accounts in this place of Cowper, Words
241
worth, and Shelley part way redeem him. Mr. de la Mare's

personal record of Rupert Brooke, by the same token, is more
important than the distinction which he makes between two
kinds of mind one of which he says Brooke's was. That dis
tinction is a piece of metaphysics, and questionable, while his
joyous tribute to Brooke's irrepressible genius, being the tes
timony of one unquestionable poet about another, is of lasting
worth.
Among disembodied discussions of poetry Mr. Perry's will
never take a place, either on the strength of its first part,
Poetry in General, or on the strength of its second part, The
Lyric in Particular, as a work proceeding from and stimulating
the imagination. He satisfies the acquisitive, classifying appe
tite, he empties out an excellent store of allusion and quotation,
he is versed to an impressive degree in theories and examples,
and he is not without equipment in the way of abstract
aesthetics, sensory psychology, and professorial common sense;
but in the long run his book is not simple enough. With his Notes
and Illustrations, his appended apparatus for the analysis of
Tennyson, and his bibliography he will be useful to a certain
kind of teacher; but he will move few students and he will en
kindle no poets. The virtue of Mr. Erskine's book, and it has
great virtue, is that by profoundly simplifying the subject it
has indefinitely enlarged it. The business of these four essays
on The Kinds of Poetry, The Teaching of Poetry, The New
Poetry, and Scholarship and Poetry has been not so much to
say what poetry and the study of poetry are as to say what
they are not, and although the misconceptions swept away are
chiefly those which linger in immature or inflexible minds, still
they are swept away by a competent hand. The way to demon
strate anything forever about poetry is to write some of it, but if
criticism must be written, this is almost certainly the kind. In
his style Mr. Erskine has preserved a fine mature balance be
tween epigram and plain discourse, between paradox and phi
losophy; his most brilliant instances and analogies serve no
cause except good sense.
Englishmen on the whole write the best essays about poetry
affectionate, grave, sublimely amateur, almost priestly. Mr.
Bailey's lecture is a dignified and skilful reminder to the makers
of "journalistic," "snapshot" poetry today "how dead it will be
tomorrow." He would soothe if possible the insatiable itch for
originality and experiment which torments, he thinks, Mr.
Robert Graves and others. "Mr. Graves is obviously a boy who
wishes to show he is not afraid of his maiden aunt. Now
poetry is not concerned with maiden aunts at all. And it is just
as bad art to write in order to annoy your maiden aunt . .
as to write in order to please her, as Wordsworth and Tennyson
now and then did." The answer probably is that criticism is not
concerned with maiden aunts either, and that if we are capable
of any sort of poetry whatever we had better go ahead produc
ing it. Mr. Bailey's plea for the recognition by poets of the
simpler and more universal themes is wholesome, and subject to
only one qualificationthat it is pertinent less to living poets
than to posterity, and if too much honored by the first will be
regretted by the second. It is not the poet immersed in an idea
who should worry about the importance of that idea to eternity;
the immersion is the thing, for eternity will be whatever it will,
no matter what the poet is or does.
The new Professor of Poetry at Oxford, long known for his
large and rugged powers in criticism, is little bothered by such
issues, and little stirred by spectacles of fashion and regenera
tion in the art he studies. To Professor Ker the history of
poetry is a tale told by a series of more or less divine accidents.
Great poets rise here and there, but from no necessity that we
know, and deriving from older poets only perhaps in occasional
cadences reborn or remembered much as the measures of Spen
ser and Drummond and Milton and Arnold were remembered
from those in the Italian canzoni. All arts but poetry are in
ternational in everything; poetry is international only in so far
as there can be absolute harmony among syllables.
Mark Van Doren
242
The Nation
Civil War Adamses

A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865. Edited by Worthington
C. Ford. Houghton Mifflin Company. 2 Vols.
WHEN the puzzled little schoolgirl wailed that her Ameri
can history was "all cluttered up with Adamses" she
was only expressing in her language of juvenile impatience an
unconscious appreciation of merit which a Burke might have
celebrated in some such sonorous phrase as: What age or what
condition of the Republic's history that has not been ennobled
by their labors or adorned by their accomplishments! The
Pinckneys, after conspicuous services in war and diplomacy,
passed off the scene with the secure establishment of our na
tional government Harrisons have cropped out from time to
time, "longis intervallis," since the old Benjamin signed the
immortal Declaration. But the Adamses we have had with us
continuously and prominently from the days when the first
John helped pilot our ship of state into the harbor of inde
pendence to the day when the latest Charles Francis piloted
the Resolute to victory over the Shamrock IV. One could
almost write the history of our country in terms of Adams
biographies. They are like Vergil's golden bough: when one
has been plucked by the hand of fate, another forthwith ap
pears in its place. "Non deficit alter" might well be the
heraldic motto of the Adamses, if heraldry had a place in such
sturdy republican stock.
Following closely upon that most brilliant and widely appre
ciated autobiography in America, "The Education of Henry
Adams," we now have two fascinating volumes of family letters
which passed between Charles Francis Adams and his two
sons, Charles Francis, Jr., and Henry, during the Civil War.
The father was our minister at the court of St. James, Henry
was his secretary, and Charles Francis, Jr., was a cavalry
officer in the Union army. The tone of all the letters is fa
miliar and unreserved. Aside from the valued light they shed
on the various problems of the conduct of the war, as seen on
both sides of the Atlantic by men of extraordinary mental
gifts, they are intensely interesting as psychological documents
revealing the characters of the correspondents: the unperturbed
medium of the experienced mind through which the elder Adams
passed all the trials and vexations of his difficult task; the
hearty pragmatic optimism with which Charles Francis, Jr.,
vanquished his physical discomforts in muddy cavalry camps
and petty inconclusive skirmishes, and his mental misgivings
(expressed with brutal frankness) on the misconduct of the
war in the East until the coming of Grant; and the brilliant,
mercurial mind of Henry, whose outpourings of joy and dis
gust, jeremiad and triumph, run through the drama like the
strophes of the chorus in a Greek tragedy. This young man in
his early twenties seems to bear all the burden of the unin
telligible world, from which he is ever and anon ready to depart
and be at peaceor to go home and seek a commission in a
colored regiment; while the older man, bearing all the responsi
bilities and, by his own confession, "passing through nearly
every variety of emotion in connection with this war," can keep
these things hidden in his heart and write quite detachedly of
England's industrial condition, the performance of Terence's
"Andria" at the Westminster School, the character of the
Prince Consort, the style of orators in Parliament, and the
solid merits of John Quincy Adams as contrasted with the
frivolity of Lord Palmerston.
The arrangement of the letters in the strict chronological
order of their composition puts the reader to the slight incon
venience of turning back mentally several pages for the answer
to questions or the response to situations raised on one side
or the other of the ocean. Sometimes new subjects have been
introduced in the intervening pages, or the mood of the first
writer has changed before the reply to his letter comes. Charles
Francis, Jr., scolds Henry for his theatrical pessimism, and
considers the incident closed, turning in his robust optimism to
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
other things. When Henry's reply comes a dozen pages later,

it seems like raking up old embers. We should like to have
the letters from both sides of the Atlantic on the Trent Affair,
for example, brought together instead of being scattered
through forty pages, and interspersed with a variety of sub
jects like the shifting of Charles's cavalry quarters and the
death of the Prince Consort. But, doubtless, the attempt to
arrange the letters in any other way would have led to editorial
complications that even Mr. Ford's skill could not have straight
ened out. The blame for the inconvenience must be laid on
that unfortunate accident of the parting of the Atlantic cable
over which President Buchanan and Queen Victoria had ex
changed greetings three years before the outbreak of the war.
And perhaps, after all, it was a blessing in disguise that there
was no means for the telegraphic transmission to England of
the sentiment of the American people and government on the
day when Mason and Slidell were taken to Fort Warren.
The volumes as a whole leave the impression of being the
war diary of Charles Francis, Jr., not only because the greatest
number and the longest of letters are from his pen, but also
because he gives the initiation and tone to the correspondence.
The letters from London of both father and son are for the
most part answers to or comments on his. The sojourners in
England are looking to him, and not he to them, for news. Nor
does the assiduous correspondent on this side confine himself to
war news alone (which, after Grant takes command of the
army and he himself rises to high command in the cavalry, be
come intensely interesting) . He discusses such topics as emanci
pation, the economic prospects of the South, taxation, loans and
currency, with a vigor and acumen which make his letters an
invaluable contribution to the history of the Civil War.
Not that he is always right. There are erroneous judgments
and bad prophecies not a few. It is one of the merits of Mr.
Ford's work that he has not "edited out" these mistakes so as
to make his fallible men appear like inspired prophets. The
brothers cling with obstinate faith to McClellan, who, says
Charles Francis, "would have triumphantly marched into Rich
mond if it hadn't been for the jealous intrigues of McDowell."
They regard Seward as the able figure in the administration
and agree that Lincoln was "incompetent" and "not equal to the
occasion." It was not until the delivery of the second Inaugural
that Charles Francis woke up to the fact that "this rail-splitting
lawyer" was "one of the wonders of the day." Whether he
converted Henry or not remains uncertain. Lee, according to
this young soldier, is a bungler, who has twice been saved from
the consequences of his folly, but had better not count on his
good luck forever. On the morrow of Bull Run, Charles Francis
thinks that "the ultimate independence" of the South "is
assured," but in December he thinks that "there will be a
Southern collapse within four months, if we can hold over that
time." A year later he finds the Army of the Potomac "thor
oughly demoralized," and would have it "broken up and the
bulk of it transferred to the Southwest, where, after the con
quest and freeing of the Mississippi, 100,000 fighting men were
to be settled as coloni by liberal land grants of Congress." At
the close of January, 1863 (four months before Gettysburg and
Vicksburg!) "the war is on its last legs." If the practical
Charles Francis, Jr., on the spot, can talk like this, it is no
wonder that the nimble-minded enthusiast-pessimist in London
outprophesies him. The father is generally too busy with the
burden of facts to indulge in prophecy.
The point that comes out most strongly in the correspondence
of both father and son in London is the persistent, malignant
hostility of the English upper classes. Writing on the Fourth
of July, 1863, the elder Adams says: "Here in this lonely posi
tion of prominence, among a people selfish, jealous, and at heart
hostile, it needs a good deal of fortitude to conjoin private solici
tude with the unavoidable responsibilities of a critical public
station." The London papers came out with flaring headlines:
"Capitulation of McClellan's army. Flight of McClellan on a
Feb. 9, 1921]
The Nation
steamer. Later from America." There were, says the minister,

"violent, incendiary posters to be seen at all the corners, calling
on the people to come to the rescue of the suffering Confed
erates." They gave only the most tardy and grudging credence
to the news of any Northern success, and refused for days to
acknowledge the capture of New Orleans or Vicksburg. They
insisted that Lee was in possession of Washington and would
soon take New York. When Sherman left his base for his bold
march across the State of Georgia, they "proved conclusively"
that he would be annihilated by "clouds of Confederate cavalry
on his front, flank, and rear," and by "swarms of patriotic
guerrillas behind every bush." In this unfriendly atmosphere
the courageous sympathy of a few devoted friends of the Union
cause, like John Bright, the Duke of Argyll, and Monckton
Milnes, was a genuine comfort, to the younger Adams especially,
who acknowledges their kindness to him in passages of pathetic
appreciation.
The reader who takes up these absorbing volumes will find it
hard to lay them down. He will anticipate from page to page
the comments and reflections on the great military and diplo
matic events of the war as eagerly as the correspondents on
both sides of the ocean anticipated the news of them. He will
come to value the elder Adams as the incarnation of Horace's
"justum ac tenacem propositi virum," and to know the dis
tinguished brothers even more intimately than they are revealed
in the "Autobiography" and,the "Education." The work will
immediately take its place in the indispensable literature of the
sources of the Civil War.
David Saville Muzzey
Cosmography and Cats

The Tiger in the House. By Carl Van Vechten. Alfred A.
Knopf.
ONE of Congreve's heroes, determined to rid himself of
love, made a list of his mistress's faults to carry always
with him. He found, however, that the more he studied the
less he minded them, and ended by cherishing her defects as
much as he did his own. Carl Van Vechten in his apotheosis
of cats, "The Tiger in the House," has adopted somewhat the
same method, first clearing the ground by summing up all the
charges made by cat-haters, and proving that they have no
more solid foundation than man's resentment at an animal
which refuses to regard man as the center of creation and to
make itself "useful" forthwith. Puss, for instance, is keen
enough in achieving his own ends, and when he refuses to per
form parlor tricks he is showing quite the reverse of unintelligence in declining thus to compromise his dignity with
senseless mummery. If he hunts for mere sport, so did Theo
dore Roosevelt with no better justification; and puss's other
alleged faults are no more unreasonable. To call him useless is
simply to proclaim a naively homocentric cosmography which
should not have survived the Copernican theory. Cats are
neither more nor less useful to the cosmos than man himself.
The reviewer has always regarded his love of cats as the
most significant proof of his virtue. Any human brute can
praise dogs for the same reason that a tyrant praises his hundred-per-cent subjectsthey serve his purposes and flatter his
vanity by complete and abject submission. But one cannot
love a slave. The talent for friendship presupposes a certain
amount of unselfishness, and he who has achieved friendship
with a cat has learned respect for the rights of others. Puss
is not ungrateful, but he will not lick the hand that has mal
treated him, and no decent man wants a friend who will. Wor
shiped in antiquity and feared in the Middle Age, the cat is a
born aristocrat whose dignity never leaves him, for he will
curl with infinite grace upon an ash heap and then, transferred
thence, accept a silken cushion as one to the manor born. Why
should he more than condescend to man?
Mr. Van Vechten's book is a store-house of anecdote and
243
DIETZGEN'S MATERIALIST MONISM

is the philosophy of modern science as interpreted by the revolutionary
workers. Joseph Dietzgen was an intimate associate of Karl Marx,
and Marx s:ladly left to him the task of developing the revolutionary
thought in the field of philosophy. His principal works have been trans
lated in two volumes :
Philosophical Essays contains his shorter and more elementary writings,
including a critique of religion and Ethics. Cloth, $1.50.
The Positive Outcome of Philosophy includes with the work for which
the volume is named "Letters on Logic" and "The Nature of Human
Brain Work." Cloth, $1.60.
The Human Situation in Nature, by Jackson Boyd, is a new work by an
American writer. Working on independent lines, refuting the idealism
which mars the works of Herbert Spencer, he has reached virtually the
same conclusions arrived at by Dietzgen. Cloth, $2.00.
CHARLES H. KERR & CO., 347 East Ohio Street, Chicago
Have you read The Principles of Freedom
By TERENCE MacSWINEY
Just issued by Dutton?
Price, $2.00
SOVIET
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7 East 15th Street
New York
The Nation
244
allusion, abundantly illustrating how persistently cats have

stalked through art, literature, and music, and justifying Bau
delaire's apostrophe to them as amis de la science et de la
volupt. Perhaps because of the sinister and feminine char
acter of their seduction, the French have loved them most, and
to call the roll of nineteenth-century writers who have adored
and celebrated them is almost to marshal the names of the
makers of French literature of the period, for the list includes

Gautier, Mrime, Hugo, Zola, Baudelaire, Huysmans, Loti, and
Mends.
To the result of Mr. Van Vechten's enthusiasm and erudi
tion a felinophile enrag like the reviewer can only say amen,
and then fall to heaping the measure with a few allusions of
his own. To the gallery of Dickens's cats, for instance, should
surely be added the famished beast in Old Curiosity Shop
which licks the drops one by one as they seep from the cellar
ceiling; and note should be taken of the fact that, as a locus
classicus for the exposition of feline independence, Kipling's

The Cat Who Walked by Himself has been completely super
seded by Francis Jammes's magnificent conception of a cat
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
ployed by the medieval Germans, Flemings, and Italians.
He
has behind him the tradition of Bewick which makes it possible

for him to obtain the luminous play of white line or mass on
black relief. The early wood engravers with their facsimile
black line upon a white ground obviously practiced a craft

more limited in artistic possibilities. For the past thirty years
original wood engraving has been employed by a few devotees,
especially in the service of the decoration and illustration of
beautiful books. Not only have these illustrations been made

in black and white, but color prints based upon the technical
processes of the early Chinese and eighteenth century Japa
nese have been produced with distinguished success. Modern
Wood Cuts and Lithographs is profusely illustrated with deco
rations in color as well as in black and white.
In both France and England, it seems, the art of wood

engraving was revived by a small group. Charles Ricketts
and Charles Shannon were the pioneers in England, followed
by a younger circle of engravers, chief among whom were Sturge
Moore, Reginald Savage, and Lucien Pissarro. In France the
revival is particularly indebted to Auguste Lepre. M. Pierre
heaven in which the immortal tabbies refuse obedience to the
Gusman, too, founder of the Socit de la Gravure sur bois
Bon Dieu Himself. Then, to the reviewer at least, the cat first
seems to enter English literature in a passage which, if it is
not well known to cat lovers, certainly deserves to be. It is
from the De Proprietatibus Rerum of Bartholomew of
originale has been energetic in furthering practice and encour

agement of the art. Other famous French engravers of the
new school are M. Emile Bernard, Paul Baudier, Paul-Emile
Pissarro, the Rouquet family, Ludovic Rodo, and Morin-Jean.
England, written in the middle of the thirteenth century and

translated from the original Latin by John of Trevisa in
1397: Of Cats. He is a full lecherous beast in youth, swift,
pliant, and merry, and leapeth and rusheth upon everything
that is before him; and is led by a straw and playeth there
with; and is a right heavy beast in age and full sleepy, and
lieth in wait for mice; and is aware where they be more by
smell than by sight, and hunteth and rusheth on them in privy
places; and when he taketh a mouse, he playeth therewith and
eateth him after play.
Mr. Salaman writes with sensitive understanding of the peculiar

merits of all these new expressionists, both French and Eng
lish, and ably expounds the charm and character of lithography

as recently revived. A small but carefully chosen series of
lithographs accompany his text. From cover to cover this
number of the Studio is a beautiful and enthralling history of

the revival of two precious crafts too long neglected.
GLEN MULLIN
In time of love is hard fighting for
Sunrise and Red Earth
wives, and one scratcheth and rendeth the other grievously

with biting and claws.
And he maketh a ruthful noise and
ghastful, when one proffereth to fight with another; and is hardly

hurt when he is thrown down off an high place.
Surely, the manners of pussies are more stable than those
of men, and I should find myself more readily at ease with Bar
tholomew's cat than with Bartholomew himself.
Mr. Van Vechten is less fortunate in his choice of pictures

than in his text. He complains justly of the insipidity of Hen
riette Ronner's paintings, but has not even a word for the
sinewy beasts of Hogarth, which, though tortured like his
men, have just that reality which cat pictures, almost always
sentimentalized, lack.
J. W. KRUTCH
Sun-Up and Other Poems. By Lola Ridge. B. W. Huebsch, Inc.

Red Earth. Poems of New Mexico. By Alice Corbin. Ralph
Fletcher Seymour.
Ry, which
comes rarely into poetry, can come by in

tuition or by research. Sun-Up, a poem of childhood, is
real by virtue of both those things. It is the work of a memory
intensified by effort and improved by psychology. A protracted
free-verse monologue spoken not to or for a child but in the
person of one, it has a certain advantage over the condescen
sions, beautiful as they are, of Martial, Jonson, Marvell, Prior,

Stevenson, and Sturge Moore, and over the systems, profound
as they may be, of Blake and Wordsworth. Needless to say,
of course, it is superior beyond measure to that ordinary poetry
about children which adores them abjectly as sweet and ob
Wood Cuts and Lithographs

This
scures them with tender conceits. The child whom Lola Ridge
makes speak is not being watched, and so is not entirely sweet.
No adult knows what little girls think about, but one is willing
to believe that it is approximately what he finds here, where
yet been shown of the impetus given in recent years to wood
Plato would have inspired a better sermon, and possibly a bet
Modern Wood Cuts and Lithographs. By British and French

Artists. The Studio, Ltd.
book, with the very able and interesting Commentary
by Mr. Malcolm Salaman, is the finest indication that has
engraving as a creative art.
Americans as a rule associate
Freud rather than Plato is read back into the infant mind.
ter poem, but not so good a monologue.
Happily there are no
splendid
rhymes to falsify and sophisticate and fatten the picture,
school of reproductive wood engravers most familiarly repre
though too many asterisks, perhaps, make it too much a sketch.
sented by Timothy Cole.
The material is for the most part primitivebewildering ani

misms, furtive personifications, wild-animal cruelty, staring im
wood engraving with the kind of work done by our own

That school is, of course,
defunct,
now that the camera has come in to despoil wood engraving of

its reproductive function. As a reaction against the camera
and the old reproductive engraving, artists, especially in Eng
land and France, began to study the wood block as a medium
of creative expression. This special number of the Studio seeks
to record what has actually been done by the modern wood
engravers in those two countries toward a rehabilitation of the
beautiful old craft of Drer and Holbein.
The modern engraver has the advantage of a new technique
richer and more suggestive in many ways than the one em
passivity to others' pain, and honesty so quick as to be dia

bolical.
Does the child love her father?
Celia says my father

will bring me a golden bowl.
When I think of my father
I cannot see him
for the big yellow bowl

like the moon with two handles
he carries in front of him.
Feb. 9, 1921]
The Nation
245
Does she have no thoughts that her mother is not sharing?

You don't like mama to be sad
when you are four years old,
so you pretend
you like the bitter gold-pale tea
you pretend
if you don't drink it up pretty quick
a little gold-fish
will think it is a pond
and come and get born in it.
NEEDED
A New Basis of Representation To Relate
Every worker, every stockholder to the first interest of the
corporation.
The value of Alice Corbin's volume comes chiefly from its

research into a field of poetical materials still new and vastly
promising, the field of Amerindian lore. The original verse
here, or the verse most nearly original, for all of it derives
in some degree from the Spanish and Indian Southwest, is
not distinguished, but the adaptations and interpretations take
a sure place alongside the work of Mary Austin, Constance
Lindsay Skinner, and Natalie Curtis Burlin. The difficult timelessness of the desert is somehow conveyed:
Blinking and blind in the sun
An old, old woman who mumbles her beads
And crumbles to stone.
The wind picks up a handful of dust,
And sets it down
Faint spiral of lives
Lived long ago on the desert.
A deep blue shadow falls
On the face of the mountain
What great bird's wing
Has dropped a feather?
D. M.
Books in Brief
np HE Morals of Economic Internationalism" (Houghton
Mifflin) by J. A. Hobson is an oration before the Amer
ican public for a liberal and enlightened foreign policy. Start
ing not, as Demosthenes recommended, by conciliating his audi
ence, but, like a logician, by stating his premises, the author
postulates that there is absolutely no case for an international
morality lower than individual morality, and that the cut-throat
competition of nations each seeking to shut the others out of
their markets is based on the fallacy that the world's wealth is
a limited hoard, and that what one gains another loses. Though
one can find these principles proved in earlier writers all the
way back through Adam Smith to Aristotle, yet the excuse for
this eloquent and convincing plea is that the world does not yet
act upon them. The whole scramble for markets derives its
argument from an economic absurdity, the idea that the export
trade is worth more than the import trade, and produces its
disastrous results in tariffs, bounties, and governmental support
of commercial exploitation, that fosters a single class in a
country at the expense of all other classes, and prefers the
immediate apparent interest of a few trusts to that of all the
world beside. Little do such wretched expedients avail in the
end, for economic internationalism is an accomplished fact. All
nations are now suffering by the terrible destruction of wealth
in the recent orgy of armed hate; and all would profit by the
increased prosperity of each. Mr. Hobson's final plea is that
America, as the least hurt of all great nations, should interpose
her wealth and power to stop the awful march to starvation
and anarchy of the European populations. Our private alms
have certainly been liberal, but it is a continent, nay, half a
world, that holds out its hands for bread. That we are morally
bound to intervene to the full extent of our resources is certain,
and that it would be our true interest to do so, on a national
Present Basis of Representation

The basis of any form of general representation is some
primary need felt by the group or the community.
When the American Constitution came into existence the
country was sparsely inhabited, immigration was a national
need, a national interest. Population as the measure of this
need, this interest, was recognized as the basis of representa
tion of each state in the House of Representatives.
The need of one country may well be weakness in another.
China is certainly not suffering today for lack of people.
Overpopulation is often recognized as a need in the negative
sense, as the justification for wars of aggression.
When the American corporation came into existence capital
was scarce, and its protection as a primary interest was af
forded through making it the basis of representation. Each
stockholder in electing the board of directors was given as
many votes as he or she held shares of stock.
The need, the interest, of one period may be the weakness
of a later period.
The Change
Today capital is more general, the source of supply has
changed. Whereas formerly thousands supplied the capital
and took the entire risk, today millions supply the capital.
The millions who have an income, who are producing more
than a minimum with which to sustain life, have become con
tributors. There were sixty-five million subscribers to the
Five Liberty Loans.
First Interest of the Corporation
The first interest of the corporation today is production
above a minimum. Without this income there can be no
legitimate division of profits. Everyone associated with the
corporation is responsible for the profits. If the profits are
divided in a way which fails to recognize individual ability,
good feeling cannot control.
General recognition of ability can only come through the
individual being related through constant association to a local
group that can judge as to the consistency of individual effort.
Constant reward is as necessary to constant effort as con
stant effort is necessary to constant reward. To make the
constancy of this relationship between effort and reward the
responsibility of all associated with the corporation is to
recognize the ability of the individual in terms of production
above a minimum or income. And the income of a department
when divided by the number of individuals making up the de
partment reveals the average power or ability that this depart
ment can lay claim to ; it reveals the basis of relationship
between the individual, the stockholders' department or any
other department and the first interest of the corporation, pro
duction above a minimum or income.
It is a fair division of responsibility all along the line that
effects a saving and insures success.
The New Day
The day has at last come when we can look to the estab
lishment within corporations of a relationship which will
allow the individual to discover in his or her work the national
ideal of, "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."
To Employment Managers, Labor Executives and all
interested in
"A Plan For Averting Industrial Strife"
Send today for your copy of a pamphlet by
SCOVILLE HAMLIN
Price Five Cents.
66 Broadway, New York City.
246
The Nation
scale and by governmental action, is at least highly probable.

It is to be feared, however, that our beloved country will not
have the imagination or insight to see its own path of duty and
of true interest. The last election was, among other things,
America's vote for a "me first" policy; so on with the danse
macabre in other continents!
WHEN we read the "Letters of a Javanese Princess"
(Knopf) we find ourselves transported through twenty
or thirty years of time and many thousand miles of space to
be set down in a society ruled by the Mohammedan law, where
an oppressive etiquette demanded that younger brothers and
sisters might not pass older ones without bowing down to the
ground and creeping upon hands and knees; might not speak
in a familiar tongue but must use only "high Javanese";
where custom strongly forbade girls ever to go outside the house
of their parents; where a woman could be married without her
approval or knowledge even, and to a husband so casually given
her she must be bound all her life, though he might be free
to marry as many other women as he chose ; where not to marry
was the greatest sin a woman could commit, and to desire an
education an act of unthinkable rebellion. It was from such a
tradition that Kartini, daughter of a Javanese regent, strug
gled to free herself and to rouse her people who with fatalistic
calmness had always yielded to a life that was "Tekdir"fore
ordained. First she had to effect her own emancipation. She
found courage and means to resist the Mohammedan code in
order that no parents might ever again be able to quiet their
daughters' longings for independence by saying "There is no
one now who does it." Forbidden by law to learn languages,
Kartini and her sisters did learn Dutch at the free grammar
school for Europeans, the only school to be found for girls.
They saw with clear eyes the task they had set themselves:
"We know what awaits us. We three are going hand in hand
through life that for us will be full of struggle and disap
pointment ... it leads toward freedom and happiness
for millions." She realized that the first step forward for the
Javanese woman lay in economic independence. "Teach her a
trade, so that she will no longer be powerless when her guar
dians command her to contract a marriage which will inevitably
plunge her and whatever children she may have into misery."
Though most of her friends and advisers were Dutch and she
had a vast respect for "Western civilization," Kartini kept
singularly pure and native ideals for herself and her people.
"We do not wish to make of our pupils half Europeans or
European Javanese. We want a free education, to make of the
Javanese, above everything, a strong Javanese." Her death in
1904 put an abrupt end to her work, but she had lived long
enough and passionately enough to set a vast impulse on foot,
as a result of which most of the ideas for which she struggled
are now generally accepted among her countrymen. Kartini
schools exist throughout Java; girls may now earn their living
without disgracing their families; and polygamy is rapidly
dying out among the younger generation.
A S a record of a valiant, upstanding fight for the vote made
f\ by a group of women who through years of disappoint
ment had developed hostility and suspicion and scorn as their
weapons, Doris Stevens's "Jailed for Freedom" (Boni and Liveright) is an invigorating document. As a record of the steady
disintegration of Woodrow Wilson's resistance to the passage
of the Federal suffrage amendment, it is extremely enlighten
ing. As a history of the suffrage campaign of the last few
years, however, it is incompletenor does it pretend to tell the
whole story. Until the fires of partisanship have died down it is
unlikely that we can have any account of that remarkable
campaign which will lay due emphasis upon the spectacular
militancy of the heroines of Miss Stevens's book and also upon
the dogged siege laid against Congress by the "old line" suffra
gists. Both lines of attack were valuable and both need to be
recorded. But the persecution of the militants is a story by
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
itself, and Miss Stevens has told it with a vigor that must make
everyone who reads her book realize the depths to which the
Administration was willing to fall in order to save its poor
dignity. If any unfortunate note creeps into this story of
valorous resistance to tyranny it appears in Miss Stevens's
frequent appeals to our pity. Doubtless some of the women
who endured ridicule, riot, and prison were, as she so often
points out, "frail," "slight," or "sensitive," but the valid ob
jections to jailing them must be found in sterner logical stuff
than this. The authorities deserved contempt because they
allowed and connived at a travesty on justice; by mean and
devious methods they deprived the women of a right that is
guaranteed to everyone. They threw the suffragists in jail on
a petty technicality because they could not accomplish it on
an honest charge, and kept them there until public opinion
frightened the Administration into releasing them. This illegal
and cowardly persecution is made neither better nor worse by
the fact of the moral or physical stature of the women who
risked it. The suffragists risked also, it is worth noting, the
promiscuity of prison life, and it is unfortunate to have stressed
the obvious differences between them and the women who sur
rounded them in jail. Doubtless the jail officials forced their
militant charges into intimate contact with Negro women and
low-grade criminals with the intention of humiliating them.
They should have refused to be humiliated. Race and social dis
tinctions may well be discarded in the common democracy of
our jails, which every year contain more and more of the best as
well as of the worst Americans.
IN "Anthony Aston" (South Haven, Mich.: The Author) Mr.
* Watson Nicholson, author of the excellent "Struggle for a
Free Stage in London," presents us with a reprint of a very
brief autobiographical sketch of one of the most picturesque
wags and strollers of the days of William and Anne. Aston
has always been known to students of the stage for "A Brief
Supplement to Colley Cibber, Esq.," but the only well-known
source of biographical information has been the vague sketch
in Chetwood's mid-eighteenth century "General History of the
Stage." Mr. Nicholson discovered independently the present
sketch prefixed to a forgotten "Droll." He is wrong, how
ever, in assuming that it has been completely unknown. The
author of the article on Aston in the "Dictionary of National
Biography" did overlook it, but it was mentioned in Charles P.
Daly's "First Theater in America" (Dunlap Society) and in
O. G. Sonneck's "Early Opera in America." However, the
reprint is welcome and every student interested in ancient
Bohemias will be delighted to hear Aston tell, with com
plete disregard for syntax and in the authentic pot-house
style of Ned Ward and the other blackguard wits, of his
amazingly varied career as "Gentleman, Lawyer, Poet, Actor,
Soldier, Sailor, Exciseman, Publican; in England, Scotland,
Ireland, New York, East and West Jersey, Maryland (Virginia
on both sides of the Chesapeake) , North and South Carolina,
South Florida, Bahamas, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and often a
coaster by the same; like the signs of the ablative case . . .
for I been in 'em, travell'd through 'em, paid for 'em, come off
genteely from 'em, and liv'd by 'em." He came of good family,
but though himself bred for law, he was a born Bohemian who
found even acting in the regular companies too tame. He
appeared at Smithfield Fair, acted "Medleys" (vaudeville) in
London with the sole support of his wife and ten-year-old son,
barnstormed through England, and was shipwrecked off the
American coast about 1702, arriving in Charleston "full of lice,
shame, poverty, nakedness, and hunger." Even in America,
however, he "turned player and poet, and wrote one play on the
subject of the country," and managed always to live "handsomly by God's providence" and the force of his own "un
daunted genius." At times, when the service of Momus was
insufficiently adventurous or lucrative, he turned soldier or
publican, and when worst came to worst was not incapable of
living by his wits, once leaving a trunk full of rubbish for an
Feb. 9, 1921]
The Nation
inn-keeper's security. "If the sun shine by day, and the moon
by night, etc. Life's a bite [a hoax]"; so ran his adequate
philosophy. "The wise liv'd yesterday. . . . There are but
two sorts of men, Scaramouch and Harlequin. If you're grave,
you're a fool; if trifling, you're a fool; ergo, you're a fool; be
what you will! Is that logic or no?" His complete life, of
which the present sketch was but a "cursory touch," would have
been a document beside which Scarron's epic of barnstorming
"Le Roman Comique"would be pale and decorous.
VARIOUS chapters and parts of chapters of "Memoirs of My
Dead Life" which were omitted out of reluctant deference
to the devotees of the goddess Ydgrun are restored in the new
edition of Mr. George Moore's book which has been just issued
for private circulation among subscribers (Boni and Liveright).
The "Memoirs" in this new form will appeal to all lovers of
beautiful books, for the paper, binding, printing, and general
format make the work a fine example of American book-making.
Misprints, which so seriously marred the companion volume
of "Avowals," issued some time ago, are almost completely
absent from the pages of this book. In a new preface Mr.
Moore gives a hint of his own high opinion of his work and
calls attention, curiously enough, to its "gaiety." It is not gay;
its memories of gay and amorous adventures of the long ago are
M sad as the withered petals of last year's flowers. The book
is too well known to require that one dwell upon its delicately
tinted, meditative, and somewhat straggling style which finds
so fit a setting on soft paper amid broad margins. Nor need
one insist now overmuch upon that quality that is found in
greater or less degree in all Mr. Moore's volumes of selfrevelation: the quiet, satisfied shamelessness, never blatant but
always apparent. An astounding illustration of this occurs in
one of the new chapters where the author tells of the kick
which he administered to a lady who discarded him as a lover,
displaying meanwhile her amused satisfaction at his disgruntlement Some men might well have wished to kick her; a few
might have done so; but only Mr. Moore would tell of the ad
venture. Even more extraordinary, and casting no such en
tirely unfavorable light upon him, is the episode told in the
chapter entitled Euphorion in Texas. One cannot enlarge here
upon the curious history of the lady from Austin who applied
to Mr. Moore for assistance in improving the literature of
Texas; but after reading his amusing narrative one is tempted
to ask someone, say Mr. H. L. Mencken, whether there are
any apparent signs in the Southwest that the efforts of Mr.
Moore and the lady in question have met with any success.
"/CHRISTIAN Socialism, 1848-54" (Macmillan) by Charles
E. Raven is a brief, well-documented, and sympathetic
account of the rise of the Christian socialist movement in Eng
land. There is an introductory chapter on the system of laissezfaire and its champions. There are full and interesting bio
graphical sketches of the founders of Christian socialism
Ludlow, Maurice, Kingsley, Mansfield, Neale, and others. The
early literary activities of the leaders are covered in three
chapters and their practical experiments in three more. The
Working Men's college is discussed in one chapter and the "fail
ure" of Christian socialism in another. The volume as a whole
is a genuine contribution to English economic history and will
doubtless be received as such. Mr. Raven would have been a
little more convincing in some parts if he had been less profuse
in praising his heroes and at the same time had shown more
charity for Mrs. Sidney Webb and other critics of the Christian
Socialists. One does not have to love "efficiency" and bureau
cracy in order to see the inherent economic weaknesses of
Christian socialism as applied in the modern competitive system.
Americans who have been within or on the borders of radical
movements of any sort will appreciate this passage from Mr.
Raven's description of the early "lunatic fringe": "There was
Mansfield [a vegetarian] with his cotton-cloth shoes and Camp
bell with his 'fonetic nuts' and Furnivall, vegetarian and non-
247
GOOD
BOOKS
E list, for your convenience in purchasing,

either from your bookstore or from us, a
few of our recent and most worthwhile publications.
(In ordering from us please add 15c per volume for
postage.)
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis.

Sigmund Freud. (6th Edition)
. . $4.50
Primitive Society. R. H. Lowie. (2d Edition)
3.00
The Awakening of Asia.

(2d Edition)
2.50
H. M. Hyndman.
The Course of Empire. R. F. Pettigrew.$4.50

Special price to Nation readers
3.00
Jailed For Freedom.

fusely Illustrated)
3.00
Doris Stevens.
The Imperial Orgy. Edgar Saltus.

fusely Illustrated) (2d Edition)
(Pro
(Pro
3.00
Liluli. Romain Rolland. (3d Edition) (With

22 Wood Cuts)
2.00
Great Modern American Stories.

Howells. (4th Edition)
2.50
W. D.
To be published early in March

Mayfair to Moscow: Clare Sheridan's Diary. . 3.00
G. K. Chesterton says, "London is talking about two
booksMargot Asquith's and Clare Sheridan's."We
think this book will be the most entertaining and widely
read book of the season.
BONI
&
109 West 40th Street
LIVERIGHT
NEW YORK
248
The Nation
smoker and teetotaler, with a spelling all his own; and there
was the unnamed with the blue plush gloves." One wonders
how Kingsley and Ludlow and Maurice, so cultivated and sensi
tive, could have endured the aggregation of cranksuntil one
has spent a week end at the country home of Sir Ralph Sniffles
who, having made his pile in South Africa, brings his broker
friends to meet some "poets and intellectuals" attracted by a
motor trip and six square meals. Every American of a reform
ing mood, of whom there are many, ought to read Mr. Raven's
book. If they are not already familiar with the deep moral
reaction that accompanied the triumph of capitalism in Eng
land, it will be a revelation to them. If they know the history
of English thought in the Victorian age and need no infor
mation on that subject, then their reward for reading this vol
ume will be a deeper understanding of socialist spirit and a
deeper sense of humor.
"EARNEST BELFORT BAX'S "Reminiscences and Reflexions
*-i of a Mid and Late Victorian" (Thomas Seltzer) may dis
turb the reader who is both socialist and feminist. Can a man
be right about socialism who is so wrong about feminism? The
distress of Mr. Bax, confronting what woman calls her mind,
is that of Mr. Shandy, master of one of the finest chains of
reasoning in nature, but plagued with a wife whose headpiece
was such that he could not "hang up a single inference within
side of it." To recall the logic-ridden Mr. Shandy is to feel
reassured about Mr. Bax and socialism. Englishmen have a
prescriptive right to their "humors"; testiness in the face of
woman's claim to intellectual equality with man is simply "Mr.
Bax in his humor." No doubt, the manifold repressions of his
Sabbath-cursed and censored infancy in Mid-Victorian Noncon
formist circles developed obscure Freudian complexes out of
which springs this irritable anti-feminism. The Commune,
kindling Mr. Bax's youthful imagination and stirring his sym
pathy for the oppressed, marks the date of his spiritual release
from the slavery of the "morally repulsive and intellectually
foolish beliefs," the "foulness and follies" of the dismal sixties.
Go to an escaped Mid-Victorian for expert assistance in cursing
Mid-Victorianism ! The direction given to his thoughts by the
Commune led him to share in the inception of the socialist move
ment in England in the eighties. Of value and interest is his
account of the unfortunate split in the Social Democratic Fed
eration which led to the secession of Morris, Bax, and others,
and to the formation of the Socialist League. Equally inter
esting are the sketches of striking personalities in the revolu
tionary movement in England and on the ContinentMarx,
Engels, Bebel, Jaures, Kropotkin, Hyndman, Morris, Shaw, and
others with whom Bax has been associated. Though not a
brilliant portrait painter, he achieves some vivid strokes. The
memory retains a lively picture of Bernard Shaw, informed by
the billiard-playing, pipe-smoking, beer-drinking workmen, at
whose club he was booked for one of his Sunday afternoon talks
on socialism, that they "didn't want no damned lecture"; or of
William Morris and H. M. Hyndman selling Justice along the
Strand, Morris picturesque in his blue serge suit, cravatless
blue shirt, and "wide-awake" hat, and Hyndman conventional
in the "hideous and sordid uniform of the capitalist era."
HP HOSE who have read "La Vie Amoureuse de Francois
* Barbazanges" would not remain long in doubt as to the
authorship of Mme. Tinayre's last novel, "Persephone" (Calmann-Levy), even if it were anonymous. Francois learned to
read in D'Urfe's "Astree," and his whole life is colored thereby.
In "Persephone" an Orphic hymn to the infernal goddess plays
much the same role. Both books are throbbing with passion that
can only be crowned in the fields of asphodel. Since her last
novel, "La Veillee des Armes," which portrayed so vividly the
spirit of France in August, 1914, Mme. Tinayre has been in
Greece and has sought from ancient mystics interpretations
of the other world. Her new book is presented as the notes
of a solitary scholar, member of the Institute and author of
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
learned volumes on comparative religion. Almost from the

start he recalls Sylvestre Bonnard, and we do not need to hear
him refer to his den as "the city of books" to be aware of his
more than academic kinship. Surely he has not Bonnard's
charm, but the story is little concerned with his personality.
Neither has he the irony of his forebear, but the notes were
written in 1919, and even Bonnardian irony would be more than
misplaced. The story turns on the experience of a young artist,
a devotee of Persephone, whom he believes to have found per
sonified in a living woman. He regards himself as the reincar
nation of the mystic poet Timocles, who celebrated the goddess
as the comforter of the dead. He is quite aware that "she who
has accepted the fateful pomegranate seed can do nothing for a
living votary, but she would, perhaps, keep tryst with a shade,
in the secret temple prepared for her, in the white chamber
where the solitary narcissi flower every spring." He is swal
lowed up in the great war, but his faith never deserts him. The
old scholar's role is limited to the observation of incidents that
confirm strikingly the belief of the artist whom he regarded as
his spiritual son. The book is not a war novel. Quite apart
from its purely artistic merit, it grips the reader by its pathetic
appeal to mystic religion in time of national bereavement. The
frontispiece bears the closing line of Dante's "Inferno," "Thence
we came out and saw the stars again," and in Timocles's hymn
we read how Persephone deliberately chose to remain in the
lower world to comfort the dead. "Then the goddess of the sad
heart pushed aside her veil and on her immortal visage each
spirit saw once more, as in a mirror, the mortal face it had
most loved. The old man believed his daughter found again,
and the daughter her mother left too soon; the husband recog
nized his wife and the maiden her beloved sister, the confidante
of her innocent loves. And the chorus of the spirits, in the
echoless air, uttered a cry like to the shudder of the wind over
the water. They were pressing forward amid the asphodels
and proclaiming : 'Love has conquered death.' "
"rjn ALKS to Writers" (Dodd, Mead) by Lafcadio Hearn is
1 a selection made by Professor John Erskine from "Life
and Literature" and "Interpretations of Literature," the two
volumes of lectures delivered by Hearn at the University of
Tokio. The present volume contains only those talks which
deal specifically with the art of writing. Addressed to alien
students, they are necessarily often elementary in subject
matter and always simple in style. Out of the latter necessity
Hearn made a virtue and achieved a naive charm, so that, as
writing, the lectures are like everything else he wrote, beautiful.
They belong to the last stage of his life when he had assumed
a sort of aesthetic austerity, proclaiming the ethical theory of
art and lecturing sympathetically on Tolstoy's "What is Art."
Upon no one does austerity sit more strangely. Half English
or Irish and half Greek, he was a born aesthete, evoking morbid
beauty as readily from the description of an incinerated corpse
in Cincinnati as from the retelling of an Oriental legend; it is
difficult to take the sternness of such a man seriously. Having
revolted from Roman Catholicism to atheism, he married a
Japanese wife and turned Buddhist. Similarly, having written
of Virginity, Mystery, and Melancholy as "three new maladies
brought among us by Christ," having called Arnold a "colossal
humbug," and having proclaimed that in history and romance
one should seek only the extraordinary, the monstrous, the ter
rible, and the sensuous, he babbled at other times of ethical
truth and the healthy tastes of the peasants. He was purely a
writer and took color from his surroundings and his moods.
Perhaps at the last, having tasted to the full the luxury of the
senses, he found in theoretical asceticism a new intellectual
luxury. Old men, said Wycherley, give young men good advice,
being no longer able to give them a bad example.
I M. ROBERTSON'S monograph, "The Problem of Hamlet"
** (Allen and Unwin), is announced as a preliminary study
for a forthcoming work, "The Canon -of Shakespeare." It does

The Nation
Feb. 9, 1921]
249
N the hope of saving the good name of our country by obtaining the release of one of its greatest men from
prison, Ruth Le Prade has collected and we have published a little book entitled
(Qebs
and
the
Qoets
We ask you to read the following review of this book, taken from the "New York Evening Post." It covers
all that we have to say about the matter:
"This small paper-bound volume with a simple black and white cover that somehow suggests the peniten
tiary garb of the great national figure to whom it pays tribute is not to be considered primarily as literature, but as
a vital historical document. The publisher says, 'This book is edited and published for the love of a great man.
The editor receives no royalty and the publisher no profit from the sales. Everything above cost will go to
advertising the book, so that others may know of it.' Eugene V. Debs is confined in the Federal Penitentiary of
Atlanta, Georgia, as a convicted felon. In this book more than two-score poets and men of letters pay him tribute.
The names are memorable. They include Henri Barbusse, Edward Carpenter, the late Eugene Field, Laurence
Housman, Helen Keller, Edwin Markham, John Cowper Powys, the late James Whitcomb Riley, Siegfried Sassoon, George Bernard Shaw, Horace Traubel, H. G. Wells, and Israel Zangwill.
"Of those paying tribute Witter Bynner is not a Socialist or a radical, Edmund Vance Cooke is not a So
cialist, Percy Mackaye is not a Socialist, the reputations of Wells, Shaw, Barbusse, Carpenter, Zangwill, Sassoon,
Field, Riley, Powys, etc., are established internationally, above any mere political creed. We choose to quote
Percy Mackaye's expressed attitude toward the imprisonment of Debs as the attitude of the vast majority of liberal
minds that cannot accept Socialist doctrine and did not agree with Debs's attitude toward America's entering the
war. To our mind no better balanced comment has been made on this subject:
" 'As to the political philosophy of Debs, many of his opinions are not held by me; but the human kindness
of his great personality and the integrity of his beliefs are characteristics which I would admire whether I agreed
with him or not. Especially in regard to the war I did not agree with him; for I was one of those who believed
and believed ardentlythat we had no other possible alternative, as Americans, than to undertake it.
" 'But the intolerant passions it has engendered in our midst have been unworthy of the high motives we
professed, and which I, among many, professed with all sincerity. Except for these unpoised passions Debs could
hardly have been imprisoned. In the white heat of conflict some intolerance may well have seemed to be moral;
but nowin the cold light of the cosmic disillusionment the world has sufferednow, if ever, our imaginations
should be touched to value only a redeeming tolerance, for if there be any left alive who are no longer cocksure,
surely they are only the incorrigible. Unless they are many, Debs will soon be free again.
" 'Politically I am of no party : simply an American, which has always meant to me (whatever it may mean
to others) a lover of human liberty, anywhere on this planet.Percy Mackaye.'
"No American but should take these words to heart. That the imprisonment of Debs should have aroused such
noble and stirring verse as Bynner's '9653,' Untermeyer's 'The Garland for Debs,' Powys's 'To Eugene Debs,'
William Ellery Leonard's 'The Old Agitator,' Charles Erskine Scott Wood's remarkable dramatic fragment, 'Debs
Has Visitors,' and such words as Wells, Shaw, Zangwell, Barbusse, Sandburg, Laurence Housman, Sassoon, and
others have spoken, is deeply significant in itself. As H. G. Wells says succinctly: 'Liberty Enlightening the
Worldand behind it Debs in prison.' And this in connection with, as James Whitcomb Riley summarized the
man:
'As warm a heart as ever beat
Betwixt Here and the judgment seat.'
"It is time that our pride in America be stirred to generous and honorable action by such a speaking witness
as this book."
We think that the liberals of America should need no urging to get this book and make it known to their
friends. It is available in two bindingspaper, 60 cents postpaid, 8 copies $1.50, 10 copies $4.50; cloth $1.20,
postpaid, 3 copies $3.00, 10 copies $9.00. In addition there is a special autographed edition of 500 numbered
copies, for sale at $5.00 a copy, to furnish an advertising fund for the book. Three hundred copies have been sub
scribed, and this advertisement is a part of the result. The Warden of Atlanta Penitentiary refused to permit the
autographing of the book by Debs, but the Attorney-General overruled this decision, and the 200 books remaining
await the first orders received.
Books by Upton Sinclair: "The Brass Check; a Study of American Journalism"; "100%: The Story of a
Patriot"; "The Profits of Religion," and "The Jungle" are for sale at the same prices as "Debs and the Poets."
A new edition of "The Cry for Justice: An Anthology of the Literature of Social Protest," is now in preparation.
This book contains 891 pages, in addition to thirty-two half-tone illustrations. It is a collection of the world's
greatest utterances on the subject of social justice, chosen from thirty languages and four thousand years of his
tory. Jack London called it "This Humanist Holy book" ; Louis Untermeyer says, "It should rank with the
very noblest works of all time." The price is, paper bound, $1.00, postpaid; cloth bound, $1.50, postpaid; 8
copies, paper, $2.50, cloth, $8.75; 10 copies, paper, $7.50, cloth, $11.25.
UPTON SINCLAIR, Pasadena, California
The Nation
250
not, to tell the truth, lead us to look forward with much hope
to the appearance of that magnum opus. Mr. Robertson is
always suggestive, always dogmatic, very scornful of the work
of his predecessors, and not always quite familiar with that
[Vol. 112, No. 2901
guarded but common secrets. This is what is known as exposi

tion. The rajah comes and offers them a sophisticated Euro
pean hospitality. He has taken an honors degree at Cambridge
He insists, for example, on the necessity of a study of
and is, on one side of his nature, a cynical, dry-souled man

of the world. But his deeper and ancestral self is at one with
the evolution of the play, but such a study has long since been
undertaken; The Genesis of Hamlet, by Charlton Lewis,
been condemned to death in India; his opportunity for revenge
a work which Mr. Robertson quite ignores, carries on this inves
is at hand.
tigation so far as to anticipate nearly all of the English
makes improper proposals to the English lady, that her un

necessary husband is shot, not, however, before he has sent to
India a wireless call for help, or that, at the precise moment
when the lady and the man of her spotless affections are about
to be tortured and sacrificed to the green goddess, the British
planes are heard metallically whirring in the air and the bombs
of warning and liberation drop? Needed one to add that?
Oak and triple brass must have surrounded Mr. Archer's heart
when in the evening of his days he set out to compete with the
early romances of Rider Haggard. Dramatic critics need not
write plays at all. Nor if they do, need they write good plays.
But can one, to take an apposite example, imagine Jules
Lemaitre writing not Le Pardon nor LAge difficile but
work.
scholar's conclusions. All of them, perhaps, that are generally
acceptable, for Mr. Robertson's discovery that Chapman wrote

the Pyrrhus speech and the play within a play is not likely to
recommend itself to Shakespeareans, and one student of Chap
man, at least, feels called upon to utter protest against such an

ascription. It is characteristic of Mr. Robertson's method that
he quite overlooks the difficulties into which his ingenious
guesses sometimes plunge him. To establish the presence of
Chapman's hand in Hamlet it is not sufficient to point out
certain similarities to Chapman's style; a plausible hypothesis
must be put forward to account for Chapman's connection with
the play, and this Mr. Robertson does not even attempt. In like
manner his guess that the old Hamlet was a two-part play
leads him to the strange conclusion that the second part began
with the return of Laertes.
This would leave so little of the
well-known story to be told that even Kyd with his gift for the
introduction of irrelevant matter would have been hard put to
make a five-act tragedy out of the poor remainder. Yet when all
is said, one owes thanks to Mr. Robertson for his insistence on
the futility of a purely aesthetic criticism of Hamlet and for

ingenious suggestions scattered through his work.
Drama
Loaded Dice
A'.
audience of extraordinary distinction gathered at the
Booth Theater to witness the first performance of The
Green Goddess by Mr. William Archer. Academic powers

and principalities displayed both easy majesty and graceful
unbending. The literary and editorial world had sent its emis
saries. Some unsophisticated youth aspiring to the honors of
letters and of learning would have been abashed by such a
blaze of glory. To one who was neither young nor unsophisti
cated the splendor of the scene was not untouched by gloom.
Mr. Winthrop Ames, it is true, lived up to the fondest expec
tations of his cultured friends. The scenic production was
his tribesmen of the hills.
Three sons of his father have just
Need one take the trouble to add that the rajah
La Femme X
In Mr. Archer's breast, however, as in Faust's, two souls

have always dwelled. He has done magnificent service in
introducing Ibsen to the English-speaking public. He has also
written a book called Play-making which is widely used as
a text-book and contains a chapter called Chance and Coinci
dence. Here he wrote: The stage is the realm of appear

ances, not of realities, where paste jewels are at least as
effective as real ones. If this referred to a ballerina's neck
lace it would be true. But it refers to much more and so be
comes dangerously untrue. The world itself is only a world

of appearances. The drama seeks to interpret the spiritual
meaning of that phenomenal order by an act of heightened
and condensed and clarified imitation. It must be, in a sense,
more real, more packed with reality than any fragment of the
sprawling, shifting world of appearances; it holds fast a con
centrated bit of reality for our contemplation. It does that or
it is nothing. And further Mr. Archer wrote: The play
wright is perfectly justified in letting chance play its probable
and even inevitable part in the affairs of his characters. That
is very loose and very inaccurate thinking. For what is a
chance or an accident? It is the event of a chain of casualty
that our vision does not embrace. Could we grasp the universe
entire and be privy to all its workings, chance and accident
would disappear. They are brief names for a necessary igno
rance.
But it is the aim of the dramatist to make life more
superb in shape and color and rich verisimilitude. There were

group scenesbarbaric warriors with dark shields and slant
and not less intelligible.
ing spears silhouetted against a burning skythat took one's
ality that explain the events with which he deals.
breath away; there was a room in the rajah's palace where

faultless beauty spoke of malignity in every detail. It is also
Greeks derived chance from the inexorable will of a fate to
true that Mr. George Arliss gave a performance of such

pliancy and precision that he seemed to flash and darken like
a polished blade in alternate sunshine and shadow, that Mr.
Ivan Simpson was of an astonishing raciness and truth, and

that Mr. Cyril Keightly and Miss Olive Wyndham displayed
their considerable talents to the best advantage. Nor must
one forget that, at the appropriate moment, Mr. Arliss made a
curtain speech whose easy elegance was a triumph of the art

which conceals art, and that the distinguished dramatic critic
and translator of Ibsen followed him in one that added weighti

ness to grace and glow to sparkle.
And yet that touch of
gloom persisted.
For all this pomp and circumstance was secondary. There

was, after all, a play. And the fable of that play is as follows:
Two British officers and a woman, unhappily wed to one, chastely
adored by the other, crash down in their airplane over the
remotest Himalayas into the unknown principality of Rookh.
While the rajah is being summoned, the three sit in the left
of the stage-picture and explain to each other their most
It is his first business, so far as it is
humanly speaking possible, to command all the chains of caus

The wise
which even the gods were subject. They made it part of their
universal order. Mr. Archer really means sudden intrusion
of the uncaused. But the uncaused does not exist. The seri
ous modern dramatist who admits accident or chance is not
unlike a chemist who should assist recalcitrant nature to pro

duce the specious show of a successful result to an experiment
by the injection of substances that negate the experiment's
entire purpose and meaning. The artist, to be sure, is fallible.
He works with treacherous and imponderable materials. His
severest masterpiece will seem to him still not inevitable enough.
He must be content if, in his innermost consciousness, he knows
that it has grown and has not been made. Mr. Archer pro
tests that, in spite of his statements, he does not like to see
the dice loaded. To admit chance, accident, or inexplicable
coincidence at all is to load the dramatic dice at the very out
set. Once you do that you can translate Ibsen and write The
Green Goddess with equal cheerfulness. But the grim old
Norseman among the shades would understand the touch of
gloom that would not, to two or three people, lift from the
Booth Theater the other night.
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
The Nation
FOU N D E D
1865
NEW YORK, wedNESDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 1921
Vol. CXII
No. 2902
sentatives in Congress. True, the total of 175,000 men pro
Contents
vided for is still absurdly large. But at least we may be
EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
251
EDITORIALS:
The Future of the British Empire. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mr. Hoover, Feed Russia 1.........
...
A Century of Fenimore Cooper...
...
The Menace of Thrift. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
THE WHITE WOMANS BURDEN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
HOW LONG WILL POLAND LAST? By James A. Honeij.
WOMEN TO THE RESCUE. By Harriet Connor Brown.............
INDUSTRIAL PEACE IN CLEVELAND. By William J. Mack. . . . . . . .
POEMS:
Sabina. By Savilla Graham... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Church-Bell. By Elinor Wylie. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Amerindian Air. By Hartley Alexander......
. .
Boomerang. By Alfred Kreymborg. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Different Day. By Grace Hazard Conkling
...
Night Is Forgotten. By Hilda Conkling. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
CORRESPONDENCE ..................................................
- - -
A PHOTOGRAPHER CHALLENGES.
254
255
255
256
257
259
261
262
264
264
265
265
265
265
266
By Herbert J. Seligmann.......
268
The Business of Religion. By Richard Roberts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Universal History. By Preserved Smith. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Books in Brief....................................................
DRAMA:
The Case of John Hawthorne.
By Ludwig Lewisohn..........
Disarmament in 1898and Now. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
American Property in Germany. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
A Manifesto from British Intellectuals..............................
269
270
270
BOOKS:
gratified with a Congress nearly unanimous in dissenting

from the President's pathetic assertion that he is unable
to see in the condition of the world at large or in the need
of the United States any such change as would justify the

reduction [from an army of 280,000]. President Wilson's
message adduces one memorable reason for his veto.
The
present bill, he urges, makes insufficient allowance for the

Chemical Warfare service, the use of which . . . is a neces
sary addition to the pre-war strength of the army. Thus,

a President of the United States has officially endorsed the
use of poison gas! But why recall how the world shuddered
at its first introduction in the recent great war, the war
which we entered to make the world safe from just such
abomination? Meanwhile, in the race between battleships
and airplanes, the dreadnoughts lead. Whichever wins out,

271
one thing is certainthe taxpayers will lose.
272
272
275
IFTY-NINE million dollars thrown away!
Shipping
Board and aviation scandals pale beside the bare

OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, EDITOR
Associate EDITORs
LEWIS S. GANNETT
FREDA KIRCHWEY
ARTHUR WARNER
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
ERNEST. H. GRUENING
CARL VAN DOREN
MANAGING EDITOR
LITERARY EDITOR
SUBSCRIPTION RATEsFive dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and
THE NATION, 20 Vesey Street, New York City. Cable Address: NATION, New
HO are the farmers that are asking for the tariff
on food proposed by the Fordney bill? The National

Nonpartisan League has been assailed on many grounds, but
its critics never dispute that it stands for the interests of
farmers; indeed a stock complaint is that the League is a
class organization for the sole benefit of farmers. Yet the
League's official organ, the Nonpartisan Leader, rightly
points out that the American farmer is not suffering from
foreign competition but because he cannot sell enough of
his own American products abroad. So long as we con
tinue to sell more goods to Europe than we buy, foreign
exchange is going to continue out of line, says the Leader.
In other words, a revival of export trade is to be attained
by stimulating, not by penalizing, imports. Why, then, the
Fordney tariff on food? The Leader guesses this:
Simply because Congress is getting ready to pass a new high
tariff protecting American manufacturers against all Euro
pean competition, and thereby enabling them to put up prices
as high as they like. This tariff is coming next spring. When
it is introduced the politicians want to be able to go to the
farmers and say: We have already helped you out with a
criminality with which the Government of the United States
has squandered the people's money upon the group of exiles

who have styled themselves the Russian Embassy and fed
themselves at Uncle Sam's trough for the past two and a
half years. We have known that Bakhmeteff and Co., rem
nants of a dead regime, were living on war loans granted
by the United States to the old Russian Government; but
now comes Nicholas Kelley, Assistant Secretary of the Treas
ury of the United States, and testifies that since the fall
of the Kerensky Government the sum of $59,000,000 has
been paid out by the United States to support the propa
ganda and dinners of the Russian gentry who have been
living so high in Washington while we were deporting the

real representative of the real de facto Russian Government.
When Mr. Bakhmeteff needed money, Mr. Kelley testified, he

drew a check on the National City Bank, whereupon the
bank called up the Treasury Department to ask if it was all
right. The Treasury Department, acting upon the advice
of the State Department that Mr. Bakhmeteff was the official
representative of the recognizedbut non-existentRussian
Government, approved the payments.
YSTERY aplenty lurks behind the strange reparations
agreements reached at Paris. When the French
Prime Minister calls the Treaty of Versailles ideally per
fect but not living, and says the only treaty we have is
accord with our allies, and the British Prime Minister
stands up and sententiously declares that the treaty must
stand, roles are reversed in a very curious fashion. Mono
tariff; now it is only fair that we should help the manufac
maniac bitter-enders like Poincar of course attack Briand
turers.
for abandoning the letter of the treaty for the forty-two

yearly payments; but Mr. Lloyd George and M. Briand know
very well that the payments proposed are more than can
HE passage of the army reorganization bill over the

Presidents veto by the unprecedented vote of 271 to
ever be squeezed out of Germany. In the early days of the
16 in the House indicates that the views of the harassed
Paris conference Mr. Lloyd George stood out against such
public are making some slight impression on their repre
preposterous play with figures; in the end he agreed to
The Nation
252
more than the French had really hoped for. Lloyd George
is not the man to give a loaf without getting a loaf in re
turn. The Paris correspondent of the New York World,
Mr. Lincoln Eyre, shrewdly conjectures that Lloyd George
gave Briand something like a free hand as regards Germany
in return for a free hand in the Near East.
Events in
Syria, Smyrna, and Thrace will bear watching.

VERY week seems to bring the Irish situation further
from a settlement, in spite of man's general conviction
that there must be an end to all things. The casualty lists
[Vol. 112, No. 2902
the city to the Poles or to the Lithuanians, as the inhab

itants might decide. Now we read that there is no settle
ment at all; the freebooter Zellgowski still holds Vilna, and
the international army is yet to be formed; in fact, the
situation is so unsettled that there may be no plebiscite
at all. The answer is simple: Zellgowski is a Pole, encour
aged by the Poles, as the Poles are encouraged by the
French. Apparently bankrupt hungry Poland is to be
driven to a new charnel-house. The Paris papers tell us
that the Bolsheviki are preparing a new offensive, and ex
perience would teach us that such stories are inevitable
grow longer, and as they grow the Government busies itself
forerunners of a Polish offensive even if we did not know
with new and more fantastic methods of terror.
from other sources that the port of Danzig is busily unload

ing munitions and men sent from France for Poland. The
It seizes a
distinguished Irishman like Colonel Moore, an officer of

long-standing in the British army and a brother of
George Moore, and carries him exposed in an armed motor
lorry as an assurance against attack. (Did not the Germans
treat civilians in Belgium in some such way?) It attempts
to make the citizens themselves, in the martial law area,
form themselves into armed squads to help England fight
their own country. The Government's policy is facing attack

not only from the Labor Party and from influential Lib
erals such as Ex-Premier Asquith and Sir John Simon, but
from the London Times and other sober organs which are
beginning to call that policy stupid. In a speech at Bir

mingham the other day it is reported that Mr. Lloyd
George's only answer to Mr. Asquith's criticism of the

Government's Irish policy was a jest. How long can he
depend upon his canned majority to laugh at that particu
lar joke?
USTEN CHAMBERLAINS admission that England
some time ago made proposals for the cancelation of
international indebtedness must astonish and horrify those
simple, loyal American bankers who have steadfastly as
serted that even to mention such a cancelation to the Eng
lish would be taken by that sensitive race as a grave affront.
To us it seems that the propaganda in that direction which
the British Government is obviously starting, has a states
manlike and humane sound. Doubtless England's debt to
the United States would sooner or later be paidif the
Continent paid its debts to England. But we may as well

make up our minds once for all that they never will be paid.
They cannot be. The desperate dying people of Europe have
other things to do with what money they have still left.
Moreover, England and the United States have selfish in
terests that must not be overlooked. As payment cannot

be made in gold on account of the conditions of exchange,
it would have to be made in goods.
This would mean the
very dumping of cheap foreign commodities in England
Polish Minister of War and Marshal Pilsudski have been
in Paris conferring with Marshal Foch about the best

means of meeting the situation, and the result is an
Entente the terms of which are still secret.
ENATORS and Representatives setting out to investi

gate the conduct of American civil and military officers
in Haiti might well begin by a study of the Haitian press.
They might choose almost at random among the Haitian
newspapers of the last few months, since the Navy censor
ship has been lifted, and find accounts of brutalities charged
against the bearers of American Kultur to the negro repub
lic. One journal especially, Le Courrier Haitien, edited by
Constant Vieux and published in Port-au-Prince, contains
illuminating details. In the number of January 5 are the
names of two captains of United States Marines and one
lieutenant, charged with burning 36 Haitian residences on
June 23, 1918. The names of the victims are given. In
the number of January 7 is a circumstantial account of the
murder of a woman on the night of January 6, 1921, by
three United States Marines. The names and testimony of .

witnesses are given. In the numbers of January 11, 12, and
14 are charges that the public health service of Haiti, di
rected by Americans, is administered incompetently and is
directly responsible for the spread of the epidemic of small
pox in the island. It is charged that patients in the general
hospital of Port-au-Prince were covered with vermin, and
that patients are permitted to leave the hospital during con
valescence when most likely to spread the contagion.
O relief is to be found in turning from the blessings

with which American intervention has graced Haiti
to the well-being conferred on the neighboring republic of
Santo Domingo. The Dominican Republic maintains an in
formation bureau in New York City. From this bureau a
statement was issued on February 1, throwing further light
and the United States of which all classes in both those
on the benevolence which has characterized American inter
countries have reason to be afraid.
vention in the Caribbean. On the night of December 26,

the statement recites, a group of United States Marines set
Putting it quite
simply, Americans will not get the cash and do not want
the goods. At the same time, these debts do represent an

obligation, and we are not in favor of any uncritical gestures
of generosity. The United States has a right to demand
on fire the store of Seor Luis Bautista and the residences
ing accounts of the international army which was to occupy
of Seores Isabel Guzman and Felicia Astacio, in the com

munity of Guayabo Dulce, situated in the Hato Mayor sec
tion. To carry out their criminal intent, the perpetrators
of this offense made use of kerosene with which they freely
sprinkled the floor and walls. Mr. Bautista, the victim of
the burning, had protested to an American naval officer
against an assault committed by a United States Marine
upon Mrs. Hermogenes Astacio, whereupon Mr. Bautista was
warned by several Marines to keep his mouth shut lest he
Vilna, supervise an impartial plebiscite, and then turn over
Suffer for it.
that the money due it which it does not get shall not go
into wasteful financial systems in the debtor countries, or
to increasing armaments, or to adventures in imperialism.
TRANGE things happen on the borders of Russia. Only

two months ago the newspapers burst forth with glow
The Nation
Feb. 16, 1921]
ABOR should congratulate itself as heartily as does

the public on the conviction in New York of Robert
P. Brindell, czar of the building trades, charged with
extortion. He has blackened the name of organized labor
and has given a club into the hand of every agitator for
the open shop and for the policy of putting labor in its
253
no more than remember the Beatitudes it might come home

to him that the meek are far from powerless; it is a para
dox, but it is also the simple truth, that in the end they are
unconquerable. Why will he not realize that the tyrant by

his tyranny after a time begins to dignify his victim and
to dishonor himself? This is not merely the vision of the
place. The law should now move just as inexorably to ob
prophets; this is the way of the world.
tain the conviction of the leaders of all the employing

rings in the same trades. Mr. Untermyer's admirable
task will not be complete until every giver or taker of
thing to heed neither the world nor the prophets.
bribes, every conspirator against the needs of the people

and against public decency is behind the bars. The business
of providing houses for the people has apparently been

converted to a source of private corruption in New York
and Chicago and Cleveland, and doubtless in other large
cities.
It needs continued investigation and thorough dis
infection.
OW topsy-turvy the world is appears once more from

the news that with the poor of England facing the
hardest of winters, the English herring catch has been
artificially restricted by forbidding the Yarmouth fishing
boats to go to sea on certain days and restricting the hours

during which fishing can be carried on. Russia used to buy
enormous quantities of Russian herrings, but Great Britain
being still like ourselves in the pleasant business of starving

Russian women and children, no herrings can yet be sold
ECOGNIZING that the record size of the cotton crop

in the State of Oklahoma is in part the cause of its
declining value, growers have resolved to reduce production
next season by one-quarter to one-half. This cotton-grow
ers strike is approved by the head of the Oklahoma State
Board of Agriculture, who advises: Do not plant any more
[cotton] than you can pick yourself, or with the aid of your
family. He suggests that the growers pick what bolls
have neither been picked nor spoiled, thus making unneces
sary the planting of large acreages next season, and urges
that more products be raised for home consumption, so that
planters will not have to barter to obtain their necessities.
Seven banks in as many cotton-growing counties have failed
through the inability of planters to liquidate their debts.
One grower reported that he could not obtain a pair of
cotton overalls for a bale of cotton. Many tenant farmers
permitted their acreages to rot that they might earn from
$1.75 to $2.50 a day picking in neighbors' fields. Despite
the belated picking movement, at least a quarter of the crop
has been left lying on the ground to rot, and the manager
of the cotton clearing-house in Oklahoma City estimated
recently that after disposing of 75 per cent of the cotton
they had picked, growers had been able to liquidate only

10 per cent of their debts. No wonder our farmer popula
tion is crying for relief.
"[VHE plain injustice and simple immorality of keeping
Eugene Debs in prison because of his opinions grad
ually incur all the penalties which in such a case are ines
capable. The honor in which he is held grows greater
among his friends with each day of his sentence; so strong
a weapon the President has put in Debs's hands. The dis
honor associated with the man who holds Debs a prisoner
grows greater with equal speed; so much has the Presi
dent weakened his own case.
It is a perilous
to those living under the Government of Lenin.
British
fishermen are thus restricted in fishing and catch in order

to keep high the prices for English men and women at a
time when a million unemployed know not where their food
is to come from. In America we propose to put up the bars

against cheaper food coming in from other countries in
order to help our farmers, thus keeping up the cost of living
for everybody else. In Brazil they are burning coffee for
fuel and imploring the Government to fix a higher price for
rubber by arbitrary means. In India the Tea Association
has demanded a limitation of the tea crop to 80 per cent of
normal, again to keep up prices. People in China and in
Central Europe and many another place may starve to

death, but prices must be kept up at any cost.
Is it better
that we should live on thus and alternate from famine to
plenty than that we should seriously set ourselves to the

task of working out a system of marketing which shall
fairly and efficiently distribute the produce of the world?
HE February number of Books of the Month has some
interesting figures with regard to the sale of books in
thirty-eight representative American cities during Decem
ber, 1920. The most popular novel on these lists was James
Oliver Curwoods The Valley of Silent Men, and next to
it came Mary Roberts Rinehart's A Poor Wise Man. But
on the whole the results look amazingly like a triumph for
the high-brows. The Age of Innocence ranks third,
Main Street fifth, Galsworthys In Chancery tenth,
Hugh Walpole's The Captives thirteenth, Rose Macaulay's
Potterism sixteenth. Blasco Ibez, whom some readers
think a highbrow, comes fourteenth. Among non-fiction
books the first place is taken by Frederick O'Briens White
Shadows in the South Seashave we not said that the
whole world is taking itself off to those Isles of Eden?
And when Woodrow Wilson
Wells's The Outline of History comes fourth; the only
refused the recommendation that Debs be pardoned on Lin
poetry on the list, Kipling's Inclusive Verse, is four
coln's birthday, he gave opportunity for a magnificent re

versal of the position in which the two men stand. Debs
seized upon it with what might seem merely a great sense

for drama were it not so clearly a great perception of the
moral situation. Woodrow Wilson does not punish me,
Debs says; I cannot be punished. As long as I am true to
my ideals, my conscience is clear.
I know that
it is Wilson who needs a pardon from the American people,

and if I had it within my power I would grant him the
pardon that would set him free.
If Mr. Wilson would do
teenth.
The lion's share of fame goes to biography and
memoirs, beginning with Mrs. Asquith's Autobiography,

second in rank, and going down through Joseph Bucklin
Bishops Theodore Roosevelt and His Time, Count
Fleury's Memoirs of the Empress Eugnie, The Ameri

canization of Edward Bok, Opal Whiteleys The Story
of Opal, Mrs. Aldrichs Crowding Memories, Andrew
Carnegie's Autobiography, Roosevelts Letters to Hi

Children, William James's Letters, and A Cycle
Adams Letters, with not a few others in the lower Y
/
254
The Nation
The
Future of the
"FTy HE highways of the East are strewn and littered with

A the debris of the recent war. And if there falls upon
us . . . the task of being the scavenger, at least give
us time to carry out that duty." In these words Lord Curzon recently summed up the official government conception
of Britain's place as a sort of glorified crossing sweeper,
brushing up with armies and advisers and diplomatic mis
sions, at all the cross-roads of the world, the accumulated
debris that the war dumped and left behind to decay and
spread its poison. Such is the official attitude; and it
creeps into the public statements of almost every British
statesman when he refers to India or Egypt or Mesopo
tamia or Persia or Palestine or the other territories where
the imperial scavenger is at work. And naturally, from this
point of view, Britain expects appreciation of its labors.
Indifference on the part of the peoples who are receiving
these gratuitous favors is not to be endured; open resent
ment is sheer treason. The Government has, for example,
lately stated that England cannot be expected to keep its
army dallying around in northern Persia indefinitely. As
Lord Curzon has pointed out, he does not "grudge the
responsibilities that have been entailed and the heavy ex
penditure that has been incurred by this country if, in the
chaos that menaces the whole of the Eastern world, we can
enable a single Mohammedan state of great traditions and
possessing a long and friendly connection with Great Brit
ain, to maintain its integrity, its frontiers, and its indepen
dence. But it must be a two-sided and not a one-sided obli
gation, and if Persia is unable or unwilling to play her part,
we cannot out of mere altruism indefinitely continue ours."
Only once in a while does a different and discordant note
creep into Britain's confessions of altruism; as when Win
ston Churchill lately indicated the Government's intention
of withdrawing the troops from Mesopotamia, and remarked
blandly: "So far as this Mesopotamian oil project is con
cerned, it does not appear to me to have anything like the
guaranty of success that the Anglo-Persian oil fields have."
"If we hold the Persian Gulf and Basra," said the Lon
don Chronicle, "we have the key of the Middle East." The
British taxpayer also is beginning to make his voice heard,
and is asking embarrassing questions in the House of Com
mons. He has learned that up to last August a sum of
100,000,000 had been spent in Mesopotamia since the arm
istice, in return for which the taxpayer has secured, says
the London Express, nothing but revolt; while 7,000,000
a year are being poured into Palestine where Britain has
lately accepted a mandate under the League. Something
more encouraging and tangible than a mere sensation of
altruism and wide-flung dominion must be offered to the
British subject if he is to be expected to pay bills of these
dimensions.
Great Britain was the victor in the warwhoever won it.
All the important prizes went to swell that already swollen
Empire. But the wages of victory are endless wars. At
the moment of its greatest power and pride the British
Empire is more permeated than ever before in its history
with the germs of decay. It is not, as some of its enemies
boast, on the verge of collapse. The solid bed-rock of its
great self-governing dominions will hold it together for
many years to come. But its more erratic adventurings in
the East may cause its boundaries to shrink and its spheres
[Vol. 112, No. 2902
British Empire
of influence to dwindle. Persia does not want British troops

patrolling its northern frontier and protecting it from the
Bolsheviki with whom it has already negotiated an agree
ment. Mesopotamia is in constant active revolt against the
British occupation. Armenia is a Soviet Republic. In the
latter part of this month a conference will be held at Mos
cow of official representatives of the Middle Eastern states,
including Turkey, Armenia, and Persia, to settle, independ
ently of Great Britain, boundary disputes and any other
outstanding disagreements. As for India, conditions grow
worse every day. The formation of the new mixed councils
under the Home Rule Bill have had no effect on the riots
and shootings that make India a country without a govern
ment. The boycott of the Government, strikes, agricultural
uprisings, mass meetings, and the rumor of famine are
worrying the authorities, and incidents such as recently
occurred when a thousand Indians stopped a train, sup
posedly carrying their arrested leader, by the spectacular
method of lying in a row across the rails, indicate the pas
sion of sacrifice that makes their cause a menace to British
security. It is ominous also that even moderate Indian
opinion is hardening against the British; so good a friend
of England as the Aga Khan, a noted Mohammedan prince,
has warned the British of the dangers inherent in "all these
expeditions and garrisons in Palestine, in Mesopotamia,
and elsewhere, for which India is furnishing most of the
troops . . ."
England's hope in the East lies in a swift reversal of
policy. If she will withdraw from Persia and Mesopotamia;
if she will finally repudiate her protectorate over Egypt and,
except for a garrison on the Canal, withdraw every soldier
from the country; if she will bring home the Indian troops
and reduce materially her own army in India; if she will
extend Indian home rule and make a definite promise of
dominion status within a specified number of years; if she
will make peace with Russia and leave to Bolshevik diplo
macy the problem of Turkey and Armenia, and the fate of
the Caucasian republics; if she will do these things as a
minimum, then Britain may be able to hold together her
Empire. If she does not do these things, she is doomed to
unnumbered years of warfare in the East. The fact is,
however, that the British Government shows signs of a
realization of its alternatives. It is not admitting defeat
or acknowledging its mistakes; but by speaking regretful
words, such as "ingratitude" and "lack of cooperation" and
"the responsibility must be theirs," the Government is pre
paring to pull out of places where, financially and politically,
it can no longer afford to stay. Meanwhile, in Ireland,
Britain's whole imperial policy is concentrated in a bitter,
devastating struggle that has got past the hope of easy
compromise. And in South Africa the campaign for seces
sion now going on proves, whatever may be its outcome,
that a conquest by force of arms can never be complete.
The future of the British Empire depends upon the wis
dom of the British Government. Several influences are at
work to teach the Government that saving wisdom, and chief
among them is the influence of the ordinary British subject
who looks into his pocket-book and sees wars in the East
and wars in Irelandand nothing else, and who shakes his
head and decides that glory and scavenging and that sort of
thing don't pay.
___ ===
Feb. 16, 1921]
-- -
The Nation
Mr. Hoover, Feed Russia!

R. HOOVER: The Quakers have just received a cable
from Moscow which says that the Soviet Government
will give them the fullest opportunity to distribute relief

supplies from America. The Quaker delegates now in Mos
cow have secured a warehouse for the exclusive use of their
255
tribution Board, which have persisted in their earnest de

sire to help in Russia despite almost every conceivable form
of official and unofficial discouragement, have established a
Satisfactory basis for supervision in Moscow.
It can be
done. And, as you know, the Friends are sending a larger

unit to help in the continuance and expansion of their work.
Except in the villages behind the present Soviet lines on
the Polish front, which you are supplying without Govern
mental aid across the ill-defined frontier, you are feeding no
supplies under their own management. But the need in So

viet Russia, untouched as it has been by the charity of the
children in Soviet Russia. Officially, you have had no direct
western world for the past four years, is too great for the
resources of the Quakers; it transcends their powers. In
evitably in such an emergency the eyes of the world turn to
you do not intend to. Yet the two representatives who went
to Moscow for you to negotiate for feeding the Polish vil
you.
lages which were for a time behind the advancing Soviet
You represent to half of Europe the finest, truest
meaning of America.
And when we in America seek to
express our good-will to the world, we inevitably, because of

your untiring service these past seven years, look to you.
Will you not, in dealing with the children who live under
the rule of those Bolsheviks whom you so much dislike, show
that same broad human charity that you showed when you
organized the work of rescuing some millions of the chil

dren of our late enemies from starvation?
You must have seen that other Moscow cable just received
by the Friends Service Committee:
38,000 Moscow babies need milk daily; present supplies can
only feed 7,000; infantile mortality 40 per cent; 550,000 gross
tins condensed milk urgently needed for feeding Moscow infants
during March, April, and May. We urgently require milk, cod

liver oil, and soap for 6,000 children between 3 and 8 years old,
already known to Moscow health authorities as requiring sana
torium care. 21,000 children between 8 and 15, known to Mos
cow health authorities as requiring sanatoria, need soap and fat.
Clothing needs are for soft material for infants; sweaters, un
derwear, stockings, and boots for older children.
negotiations with the Bolsheviks for such feeding, and say .
army, were impressed both by the need in Moscow and by

the possibilities of cooperation, and so reported.
No Gov
ernment in Europe discriminates more in favor of its chil
dren than does the Soviet Government, yet they perforce

go hungry.
You have called the children whom your organization is
feeding in Central Europe our messengers of good-will.
We want messengers of good-will across all frontiers, in all
countries, whether their governments be monarchist, par
liamentary, or soviet. We cannot understand a conception
of charity which selects children to feed according to the
politics, or even the actions, of their parents. And we can
not believe that you will long be untrue in Russia to the
things for which the name Hoover stands in the rest of
Europe.
A Century of Fenimore Cooper

HEN James Fenimore Cooper wrote The Spy one
Can you let political disapproval or resentment at the im

prisonment of Americans in Moscowespecially when so
many simple Russians have been imprisoned without cause,
and often brutally treated, in our own country-steel your
heart against such an appeal? Can you plead poverty when
you have never before hesitated to plan to meet the need
even before the money was in hand? We know the apathy
and weariness with which America today meets appeals for
hundred years ago he wrote the earliest American

novel to achieve permanent reputation, and its success con
firmed him in the career which has done more than that of
any other American novelist to furnish the world with a

legendary notion concerning this land and nation. The
spirit of Leather-Stocking is awake, said a French states
man in the spring of 1917, meaning that the United States
had entered the World War.
need in Europe; you have surmounted them and raised, if

not the thirty-three million you asked for, yet nearly
twenty million dollars for child-feeding in Poland, in Czecho
Slovakia, in Austria, and in Germany. Will you not strug
gle once more to rouse them to meet the need in Russia?
It will not be easy either to raise the money or to arrange
terms satisfactory to you and to the Soviet Government. The

Russians naturally regard with a certain suspicion relief
organizations which have steadfastly shunned Soviet Rus
sia in the past while feeding its enemies, and they may not
distinguish as yet between organizations which have used
their relief as a form of political propaganda and organiza
tions which do not. Supervision there must be; American
givers have been told so many tales of misuse of relief Sup
plies for Bolshevik armiesstories which Dr. Livingston
Farrand, chairman of the Executive Committee of the Red
Cross, deniesthat they would demand strict supervision of

distribution.
But the Friends and the Jewish Joint Dis
* In a letter, to Dr. Judah L. Magnes, dated, January 14, 1921; Mr. Hoover
said: I would say first, that I shall not ask the American people for charity
toward Bolshevik Russia until complete American supervision can be estab

lished, upon the same terms as we act everywhere else in the world; second,
that the organization I direct will not jeopardize Americans by establishing
them in Russia so long as Americans are held prisoners without cause.
His image surprised many
Americans who had not realized how clearly a fictitious
character of Cooper's still seems to the rest of the world a

significant symbol, how much the national type is still iden
tified with the simplicity, downrightness, competence, unso
phistication, and virgin prejudice that appear in Natty

Bumppo. The adults of various foreign countries who may
have had occasion to encounter the commercial Yankee er
rant doubtless have a different conception, but for the boys
of both hemispheres the scout, the trapper, Hawkeye, La

Longue Carabine, Pathfinderas Natty is variously called
represents the natural American, the unspoiled philoso
pher of the wilderness. Harvey Birch in The Spy, peddler
and patriot, is of the same stock; so is Long Tom Coffin in

The Pilot, the first memorable sailor in American fiction
and to this day almost the best. All three belong to nature;
so, of course, do Cooper's Indians, with certain emphatic
differences ascribed by Cooper to the gifts of their race.
What particularly marks them all is their aloofness from
civilization, their suspicion of the wiles to be encountered
among the civilized. While as a nation we have lost much
of that suspicion and aloofness, it is still instinctive in the
native herd. Witness the powerful tradition of separation
256
The Nation
from Europe. Witnesscomically enoughthe atavistic

trait which influenced Henry James in his first important
novel, "The American," to exhibit a virtuous but be
guiled compatriot suffering at the hands of an elegant, cor
rupt civilization and yet with a magnificent gesture refus
ing to take his revenge out of sheer contempt for those
who have wronged him. Henry James, at the time feeling
keenly the tight exclusiveness of French society, by some
freak of the blood repeated in his novel the gesture of
Daniel Boone, renouncing the "settlements," on which
Cooper had founded the character of Leather-Stocking. If
Henry James had so much of Natty Bumppo in him, who
among us has not had more?
Now this simplicity of character, which appears likewise
in all the novels of Cooper, conditioned his art in a most
important respect. His simple souls require no minute
analysis, but they do require opportunities for action which
may display their qualities. With Harvey Birch it is cease
less flight over the Neutral Ground from friend and foe
alike, for both think him an enemy. With Long Tom it is
an almost incessant battle with the rocks and storms and
warships of the Scottish coast. With Natty Bumppo, re
peated through five romances, it is a whole lifetime of
valor over half a continent. There was thus produced the
panorama of the American frontier which at once became
and has remained the classic record of an heroic age.
The classic record of an heroic age !although not classic
at all in any stricter sense of fidelity to all the circumstances
of the frontier. And yet in spite of the many charges that
have been brought against Cooper's accuracy, charges well
founded and well proved, his potency with his younger au
dience holds steadily up. He may not have recorded his uni
verse exactly, but he created one. His mighty landscapes
lie still unshaken in a secure district of the human imagi
nation. Over such mountains through such dim and terri
fying forests to such glorious lakes the mind still marches
with him, for the moment convinced. His Indians, what
ever their authenticity, are securely established in the
world's romantic memory as a picture of those belated, un
fortunate men of the Stone Age who opposed the ruthless
advance of a more complex civilization. It is to the credit
of mankind that those naked savages, unjustly as they were
dealt with while alive, should still be a little honored with a
chivalrous reputation when dead or conquered. In this
manner all high-minded peoples remember their ancient
defeated enemies. And recent studies of the art and ritual
of the Indians have gone far toward showing that the race
possessed, if not precisely the qualities Cooper ascribed to
them, at least a fineness and elevation of mind which are
worlds closer to Cooper's representation of them than to
the picture as corrected by those subsequentand now
archaiccritics who called the Indians mere squalid sav
ages. That Natty Bumppo, to the contemporary eye doubt
less hard and crude enough, should have been made a hero is
no more remarkable than that the same fortune should have
come to Daniel Boone or Alexander Selkirk, plain men who
like Natty clung to the dearest human virtues in the face
of a nature which would as readily have destroyed as dig
nified them. The unending charm of these diversified ad
ventures inheres not only in the narrative but in the human
disposition which cherishes memories and hopes of a larger
experience, free, abundant, glorious, and on but casual
provocation will follow a great story-teller to the ends of
the earth.
[Vol. 112, No. 2902
The Menace of Thrift

TTÔR several weeks we have had our weather eye on the
r thrift campaign that various worthy business men
have been promoting, and have felt that sooner or later it
was sure to bump into a contrary sentiment among business
men just as worthythat is, with just as much money in
the bankand equally able to hire publicity experts to think
for them and the public. And so it has turned out. An
organization calling itself the National Prosperity Bureau
has sprung into existence, and is ladling cold water on the
preachments of "Thrift Week," during which we were ab
jured in newspaper advertisements and posters to save our
money and invest it (the names of stock brokers who
would help us were obligingly supplied) against a rainy
day.
This kind of thing will not do at all, thinks the National
Prosperity Bureau, and is getting up at four o'clock these
cold winter mornings to plaster our shop windows with
posters of a figure of Uncle Sam sitting at the throttle of
a locomotive. Surrounding him is the inscription: "Full
speed ahead! Clear the track for prosperity! Buy what
you need now!" More than that, the Bureau has locked
horns directly with the Benjamin Franklin Memorial Com
mittee of the New York Thrift Committee (not very thrifty
of words, that body) to which it has addressed a letter
saying:
The mere word "thrift," variously defined by thrift exponents
to meet their respective objects, means in practice, if it means
anything, to buy less. How can buying less open up closed
mills and halt failures? We are opposed to any sort of thrift
which leads to industrial stagnation. We are against any new
national thrift policy which creates a financial imperialism. We
repudiate a thrift, no matter how alluring its guise, which in
evitably reduces the living standards of American workingmen
to the niggardly requisites of certain immigrants.
Thus the Thriftites and the Prosperitites come to blows.
Of course, the advocates of thrift are right. And, of
course, the boosters for prosperity are correct, too. But
as neither side knows in any but a superficial way what
the nice-sounding words of its well-paid publicity experts
are all about, the argument is likely to leave the public
confused. Civilization certainly needs to be simplified. We
need to reduce our wants, to cut down our standard of
living, to buy less, to make less, to work less, to consume
less of our lives in the machinery of living. Thrift is one
path in that direction, but it leads finally to broader roads
headed toward a new industrial system. Prosperity, as
commonly understood, lies in the opposite quarter of the
heavens. It consists of stimulating wants and scrambling
to supply them; of working feverishly twelve hours a day
that we may spend deliriously the other dozen. The Thrift
ites are right, but they do not know why. The Prosperitites
are wrong, but the public does not know why. And until
the public learns, it will continue to spend when it can
and save when it has tojust as it is doing today. There
has never been a "buyers' strike," except in so far as high
prices have compelled people to reduce their purchases to
conform with their incomes.
Meanwhile, we predict that the Thriftites and the Pros
peritites will speedily settle their differences. For they are
all worthy business menwith virtuous money in the bank
and they do not wish to upset the industrial system out
of which their worth and their virtue are derived.
Feb. 16, 1921]
The Nation
The White Woman's

"FN February there will be held in Washington a meeting
A of women which will be comparable only to their first
great gathering in Seneca Falls in 1848." This, though
from the Press Chairman of the National Woman's Party,
is no overstatement. The three-day convention of the Na
tional Woman's Party on the 101st anniversary of Susan
B. Anthony's birth will be notable, not merely because of
the character of the women who attend, nor because they
justly celebrate their important part in winning for this
country political sex equality, but also because of the
opportunity that this great yet incomplete victory affords.
For incomplete it is. The Nineteenth Amendment has
been ratified. The world has been told that America which
first lit the beacon of political democracy on earth has at
last joined the nations which make no political distinction
among their citizens because of sex. Yet some three million
womenthe women of colorin the States south of the
Mason and Dixon line are still disfranchised. In The Nation
of October 6, William Pickens describes the unconstitu
tional and illegal devices by which the American woman
citizen of African, or of mixed European and African, de
scent is robbed of her vote. This article was sent to each
one of the 160 members of the National Advisory Committee
of the National Woman's Party. With it went four ques
tions :
1. Do you approve of the attempt to nullify the Nineteenth
Amendment in regard to colored women?
2. What steps, if any, do you purpose to take to help remedy
this situation?
3. Do you consider this a matter for official action and effort
by the National Woman's Party?
4. What suggestions have you for a course of procedure?
In sending these letters, The Nation felt confident that
no body of women would be more alive to the issue in
volved, to its identity with the bitter fight which they had
just waged and apparently brought to a triumphant con
clusion, indeed, to its inseparability from the whole fabric
of our democracy. Would not these "suffrage radicals,"
fresh from the hardships of disfranchisement and discrimi
nation, see clearly the far graver and greater injustice now
being treacherously and dishonestly worked on an integral
part of their electorate?
About one-third of those written to replied. The tenor
of these responses was most gratifying. The majority de
clared themselves outraged at the disfranchisement of
American colored women and resolved to fight it through.
A few were evasive and noncommittal, one or two opposed.
Yet if any considerable part of the hundred or more who
did not reply is even indifferent, the outlook is none too en
couraging.
The Nation feels that this issue is fundamental and that
whatever the arguments for or against the continuation of
the National Woman's Party, as an organization, its mem
bers should realize that their goal has not been achieved
and the Nineteenth Amendment not won until it means the
enfranchisement of every woman regardless of color or race.
Will the women of America accept this honor, responsi
bility, and duty?
Among those replies which appeared to be unfavorable is
that of Mrs. Oliver H. P. Belmont [a native of Alabama],
from whom was received the following:
257
Burden
Mrs. Oliver H. P. Belmont wishes me to acknowledge receipt

of your letter of September 24 asking her to answer four ques
tions. Mrs. Belmont says she finds it needless to give her
answers to these questions. She regrets, however, not being
able to oblige you.
Louise Galvin, Secretary,
as well as the following from Charleston, S. C:
I have yours of 24th inst. asking if I approve the disfran
chising of the newly enfranchised Negro women. I say em
phatically no. At same time I say most emphatically, let the
South handle its own problems, just as I say let the Californians
solve their own problems; one in the North or West, where
the proportion of Negro population is about one to every thou
sand white, cannot possibly undertake to give advice or to help
us in the South, where we have communities where the Negro
either predominates numerically, or is at rate of half and half.
We in the South would not presume to go to the Western coast
and undertake to settle the trials and problems caused in Cali
fornia by the yellow race problem, and no more can the North
come into the South and undertake to solve our problems. If
you were living in a community, like this city, where we have
half and half, or in Beaufort, S. C, where the Negroes outnum
ber the whites and where they are constantly incited by the
white race coming from a distance to meddle into affairs of
which they know nothing because they have no experience, you
would then perhaps get something of the point of view of the
South. . . .
Susan P. Frost.
Somewhat more non-committal is the brief reply:
I'm very sorry to have nothing to say on this important
question. Frankly I don't see any clear solution. I shall read
with the greatest interest what others have to say about it.
Martha B. Bruere.
Entirely non-committal is that of Mrs. Charlotte Perkins
Gilman who writes:
Your second letter about the colored woman voter received.
I do not give views or interviews save as I am moved to
on my own initiative. In that case I seek to publish them
professionally.
C. P. Gilman.
A teacher of Latin in a Georgia college, after admitting
some haziness on the whole question, says:
As you know we white women were prevented from voting
in November by the registration clause. The more I think on
the race problem the more insoluble it seems.
Becoming slightly more positive is the reply of the Na
tional Chairman, who writes:
We have just received your letter of September 24 attached
to the October 6 issue of The Nation. In reply I am writing
to inform you that a bill for the enforcement of the Nineteenth
Amendment was introduced last spring in Congress, but was
not acted upon owing to the fact that Congress adjourned before
ratification of the suffrage amendment was completed. This
enforcement resolution will be brought up at the coming session
of Congress and we will endeavor to have it passed.
Alice Paul.
Of the stirring letters, those which breathe the true
spirit of militant American democracy, the following are
but a few specimens:
1. I disapprove wholly of every attempt to nullify the Nine
teenth Amendment, or to infringe in any way upon the right to
vote of any colored women or colored men, or any other citizens
of the United States who are not actively insane or undergoing
punishment for non-political crimes.
2. I propose to work with other voters for the passage of
the anti-lynching law, and for reduction in the representation
of any State which' may not obey the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
258
The Nation
Amendments and uphold, in letter and in spirit, the Nineteenth

Amendment.
3. Yes.
4. It is my intention to bring up this subject at the ap
proaching meeting of the National Woman's Party, hoping for
official action at that meeting, followed by effective insistence
upon equality before the law for all women.
Florence Kelley.
And a letter from Mrs. Harriot Stanton Blatch, some
what too long for reprinting, which includes "an old yellow
pencil note of my mother's which shows how she felt in
regard to our treatment of the colored race. I feel exactly
the same."
From distant California came this letter:
1. Decidedly not. The National Woman's Party, of which I
have been a member since its foundation, has fought for sex
equality at the polls, subject only to the same limitations as
apply to men. Any attempt to disfranchise women on the
ground of color deals as mortal a blow to the ideal of democ
racy in general and the purpose of the Nineteenth Amendment
in particular as to disfranchise laboring women on the ground
of elan. The Nineteenth Amendment, in other words, is more
than skin deep and is color blind. White women who cannot
consider this question apart from race prejudice and who are
willing that the spirit and purpose of the Nineteenth Amend
ment be nullified where black women are concerned, should keep
in mind the selfish consideration that once the Nineteenth
Amendment is tampered with where colored women are con
cerned it can be tampered with where white women are con
cerned. It is not that equality which is justice. We aimed at
justice.
2. I shall call attention to this matter in the San Francisco
Civic Center, also in any other organizations where public action
on their part would prove influential. My association with the
National Woman's Party, however, has converted me wholly
to the idea of political action on these political questions. Con
certed public opinion has to work through those political chan
nels by which alone a movement becomes practically effective.
I consider that there has been sufficient education in this coun
try on the subject of political equality and I would therefore
recommend that the National Woman's Party with its equipped
and well-organized body, its unparalleled leadership and sophis
tication in politics undertake such action as is necessary to
protect the Nineteenth Amendment. The Nation probably knows
that in the middle of February there is to be a national con
vention of the National Woman's Party at which time the mat
ter of dissolution or further continuation of the party is to be
voted upon. My personal desire is for its continuation in order
that it may carry on its fight for equality in the fullest sense,
and I shall recommend to the convention, if it votes to continue,
that this matter under present consideration be the first one
for which a fight be made by the organization. Sporadic, in
dividual action here and there is of little avail. Even letters
to congressmen and senators, unless they are let loose upon
them in terrifying numbers, are of little avail. There must be
a responsible body, efficient and tireless such as the N. W. P.
has proved to be, undertaking the work.
3. My reply to question 2 covers affirmatively this question.
4. I feel this question is one for consideration by people more
skilled in political strategy than I am, but in general I would
suggest that "the appropriate legislation" called for in the
second paragraph of the Nineteenth Amendment, to be passed
by Congress for the unqualified enforcement of the amend
ment, be made as strong as that legislation by which the Prohi
bition Amendment is protected and that, if necessary, the
N. W. P. if it remains an active organization insist on the
appointment of Federal officers to protect the rights of citizens
to their vote. . . .
Sara Bard Field.
[Vol. 112, No. 2902
And the following from the Atlantic Coast:

On February 15 next there will be held a national convention
by the National Woman's Party in Washington, D. C. The
paramount issue before that convention will be the question
of the future existence of the Woman's Party which at present
has attained the only object of its organization, namely, the
passage of the Susan B. Anthony Suffrage Amendment. If it
is decided at the convention that we continue to exist as a new
organization one matter will be paramount, whether our future
existence be for political or benevolent purposes. This matter
will go with us, whether we indorse it or not, that of the im
mediate action taken by a large portion of the Southern States
after the recent ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, by
which all women, white or colored, have been disenfranchised.
In other words, that portion of our country which has so per
sistently opposed the object of the Woman's Party, has turned
its defeat into a practical victory for itself, by callously de
fying the Nineteenth Federal Amendment, as was the case re
garding the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. More
over, the situation is much more vital in regard to the Nine
teenth Amendment, for never before has there been a trained
organization of the leading women of the nation associated to
gether for seven years for the sole purpose of carrying through
a Federal amendment. The Woman's Party, if it is to have
a future existence, will stand or fall in accordance with the
path it chooses in this matter. . . . Ella Rush Murray.
And this from the chairman of the Information Com
mittee of the Woman's Republican Club:
Your courteous inquiry of the 19th inst. in relation to suffrage
was delayed in Washington. It is here at last and I hasten to
say in answer to your four questions:
1. I do not.
2. Agitation: appeals to Congress, the courts, and above all
to the press and the public. Aggressive action all along the
line. A man or woman who attempts to deprive a citizen of
his or her right to vote should be disfranchised.
3. I do most assuredly.
4. I prefer to submit this in a later communication. It is a
proposition involving serious thought. I stand with the women
of America, white or colored, in the battle for every right to
which they are entitled under the Constitution.
Jean L. Milholland.
Finally a vigorous letter which the writer subsequently
forbade the use of "either in the compiling of statistics or
otherwise unless you use them in full, including number 5" :
1. Noneither in regard to colored men or colored women.
2. I shall join the N. A. A. C. P. if they will send me their
membership blanks. I shall urge colored people to join the
Socialist Party which will give them membership in the party
on equal terms with the whites and with the triumph of social
ism will give them political and industrial justice.
3. Certainly not. The National Woman's Party was formed
for the purpose of abolishing discrimination against women
specifically suffrage discriminations. In the task of freeing all
womencolored as well as whitesuffragists were not helped
much by colored men voters. On the contrary, the suffrage
referendum of 1915 (Penna.) was beaten chiefly by votes in
wards (Phila.) where the Republican machine is strongest.
4. The colored voters should demand that this present Re
publican congress should cut down the representation from the
Southern States where the colored voters are disfranchised and
should threaten to bolt the party if this is not done. As long
as the colored voters continue to bend before the Republican
Party, so long will they be enslaved.
6. I don't know why The Nation has arrogated to itself the
right to catechize the National Woman's Party. The Nation
was utterly indifferent when the members of the N. W. P.
were illegally thrown into jail for asking for the vote.
Mary Winsor.
Feb. 16, 1921]
The Nation
How
Long
Will
Poland
259
Last?
By JAMES A. HONEIJ
ON the remodeled face of battered Europe the largest
patch applied by the diplomatic surgeons bears the
name of Poland. Ten years henceor lessthe map of
Europe may show no trace of it. Poland, spreading jelly
fish-like over North Central Europe, a thin finger touching
the Baltic, bulging eastward into Bussia and westward into
German territory, is hardly more than a two-dimensional
state. It exists on today's provisional maps, an attempt at
fulfilment of a romantic dream, conceived in the necessity
of statecraft, a creation of military cartographers, a na
tional stop-gap. There is little of a nation in twentieth
century Poland. To speak of it as a republic or a democ
racy is a tragic joke. The so-called Government at Warsaw
scarcely functions. The plaything of a few nobles and aris
tocrats living centuries after their proper time, it does noth
ing and has done nothing for the people. For several years
practically its sole business has been the ineffective waging
of war, deliberate war, against neighbors with a sole view
to enlarging Poland's territory, war which has merely deep
ened the extreme distress of her own people. Of the prob
lems of peace the Government in Warsaw knows naught
and thinks as little, unless it be in terms of apprehension
for something that it does not and cannot understand.
What is the explanation of the Poland of today? Utter
inefficiency, total inexperience in self-government, selfish
ness and intrigue, absence of national feeling except in cer
tain limited ways, and above all the medieval state of mind
of the ruling minority all play their part. Class distinction
between the lord and the laboring classes is as rigidly drawn
as between lord and serf of centuries ago. In the belief of
many Polish noblemen the peasant is his particular prop
erty, bound to him in every respect.
It is often asked why one cannot do business with either
Polish Government or people. Why is it not possible to
come to an understanding which obviously can only result
to their benefit without any expense to them? Why is it
that one's efforts and energies to assist these people are so
often wasted day after day simply for lack of definiteness
and frankness? It makes little difference whether you buy,
sell, or give, the same tiresome, prolonged discussion and
delay are always present.
It has been my unpleasant experience to have again and
again offered to assist with men and material, free of any
obligation on the part of the Government, during crises
when each day's delay meant death to many soldiers, only
to have every conceivable obstacle thrown in the way so that
eventually the project had to be abandoned. During the
crisis of bolshevist invasion an American organization of
fered to plan and equip five sanitary trains. What was the
result? It was necessary to have the individual approval of
no less than fifteen department heads after the minister of
railways and the military commander had finally issued
authorization for it. This was during a period when sol
diers were dying by the hundreds of wounds and disease
for the lack of care and medical attention. It is typical of
Polish management.
I was in Poland during the great Eussian advance. I
was in Minsk when the city was in flames and being hastily
evacuated. But even at this time of supreme national peril
there seemed to be no concerted effort by the authorities in

the city to meet the situation.
I was in Vilna when the
Russian armies were but eight kilometers to the northeast
and patrols were reported to have cut one of the main roads
leading to Warsaw, and again the same lack of organization
was apparent. No provision on the part of the railway author
ities was made to assist in the evacuation of the large mili
tary hospital. The total inability of all departments to cope
with the crisis was harrowing. No definite plans seemed
to have been made to care for the wounded. Numbers of
these were as many as nine days en route to Warsaw from
points covering at least thirty degrees of a circle. Just at
this time dysentery also made its appearance among the
troops, due to lack of proper medical care, resulting in enor
mous losses. Trainloads of box cars, each containing fif
teen or more sick and wounded soldiers lying in the greatest
filth, kept rolling in. They had had no attention whatever
on their trip from the front. The dead lay among the dying,
amid stench and agony unspeakable. But the authorities in
Warsaw seemed to be unmoved by these youthful sacrifices.
Appeals made to the Government for many weeks, earnest
and impassioned offers of assistance fell on the deaf ears
of individuals, callous not only to the descriptions but even
to the sights themselves.
It was seldom that one met wounded officers at the rail
way stations, and much more seldom in the outlying dis
tricts or near the front. That the soldiers were poorly led
and cared for by their officers was a universal plaint. But
the cities, especially Warsaw and Krakow, were filled with
officers in excess even of the number of soldiers on streets
or in cafes. Krakow itself has become famous as the head
quarters of a cavalry regiment made up of the young nobil
ity that had been formed on the distinct understanding that
it was not to be sent to the front. Yet it is from this class
that Polish chauvinism emanates.
Indeed, it was common knowledge not only that the best
regiments came from Posen, where there is large Teutonic
admixture, but that the peasant constitutes whatever back
bone there is of Poland's fighting machine. There is little
doubt that when he fought he fought well; but it is equally
true from personal observation that when he ran he also
ran well. An analysis of the eight weeks of intensive fight
ing and rapid advance of the Russian army shows that the
Polish troops cannot stand successive reverses; that their
morale is soon destroyed. The success of the Polish army
in saving Warsaw was due to the assembling of a new army
largely composed of older men, to French officers and French
generalship, but chiefly to the too rapid progress of the
Russian advance armyand not in any way to the recovery
of the troops' morale in the field.
It is not that the Polish peasant is devoid of patriotism in
the sense of attachment to the plot of soil on which he was
reared, but from his many utterances and general behavior
it is evident that fighting to him is merely obeying orders.
The peasant, one nobleman of a large estate expressed it to
me, being his property did as he was told and had no
right to independent action. All these observations confirm
my opinion that Poland's fame as a nation of soldiers and
patriots has been revived in theory only, and not in fact.
260
The Nation
The suffering of the Polish masses is conspicuous every

where, not merely in the constant ebb and flow of countless
numbers of women and children in their small peasant carts,
but in their expressionless, apparently stolid, indifference
shown by face and figure to heartrending events among
and around them. The tragedy of oppression is written into
their lineaments. One wonders what life must hold for
these people to keep them going, or whether intelligence is
at such a low stage- of development that they cannot realize
to what an extent they are pawns in a greedy, heartless
game.
Where there is enlightenment among the masses it
expresses itself in profound distrust of the Government and
of the unknown forces that seem to be directing Polish
destiny. A large part of Poland's failure may be attributed
to this well-justified lack of confidence. Indeed, the only
effort toward national unity on the part of those in power
has been the modern device of propaganda, which is much in
evidence throughout Poland in one form or other. Probably
its most conspicuous form was brilliantly colored posters
gruesomely depicting bolshevik horrors that would befall
Poland should her citizens be slow to spring to her defense.
Practically all posters carried a legend to stimulate enlist
ment, but they in no way appealed to the patriotism or the
love of Poland in the peasant. Even to his simple mind it
must be more or less inconceivable that the Russian peasant
who rubbed shoulders with him before, during, and after
the war, or the Russian prisoner of war who was found in
almost all parts of Poland, could be the same horrible crea
ture the posters represented. Peasants were also constantly
going to and from Russia without hindrance, a further con
tradiction to government statements of what might be ex
pected if the Russian entered Poland. With only the nar
rowest dividing line between Russian and Polish peasant,
their lives essentially similar, the language difficulties along
the border almost absent, it is clear that there is no national
heritage of hate between them. It has also become common
knowledge among the Poles, especially in the southern por
tion, that the troops under Denikin committed atrocities on
friends and foes alike equal to any committed by the Soviet
armies. Just before the signing of peace between Poland
and Russia reports were widespread of the atrocities com
mitted by Wrangel. So even the government propaganda
was typically ineffectual.
The great part of the present plight of Poland is physical,
but it is not a legacy of nature. Continual warfare coupled
with governmental failure have made poverty and disease
widespread. The number of orphans one sees in the cities
is startling. One of the most pathetic sights I ever hope to
witness was a demonstration in Warsaw on the 4th of July
of twenty thousand orphans, from children barely able to
toddle to adolescent boys and girls. While the future of
Poland lies with her children, she neglects them even more
than the rest of her population. If it were not for the help
that America has given to these little people many would
not be alive today. Of the diseases which ravage Poland,
typhus is the greatest scourge. It is practically endemic
cases are found in every village all the year round. Typhoid
and dysentery are common, particularly in the northern dis
tricts, the latter being especially prevalent and serious this
last summer, and smallpox can be found almost everywhere.
Yet no progress can be made in combating these plagues
until elementary sanitation and hygiene are adopted. No
government organization worthy of the name has made even
[Vol. 112, No. 2902
a beginning. Here again we come to a typical Polish para

dox. Krakow has one of the best constructed hospitals for
the care of communicable diseases in the world. But, due
to the lack of interest on the part of the Polish Government,
funds are lacking and this institution stands practically use
less and empty, while throughout the country Poles are
dying for want of care and medical attention.
Undernourishment, too, is leaving its mark. The large
numbers of deformed children, bowlegged and knockkneed,
is appalling. The tragedy of Poland is that it all appears
so unnecessary. The country's natural heritage is rich. In
the north are some of the most wonderful pine forests to
be found anywhere. In the south the agricultural possibili
ties are such that twice the entire Polish population can
easily be supported there. Miles and miles of wonderfully
rich valley land, fertile, well watered, have not been touched.
A fairly good network of railways spans the country and
development would not be hindered by lack of transporta
tion. But the man-made scars are everywhere in evidence,
in idle factories, in wretched villages.
"Must Poland fight?" I asked this question of many
Polish gentlemen of authority and influence. They agreed
in principle that Poland should develop her own territory
but added that many of the estates and consequently of the
wealth of the nobility were in Russian territory, and this,
they felt, would always act as a cause of war. Then there
is the French influence constantly stimulating the eques
trian nobles' dream of a great Poland. In this mirage these
medievalists see themselves as knights-errant, heroic figures
heading victorious armies. To the realities of the present,
to the crying needs for physical and industrial rehabilita
tion of their country these gallant gentlemen are for the
most part totally blind.
Only a miracle can save Poland. For it requires a miracle
to create what is not, of which the very seeds are lack
inga well-ordered government devoted to the common
good. The immediate future of what is now Poland rests
largely on the will of the Allies. Her neighbors she has
antagonized. Bankruptcy and decay are actualities. Unless
Poland can lift herself up by her own bootstraps, she will
soon perish. Nor need it be a violent death, a conquest from
without. More likely is a petering out, until collapse, of a
rotten structure, whose props from the start have been
largely mythical. A receiver will come in. It may be Rus
sia. It may be Germany. More probably it will be a com
bination of both.

James Albert Honeij, M.D., has been professor in Yale
University Medical School and chief medical officer of
the American Red Cross Mission to Poland in 1920.
Harriet Connor Brown is a Washington woman who has
made a special study of administrative expenditures by
the Federal Government.
William J. Mack is the impartial chairman in the
woman's clothing industry in Cleveland.
The Challenge of Waste to Existing Industrial

Creeds, by Stuart Chasean important articlewill be
published in a forthcoming issue of The Nation.
Feb. 16, 1921]
The Nation
Women to the
261
Rescue
By HARRIET CONNOR BROWN

TESTIFYING before the Naval Affairs Committee of
the House of Representatives recently, General Tasker
H. Bliss, formerly Chief of Staff of our United States
Army, said that, while in Paris, first as a member of the
War Council and later as a member of the Peace Confer
ence, he had talked with the leading men of all nations and
had found them agreed that another world war would mean
the end of civilization. One might fancy that, after sitting
thus in solemn consultation around the sick body of poor
Human Progress and coming to a unanimous conclusion in
regard to the slender chances of her complete recovery,
even under favorable circumstances, those clear-eyed doc
tors would have gone their separate ways resolved to urge
the patient's guardians to give her rest and peace, pure
food and strong hope, in order that she might have a chance
to live and thrive, above all, to keep her from excitement.
Some of them are said to have spoken the word of warn
ing. In America it was not heeded. Closing its ears to
the story of havoc and failure which is the story of war,
even of a war to end war, Congress went feverishly to work
to make the nation ready for more war. With Europe
broken and bankrupt, too spent and bloodless to injure
America if she would, Congress yet entered on the creation
of huge armaments such as no conqueror ever dreamed of
in his most ambitious moments. The Army Reorganiza
tion Act was passed increasing the army from 100,000 to
280,000 enlisted men, the number of officers from 5,000 to
17,000. And great naval increases were authorized also,
two dreadnoughts to cost $40,000,000 apiece and other supervessels to fill with fear the hearts of our possible enemies.
"The United States declares peace on the universe," com
mented sarcastically the French journal L'Opinion.
And at what terrible sacrifice not only of the world's
friendly feeling, but of our financial treasure was this
program launched last spring! When Congress adjourned
and the clerks of the Appropriations Committees began to
set down in orderly, tabular arrangement the results of
Congress's hysterical acts, what appalling punishment for
the people, the trusting people, was then disclosed! To
finance the greatly enlarged military and naval establish
ments the gigantic sum of $855,956,963 had been appro
priated, a sum that was sufficient, exclusive of the postal
service which has been practically self-sustaining, for the
entire expenses of the Government in the year before we
entered the World War. Added to the $2,838,118,400 re
quired to pay this year's bill for our past wars, this made
the staggering sum of $3,694,075,363 for war purposes, to
be raised by a cruel levy of taxes.
With over three and a half billion dollars to be collected
and expended for past and future wars, it was evident that
not much more could be wrung from the people for other
purposes. For the development of commerce, agriculture,
public works, public health, science, research, education,
and all the beneficent works of peace, only $481,744,726
less than half a billion dollarswas therefore appropriated.
America is rich in resources, but even America has to bend
its back in bitter toil to wring from its domain four thou
sand million dollars each year for the Federal tax gatherer.
A four bi llion dollar entertainment has been provided for
the year. It is given in a two-ring circus, but the people's

ring in which alone are performances that interest the peo
ple generally is only one-seventh the size of the other ring
in which the great military parades take place. And the
whole stupid program costs every man, woman, and child
in the country, on the average, about $40. The average
family has to pay approximately $200 for this annual na
tional exhibition of military and naval preparedness. It
is a pretty sum, enough to pay the fees of a bright boy
or girl at the university, enough to give the whole family
a modest summer vacation. Instead, it goes to support
stalwart idlers in barracks and on battleships.
The same Congress that passed the Army Reorganization
Act also passed an act to establish a National Budget
System. It was said that a budget system would promote
economy and reduce taxation, but the gods in the machine
must have laughed in their sleeves at the fine irony of the
situation. With 68 per cent of our current appropriations
devoted to past wars and 20 per cent to future wars only
12 per cent can possibly be left for all other purposes of
Government. What can a budget system, be it ever so
systematic, do with a budget like that?
The 68 per cent appropriation is composed of items like
pensions, insurance, compensation for disability, the voca
tional education of mutilated soldiers, the upkeep of sol
diers' homes, the return to America of the soldier dead,
the interest on the war debt, and so on. These are debts
of honor and not even a flinty-hearted, lynx-eyed director
of a budget would or could refuse to pay them. Nor could
he save much of the 12 per cent appropriation allotted for
general purposes. If he saved by reorganization of de
partments and elimination of duplicate activities from one
to two per cent of the total appropriations, he would do
exceedingly well, but the saving would only be from forty
to eighty million dollars. The only item that can be seri
ously cut is the 20 per cent of our appropriations which
is devoted to the army and navy.
It was currently said in Washington before Congress dis
persed for the summer that, had the elections not been com
ing on, the Army Reorganization Act would have contained
a provision for universal military training for our youth,
but that this provision was not added because women were
to vote in large numbers and it was feared they might not
like to have their sons conscripted. The elections safely
over, however, the chairman of the House Military Affairs
Committee cheerfully told the papers that he was going to
urge the passage of a measure for "automatic, peace-time
conscription" of our boys as soon as Congress had convened.
When Congress had assembled, the Executive Depart
ments laid their estimates before it. The country gasped.
We are at peace with the world and we had just appropri
ated $855,956,963 for an enlarged army and navy, but big
deficiency bills were brought in for items not covered in
that huge total and estimates were presented for the next
year equal to nearly twice that shocking sum. A billion
and a half dollars required by our peace-time army and
navy for the year 1921-22! To spend 20 per cent of our
appropriations this year for maintaining a vast and non
productive military class is folly; to contemplate spending
262
The Nation
38 per cent next year for settling that class still more
firmly on our backs is not merely folly but also a crime
against the race. And still that monstrous sum takes no
cognizance of the expenses of conscription, of a soldiers'
bonus, or of the deficiency items.
But the arrogance of these demands has brought their
own reaction against militarism. Before the session of
Congress was half over the people had spoken unmistakably.
From the business men of the country (even from some
branches of Big Business), from the working people of
the nation, from thrifty, peaceful Quakers, and especially
from the recently enfranchised women of the land have
come storms of rage and protests of despair. "Not another
penny for armaments!" "Not another word about con
scription."
On December 1, there was no real sentiment for economy,
no real sentiment for disarmament in Congress. The stage
seemed set for the second act in the great prearranged
drama of the militarists with members of both parties
ready to take the leading parts. It was whispered that
there would be no general legislation but that legislation
authorizing conscription might ride through on a supply
bill.
Nothing of the kind has happened or will happen if those
who deplore this waste of public funds will continue their
protests. Instead, there will surely be a conference before
long to discuss the matter of disarmament, we are likely to
join with England and Japan in a naval holiday, there
will be reductions instead of increases in the amounts ap
propriated for the War and Navy Departments, and there
is hope that we may enter upon a better understanding
with the nations of the world.
"What next?" the magazines have been asking women.
"You have your precious ballot after half a century of
struggle. What will you do with it?" A very definite
answer has been given by the women who constitute the
Federation of Women's Clubs and the League of Women
Voters. They are asking of Congress six concrete reforms :
the protection of maternity and infancy, the safeguarding
of child laborers, the promotion of education and home
economics, the regulation of the live-stock industry, the
recognition of woman's citizenshipall reforms in har
mony with their sex instinct to cherish and conserve that
which is valuable for human life.
But before they can hope for large success in any such
comprehensive program, there must be drastic reduction
of armaments. The little 12 per cent of our national appro
priations which is available for works of peace is not suffi
cient to permit us to take up new enterprises. Is it not
high time that the women of the world, lifted now by their
enfranchisement into a position of power, should become
sex-conscious and work together in every land and all lands
for the reduction and final abolition of armaments? In
time, if we have the vision and courage and steadfastness,
things may be reversed with 88 per cent available for good
works and only 12 per cent to be expended on armies and
navies detailed for police duty.
There are two reasons why we may control the situation.
First, we can hold the balance of power. If we keep out
side of political parties, holding ourselves a mobile mass
poised to crush the enemies of the race as they show their
heads in different parties, we may decide elections. Many
splendid men denounce and deplore the great armies and
navies created by Congress, but such men are at present
[Vol. 112, No. 2902
outnumbered. With the help of the women, however, they

can make their ideas prevail and bring about disarmament
in all countries.
In the second place, women can lead a crusade against
war and the preparation for war more easily and naturally
than can men. Women are under no imputation of coward
ice if they refuse to fight or to prepare for war. My plea is
not for sex antagonism, but that we throw our support to
the side of our noblest, our most idealistic men.
If ever I doubted that voting women will have power to
effect national policies, I forgot my doubt on January 11,
when, with five other women, I appeared before the House
Committee on Military Affairs to plead for a reduction of
armaments. With their ears to the ground during the
previous six weeks, the members of the Committee had
heard the warning rumble of the people, the light voices of
women rising clearly above the general clamor. Forgotten
was the issue of "automatic, peacetime conscription." They
actually asked our views about the size of the army. For
the first time in the history of the nation, a Committee on
Military Affairs conferred with a delegation of women on
the best kind of "preparedness."
Is not the plain logic of the situation this:
That we should organize non-partisan groups of women in
every Congressional district for the purpose of electing to
Congress only persons pledged to stop this waste of public
funds;
That we should join with the voting women of other na
tions to bring about general disarmament; and
That we should consecrate ourselves to see that our po
litical freedom is not lost in any international government
that is established and that all the remaining legal disa
bilities of women are removed.
Here is a program that the National Woman's Party con
vening in Washington may well consider.
Industrial
Peace in
Cleveland
WILLIAM J. MACK
WITH the world in a whirlpool of industrial unrest and
confusion, we see with interest and renewed hope
the experiment that is now being worked out in the ladies'
garment industry in Cleveland. Here, in spite of the wide
spread industrial depression, peace has been maintained,
and no reduction of wages has yet been necessary. The two
manufacturers' associations have agreements with the In
ternational Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, substituting
for strikes and lockouts an impartial machinery for the
final adjudication of all disputes and differences between
the employers and the workers. This machinery is similar
in most respects to the machinery existing in the other
clothing markets. The basis of the agreements lies in the
realization that, as stated in the preamble,
In view of their primary responsibility to the consuming
public, workers and owners are jointly and separately respon
sible for the cost and quality of the service rendered. It is
agreed that cooperation and mutual helpfulness are the basis of
right and progressive industrial relations, and that intimida
tion and coercion have no proper place in American industry.
The most serious friction between employers and em
ployees in the ladies' garment industry is caused by the
alternation of busy and slack seasons. The industry is, in
Feb. 16, 1921]
The Nation
its very nature, a seasonal one. In the slack seasons it is

thought to be to the interest of the employer to lay off as
many of his workers as possible, and in the busy season it
is sometimes said to be to the interest of the workers to
decrease their rate of production as much as possible in
order to compel the employer to keep them at work for a
longer period. In slack seasons control of the industry has
been in the hands of employers, and in busy seasons in the
hands of the workers.
The distinctive feature of the situation in Cleveland is
the system now being installed in the hope of eliminating
so far as possible this seasonal difficultyof avoiding on
the one hand the evils of under-productivity on the part of
the workers, and on the other hand the lack of continuity
of employment during the slack periods. It provides that
the union and the association shall jointly engage and pay
industrial engineers who, under the supervision of the Im
partial Chairman, shall establish for each of the factories
fair and accurate standards of average production for a
minimum weekly wage, each worker to receive additional
pay for every unit he or she produces in excess of the
minimum standard. It has been further understood that
the employers will guarantee each permanent worker at
least forty weeks' employment and one week's vacation with
pay. The standards for compensating the workers, as
worked out by Miller, Franklin, Basset and Company
through W. T. Fitzpatrick, are determined by timing each
process of the work with a stop-watch and then converting
these times into money at a basic rate established yearly
by the referees. One interesting feature of these timestudy standards is that they are carried not in minutes
and fractions thereof, but in points on the basis that one
thousand points equal forty-four hours' or one week's work.
This work is being done with the consent and cooperation
of the union in spite of the traditional opposition of labor
to the stop-watch. It is unique in the history of industry
for a union and a manufacturers' association jointly to
share in the cost of financing such an experiment. Although
the interests of the two groups are not in all respects
identical, each group believes that it will be best served by
joining with the other to further the welfare of the industry
as a whole.
Within the recent past all of these matters have been
brought to a focus. The situation was full of difficulties
here as in most other manufacturing centers. A hearing
was held before the full Board of Referees, Judge Julian W.
Mack, Major Samuel J. Rosensohn, and Mr. John R. McLane,
and the impartial chairman, Major William J. Mack. The
manufacturers' association, represented by its labor man
ager, Mr. F. C. Butler, asked for a reduction of wages on
the ground that business conditions made it imperative
that they reduce the selling price of their goods and the
cost of production, stating further that the cost of living
was decreasing and that wages should be reduced to the
1918 level. The manufacturers asked also for the mainte
nance of the existing system of wage payments and price
fixing and the postponement of all guaranties of continuity
of employment until the production standards should be
introduced.
The union, represented by its vice-president, Mr. Meyer
Perlstein, asked for an increase of wages, for the estab
lishment of temporary production standards pending the
introduction of the standards now being prepared, and, to
insure continuity of employment, the adoption of a guar
263
anty of forty weeks' work and one week's vacation with

pay.
The hearing was followed by conferences between the
referees and groups representing both sides, in which the
referees assumed the part of mediators and conciliators, en
deavoring to bring the parties to agreement on the points
at issue. These conferences were not entirely successful
at first, and it became necessary for the referees, in their
capacity as arbitrators, to formulate a tentative decision
on the points submitted.
The tentative decision disposed of all the demands pre
sented. Production standards were to be installed as rap
idly as the engineers, under the supervision of the impartial
chairman, could prepare them. The wage scale and the
guaranty were to be applied together. The present wage
scale was to be maintained except as to those employers
who would accept the guaranty system providing for a
forty-week guaranty, with one week's vacation with pay,
with liability limited to 15 per cent of the productive pay
roll. As to such employers the wage scale was to be reduced
to the scale in effect by the award of July, 1919, with certain
minor changes which it is not necessary here to enumerate.
It was nevertheless evident that there were many reasons
which made it undesirable for the referees to pass upon the
question of a reduction in the wage scale at this time.
Therefore, after acquainting each side separately with the
tentative decision, they recommended an adjournment of
the hearing until April, 1921, at which time the pending
requests of each side would be determined. The executive
board of the Manufacturers' Association waived its right
to an immediate decision because of the untimeliness of
introducing substantial changes in conditions during the
preliminary work of establishing standards of production.
The referees state that they have been actuated in their
mediation by the desire to put the industry in Cleveland on
a satisfactory permanent basis. This, in their judgment,
cannot be accomplished until the fair and accurate method
of determining the weekly wage of the individual worker
shall have been established, the definite continuity of work
provided for, and a reduction in the unit cost of production
attained. While we are hopeful that the essential reduction
in unit cost may be thus secured without a reduction of the
minimum wage scale, yet, if necessary, labor as well as
capital must bear its share in attaining this end. The
referees clearly recognize that this industry, like all other
industries, "must meet the problems incident to deflation,
and that it, like them, is necessarily subject to the opera
tion of economic laws."
The whole-hearted acceptance by both the union and the
association of this decision, with all that it implies, assures
the continuance of this unique experiment. If it is success
ful, as there is every reason to expect, it will mark a new
step forward in industrial efficiency, and the example set in
Cleveland will doubtless be followed in many other manu
facturing centers.
There will be no strikes or lockouts in the ladies' garment
industry in Cleveland. The crisis in this one industrial
center at least has been met through the vision and broadmindedness of the leaders on both sides. As we turn with
disappointment from one industrial conflict to another, let
us watch the development of the Cleveland program and
trust that mutual confidence and cooperation may be re
stored throughout the country and that the upbuilding of
friendly industrial relations may be generally supported.
The Nation
264
[Vol. 112, No. 2902
Poems
How many a Saturday's debauch was cut
By the instalments on stained pine imitations
Of Aunt Sabina's fumed oak dining table!
How many a Saturday's debauch was cut
Sabina
By SAVILLA GRAHAM
My Aunt Sabina's nature, like her name,
Was steeped in use and custom.
To the slim shafts of gilt piano lamps

Oh, they had them all,
In a year's time too thoroughly American
She was most generous of food or money.

Sickness or sorrow in a house
Drew Aunt Sabina as a currant bush in May draws flies.
Not to have all the Things that other people had 1

Sons of those same women drive their own cars now,
And one became an Ace in Flanders.
But anything that she had worn or lived with,

The cardboard castle hung in the spare bedroom,
Adrip with tassels of red wool and crystal beads,
Her bugle-trimmed black dolman,
The shell carved with a portrait of George Washington
Great Uncle Adoniram brought from the Centennial
All these absorbed a virtue from her.
God, who in Greece had come as golden rain,

Here in Connecticut
Had stooped to mortals in the guise of Things.

My Aunt Sabina was but pace-maker
To the great urge by which the American spirit
Drives on to mastery.
Suddenly the room
Giving such things away

Even to people who could make good use of them
Making good use of Things was part of her religion
Required what doctors call a major operation;
Some shreds of her identity went with them.
Seemed full of votive tapers

Burned on the altar of Democracy!
And braving Evalina's slight, derisive smile,

I turned and left them with their God awhile.
As if the inchoate succession
Of rugs, consoles, and upholstery

Were all her past, her race,
The Church-Bell
Her sole thrust at social continuity.

And parting her from even the worst
Of our Grand Rapids periods,
By ELINOR WYLIE
Was like the cutting off of France or Italy from one of us.
As I was lying in my bed

I heard the church-bell ring;
I recall how she would go to Evalina's

Just to look at the old horse-hair sofa
Gay as a rewed widow in its Morris chintzes
A bird began to sing.
She gave to Evalina when she married;
I heard a dog begin to bark

And a bold crowing cock;
And come away refreshed
Before one solemn word was said
In that deep passion for stability
The bell, between the cold and dark,
Which was the core of Aunt Sabina's being.
Tolled.
II
When Aunt Sabina died
Her house's every corner
It was five o'clock.
The church-bell tolled, and the bird Sang,

A clear true voice he had;
The cock crew, and the church-bell rang,
I knew it had gone mad.
Was found stuffed like an old shrine,

With casts of every phase of ugliness
We have been cured of; perfectly good things,
As Evalina said, nobody would give house-room.
A hand reached down from the dark skies,
And yet, I could remember
The clapper shook to song.
When just to compass that pink brocaded parlor Set,

My Uncle Henry,
Who loved to keep the business as his father left it,
Built out the new addition to the store
It took the bell-rope thong,
The bell cried Look! Lift up your eyes!

The iron clapper laughed aloud,
Like clashing wind and wave;
The bell cried out Be strong and proud!
Then, with a shout, Be brave!
And brought a brisk young window-trimmer

To bait it with the showy sort of goods
Would wake the mill hands from their wantlessness,
And edge them with the keen desire of Things
Toward more day's labor and more wages for them.
The rumbling of the market-carts,
The pounding of men's feet
Were drowned in song; Lift up your hearts!

The sound was loud and sweet.
Oh, they took the bait: hook, line, and sinker!
Slow and slow the great bell swung,
Goods-hungry Poles and Lithuanians
It hung in the steeple mute:
Slaked the balked appetites of a thousand

"chieving a red plush distinction.
years
And people tore its living tongue

Out by the very root.
The Nation
Feb. 16, 1921]
265
Amerindian Air
The Different Day
By HARTLEY ALEXANDER
By GRACE HAZARD CONKLING
Let it be beautiful
I wonder if the hawk knew
when I sing the last song

Let it be day!
Morning was different?

He stood so long below the sun
I would stand upon my two feet,

singing!
I would look upward with open eyes,
singing!
-
I would have the winds to envelop my body;

I would have the sun to shine upon my body;
The whole world I would have to make music with me!
With the blue reins of the horizon

In his beak.
There was a vireo
Hid in the hair of the mountain-side.
I can recall his tuneless warble
Because it wrote itself on oak-leaves
Encrusted with gold of noon.

Always I see its monotony
Shining,
Curved like words of water
Let it be beautiful
Over a bright ledge
when thou wouldst slay me, O Shining One!

Let it be day
when I sing the last song!
Afternoon tossed a storm over the mountain,

Lost it in the valley.
A chickadee hung by one claw
Defying the probable
What was there in the day
Boomerang
By ALFRED KREYMBORG
If it is
Made us so still?
The mountain held us under clouds like sails
There was spray on the wind
spray on the island
wind
God who fashioned me,
Or was it fire?
is it He
Did you feel the heave of the earth, did you see flame
Along the wind at sundown?
who asks, Is He pleased ?
Did you remember strangeness

We had lived before?
Does my prayer,
which is His
if Im His,
Oh, love, my love,

Now at last with you
move or leave Him unmoved?
I can wonder:
Is it He
Now with you I am dream.

Now wild earth flying
who lifts these questions,
Pours me mist of suns
or am I
And darkness golden!
to blame for thinking?

If He,
noticing me
at last, notices Himself
whats wrong with Him?
Really,
Im not regretting
what I am,
nor begging, Make me better.
If I
have a sense of the droll
surely,
He has one too
asking himself
to pray to Himself
that is,
if He fashioned me?
Night Is Forgotten
By HILDA CONKLING
Night is forgotten;
Birds sing when the happy sun
Looks suddenly down.
I hope the iris is out
With dew like jewels fringing the petals,
I hope the Oriole is up
Arranging his feathers.
I must hurry
there is so much to see .
I can hardly remember it all!
Only yesterday I made a song about a yellowbird
And what did I say?
It is not real to me now,
Though I know how he gleamed

Shining through four thin leaves
Of the pear-tree.
The Nation
266
Correspondence
A Ripping Review
Sir: A question of literary morals emerges out of J. Salwyn
Schapiro's perfectly ripping review of Wells's Outline in your
February 9 number; ripping, incidentally, in a double sense,
both as regards the undersigned and Mr. Wells. The question
may be best stated by stating a few facts. Mr. Schapiro be
gins his 10,000-word review with the thesis that Mr. Wells
has performed at least one remarkable feat: he has interested
the- average intelligent reader in history. Mr. Schapiro ends
with the statement that to read the book is in itself a liberal
education. Between the first sentence and the last Mr. Schapiro
observes, among other things, that
With the close of the Wells chapter on Buddhism a startling
change for the worse sets in.
The Wells interpretation of the Roman Empire is pretty
nearly all wrong.
"So deeply is Mr. Wells hostile to Christianity that when he
does say something nice about it he says something which is
erroneous."
In the history of the Middle Ages there is nowhere an ade
quate description of feudal society.
The chapter on the Renaissance and Protestantism "is sur
prising because there is so little of the Renaissance and of
Protestantism in it."
The Wells treatment of the nationalistic era, from the seven
teenth century on, is wrong-headed.
"It would take real ability to write a chapter on the French
Revolution worse than this."
Wells carries his hostility to Napoleon "to absurd lengths."
In Wells's account of the nineteenth century, Mr. Schapiro,
who knows that century very well, finds "little in it, political,
economic, or cultural that I recognize as nineteenth century
history."
"The explanation of Socialism is scrappy and totally inade
quate."
On Ireland, Wells is biased and cruel.
And Wells's evocation of the world-future is "vague, senti
mental, middle-class, middle-age, mid-Victorian."
Now I have not been quite fair in summing up Mr. Schapiro.
For that part of Wells which precedes Buddha and goes back
to the nebulae, the reviewer has a great admiration. That is
to say, Wells is fascinating as long as he deals with nebulae
and paleolithic rocks and primitive men and other things about
which we who live today really know very little and care less.
As soon as Wells gets down to things of the past in which are
rooted the things of our present, as soon as he gets down to
that present which, after all, is of the greatest concern to us,
why, then, Mr. Schapiro has shown in masterly fashion and
with splendid courage that H. G. Wells has published a rotten
history, as one of Mr. Schapiro's Seniors might say to another.
Now put aside the fact that if Wells is wrong about pretty
nearly everything that matters after Buddha, he is probably
wrong about most things from Buddha back to the Glacial
epoch. Concede that he scores 100 per cent up to Buddha.
But if he is wrong on Christianity, the Roman Empire, the
feudal period, the era of national development, the French
Revolution, the nineteenth century, and Socialism, and the fu
ture, Mr. Wells, if he were passing a history exam for Mr.
Schapiro would score, according to my impression, between 11
and 14 per cent.
And now my original question. Why does a review, which
demonstrates that a book is really quite bad, begin by calling
it remarkable and end by calling it a liberal education? This
interests me who have written book reviews and you who pub
lish them and the people who read them. Of course, it is good
nature to begin by saying the kindest things you can. It is
also good tactics: if Mr. Schapiro had announced in his first
[Vol. 112, No. 2902
sentence that the Outline is only 11 per cent good, a great many
people would get angry and stop right there, and never learn
the truth about Wells.
And yet, you know how people, even Nation readers, will
often read reviews. A glance at the first paragraph and a
blink at the last paragraph before they decide the thing is
worth while. A good many get no further than that. A re
porter would be fired if he wrote a "lead" which not only fails
to give the gist of his subsequent story, but actually gives the
opposite impression.
And what is the good of interesting "the average intelligent
reader" in history which is not history? And why is a book
which is nearly all wrong a liberal education?
New York, February S
Simeon Strunsky
Ireland, England, and the United States
Sir: Your condemnation of the speech of Mr. Harry Boland
at Madison Square Garden meets with the approval of every
right-minded American citizen. His speech on that occasion
was as stupid as it was futile. You are, however, wholly mis
taken when you say that "the hope of Ireland lies in convincing
the world of the justice of her cause and of the use of peaceable
means to obtain it." The world has long ago been convinced of
the justice of Ireland's cause, and this includes the most enlight
ened opinion in England. Any American who denies it, repudi
ates the Constitution of his own country and its professed policy
during the late war. You make a glaring misstatement when
you attribute reprisals to the Irish as "their own game";
reprisals are now and always have been the English game.
When you wrote "the American people intend to have peace
with England," you should have added "if they can." The
American people intended to have peace with England before
the War of 1812, they intended to have peace with the South
before the Civil War, they intended to have peace with Spain
before the Spanish-American War, and they elected Mr. Wilson
President because he "kept us out of war," by which they proved
their intention to avoid war with Germany. Yet, in each dis
pute America settled the issue not by supinely laying down her
arms and peaceably striving to convince the world of the justice
of her cause, but by "the dread arbitrament of war."
It is quite probable, as you state, that America will not go to
war to free Ireland, although she has just as much right and
duty to check the ravages of the English in Ireland as she had
to help defeat the Germans at sea and on the continent of
Europe. But America will go to war to protect her own inter
ests and preserve her liberty. These are now insolently chal
lenged and threatened by England in every part of the world.
It does not therefore require the son of a prophet to foresee the
smashing of England's arrogant power by the armed forces of
the United States.
New York, January 31
Charles Noonan
[This letter gives a clean-cut presentation of what is proba
bly the prevailing view among Americans of Irish descent. Un
fortunately, it is not the case that "the world has long ago been
convinced of the justice of Ireland's case." The great majority
of people, in this country at least, are wholly uninformed about
the centuries-old and heroic struggle of Ireland for independ
ence; unaware that two years ago the people of Ireland in a
national election held under British law voted four to one for
self-determination; unconscious of the extraordinary parallel
between the cause of our thirteen colonies in 1776 and that of
Ireland today. A great task lies before those who want to
secure justice for Ireland in making these and other facts widely
known. As for the possibility of war between the United States
and England, every right-minded citizen should regard it as
an unthinkable calamity. It would settle no grievances. War
in itself has never solved anything, and of all methods of
attempting to adjust differences it is infinitely the worst, as the
last five years have amply proved.Editor The Nation.]
_--
------_--"
The Nation
Feb. 16, 1921]

An Utter Abomination
SIR: Some of us who hear Mr. Hoover realize with painful

chagrin what efforts are being made to get people to give to the
starving children with one hand while paying enormous taxes
for war with the other. On the first page of the Literary Digest
is a picture of a battleship, one of six, to cost $23,000,000 each,

and on the next page War is devouring 93 per cent of the
taxes while poor Education crawls to pick up a 1 per cent
267
with the accounts. These accountants criticized the whole sys

tem of accounting which has been developed with great care
during the past thirty or forty years for the purpose of run
ning a complicated business which deals in perishable products.
They were unable to make constructive suggestions of any
kind. Not one single accounting device for the purpose of con
cealing extortions or profiteering was uncovered and no evi
dence of extortions or of profiteering was found.
The Trade Commission did not establish the fact of monop

olistic control. If it had, the packers would have been indicted
crumb.
long before this. Swift & Company has no agreement or col
This is worse than grotesque, it is an utter abomination.

We are not simply throwing away this sorely needed money,
we are sowing dragons' teeth to hound peace and reason from
lusion with any other packer to affect prices of meats or live
our shores. If we cannot at present reverse the percentages for

war and education, at least let us turn those six battleships
into food and clothing.
Mr. Hoover asks for $33,000,000 to
keep the children from starving. $138,000,000 would make

many of them fat and rosy and be an investment in good-will
that would repay a hundred thousand fold. If the little candle
of the return of the Boxer indemnity has thrown its beams
so successfully and so far surely the price of six battleships
would make a great light in a naughty world.
Why should America fight fools with fools weapons?
Cambridge, Massachusetts, February 1
F. W. REED
Federal Trade Commission and Packers

SIR: The Nation of January 12 contains an article by George

T. Odell, The Federal Trade Commission Yields to Pressure,
which considers the dismissal of two men by the Federal Trade
Commission. The object of this letter is not to comment on this
dismissal, but rather to call attention to certain statements
in the first paragraph of the article which referred to the
stock, and there is not one single bit of evidence presented by

the Federal Trade Commission which disproves this statement.
All of the charges made above against the Federal Trade
Commission may be substantiated by referring to Swift & Com
pany's Analysis and Criticism of Part Two of the Report of
the Federal Trade Commission, copy of which may be obtained
by sending to the Chicago Office of Swift & Company.
For these reasons, we find it necessary to protest against the
statements appearing in the first paragraph of the article in
The Nation and to express the hope that you will let your
readers have the benefit of the facts in this letter.
SWIFT & CoMPANY, per L. D. H. Weld,
(manager) Commercial Research Department

[As to the accuracy or fairness of the report of the Federal
Trade Commission on the meat packing industry about which
Mr. Weld complains, the courts, the United States Senate, and
even the Big Five packers themselves have already passed
judgment, and their verdict is against Mr. Weld. The Depart
ment of Justice drew up a bill of complaint against the packers
based on the facts and conclusions of the Federal Trade Com
mission's report, and on that bill a consent decree signed by

the packers was entered in the supreme court of the District
of Columbia. Under the orders of the court the packers are
Federal Trade Commission's investigation of the packing in
now divesting themselves of their stockyards and other monop
dustry.
olistic holdings which were complained of by the Federal Trade
It is said that the investigators of the Commission employed

the precise science of mathematics in unraveling the compli
cated accounts which the packers had used to conceal their ex
tortions and profiteerings and the most exacting laws of evi
dence in dissecting the legal subterfuges through which they
maintained their monopolistic control over food products.
It has been proved again and again, not only in the published
statements of Swift & Company, but in numerous Congressional
hearings that the Federal Trade Commission did not employ
the precise science of mathematics nor the most exacting
laws of evidence.
In the first place the investigation was ex
parte; in the public hearings, the packers were not permitted

to be represented by attorneys, they could not examine the
prejudiced witnesses that had been sought out by the Trade
Commission, and they could not put on and examine their own
witnesses.
The private files of the packers were examined and only such
Commission.
Furthermore, only a few days ago the Senate by
a majority of 13 passed the Kenyon-Kendrick bill for public
control of the packing industry, thus recording its verdict in

favor of the Federal Trade Commission and against the packers.
In fact, Senator Kenyon brought out very clearly during the
debate that the packers had been given the widest latitude
during the hearings before the Agricultural Committee, but
that they had failed to directly attack or impeach the Commis
sion's report. Although they were invited and urged by the
chairman of the Federal Trade Commission and by senators
before whom they were appearing to produce any of the ma

terial which they charged had been unfairly left out of the
report, they produced nothing. The Federal Trade Commis
sion presented the evidence secured by its investigators and the
conclusions therefrom drawn by the commissioners themselves.
The signature of the packers to the consent decree based upon
that report and the action of the Senate on the Kenyon bill
letters and documents as could be used in trying to make out
point to the fallacy of Mr. Weld's complaint.G. T. O.]
a case against the packers were taken and reproduced. Other

parts of the same files which controverted the contentions of
the Commission were suppressed. In the report of the Federal
Trade Commission items from telegrams were reproduced in
order to make out a case against the packers, and other items
from the same telegrams which completely refuted the con
December 22 about the Globe, Dr. Frank Crane, the Morse
tentions of the Commission were omitted.
Since such methods
International Agency, and the Gorham Company's advertising.
were used, it is difficult to understand how one can say that

the Federal Trade Commission used the most exacting laws
I had overlooked the correspondence in the Globe and was

grateful to be informed about it.
Subserviency to advertisers is a bitter price to pay for profits
in the newspaper and periodical business, but I fear the list
of those who pay it nowadays is a very, very long one, while
of evidence.
As for employing the precise science of mathematics the

investigators used and presented faulty statistics in their at
tempt to prove that the packers controlled the food supply
of the nation.
Their accountants did not make a thorough
examination of the accounting system of the packers, but merely
made superficial studies in an attempt to find something wrong
Advertising and Freedom of the Press

SIR: I beg to thank you for the paragraph in your issue of
those one knows of who dont can be reckoned on the fingers.
If the decline of advertising, which impends, will bring back

the freedom of the press, the net gain will be enormous.
New York, December 22
EDWARD S. MARTIN
268
The Nation
A Photographer Challenges
A PLACE without doors, it was called by a street car con
ductor who happened upon the top floor of 291 Fifth
Avenue, New York. It was an expression of literal truth. In
the thirteen years Alfred Stieglitz experimented there, holding
exhibitions of Rodin, of Brancusi, of children's drawings, of
Matisse, of Picasso and of Negro sculpture, of Marin and of
other work, and receiving everyone who came, the place had not
been locked or guarded nor its contents insured.
Their experience there made people ask: "What is 291?" It
was obviously not merely a place. And the man who maintained
it said it was not himself. Letters came even from Europe
asking what was 291. So Stieglitz undertook to inquire what
it did mean to people. He asked some thirty people what it
made them feel and received more than twice as many replies,
which were published in Number 47 of the magazine, Camera
Work, dated July, 1914. He has now, after more than six years,
undertaken again to question and to affirm, this time in an
exhibition of 145 photographs at the Anderson Galleries, be
ginning February 7.
Stieglitz affirms photography. Its mechanical processes he
has used to explore life and to record his exploration. Loving
the visible world, the peace of harvest fields with people work
ing in them, the glistening bodies of swimmers pearled with
bubbles, the quiet dignity of a child in a doorway, the shadow of
a steep Italian street, he gave utterance to that love through a
craftsmanship constantly formulating and solving new prob
lems in the use of photographic machinery.
His work of experiment with his medium went on, always,
and as time passed the utterance of the man took on new, more
conscious insistence. Returning from Europe, an American, he
photographed the steerage of an ocean liner, its human cargo
cut off by a cruelly white bridge from the remainder of the
ship. In terms of what could be seen he stated the unfulfilled
promise of American life. Having returned to this country he
became, of necessity, one of those lonely beings whose hope
beats against the slagheap of an age of steel and fear and
exploitation. It is not as a passerby merely that Stieglitz
photographed the crenelated skyline of lower Manhattan, swept
with swirls of steam; a Fifth Avenue stage coach enveloped
in whirling snow; the steaming bodies of car horses in the
New York of twenty-nine years ago. In the print of a darken
ing railroad yard, harboring no human being, only a locomotive
belching smoke and the telegraph poles that link cities, it is
as though the lines of gleaming steel rails had cut through the
twilight into the soul of the man who saw and recorded them.
The photographer realized that men as they build express
their age. Those prints of office buildings looming in daytime
and by night over the dwelling places about which they have
grown, are a photographer's record of what an American city
gave to his eye. Just so, upon the rancid society of our time,
with its diseases of fear and pretense, he turned that searching
eye of the camera, seeking out men and women. For Stieglitz
a portrait is not an acceptance of looking pleasant. The spirit
of inquiry that made him ask people what 291 meant to them
pursued him as he photographed people. What is this man, this
woman? If he or she can look pleasant, then that pleasantness
is only the gesture concealing something of which that human
being is afraid. Very well. Move the camera closer. Push
farther the limits of chemistry, of developing and printing, of
paper and mounting. Photograph every pore in that person's
face at the extremes of looking pleasant and of terror. A
Stieglitz portrait, then, becomes one, two, or three, or half a
hundred photographs.
Hope, longing, drive this lonely spirit on. What is America,
what are Americans? Love of the world leads him to the
purest expression of it, to woman. It is from woman's hands,
from her face, breasts, feet, that he evokes a terrible sense of
the innocence and sensitiveness that have no home in America.
[Vol. 112, No. 2902
This woman, who comes to be an embodied love of the world, a

living, quivering being that is flung up for a moment out of
night, eloquent of death; this dying chestnut tree that thrusts
its tripartite trunk into a darkening sky; these raindrops on
the branches of a young tree in autumnwhat place is there
for them in this America? Is it not afraid of them? Do not
Americans fear woman as they fear the plague? With reason,
for woman is terrible, as terrible as life.
What is it that this despised box, fitted with lens and
shutters and called a camera, has done in this man's hands? It
has penetrated the fear which human beings have of themselves
lest those selves be made known to others. So doing it has
laid bare the raw material which life in America has not yet
dared to look upon and absorb. When Americans are ready to
undertake inquiry about themselves, their nation, the world, as
the camera has been made to inquire, there may dawn a sense
of common humanity. That inquiry cannot be undertaken by
grotesque puppets gesturing in the mirror of what they con
ceive will be affluence and popular approbation and calling their
gestures art, science, sociology, democracy, or any of the name3
with which civilization reeks. It can not be undertaken by
people who think they will use other human beings for their
own profit, while they proclaim freedom.
In a land where disinterested inquiry, instinct with feeling,
does not exist, photography has become an instrument of it.
No human being can ever retrace the living and suffering that
culminated in the moments out of which Alfred Stieglitz's
photographs sprang. But his affirmation carries a challenge to
men and women of the future. It is the challenge implicit in
that question asked just before the war: "What is 291?" The
spirit of 291 and of its gallery or "Place of Demonstration" was
an attempt to make room for disinterested inquiry, for work
and respect for workmanship irrespective of person. There the
attempt was made to fight free of the use of one human being
by another for profit, the subordination of creative impulses
to personal advancement, all the tragedies which are the har
vest of greed and jealousy. It was such a spirit that made
possible the life recorded in Stieglitz's photographs. It is such
a spirit that Randolph Bourne, dead protagonist of Youth and
Life, gave voice to. Bourne foresaw in a trans-national Amer
ica a concert of eager spirit, conscious of one another, creating
each in his own form a common heritage of expressiveness.
The peoples in America Bourne conceived to be in a common
enterprise. He saw, in a world that dreamed of international
ism, America as the first international nation built unawares.
Was his dream a dream merely? Did the quality of Bourne's
hope die with him? Will the passions of self-seeking and fear
which masquerade as patriotism, will intolerance and race
hatreds destroy the hope of this unique experiment in the
world?
The answer is in the challenge of Stieglitz's work. It is
achieved in the spirit in which trans-national America will be
realized if that is to come to pass. Significant of that spirit
is the fact that of the fifty numbers of Camera Work, the
magazine which Stieglitz published with no thought of gain
and at financial loss to himself, not one contained his work
after 1911, work which represents the maturity of the man and
gives body to the exhibition at the Anderson Galleries. It is
significant of Stieglitz's spirit that 291 was maintained to give
workers opportunity to work, to exhibit, to see the work of
others, even to sell their work, and that his own photography
during those years was held in abeyance, so much so that
among photographers the world over the impression had spread
that Stieglitz had stopped photographing.
I once heard Stieglitz wonder aloud whether there were more
such fools as he had been. That is the question which his
exhibition asks. If there are young men and young women who
will attempt to answer that question, in their lives and their
work, with affirmation, then there is indeed hope of the fulfil
ment of the promise America made to Stieglitz and to us, a
promise as yet unredeemed.
Herbert J. Seligmann.
Feb. 16, 1921]
The Nation
Books
The Business of Religion
Fundamentals of Prosperity. By Roger W. Babson. Fleming H.
Revell.
Religion and Business. By Roger W. Babson. The Macmillan
Company.
HP HE unknown cynic who assigned statistics to the chief seat
* in the synagogue of lies would have a grievous half-hour
if by chance he fell into Mr. Roger Babson's hands. To Mr.
Babson, figures are the raw material of revelation; and so
loudly and plainly have the figures spoken to him that he has
turned preacher.
The gist of the matter is this: Statistics have proved to
Mr. Babson that this is a moral universe. This is of course not
an original discovery; nor is Mr. Babson the first business man
to make it. It was surely a business man who long ago said
that "honesty is the best policy" ; and the saying was much more
than a petty maxim of safe conductthe man had found out
that this world was so made that it did not pay to be dishonest
in it. It was a faint and flickering perception of the consider
able fact that the universe has some sort of moral basis; and
that the man probably made his discovery by having his fingers
burnt in a crooked transaction does not take anything from the
truth and the greatness of it. But what this man learned from
his burnt fingers, Mr. Babson has established by statistics. He
has accumulated figures about many things, from many quar
ters, and through many years. He has classified and collated
them, turned them inside out, and stood them on their heads;
he has reduced them to graphs and curves. He has pondered
and brooded over them; and the upshot of it all is to establish
beyond peradventure that business prosperity is an affair of
good morals. The story is told of a very tired bookkeeper that
one day he closed his books with a slam, saying that "those
confounded figures were laughing at him." No doubt there are
scoffers who would say that Mr. Babson's figures were also dis
playing an unseemly levity. But Mr. Babson does not let his
figures run away with him. He treats them firmly and austerely.
He is aware of the margin of error that is present in all sta
tistics; he knows what reservations to make in drawing his
inferences. And his graphs and "composit-plots" tell him plainly
that you cannot divorce business prosperity from decent morals.
So far, good. But there is more to follow. From his ethical
generalizations, Mr. Babson turned to the New Testament; and
he has made the startling discovery that Jesus was a realist.
This will be painful reading to certain up-to-the-minute mod
ernists who have been applying the Freudian gauge to Jesus
and finding him quite inadequate. According to one of them,
Jesus was a "masochete" or something of the sort; and another
confident young gentleman (probably newly married) the other
day dismissed him as "a pacifist bachelor" who need not be
taken too seriously. And now comes this hard-headed statisti
cian telling us that Jesus knew all about it and that his teaching
is a very cyclopedia of good and sound business practice. The
"hard sayings" which even the devout have felt constrained to
mitigate in pity for human frailty turn out to be fine business
commonsense. To "seek first the Kingdom of God" pays. The
"second mile" is good business. "Take my yoke upon you" is the
path of success. In fine, "statistics show," says Mr. Babson,
"that Jesus's teachings are absolutely sound."
Some of us have suspected that this was so for quite a time;
and yet somehow Mr. Babson does not make us as happy about
it as we ought to be. It is good to have our convictions rein
forced from an unexpected quarter; but one has an uncomfort
able suspicion that Mr. Babson has stopped at the wrong station.
There seems to be a flaw in his premises, and he has landed us
in a dubious conclusion. He tells us that if we would be pros
perous we must needs be moral, and therefore religious. But
there is very good historical justification for fearing that once
269
we are prosperous we shall cease to be religious. This tendency

was noted by an old writer well over two thousand years ago.
"Beware . . . lest when thou hast eaten and art full and
hast built goodly houses and dwelt therein, and when thy herds
and thy flocks multiply and thy silver and thy gold is multiplied
and all that thou hast is multiplied, then thy heart be lifted up
and thou forget the Lord thy God . . . and thou say in thine
heart, My power and the might of mine hand hath gotten me
this wealth." This is a piece of sound observation. If Mr.
Babson could find the relevant statistics, he would find that
they proved something of this kind.
Lest criticism take up so much space as to confine apprecia
tion to an inconsiderable final paragraphwhich would be a
gross unfairnesslet me say here that these are notable books
and should be read. Mr. Babson is not trying to secure religious
sanction and reinforcement for the existing social order; and
if upholders of the capitalist system turn to these pages for aid
and comfort, they will be turned empty away. True, Mr. Bab
son sees no hope in socialism; but he says plainly that capital
ism has proved a failure; and he says many other courageous
and far-seeing things. For instance: "Social movements thrive
on persecution. You can imprison a man, but not an idea";
"the inheritance of property develops weakness and cannot be
defended on spiritual, economic, or scientific grounds. The only
excuse for the present inheritance laws is that man has yet
been unable to devise a better system for disposing of property
after death." (And, by the way, Mr. Babson has been thinking
about this problem for a long time. Has he no light to give us
upon it?) There is throughout the book much shrewd criticism
both of modern business and of organized religion; and in so
far as the book insists upon the connection between religion and
business in the unity of life, it does a really valuable service.
But the central defect of the book is an error in perspective.
Mr. Babson has not yet thought his way through to first prin
ciples. This appears occasionally in the vacillation of his mind
concerning the relations of religion and business; now, religion
seems to be the handmaid of business; another time, business
would appear to be ancillary to religion. What he does not see
is that both religion and business are subsidiary to life. Hence
also his mistaken emphasis on production. After all, this
vast synthesis of commerce, industry, production is at bot
tom an organization of the processes by which the physical
basis of life is maintained. As I have said elsewhere, its rela
tion to the rest of life is that of the kitchen to the rest of the
home. It is essential, indispensable, yet strictly preliminary and
subordinate; and the primacy of the business interest in the
modern mind means that we are living almost altogether in
the kitchen of the house of life and pay but occasional and per
functory visits to the living rooms of the house. In point of
fact, it is simple heresy to test the religion or the life of a
community by the measure of its productivity. Of production,
in the usual sense, society needs no more than that which will
supply its members with an adequate physical life In abnormal
times such as these, when a five-year orgy of waste has given
a special urgency to production, the case is different. But in
ordinary times, an excess of production over a generous esti
mate of the common need is mere waste. After all, men do not
live to produce; they produce to live. And it is because we
have not yet learned the real values of life that we have sur
rendered to this gospel of production.
It is just here that religion has- failed. The business of re
ligion is not (as Mr. Babson seems to think) to teach morals
but to reveal values ; and it is precisely this that religion has not
been doing. If it could give to men a true principle of valua
tion, morals would take care of themselves. This is a larger
matter than we may discuss here. But summarily one may say
that the final test of a way of life is its creative quality
that is, whether it makes for the increase of life. Productivity
means only an increase of things; and it need not mean an in
crease of life. It may quite easily mean an arrest of life. It
is not without its significance that Mr. Babson has nothing to
270
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2902
say about Art, though one suspects that somewhere within his
insistence on production there is an unrecognized sense of its
inadequacy for the whole business of life. He sees that the
craving for self-expression is inherent in human nature. But
production is for self-preservation; while self-expression is
essentially creative; and in the end the main test of a com
munity's life is its Art.
Mr. Babson is moving in the right direction, but he has some
distance yet to go. Meantime, however, he will help men to
reach a religious evaluation of business. It has been said that
"the true student goes to his desk as to an altar"; and Mr.
Babson would add that the genuine merchant goes to his office
as to a shrine. This generation has loved money without
respecting it. For money is a symbol of value, and value is
created by the expenditure of the priceless stuff of life. A
coin is so much minted life, a holy thing, neither common nor
unclean; a sacramental thing like the bread and wine of the
Communion, the symbol of life fruitfully expended. That is
why the banker should be as a priest, and a bank a holy place.
The goods in the store are so much congealed life; and the
merchant who does a crooked trade is defiling the Temple no
less than the hucksters and money changers in Jerusalem long
ago. Some day we shall perhaps come to think in such terms
as these; and Mr. Babson, despite the confusion of much of his
thought, is helping to hasten that day.
RlCHAHD ROBEETS
act, as he regarded it, in the history of freedom, the emancipa

tion of the American slaves. And he tells it with a brio, a
bravura that remind the reader of his uncle Charles Beade's
breathless tales of adventure. If he is less original than his
predecessor Voltaire and less well informed than his successor
Wells, his spirit and style are no less captivating than are
theirs. His researches into the origins of things remind one of
nothing so much as of Polydore Vergil's great, neglected book,
"De Inventoribus Rerum." Bits of Buckle and of Comte and of
Herbert Spencer are worked into the larger plan.
In the introduction to his "Outline of History" H. G. Wells
speaks of Reade as one of his masters. Though Wells is doubt
less far superior to Reade in accuracy and scope, the indebted
ness is evident. Both view history as a whole and both antici
pate a Utopia of science in the future when, as the earlier
writer puts it, "this earth, now a purgatory, will be made a
paradise"; when all will be rich, good, happy, and intelligent,
and when man will migrate from planet to planet and from
sun to sun. Though in that day all men will be brothers and
the universe will be one common fatherland, in the meantime it
may please Americans to read this author's opinion that our
own country, to which he was not native, had advanced the
furthest along the road tothe ideal. The United States, in
his opinion, is the happiest, the most civilized, the most pros
perous, and also the noblest people upon earth.
Preserved Smith
Universal History
The Martyrdom of Man. By Winwood Reade. Twenty-second
edition with an introduction by F. Legge. E. P. Dutton and
Company.
TWENTY years ago, when the reviewer was a student in
college, he was handed by a deprecating, almost furtive,
professor a work described as equally brilliant and dangerous.
Even then it was a rather old book, having been first published
in 1872. Solely by its own merits it made its way into a mod
erate popularity, for, though most journals, including the Lon
don Times and the Spectator, had refused to notice it, and
though all the reviews it received until 1906 were bitterly hos
tile, it continued to sell until fifteen thousand copies had been
disposed of and until now the twenty-second edition has been
issued with a biographical and critical introduction.
The reason for its cold reception was the author's hatred of
Christianity. Reade lived in the generation when to many men
Darwin seemed to have finally relegated the existence of God
to the limbo of unnecessary hypotheses, and when Nietzsche
and Richepin and Swinburne and James Thompson ("B. V.")
were straining the resources of language in the effort to give
the Deity a piece of their minds and thereby to "epater le bour
geois." It is just in this particular that Reade "dates" the most;
his passionate' assurances that "the destruction of Christianity
is essential to the interests of civilization," that "God-worship
is idolatry, prayer is useless, the soul is not immortal, and super
natural Christianity is false," strike one now less as blasphemies
than as the quaint survivals of the Victorian era when the
so-called "warfare of science and theology" reached its climax.
But it is only the author's bitter spirit that nowadays seems
out of place. It is instructive to follow the notes pregnant with
irony in which the historian's modern editor points out that
many of the positions taken by him in the treatment of Bibli
cal history, which at the time they were written gave much
offense, have now been adopted by the contributors to the chief
religious encyclopedias.
Taken all in all a noble idea is worthily worked out in this
first universal history to use the results of Darwinism. Reade
was the first to see and to put into popular form the bearing
of evolution on the perspective of man's past. In four chapters,
on war, on religion, on liberty, and on intellect, he tells the story
of the race's progress from the anthropoid to the culminating
Books in Brief
"\J OW, don't be an ignorant, immoral foreigner," says one
of Bernard Shaw's English characters to a person who
has not the advantage of British birth. The hostility, or preju
dice, with which every nation regards every other, which has
made the Latin words for "stranger" and "public enemy" the
same, and which has given its English meaning to the word
"outlandish," is well illustrated in a book by the Chilean editor
Tancredo Pinochet, intended to bridge over "The Gulf of Mis
understanding" (Boni and Liveright) as it exists between
Anglo-Saxon and Spanish America. Cast in the form of letters
to a South American lady, some from her husband bitterly
criticizing the United States and others from a North Amer
ican friend answering these attacks, it analyzes the character
of our civilization both from the inimical and from the friendly
viewpoint. The South American is first of all struck with the
rush, the cult of speed, so great that when a man falls to his
death from his office at the top of a sky-scraper, he is handed
a check for his life insurance as he passes the window of the
company ten stories below. Hollow, the South American ob
serves, are our pretenses at democracy, with our concentration
of great wealth, our miserable proletariat, and the horrible
treatment of the Negroes. Thoroughly does he disapprove of
our feminism, which not only has made woman equal to man but
has put her in the position of master. Strange, he remarks,
that there are so many divorces when husband and wife never
see one another from early morning until late at night. On the
strength of a novel of Ernest Poole he concludes that cicisbeism
is becoming common. At the divorce court he says he heard
men fined and sentenced to prison for not giving their wives
all, instead of only most, of their earnings, and, in another
case, for not allowing pet dogs to sleep in bed with them.
Manners he finds atrocious, as when he gallantly offered his
seat to a lady, only to be met with the tart reply: "Why should
you give your seat to me? Am I frailer than a man?" Reli
gion, as typified by Billy Sunday, prohibition, education or
rather the lack of it, materialism, and imperialism all come in
for hard knocks. The wholesome, if humiliating, task of read
ing a book full of such criticisms, is sweetened by a coating of
praise laid on by way of antidote, and by the final conversion
of the Chilean gentleman to a love for the United States and to
a perception of her real idealism and fine purpose.
Feb. 16, 1921]
The Nation
Drama
The Case of "John Hawthorne"
T ATE in January "John Hawthorne," a drama by an hitherto
' unknown playwright, David Liebovitz, was tried out for
afternoon performances by the Theater Guild and withdrawn
at the end of a very few days amid the practically unanimous
jeers of the critics of the New York daily press. We do not
regret the withdrawal. Indeed, in its present shape the play
should never have been put on. Nor, if it was worth putting
on at all, should it have been intrusted to a group of actors
whose wooden inexpressiveness and feeble declamation was unpierced by one ray of feeling or intelligence. Where did the
directors of the Guild keep their sensitiveness to the quality of
human speech when they permitted Mr. Liebovitz to make his
Kentucky mountaineers speak as surely no human beings have
ever spoken in the world? The plea that the dialogue was not
realistic but "stylicized" cannot be admitted. For the baldness
and lifelessness of the lines grows in proportion as the author
seeks to raise them above the level of humble human speech.
No, from the point of view of the directors of the Guild, there
was little excuse for the production of a work so obviously im
perfect. Nevertheless, its immediate critical reception was cal
culated to confound and not to correct Mr. Liebovitz. That
reception was so dangerously thoughtless and so wholly bare of
any understanding of the character and aim of the tragic
drama that it struck one as a menacing prophecy of what was
more than likely to occur on some other and graver occasion.
For what no one saw or was willing to see was that Mr.
Liebovitz had built an action which, stripped of his dialogue,
was not only of an authentically tragic quality but added to
the tragic drama's stock of psychology a new and recognizably
American motive. It was glibly said that the stuff of the play
was "raw." So is the stuff of "Oedipus" and "Macbeth." It
was said that its fable involved the tiresome old triangle. So
do the fables of "Rosmersholm" and "Le Pardon" and "Rose
Bernd." The value of a dramatic action has nothing to do with
novelty of incident or the tingle of physical suspense. Char
acter, motive and fatality, man and the earth and the gods
such are the elements of dramatic action. Consider Mr. Liebovitz's story. A lonely, unloved mountain girl marries a rich,
harsh, middle-aged farmer. She and one of the hands, John
Hawthorne, are drawn together by a strong, fresh passion.
John tries to tear himself away. But Laura Smart will not
let him go, half-veiling her love even from herself by a show
of solicitude for John's salvation. He stays and, at the end
of a quarrel convincing enough in its origin and progress, kills
the husband. The guilty lovers flee to the hills. But Laura, a
Kentucky country-girl, let us remember, a communicant, prob
ably, of the Southern Baptist church, can find no peace while
BftflBBBBBBSBl H. L. MENCKEN uys:8BBBBBBHMBSBBBB
"Even a college professor or Congressman can understand Tridon
on 'Psychoanalysis'."
Friday Afternoons at 3:30, February 25 to March 25, 1921
A NEW AND REMARKABLE SERIES OF FIVE LECTURES ON
"PSYCHOANALYSIS"
By ANDRE TRIDON
of "Psychoanalysis and Behavior," "Psychoanalysis, its Theory and
Practice," "Psychoanalysis. Sleep and Dreams," etc.
25THE UNCONSCIOUS AND ITS MYSTERIES:
or What is Psychoanalysis ?
- THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS :
or Suppressed Desires and Their Dream Gratification
March 11 PROBLEMS OF CHILDHOOD:
or Heredity and Sexual Enlightenment
March IS DUAL PERSONALITIES :
or the Jekyll and Hyde Case in Actual Life
March 25 LOVE, NORMAL AND ABNORMAL.
RUMFORD HALL. 50 E. 41st ST., Near Madison Aye.. N. Y.
Single Admission $1.25 Plus 10% war tax Course Ticket $5.00 '
Management of THE FINE ARTS GUILD, 27 W. 8th St. Phone Stoyvesant 717
N. B.Inasmuch as the seating capacity of Rumford Hall is limited to 250,
we urge you to make your reservations at once, either for single lectures or
the complete course. Reservations will be honored in order of receipt.
271
she is certain of John's damnation at the hands of an angry

God. He must expiate. And since she cannot persuade his
pagan soul of that necessity, she betrays him to the sheriff' in
order to save him both in this world and the next. No one
who has known the half-illiterate evangelical sects of the South
can doubt the force and truth and, if one likes, the originality
of the inner progression of this fable. The structure of its
dramatic embodiment was neither taut nor straight enough.
But it was ambitious of tautness and straightness. It was
blamed, however, for not being ingenious and meretricious and
falsely smooth. It was condemned not because it was not more
like "Macbeth" but because it was not more like "Declassee."
Suppose another and a greater than Mr. Liebovitz were to
appear? What would be his fate?
The choragus of newspaper critics set an unenviable example
in the Times. He called "John Hawthorne" "uncommonly lugu
brious," which is precisely what he called Gorki's "Night Lodg
ing." He accused it of "sedulous gloom"; did he expect the
humblest practitioner of tragedy to be sedulous about packing
his troubles in his old kit-bag? The play's execution was,
artistically, depressing enough. Its subject-matter was gloomy
only in the sense in which "Lear" and "The Cenci" and
"Ghosts" and "The Weavers" and "La Course du Flambeau" and
"Redemption" and "Justice" are all gloomy. The Times glows
with chubby cheer over the performances of Booth Tarkington
and Zoe Akins. Gorki depressed it, Tolstoy left it chilled,
Galsworthy could not entice it. The story of "John Hawthorne"
inspires it to repeat a frivolous anecdote. A man was buried
in a cellar in the anecdote. So was a man buried in "John
Hawthorne." Well, Clytemnestra was killed behind the palace
doors and Wallenstein stabbed in a dining-room and Falder
throws himself out of a window and Rosmer and Rebecca jump
into the mill-race and murdered men have been buried in many
places, and the incidents could, no doubt, all be matched in the
more sardonic jokes that fly about on the lips of men. And any
tragedy can be called gloomy and lugubrious and represented
as a bad joke to the thoughtless.
Whenever a tragic dramatist appears among us, Mr. Alex
ander Woollcott will be depressed. The dramatist's dialogue,
which will be very different from Mr. Liebovitz's, will not save
him. For, according to a current theory, dialogue counts for
little, drama has no relation to literature, and a theatrical re
viewer need not possess the art of reading. It was not, in a
word, the glaring faults of "John Hawthorne" that damned it,
but that within the play which will be shared by any American
tragedy that may appear. That tragedy will be called sordid
and drab and will be contrasted with the sunniness of "Clarence"
or the political uplift of "Poldekin." Hence those who believe
in the future of the American theater must begin to counteract
such critical attitudes. We, too, deplore the Theater Guild's
judgment in this instance. But we applaud its spirit and in
tention even here.
Ludwig Lewisohn
Herald Square
New York
Maintains the
largest
and
most complete
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York
City.
Copyright, Ml, R. H. Macy <fi Co.. Inc.
International
Relations
Disarmament in 1898and Now

IN the light of current discussions of the question of the
limitation of armaments, and of the need for an inter
national conference to agree upon some such limitation,
it is enlightening to recall the famous rescript of the
Eussian Czar calling the first joint conference on dis
armament and peace in August, 1898. The text of the
rescript, transmitted to the governments through Count
Muraviev, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs, follows:
The maintenance of general peace, and a possible reduction of
the excessive armaments which weigh upon all nations, present
themselves in the existing condition of the whole world as the
ideal toward which the endeavors of all governments should be
directed.
The humanitarian and magnanimous ideas of His Majesty,
the Emperor, my August Master, have been won over to this
view. In the conviction that this lofty aim is in conformity with
the most essential interests and the legitimate views of all
Powers, the Imperial Government thinks that the present mo
ment would be very favorable for seeking, by means of inter
national discussion, the most effectual means of insuring to all
peoples the benefits of a real and durable peace, and, above all,
of putting an end to the progressive development of the present
armaments.
In the course of the last twenty years the longings for a
general appeasement have become especially pronounced in the
consciences of civilized nations. The preservation of peace has
been put forward as the object of international policy; in its
name great states have concluded between themselves powerful
alliances; it is the better to guarantee peace that they have
developed, in proportions hitherto unprecedented, their military
forces, and still continue to increase them without shrinking
from any sacrifice.
All these efforts nevertheless have not yet been able to bring
about the beneficent results of the desired pacification. The
financial charges following an upward march strike at the
public prosperity at its very source.
The intellectual and physical strength of the nations, labor,
and capital are for the major part diverted from their natural
application, and unproductively consumed. Hundreds of millions
are devoted to acquiring terrible engines of destruction, which,
though today regarded as the last word of science, are destined
tomorrow to lose all value in consequence of some fresh dis
covery in the same field.
National culture, economic progress, and the production of
wealth are either paralyzed or checked in their development.
Moreover, in proportion as the armaments of each Power in
crease so do they less and less fulfil the object which the Gov
ernments have set before themselves.
The economic crises, due in great part to the system of arma
ments d I'outrance, and the continual danger which lies in this
massing of war material, are transforming the armed peace of
our days into a crushing burden, which the peoples have more
and more difficulty in bearing. It appears evident, then, that if
this state of things were prolonged, it would inevitably lead to
the very cataclysm which it is desired to avert, and the horrors
of which make every thinking man shudder in advance.
To put an end to these incessant armaments and to seek the
means of warding off the calamities which are threatening the
whole worldsuch is the supreme duty which is today imposed
on all states.
Filled with this idea, His Majesty has been pleased to order
me to propose to all the governments whose representatives are
accredited to the Imperial Court, the meeting of a conference
which would have to occupy itself with this grave problem.
Section
This conference should be, by the help of God, a happy presage

for the century which is about to open. It would converge in
one powerful focus the efforts of all states which are sincerely
seeking to make the great idea of universal peace triumph over
the elements of trouble and discord.
It would, at the same time, confirm their agreement by the
solemn establishment of the principles of justice and right, upon
which repose the security of states and the welfare of peoples.
American Property in Germany

THE report of the German Alien Property Custodian,
Dr. Nieders, on the treatment of American property
in Germany during the war, was secured in Berlin by Mr.
Bernard G. Heyn, who has recently concluded an investiga
tion of the administration of American property by the
German authorities.
I
From the Beginning of the European War to the Declaration
of War by the United States
American property in Germany was not subjected to any un
usual measures of war or reprisal. In the few cases in which
American property was seized, it was done not as a measure
directed against America, but in connection with the confiscation
and seizure of certain raw materials because of military require
ments, a measure to which all German citizens were subject.
This happened in the case of copper and of certain other raw
materials indispensable for the waging of war. Such seizure
affected all Germans and all foreigners resident in Germany, in
so far as they were not protected by extraterritorial rights, with
out exception.
n
From America's Declaration of War to the Armistice
(November 11, 1918)
In the first place, a distinction should be made, in considering
measures introduced and executed by German officials against
enemy property, between the text of the various laws and
regulations and their actual execution. At the beginning of the
war the German Government took its stand upon the inviolability
of private property and desired to carry out in detail the pro
visions of Article 23, paragraph (h) of the Hague Convention
for Land Warfare of the Second Hague Conference of October
18, 1907. In publishing the law of August 4, 1914, which the
American Alien Property Custodian cites, it had no thought
whatever of economic warfare.
It was England which began the violation of enemy private
property when, on August 5, 1914, one day after the declaration
of war, she prohibited commerce with the enemy. Germany
followed the enemy states only hesitatingly; all the laws and
decrees put forth in the course of the economic war are es
sentially replies to corresponding enemy laws, and came after
them. That is evident, for instance, in the fact that whereas the
English custodian took up his work on the basis of an English
law of November, 1914, the German Alien Property Custodian
was established only by an order of April 19, 1917. Despite the
fact that a state of war with America already existed, the
Enemy Property Custodian for a time made no use of his power
to confiscate American property or to administer it. The
measures taken against Germany's other enemies in connection
with the economic war were extended to America only when
America had acted first. The office of Alien Property Custodian
was established in America by the Commerce With the Enemy
Act of October 6, 1917. When it was learned in Germany that
on the basis of that act German property in America was being
attacked ruthlessly, the embargo on property of certain enemy
Feb. 16, 1921]
The Nation
states established by the order of October 7, 1915, was extended

to the United States by the order of November 10, 1917. The
same is true of the German order of December 13, 1917, per
mitting compulsory administration of American business. The
right to cancel contracts with the subjects of other enemy states
was extended to the United States only by the order of December
31, 1917. But the reports of the American Alien Property
Custodian show best how exclusively the entire German economic
warfare was dominated by the thought of defense and retaliation.
The American custodian on February 7, 1918, replied to a
question sent to the State Department by the German Govern
ment through the Swiss Embassy as follows:
"The Department of the Treasury has ordered the liquidation
of enemy fire and re-insurance companies. The liquidation of
German private property, especially of business enterprises,
when conducted by partnerships to which an enemy belongs, is
in process. The war has made such partnerships void; therefore
the War Trade Board has granted the partners licenses for con
tinuation of business, with intent to liquidate the enemy portions.
Where these portions exist in the form of shares, the shares will
be taken over by the administrator, and he will name directors
for the conduct of business. For the present no such companies
will be liquidated."
It was only after receipt of this information that the order
of March 4, 1918, regarding liquidation of specified enterprises,
was issued, and this order does not, as the American Alien Prop
erty Custodian says in his report, "order" the liquidation of
American factories in Germany, but enables it. At the same
time the American State Department was informed through the
Spanish Embassy in Berlin, as the American custodian re
peatedly states in his report, that the decrees against American
property would be carried out only in so far as the American
officials applied the law against German property in the United
States. In fact, the German Government not only loyally kept
this promise, but, despite all the reports of ruthless treatment
of German property in the United States, remained consistently
far behind the American measures, and always treated American
property in Germany with every consideration and care.
Enemy private property such as furniture, household objects,
personal ornaments, and such matters intended for the personal
use of the owner, were in principle not touched. The property
of all enemy subjects was treated alike in such matters; the
contrary reports of the American custodian are mistaken.
Articles of clothing, etc., were sold only after authorization by
the German custodian when the German depositary requested
it because the objects were subject to damage by moth-eating,
etc. Such authorization was given only exceptionally and after
careful examination of the case. Nor were American patents
and licenses in Germany sold or otherwise disposed of to people
not entitled to them, as occurred in so many cases and apparently
still occurs in America. According to American legislation all
German intangible property in the United States is completely
outlawed, which seriously hampers the resumption of economic
relations, and is ultimately injurious to American citizens as
well.
There has never been compulsory liquidation of American
businesses. German war legislation makes a distinction between
compulsory liquidation and compulsory administration. Com
pulsory liquidation means sale of enemy property or its complete
dissolution after sale of its balance and payment of its debts.
No American enterprises were subjected to such treatment.
Compulsory administration of enemy enterprises had the sole
purpose of bringing the enterprise under German control
and seeing to it that it was not administered in a fashion
contrary to German interests. Furthermore the compul
sory administrators (Zwangsverwalter) were made custo
dians of the enemy property and as such were obligated to carry
on the business conscientiously in the interest of the owner. In
almost all such cases the industry was continued, the old em
ployees retained when there was work for them to do; and many
of the businesses so conducted operated successfully and made
273
large profits during the war, which now go to the enemy owners.
The business of the International Harvester Company, for in
stance, was so well administered in the interests of the Amer
icans that the American vice-president, when he came to Ger
many, expressed his particular gratitude to the Zwangsver
walter. The sale of entire businesses to newly formed companies
occurred in only a few cases, when such measures were neces
sary for the protection of the American property interests. Thus
the transfer of the information service "Dun and Co.," which the
American Alien Property Custodian mentions in his report, to a
newly formed company, became necessary because after America
had prohibited payments to the enemy the firm lacked means
and consequently would have been condemned to bankruptcy.
The business, and the valuable material and archives of the firm,
could be preserved only if new capital were introduced. For
that, a new company had to be formed, the founders of which,
although indeed German subjects, were friends of the American
owners, and ready to come to an agreement with them regarding
the return of the business. In another case, that of the Johnson
Erntemaschinen Company, sale to a company to be newly formed
had been almost completed before compulsory administration
began, and the arrangements were carried out by the representa
tive appointed by the American firm. Sale took place to the
Budapest representative of the American firm, solely with the
purpose of maintaining the business of the Americans. The
number of American partnerships and enterprises brought under
compulsory administration is, in comparison to the total amount
of American capital at work in Germany, extraordinarily small ;
up to the armistice there are only 186 reports of such orders in
the Reichsameiger.
The personal property of Americans was handled with even
greater consideration than their business enterprises. Property
intended for personal use, as has been said, remained entirely
free from any measures of alienation. Claims of Americans
against German individuals or firms (goods to be delivered,
loans, etc.), were carefully recorded on the custodian's -books.
This meant merely supervision as a preparation for future set
tlement. In not a single case did the German custodian make
use of the right granted him by paragraph 6 of the order of
April 19, 1917, to collect these claims. When German debtors
who wished to settle at once voluntarily paid the custodian, the
sum was accepted for the enemy creditors and will be credited
to them at the final reckoning. Where securities and other de
posits in banks were concerned, the deposits also came under
the supervision of the custodian, but were left in the banks.
Sale of obligations, stocks, or other securities did not take place,
except in exceptional cases when the bank, for the protection of
important interests of the foreigner, sought such permission.
Interest on securities was paid by the banks to the custodian,
and will be administered by him for the account of the enemy
owner until the final reckoning.
Ill
From the Armistice to January 10, 1920
Although Germany had the right to continue the measures
directed against enemy property in the period between the armis
tice and the conclusion of peace, and although the custodian
might have continued his control of enemy property, no use was
made of this right. Yet the report of the American custodian
makes it clear that the liquidation and sale of the enemy prop
erty seized was not only continued but that new seizures and
sales were ordered and carried out. In the few cases where the
German custodian took enemy property under his control after
the armistice it was not a hostile measure, but was done in order
to supervise and to preserve for their owners property which
would otherwise have been left without protection. In general,
the German Alien Property Custodian had the task only of ad
ministering alien property, and of preserving it for its owners,
not of selling it or of liquidating it, in the sense in which the
American custodian regarded his function and ruthlessly exe
274
The Nation
cuted it. In so far as enemy enterprises in Germany could be

supervised, administered, or liquidated, that was the task of the
officials of the federated states of Germany. The custodian had
no influence upon these measures, and was, according to para
graph 2 of the Alien Property Custodian Order, limited to the
task of taking over and administering property made over to him
by the administrators or liquidators or other supervisors of
enemy property. His task was chiefly to administer the enemyowned securities in German banks, which, according to paragraph
6 of the order, he might have confiscated (except for landed
property, factories, or domiciles), although he hardly ever made
use of that power. But he was not only empowered, but, by
paragraph 3 of the order, obligated, to accept payments from
German debtors seeking to discharge their debts to enemy sub
jects. He gave no final receipt in such cases when the amount
of the debt was doubtful or when the debt was to be paid in a
foreign currency on which the final rate was not certain. The
right to supervise enemy property in Germany was also granted
the custodian by the order of January 30, 1918, which pre
scribed declaration of American property in Germany to the
custodian.
IV
After the Ratification of the Treaty by the Great Powers of
Europe on January 10, 1920
Since the United States did not ratify the Treaty of Ver
sailles on January 10, 1920, as did the European Powers, and
has not yet ratified it, the state of war between Germany and
America continues, and Germany might still have utilized
measures of economic warfare against America as America
is still doing against Germany. Nevertheless, the German order
of January 11, 1920, abolishing war measures, comprised all the
legal proclamations and orders having to do with economic
warfare, including those directed against the United States.
Measures of economic war and reprisal are henceforth out of
the question. The Alien Property Custodian, according to Ar
ticle 3, paragraph 2, and Article 6 of the order of January
11, 1920, acts solely in the interest of the alien property owners
until the property is returned. Only for that purpose can he
continue to exercise the powers previously granted him, demand
information regarding the property in his custody, or take pos
session of property including back or future interest. The
custodian has followed these provisions faithfully with respect
to the United States as well as the other countries. Liquida
tion is, however, seriously hampered, not by ill-will in Germany,
but, as is not well understood in America, by the provisions of
the Treaty of Versailles which was forced on Germany. Sec
tion III (Debts) of Part X (Economic Clauses) of the peace
treaty provides for a clearing-house system for the settlement
of debts between states. Detailed provisions for this are pre
scribed in Article 296, in case the enemies of Germany give
notice that they so desire within one month of ratification of
the treaty. In order to prevent private debtors and creditors
in the enemy states and in Germany from settling their prewar
reciprocal business arrangements, Article 296 (a) prescribes
that "each of the High Contracting Parties shall prohibit, as
from the coming into force of the present treaty, both the
payment and the acceptance of payment of such debts, and
also all communications between the interested parties with
regard to the settlement of the said debts otherwise than through
the clearing offices." In order that Germany might not, as has
so often been the case, be subjected to unwarranted charges
of not maintaining the provisions of the treaty, the German
Government had to include in the law for the execution of the
peace treaty, the law of August 31, 1919, paragraphs 1 to 3,
a prohibition of such settlement of debts until some one of the
Allied and Associated Powers should give notice that it had
decided against the clearing office procedure prescribed in Ar
ticle 296 of the treaty. Consequently, until America ratifies
the treaty, or previous to ratification renounces the clearing
office procedure, as Brazil did, Germany cannot undertake or
[Vol. 112, No. 2902
permit settlement of American property which might, if Amer

ica should adopt the clearing office procedure, fall into the
categories listed in Article 296, paragraphs 1 to 4. This in
cludes prewar debts on goods ordered or other contracts arising
in commerce between nationals of the various states. Conse
quently Germany has up to the present been able to return to
Americans only securities or other definite individual physical
property, and cannot give up other forms of property. Payment
of outstanding debts and proceeds from sales by the custodian
in general cannot be made because the United States has not
ratified the treaty or renounced the clearing office procedure.
Since, however, strict execution of that paragraph of the treaty
would have had the effect of hampering the resumption of
German-American economic relations, and since such resump
tion is regarded in Germany as desirable, action was taken in
individual cases to put the necessary means at the disposal of
the directors of American enterprises. This had been done
during the war, before the restrictive provisions of the peace
treaty took effect, both as regards businesses and needy indi
viduals of American citizenship. A wider development of such
practice can be made possible only by action of the American
Government. Nothing would be more welcomed in Germany
than action by the United States to enable rapid and free set
tlement of German debts to America and to Americans.
V
American Property Under the Administration of the Alien
Property Custodian
The following figures regarding American property held by
the German Alien Property Custodian are approximately cor
rect:
The total property of American nationals in Germany re
ported to the custodian amounted to about 208,799,000 marks.
As of June 1, 1920, approximately 6,041,800 marks had been
handed over to the custodian, and the interest due the custodian
according to paragraph 7 of the order establishing the Alien
Property Custodian brings the total to about 11,000,000 marks.
About 202,757,200 marks were left with the owners and merely
entered on the custodian's books. This involves chiefly cash
debts due Americans by German debtors arising from interest
in companies, outstanding debts in banks, goods debts, accep
tance debts, insurance premiums, etc. Something more than
24,000,000 marks were transferred to the custodian in American
enterprises in Germany subjected to compulsory administra
tion or supervision, and about 2,000,000 in bonds. Thus far
about 54,000,000 marks have been paid out to enemy owners,
including bonds returned, in redemption of such enterprises
by the custodian. In all, the custodian has thus far released
at least 135,000,000 marks to America, including the bonds in
bank taken under his charge. This alone shows that the cus
todian has handled American property with particular care,
and that everything possible has been done to resume commercial
and business relations with as little friction as possible. Among
the larger American firms in Germany which were subjected
to compulsory administration and whose receipts and proceeds
were diverted to the Alien Property Custodian the following
may be mentioned: the International Harvester Company, the
Singer Co., Steinway and Sons, the F. W. Woolworth Co.,
Marshall Field and Co., the National Cash Register Co. . . .
It can only be repeated that it depends exclusively upon the
American Government whether or not the economic war shall
be liquidated by immediate return of all American property to
nationals of the United States and full resumption of business
relations in the near future thus be achieved. Nothing is more
desired in Germany than complete reestablishment of the tra
ditional good relations such as had existed between the great
republic of the new world and the German people from the
time of Frederick the Great and of Washington. Such rela
tions would find their expression and development in the ex
change of personal relationships as well as of goods.
The
Feb. 16, 1921]
Nation
275
A Manifesto from British Intellectuals

MANIFESTO from a group of British authors, artists,
and professors, demanding that the Government find
a solution of the Irish question or resign, was recently pub

lished.
We, the undersigned, practicing the arts, the humaner letters,

and the abstract sciences, or belonging to the churches and the
learned professions of this country, being neither active nor in
terested politicians, view with profound humiliation the present
As
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state of the Kingdom of Ireland.
We see our country, which in the past and until very lately
made great sacrifices, thinking that it made them for the cause
of oppressed peoples, now presenting to the world the aspect of
a land hardly equaled in the past for ignorant and unavailing
coercionthat coercion being practiced upon a nation that co
equally with ourselves has inherited our traditions of individual
liberty. This not because of any native ferocity, greed of gain,

or thirst for rapine in our people, but because of irresolution,
incapacity, and misreading of facts by those who hold the reins
of our Government.
We therefore call upon the present Ministry to find immediate

means of arbitration or mediation between ourselves and the
CThat is, insured against
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[Vol. 112, No. 2902
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Vol. CXII

Contents
277
EDITORIALS:
Dillydallying Disarmers
280
Lo, the Poor Railroads!
281
Bad Debts or Bad Blood
282
Wilson's Legacy to Harding
282
The Fallacy of Technique
283
THE CHALLENGE OF WASTE TO EXISTING INDUSTRIAL
CREEDS. By Stuart Chase
284
THE FRENCH IN SYRIA. By Paiton Hibben
287
THOUGHT CONTROL IN JAPAN. By Junius B. Wood
290
JOHN KEATS: 1821-1921. By Mark Van Doren
292
HEROES AND HERO WORSHIP. By R. Niebuhr
293
THOSE MARK-DOWNS! By William A. McGarry
294
296
CORRESPONDENCE
29
BOOKS:
Great Was the FaU ! By B. U. Burke
297
Transitions in Politics. By Charles A. Beard
297
A Laborer in Alaska. By G. S
298
Anatole France in English Again. By George Boas
299
Books in Brief
299
Notable New Books
300
DRAMA:
Rank and File. By Ludwig Lewisohn
800
South Africa's Crisis
802
FOURTH OFFICIAL REPORT OF AMERICAN COMMISSION ON
CONDITIONS IN IRELAND:
Testimony of Miss Mary MacSwiney (concluded), John Tangney,
Mrs. Anna Murphy, John Joseph Caddan, Daniel Galvin, and
Miss Ruth Russell
309
Associate Editors
LEWIS S. GANNETT
FREDA KERCHWEY
ARTHUR WARNER
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
ERNEST H. GRUENING
CARL VAN DOREN
Managing Editor
Literary Editor
Mexico ; to Canada, $5.50, and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, 86.00.
THE NATION, 20 Vesey Street, New York City. Cable Address : Nation, New
GENERAL SMUTS has secured his majority in the
South African elections, and the Empire is invited
by the press to give a sigh of relief ; it is still intact ; South
Africa is not a republic. The fact that the Nationalist
opponents of General Smuts and of his South AfricanUnionist fusion party refused to fight on the issue of seces
sion did not daunt the supporters of imperial integrity.
They were set upon saving the British Empire even if no
danger confronted it. According to the latest reports, the
Smuts party has secured 76 seats, an increase of 11 over the
combined South African-Unionist representation in the elec
tion of last March. The Nationalists, with several country
districtspresumably Nationalist in sentimentyet to be
heard from, dropped from 43 to 40an inconsiderable loss.
But the Labor Party, which made a spectacular campaign
last spring and secured 21 seats, has lost 12, at least 8 of
which went to the new Smuts fusion party. A reading of
the campaign documents printed in this issue of the Inter
national Relations Section will render the issue clear and
the result intelligible. The Nationalist representation is
intact, the Labor Partywhich supports the imperial con
nectionis badly beaten; or, in other words, the status of
the Empire is just what it was before the election, but radi
calism is for the time being crushed.
HE American relief workers who have recently arrived
in Ireland find their field of activity limited by Dublin
Castle. It is not yet certain whether they will be allowed
No. 2903
to work in the martial law areawhere the need is naturally

greatest; and there are ominous stories of refusal to permit
them to aid those who have been punished by the British
military authorities. Since the authorities have openly
taken to destruction of homes of those who merely refuse
to act as informers, such prohibition of relief would seem to
be a cold, calculated form of cruelty almost beyond belief.
Yet there is nothing too cruel or too inhuman to fall to
Ireland's lot. The threatened strike of British railwaymen
in protest against the shooting of their fellow-railwaymen
at Mallow seems destined to fizzle. Parliament reopens
with an embittered opposition, strengthened by such honest
conservatives as Lord Robert Cecil, but the coalition of the
ablest minds and finest spirits of three parties seems to
avail nothing against the sodden power of Lloyd George's
stupid and selfish majority.
FOUR ships loaded with relief supplies for Soviet Russia
and the Ukraine have sailed from the port of New
York within the past three months. Most of these supplies
were indirectly purchased by the Soviet Government. The
two independent relief organizations which have persisted,
despite official obstruction, in their struggle to do relief
work where it was most needed, the Jewish Joint Distribu
tion Board and the American Friends Service Committee,
have also landed supplies within Soviet Russia and are dis
tributing them. We recently announced the gift of $50,000
worth of relief supplies by the American Red Cross to the
Friends Service Committee. Mr. Hoover's organization, the
American Relief Administration, has just given $100,000
worth of relief supplies for the same purpose. We hope
that these large organizations, if they will not go into
Russia directly, will continue and expand this policy of aid
to organizations which do.
TWENTY-ONE Marines attacked and completely de
stroyed the plant of La Tribuna of Managua, Nica
ragua, because that newspaper contained an article which
offended them. La Tribuna is the leading liberal paper of
Nicaragua and has consistently protested against the
American occupation. Of course, we all had somehow gath
eredthose few of us who happen to know at all that Amer
ican forces have been in Nicaragua for the last eight years
and that they have killed somewhat more than two thou
sand Nicaraguansthat our Marines were sent and are
being maintained there to preserve order. At least that is
the official version. The truth is that they were sent there
to protect the investments of a large New York banking
house. But when these appointed guardians of law and
order, wearing the uniforms of a great democracy, them
selves start rioting and destroying property, and the news
trickles out, what next? Appoint a court martial of course,
sentence a few of .the rioting privates, and take care that
the news doesn't leak again. The Congressional committee
which purposes to look into our extraterritorial ventures
will find the story of Nicaragua second in interest only to
that of Santo Domingo and Haiti. Though differing in
detail the processes of enslavement have been very like.
278
The Nation
MEANWHILE it is pleasing to announce the arrival in

the United States of a Haitian Commission, consist
ing of M. Paulus Sannon, Haitian Minister to the United
States during the Taft administration, and M. Stenio Vin
cent, president of the Haitian Senate which was dissolved,
literally at the point of the pistol, by Brigadier-General
Smedley D. Butler, in 1915. The latter is the same officer
whom Nicaraguan mothers invoke when they desire to
frighten their children : "Hush ! Major Butler will get you"
has been a current maternal warning in Nicaragua for
years. The arrival of the Haitian commission coincides
both with the statement of Admiral Knapp giving the Amer
ican occupation of Haiti the cleanest of bills of health,
and, paradoxically, with the worst smallpox epidemic in
the memory of living Haitians. Congress cannot investi
gate too soon or too thoroughly.
BERNARD M. BARUCH, formerly chairman of the War
Industries Board, was asked lately by the Kansas State
Board of Agriculture for suggestions that would help to
put farming on a more businesslike and profitable basis.
His recommendations, so far as they go, coincide closely
with the program of the National Nonpartisan League
(which American Legion members have been trying to keep
out of Kansas), embodying three main proposals: (1) pub
lic warehouses where farm produce will be fairly graded
and safely stored; (2) cheap loans on such produce; (3)
market reports for farmers. Mr. Baruch's proposals were
formulated with the grain crop chiefly in mind, but may be
applied to cotton, tobacco, and other large-scale produce as
well. The principle, he explains, is that "the producer must
be placed on a footing of equal opportunity with the buyer."
Adequate warehouse facilities for farmers would obviously
place in their hands much of the power now held by food
dealers and speculators, and the receipts for produce could
either be sold by the farmer or used as security for loans.
Mr. Baruch notes that the Government maintains an elabo
rate service for informing buyers where they can purchase
cheaply, but does not tell farmers where they can sell profit
ably. He favors the erection of warehouses by private
finance, whereas the Nonpartisan League demands State ac
tion; but he concedes that if private capital is not forth
coming, then government funds should be used. He will
probably find that private capital is not interested in a pro
ject which seeks to bring producer and consumer closer,
thus reducing the profit and control of the middleman.
MANY persons who read on the one hand of the closing
of numerous country banks in the West because farm
ers were failing to repay their loans, and on the other of the
refusal of farmers to sell their grain at the present low
prices, are at a loss to reconcile the two sets of facts. Why
do the banks not move to foreclose on the property which
the farmers have given as security, they ask, and thus com
pel them to sell any produce for which they can get cash?
There are two reasons. In the first place, prices have fallen
bo acutely that the grain or other property pledged as se
curity often would not sell for enough to cover the loan. In
the second place, the country banks in. question are local
institutions, directly dependent upon the prosperity and
good-will of the community. If only one or two farmers in
their region were in difficulty the banks would not hesitate
at foreclosure proceedings, but to ruin any considerable
mber would be to ruin themselves as well. Moreover,
[Vol. 112, No. 2903
there is at the moment a class consciousness among farmers

that must be reckoned with. At an auction sale of cattle,
seized recently for debt by a North Dakota bank, not one of
the 1,000 farmers present would make a bid, and the bank
had no alternative but to let the owner take his herd home.
In eastern Montana farmers are threatening to go into
bankruptcy, which would mean fatal losses to local banks.
COMMUNISTS in this country waste a lot of time rais
ing scanty funds with which to print their propa
ganda. A few months ago they laboriously printed the
proceedings of the Second Congress of the Communist In
ternational. The translation was bad, the printing poor,
and the paper wretched. If they had only appreciated our
generous State Department! Now there comes to our desk
a copy of a 166-page pamphlet, very nicely printed indeed,
and on good white paper, entitled "The Second Congress of
the Communist International, as reported and interpreted
by the official newspapers of Soviet Russia." The State De
partment obligingly collects and translates these documents ;
the Government Printing Office attends to the typograph
ical work; and it is sent free to all the papers. Apparently
any citizen, be he Communist or Union Leaguer, can se
cure a copy for the asking. The Communists really waste
their energy and pennies; they are too impatient; here is
Uncle Sam paying out of taxation for propaganda for the
distribution of which Communists have been going to jail.
We do not know which to laugh at most, the Communists or
the State Department.
ODS-FISH! A mere United States Senator dares stand
up and attack the Grand Panjandrum and Supreme
Arbiter of our national sport? In addition to occupying
that pinnacle, Kenesaw Mountain Landis is a Federal judge
in Chicago. That is a detail, but a detail not wholly insig
nificant, since it was in his capacity as Federal judge, and
not as Grand Panjandrum of baseball, that Kenesaw Moun
tain Landis recently paroled a young bank embezzler on the
ground that he was more to be pitied than jailed, the bank
having proved itself the chief culprit by paying its youth
ful cashier only $90 a month. This pained Senator Nathan
iel Barksdale Dial of South Carolina, president of the En
terprise National Bank, of the Home Trust Co., and of the
People's Loan and Exchange Bank of Laurens, S. C. He
threatens to have Judge Landis impeached, and insists that
the action is a blanket invitation to all persons receiving
$90, or less, a month, to dip into their employers' tills. To
which Judge Landis, having had to look up Senator Dial in
"Who's Who" before he knew whether he was an American
or an Albanian legislator, responds that he has "performed
the herculean task of dragging Senator Dial from what
appeared to be an airtight obscurity."
JUDICIAL interpretation seems capable of refining
away any right of organized labor to which a court
happens to be hostile. The right to peaceful picketing, for
instance, though generally established in theory, is often
denied in practice by the application of other principles of
law. A recent decision of Justice Strong of the Supreme
Court of Queens County, New York, permanently restrains
strikers from picketing or patrolling the premises of a tex
tile factory, from following strikebreakers, or from telling
them that a strike is on. The reason given for this extra
ordinary prohibition is that since the places of the strikers
Feb. 23, 1921]
The Nation
have been filled, no strike exists, and consequently the

usual lawful accompaniments of a strike cannot be allowed.
What higher courts may say to this refinement of legal
reasoning we have no way of judging, but the actual effects
are clear. Apparently all an employer has to do in the
event of a strike is to hire a few professional strikebreakers,
declare that a strike does not exist because the places of
his former employees are filled, secure a court order which
will prevent the union members from making converts to
their ranks, and then dispense with the strikebreakers and
reemploy his former workers at his own convenience and
on his own terms. Peaceful persuasion of workers by exworkers is ruled out. Such a decision might even be used
as a precedent to prevent members or officials of a union
from attempting to organize any non-union establishment.
By such processes of judicial interpretation the legal status
of unions is rapidly being reduced to zero.
BILLS that become laws are not always the most inter
esting bills. For instance, we have in Massachusetts
an excellent proposal, introduced in the legislature by Rep
resentative George P. Webster, to penalize the use of
agents provocateurs in labor organizations. The bill was
an outgrowth of the exhaustive report on industrial espion
age recently conducted under the direction of Dr. Richard
Cabot, a valuable digest of which the New Republic is now
printing. Under the terms of the bill a private detective
who incites any person to commit an unlawful act will him
self be liable to a prison sentence of from ten to twenty
years, and the same penalty applies to a person who employs
a detective for such purposes. On the other side of the
industrial fence the open shop advocates are everywhere
marshaling their legislative forces. Two bills in particular
are reported by Industry, a mouthpiece of the employers,
as ready to be introduced in the legislature of every State.
One bill makes it possible to sue any "voluntary association
of seven or more members," even though such an association
is not incorporated. The second, framed "for the better
protection of public welfare," would make illegal all strikes
or lockouts by or in respect to public employees, or in viola
tion of an agreement between a union and an employer, or
in violation of an arbitration award, or without reasonable
notice, or "where there is no trade dispute involving issues
of direct benefit to the acting parties"in other words, sym
pathetic strikes. These are interesting bills, indeed, and
the fight for and against them will be more interesting still.
IN the largest city of a certain backward nation an election
was held in the fall of 1919. One district, where the
vote was close, was the scene of great disorder. Anarchis
tic rowdies rushed from polling place to polling place in
large touring cars, intimidating voters and turning out
lights; in some cases official watchers were thrown out of
the election rooms. In view of the establishment of these
facts, one of the highest judicial officials of the province
ordered the ballots recounted; the recount showed the elec
tion of a candidate who had been reported defeated by the
original count. The ballot boxes were then turned over to
the Board of Aldermen of the city as provided by law, for
a final official recount. From that day to this, no recount
has been made, and the mistakenly seated candidate has
held his place as representative of the people. The members
of the Board give no excuse for their inaction. None of the
widely circulated newspapers has paid much attention to
thi3 flat contradiction of democracy; nor has any public
279
man or civic association protested. The nation which thus

shows its contempt of representative government is not
Russia or Germany, or a Central American republic, but the
United States of America; the city is New York, the district
is the Twentieth Aldermanic, the rightfully elected candi
date is Edward Cassidy, Socialist, and the judge who ordered
the recount is Supreme Court Justice Bijur. In the interest
of democracy it might be advisable to effect some sort of
exchange of election supervisors with Cuba, where our
General Crowder is now engaged in attempting to make
election results conform to the expressed public will.
AT the fifth annual convention of the American Federa
tion of Teachers, held at St. Paul in December, there
were passed certain resolutions regarding Americanization
and patriotic service which have a most un-resolution-like
ring. Among the first persons to be Americanized, these
resolutions very rightly insist, are native Americans, whom
it is the duty of teachers to arouse from their ignorance
and apathy by every possible means. As to aliens, it is
absurd to think that Americanization means the "painless
but complete excision from the foreigner's heart and brain
of every tie that connects him by loving memories with his
native land" ; and as to demanding that the immigrant shall
swallow the United States whole, without a single reserva
tion, why, these teachers say, that is more than we demand
of native Americansat least during times of peace. What
ever demagogues may do, teachers have a more self-respect
ing task than to praise their country for qualities which it
does not possess; it is their obligation to point out the
national shortcomings as well as the national virtues. The
best service to Americanization, the resolutions hint with
out quite saying it, is to work to make the country what we
want to tell the immigrants it is. These are honorable, ad
mirable words, and very pleasant to hear after the blare of
stupid and violent language which has characterized the
resolutions of so many public bodies for seven long years.
THE death of Barrett Wendell and of James Gibbons
Huneker in the same week singularly emphasizes a
clash of cultures which has been going on in the United
States during the past thirty years. Professor Wendell
stands as the typical epigone of the old New England tra
dition : he had its culture, its learning, its passion for Eng
land, its unconcern for all of America that lies south and
west of the Hudson, its academic prose, its air of breed,
its consciousness of class. That circle of charming provin
cials which during the early nineteenth century pro
duced a new American literature had in Professor Wendell
a pious historian, and his attitude toward them did much
to establish their reputation. By comparison Mr. Huneker,
certainly as learned as Professor Wendell, and no less
trained in an old tradition, though his was the Catholic
tradition of Philadelphia, seemed wild and rowdy. He
studied the exotic; he turned rather than to the Continent
than to England ; he brought in names and tones and voices
that appeared strange in the decorous galleries of the
"genteel tradition." He wrote racily and capriciously, im
properly when it suited his purposes, and always with a
wide swing of the critical arm. He had, what Professor
Wendell never had, a sense of the many-stranded complexity
of modern American life. Professor Wendell was of the
silver age; Mr. Huneker belonged emphatically to an age
which, though it has not yet quite decided whether it will
turn out iron or gold, is certainly not silver.
280
The Nation
Dillydallying
OF all the issues before Congress, disarmament is the
most important. And no less conservative a man
than Congressman Mondell, Republican Floor Leader, has
declared:
I am tremendously earnest in regard to this matter because
of the all-important fact that if an agreement is not reached
for the limitation of armaments and warlike expenditures in
the near future the fault will be that of America, as in former
days the fault was that of Germany. The fault will be ours,
because as we are the only great nation which could maintain
enormous establishments on land and sea without bankruptcy,
without being condemned to bear indefinitely and add to today's
frightful load of national debt, it is our duty to lead the way
toward relief from a present and future burden of warlike
expenditure which, irksome and oppressive to us, would be
unbearable to other nations. More than that, it is our duty to
lead the way, because, strangely enough, we are the only great
nation that since the World War has officially taken a position
favorable to the increase rather than the decrease of arma
ments and warlike expenditures, and the one nation in which,
I fear, there is a really dangerous sentiment in favor of in
creases rather than decreases of military establishments, a
sentiment limited, it is true, as to the number of people openly
avowing it, but a sentiment nevertheless deeply planted,
shrewdly calculating, and very persistent.
Congress has been in session ten weeks. During those
weeks it has done nothing about disarmamentexcept talk.
Less than three weeks of life remain to it. During that
time it is likely to do nothingexcept talk. It can move
fast enough if it wants to. The other day it put through
in an hour the Winslow bill, providing for payments of
$340,000,000 to the railroads in advance of any final account
ing. Lacking the necessary two-thirds vote required under
suspension of the rules, it took the whole matter up again
de novo next day, and again passed it in an hour. But the
disarmament story is different. Whenever Congress deals
with a matter of real importance to the people, it seems
to be attacked by creeping paralysis.
As first practical steps toward disarmament, two things
were chiefly needed in this session: first, the drastic cut
ting down of our war preparations, especially naval, as
evidence of good faith; second, a frank approach to other
nations for a conference. What have we actually done?
The Secretaries of War and of the Navy, completely un
der the spell of the professional staffs surrounding them,
submitted estimates for the military and naval establish
ments in the dizzying sum of $1,379,000,000, an amount
more than five times our highest pre-war appropriations,
and more than half a billion greater than the bloated sums
appropriated for this year. Happily, in response to the
groans of the taxpayers, the congressional committees cut
the estimates almost in two, reporting to the House the
sum of $727,000,000 for the two servicesa monstrous
waste, to be sure, but even so a saving of a full hundred
millions over last year's figures. So far so good.
Political reasons combined with the economy motive to
accomplish this result. The Secretary of War had re
cruited the army to a number 30,000 in excess of the
175,000 appropriated for last year, and was moving straight
on toward the authorized maximum of 280,000. Had Con
gress really desired to reduce the army and save money, it
could in a week have passed the necessary legislation. In
[Vol. 112, No. 2903
Disarmers
stead, it made political capital of the situation for two

months, and only on February 7 did it finally pass, over
the President's veto, a resolution stopping recruiting until
the number of men shall have fallen to 175,000. Now the
House appropriated for the pay of an army of only 150,000
men, a number which cannot be reached before April, 1922.
And the number of officers has actually been raised from
13,000 to 14,000. Discredit the Democratic Secretary, and
show apparent economythat pretty nearly sums it up.
The naval story is not dissimilar. We have seventeen
dreadnoughts under way, ten of them in private yards, not
to speak of 32 destroyers, 39 submarines, and an auxiliary.
Congress wanted to discredit Mr. Daniels's propaganda for
the League of Nations, but at the same time it did not want
to interfere with contracts. Therefore in cutting the naval
bill, it took good care not to cut out the $90,000,000 for
increase of the navy, and we shall spend $145,000,000 next
year on capital ships, despite the grave doubt in expert
circles as to their fighting utility. To suspend construction,
however, even for six months, would, as Senator Gerry
feelingly observes, work "a great injustice to very large
shipbuilding companies." So on with the big ships! None
the less, Senator Borah's resolution inquiring about the
possibility of deferring construction for six months made
a good deal of a row. Admiral Sims unkindly expressed
doubts about the big ships, but the eighteen-inch guns of
the General Board were promptly brought into play, and
the proper recommendation for going on with the capital
ships, and adding two airplane carriers besides, was forth
coming from the Senate Naval Committee. The fight on
this program, however, may carry the naval bill over into
the next Congress.
In positive action looking to disarmament, the achieve
ment is nil. Both Senator Borah's resolution for inviting
England and Japan to join us in a five-year naval holiday
and Representative Brooks's measure requesting the Presi
dent to call a conference of all nations in Washington to
consider disarmament have been favorably reported by the
proper committees, chloroformed, and buried under a moun
tain of appropriation bills. Of talk there is plenty. The
House Naval Committee has listened to many distinguished
witnesses, all of whom favor disarmamentif, but, and
although. Congress favors it, in the same way, only a
good many members want to be sure that we have the big
gest navy on earth before we all begin to reduce propor
tionately. Deep underneath there is steadily at work the
silent, consistent pressure of great business interests that
push us irresistibly forward on the path of imperialism, ar
mament, and war. And a petty, well-meaning, unseeing
Congress jumps when business pulls the strings.
Is there, then, no hope for a war-torn world unutterably
weary of slaughter and strife? None save in a great move
ment of the people of the United States, who today hold
the world's destiny in their hands. In their "representa
tives," so-called, there is no light or leading. They will
act only if the popular demand is so overwhelming and so
insistent that they dare not disregard it. That demand
ought to be rolling in to Washington today in tones of
thunder from every city and every hamlet in the land.
There is no reason to wait for any other nation. Ours is
the privilege and duty to make the beginning.
Feb. 23, 1921]
The Nation
Lo,
the
Poor
PITY the poor railroads! They must cut wages, right

away quick, tomorrow, or they will go bankrupt. Gen
eral Atterbury, of the great Pennsylvania system, says so.
Yet an unfeeling President refuses to bring the matter
before Congress, and simply refers the beggared executives
"to the legally constituted tribunal, the Railroad Labor
Board, and the Board says it must investigate before ap
proving wage slashes. And that isn't all. These same lean
and hungry executives, looking about, observe that if Uncle
Sam would do a little borrowing he might have in his treas
ury $340,000,000 that they need in their business immedi
ately. They have a perfectly good measure drawn to transfer
these funds to their own coffers, and a faithless and unbeliev
ing House fails by two miserable votes to give them the
two-thirds majority necessary to jam this Winslow bill
through without amendment under suspension of the rules.
So it all has to be done again next day under a new rule.
Republics are ungrateful, anyway. See what the rail
roads have done to usand what have we ever done for
them? Pass over the land grants, the "Chapters of Erie,"
and other like happenings in our early railroad history, and
come down to the past decade with its annoying efforts at
strict regulation. Reckless and dishonest mismanagement,
culminating in the plundering of rich properties like the
New Haven and the Rock Island, had destroyed railroad
credit. Equipment ran down, and we suffered from freight
blockades and embargoes. Then came the war. In despair,
the Government took over the lines.
Federal control lasted twenty-six months. During that
time $1,200,000,000 was spent for improvements, $900,000,000 being furnished directly by the Government. Figuring
on the basis of the best three years in railroad history,
Uncle Sam guaranteed the carriers a "standard return" of
$900,000,000 a yeara sum sufficient not only to pay interest
and dividends, but also to leave $400,000,000 to $450,000,000
for new facilities and equipment, if we may believe Mr.
Hines. During the twenty-six months the roads lacked
$745,000,000 of earning that return, so the treasury made
good the deficit. The total of government loans and gifts
for the period came to $1,886,332,885, according to the final
report of Director General Hines. Meanwhile the country
was flooded with richly financed propaganda for the return
of the roads to private ownership. (Mendacity, by the way,
has not gone out of fashion even yet. A current Western
time-table compares the cost of travel in the United States
and "in other countries which suffered from the same [!]
war conditions." As an example : Denver to Chicago, 1,034
miles, $40.26; Paris to Naples, 1,046 miles, $75.41. Foreign
fares are given first class, computed at normal rates of ex
change. Add Pullman charges to American rates, as must
be done in any fair comparison, and compute the franc at its
actual dollar value, and the figures stand thus: DenverChicago, $52.01; Paris-Naples, $28.00.)
To resume, on March first last the roads went back to their
owners under the Esch-Cummins law. That measure gave
them a revolving loan fund of $300,000,000, and continued
the standard return up to September first. During these six
months (while their application for higher rates was pend
ing) the roads managed to pile up a deficit of $600,000,000
almost as much as during twenty-six months of Federal con
trol. On the basis of this showing they got their rate ad
281
Railroads !
vance. The Esch-Cummins law required the Interstate Com

merce Commission to fix rates that would yield six per cent
on the aggregate value of railroad property. Allowing the
astonishing valuation of $18,900,000,000 (95 per cent of
what the roads claimed), the Commission granted a rate
increase estimated to yield some $1,600,000,000. The man
agers rubbed their hands in glee. Now, let who will add up
these figures and discover that Uncle Sam during the past
three years has presented the railroads three billion dollars
in cash or credit, and has given them besides an added tax
ing power of a billion and a half a year. The railroad statis
ticians will prove him a dangerous agitator.
Less than three months after they got their roads back,
the executives came scampering to the Interstate Commerce
Commission once more, beseeching that body to help them
break the freight jam in which they had involved them
selves (having begun the old selfish scramble the minute the
roads were returned). The thoughtful man with a passable
memory will easily recall the paean of praise which the
executives raised to themselves some weeks since over
"their" achievements since the return of the roads. He
might consider the following statement from the Railway
Age:
The railways fought and won in 1920 the hardest and most
important battle of their lives. They succeeded in getting
themselves returned to private operation under unprecedentedly
favorable legislation. They secured almost all the advances in
rates for which they asked. They began breaking all records
for volume of business moved just when their critics commenced
to proclaim they were "breaking down."
Having digested this, he might study the following, from an
other railroad source:
With operating revenues more than double those of any year
prior to 1916, the gross earnings of the railways of the United
States as a whole in 1920 were insufficient to cover operating
expenses, rents of equipment and facilities and taxes. Nothing
was left for interest or dividends.
This looks disagreeable, for it is agreed that the public
can't be bled for further rate increases. What then? Ah,
a long-forgotten devicecut expenses. Mr. Slason Thomp
son, in the Railway Review of January 22, obligingly shows
how: The roads must save $1,250,000,000, and "two-thirds
of this saving must come out of the pay-roll." The detail is
simplicity itself. The Adamson law added $300,000,000 to
the pay roll; repeal the Adamson law. The Railroad Labor
Board added $635,000,000 to wages in 1920; "the board
should review and reverse its award rendered to prevent a
strike." And then?
With these two sops to Cerberus out of the way, coupled with
the restoration of piece work, a modification of the seniority rule
to make way for merit, the abolition of standardization of pay
under different conditions, and the severing of slacks from soft
jobs, there need be no immediate reduction in the wage scale.
How comforting!
The eyes of railroad executives today are glued to profits
and financial guarantees. The Esch-Cummins law gave
them everything they asked, and its administration has given
them more than they dreamed. After a record year's opera
tion under this, their own measure, they declare themselves
faced with bankruptcy, and they start in to discharge em
ployees and slash wages as the only means to keep up profits.
Will they get away with it?
The Nation
282
Bad Debts or Bad Blood

ALL these discussions of Germany's total debt, all the
palaver between Briand and Lloyd George and their
train of experts at Paris, and all the coming palaver be
tween the same Prime Ministers and experts and Herr
Bergmann and his experts from Germany, have an unreal
air of tentativeness and futility. The papers may announce
once morefor the thirteenth time at leastthat a final
settlement has been made, but the settlement will not be
final until the United States takes a hand in it. And by
taking a hand in it we mean no mere ratification of a
treaty which is already in process of decomposition, but a
share of financial responsibility. The fact of the matter
is that it is impossible to divorce the question of repara
tions from the question of inter-Allied debts.
For there are two basic truths which are often forgotten
in discussion of reparations. One is that Germany cannot
pay enough to recompense France for the devastation
wrought in her northern provinces (even Briand's Paris
program contemplates less than the total damage which the
Reparation Commission is charging against Germany) ;
and the other is that unless France is recompensed for
that devastation, France can never repay her debts to the
United States and to Great Britain. Hence until some
definite arrangement regarding those debts is made, no
permanent arrangement regarding reparations will be made.
It is the current fashion to say that Congress and the
American people are opposed to cancelation of those debts.
They are. But Congress and the American people, if they
were consulted, would be as opposed to "funding"which
means passinginterest on those debts. Yet the interest
is being funded, simply because the European nations can
not pay the interest. And it will continue to be funded.
The debts are bad debts. The American people may be
very angry about it, but it might just as well adjust itself
to the fact. And it would do well to direct its anger
against the statesmen who led it into making "loans" which
were sure to become gifts, rather than against the bankrupt
European nations. The American people was deceived about
these "loans" just as it was hoodwinked about a hundred
other matters during the war. It is still being hoodwinked.
The recent "sales" of War Department goods to Poland
on long term credit were in reality gifts; some day the
Man-in-the-Street will wake up to the fact and curse Poland
for it, when he should curse the Secretary of War.
So the question of remission of debts will come up again
as it is coming up now, and some time the debts will be
remitted. Secretary of the Treasury Houston says that
Great Britain has repeatedly suggested a general cancela
tion of debts, Great Britain canceling the Continental debts
owing to her, and we canceling the loans made by our
Government to all our European allies, totaling nearly ten
billion dollars. France, if not officially then unofficially,
has made similar suggestions. They have repeatedly been
made in the semi-official French press. M. Ribot, former
Minister of Finance, even suggested that the total Allied
war costs be distributed among the Allies in proportion to
their resources and in inverse proportion to the number of
men losta proposal which obviously would cost us far
more than cancelation even of a ten billion dollar debt.
Such suggestions have hitherto been cold-shouldered by
American officials. Frenchmen have not relished this per
[Vol. 112, No. 2903
sistent cold-shouldering, and the feeling is very general in

France that the United States has come out of the war
unscathed and is less than generous to its former ally. If
we should ever call our debts, the action would rouse very
bad blood indeed. But by letting them slide, "funding" the
interest indefinitely, we in reality promote that uncertainty
and suspense which has so agonized Europe these many
months, and for which we in America have held France
largely responsible.
Yet to cancel the debts offhand would be to shirk respon
sibility. It would be another futile gesture of generosity
such as was our unconditional entry into the war. Cancel
ation might merely give British military imperialism a
free hand in Ireland, India, and Mesopotamia, and encour
age French expansion in Syria and aggressive action against
Germany. The difficult problem which America must face
is to avoid the bad blood which insistence upon payment
would involve, and to utilize the possibility of cancelation
as a lever for an economically reasonable policy toward
Germany and for generosity within the British Empire.
Just as reparations cannot be settled apart from the ques
tion of these debts, so the debts must not be settled without
effective consideration of their influence upon reparations.
The opposition to cancelation in America cannot be over
come so long as the rather inarticulate feeling that Europe
has misusedand will continue to misuseour money, con
tinues. The moods of the two continents interact; Amer
ica's aloof disinterestedness aggravates France's sense of
isolation in an impossible task and her resultant bitterness ;
and Europe's harshness aggravates America's unwilling
ness to embark upon a policy of generosity. But if our
diplomacy can rise to the need, it may make these debts,
now only a source of irritation, the foundation-stone of
real peace in western Europe.
Wilson's Legacy to Harding

PRESIDENT WILSON'S legacy to Mr. Harding will be
one of debts rather than assets. With the single excep
tion of Lincoln, probably no President in our national history
has taken office with as pressing a burden of unsolved ques
tions as will fall to the lot of our next Executive. In saying
this we are ignoring domestic issues entirely. Grave as
they are, Mr. Harding will not be directly responsible for
the solution of many of them. By our Constitution and our
historic policy, that duty, in most instances, rests primarily
upon Congress. Since Roosevelt's time, it is true, our Presi
dents have taken an increasing part in initiating domestic
legislation; but Mr. Harding has given unmistakable notice
of his intention to return to our former method.
In foreign affairs, however, the President is directly re
sponsible for initiating American policy, and here Mr. Hard
ing will be the inheritor of a bankrupt estate. Eight years
ago, as he slipped out of office, Mr. Taft left the Mexican
problem, then a new-born infant, on the White House door
step. President Wilson has been dandling the infant upon
his knee ever since without stopping its cries, and is now
passing it on to Mr. Harding. If the foundling is now better
off-and indications are that it isthe change is due to its
own patience and good sense rather than to the care it has
received. In addition to the Mexican problem, moreover,
President Wilson has accumulated enough other waifs from
various parts of the world to establish an international
Feb. 23, 1921]
The Nation
orphan asylum. There is the issue with Japan over immi

gration and the island of Yap, our relations with Russia, our
disgraceful occupation of Haiti and Santo Domingo, the un
warranted presence of American Marines in Nicaragua
(which, indeed, goes back to President Taft's day), friction
with Panama, the old unsettled dispute with Colombia over
the rape of her territories, tension in Cuba, a dispute with
Great Britain over oil rights in Mesopotamia, and, last but
not least, our attitude toward European reconstruction.
Now, all this seems like an overwhelming task for our
next President. But much of it becomes simpleif under
taken in the right way. In our foreign relations, the best
way is superlatively the easiest. Our troubles are almost
wholly due to subserviency to financial interests and, since
our entrance into the European struggle in 1917, gradual
submersion in the methods of Old World diplomacy. To
regain our self-respect and the esteem of other nations, Mr.
Harding has only to return to two once generally accepted
principles of international polity:
1. A nation has no official concern with the morals or
politics of any other state, and need assure itself only of
the existence of a de facto Government in order to recognize
and treat with it.
2. A citizen of one nation who lives in, or does business
in, any other state has a right to the same protection under
its laws as is enjoyed by natives or by citizens of other
nations; but he has no extra rights because of the superior
power or the greater privileges that he enjoys at home.
Most of our international complications nowadays are due
to the mischievous doctrine commonly credited to Lord Palmerston that nationals of a strong state have what amount
to extraterritorial rights in a weaker one. This leads to
unwarranted interference. It is not the duty of America
to guarantee the lives of its citizens abroad (it does not do
so even at home), but only to see that they are as well pro
tected as others ; it is not the duty of America to underwrite
the investments of its business men in foreign lands, but
only to see that there is no discrimination against them.
A majority of our foreign problems become simple if these
principles are applied. They call forand nothing is sim
plerthe immediate recognition of Russia and Mexico. (We
cannot even insist upon equal protection of American prop
erty interests in Mexico when we discriminate against Japa
nese in California.) They call for the immediate withdrawal
of our Marines from Nicaragua and, as soon as native gov
ernments can take charge, which need not be long, from
Haiti and Santo Domingo. Nothing, in fact, could better
safeguard our citizens in all of Latin America than such a
gesture. A speedy peace with Germany should be made.
That does not mean that we have no further responsibilities
in Europe, but the greatest thing we can do for that conti
nent, stricken with poverty and hate, is that this, the strong
est and richest nation on earth, should by its own disarma
ment prove its belief in peace and good will. This last action
will, we think, hasten the settlement of such foreign com
plications as cannot be resolved by the two principles already
alluded to. It will make possible the open diplomacy
preached but not practiced by President Wilson; it will
eliminate the need for the various secret "agreements," gen
tlemanly or ungentlemanly, by which the Senate's lawful
right to participate in foreign affairs by the ratification of
"treaties" has been taken from it. Mr. Harding has the
opportunity to initiate a diplomacy as new as sunrise and as
old as the moral law; as magnificent as it is simple. Will he?
283
The Fallacy of Technique

A CERTAIN not undistinguished critic is fond of pro
claiming what he calls his "technical-mindedness."
He has studied innumerable novels and stories and plays
and analyzed the exact methods by which in each case the
writer has manipulated his material and rearranged it into
striking and effective shapes. Our friend's favorite drama
tist is Pinero, and he has persuaded a great many people
to regard that writer's theatrical dexterity as dramatic art.
It is a similar theory that underlies the courses of instruc
tion so widely given in the composition of plays and stories.
Everywhere the notion obtains that effectiveness is the aim
of art and technique a more or less well-defined system of
methods by which such effectiveness may be attained.
This stubborn and fundamental error finds its counter
part in life. Respectable persons who have never reflected
closely or suffered very keenly tell their troubled or per
plexed or aspiring neighbors to "play the game" or to be
"sports." They have in their minds definite notions of
what effects a normal human life ought to produce in them
and of the precise aspect it should wear. And to play ac
cording to the rules of the game, to take mortal events in
a sporting mood, means to them the perfectly rigid tech
nique by which their own lives are governed. They frown
upon beautiful and spontaneous actions which expand or
subtilize the possibilities of human experience and fear
them as an elderly card-player fears innovations in his game.
But just as the preciousness of a human experience lies,
subjectively, in the sense of its exquisite strangeness and
uniqueness and in the added grace and wealth it lends the
inner life, so its objective value for mankind, when it is
made manifest by an artistic communication, depends on
the inviolateness of the original character by virtue of
which it introduced an unheard melody into the music of the
soul. Neither life nor art is interesting or beautiful if, like
games, they proceed according to fixed rules to a few poor,
foreknown ends. The analogy is popular because it puts a
premium on safety and sloth. Any man can play at a game.
It takes genius or moral courage to break the rules and
transcend the game. To be "technical-minded" in life is to
play safe. Though you achieve no triumph, you court no
disaster and a decent legend will gild your headstone.
The case of the "technical-minded" writer is an equally
comfortable one. He needs no new or immediate experience.
Nor would one help him if he came upon it. For since he
would not broodingly await the form destined to project
its special pang and thrill and significance, he is as well
served by a blunted general emotion, a stereotyped gesture,
and a common act. He can weave these into a technical
pattern and produce on the stage or in the pages of a maga
zine an effect that will briefly please those to whom art is
a little higher than bridge, a little lower than base-ball.
But art is not so produced. The artist is one to whom all
experience is revelation. His moments have depths within
depths; the unique and incommunicable throng his days.
In long vigils, in late bloom or tranquillity, remembered
experience builds within his mind the symbols that alone
can express it. To distort or rearrange experience for the
sake of an external effectiveness is to him the very nega
tion of the creative act. Liberation can obey no law but
an inherent one and expression must create the rules by
which it works.
284
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2903
The Challenge of Waste to Existing Industrial Creeds

By STUART CHASE
THE wastes of the present industrial order have long
been subject to attack, but the definition of what con
stitutes waste has been somewhat neglected. . Before criti
cism is in order, a standard must be set whereby current
performance can be judged. There is no evil until good
is first defined. People tend to think of economic waste
when they think of it at allin three categories: garbage
cans, Taylor systems, or as a whole industrial synthesis.
Much attention has been directed to the first two, but rela
tively little to the last, and it is the last which chiefly con
cerns us here.
Perhaps, to most minds the word "waste" connotes the
first category. They think of waste paper, refuse, sewage,
odds and ends generally. They think of the late patriotic
exertions of fellow townsmen beseeching them to win the
war by baling their Sunday newspapers, or by saving their
peach stones. The Department of Commerce instituted a
waste reclamation service to promote just this sort of thing.
To junk men it must have seemed that the millennium had
come. And, of course, waste of this nature is a real eco
nomic problem. There are many interesting methods abroad,
technical and otherwise, for turning refuse normally thrown
away into valuable products. Thus, for instance, a process
has just been perfected for converting sawdust into the
basis of a nutritious food for cattle. But when all is said
and done, this type of waste is only a drop in the bucket
from the standpoint of a synthetic view of the whole indus
trial system.
Many peopleparticularly business menthink of waste
as synonymous with inefficiency, connoting in turn all the
elaborate hue and cry of the past ten years in pursuit of the
goddess Efficiency. How many countless youths have bowed
on their knees, their correspondence school books in their
arms, before this deity! Pep, efficiency, successthe holy
trinity. But efficiency after all is at heart only another
method for increasing profit under the price system. It
deals with means, not ends. It provides methods, and often
very sound methods, for reducing costs, increasing output,
and getting to windward of one's competitors. It is to be
doubted if business men would be interested in a universal
installation of efficiency methods resulting in lowering in
dustrial costs, but in unchanged profit levels. No particular
business man would gain thereby, because the bulk line
producer (who tends to set the price), maintaining an
efficiency system equally with the lowest cost producer,
would be in precisely the same relative position as before
the transformation began. The reorganization, the educa
tion, the staff upheaval which always accompany the in
stallation of efficiency methods would hardly be undertaken
unless there were definite hope of increased individual
profit.
The cult of efficiency, therefore, cannot be termed a direct
assault upon the problem of waste. It is a flank attack
carried on mainly for private advantage, though revealing
at the same time certain new processes and methods of
great social value. Mr. Taylor's approach in cutting under
the immemorable craft practices in bricklaying and car
pentry was as significant as it was refreshing. Mr. Hoover
now proposes through an association of engineers to extend
this aspect of industrial waste, particularly in respect to

the efficiency of labor. All this is well and good so far as
it goes. But not in slack habits of workmanship, or in poor
office lighting, or in lack of window envelopes, is the heart
of the problem of waste to be found, any more than in the
garbage pail. An efficiency system can be introduced into
a laboratory which is manufacturing poison gasor TonoBungay. A sound theory of waste would refuse to recognize
the necessity of making poison gas or patent medicines
at all.
No, the problem of waste must be approached with fresh
eyes which see the economic process as a whole, which see
particularly the physical stuff of things under the meta
physics of money and credit and price. Hudson Maxim
says in his book, "Defenseless America," page 228:
The nation as a whole is not impoverished in the least by the
burden of armaments, but is rather benefited by their support;
the fact that a war indemnity takes gold out of the country and
gives it to another people, makes the indemnity a national
calamity. But when money is spent within the country as it is
for armaments, the condition is entirely different. The money
spent by the Government in building fighting ships could not
be esteemed so much money lost, even if the ships are useless.
The Government taxes the people for the money to build the
ships, and then pays the money back to the people again for
the ships. It may be argued that the labor of the people is lost,
but what of it? Labor is neither money nor wealth, it merely
represents time. The result is that the fighting ships have cost
nothing. On the contrary, everybody is made better and richer
through the building of them.
Here is a mind debauched and undone by its failure to
look under the shadow of money. The student of waste
must lose himself in no such fog.
Given a population, given its basic heeds and wants, given
the deposits of natural resources from which such needs
may be supplied, given an industrial mechanism of produc
tion and distribution whereby natural resources may be
turned into human requirements, given existing scientific
knowledge, and all the factors are at hand to develop a
standard for a coordinated industrial system which can
really measure the problem of waste. Budget the basic
wants;* ascertain the raw materials available; survey the
industrial plant in the light of the present status of the
technical arts, and calculate what it means in human effort
to get these basic wants out of the earth and into people's
lives with a minimum of effort and friction. Such a stan
dard, it goes without saying, is based flatly on the assump
tion that an economic process has no justification other than
that of supplying the things which mankind needs; that
the only end of human work is to produce the groundwork
for a rich and happy human life.
If now we swing the searchlight of this standard upon
the industrial system as it operates today, and attempt to
measure the gap between the performance of a system oper
ated to such a standard and the performance of the current
system, a fundamental conception of waste emerges. In
dustrial waste is the difference between a system planned
An interesting method of budgeting basic wants is to take the require
ments of a family of five (say the Ogburn budget) given in physical terms
of pounds of flour, suits of clothing, house space, etc. ; and translate the
items back into raw materials needed for the whole populationwheat, live
cattle, lumber, coal.
Feb. 23, 1921]
The Nation
and designed to furnish mankind with what it genuinely

needs, and a system such as the ruling one which operates
at the call of profit only, in which the supplying of needs
is only a by-product and which is not planned and designed
at all.
From this standpoint, waste appears in all its immensity,
far outshadowing the nibblings at the garbage pail and
efficiency devices. It is nothing less than the measurement
of how far society has failed to apply its own proven knowl
edge to the satisfaction of its wants. A high standard, per
haps, but it is doubtful if anything less will do. It is not
Utopian because it does not count upon inventions and
processes which lie in the womb of the future, but only upon
those inventions and processes already made and proven.
It shows what mankind might do if it took hold of its own
slatternly house. As scientific research unfolds in the
future, the standard must perforce march with it. But
today the standard for the measurement of industrial waste
can only be set par with the proven knowledge of today.
To compute the industrial potentialities of such a stan
dard is a long, arduous, and many-sided task. But one is
inclined to believe that a body of engineers and statisticians,
at once specialists in their own fields, and synthetic in their
social outlook, could do the job sufficiently well to provide
a rough yardstick which might be clapped down upon the
present industrial order (or disorder) for the purpose of
exhibiting the more outstanding wastes therein. One can
not help but feel that the findings of such a court of inquiry
would constitute perhaps the most important set of facts
which ever challenged the intelligence of men.
Industrial waste as thus outlined cannot be measured in
terms of money. Money comprehends too many wasteful
values in itself to begin witha dollar will buy equally ten
loaves of bread or a dose of opium. Again, money fluctu
ates in terms of commodities too uncertainly to form a re
liable unit. And lastly, an aggregate of waste in such enor
mous proportions shown in money terms would be largely
meaningless; it would give no grip or understanding of
the physical realities of the situation.
Two real things are wasted, and between them they may
produce a third: (1) Labor of hand and brain, (2) mate
rials, and (3) power. The quantitative measurement of
waste to have permanent meaning must be given in units
of man hours, weights and volumes of raw materials, horse
power hours, and the physical measurement of "plant"
which in turn has been created originally by labor and
materials.
Let us go a little more concretely into the problem. Sup
pose we consider the United States, its people and its in
dustries in the light of this standard. Suppose we take an
airplane and go up very high and look at this broad country,
its resources, its population, and the things which people
are doing. Here are, according to the last census, 106
millions of men, women, and children. They are all con
sumers. They all want goods and services. Perhaps thirty
million men, ten million women, and three million children
are working, or trying to get a chance to work, for wages
and salaries which in turn they exchange for goods and
services. They are called producers, but in the case of many
millions of them the term is ironic. Another eighteen
million women are working hard and all the time in homes.
The remainder of the population, about forty-five millions,
is made up of dependents, children, old people, and defective
people, including the idle rich.
285
We see a country rich in natural resources. It has the

farm lands, the grazing lands, the forests, the water power,
the coal, oil, iron, copper, lead, the fisheries, to provide raw
material for nearly every product which the population
needs. Certain resources, notably the forests and the oil, are
in sight of exhaustion under present extractive methods,
but immense deposits still remain.
We note the "plant" for turning natural resources into
consumable goods. It consists of improved farm lands,
barns, harvesting machinery, mines and wells, transporta
tion systems, factories and mills, warehouses, stores, de
livery systems, office buildings. This plant has been de
veloped almost entirely by the isolated initiative of certain
individuals. Authority to determine what shall be built
and where has lain in private hands. Portions of the plant
are surprisingly good and surprisingly well built, but the
totality we note is chaotic, as one would expect of a thing
which had never been planned. Chaotic and clumsy. Plants
jammed into cities, plants located thousands of miles from
sources of raw material, plants duplicated and ill designed.
As for distribution, one glance at South Market Street,
Chicago, convinces us that we are looking at Bedlam on a
hectic day. It is a clotted sprawling plant, rather like a
nursery floor just before the children are told to pick up
their toys and go to supper.
Here are the people mightily concerned with this plant.
They swarm in and out of it. They make motions with
their hands and legs; they sit hunched over decks; they
pull levers and raise whips and axes ; they shout signals and
ring bells and push pieces of paper over counters; they
throw white hot rivets into the air, and burrow deep into
the earth.
As a result, a great stream of materials pours from its
immemorial stability in the earth through furnaces, pipes,
tanks, silos; through grinding machines and cutting ma
chines and threshing machines ; through spindles and rollers
and hammers; through storehouses and warehouses and
terminals; and at last over railways and waterways and
highroads into shops and stores, and thus into the lives
of 106 millions of people. But we note that it is a captious
stream, partly because of the poor adaptability of the
plant to handle it; partly because it is given to unaccount
able fits and starts. It slows down here, and it slows down
there, and it piles up in storage somewhere else. Sluice
gates may open and it will be dumped in great quantities,
while people go shivering and hungry for want of it. Or it
may flow in steamships overseas with no useful equivalent
coming back. Untold quantities go from east to west, and
back from west to east for no other purpose apparently
than to give an already overworked transportation system
something more to do. And we note that the stream has
a persistent habit of surfeiting some people and starving
others.
Finally here is the accredited scientific knowledge of
mankind. Here in books and charts, and in men's minds,
are ways of doing thingsthe best ways yet invented.
Here are technicians and engineers and workmen who know
how a forest ought to be cut so that the area never dimin
ishes to the danger point; how power ought to be husbanded
and utilized with a minimum of effort per horsepower;
how farms should be cultivated and fertilizers employed;
how coal ought to be won, oil wells drilled, transportation
systems laid out, cars loaded, public health maintained,
schools equipped, the city organization of foodstuffs organ
286
The Nation
ized. There are men who know a better way of delivering

milk than employing fourteen half-loaded wagons to a
block. These technicians are not omnipotent. They have
much to learn. Invention" and improvement of processes
must go steadily on. They only know the best way dis
covered to date. And it is when the best way discovered
to date is compared with the existing flow of material
through plant that the gigantic extent of industrial waste
comes to light.
Wastes in the technical process of production and dis
tribution are, however, only part of the story. Fully as
important is the non-utility of the thing produced. This
stream of goods and services which flows through plant and
out into people's lives is badly in need of analysis from the
standpoint of the wants of man. Which is, of course, dan
gerous ground. What do these 106 million people want?
Gods and devils, and earths and heavens! Can one throw
a noose around human wants and yoke them to the statis
tician's plow? No. But one can classify wants on the
basis of past consumption and make some estimates of
basic requirements. And many wants lie outside the field
of economics altogether so that they can be disregarded in
this thesislove, for instance, and the beauty of nature,
and flirting with the spirit worlds (though a ouija board
takes labor and materials). There appear to be certain
fundamental wants of man which require economic effort
for their satisfaction and which appear in practically every
normal individual. They can be grouped into eight main
categories: (1) Wholesome food; (2) adequate housing;
(3) adequate clothing; (4) education, including books,
news, lectures, etc.; (5) recreation and play; (6) public
health facilities; (7) religion, including churches, services
of pastors, etc.; (8) art, including music, painting, litera
ture, the theater.
A theory of waste cannot presume to define the quantities
and qualities of each of these fundamental wants without
becoming absurd. It can insist, however, that production
should be confined to providing these things in some sort of
relative balance, free from adulteration and degradation.
Let us look with some care at the stream of goods and
services which fluctuate below us. It is a vast miscellany
onions and window frames and suspenders, dreadnoughts,
Peruna, gimlets, rattles, striped pajamas, Sunday news
papers, snow shoes, electric lights, Billy Sunday sermons,
bus rides, Rolls-Royces, golf balls, Tudor houses, under
shirts, and india rubber boots. If the Eight Wants be
allowed as a standard, they cleave into this assortment like
a plow through red earth. On the one side they throw the
kind of goods and services which people really need and
want, and on the other the ills and disservices which it is
to be doubted if anybody truly wants. But in between
caught in the plow's bow are, of course, a lot of things which
are indeterminable and cannot be classified as waste pro
duction out of handbeers and light wines or tobacco,
for instance.
Perhaps we can classify as waste ("illth," as Ruskin
called it) production of this general nature: Luxuries
over a standard of reasonable comfort; patent medicines;
armaments ; adulterated products ; distilled liquors ; opiates ;
prostitution; most newspapers; much advertising; the ser
vices of quacks, astrologers, mediums; the services of most
middlemen; the business of gambling and speculation, etc.
We note that the flow of consumable material, haphazard
as it is, carries an enormous amount of such outputthings
[Vol. 112, No. 2903
which people do not want or could give up over night and

be the freer and happier for so doing. How many wants
are created and maintained by advertising alone? How
many on the basis of "keeping up with the Joneses"? The
percentage which this material bears to the total output
will be exceedingly difficult to calculate, but it undoubtedly
involves the diverting of the labor power of millions of
workers and the destruction of millions of tons of good raw
material each year.
Lastly, we note the great number of idle or partially idle
men and women of producing age. Here are the unem
ployed, a great army varying from one to five millions,
and always present in the social organism. The uncer
tainties of industrial life have made many of them at last
unemployable. Here are the idle rich, particularly the
parasitic women of the rich. They take greedily from the
stream and give nothing. Here are strikers and locked-out
workers, accountable for untold millions of wasted labor
hours. Here are workers striking on the job.
Such is the broad picture of the industrial life of Amer
ica which goes on underneath the shadow of money and
price.
Our engineers then in their survey would strive to classify
human wants so far as the great basic necessities were
concerned, and from the standpoint of such classification to
rule out as waste and loss all industrial activity concerned
with the production of goods and services lying clearly
outside the category. They would not tolerate the produc
tion of most patent medicines, adulterated goods, war mate
rial, but would lump the whole misbegotten mass into one
great item of waste, and measure it in labor hours and
materials literally thrown away.
With this cleared, they would proceed to an analysis of
the technical methods of production and distribution em
ployed in the remaining industries. Their standard of
criticism would be in each case the best technical process
discovered to date, but implicit in the calculation would be
a full recognition of the cost of reconstruction. (Many
new and better methods are for the time being prohibited
because of the great amount of unproductive labor and
material necessary to instal them.) The failure of modern
industry to adopt approved technical methods would thus
form the next great category of waste.
Finally the extent of unemployment, sabotage employ
ment, and out and out idleness among the population would
constitute the third great item of waste. The theory of
waste can only operate on the assumption that apart from
genuine dependents, those who eat must work.
The thesis so far developed has considered waste only
as an impersonal quantity. In conclusion it is necessary to
note the effect of industrial waste on human life. Because
an insufficient amount of necessary goods and services are
produced under prevailing industrial methods men suffer.
This suffering is the factor of human waste. Human waste
is the result of industrial waste, but in that diminished
vitality breeds diminished labor power, a vicious circle is
set up in which industrial wastes create human wastes, and
human wastes in turn augment industrial wastes. The
more outstanding of human wastes are: Malnutrition;
overcrowding; inadequate clothing; industrial accidents and
diseases; infant mortality and high mortality rates in gen
eral; illiteracy and under-education ; crime and prostitu
tion (in part) ; alcoholism and use of drugs (in part) ;
deadening of the creative instinct.
The Nation
Feb. 23, 1921]
Our engineers must add a fourth category to their com

putationsthe measurement of human wastethe price
society pays for not applying its accredited knowledge to
industrial affairs. Such measurement may often defy
quantitative statementit is compounded of blood and tears
and agonybut the amount of poverty and preventable
misery can be statistically surveyed to a certain extent.
If society made the things it genuinely needed according
to the best available technical methods of production and
distribution, there would result an industrially wasteless
society. Such a social group may never completely eventu
ate, but it constitutes the standing challenge to the intelli
gence of mankind. It is more than time that the challenge
The
287
be taken up to the point at least of compiling a rough

engineering draft of a wasteless society, and of estimating
the vast increase in well-being which would accrue if
society had the common sense to plan for its own provi
sioning.
Such a draft is not capitalism, socialism, nor any other
ism. Its philosophy cuts sharply across all doctrines of
opinion and concerns itself only with the facts. It is inevi
table unless society is willing to proceed to its own destruc
tion with its national, class, race, group conflicts (from
war down to "legitimate" business competition), all inter
necine as far as humanity is concerned, and in themselves
the apotheosis of waste.
French in
Syria
By PAXTON HIBBEN
IN London on February 21 a conference of the same Pre
miers who were so determined a short time ago to compel
the fullest enforcement of the Treaty of Versailles will meet
to adapt the Treaty of Sevres to the wishes of the late enemy.
A barrage of publicity matter from Paris and to a lesser
extent London has already begun to prepare the mind of the
public at large for a radical shifting of Entente policy in the
Near East. To the average man it is not clear that the
Entente policy in the Near East has already shifted. By the
time the conference meets, the press will have been so filled
with conflicting accounts of the situation in the former Otto
man Empire that whatever is done will be received by a con
fused public as better than further talk about a matter which
no one understands anyhow. For this reason if for no other
it may be well to glance back at events in the Near East dur
ing the past twenty-eight months to get as clear a view
as may be of the French Levantine policy, at least.
For it is France who leads in the movement to revise the
Sevres Treaty downward, and it has been French censorship
which has kept the details of what has been going on in the
Near East from the world at large while the French press
has supplied the foreign correspondents, writing from Paris,
not Beirut, with alleged news in support of France's position.
Neither the Syrians nor the Armenians have any propaganda
to supply the world's newspapers with their side of the
story. The Greek propaganda agency was a personal ma
chinery built up by ex-Premier Venizelos for his own use,
which continues to function for Venizelos as a private citi
zen, with the purpose of effecting his return to power in
Greece ; it has no interest in presenting Greece's story. The
facts, therefore, are not easy to obtain. So far as they may
be ascertained, with reasonable certainty, they are these:
A week after the armistice with Turkey was signed on
October 30, 1918, the French and British Governments de
fined their intentions toward their Arabian, Syrian, and
Armenian allies, whose loyal cooperation had enabled Gen
eral Allenby to sweep the Arabian peninsula clear of Turks.
In part the statement read :
The aim which France and Great Britain have in view . . .
is to insure the complete and final emancipation of all those
peoples, so long oppressed by Turks, and to establish national
governments and administrations which shall derive their author
ity from the initiative and free will of the peoples themselves.
Not one jot of this unequivocal pledge has been kept.
Practically, no less than diplomatically, the course which
has been followed by both British and French toward

their allies in the Arabian peninsula has been that laid down
in the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of May, 1916, dividing
the whole of Arabia and Syria between the two contracting
Powers as spoils of war, and entered into seven months after
specific pledges had been given the Arabian peoples that
their active aid in the war would be compensated by a recog
nition of their independence.
On the basis of these pledges, Syrian, Arabian, and Ar
menian aid was unstintedly given French and British mili
tary operations in Mesopotamia and Palestine. As a result,
a disastrous campaign was turned into a victorious one.
But no sooner had the conquest of Arabia and Syria been
completed and the final defeat of Turkey compassed than
the French began to clamor for their share of the spoils
under the Sykes-Picot agreement. Before even a treaty
with Turkey had been negotiated, or the administration of
General Allenby in the territory held by the troops under
his command installed, a propaganda was opened by the
French for the surrender of Syria and Cilicia to them.
Determined to have Syria as a field of exploitation and not
by a trusteeship looking to the ultimate self-government of
the Syrians, the French opposed the whole principle of man
dates as applied to "communities formerly belonging to the
Turkish Empire." So sharp was French opposition during
the peace conference to anything less than possession of
Syria as a colony that President Wilson sent the King-Crane
Commission to the Levant to investigate the wishes of the
local inhabitants.
Its findings, never made public, were that the inhabitants
of Syria preferred independence ; that if they could not have
independence, they preferred an American mandate, and if
that were impossible, a British mandate. Save the Maronites and a very limited population in the vicinity of Leba
non, where the French missions had been at work, no one in
Syria favored a French mandate.
But "the initiative and free will of the peoples themselves"
were not mentioned in the Sykes-Picot agreement. In May,
1916, there was almost as little talk of such matters in Euro
pean circles as there is today. The French stood upon the
letter of that agreement, and by September 15, 1919, the
British had acceded to their demands and yielded control of
Syria and Cilicia to a French military administration under
General Gouraud, with the exception of the provinces of Da
mascus and Aleppo, which, by the Sykes-Picot agreement,
The Nation
288
itself, were to be independent under an Arab government.

In assuming control of Syria the French had one of two
courses to pursue: they could carry out the pledge of Sep
tember 18, 1918, and favor the development of the local
populations to a point where stable self-government would
result and independence one day be possible, and by doing
so enlist Syrians and Armenians alike in the defense of the
country against any Turkish effort at reconquest; or they
could ignore the pledge they had made the local inhabitants
and regard the country as conquered territory, which they
had not even the prestige of having conquered, themselves.
In the latter event, they could count, of course, on the hos
tility of both Armenians and Syrians in addition to the
active hostility of the Turks, determined if possible to re
assert their dominion if not over Arabia over at least the
immensely rich Cilician plain.
At their initial appearance in Cilicia the French inclined
to follow the first course.
While elsewhere out of fear and
jealousy of the British the French had favored the Turkish

Nationalists, in Cilicia they suddenly found themselves face
to face with these same Turkish Nationalists as an hostile
force. With only the very minor military detachments,

largely Mussulman, which the French had sent to occupy
Cilicia to oppose the Nationalists, General Hamelin in De
cember, 1918, had undertaken to augment his meager forces
with Armenian and even Kurdish volunteers. Many of the
[Vol. 112, No. 2903
the city or suffer the same fate as at Marash. On March 29

the Nationalists took the town of Hadjin, northwest of
Marash, under a siege which ended only last October with
its sack by the Turks and the massacre of 11,000 Armenians.
On March 26 Adana, the chief city of Cilicia, on the Bagdad
railway and only 12 miles from the coast whence the French
force could be readily supplied or reinforced, was besieged.
Eleven Armenian towns in the vicinity of Adana were at
tacked. Harounieh and Eybez were completely destroyed;
Yenidje was captured and the railway linking Adana with
the coast taken by the Turks and cut, isolating the French
and the Armenian refugees and indigenous population of
the city. The press of Europe and even of the United States
was filled with display headlines announcing massacres in
Armenia spreading.
In that part of Syria about Damascus in which, under the
SykesPicot agreement, the Syrians themselves were to
have sway, the pledge of September 18, 1918, was being
taken seriously by the Syrians. On March 8, 1920, the Pan
Syrian Congress at Damascus declared the independence of
Syria and the Emir Feisal was chosen king. . It was all in
order and in complete accord with the assurance of the
-
French that
Far from wishing to impose on the peoples of these regions

this or that institution, they [the French and British] have no
other care than to assure, by their support and spiritual aid, the
officers of the French troops which had operated with Gen

eral Allenby had been Armenians, and these Armenians were
normal working of such government and administration as the

people themselves shall have adopted.
now available to recruit other Armenians among the local
Neither in Cilicia, where they had been repeatedly de

feated by the Turks and local tribesmen and where their
garrisons were beleaguered or already prisoners of the Na
tionalists, nor in Syria where Feisal was proceeding on the
inhabitants of Cilicia and thus to furnish the French with
a very considerable non-Moslem aid to offset the frequent

desertions of the Algerian Mohammedans to the ranks of
their Turkish coreligionists. It seemed a sensible course to
follow, and when General Gouraud arrived and took charge
assumption that when the French had made a promise they

meant to keep it, was French prestige at this juncture very
he encouraged it.
high.
It was at this propitious moment that Millerand at
It is important to bear in mind that at this periodlate in
San Remo undertook to retrieve on paper the prestige which
1919 and early in 1920the conference of San Remo, which
the French had already lost in fact, by securing a French

mandate over Syria, which not an hundred thousand of the
assigned the mandates under the Treaty of Versailles, had

not been held. Much less had the Treaty of Svres been
accepted by the Turks, or the two secret protocols signed
simultaneously with the Svres Treaty carved Turkey up
into zones of influence and zones of exploitation. The French
almost four million inhabitants of Syria and Cilicia desired.

The decision of San Remo of course altered nothing of
the facts of the situation. The French thereby were not
more but less acceptable to the people over whom they

aspired to rule. The solemn promise of national govern
were in Syria and Cilicia ostensibly as a measure of military

enforcement of the armistice of October 30, 1918. When,
ments and administrations which shall derive their au
therefore, on January 21, 1920, the Turkish Nationalists
thority from the initiative and free will of the people them
began active operations against the city of Marash, held by

the French with Senegalese and Armenian troops, it was a
contingency which the French might have foreseen and
should have been prepared to meet. They were not. After
eighteen days of resistance they evacuated the city and left
selves was obviously not abrogated by a secret conclave at
the Armenians to the mercy of the Turks. Sixteen thousand

of these were killed or died on the march out to Islahie.*
To the Armenians, Marash was the first disillusionment.
San Remo in which the people themselves of Syria and

Cilicia had no part.
All that the San Remo conference ac
complished was to furnish French politicians with a legal

cloak for land grabbing of the kind of the days before the
warand probably future French historians with a justifi
cation for the repudiation of every pledge given the people
of Syria and Cilicia.
That the French should have used them, encouraged them

to enlist and fight their secular enemies, and finally when
hard pressed should have left them without compunction
Once legally given a free hand, General Gouraud lost no

time in disposing forever of any nonsense about such gov
while they saved themselves, was incredible. They had yet
have adopted. On July 15, 1920, he sent King Feisal an

ultimatum demanding the immediate recognition of the
French mandate over Syria and quite a number of other
to learn the stern necessities of war and of politics.

At Urfa, the same history was repeated on a smaller
scale, beginning the very day that the French fled from
Marash. On March 19, the Turkish Nationalists ordered
the French in Aintab, 60 odd miles north of Aleppo, to quit
ernment and administration as the people themselves shall
details having no relation whatever to the initiative and
free will of the people themselves. And though Feisal

accepted the terms of the ultimatum, Gouraud revealed the
purely pretext character of his demands by marching upon

* Congressional Record, March 10, 1920.
Damascus, with an army of 60,000 men.
Offering no re
Feb. 23, 1921]
The Nation
sistance, Feisal was promptly dethroned and exiled. And

the French imposed a ten million francs fine on Syria after
the manner of the Germans in Belgium. The mandate was
already beginning to pay.
In Cilicia, however, matters were not progressing so well.
One Kurd leader, Kurshid-Aga, who was given the Legion of
Honor and considerable cash as a bribe to join the French,
when his force of 10,000 men had been duly equipped by
them, calmly attacked the French with their own arms and
ammunition. General Delamotte sent out an expedition of
750 men with flags flying and bands playing and "political
fund" moneys to distribute discreetly, with orders "to im
press the local populations with the fact that France is a
great military power." The local Kurdish guide led the
expedition into an ambush of his countrymen and the entire
column was destroyed, the major in command wounded, and
three captains killed.
Until May the French still pursued the policy of arming
the local Armenians and letting them do the fighting, they
meanwhile, as at Aintab, standing aside as spectators. On
May 28, however, the first indication of a change of policy
became evident in an armistice of brief duration reached
between French and Turks that made no provision for the
safety of the local Armenian inhabitants. Terror stricken
by this betrayal, thousands of Armenians from all over
Cilicia began to crowd into Adana, the principal city of
Cilicia, for the safety of numbers. Early in June the
French evacuated Sis, and 8,000 of its Armenian inhabitants
poured into Adana, where there were neither houses, food,
work, or household goods. These refugees were fed by the
American Near East Relief whose cargoes of flour for relief
purposes the French held up in Mersine, to collect customs
and port dues.
On June 16 a French battalion was captured entire only
twelve miles from Adana, and the Turkish siege settled dusvn
in earnest. The principal defending force was an Armenian
one of some 1,300 infantry and 80 cavalry, organized by an
American Armenian serving as an officer in the French
foreign legion. Its rifles and uniforms were bought by
public subscription among the Armenians themselves, and
their business at first was to police Adana. But Adana was
still a Turkish city with a large Turkish population, and
murders of Armenians were of daily occurrence. The Ar
menians were not permitted to open shops in the city, and
to go into the fields in the suburbs in search of garden truck
for food was a hazardous enterprise from which those who
dared it frequently failed to return. With the Turkish Na
tionalists surrounding the city and Turks living within it,
the defense of Adana was militarily impossible. The Ar
menian defense corps therefore finally expelled the Turks
from the city to join their countrymen on the neighboring
hills, and prepared to hold the place as an Armenian center.
On July 30 the major French force of 3,000 men cut its
way out of Adana to Mersina and left the city and its Ar
menian population to the defense of the Armenians. There
was no food. The Armenian force therefore took the offen
sive and in a three days' campaign drove the Turks out of
the fertile plain south of the city, took the town of Karatash,
and captured with it enough wheat to feed the civil popula
tion of Adana for a year and a half. When the victorious
Armenians sought to bring the grain supply back to the city
the French authorities seized it and sent it to Marseille,
while the Armenians of Adana were forced to fall back upon
American relief for a meager supply of food from day to day.
289
Meanwhile, in Paris the news that the Armenians had

driven the Turks out of Adana was received with consterna
tion. The Treaty of Sevres had been signed and Adana and
Cilicia north of the river Djihun had been declared a French
zone of influence. If the French were to make any money
out of this region, evidently it must be by being friendly
with the Turks who held the greater part of it. Germany
might have to pay to the last dollar, but the French do not
want to sell the Germans anything. The Turks perhaps
were more savage enemies of civilization than the Germans,
and for a longer period; but the Turks are a market, and
France needs markets. Also, the immensely rich cotton
lands of the Cilician plain are what French factories require
to furnish raw material. So plans were promptly laid to
push France's claim to a mandate over Cilicia.
This would, of course, be difficult with the Turks hostile.
Therefore hurry orders were dispatched to Gouraud to get
the Turks back into Adana at once and to contrive somehow
to give Cilicia the appearance of complete pacification at the
hands of a benevolent French administration.
The Turks, however, would not return to Adana until the
Armenian troops that had held the city since February,
1920, had been disarmed. True, the Armenians were men
tioned in the Treaty of Sevres as "Allies"but what is a
treaty between friends ? So on September 10, a month after
the Treaty of Sevres and its secret annex had been signed,
Lieutenant Shishmanian, the American head of the Ar
menian defense corps of Adana, was arrested with thirty
members of the Armenian National Union. Shishmanian
was taken to Beirut and sent out of the country. The mem
bers of the Armenian National Union were deported. The
arms of the Armenian defense corps, which had been bought
by public subscription among the Armenians, were taken
from them and the corps disbanded. Four hundred and
fifty of the corps, who had gone to the relief of Hadj in,
were surrounded by 1,500 French and forcibly disarmed
and deported. A little later Hadj in, unrelieved, was taken
by the Turks and its Armenian inhabitants massacred.
And as a final little revelation of the wall of censorship
behind which all of this has gone on, General Gouraud on
November 13, replying to official inquiries from Washington
as to the fate of the American citizen, John Shishmanian,
stated that "Shishmanian is in perfect health and now in
command of the Armenian volunteers in Adana." Shish
manian had been arrested by the French two months pre
vious, deported a month before,, and the Armenian volun
teers of Adana had ceased to exist since September.
It is altogether likely that the French will receive the
mandate for Cilicia, with some of the richest cotton land
in the world, sooner or. later. It is almost certain that the
Treaty of Sevres at. the instance of France will be modified
in favor of the Turks. It is the same old game that the
French have played in the Near East since the Crusades.
General Gouraud has put it quite frankly:
France must remain in Syria, both for political and economic
reasons. The political consequences of our abandonment of the
country would be disastrous. Our prestige and influence in
the Levant and the Mediterranean would be doomed. The eco
nomic interests of France also compel us to remain there. When
fully developed Syria and Cilicia will have an economic value
that will be fully equal to that of Egypt.
And to this, ex-Premier Leygues had said of Syria and
Cilicia: "France will occupy all of it, and always." Which is
definite, anyhow.
[Vol. 112, No. 2903
The Nation
290
Thought
Control
in
Japan
By JUNIUS B. WOOD
Tokio, Japan, January 8
rTlHE NATION has had the rare distinction of being
A
suppressed by the Imperial Japanese metropolitan
police. Pursuit of "dangerous thoughts" is one of the
duties of the national police organization. While they do
not presume to have clairvoyant power to read within the
close-cropped craniums of their fellow countrymen, they are
extremely busy reading everything which is printed and
trying to overhear everything which is spoken. Accord
ing to their standards, the police are sincere, conscientious,
and thorough in their work. In fact, they are so zealous
that many sometimes wonder whether they do not consider
it dangerous for the ordinary subject of the Emperor to
have any thoughts.
Despite all this activity, any suppression of an Englishlanguage periodical in Japan is beyond the memory of the
average sojourner in the country. Even the daily news
papers printed in English are allowed to publish many
things which would be prohibited in the vernacular news
papers. This may be because the police do not read English
as fluently as they do the angular kata-kana characters of
their own language. The experience of The Nation sup
ports such a theory. Again, it may be that the police have
the same philosophy which was aptly expressed by Clemenceau during the war. At that time the French censor, the
British censor as well, prohibited the publication of the
daily German official communique in the local newspapers.
However, the German communique sent out by the Nauen
wireless was published in the Swiss newspapers which
reached Paris within twenty-four hours. When one of the
big Paris editors protested to the Premier that he was
unable to print this news in his paper, though the Geneva
newspaper sold on the same kiosks on the streets of Paris
could be bought by anybody, Clemenceau replied: "Very
true, but the few persons who buy the Geneva journal are
able to think for themselves and can be trusted to decide
whether what they read is true or logical."
The particular issue of The Nation which was suppressed
probably would never have come to the attention of the
omnipresent police if the particular article had not been
translated into Japanese and published by one of the Tokio
newspapers. It was by Lewis S. Gannett, giving a descrip
tion of the I. W. W. at variance with the picture painted by
Attorney General Palmer and other pretorian enemies of
democracy. There was no question that it contained "dan
gerous thoughts," according to police definitions.
Official machinery and red tape, which has been running
a losing race with dangerous thoughts since the day when
Adam ate the apple, was as usual outdistanced in this in
stance. The newspaper was in that departed limbo of yes
terday's editions before the police got into action. The
best thing in their minds to do was to save the spilled milk
by confiscating the pitcher. Of course the seeds of trouble
which might be sown by the comparatively few copies of
The Nation which come to Japan were negligible in pro
portion to the damage, if any, which had already been done
by a vernacular newspaper with a daily circulation of sev
eral hundred thousand. But this particular edition of The
Nation must be suppressed. This is what happened.
Kelly & Walsh, Ltd., a British corporation, with stores in

Yokohama, Hongkong, and Singapore, is one of the largest
publishing concerns, booksellers, and magazine distributors
in the Orient. Each week, if a mail steamer arrives, twen
ty-five copies of The Nation are received by the Yokohama
store of Kelly & Walsh for the Japan trade. The Yokohama
police telephoned to the store that they were coming to seize
any copies of that particular edition of The Nation which
might be on its counters. When the police arrived, a few
minutes later, all the copies had been "sold" and there were
none to confiscate. The police duly made a report to that
effect, and the vernacular newspapers published stories that
The Nation had been suppressed, each of them sketching
Mr. Gannett's article in a manner which would have been
uncanny if they did not have the magazine in front of them.
Though no copies of subsequent issues of The Nation
have been received through the mail since that time, the
police say that "no suppression will be enforced against
ensuing numbers unless they contain similar articles." Be
ing suppressed by the police has more advertising value for
a periodical or book than losing her jewels or being named
corespondent in a divorce suit has for an actress.
In a long editorial entitled Raids on Dangerous Thoughts,
the Japan Chronicle of Kobe in commenting on the "capture
of the New York Nation," says in its usual forceful and
pungent style:
The police seem to be very unimaginative persons. They see
that the Americans can read their Nation without the Union
going up in smoke, and they see the English reading their own
particular Nation without becoming denationalized in conse
quence. And the Americans and the English are comparatively
informed in the way of patriotism. There is in them none of the
national solidarity, the community of pride in national descent,
and all the standardized nobility of national thought that make
Japan unique among nations. Yet they can read their Nations
and their flve-and-thirty other dangerous periodicals without the
countries going to the dogs but rather growing greater. In
Japan howeverthe loyal, the staunch, the nationally conscious,
the intrinsically superiorit is conceived that a little literature
which is harmless elsewhere will work havoc. The guardians of
the people have singularly little faith in them or even in the
effects of the loyalist education so sedulously inculcated. At this
spectacle how can a world, grown cynical in experience, do aught
but laugh?
The Japanese press laws are quite elaborate and, like all
other laws, dependent for their interpretation largely on the
opinions or prejudices of police and judges. Usually news
papers and other periodicals must make a cash deposit of
from 175 to 2,000 yen as a guaranty that any fines will be
paid. In addition a newspaper usually has a dummy editor
or publisher who will go to jail in case of trouble. A news
paper is not permitted to publish details of preliminary
examinations, and when an individual is libeled it must
publish a retraction in the same type and position. When
it violates the military or diplomatic censorship it is liable
to suspension by a court.
Those responsible in person for what appears are: (1)
The actual or nominal editor, (2) one who signs published
matter, (3) one who demands the insertion of a correction
or contradiction.
Suppression of local newspapers happens occasionally.
Feb. 23, 1921]
The Nation
Usually the police arrive deliberately several hours after

the edition has been distributed to the news-stands and has
caught the mail trains. Almost invariably the office is noti
fied in advance that they are coming. The police seize all
"visible" copies and a message is telephoned over the city
and telegraphed to other cities to confiscate all copies re
maining unsold on the news-stands.
On the face of this such a proceeding looks like futile
flubdub. However, the police realize that they are not really
suppressing anything, but merely going through the mo
tions. Their action is more of a warning than a punish
ment. If a newspaper or periodical persists in publishing
articles for which it has been once suppressed, or which it
has been warned not to publish, it can be suspended from
publication for a definite period of days or weeks or even
closed permanently and the publisher fined and imprisoned.
Also, if the police wished to be drastic, they could do their
censoring of the newspaper's proofs before permitting each
edition to appear. This is not done and the censorship is
much less hampering or effective than generally imagined.
However, it is sufficiently vigilant, in a post-mortem style,
as any government department may request the suppression
of an article which it feels is prejudicial to its particular
field of national activity.
On one of the occasions when the Japan Advertiser in
Tokio was suppressed it had printed a photograph of a nude
statue. To those who do not understand the Japanese
standard of ethics this may seem strange in a country
where the sexes are not segregated in public bathhouses or
beaches or even in toilet rooms of railroad stations.
Roughly, the distinction is that anything which is necessary
is not immodest. Unnecessary display of nudity or even
affection is considered an affront to morals and decency.
Kissing scenes are cut out of moving pictures, working con
siderable havoc with American films. Art must wear a
kimona.
Notices warning newspapers against the publication of
certain facts or surmises are frequent. The latest instance
occurred last November, during the negotiations over the
Yap cable station, when all newspapers and news agencies
in the Empire were warned one night not to print anything
about the result of the conference between Japan and "a
certain country"the latter being the stereotyped phrase
indicating the United Statesover communications. But
the censor permitted Reuter's and other foreign correspond
ents to cable this official notice to the outside world, though
its discussion was forbidden in Japan.
At the time the occupation of the northern half of Saghalin was contemplated the newspapers were warned not to
speculate on the permanency of Japanese troops on the
island. They also were warned not to publish any specula
tions on the cause of the fire which destroyed the amphi
theater of the World's Sunday school convention in Tokio
the night before the convention started. One vernacular
newspaper printed a story that two Japanese training
ships were marooned in South America on account of the
failure of some naval official to provide them with sufficient
supplies for the cruise. Probably the story was exagge
rated, but a warning came to all the newspapers not to pub
lish any stories about the two ships. Some of the warnings
are later revoked and others stand until their subject-mat
ter becomes ancient history from a newspaper standpoint.
Of the latter the "mysterious diplomatic blunder" is a shin
ing example of 1920.
291
The Japanese foreign office says that there is no censor

ship on cables which are sent to other countries for publi
cation. They say that if a correspondent should send a
cable which was maliciously untrue and damaging to Japan,
they probably would not know about it until after it was
published, and that then they would take suitable action
against the correspondent.
The latest official figures show that sixty-two foreign
books were suppressed in 1916, twenty-five for being preju
dicial to public order and thirty-seven as against public
morals. In 1917, 738 warnings were given to newspapers
and periodicals (there were 3,018 of both in the Empire),
174 orders of suspension were issued, and 244 cases taken
into court. In the same year, 553 books were suppressed
on account of morals and forty-five on account of public
morals, 177 magazines were given warning, and twenty
almanacs forbidden publication, the latter being' a monopoly
of the Great Shrine of Ise.
The difference shown by the above figures between the
repression of "dangerous thoughts" in the Japanese lan
guage and the same thoughts in foreign languages is strik
ing. Translations in Japanese of De Maupassant and Flau
bert and similar authors are suppressed, which may be pre
ferred to the American method of permitting flaccid trans
lations in public libraries. The unexpurgated French edi
tions of the same novelists are not interfered with in Japan,
the official explanation being "that they are read only by
those who are above temptation by novelists."
Bolshevism and socialism are considered "dangerous
thoughts" without camouflage. Professor Morito of the
Imperial University in Tokio is now in jail for commenting
on a phase of Kropotkin's writings, as is the editor of the
magazine which published the professor's article. Aside
from the present inconvenience of the professor and pub
lisher, the chief result has been to create a popular demand
for the writings of both Kropotkin and Morito. It is sur
prising how many persons are conversant with them despite
police vigilance. Either because they actually think them
selves or because youth in Japan is becoming unruly, pro
fessors and school-teachers seem to be the principal suf
ferers on account of "dangerous thoughts."
Trotzky's rather dry book on Bolshevism was prohibited
the day after it was reviewed by the Japan Chronicle. Lots
of people want to read it now. Lenin's book, which is said
to be a rather uninteresting restoration of the doctrines of
Marx, and Eden and Cedar Paul's rather eloquent "Crea
tive Revolution" have both been reviewed by the same
energetic English newspaper, but have not received the
same sales support from the police.
It is said that certain books of Herbert Spencer, Mill,
and such old-time philosophers are on the official blacklist,
but that the police have forgotten about them in the flood
of new accumulations. One of the latter, considered preju
dicial to Japan's diplomatic and national reputation, is
"Japan at the Cross Roads," by A. M. Pooley, the author
of "The Secret Memoirs of Count Hayashi," and "Japan's
Foreign Policies." The Yokohama manager of Kelly &
Walsh, Ltd., still bewails the fourteen copies of "Japan at
the Cross Roads," which the police took off his shelves and
were a "total loss." However, in Japan it is much as in
"dry" America. If a prominent citizen here really loves
you, he opens his strong-box and shows you a copy of the
forbidden book. There must be a supply coming from some
where.
The Nation
292
John Keats: 1821-1921

By MAEK VAN DOREN
KEATS was so full of poetry, body and soul, that begin
ning poets in times like these or any other rightly
return to him for color and momentum, furniture and fire.
Many new kinds of poetry flourish today, with many new
inspirations, but Keats's kind remains as surely alive as it
was in the days of Tennyson and Rossetti. Almost as if to
celebrate the centenary of his death come volumes of verse
from England, by Edward Shanks and Aldous Huxley,
packed with the luxuries, even the vulgarities, that notori
ously derive from Endymion. Readers of Rupert Brooke
six years ago, and of his imitators since, can never have
been doubtful, if they knew Keats, as to the model for a
manner so crowded with fine things said intentionally, so
carefully enriched with catalogues of enjoyable objects.
Keats was full of poetry both in an unhappy and in a
happy sense, and the reason for the distinction is interest
ing. His unhappy poetry was his purely personal poetry,
was the poetry of himself turned in upon himself ; his happy
poetry was the poetry of the liberating, objective world. This
is a commonplace, but it may decently be directed in any
generation to the ears of poets who would too particularly
indulge and exploit their personalities. Keats, when he was
a good poet, was a personal poet with a vast difference. It
has generally been remembered how saturated he was every
minute with imminent verse. "I had become all in a trem
ble from not having written anything of late," he wrote in
a letter once; "the sonnet overleaf did me good; I slept the
better last night for it; this morning, however, I am nearly
as bad again." "I feel assured I should write from the
mere yearning and fondness I have for the beautiful, even
if my night's labors should be burnt every morning, and no
eye ever rest upon them." It is not so generally appre
ciated how likely he was in the better moments to be oblivi
ous of his painful private state, to be what is called an
objective artist.
There is his passion for scenery, for instance, which at
first, to be sure, in Endymion, was only a passion for set
ting his hungry soul among delicious bowers, but which
eventually was a passion for making beauty true. An ob
server of him as a student in London recorded that in read
ing poetry then to his friends he "admired more the exter
nal decorations than felt the deep emotions of the Muse.
He delighted in leading you through the mazes of elaborate
description." Description became his task and evoked his
genius, once he was something like mature. He could be
interested only in what had shape and place; meaning and
motion were not sufficient for him as they were for Shelley.
Keats stood still and looked, stationing his imagination by
preference in hushed retreats preternaturally thickened with
frondage, but stationing it always somewhere. Using an
etcher's cunning in The Eve of Saint Mark, a glorified
mosaicist's conscience in The Eve of St. Agnes, a great and
tranquil painter's wisdom in Hyperion, he rendered visible
a perfect world, not merely himself within a perfect world.
A reader, he thought, should see all that he saw, but should
not see him. "The rise, the progress, the setting of Imag
ery should, like the sun, come natural to him, shine over
him, and set soberly, although in magnificence, leaving him
in the luxury of twilight."
[Vol. 112, No. 2903
For another instance, there is his increasing conviction

that his poetry existed, that poetry in general existed, but
that he did not. With this increased his lucidity, with his
lucidity his power, and with his power his peace. It is
agreed that a writer must do well if he knows much about
his subject; but Keats, in Endymion, knew too much about
his subject, which is the same as saying, since he was
young, and the subject was himself, that he knew too little
about it. He saw clearly enough, both then and later, that
he had to get rid of himself. "I feel more and more every
day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in
this world alone, but in a thousand worlds." "A poet is the
most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no
identity; he is continually in, for, and feeling some other
body. . . . It is a wretched thing to confess, but it is a
fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted
as an opinion growing out of my identical nature." If
Keats exists in his poetry, he exists, it may be said once
more, with a difference; the whole of him passed into it.
Endymion died that Saturn and Hyperion and great Thea
could be born.
But any discussion of Keats must sooner or later turn to
his language. The meaning of certain poets is more impor
tant than their language; Keats's language was his mean
ing. Tone was his favorite word, his most necessary
thought. "We shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having
what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone."
"Let me write down a line of glorious tone." He studied
effects of consonants and vowels, and inquired the values of
words in spiritual ears. "There is a cool pleasure in the
very sound of vale," he noted on the margin of his Milton.
And so far as meter is concerned, it almost can be said that
he lived from one good cadence to another.
Here, somewhat as before, a distinction is inescapable
between the language of himself and the language of the
poetry that was in him. The language of himself was
expression of a kind, but hardly communication. It ex
pressed, in a raw, ineffectual way, his instinctive delight
in slanting verbal curves, in plunges and dips and quivers
of syntax, but it failed to convey much experience of beauty.
The language of the purer poetry that lay in him, like the
language of all pure poetry everywhere, communicated
beauty through cadences so sure that they seemed deter
mined less by him alone than by the abstract Muses. "In
reading prose," said Emerson, a great poet and judge of
poetry, "I am sensitive as soon as a sentence drags; but in
poetry, as soon as one word drags. Even as the thought
mounts, the expression mounts. . . . The poem is made
up of lines each of which fills the ear of the poet in its turn,
so that mere synthesis produces a work quite superhuman."
The passages and lines in Keats which are superhuman,
which belong, that is, not to Keats but to poetry, are few,
but their smooth, slow, richly-running tide, their grave,
sweet movement like descending weights, bear them beyond
the business of enumeration.
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown. . . .
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat gray-hair'd Saturn, quiet as a stone. . . .
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time. . . .
To cease upon the midnight with no pain. . . .
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. . . .
Dream, and so dream all night without a stir.
The Nation
Feb. 23, 1921]
Heroes and Hero Worship

By R. NIEBUHR
THE war did more for democracy than to cast down
kings from their thrones; it discredited heroes and
supermen. The irresponsible authority of hereditary monarchs is hardly more inimical to democratic interests than
the inordinate and only partly responsible power with which
men invest their supermen and heroes. The war did not
immediately abolish hero worship, for it produced as many
heroes as any war of history, but it forced them upon a so
phisticated world against its own best democratic instincts
and thus produced the reaction which promises to deliver
us from their peril.
The belief in heroes has been a cherished illusion among
men in all ages. Constantly struggling with difficulties from
which they could find no way of escape, they found it com
forting to attribute superhuman courage and wisdom to a
few among them and look to these for salvation from ills
with which they felt themselves powerless to cope. But the
comfort of this illusion has cost humanity dear because the
power which men have intrusted to their supermen has in
variably been used to rend them, the heroes inevitably lack
ing either the virtue or wisdom to justify the expectations
of their worshipers.
War periods are particularly conducive to hero worship
and fruitful in heroes because they create precisely those
problems to which the average man feels unequal and abound
in those perils from which he seeks escape by calling to his
idols. He resorts to the fiction of supermen the more readily
because war inevitably concentrates great power in the
hands of a few and prompts the error of assuming that the
possession of power implies capacity for its use. Moreover,
emotions always run high in periods of national danger and
give ready support to the cult of hero worship which, in
common with other religions, requires a strong emotional
power to carry it along by glossing over possible defects in
fact with the fiction created by need and desire.
The past war has been no exception to the rule. Its heroes
have been many. What is significant is that they barely out
lasted the conflict. Clemenceau, but recently the savior of
France, is denied the presidency. Lloyd George maintains
his power because crafty enough to renew his lease upon it
while war psychology prevails, but he is known for the artful
political juggler that he is. Venizelos is in exile. Hindenburg's wooden statue is rotting in some back yard of Ber
lin, and the case of the Kaiser is too obvious to require
comment. The fall of Wilson is most tragic of all. Hailed
yesterday as the Messiah of a new world order, he is today
discredited abroad and disliked at home as he retires into
private life. Foch seems to have fared best among the
supermen, but even the cry "Leave it to Foch" is heard
no more as we see the hero of a war that was meant to end
all war busily engaged in preparing for the next one and
demonstrating that a military strategist is not necessarily
a statesman. Not the least significant is the case of Persh
ing, whose behavior since the war has been wholly modest
and dignified. Yet compare his position today with that
of former military heroes of our historymade presidents
by a grateful people.
Some will attribute the fall of all of our war idols to the
lack in each one of some quality essential to real greatness.
293
Foch was only a strategist and not a statesman, they will

say, while Pershing lacked those qualities of personal mag
netism without which mere professional efficiency makes
no appeal. Wilson would have been great had he been a
little shrewder and Clemenceau, had the milk of human
kindness not turned to gall in him. But these objections
are hardly convincing. Heroes of other ages were as im
perfect and yet not discredited. Besides there was Lloyd
George, who was a little shrewder than Wilson and a little
more human than Clemenceau and yet no greater than either.
But the fact that, out of the struggle of the ages which
called forth the intensest energy of the greatest and most
diverse number of people not a single supremely outstand
ing figure remains.
Our war heroes have been the victims not only of the
sophistication of our age, but of a peculiar irony. They
fell because they were raised to impossible heights. They
failed because they were intrusted with tasks beyond the
capacity of any man. They were dwarfed by playing on too
large a stage. Supermen may have always been fiction, but
the modern state with its consolidations of power has re
duced them to an absurdity. It has cured us of idol Worship
by claiming too much for or expecting too much of the idols.
The centralization of power which rapid means of inter
course have made possible in the modern state and the
stabilization of authority which has come through our con
stitutional forms have given the modern statesman authority
more far reaching and real than any dreamed of by ancient
despots, while the complexities of modern life have made a
wise use of this authority by a single individual simply
impossible. The history of the three old men in Paris de
ciding the fate of peoples whose very names were unfamiliar
to them and sealing the destiny of nations in decisions from
which personal motives could not be excluded and in which
momentary passions were bound to weigh heavily, shows us
the absurdity of the demands made on the modern states
man. Here were three men raised to impossible heights of
authority and compelled to play a game with the destiny of
nations for stakes, with the possibility that one man's lack
of wit, and another man's lack of courage, might seal the
doom of millions of his fellowmen.
But the forces of modern civilization have not been con
tent to discredit the supermen by making their failure in
evitable. They took steps to publish their failure to all the
world. The same means of rapid communication and inter
course which have consolidated the power of the modern
state and made it possible for the statesman to play on a
world stage have also destroyed the remoteness of the super
man. The ubiquitous newspaper and the clairvoyant re
porter have subjected the great man to the intimate scrutiny
of his fellows, which has become all the more critical since
literacy has become fairly universal and given each man
the pride and power of his own opinion. Heroes can thrive
only where ignorance reduces history to mythology. They
can not survive the coldly critical temper of modern thought,
when it is functioning normally, nor can they be worshiped
by a generation which has every facility for detecting their
foibles and analyzing their limitations.
The war has only hastened a development toward which
all forces of history have been conspiring. If it tempted
us for a while to accept the puerile hero worship of some
of our war reporters, it has the more surely driven us into
the wholesome cynicism that feeds on such history as
Phillip Gibbs's "Now It Can Be Told" and hails Lytton
The Nation
294
Strachey's biographical art. This is the twilight not only

of kings but of all supermen. We have learned that we are
not secure against despots simply because hereditary des
potism has been destroyed and its power given into the
hands of individuals against whose self interest we are
guaranteed only by an occasional referendum and against
whose folly we have no guaranty at all.
So far the lesson we have learned has affected only our
temper and not our political philosophy or political forms.
It will not be easy to apply the lesson in the reorganization
of our political life without destroying the coherency and
unity of the state. Yet no matter how great the peril it will
be necessary not only to make the authority of the modern
state increasingly responsible to the people but also to
divide its power. No scheme of government will ever ob
viate the necessity of leadership in society and no govern
ment could function without confidence in leaders. Yet there
must be a way of dividing the power and authority of the
modern state without destroying its efficiency and of dis
tributing authority in more exact proportion to the distri
bution of ability among men.
Those Mark-downs !
By WILLIAM A. McGARRY
THE consumer who doesn't care how he looks and is
willing to wear out-of-date designs in any size into
which he can force himself can find bargains today. Like
wise, he can find plenty of merchandise at prices that seem
reasonableuntil he examines the material. One investi
gating retail sales becomes increasingly impressed that the
older the article the greater the bargain, provided it fits.
Old and inferior stock is being unloaded on the public in
the guise of bargains. The price range in almost any store
indicates that manufacturers are right when they say that
retailers, on the whole, have not taken losses. But there is
also plenty of indication that manufacturers who control
their markets are still holding out for high prices.
In fields where competition is keenshirts, clothing, hats,
hosiery, underwear, and even in some lines of household
furniture and equipmentmanufacturers have been forced
to sell direct to the consumer in the attempt to break high
prices maintained by the retailer. It will be true of many
other lines before the cost of living reaches a level pro
portionate to the tremendous cuts that have been made in
raw materials. These reductions are being quoted every
day in the attempt to show that the cost of living has been
reduced. They are being used also in the campaign to
reduce wages. Yet the fact is that retail prices are as high
as ever, or nearly so, in lines that have suffered the greatest
raw material and wage cuts. Deflation, in so far as it has
been glowingly described as the promised land of economic
relief, is still a mirage. To the wearied journeyman it is
still a "now you see it, now you don't."
Shoes offer one illustration. They are being sold in retail
stores all over the country at such prices as $9.95, $11.85,
$14.35, with handsome price tags, especially made for the
alleged slaughter showing the former price elaborately
crossed off in red ink. These represent, as a rule, "reduc
tions" of five, fifteen, and sixty-five cents respectively from
the prices obtained during the "orgy of buying." Cheap
^hoes are for sale at lower prices.
[Vol. 112, No. 2903
A Philadelphia shoe store chain is now advertising a big

sale with all the usual catch phrases"taking a tremen
dous loss," "clearing the decks for new business," "less
than wholesale," and so on. It is selling shoes as low as
$2.95 a pair. In one of these stores the writer found ex
actly four pairs of shoes at this price. Two pairs were
extremely small, two very large. The shoes were heavy and
made of good material. But they were so badly shopworn
that stitching was torn away in several places. A salesman
led the way to another counter, marked $5.95, all odd sizes
and out-of-date styles. From there it was an easy step to
a counter piled high with shoes marked $9.95. The sales
man admitted that the stuff was not selling. He had plenty
of visitors, but few customers. The general complaint was
that prices were too high for desirable goods. Nearly every
visitor knew that green horse hides have dropped from a
peak of $14 and $15 each to $5 and $6. Some of them had
read the February report of the Federal Reserve bank cov
ering this particular district, showing that wage reduc
tions of 25 to 35 per cent have been made at many tan
neries. Without exact figures for the entire industry every
prospective purchaser knew that he was entitled to more
than a five, fifteen, or sixty-five cent reduction on a pair of
shoes, and indeed to much more than even a 5, 10, or 15
per cent reduction.
Similar conditions exist in hats, shirts, and clothing,
although doubtless there are exceptions. A Philadelphia
hat manufacturer who has always disposed of his stock
through retailers is now selling hats at retail for $3.50 each,
and is doing a business of more than $2,000 a week. At
the peak of high prices he had to pay $15 a pound for the
felt going into these hats. The price today is $7. Prices
of silk bands have dropped 20 to 25 per cent. Many of the
hats now being sold at retail were made to wholesale at
$66 a dozen. But the manufacturer, after many cancela
tions, offered the hats to retailers at $42 a dozen. Instead
of buying at this price and then averaging it with the cost
of stock bought at high prices, retailers generally preferred
to hold out for $8 and $10 on hats which had cost them
$5.50. As a result they forced the manufacturer to sell
direct. Every time he sells a hat the retailer loses a sale,
and his chance of collecting a fat profit on high priced
stock grows less.
The consumer does not need to be told that the cost of
living has not been reduced in anything like the proportion
that raw material prices have dropped. But apparently
the retailers and some manufacturers are not yet awake to
the fact that there is a consumers' strike. A familiar
phrase is "people have money; they've got to buy." But
the records show that they are not swallowing all that is
being fed to them about price reductions. They are inter
ested in ultimate prices, not in alleged reductions. In the
same Federal Reserve report referred to above, under the
caption of retail trade, it is remarked that not even at
tractive offers have served to draw buyers to some localities.
"A second explanation is noted," the report continues,
"where reduction sales have been conducted continually dur
ing the past six months or more. In short, the public has
been buying where it has felt absolute confidence in the
prices quoted, but where sales of a varied nature have taken
place in a constant series, the public has become immune
to the advertising appeal."
It might be unfair to recall the old adage about what
happens when thieves fall out. But there is a certain grim
Feb. 23, 1921]
The Nation
satisfaction for the consumer in the present situation.

Manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers are fighting in the
open, to some extent, for the first time in the history of
business. This is an exact parallel in effect to the con
dition that led to regulation of public utilities. The public
is beginning to learn something about "mark-up."
Take collars. Three companies produce most of the out
putCluett, Peabody and Company, Earl and Wilson, and
the Ide Company. When the war started men's collars
sold at retail two for a quarter, and they were made partly
of linen and partly of cotton. Now they are all cotton and
the standard retail price is twenty-five cents. For a time
it was thirty-five cents. And the three grades of cotton
now going into a collar cost the manufacturer just a trifle
over three cents. In 1918 Cluett, Peabody and Company's
profits were $1,871,163, according to Poor's Manual. But
in 1919 the profits were $5,153,129. The surplus for 1918
was $301,163. For 1919 it was $3,584,179. In those days
the big companies sold to retailers only with the distinct
understanding that the retail price would be maintained.
Now he is "requested" to maintain the price, and if he
doesn't he is told that the factory is "just out" of the size
and styles he orders. But in spite of this you can buy
collars today at twenty cents, and less. You can do this
because the retailer who is desperately advertising for $1.95
cheap shirts worth about seventy-five cents, must have
something to get visitors into his store. He pays $2.10 a
dozen, or seventeen and a half cents each, for collars. The
total investment is negligible in comparison to his entire
stock, and the turnover is relatively rapid. Business has
fallen off so much that the control of the manufacturer is
slipping.
In clothing the raw-material reductions have been even
more marked. Fine clothing territory wools sold for $1.70
a pound in January of 1920. The price now is from sixty
to sixty-five cents. And this is not peculiar to one quality.
Fine staple territory dropped in the same period from $2
to ninety cents; Ohio quarter blood from sixty-seven to
twenty-seven cents. Reports of manufacturers to the Fed
eral Reserve Bank show reductions in cloth of 10 per cent
in January of this year, making a total of about 60 per
cent below the peak. They also report reductions of 15
to 25 per cent in the wage scales.
How much of this has been passed along to the con
sumer? Perhaps the best answer to that question is to be
found in the fact that more manufacturers than ever before
are selling direct to the wearer, because they^ cannot sell
to the retailer. Here again there are exceptions; but as a
rule the lack of business indicates that the consumer has
not even been given a fair average of high and low prices.
He can now pretty generally buy the same cheap stuff that
he could always buy at low prices. For good material the
"reduction price" is still absurdly and obviously high.
The result of all this is that even the retailer who has
made bona fide reductions is not getting as much business
as he needs, mainly because the public has lost confidence.
When there is manufacturing competition the consumer who
is not expert in judging materials will reason that his chance
of getting his money's worth is greater at the factory than
in the retail store. And in the meantime all the talk of
optimism avails nothing while the consumer remains a
pessimist, and pessimist he will remain, a buyer on strike,
until the prices to him are much, much lower, somewhere
in the vicinity of pre-war, pre-1914, standards.
295
In the Driftway
FRONTIERS are after all only accidental monuments to
man's stupidity, and the pother and fuss and elaborate
formalities which we attach to them are but a passing bit
of petty pomp. It will not always be thus; indeed it was
not ever so. In the ancient city of Troyes, hard by the
Street of the Care-free Children, rue des Enfants SattsSouci, is a tall Gothic church dedicated to the memory of
Jacques Pantaleon, son of a Troyes shoemaker, who became
Pope Urban IV. On the stone wall of the north crossing
hangs a tablet that tells without ornament a significant
story of the internationalism of the thirteenth century.
Jacques was a choir boy at Troyes; he entered the priest
hood, if the Drifter's memory serves him aright, at Li6ge,
which is now across the Belgian frontier ; moved to Cologne,
which in these modern days means passing another frontier,
political, linguistic, and emotional; in time he became
Bishop of Verdun, in France again, Papal Legate at War
saw, Poland, Primate of Jerusalem in Palestine, and finally
Pope, dying at Perugia in Italy. Frontiers there were in
his day; but Jacques Pantaleon could not have taken them
very seriously.
*****
THE Drifter has been reading a more modern tale of
the futility of frontiers. A German was engaged to
marry a Lorraine girl when the armistice suddenly erected
a frontier wall between them. She became French, he re
mained German. The date for their wedding had been set.
He applied for a permit to enter France for his wedding,
but the papers lay forgotten on some official's desk, and the
permit did not come. The day drew near; the bridegroom
grew impatient. At last some shrewd fellow-townsmen
told him of the unfeminist law code of his day, and the
difficulty was solved. He wrote to the mayor of the girl's
commune, and to the mayor of the commune just across the
frontier from his own, and arranged with his own mayor
to be with him on the scheduled day. The three mayors,
the groom, the bride, and their friends, met on the imagi
nary line that cuts France from Germany. The groom,
standing in Germany, and the bride, still in France, were
married by the mayors. He could not enter France, and
she had no permit to cross the line to Germany. But the
mayor of the French commune gave her a mighty shove, and
she fell into her husband's arms in Germany. Unmarried,
she had been French, and required a passport to live in
Germany ; married, by our wise modern laws, she took the
nationality of her husband, and became German. As a
German, she required no special papers to dwell in her coun
try; the mayor's shove had solved the problem of the fron
tier for her. For the rest of the world, the mummery of
frontiers only grows.
*****
HERESY ye have always with you. For nearly four
years the Drifter has been shaken by one heresy after
another, and appalled at the persecution which followed in
its wake. He has seen his friends and neighbors brow
beaten for being silly, for being wise, for being merely hon
estyet he has survived. He has consoled himself with the
thought that if his fellow-men were not advancing, they
were at their worst only repeating the intolerant antics of
past generations. And in a back file of the Cleveland Press
he has found confirmation which revives his spirits like the
The Nation
296
sting of the March wind upon his cheeks. Some months

ago the Press brought to light a letter written in 1826 by
the School Board of Lancaster, Ohio, refusing to permit the
schoolhouse to be used for a meeting to discuss railroads!
The Board wrote in part:
You are welcome to use the schoolhouse to debate all proper
questions in, but such things as railroads are impossibilities
and rank infidelity. There is nothing in the word of God
about them. If God designed that His intelligent creatures
should travel at the frightful speed of fifteen miles an hour
by steam, He would have clearly foretold through His holy
prophets. It is a device to lead immortal souls down to hell.
The Drifter read, and chuckled. Accustomed to the com
monplace marvels of today, the meager beginnings of the
railroads of 1826 seem to us in 1921 but puny items of
progress. The Drifter wonders if anyone will take the Act
ing Superintendent of Education in New York State aside,
and whisper in his ear. In 1826 it was railroads; in 1921
it is communism that is an indelicate topic for discussion
in our public schools. In 2116but the Drifter stifles his
impulse to prophesy.
The Drifter
Correspondence
Why the Socialist Vote Shrank
Sir: Even enemies of the Socialist Party predicted for
Eugene V. Debs 3,000,000 votes at the last election. Hopes and
expectations of the leaders of the party ran even higher. But
realities are respecters neither of hopes nor of expectations.
Debs polled about 910,000 votes, which is but a slight advance
on that of 1912 when he polled 901,873. The status of the
Socialist Party thus once more becomes that of other insignifi
cant third parties which from time to time cropped up on the
national political arena and then disappeared.
As a national political movement the Socialist Party has been
in the field continuously since 1892. Their nominee, Simon
Wing, then polled 21,164 votes. The increase in party strength
was very slight at the next national election, being only 36,274
in 1896; but with the appearance of Eugene V. Debs on the
scene in 1900, it rose to 87,814. At the next two successive
elections Debs succeeded so far as to jump the Socialist vote
up to 402,283 and 420,793 respectively, and in 1912 to the
phenomenal height of 901,873. In 1916, however, when Allan
L. Benson displaced Debs as the banner-carrier of the Socialist
Party, the strength of the party crumbled and fell to 590,579.
The year of grace 1920 was one that held many favorable
conditions for the Socialist Party. Woman suffrage alone
should have nearly doubled the strength of the party. The
march of events between 1916 and 1920 was such as to cause
people to think deeper than ever before. At no period of time
in American history were so many people very directly af
fected by the economic and political trend of tremendous events
following one another. In 1920, 2,000,000 of our young men
were back from France, where, conceivably, a considerable part
of them had their minds broadened and their visions enlarged.
And did not Thaddeus Sweet make excellent propaganda for
them? If, then, with the most favorable conditions for a really
large vote in the history of their movement, they could but
muster a strength equal to that of 1912is this not retrogres
sion?
The cooperative commonwealth is an abstract term, and must
remain such for a long time to come for the masses of this
country. And the masses do not deal in abstractions. On the
other hand, let the Socialist Party raise the issue of unemploynent, a very concrete and understandable issue, and omit for
[Vol. 112, No. 2903
the present all other abstract ideals, and it is very conceivable

that all organized labor would join forces with it, and it is
even conceivable that all of the middle classes would support
such an issue. To say that unemployment is the very worst
evil from which suffer not only men who labor but also most
retail merchants is to state a truism. Unemployment is the
bane of the labor movement; in the face of it, unionism becomes
prostrate; and it eats into the very life of 90 per cent of the
people. Why not, then, give the people an issue around which
they could rally, and which they would enthusiastically sup
port? To do away with unemployment; to win the right to
labor, the right to earn a livingcan anything be more con
crete?
New York, February 6
Max Mahler
Why Wells's "Outline" Is Remarkable

Sir: "Why does a review, which demonstrates that a book
is really quite bad, begin by calling it remarkable and end by
calling it a liberal education?" asks Mr. Simeon Strunsky re
ferring to my review of Mr. Wells's "Outline of History."
This is indeed an embarrassing question. My answer may
sound odd to Mr. Strunsky's keen ears. In reading the "Out
line" I had a distinct sensation that I was reading a remarkable
book, in spite of Mr. Wells's bad historical judgments. Why?
1. It makes a magnificent approach to human problems.
What history is there besides this one that is at the same time
a philosophy of life? To view history as the struggle of man
kind to attain salvation through a universal solution of the
terrible problems of poverty and war; to examine every phase
of human development in the light of a great future: are not
these the qualities of a remarkable book?
2. It gives a sense of continuity to history as no other book
does, by explaining at length the origins of institutions and
ideas. It is really more important to know the origin of writ
ing than of the Balkan Question; of the Neolithic Man than of
the bourgeoisie; of the Old Man of the Tribe than of Napoleon.
History has too long dwelt in splendid isolation from her sister
sciences with the result that the average historian writes as
though man sprang fully grown from the brow of Clio.
3. It has interested thousands in reading history. The man
who can interest the Tired Business Man and his mate, the
Idle Woman of the Afternoon, in reading this serious twovolume work has to my mind done a remarkable thing for
which he cannot be too highly praised. Many a man and woman
will emerge from these volumes with enlightened views upon
the great problems of the day. Is this not a liberal education?
No, Mr. Wells has not written a "rotten" history. With
all its glaring faultsand I pointed them out unsparingly
it ought to have a salutory influence upon teachers and writers
of history. Instead of emphasizing historical wrongs, national
antagonisms, and racial hatreds that have done no end of
mischief, they will learn to emphasize those things in the past
that make for a better future.
3. Salwyn Schapiro

Stuart Chase is an economist and statistician with the
newly formed Technical Alliance.
Paxton Hibben accompanied the Harbord Mission to
Armenia and was Associated Press correspondent in
Greece 1915-1917.
Junius B. Wood is the Japanese correspondent of the
Chicago Daily News Syndicate.
William A. McGarry is a Philadelphia journalist.
R. Niebuhb is pastor of the Bethel Evangelical Church
of Detroit, Michigan.
The Nation
Feb. 23, 1921]
Books
Great Was the Fall!
How We Got On With the War. By Irene Cooper Willis. Lon
don: The National Labour Press.
TTÎNDING it impossible in the present indeterminate state of
* affairs to conclude her study of British Liberal idealism,
Miss Cooper Willis has continued "How We Went Into the
War" -with an intermediary volume, covering the period from
the outbreak of war up to the armistice. The material "pil
loried" in this is mostly taken from the Daily News, Mr. A. G.
Gardiner, till recently its editor, being chosen as fairly repre
sentative of British Liberals and his paper as the one chiefly
responsible for the myth of the Holy War. The gist of his
famous letter to Lord Northcliffe in December, 1914, epito
mized in the words "We lostand you won," is taken as the
text of this little book, and is proved true to a far greater
extent than when the words were written. For, as Miss Cooper
Willis points out, had Liberals at that time allowed the sense
of these words thoroughly to permeate their consciousness they
might have followed a course more consistent with their pre-war
policy and their idealism might have been tempered. "It was
not tempered. It was arrogantly confident, overweeningly sure.
There has been no more pitiable spectacle in the war than the
spectacle of Liberals, at sea in reaction, clinging to the myth
that their aims were supreme."
Carried on a wave of enthusiasm, which discarded Bernard
Shaw's "Common Sense" assertion that the war was "a balance
of power war and nothing else" in favor of all manner of
visionary aims covering the entire terrestrial globe, and bol
stered up by windy rhetoric which far outdid that of the
blunter and more patently egotistical Tories, the Liberals sailed
through the first months of the war blind to everything but
Germany's mistreatment of Belgium, and insistent that if Prus
sian militarism were but defeated militarism in all other coun
tries would automatically end. Even when they had to re
linquish the idea of an early victory, their illusions were in
no wise dimmed. Dazzled by the luminous prospect of the
reconstituted world of their desire which was to emerge as
the result of all the bloodshed, they failed to heed the pitfalls
being dug by the forces of reaction, though these were obvious
enough. There was the Daily Mail's frequent and frank dis
cussion of war aims, which included seizing German trade; ob
taining naval positions, "Gibraltars of the Future"; and doing
all the land grabbing possible, as for example: "German East
Africa, especially, with an area of 400,000 square miles, will
pleasantly fill in the solitary gap in the continuity of British
possessions between Cairo and the Cape. In the Pacific, too,
there are many islands that it will be an act of charity to
relieve Germany of."
Though the confidence of Liberals weakened toward the
close of Mr. Asquith's administration, it revived fully on the
outbreak of the Russian revolution, and they became ecstatic
on the entry of America which followed so soon after. "Deep
has answered to deep," wrote A. G. G., "and across the sunder
ing ocean the democracy of America clasps the hands of the
democracy of Russia, freed at last from the gyves of the cen
turies." Nor was the Daily News able to detect any difference
between the Russian revolutionary peace principles and those
of the Allies. "In all essentials the peace of M. Lenin's ideal
is the peace of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Wilson." Their
hopes were again somewhat dashed by the continued failure
of the Allies to publish war aims, but faith in Wilsonism
buoyed them up, so that by the time the final military suc
cesses led to the armistice, they had traveled so far on the
Toad of self-deception that "The Daily News felt that it was
living in a fairy taleall its dreams were coming true."
It is with keen irony that Miss Cooper Willis records and
analyzes the course of Liberal sentiment. Her terse comments
297
fall with unerring aim on the vulnerable points, so that this

compilation of typical newspaper extracts makes strangely
dry and humorous reading. Humorous, that is, until one stops
to realize how large a part of public opinion everywhere is
reflected in the mirror here held up to British Liberals. Then
the quasi-comedy becomes tragedy, for the laugh is at the ex
pense of such a large section of mankind. It is ludicrous enough
now, humiliating as it was at the time, to reread such a per
version of the natural order of things as the statement that
the Kaiser and the Crown Prince"if guilty"were "to be
tried"; such partial reasoning as the designation of England's
advance of 5,000,000 to Rumania as a "loan," and Germany's
of 3,000,000 to Bulgaria as a "bribe," previous to the entry
of those two countries into the war; such childish methods of
meeting the food shortage as the proposal to suppress beer and
race horses, since both "consumed grain"; or of such an anomaly
as the rector of a Scottish church (at Goose Green, Dulwich)
who converted his vestry into a shell factory.
The most pitiable part of it all is that in deluding them
selves Liberal war leaders carried astray such a large part of
the world which looked to them for leadership and faithful
interpretation of facts. This trust, wittingly or unwittingly,
they betrayed. Instead of holding to the true idealism, which
probes diligently for truth and tests it fearlessly, they fol
lowed the false, which insists on seeing facts as it would be
pleasant they should be, and which necessarily leads to wrong
trains of thought, since it deduces them from a wrong basis.
For the public, the descent from such illusion is to cynicism,
and thus the sane realization of things as they are is missed in
both directions. Nothing but individual thought can conquer
these blind tendencies. Not only must leaders come to a greater
sense of their responsibility, but this responsible sense must
also come to be innate in every member of the crowd, which
must grow out of drove instincts into those worthy of men.
Only thus can national opinion be trusted not to go astray, and
governments be restrained from prostituting public sentiment
to sordid commercial aims. The best hope of avoiding for the
future such manifestations of popular folly as this instructive
little book shows up, lies in sounder educational textbooks and
more fairly written histories.
B. U. Burke
Transitions in Politics
Political Systems in Transition: War-Time and After. By
Charles G. Fenwick. The Century Company.
N this volume of about three hundred pages we have a review,
i concise and dispassionate, of the outstanding political results
of the Great War. Almost one-third of the book is devoted to
the changes in the governments of Russia, Germany, and Aus
tria, and to the war methods employed by the parliaments of
England and France. While giving consideration to the con
flict of ideals which some imagine to be the root of the war,
Professor Fenwick tells us bluntly that the issue lies deeper
in the economic rivalry of the nations and the international
anarchy which imposes on each country the necessity of de
fending its rights by force. Outside of Russia and the Central
Powers, it seems, the much discussed and ambitious programs
of "reconstruction" have faded away into a dreary hope that
things will not get worse. The mere extension of the suffrage
in Great Britain, which was bound to come anyway, is a small
mouse to issue from the groaning mountain.
In the midst of much editorial froth and fume, it is interesting
to have the judgment of a sober and thoughtful American
scholar on the drift of affairs in Germany and Russia. Though
cautious about expressing a hasty judgment on the new con
stitution drafted by the Teutons, Mr. Fenwick thinks that, taken
at its face value, it represents a truly democratic form of gov
ernment, contains many elements of intrinsic worth, promises
to combine efficiency with democratic popular control, and makes
a heroic effort to reconcile the demands of individualism and
298
The Nation
socialism. As to Russia, Mr. Fenwick is careful to make a dis

tinction between the soviet form of government and the prin
ciples of communism, but he believes that the whole experiment
has many profound lessons for the rest of the world and that
when the flood has receded, as in the case of the French Revolu
tion, the course of the world's thinking and acting will still be
deeply affected.
Of the remaining two-thirds of the volume, more than onehalf is given to the war powers of the President and the emer
gency legislation, State and Federal, evoked by the war. A
fourth and last section deals with the newer ideals of democracy
and with political and international reconstruction. Here are
to be found brief descriptions of important legislative and execu
tive acts connected with the prosecution of the war, and a
summary consideration of the various proposals associated with
that vague term "industrial democracy," public ownership, a
national budget system, and the possibility of cabinet govern
ment in the United States.
Mr. Fenwick does not himself make many judgments or pro
pose many new things. He evidently believes that, while re
jecting socialism somewhat emphatically, we shall be adopting
one socialistic measure after another in meeting concrete issues
as they arise. He asserts that the abstract principle of freedom
of speech, in view of recent legislation, is in "a somewhat pre
carious position." He shrinks from popular control over foreign
affairs in view of the "chauvinistic" character of American pub
lic sentiment. He proposes a constitutional amendment con
ferring upon the Federal government the power to deal with all
problems of national importance which transcend the authority
of the State legislatures; in framing it he might have recourse
to the plan devised by that far-sighted man, Alexander Ham
ilton, nearly a hundred and forty years ago.
In a work so temperate in tone and so carefully done there is
little with which one can profitably quarrel. It is hardly cor
rect to say that Magna Carta "contained guaranties against
oppression of the people by the king." The term "people" had
no legal significance in the Middle Ages and certainly the bulk
of the English people, the serfs, secured few rights under Magna
Carta. Neither is it quite accurate to say that the American
ideal recognizes the right of a majority of the electorate to
control the government. Anyone who will read the tenth num' ber of the Federalist will discover that the framers of the
Federal Constitution feared above all things the rule of the
majority. Moreover, it is a vague term. Majority of whom?
Of all the potential voters? Of those who register? Of those
who take the trouble to vote? In some cases we are ruled by
pluralities; in other cases by two-thirds of Congress and threefourths of the State legislatures without any referendum to the
electorate at all. Really, the time has come for someone to
explore the facts and implications of majority rule.
Mr. Fenwick favors freedom of speech so long as the speaker
advocates changes according to the forms of law. With this
idea most Americans will doubtless agree. It is interesting to
note, however, that, had the framers of the Federal Constitu
tion adhered to the forms of law prescribed by the Articles of
Confederation, they doubtless could not have secured the adop
tion of our present system of government.
One more train of reflection is suggested by Mr. Fenwick's
interesting book. The American democratic system, in dealing
with military affairs, seems to amount to this: A President,
who may represent a minority of the voters as did Lincoln in
1861, may create a diplomatic situation which compels Congress
to declare war. As soon as war is declared, the Constitution, for
practical purposes, permits any action necessary to win the war.
During the war, everybody must accept the decision of the gov
ernment as final. Any appeal to the voters to turn the admin
istration out of office at an election and return one pledged to a
reversal of the war policy and a return to peace is treason.
Query: What becomes of democracy? Alexander Hamilton pro
vided one answer a long time ago in the seventieth number of
the Federalist: "Every man the least conversant with Roman
[Vol. 112, No. 2903
( story knows how often that republic was obliged to take refuge
in the absolute power of a single man, under the formidable
title of Dictator, as well against the intrigues of ambitious indi
viduals . . . and the seditions of whole classes of the com
munity ... as against the invasions of external enemies."
Everyone knows also what happened to Rome. It requires no
very vivid imagination to discover where a series of wars and
internal disturbances would lead us. So distinguished a jurist
as Charles E. Hughes is reported to have expressed doubts
whether the republic could survive a long war conducted along
the lines followed by Mr. Wilson's administration.
Charles A. Beard
A Laborer in Alaska
Alaska Man's Luck. By Hjalmar Rutzebeck. Boni and Liveright.
T T is typical of the spirit of Mr. Rutzebeck that he does not
* think it strange to write, in his letter to the publisher, "I
left school when I was 12, determined to become an author."
His literary activities since then have been hampered by the
necessity of learning English, and "by having to make a living
for myself and my family, except the one year when I was in
jail." And few writers indeed would be so frank as to admit:
"Generally, I am quite conceited, but now in my humble mo
ments, I accomplish my best work."
One could regard this book merely as a pleasant and true
story of adventure by a present-day pioneer. He meets the girl
of his choice, not, as in the old stories, in the church sociable,
but in the rooms of the Young People's Socialist League. Deter
mined to get to Alaska in order to make his "stake," he beats
his way up the coast from California, riding on the rods and
dodging the railroad detectives, and finally slaving for a month
in a lumber camp. Once in Alaska, he is precipitated into a
continual round of adventures, experiences of the sort for which
the city man's substitute is the roller-coaster or the maze of
the amusement park. Working as a miner, prospecting, making
long and incredible journeys through the wilderness, over cliffs,
glaciers, and fjords, threatened with starvation through unem
ployment, stealing, running away from the police, making
breathless escapes from jail, he finally breaks his way into
organized society by staking out his farm and becoming, in a
small way, a man of property with hopes of more. His diary,
written for the girl, makes the book. Surely, this is one way
of "becoming an author" which is refreshing in contrast with
the moonings of garret-bound youths who do not admit that
they accomplish their best work when humble.
Although the book is an artless tale of actual experiences, it
does not have the aridity which often vitiates stories of exter
nal adventure. It shows, in the first place, a genuine and deli
cate appreciation of wild nature. And the hero is not merely
a lay figure in violent action; he is introspective, and his con
stant attempt to make an adjustment between himself and his
surroundings produces many curious observations. Can a man
go hungry, steal, run miles from the authorities, break jail, and
finally spend a year in confinement without either losing his
self-respect or becoming a callous anti-social being? Here is
the proof that he can. Furthermore, here is the proof that it is
just the sort of man who can do these things who can also,
when he has the opportunity, become a pillar of society through
energetic work. The result is achieved not through the con
ventional mummery of sin and repentance, but through genuine
candor, which distinguishes clearly between personal fault and
the crude judgment of law. It is easy to see what direction
such a sturdy mind and body might have taken if there had
been no free land to reclaim. If, in order to make a fit place
for himself, he had had to undertake the reorganization of
society, he would not have shrunk from the task. The one
thing he would never have done would be to surrender the dig
nity and freedom of his personality. Here is a hint for Mr.
Rutzebeck's next venture into authorship.
G. S.
Feb. 23, 1921]
The Nation
Anatole France in English Again

The Bride of Corinth; Little Pierre; The Seven Wives of Blue
beard. By Anatole France. John Lane Company.
ALTHOUGH these three books are not by any means the
most interesting of Anatole France's work, they have a
peculiar value for his admirers in that they include the earliest
and the latest of his major writings. "Les Noces Corinthiennes"
appeared in 1876, while its author was employed in the Bibliotheque du Senat, practically unknown except for his "Poemes
Dores," which had been, published three years earlier, and for
a few critical studies. "Little Pierre," in which the zealous see
a note reminiscent of the author's childhood, came out in France
in 1918 and was a welcome antidote to the drugged literature
then in the bookshops and, if -one may take liberties with a
language not his own, for its creator's own bits of patriesserie
then confounding his friends on I'Humanite'.
"Les Noces Corinthiennes" is not happily entitled "The Bride
of Corinth," in spite of its affiliations with Goethe's poem of
that name. For one of the distinguishing marks of Anatole
France's titles is that they refer to the situations in which the
characters find themselves or to the circumstances which make
them what they are. To one "Petit Pierre" there are a dozen
"Rotisserie de la Reine Pedauque," and it is not entirely fancy
which leads one to say that titles of the latter sort usually indi
cate the greater books. For human beings to Anatole France
are much more the playthings of the Comic Spirit than
they are even to Meredith, and in the maze of accident which
plays out our lives for us he sees life's meaning. Thus "The
Bride of Corinth" is no longer what she was for Goethe. Had
the English publishers been as kindly as the French, they
would have given us a translation of "Die Braut von Korinth"
to compare. For Goethe the bride is a ghost come from the tomb
for love, after being consecrated to the new god who wants
neither lambs nor bulls as sacrifices, but human souls. To
Anatole France she is a living girl in love who is vowed to
eternal chastity by her mother in honor of Christ, the "Prince
impur d'une race infestee," and in recompense for restoring
her to health. Whereas in Goethe it is the force of the old
gods which pulls her to the arms of a lover, in Anatole France
it is love itself which forces her to break her mother's vow
although she knows the price is death. In Goethe one has but
the scene in the lovers' chamber, the entrance of the spirit,
their discovery by the mother; in Anatole France one sees the
drama unfolding from the first meeting of the two to the girl's
tragic and self-imposed death.
It is a delightful Anatole France who presents himself to us
here, a very charming and lyrical and bored Frenchman of postclassical leanings, more attached to those sad centuries when
the grace and diversity of Hellas were giving way to the big
otry of the Orient. It is the Anatole France of "La Revolte des
Anges" in a measure, particularly of those delectable chapters,
Le Recit du Jardinier. But the editors have included in the
same volume his "Man Who Married a Dumb Wife," produced
so exquisitely by Mr. Granville Barker in New York in the
season of 1915, a dramatic version of "Crainquebille," as played
by Lucien Guitry, and "Come What May," a comedy of con
temporary manners. These all suffer in translation, particu
larly Crainquebille, who turns into a London huckster, speaking
an idiom in which "Mort aux vaches" suffers a channel-change
into "Bloody copper." But such infelicities are perhaps inevita
ble. The poems in the volume are of course the worst suffer
ers, although certain stanzas are extraordinarily goodlike a
woman's preaching according to Dr. Johnson.
"The Seven Wives of Bluebeard" contains the title story, the
legend of St. Nicholas, the story of the Sleeping Beauty, and
The Shirt. These are all in Anatole France's most individual
manner. The Seven Wives is a defense of Bluebeard, whose
character has been progressively besmirched for years, thanks
to the influence of Perrault. Instead of being the monster of
299
vice and cruelty we have known in our childhood, he is here

shown to us as a strong, kindly, rich, and uncomfortably uxorius seigneur, whose seven wives make his life a hell upon earth.
In the legend of St. Nicholas we have the story of the three
children who were saved from the salting tub. One becomes a
roistering rake of a captain, one a money lender, and one a
heretic who preaches "more errors than Sabellius, Arius, Nestorius, Eutyches, Manes, Pelagius, and Pachosius combined,"
among which are the denial of purgatory, of the need of con
fessing to a priest if one confesses to God, and of man's right
to money and private property. Excommunicated by the Pope
because of these children whom God bade him rescue, the saint
finds refuge on a mountain top with a hermit who turns out to
have been their murderer. The Shirt recounts the search for
a happy man's shirt, which is to be used to cure the king of
melancholy. After an examination of courtiers, scientists, mil
lionaires, bourgeois, lovers, a pug-nosed man is found, living
in a hollow tree, simple as a child or an animal is supposed to
be. He admits that for all he knows he may be happy. He has
never reflected about it. But he has no shirt.
"Little Pierre" will probably be the most popular of these
three books, for it deals with a child. We have a fondness
today for what is immature and unformed and we run to chil
dren as Frenchmen under the later Louis ran to happy savages
and shepherds. No book written by the author of "L'lle des
Pingouins" could fail to be worth reading, but there is a low
ered pitch in this volume, a dropping vitality, a reminiscence
which rumbles and seems old. The fire flashes at times and the
irony bites, but it is the fire and the irony of an ancient. One
has only to compare it with "Le Livre de Mon Ami" to see that.
Yet it is so immeasurably superior as a work of art to any
thing else being produced today that one must apologize for
finding fault with it.
A word should be said for the translators, who have per
formed a task more than usually difficult in a more than usually
successful manner. The style of Anatole France, with its
hendiadyses and rapid contrasts, is a despair and a delight,
and to see it even suggested in English is worth a great deal.
George Boas
Books in Brief
T N "Poetic Origins and the Ballad" (Macmillan) Miss Louise
Pound has brought together a body of evidence that plays a
good deal of havoc with the mysterious notion classically ex
pressed in the words "Das Volk dichtet." Wherever possible she
has looked for traces of the dancing throng which the orthodox
describe as the origin of narrative verse. On examination that
rhythmic gang turns out to be very hard to find; moreover,
when found it rarely gets beyond the song, and only at a rela
tively late date does it arrive at the ballad containing a con
tinuous story. Not to enter into the more technical aspects of a
controversy capable of being prolonged almost foreveras in
deed it has beenby certain Teutonic mystagogues and their
followers, Miss Pound by excellent arguments has shown the
essential likeness of the poetic process in the earliest and in the
latest ages. Then as now poetry was made by the person who
was gifted enough to make it; the primitive folk had much the
same role as the modern public, in that it did not originate but
transmitted, molded, preserved, distorted, fixed, neglected, or
lost the poetry which it got from the primitive artist, re-creating
(in Miss Pound's phrase) but not creating it itself. In any simple
sense the idea of communal composition has always been non
sense; and the modifications and explanations of the idea have
gone a long way to doing away with what slight validity it ever
had; Miss Pound has carried these modifications and explana
tions on to a point at which they are able to stand alone without
any help from the old central mystic doctrine. The ballad
process, she sensibly argues, has been much the same every
where and all the time; in fact, it is still not a closed account
The Nation
300
[Vol. 112, No. 2903
but is going on in various quarters of the globe, where it can

be studied. Why, then, be hypothetical and mystical about it?
Notable New Books
A particularly interesting part of her book deals with Balladry

The Colonization of North America. 1492-1783.
in America.
By Herbert Eu
gene Bolton and Thomas Maitland Marshall.
"T HE Wisdom
of the Chinese: Their Philosophy in Sayings

and Proverbs, Edited with an Introduction by Brian
Brown and a Preface by Ly Hoi Sang (Brentano's) is an
agreeably printed volume for amateurs in philosophy, Chinese
Macmillan.
Not confined to the Original Thirteen.
The Battle of the Books in Its Historical Setting. By Ann

Elizabeth Burlingame. Introduction by James Harvey
Robinson.
or any other, who can dispense with scholarship even of an

elementary sort. Following a vague and sketchy Introduction
The quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns at the end of the seventeenth
century.
come selections from Confucius and Mencius, moralists, Lao
The Cords of Vanity.Domnei (formerly issued as The Soul of
Tz and Chuang Tz, mystics, from Yang Chu, Kang-Hsi,
Melicent).
By James Branch Cabell. McBride.
New volumes in the uniform edition of Mr. Cabell's works.
Kuan-Yi-Wu, Yu Tse, and Tse-Chan, from the poets, and from

miscellaneous nameless makers of maxims.
The translations,
which happen in most cases to be classic ones, are never so much

as identified, let alone attributed and annotated, and a bibliog
raphy at the end consisting of eleven items entered in six dif
ferent ways is hardly even suggestive. Too much apparatus
would have been pedantry, considering that the purpose of the
book is popular, but too little apparatus leaves it anonymous
and blind, and to that extent ineffectual. The material itself,
of course, is very great, and worth reproducing in any form
at any time. The imperturbable, unexceptionable Confucius,
so penetrating and yet so impersonal, who neither esteems a
person more highly because of what he says nor undervalues
what is said because of the person who says it, is amazingly
fresh at every Western reading.
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories.
By Anton Chekhov.
Macmillan.
Vol. IX of The Tales of Chekhov translated by Constance Garnett.
Careers for Women. By Catherine Filene.
Houghton Mifflin.
A detailed, careful, and intelligent guide to the careers open to women

in the United States.
Dream Psychology. By Sigmund Freud. McCann.

The gist of Freud's psychology in the master's own words.
The Art of Letters. By Robert Lynd. Scribners.

Agreeable light essays on various English authors reprinted from Eng
lish magazines.
Instinct and the Unconscious. By W. H. R. Rivers. Cambridge

University Press.
A valuable attempt to bring functional disorders of the mind and
nervous system into relation with the concepts concerning their normal
mode of working which are held by the biologist and the physiologist.
SLANDS are accidents to Nature but ideas to men, at least
to men with veins of philosophy and geography. The idea

of an island, for instance, was always precious to Thoreau,
who wanted to build his Walden hut on one.
Even a bare,
grassy isle, which I can see over at a glance, has some un

defined and mysterious charms for me. And think of Crusoe,
Gulliver, Atlantis, Corsica, St. Helena, Prospero, Sindbad, The
Golden Fleece, Treasure Island. In Islands and Their Mys
teries (Duffield) A. Hyatt Verrill has exploited the idea with
The Imperial Orgy. By Edgar Saltus. Boni and Liveright.

An account of the Tsars from the first to the lastcourt gossip.
blood, and horrors related in a style vivid, staccato, decadent.
Rites of the Twice-Born. By Mrs. Sinclair Stevenson. Oxford

University Press.
A description of Brahman customs.
Posthumous Works. By Leo Tolstoy. Translated by Archibald

J. Wolfe. International Book Publishing Company. 3
vols.
all the enthusiasm and science of which he is possessed, and

they are considerable. He has lived much on islands, espe
cially in the tropics, and knows their fauna and flora, their
Drama
geology and poetry, as one knows anything that fascinates him

and can have his time. His descriptions are not by name but
by kindcoral, volcanic, lake, sea, tropical, salt, pearl, arctic
Rank and File

URING certain weeks of the theatrical season the crowd
and are such as must prove useful material to conscientious
writers of water yarns, to Stevensons, Conrads, Defoes, no less

than to travelers and natural scientists.
SA'i.
McCHORD CROTHERS is an essayist in his own
name and right; he thinks to please himself. The result

is usually original and sound. In The Dame School of Ex
perience (Houghton Mifflin) he ranges from dialogue with Old
Dame Experience about the various kinds of torment the human

race has been to her in her efforts to educate it, to gentle fun
with the solemn affectations of Henry Adams. Mr. Crothers
has one of the rarest qualities of the essay writer; he starts
with man in the right perspective. He has the great advan
ing of plays makes necessary a rigid selection. Smeoth

and accomplished and successful things must give place, in
the critic's record, to those which, despite a thousand faults,
express a more vital mood, and fragile grace must yield to the
rougher grain of a more significant beauty. Thus Deburau.
by Sacha Guitry (Belasco Theater) has been waiting. The
play expresses, in both dialogue and structure, a characteristic
French strain of romance drawn from the atmosphere of 1830

and also of the Second Empire. A stiff and very urban sort
of poetry is in it, the pathos of old costumes and dead loves
and forgotten plays. Its virtue is the French respect for
passion and for art; its weakness lies in an execution both
tage of having followed him in all his Biblical roles. His humor
artificial and tawdry.
is frequently merely his method of pointing a way, of bringing

man round to his senses. This once done he spares his victim
for a further lesson the next day. Perhaps the best essay in
the book is that called The Hibernation of Genius, in which
Van Wyck Brooks, despite his recent book on Mark Twain,
sensitiveness.
receives this wholesome dispensation.
M*.
BURTON RASCOE'S beautiful edition of Theophile
Gautier's Mademoiselle Maupin (Knopf) serves to make
clear why this book has so often been hounded for appearing in
the bookstores. The immorality, it now appears, of the casual
editions has lain in the fact that they did not contain Gautier's
Preface, which is as indispensable and as entertaining as one of

Bernard Shaw's.
Mr. Belasco has staged it with great
Play and producer are, for once, ideally at one.
That fact gives us the quality of both. Another French play

is the Callaivet and Flers comedy Transplanting Jean (Cort
Theater). Its action is as fortuitous and as undisciplined by
reality as that of similar native plays.
But in the delineation
of the central character there is so much tolerance and worldly

wisdom of the better kind that one wishes the play to succeed
if only as a corrective to the odious sentimentality that fills
our stage.
Miss Grace George continues to cultivate comedy that has

a hard, bright surface but is soft and amorphous within. The
late Harold Chapins The New Morality (The Playhouse)
has neither novelty nor moral sagacity. Three briskly and not
inelegantly written acts culminate in the discovery that the
Feb. 23, 1921]
The Nation
lady in the case desires her husband's attentions, both grave

and gay, to be confined exclusively to herself. But that much
was easily suspected from the first. The wisdom of such com
plete preoccupation during so long a process as marriage
might have furnished here a notable comic debate. These
British high comedies of modern manufacture, however, keep
the form of the genre and are afraid of its substance. But
you cannot be both brilliant and conventional, satiric and safe.
Miss George has a grateful part in which she glints and glit
ters in her accustomed way. Her art has a very genuine if
rather light and fleeting sort of beauty. But she should at
least play Millament and Lady Teazle and keep the admirable
Laurence Grossmith at her side.
The stereotyped formula plays thrive as they always do.
Mr. John Golden, who has fully developed both the philosophy
and the commercial possibilities of the hundred-per-cent sweetpure-and-wholesome American drama, presents "Dear Me"
(Republic Theater) by Luther Reed and Hale Hamilton. The
Pollyanna formula is used. The heroine's name is April. Her
business is saving people's souls by getting them to hustle.
For salvation, in these plays, has nothing to do with any
discipline or activity of the spirit, but consists in holding down
a good job. April herself becomes a popular actress in a typi
cal Golden play. The formula used in Mr. Willard Mack's
"Near Santa Barbara" (Greenwich Village Theater) may be
called the detective-as-crook formula and was recently brought
into prominence by "The Bat." Since, in such plays, a crime
must be committed and since the pursuit of the criminal must
sustain the suspense, the latest trick is to have the officer of
the law be shown up as the guilty one. The moral mood of
"Near Santa Barbara" may be summed up by saying that a
man who is not a Galahad should be shot, but that to lose
one's wife's property at poker is a gentlemanly weakness.
The work of the experimental stages is refreshing and in
structive even where the execution is poor and thin. Thus Mr.
Butler Davenport gives a production of Oscar Wilde's "The
Importance of Being Earnest" (Bramhall Playhouse) which
is excessively amateurish and yet succeeds in furnishing a
striking commentary upon, let us say, "The New Morality," and
on the nature of comedy in general. For even in this com
paratively trivial piece Wilde threw out critical perceptions
on men and women and society which are as instructive as, in
this form, they are amusing. Similarly the character of tragedy
is illustrated by Messrs. Conroy and Meltzer's production of
the Icelandic play "Eyvind of The Hills" by Johann Sigurjonsson (Greenwich Village Theater). The play is unskilfully
cast, acted angularly, in an impossible tempo, and according to
a wretched translation. But this is tragedy: free and noble
passions strangled by mean tribal ferocities; a negligible of
fense against property used to destroy two beautiful spirits;
the pack casting out its best to perish and regarding its shame
and loss as law, order, and morality; the eternal story of
"what a world we make, the oppressor and the opprest."
The decorative art of the theater may be exemplified by Miss
Constance and Mr. Maxwell Armfield's "synthetic" production
of "A Winter's Tale" (Little Theater), and by the Neighbor
hood Playhouse's "pantomime ballet" "La Boutique Fantasque."
The precise meaning of "synthetic" as applied to the first of
these productions is by no means clear. If it meant the externalization of an inner rhythm of mood and music that was to unify
the fragmentary scenes that make the play, the experiment
cannot be called successful. The frail human gaiety and
pathos of the characters were, at all events, sacrificed in the
process, and the lovely airs of Gluck, Scarlatti, and Purcell
seemed to sustain no relation to what the eye beheld. The
dancing and pantomime in "La Boutique Fantasque," on the
other hand, is exquisite despite a tentativeness of execution
inseparable from the work of young pupils. The staging and
direction are delightfully imaginative and the rhythms of color
and motion blend with the music of Rossini that is played.
Ludwig Lewisohn
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Questions and Discussion
International
Relations
South Africa's Crisis

General Smuts Appeals for a New Party
FOLLOWING the failure of the Hereniging Congress at
Bloemfontein to achieve a union between the South Af
rican and the Nationalist partiesa failure which General
Smuts attributed to the adhesion of the Nationalists to a
policy of secession from the British Empirethe following
letter was addressed by General Smuts to the chairmen and
members of the district committees of the South African
Party. The text of the letter, which formed the basis for
the Unionist-South African Party campaign in the general
election held on February 8, is taken from the Cape Argus of
September 30.
The Head Committee, as you already know, has decided to
call a special congress of our party on Wednesday, October 27,
at Bloemfontein, in order to determine what steps should be
taken in consequence of what has happened at the Hereniging
Congress. Here I only wish to lay stress on some points for the
further information of our committees, and to impress upon them
the great importance of this congress.
The Head Committee feels that the Bloemfontein Hereniging
Congress marks a great turning-point in our political develop
ment, from which important results for our future will follow.
After repeated and earnest attempts at the reunion of the South
African and National parties it has at last become evident that
such a reunion is not possible. The National Party has, through
its spokesman, declared most clearly that the active propaganda
for secession from the British Commonwealth must form an in
tegral part of any political program to which it could subscribe.
The S. A. P. regards such a policy as a wrong and dangerous
one for our young country and people to follow, as a violation
of our Constitution, as a breach of the good faith and under
standing in which both European races came together to found
a united South Africa, and as an effective means to force the
future policy of South Africa on racial lines. The S. A. P.
would be false to its past and seriously endanger the great con
structive work of the last twelve years if it were to embrace
such a policy.
It was hoped that the National Party, for the sake of national
unity, would have been willing to waive its secession policy, but
this hope has now proved vain, and thus reunion has become im
possible.
Under these circumstances another way out of the present
political difficulties must be sought. For some considerable time
the S. A. P. has had the choice between reunion and expansion,
and now that reunion has been negatived, the other alternative
of expansion is left, and the decision in connection therewith
must be submitted to a congress of our party. Now that the Na
tional Party has firmly resolved to continue its propaganda of
fanning the fires of secession and of driving the European races
apart from each other, and ultimately into conflict with each
other, the moderate elements of our population have no other
alternative but to draw closer to one another in order to fight
that policy.
A new appeal should, therefore, be made to all right-minded
South Africans, irrespective of party or race, to join a new
party which will be strong enough to safeguard the permanent
interests of the Union against the disruptive and destructive
policy of the National Party. Such a central political party will
not only continue our great work of the past, but is destined to
play a weighty role in the future peaceable development of South
Africa. The recent great improvement in our status and posi
tion must for the future be consolidated by peaceable means;
the internal development and strengthening of South Africa
must be promoted by the one and only method, and that is by
Section
cooperation in every respect between both European races; the

dangers of public lawlessness and indiscipline which are threat
ening the old world must be kept in check in South Africa, where
our position as a civilized community is exposed to special dan
gers.
These and other objects can best be served by a political party
which declares itself against revolution or violation of the Con
stitution or lawlessness in any shape or form, a party which
all moderate South Africans, of whatever race, can join with
every confidence, a party whose high task it should be to guar
antee peaceful relations with and the support of the British
Commonwealth for the attainment of those great economic pros
pects which lie before us. There has been a general feeling of
the great need for such a party. Now, on account of the failure
of reunion, it has become an urgent necessity, and the time seems
to have arrived for the South African Party seriously to con
sider her attitude toward such a party. . . .
J. C. Smuts
Chairman of the Head Committee
The Unionist Response
The Unionist Party responded promptly to General
Smuts's appeal, and Sir Thomas Smartt, leader of the Union
ists, issued the following call to the members and supporters
of his party:
The Prime Minister has issued a call to all South Africans
who desire to preserve their country from civil strife and revo
lution, and to maintain the Constitution against the forces of
secession, to send him back to Parliament at the head of a party
strong enough to insure a stable government, representative of
the moderate constitutional and progressive elements of the com
munity. Actuated by the same motives, the Unionist Party at
its recent congress decided to give him its whole-hearted support.
I therefore confidently appeal to all members and supporters of
the Unionist Party to join the organizations which are being
formed for the forthcoming election, and to give their active and
energetic support to the candidates who will be selected. Con
gress decided that at this supreme crisis the only course open
was to throw in its lot with the enlarged South African Party
and thereby present a united front to a common danger. As
your leader in the past I ask you unreservedly to give the same
whole-hearted and loyal support to General Smuts and to the
new organization that you have given to me in the past.
T. W. Smaktt
Labor Stands Apart
In his manifesto to the electors, Colonel Cresswell, leader
of the Labor Party, denied that any danger threatened the
Constitution of the Union.
For the second time in twelve months a general election con
fronts you.
Be quite clear what this sudden dissolution means, and what
is the real issue at the election.
In the present House the majority pledged to uphold the
existing Constitution (including every member of the Labor
Party) is overwhelming. No parliamentary danger threatens
that Constitution.
It is not even with any prospect of increasing the number of
members pledged to uphold the Constitution that this election
is sprung on you. Everyone knows that the Nationalist Party
is more likely to increase its representation in the country dis
tricts than the reverse. Nor is this sudden dissolution the result
of a vote in the House which places any definite issue before the
country on any other question. Nothing of the kind.
This election is forced on the Government by its latest recruits.
That Unionist group upon which the urban electors passed judg
ment last March fondly hopes to emerge from the discredit into
which it has justly fallen by pretending to disappear. It has
Feb. 23, 1921]
The Nation
now forced the Government to dissolve at once on the off-chance

of getting back some of the urban representation it had very
rightly forfeited.
Make no mistake at all.
The one and only object of this sudden election is to get rid
if possible of that inconveniently considerable Labor Party which
you sent to the House in March, and to get back the old Union
ist profiteering crowd.
They have no room for any other party, however clear on the
constitutional question, if that party is not prepared to acquiesce
in the effective sway of big finance, big property, and big profits.
Good. We take up the challenge, and we will take it up again
and again, however often these elections chase one another.
The Labor Party is pledged to uphold the present Constitution,
but it refuses and will go on refusing, to identify the British
connection and the Act of Union with the domination of our
Parliament by the exploiter and profiteer.
I appeal to every man and woman who helped us last March
to throw themselves now into this new election struggle. Send
the Labor Party back 30 strong instead of 21, and show these
people, Nationalist, S. A. P., and Unionist, that your vote last
March meant you were no longer going to be led by the nose at
election time as you had been in the past.
The issue today is the same as it was in March, and is even
more unmistakable.
F. H. P. Cresswell
The Nationalists State Their Case
Following the meeting on December 9 of the Federal
Council of the Nationalist Party, General Hertzog published
a manifesto stating the position of the Nationalists on
imperialism and the other issues involved in the election.
The text printed below is taken from the translation of the
Dutch original, published in the Cape Times for December
10, with certain corrections afterwards made by the Nation
alist Party and printed in the same paper on December 13.
To the Electors of the Union : Compelled by the coalition
of the South African Party and the Unionists, General Smuts
will appeal to you at the polling booths in February next to
grant him your confidence as the Prime Minister and ruler of
the Union. The question now is whether this confidence may be
placed in him. Through the fusion of the party the South
African Party has openly declared common cause with Sir
Thomas Smartt and his fellow Unionists. The former South
African Party and the Unionists will in the future strive side
by side for the maintenance and furtherance of the imperial
policy which until quite recently was repudiated with abhorrence
by the members of the South African Party and with indigna
tion by the Ministers of the South African Party. Until quite
recently the Unionists were the only party who openly professed
the imperial policy. In the future it will be otherwise. The
South African will be the only party to avow this policy. . . .
The increase of want and poverty among our people, the high
cost of living, the increased cost of shop goods, the retrogression
of the families of farmers, the dislocation of the exchange, the
want of a market for the export of our products, the pressure
of the trading classes, the lack of money and the pressure exer
cised by the banksall these are questions which are most inti
mately connected with the policy prosecuted by the Government.
Every one of these has but one cause, and the question is how
far the imperialistic policy of our Government is the cause of
all this. If the blame is to be attached to the imperialistic pol
icy, then it is sufficient reason for every one of us to detest this
policy, and then it is our absolute duty to reject this policy by
our united strength. In the meantime, I maintain without fear
or hesitation that this policy is the main cause of all our misery
and retrogression, and I go further and hold that if this is not
speedily put an end to, numerous persons who are today still
well off will shortly be doomed to ruination. For this conviction
I have every reason, and the justness thereof is warranted by
303
the activity of the British imperialistic tradespeople and politi

cians to possess themselves of the monopolies of all our economic
sources and means of help. . . .
In the meantime I feel it my duty, in so far as is possible, to
direct the attention of the people to this movement which on
account of its secret course and the object of its prosecution is
nothing but a combination to bring about our economic down
fall. It is all the more my duty on account of the role played
by our Government in this movement as a result of its imperial
istic policy. The aim and object of the combination or con
spiracy is nothing less than to get us economically in their power
and to bind us in such a way that for many years we will be
the helpless prey of the imperial trade interests and the im
perial covetousness. In order to attain their object the con
spirators have already for some time been busy to prevent, with
the assistance of the ministers, the exportation of our products,
minerals, and raw materials to markets other than those in
England. But not yet satisfied with this the imperial workers
are busy taking a second and a third step which will enable
them to rob us in a truly imperialistic manner. The first of
the two steps consists of an endeavor to prohibit the export
from or import to South Africa of goods in ships other than
British (imperial). In this way the British shipping companies
must be placed in possession of the shipping monopoly at the
Union ports. That they have already squeezed us dry and are
still engaged in robbing us, owing to the lack of competition, is
naturally no scruple of conscience with these imperialistic gen
tlemen, but rather a source of encouragement. What would be
the use of this monopoly to them if it were not for their enrich
ment even though it be at our cost?
But this is not all. They have another string to their bow, a
string which wijl soon prove more fatal to our welfare than any
of the others. They are busy (in the interests of the Empire of
course) erecting an imperial bank. Fundamentally this bank
will be nothing less than a gigantic Empire banking trust. This
imperial bank will control the money and the money market of
the whole Empire, and will take care that all notes of exchange
within the Empire are drawn on London. In other words, this
bank trust will be another monopoly which will see to it that in
so far as we retain any further economic freedom, we will be
financially bound and handed over to the British shipping com
panies, to the English manufacturer, and to the London banker.
Those who follow this and figure for themselves how everything
is calculated to rob us are overwhelmed by this audacity which
has been disclosed by these Empire gentlemen who, with bold
presumption, are out to bring about our permanent economic
ruin. They may well exclaim "Live the Empire." And yet it is
not for us to condemn these people unconditionally. The blame
attaches not so much to them, who merely wish thereby to save
and enrich themselves at our cost, as to those amongst us who
are assisting them. As the British merchants are today having
recourse to the above-named methods which are calculated to
make us the victims of the Empire trade monopolies, they only
follow the way indicated to them by the history of the British
commercial policy, whereby up to 1914 they attained riches, influ
ence, and authority which made them the skippers, the manu
facturers, and the bankers of the world. Now that as a result
of the war they have lost this world position, nothing is more
natural than that they should again seek their salvation and
riches along the way in which they previously obtained them.
By means of British legislation in their favor and to the detri
ment of the colonies it was then provided, among other things,
(a) that all products, minerals, and raw materials produced by
the colonies should go only to England and nowhere else, (b)
that no materials or goods should be taken to or from the colo
nies except by British shipping, (c) that no factories should be
erected or encouraged in the colonies. Now that the British
legislator does not dare to repeat these laws, the British manu
facturer and the British banker, all supported by the British
Government, endeavor to obtain by subterfuge, namely, by indi
304
The Nation
vidual combination and cooperation, what was formerly obtained

by the above-named legislation.
The means which they adopt today for their own gain are the
same which were adopted in the past for the ruin of the colo
nies and which forced America to take up arms against England
in defense against robbery. I do not wish to blame very much
either them or the British Government for the endeavor in their
own interests, yet, in the name of the people of South Africa, I
protest and every Afrikander of whatever race or language
should also protest against the accessory part played by our
Government in this combination to effect our economic ruin.
Ministers whose first duty was to protect courageously the inter
ests of our own people have been among the first to take part in
the sacrifice of our interests to those who are at present robbing
us. Our products, minerals, and raw materials have been prom
ised to England by our Prime Minister and his colleagues, to the
exclusion of the free markets of the world. This promise has not
only been given without consulting Parliament or the people; it
has been given secretly and with the deliberate object of hiding
it from the people as long as possible. And when in the end the
secret was disclosed by mere accident, and the Ministers con
cerned were called upon in Parliament to explain the matter,
these Ministers had so little courage to defend their action that
they did not fear to deny their participation until the proof of
their intrigue was shown to them in black and white. The im
propriety of this conduct on the part of the Ministers in respect
of the promise cannot be denied. But the shipping monopoly
and the establishment of an imperial bank trust is so much the
natural result of this promise that our Government, so far as
they are concerned, stand compromised as accomplices. That
all this would be the inevitable result of the imperialistic policy
followed by the Government for many years . . . has long
been predicted, although apparently not comprehended by the peo
ple. Now, however, there is hardly anyone who does not feel it.
The viciousness of this policy cannot be better exposed than by
what has actually occurred as a result of the conduct of the
Ministers themselves, who, while putting their policy into prac
tice, were forced to resort to secrecy, and who at the disclosure
took refuge in denial. And yet it is on this policy that the same
Ministers are now coming to you to ask your confidence, both
in them and in their policy. Will you give them that confidence?
And, if so, on what grounds? That they are imperialists who,
for the sake of the Empire or for that of their own pockets,
would sacrifice South Africa, we have reason to believe. . . .
Among the many dishonest, insincere attempts which are
made in this direction, I wish to draw attention to two, and in so
doing to prevent people from succeeding in their exertions and
zeal to distract your attention from the actual force of the strug
gle with a view to centering it elsewhere. It is alleged by the
opposition that the election will decide the question whether we
want a republic now or not. With all due respect to these gen
tlemen, the Prime Minister included, this is not the issue and
will not be the issue in the next election, at least not so far as
the Nationalist Party is concerned. If General Smuts (and the
South African Party) already desires a republic now and wishes
the people to decide thereon, then it is his affair, and he can
request the people to empower him to proclaim a republic. But
I and the Nationalist Party are not in the least concerned with
this appeal. As General Smuts admitted in the course of an
address in Pretoria on Friday, December 3, the ideal of the
Nationalist Party is sovereign independence at the right time.
As according to our opinion the right time has not arrived,
yet the Nationalist Party has the right, without in the least
resigning its desire for freedom, to say that it does not wish
to bring the matter to a vote at the next elections, and this is
exactly what the Nationalist Party has decided to do. As far
as that party is concerned it will surrender nothing of its
endeavor to obtain independence, but it will not appeal to the
people at these elections for authority for a republic. What it
has decided to do is to request the people for authority to suc
ceed a government party which has neglected its duties towards
[Vol. 112, No. 2903
the interests of the people, and which has brought the country
to the verge of bankruptcy. . . .
The second attempt which is being made to divert the at
tention of the electors from the actual issue at the coming elec
tion is the mean imputation that the Nationalist Party is a
racial party which is endeavoring to create unpleasantness for
the English-speaking people in South Africa, or which grudges
them the same rights, privileges, or liberties in common with
the Dutch-speaking section.
Those who declare this are either speaking falsely or with in
tent to mislead, or they are the dupes of a deliberate campaign
of slander and deception against what the Nationalist Party has
had to fight from the very hour of its inception. I call this
imputation dishonorable, no matter from whom it emanates,
and this because of its malevolent untruth and its unmistakably
evil purposenamely, to antagonize the Dutch and English.
The position which the Nationalist. Party takes up, and on
which its whole existence is based, and the fundamental reason
of its republican movement, is the equality of the British and
Dutch in South Africa. Because this equality could not be
obtained under the old South African Party Government, the
Nationalist Party was called into existence, and because in the
opinion of the Nationalists this equality will not be obtained
as long as the British connection continues to exist, the Na
tionalist Party has adopted as its practical ideal the severance
of the connection. From the desire for equality the Nationalist
Party originated, through the desire for equality it is now
driven to strive for freedom, and with this desire for equality
it is also firmly resolved to tread the path of the future. The
equality between the British and the Dutch is not only an
election cry for the present; it is also the soul of the party's
origin and existence. ... As far as the Nationalist Party is
concerned I have a right to say, and I say it in all honesty and
sincerity, that its aim is still the same as it was at the com
mencement, namely, to insure the prosperity and happiness for
South Africa by equality in the exercise of our rights and the
enjoyment of our liberties in which, without the equality, we
can never share, whether it be the Dutchman or the English
man who is the victim. . . .
The Government in Its Own Defense
At a meeting of the South African Party Club on De
cember 13, General Smuts took up in detail the charges
against the Government contained in General Hertzog's
manifesto. Part of his speech, as reproduced in the Cape
Times for December 14, follows:
Let me come to General Hertzog's great indictment of our
economic policy. He says that the imperialistic policy of the
Government has brought the country to the verge of bankruptcy,
and brought wanton poverty among the people. What are the
facts? Assuming that I and my other colleagues who served
under General Botha are to be held responsible for the policy
since Union, we find the following outstanding facts between
1910 and 1919: The Union increased its imports by roughly 14
millions sterling, and its exports by 37 millions sterling. The
total import and export trade per head of the white population
rose from 72 per annum in 1910 to 96 per head per annum
in 1919. The Post Office Savings Bank deposits increased by
approximately 2J4 millions sterling. The value of the goods
manufactured in the Union increased by about 45,000,000. The
deposits in the private banks went up by leaps and bounds.
How the country has been impoverished when such increases
have been shown we confess we do not know. And what about
the farmers in 1914? The exports of the produce of the land
totaled 9,090,442, and in 1919 they were valued at 32,820,388,
an expansion of nearly 23,800, which scarcely spells agricul
tural "retrogression." In the same period there was a big drop
in the' imports of articles of food and drink, so that the agri
culturists not only vastly increased their exports but sold more
stuff within South Africa as well. Thus the general charge of
Feb. 23, 1921]
The Nation
"ruining" the country economically is obviously absurd. Nobody

who has the faintest regard for facts can believe it for a
moment. . . .
When General Hertzog comes down from vague and general
abuse to specific charges against the economic policy of the
Government, he mentions three facts as showing our imperial
istic policy. Let me deal with these three facts seriatum. In
the first place he says that South Africa's trade and resources
are to be handed over to Great Britain to be exploited for the
benefit of England. The main clause in his indictment is this:
"Our products and raw materials have been promised to Eng
land by our Prime Minister and his colleagues, to the exclusion
of the free markets of the world. This promise has not only
been given without consulting Parliament or the people; it has
been given secretly, and with the deliberate object of hiding it
from the people as long as possible." Now this wonderful dis
covery is simply a mare's nest. The tremendous charge upon
which the Nationalists fancy they can overthrow me is based
upon a resolution passed at the last Imperial Conference, which
formed the text of several Hertzogites during the last session
of Parliament.
That resolution reads as follows : "The Conference agrees that
it is necessary to secure for the British Empire and the bellig
erent Allies the command of certain raw materials in order to
enable them to repair the effects of the war as soon as possible
and to safeguard their industrial requirements. The Conference
is of opinion that the governments of the British Empire should
make such arrangements among themselves as will insure that
these essential raw materials produced within the Empire shall
be available for the above purpose."
Now it is perfectly clear from the terms of this resolution
that no promise was ever made that our raw materials should
exclusively go to England and forego the benefits of a free
market. In every case arrangements have to be made between
the Dominions and the Allied country which wanted the raw
materials. No such arrangements have ever been made in
regard to South Africa. Our producers, therefore, have always
been free to sell their produce in whatever market and at
whatever price they liked. Even when the Government offered
to assist in the sale of their wool to the British Government
the woolgrowers were in the position to decline to do so and
to sell to other purchasers, and deeply they regret today they
did not accept the advice of the Union Government. . . .
The fact of the matter is that the Nationalists made all the
political capital they could make out of the subject six months
or more ago and were completely routed in the debates. If
we were bound by secret promises to deliver our products to
England how comes it that in 1919 the Union exported to for
eign countries outside the British Empire products valued at
14,887,596? How did it manage to sell to the United States in
that year alone goods valued at 7,961,115 and to Japan mate
rial worth 3,799,613, to say nothing of large quantities to
Belgium, France, and Holland, and so on? And how is it that
a Union government commission is today in Germany for the
express purpose of arranging for the sale of South African
products in Central Europe? The fact is that there is not a
tittle of truth or substance in this charge of economic imperial
ism which General Hertzog makes against the Government.
Everybody knows that we have had a perfectly free market,
with the whole world, except the enemy countries-, during the
war, and now since the war we have a free market with the
whole world.
The next charge is that a British shipping combine has and
will continue to have complete control of the external transport
of South Africa. How General Hertzog comes to formulate
this as a charge against the Government I fail to understand.
It is admitted that our shipping is controlled by a combine,
and has so been controlled for many years; but this is a mis
fortune which we share with many other countries, both inside
and outside of the British Empire. Will General Hertzog deny
that all the world knows that the shipping of practically every
305
country in the world is today controlled by one or other com

bine? Whether we look to Europe or Asia or America ; whether
we look to empires or kingdoms or republics, we see the same
grave situation everywhere. A limited number of shipping com
bines is in control of the marine transportation of praetically
the whole world. We have done our best to fight this evil in
South Africa. We have passed legislation against it, and we
shall continue to fight it; but if we fail, as every other Gov
ernment has failed all over the world, it is idle to make a charge
of imperialism against us, and General Hertzog knows perfectly
well that a Nationalist Government would be in no better posi
tion to solve this question for South Africa. That quarter from
which he expects salvation is itself to my best information
working in complete understanding with the English combine.
The third and last charge of economic imperialism which
General Hertzog makes against us is that there is going to be
created a central imperial bank for the whole Empire which
will control our South African credit also. I rubbed my eyes
when I saw the statement. It is perfect news to me, and even
after repeated inquiries in well-informed quarters I have not
been able to find anybody who knows about this imperial bank.
It appears that an English banker has read a paper at a con
gress on the subject of a new banking system for the Empire
which will do away with the present exchange difficulties. This
paper met with some comments and criticisms in the press,
but there is nothing official in the proposals that I know of. It
expresses the individual opinions of one banker, and I am sure
it has not received the serious consideration of a single govern
ment in the whole of the British Empire. So I still do not
know at what particular windmill General Hertzog is here
tilting. He could not, of course, refer to our own new Central
Reserve Bank which received the blessing of the Nationalist
Party in Parliament, and is a purely South African institution,
the control of which is entirely local. . . .
At the first campaign meeting under the auspices of the
combined election committees of the South African and
the former Unionist parties, Colonel Reitz, a South African
Party member of Parliament, attacked the Nationalists
and charged that the issue of the campaign was "secession
and racialism and not the brand new economic bogies
which General Hertzog had raised." As proof, he read a
translation of a document which he alleged was part of a
minute of the Nationalist head committee. The text of the
translation appeared in the Cape Times of December 15.
The head committee to decide to drop the republic for the
time being and contest the election on the economic issue, so as
to cut the ground out from under the feet of the Government.
We are going to the people, and we will tell them that for the
moment we have nothing to do with the republican question.
We will never drop the republic, but we will tell them the time
is not ripe at present and so we are going to make much of the
economic question. We will tell the farmers that it is the fault
of Smuts that the farmer cannot borrow a single sovereign
from the Land Bank and cannot get a market for his wool,
and we will tell them that the whole blame for the bad finan
cial conditions of the country is due to Jan Smuts and his
English friends.
The Nationalist Declaration of Independence
The secessionist issue having been forced into the fore
ground of the campaign, the Nationalist Party on De
cember 15 published an official declaration "regarding the
constitutional relations between the Union and the United
Kingdom and regarding the Nationalist standpoint and
action in connection therewith."
1. Every nation has through the providence of the Almighty
an inborn and inalienable right to develop itself, and through
the necessary measure of civilization to obtain its sovereign
independence, and thus to become of age.
306
The Nation
2. The only one highest freedom for a nation which is of age

is its own freedom, that is to say, the right to fix its own form
of government and if need be to modify or alter it.
3. A nation has, therefore, not really become of age unless
it enjoys sovereign independence, separated from any other
nation.
4. The United Kingdom, having become wise as the result

of the American War of Independence and acting on principle
No. 1, has acknowledged for more than eighty years the right
of a self-governing British Colony (and, therefore, so much
[Vol. 112, No. 2903
the wish of the people of the Union, even if that desire is that
the people of the Union no longer wish to have a king.
15. Further, as we are on an equal footing with the United
Kingdom, it follows that we are fit to obtain and enjoy sov
ereign independence. It is absurd to state in one and the same
breath that we enjoy equality with England, but that we are
unfit and unqualified for sovereign independence.
16. The objection that the Union of 1910 was a holy alliance
between Boer and Briton does not hold. It was simply an
unification of four already existing British Colonies, and the
the more of the Dominions) to separate in a peaceful and con

stitutional way from the United Kingdom.
In the words of the British Minister, Mr. Bonar Law, the
motive was mainly economical difficulties.
British connection does not depend on England, but on the will
United Kingdom and the British Empire, we must take steps to

gain equality with England in every practical manner and in
and the wish of the Dominion itself.
17. Pending the realization of our national ideal, namely,
sovereign independence for South Africa, separated from the
5. It is therefore quite natural and strictly constitutional

for any citizen of the Union to strive for a sovereign indepen
dent Union of South Africa, altogether separated from the
United Kingdom or the British Empire, and to convince his
fellow-citizens or try to convince his fellow-citizens of the de
reality.
sirability thereof.
position cannot be a stationary one.
6. It is an historical, irrefragable fact, acknowledged even by

General Smuts, that Afrikanderdomor at least the mass of
the Afrikander peoplehas cherished for 120 years the sov
ereign independence of South Africa as a national ideal. If
19. Huge, flattering, and subtle efforts are being made to

draw us closer together. The danger of this must be clear to
the population of the Union. The see-the-war-through policy
taught us a bitter lesson. No, the Dutch Afrikander says:
such an ideal is taken away or hushed, or the realization
We choose Chamberlain's alternative of total secession.
thereof is simply left to the course of circumstancesthat is,
20. Therefore, we must be careful not to do anything by

means of negotiations with England, or in connection with im
perial or other conferences, or in any other manner, which
will in any way bind or retard our free sovereign national
desire in the Union. The sovereignty of the wishes of our
people must remain unattacked and inviolate.
21. In principle we have absolute equality with England (the
United Kingdom). That is fixed and no imperial conference
or constitution is necessary to confirm or to explain or promote
it. Nothing further is necessary but our practical action here
in the Union to make that equality real. Therefore there is,
as far as we are concerned, no necessity for the Imperial Con
purely to chancethen of necessity it has a killing effect on
the people and great moral damage is done to it.

7. The will and desire of the Dominion of South Africa must
be expressed freely and without hindrance in the recognized

constitutional and political manneri. e., by the enfranchised
18. There are only two ways, as the famous Joseph Chamber
lain said. The Dominions and the United Kingdom must either
separate from each other altogether, or otherwise be brought
closer and be bound together. There is no middle course. The
citizens of the Union. Common-sense and statesmanship indi

cate that the question of separation (secession) must not be
hurried or forced, but that, when the proper time arrives, this
question shall be specially referred to the peoplethis question
alone, without the addition of any other question, in order that
the voters may express themselves on the matter and give their
decision at the polls specially and only on this matter. If a
decided majority of the voters expresses itself in favor of
separation, then it can be said with equity that the Dominion
pendent as possible economically.
desires it.
the exchange and other financial disadvantages under which
8. The right of secession is an ever-existing and lasting right

until separation has finally been achieved.
9. Self-determination is the right to fix one's own form of
government, and in the case of the Union, this is merely an
other word for the right of separation or secession. It is
evident that these rights in the most instances, if not in every

case, must lead to sovereign independence.
10. Our Union is now, in theory at least, absolutely and in
every way on the same footing as the United Kingdom. In
ference of 1921.
22. Pending secession we must contrive to become as inde
We are deeply affected by
England has suffered and is still suffering, because she has

ever been the avenue and clearing house through which all our
business with the world passed.
23. No constitution is a law of the Medes and Persians and
unalterable. A constitution is made for a people and not a

people for a constitution. No nation has vindicated this prin
ciple more than the British nation itself.
With reference to the accusations which have been leveled
against the Nationalist Party, especially in view of the forth
practice and reality this equality has so far not yet been
coming elections, the Federal Council declares:
achieved. But in any case it is clear that the unwritten British

Constitution, according to which the British Parliament acts
(a) That it is absolutely untrue that the Nationalist Party

has altered its attitude with regard to independence and
(and the British Parliament passed our written Constitution

of the Union as an ordinary British act) grants us this equality.
secession.
11. The creator is greater than the creature.
Therefore,
(b) That it is just as untrue that the Nationalist Party

stands for the immediate secession of the Union.
because we are British subjects, and we are a Dominion, the

British Constitution gives us the right of self-determination,
separation or secession, and acknowledges our equality with
(c) That it has been authoritatively declared repeatedly by

the Nationalist Party that the realization of the right of seces
the Motherland.
wishes of the people, as it has declared, inter alia, under No. 7.

(d) That it is absolutely untrue that the Nationalist Party
12. It is, therefore, absurd to say that our written Consti

tution (created by the British Parliament) will be violated
(not even to mention the fact that the Union Constitution
provides for its own alteration).
13. The British people can undoubtedly alter its Constitu

tion as it wishes, and has also done so in the past. A consti
tutional monarch is one who carries out the wishes of his people.
14. If we, therefore, have equality with England, then, with

out taking into consideration the already long existent rights
of secession, the King must, as a constitutional king,
carry out
sion or separation must be based on the broad basis of the
is a racial party.
(e) That there are numerous English and English-speaking

members among the members of the Nationalist Party, espe
cially on the Witwaterstrand.
(f) That the Nationalist Party has ever striven and always
will strive for the reunion of the Afrikanders, who have been
rent asunder in an unnatural way, without doing damage to
the principle that anyone who accepts our principles and South
Africa as his fatherland is welcome to join us.
Feb. 23, 1921]
The Nation
307
(g) That it is a distortion of the truth that the Nationalist

Party strives for a Dutch or racial republic.
Our leaders have
repeatedly explained that both sections will enjoy equal rights.

(h) That it is untrue that the Hereniging Congress failed
on any other point than the refusal of the South African

Party to acknowledge the right of secession and to retain inde
pendence as a principle or to regard it as a practical ideal.
(i) That it is absurd to assert that the Union already pos
sesses sovereign independence, or that it can attain it as a part
of the British Empire.
The Federal Council further warns against the following

dangers, which are growing, now that the Unionists as mem
bers of the new South African Party, even more so than pre
viously, and within the ranks of the new South African Party,
As
your skin insured 2

can make themselves felt:
cold and wi
1. Closer union with the United Kingdom and the British

Empire.
2. State or state-aided immigration to swamp the Dutch vote.

3. Taxation of land.
4. More taxation for the farmer.
"TOILET LANOLINE"
is one ine
of the
is pbest
*
5. Larger subsidies to the British fleet.

6. Continuance of the reckless financial and the general eco
tions
:
for
or th
the skin.
the greatest der
:
for chapped lips and hands, rough
rapiens, pimples and all eruptions of the
ness, a
n. It is the best of all protectives for cuts
nomic policy of the present Government, which is wrong.

7. The detrimental influences of capitalism and gold and
and burns, and prevents t
e.pain incident to
country has become an area for exploitation for foreign in
ent, Protective, bland and

soothing. Lanolin5. # the best remedy for
preserxing and
skin, especially
terests.
with SM
diamond magnates under this Government, through which our
#"
CHILDR
8. The squandering of money in connection with the Depart

ment of Defence, and the misuse of the defence force to de
nationalize our sons.
On account of all these reasons the Federal Council of the
PREPARED BY
PLEXO PREPARATIONS,
Inc.
NVEW YORK
Sele Agents and Distributors
Nationalist Party appeals to everyone who loves South Africa
to deal the death blow to the ruinous policy of the Government

at the forthcoming elections; to prevent a considerable portion
of the Dutch Afrikanders from being subjected for good and
all to the disadvantageous influences of the Unionists.
On behalf of the Federal Council of the Nationalist Party.
J. B. M. HERTZOG, Chairman.
C. W. MALAN, Secretary.
General Drug Co., N.Y., 94 N. Moore St.
:=r
H. L. MENCKEN
Even a college professor or Congressman can understand Tridon
on 'Psychoanalysis'.

A NEW PARTY
*PSYCHOANALYSIS
During the campaign a new party was organized by cer
tain dissatisfied members of the Labor Party and called
the South African Liberal-Labor Party. At the time of
By ANDRE TRIDON
Author of Psychoanalysis and Behavior, Psychoanalysis, its Theory and
Practice, Psychoanalysis, Sleep and Dreams, etc.
its formation one of its founders described the aims of the
February 25THE UNCONSCIQUS AND ITs MYSTERIES :
party in the following terms:
March 4
It is our intention to contest every seat in the industrial

centers of the Western Province if possible. We consider the
March 11
attitude of Colonel Cresswell and his followers
March 18
such
as to justify us in leaving the old party and establishing a

new democratic organization whose main platform is anti-re
publican. We shall support Smuts in every possible way to
maintain the position South Africa has gained amongst the
nations of the world which count, but shall reserve our inde
pendence on local questions. . . .
Another bone of contention [with the Labor Party] is the

color bar.
March 25
or What is Psychoanalysis?
The iNTERPRETATION OF DREAMS:
or Suppressed Desires and Their Dream Gratification
PROBLEMS OF CHILDHOOD:
er Heredity and Sexual Enlightenment
DUAL PERSONALITIES:
or the Jekyll and Hyde Case in Actual Life
LOVE, NORMAL AND ABNORMAL.
&_^. *
RUMFORD HALL. 50 E. 41st ST., Near Madisen Ave., N.Y.

Single Admission $1.25 Plus 10% war tax Course Ticket $5.00
f
#
#
E. r
.."
Management of THE FIME ARTS GUILD, 27 W. 8th St. Phone Stuyvesant 717
N. B.-Inasmuch as the seating capacity of Rumford Hall is limited to 250,
we urge you to make your reservations at once, either for single lectures or
We entirely disagree with the Labor people of the
north over that and consider that the Cape colored people
should have full privileges in every respect. Again, it is very
evident that a section of Colonel Cresswell's party would not
hesitate to advance the doctrines of bolshevism and would join
the Republican Party tomorrow if they thought for one moment
that General Hertzog had any hope of success at the forth
Bind your copies of
The Nation
coming polls.
in a strongly made, cloth covered binder. A con
The new party hoped to include in its membership the

liberal group in the Unionist Party led by Mr. Morris Alex
venient and orderly way in which to keep each vol

ume of The Nation as completed.
ander, Unionist member of Parliament, who had previously

made a statement indicating the interest of his group in a
new democratic party.
Sent postpaid for $1.00

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New York City
The Nation
308
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American
Commission on Conditions in
No. 2903
Ireland
Fourth Report: Hearings in Washington, D. C, December 10 and 15, 1920

Testimony of Miss Mary MacSwiney (concluded), John Tangney, Mrs. Anna
Murphy, John Joseph Caddan, Daniel Galvin, and Miss Ruth Russell
THE MURDER OF LORD MAYOR MacCURTAIN
Chairman Howe. At the suggestion of Senator Norris, we
have asked Miss MacSwiney to make a statement relative to
the Mayor MacCurtain matter. Miss MacSwiney was at the
inquest, we understand.
Q. Mr. D. F. Malone. Will you now please describe the con
ditions of Mayor MacCurtain's murder, the situation of his
family, anything leading up to his murder, and state briefly the
testimony you heard given at the inquest? A. Lord Mayor
MacCurtain had a wife and five children, the eldest of whom
was ten years of age when he was murdered. I may say that
five months after his death his wife gave birth to twins who
were dead when they were born. He was a man of a very sweet
disposition, always a pleasant laugh and kind word, even to
those with whom he differed most, politically. He was also a
shrewd business man. He did his best to smooth over matters
in Cork when Mr. Redmond caused a sort of split in the Volun
teer movement. He, of course, remained on the right side, and
he did a great deal to avoid any bitterness. He was a par
ticular friend of my brother for years. They had been asso
ciated in the Gaelic League movement and in the industrial
movement, but whereas my brother never joined the Sinn Fein
group, Mr. MacCurtain did. He joined the Arthur Griffiths
movement. But of course there is no such thing now as the
constitutional Sinn Fein. But when in 1905 the movement was
first started, it was a constitutional movement, and Mr. Mac
Curtain belonged to it. I did not know him then. But my
brother never belonged to it.
Mayor MacCurtain, like my brother, had spent most of his
time in prison. He was not in prison so much or so long; but
in 1916 he was in prison with him until Christmas. In 1917
he was deported, and they returned home to Cork at the same
time. I do not think he was arrested in October, 1917, the
time of my brother's first hunger strike. But he was arrested
in 1917, in February, and they were in and out of prison like
that. It is a sort of natural thing to be spending half of your
time in prison. He was continually on the run. Mr. MacCur
tain had a flour and mill business. He dealt wholesale and
his business was injured by his frequent imprisonments. But
when he came out of prison in 1918 he started his factory.
Of course he was always interested in the development every
where of Irish industries. And he started an industry and got
some machines together, and employed a number of people for
the manufacture of underclothing. That was going ahead
splendidly when he was made Lord Mayor. And of course he
was only inaugurated a very short time when he was murdered.
Mr. MacCurtain was made Lord Mayor in January, after the
municipal elections, which resulted in large Sinn Fein majori
ties all over the country.
Q. Commissioner Norris. January of what year? A. January,
1920. The councilors were elected to the corporation, and then
the new corporation elected the Lord Mayor. He was unani
mously chosen. The first thing that the new corporation did
was to declare allegiance to Dail Eireann. The keeping of that

resolution declaring allegiance to Dail Eireann, which is the
Irish Parliament, was one of the charges brought against my
brother when he was tried in the August following. Mayor
MacCurtain and the corporation determined that economy should
be practiced in the city. Wherever you have a society like ours,
a social system where you have an alien people imposing its
will on the nation, you have a great deal of inefficiencyworth
less people pressing you for jobs. The new Republican organi
zation made up its mind that this inefficiency should be destroyed
forever. The salary of the Lord Mayor was 600 a year. That
is not a very large amount, and it is not as big as it looks,
because I think about one-half of it had to go to certain chari
ties. But the new council decided that that should go, as the
first step in the direction of economy. The Lord Mayor also
did a great deal in the way of entertainment, and always began
the year with what was known as the Lord Mayor's banquet.
It was decided that that should go, and there should be no
extravagance whatever. Everything necessary for the life of
the citizens should be done. But it was not thought necessary
for the Lord Mayor and his friends to sit around a table eating
their fill and drinking. They also gave pleasing proof that they
meant what they said, and that they were not out to make things
easy for themselves financially. Another rule was that the
members of the corporation and above all the Lord Mayor were
expected to attend to their duties. Some Lord Mayors had gone
to the city hall to perform their duties perhaps three or four
hours out of the week. The new Lord Mayor undertook to do
differently. It was rather destructive of the Lord Mayor's
business, but they determined that was what had to be done.
Q. So that they cut his salary and increased his work? A.
Yes, I should like to stress the wonderfully good influence that
Lord Mayor MacCurtain had on the Unionist members of the
corporation. They expected to have a very bad time of it. They
found that they got just as good treatment as his colleagues.
There were two representatives of the Federation of Discharged
Soldiers and Sailors. Owing to the very large number of men
that Cork had in the English army before and during the war,
these men were able under the proportional representation sys
tem to send two members to the corporation. It did not follow
as a matter of fact that they were anti-Irishas a fact, they
were not; but they wanted to get what they wanted for the
former soldiers and sailors from the Republican Government.
They expected to have a very bad time from the Government
that was opposed to the English army. As a matter of fact,
they did not. They found out that they were accepted as good
citizens, and expected to cooperate for the good of the whole
population. All these classes of the population were greatly
touched by the attitude of the Lord Mayor and the other mem
bers of the corporation toward them. And they showed it, and
I don't believe there could have been a better example of that
than the way the whole of Cork rallied around the Lord Mayor
at the time of his death. There was a special meeting of the
The Nation
310
corporation called on the day of his death, and every Unionist

member spoke; and I may as well tell you that at that meeting
one of the bitterest anti-Irish and pro-Unionist people in the
corporation actually cried when he was seconding the vote of

sympathy to Mrs. MacCurtain and the condemnation of the cruel
action. At that time, of course, there was no question as to
who had committed the murder. There was a general outburst
of feeling on the part of the whole city. I could read you many
examples of the nice things that were said about him by the
[Vol. 112, No. 2903
for a week or two before and after the shooting? A. Yes, on

the night of the 10th of March there had been shots fired at a
policeman. We had a night of terror in the city. They shot
people of the city. They went looking for men on the run
who would have been shot like Mr. MacCurtain if they had
been found.
They ran amuck, as we say.
went back to their barracks.
And then they
Of course, the rules of the bar
racks are that every time ammunition is taken or a gun is
Some of us had the idea that it was because of the
taken off the racks in the barracks it must be put down in

the books. No account whatever was put down for the taking
rapidity with which he was winning over the hearts of the

Unionists and impressing upon them the fact that they were all
Irishmen together and should work for Ireland's good, and the
of guns and ammunition on the 10th of March. It was acknowl

edged that the police did go out that night and did shootings,
and it is acknowledged that no record whatever was kept.
fact that he was such a thoroughly practical business man
Q. This was the week before the shooting of the Lord

Mayor? A. Yes, it was the 10th, a week before.
Q. COMMISSIONER ADDAMS. That was after an attempt to
shoot a policeman. Was one of them killed? A. No, one was
wounded, but no one killed.
Unionists.
you see, I am stressing that because we are called and have been
called for years impractical idealistswe have lovely theories,
but we have no practical conception of business matters at all;
that we have no idea of how to run a state or run a city, and
that we are always up in the moon. But Lord Mayor MacCur

tain had such a practical grasp of business matters that he
opened the eyes of a great many people who had never come
into personal contact with Irish Republican people before. He
had practically within a month converted the whole corporation
into Republicans. Even the resolution of the corporation pledg
ing allegiance to Dail Eireann practically got no opposi
tion.
Q. Miss MacSwiney, you started to say something about the

belief that Mayor MacCurtain's efficiency and his popularity
and his ability to win over the Unionists of the opposition was a
significant reason for his death? A. That, of course, couldn't

be proved, but it is very reasonable to suppose. But he, of
course, had been on the run, although he had been sleeping at
homea great deal more than some of the others like my brother.
He happened to be home on the night of the 19th of March,

1920.
A knock came at the door between one and a quarter
past or one and half-past, anyway, in the morning. As usual,

they came to the conclusion that it was the military or the
police, and he wanted to go down, but his wife would not let him.
She put her head out of the window and asked, Who is there?
and the answer came back, Come down quick. The plan is,
of course, not to let the men go down and open the door, for
they would be shot on the spot; so usually the women go down
and open the door to let the man escape if possible. Before
she got downstairs, the door was smashed in. About six men
smashed their way in, and two of them gripped her and pushed
her up against the wall, and one of them said, Hold that
woman!
And the others rushed upstairs.
I want you to know this thing: They went immediately to

Mr. MacCurtain's room.
That is remarkable in a house like
MacCurtain's, where the steps are very peculiarly placed. They

made no hesitation. They went straight to his room and called,
Come out, Curtain.
Mrs. MacCurtain, who was downstairs,
heard the baby cry, and she begged to go upstairs and bring
the baby down. Then the shots rang out, as soon as they had
yelled out, Come out, Curtain. He came to the door, and they
shot him. The baby then ceased to cryperhaps it was taken
by its aunt; and the poor mother thought that the baby was shot,
too. She was in a fainting condition. Meanwhile the six men
came downstairs and went out. The sister upstairs had run to
the rescue of the Lord Mayor, only to find out that he was
bleeding and in a dying condition. Mrs. MacCurtain ran out
of the house crying, For God's sake, a priest and a doctor!
The main thing brought out at the inquest is that Lord Mayor
MacCurtain was murdered at quarter past one; that there were
shots fired from outside the house when the brother put his head
out and called for help; that there is a police barracks within
fifty yards from the house; that nobody in those barracks could
possibly help hearing those shots, but that not a policeman
appeared from those barracks until 8 o'clock in the morning.
Q. Was it not also brought out at the inquest that the
records of the goings and comings of police had not been kept
Q. Was the shooting of the Lord Mayor a reprisal for the

shooting of that policeman?
A.
I think the police were anx
ious to make it appear so, but, of course, they never acknowl

edged that it was done by them; they tried to pretend that it
was not done by the police, but the evidence was irrefutable.
THE END OF PASSIVE RESISTANCE
Q. COMMISSIONER NORRIS. This idea has come to me, not only

in the case of the murder of Lord Mayor MacCurtain, but in
other cases where Black and Tans had broken into houses in the
night. Why is it that these people whom they come to kill do not
defend themselves? They certainly would have a good oppor
tunity to shoot people coming into their houses. For instance,
why did not the Lord Mayor, coming out of his room as he did,
shoot them? A. Because they do not have any arms in the
house.
At that time they had not begun to shoot down
unarmed men. It was the first time. To be exact, the shooting
of two unarmed men the week before, on the 10th of March, was
the first event of that kind.
From that time on no man ventured
to sleep in his house without arms, as I have told you that when
my brother did sleep at home with his guard both were armed,
and on the two occasions when we had an alarm at the door
they were prepared to sell their lives dearly.
But that was
after the murder of Lord Mayor MacCurtain.

Q. COMMISSIONER WALSH. Excuse me a moment.
You said
at the time of Lord Mayor MacCurtain's death you had reached

the stage of armed warfare. Do you mean that up to that time
the campaign was one of passive resistance and not of open
warfare? A. No, we do not make the claim of passive resist
ance after 1916.

that
time
it
Up to 1916 it was passive resistance.
was
not.
What
mean
is
that
After
while
the
Volunteers carried arms and were compelled to defend them
selves against open force, we had not reached the stage where
the British Government was ordering shootings and raids and
the killing of unarmed men at sight. Therefore, the men stay
ing at home did not carry arms.
Q. My impression of the Irish situation is that you had an
open revolution in 1916, and then you later proceeded to hold
elections and get an evidence of the unmistakable desire of the
people of Ireland to have applied to them the principle of self

determination; and the evidence of the election proved that you
wanted that principle applied to you as well as to any other
country. And that you then proceeded to do all of the things
necessary to set up a republican form of government without
bloodshed, without any war, without murders, and without any
policy of destruction of human life; and that that policy was
rigidly carried out until such time as the English Government
began to send soldiers and Black and Tans into Ireland and
began to interfere with the functioning of that government
which you had previously established. Is my idea right or
wrong? A. It is absolutely right, Senator, if you take it that
we have never said that we would have nothing but passive
resistance. Never, up to the time that the campaign of the
Feb. 23, 1921]
The Nation
enemy began, and became so hot against us, was there any
offensive, any shooting on our part. You are quite right that
we wanted to get our government going. If our courts had
been allowed to meet in peace, and we had been allowed to carry
on the municipal government of the country, we would have
been quite willing to do that and build our country up, and then
have turned to clearing the enemy out, peaceably if possible.
Q. Up to that time you had a bloodless revolution. You had
by the ballot box and by talk and discussion brought about the
revolution about as effectively as if there had been bloodshed.
You had established a form of government, and had done every
thing you could to drive off the old government without the shed
ding of blood. So that so far there was no force and no armed
activity. But did any Irish Volunteers or anybody else murder
any policemen or anybody else up to the time of the murder of
Mayor MacCurtain? A. Oh, we destroyed police barracks and
things like that.
Q. When? A. In 1916.
Q. I am asking you if there came a time when you had with
out bloodshed and without force and arms established a func
tioning government, and whether that was by peaceful methods?
A. There was no warfare at all until after 1916, when they
began to interfere with our government.
THE BEGINNING OF OPEN WARFARE
Q. Commissioner Addams. When did the open warfare be
gin, after the Easter revolution of 1916? What was the overt
act which started things? A. The extraordinary activity of the
English secret service. When they started to get information
about our people and running them down and gathering infor
mation about our courts. I cannot say the exact date. I want
to be scrupulously exact, and do not want to make a mistake.
With us the whole question was what was best for the move
ment. We had no scruples against open warfare if it was
necessary to get independence for Ireland. But we did not want
war. We put it off as long as possible. It may have been
1919 before the warfare began. I am inclined to think it was
before the burning of police barracks. I want to be very exact
on details, and I cannot tell you the exact date on which we
began to burn police barracks.
Commissioner Thomas. Please state some specific instances.
The Witness. Well, first of all, there was the arrest of the
Sinn Fein members.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. Of Parliament?
A. Yes, of
Parliament. They put all the Sinn Fein members in jail, but
that did not matter, because the remainder were Republicans,
and they were able to carry on. But in one case, take the Galway county council, they arrested all the Sinn Feiners, and
with the rest they could do what they liked, and called it the
Galway county council. And again, they hampered the courts.
They know the courts gave a greater impression in England
than anything else. You know the daily papers gave case after
case where before you had the police courts you now have the
Sinn Fein courts giving judgments that the people eagerly
accept.
Q. Commissioner Thomas. Did they begin to obliterate
these courts before the violence began? A. They did it not
openly at first, but secretly.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. You were enumerating the things
that you said provoked the Irish people to give up in part or sur
render in part their policy of passive resistance, and you named
the arTest of the leaders and the breaking up of the courts.
Now, what other things? A. The system of espionage which
made it impossible for our civic leaders to carry out any work
for the good of the country without being spied on by the Eng
lish police, and being arrested or shot in consequence. The sys
tem of spying that was carried on, and the fact that it was
impossible for our people to carry on the government for the
good of the country, brought the first trouble. All that I would
like to look updates and factsand give them in writing to
the Commission.
311
Q. Commissioner Norris. I hope in doing that you will not

think that the American people consider that the Irish people
have to wait until they are obliterated and put in prison before
they are justified in putting up a resistance and fighting. Per
sonally, I am called a great pacifist, and I have suffered a great
deal of abuse on the subject. I asked you the question about Lord
Mayor MacCurtain. It seems to me that if I had been him I
would have shot those men. I would have tried to see how many
of the other fellows I could have laid out first, before they got
me. A. Perhaps that is the best answer I can give to your
question: Up to the time that Lord Mayor MacCurtain was
shot there had been none of our unarmed leaders shot in their
homes.
Q. But there was a policeman shot nine days before? A.
Yes, but he was not unarmed. You understand, please, Miss
Addams, that all the policemen are fully armed.
Mr. D. F. Malone. They were not all shot by Republican
sympathizers, either.
The Witness. No, indeed, they were not.
THE TESTIMONY AT THE MacCURTAIN INQUEST
Chairman Howe. Now, we will go back to the inquest.
The Witness. I think the knowledge that the police were
responsible for the murder of Lord Mayor MacCurtain was
pretty generally known among Republicans on the morning of
his death, but it had not got to be generally accepted as the
opinion of the whole city until the inquest began. The inquest
took a very long time. The principal witnesses were those who
testified to the holding up of civilians from entering the zone
that was formed by the police around the Lord Mayor's house.
A lamplighter testified to the fact that he was held up on a
road which leads from King Street to the hill road, that is, the
road on which we live. That particular band was supposed to
be waiting for my brother. They did not know that he was
home that night, and they were not searching the house. But
it was thought that as soon as Mrs. MacCurtain knew that her
husband was murdered she would send instantly for my brother,
and perhaps one or two others, and they would have the oppor
tunity of shooting them, too. However, this lamplighter was
topped on York Hill, and they sent him back another road.
Another man named Desmond, a lamplighter also, had parted
from the first lamplighter named Thompson. He had a brother
who was also a lamplighter, and their general plan was to wait
for each other on the corner of King Street (since then, I can
tell you, called MacCurtain Street), that they could go home
together to the south side of the city. He got there first that
night, and stood on the porch of the Coliseum Theater, exactly
opposite the police barracks. He had been standing there for a
quarter of an hour when he saw this band of armed men com
ing down York Hillthe foot of York Hill, to be precise, eight
or ten yards from the door of the King Street police barracks.
They came down York Hill in single file. They walked very
quietly. They must have had rubber soles on their shoes. Each
man was dressed as the murderers were dressed, with rain coats
mostly, some dark and some drab. He could not say what they
had on their heads. But they came down the hill in single file.
They went up the steps of the police barracks. They carried
revolvers down by their sides. They walked with the steps of
soldiers, for policemen in Ireland are always drilled like soldiers.
They tapped lightly on the door of the police barracks, and the
door was opened instantly, and they went inside immediately.
No light was shown. He thought that something was up, and
he went home without waiting for his brother, as fast as he
could. He came forward very bravely and gave evidence at the
inquest. And an attempt was made on his life during the
inquest, but did not succeed. That was about twenty minutes
to two. Another man, a postman, saw that same body of men
file down from the police barracks about one o'clock.
Q. What time was Mayor MacCurtain killed? A. About
quarter-past or half-past one, I cannot say exactly.
312
The Nation
Q. So that a file of men were seen to leave the police barracks

about a quarter of an hour previously? A. Yes. But they did
not come back all together at the same time. With the number
who held up the roads and so forth, there must have been a
large number of men engaged.
Q. Was there evidence that roads were held up? A. Yes.
Q. How many roads? A. On one road six men were held up
and stood with their backs to the wall. And on another road
another man was stood up by these same men with long coats
and soft, dark hats. And the third road was held up by police
men in uniform. They prevented men from passing Lord Mayor
MacCurtain's house.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. What reason did they give for
holding up these men? A. They asked them what business they
had on the streets then.
Q. Was this before or after the mayor was murdered? A.
While he was being murdered.
One man who was held up by the policemen in uniform was
prevented from passing Lord Mayor MacCurtain's house, and
was sent down a road which led out by a church beyond Lord
Mayor MacCurtain's house. He looked back, and the police
shouted, "Go on and keep your eyes before you." The first time
he looked back he saw four policemen standing at Lord Mayor
MacCurtain's house. His house was only a few doors beyond,
and just as he got there he heard three shots ring out.
Q. Commissioner Wood. Was all this evidence at the in
quest? A. Yes, every bit of it was sworn evidence at the in
quest. I don't know whether you think it relevant, but at halfpast two that morning officers and soldiers came to raid the
Lord Mayor's house. There were policemen outside. But this
night the policemen refused to enter the house. The rule was
that the policemen searched the house while the military re
mained on guard. This night the officers searched the house
and saw the dead man lying there and the women weeping.
A question was asked in the House of Commons the day after
the murder. Mr. Ian MacPherson, who was Chief Secretary at
that time, was asked why they so cruelly sent a military party
to search a house where a man was lying dead. And the answer
Mr. MacPherson gave was that the military party had been sent
to Mayor MacCurtain's house to find out clews to the murder.
General Strickland, the military commander who had sent that
military party, said the next day that when the officers had
come to the house, they had no idea of the murder; and he did
not know of it until the officers got back and reported.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. So that the claim of the Irish
Republic sympathizers is that the police sent this military party
to show that they had no knowledge of the murder? A. Well,
my personal opinion is that the military did not know it.
Q. But the police? A. The police and the military at that
time were separate bodies. They are together now, but they
were not then.
Q. Commissioner Norris. Your theory is that both the police
and the military were after him the same night? A. Yes, and
acted independently.
Q. And that the going of the military in there afterwards
was not for the purpose of deceiving the population as to who
committed the murder? A. No, I do not believe it was. The
police, who got the order from the military at five o'clock that
afternoon to have three policemen ready to conduct the party
on the raid, hoped to use it as a cover. But I do not really think
that the military knew what was going on that night.
Q. Who ordered his killing that night? A. Oh, I suppose
the orders came from Dublin Castle.
Q. Why did they not use the military rather than the police?
A. Oh, the military were really decent up to that time. They
were rather decent, and were not consciously out for murder up
to that time. Now they are quite different. The military be
lieved that they were there quite largely because Ireland was
their country. Some of them think it still.
Q. Mr. D. F. Malone. Did that practically conclude the tes
timony offered at the inquest about the connection of the police
[Vol. 112, No. 2903
with the murder? A. No, there was another significant thing1.

A doctor who lives on the hill saw a body of armed men stop at
the corner, and three or four of them go further up the hill. A
nurse who lives farther up that way saw them enter District
Inspector Swanzy's house.
Q. Mr. D. P. Malone. I want to ask you first if the coroner
who presided at the inquest was an officer of the British Gov
ernment? A. Yes.
Q. Was there a jury? A. Yes, the jury was impaneled by
the police.
Q. What was the verdict of the jury? A. The verdict is
this: "We find that the late Alderman Thomas MacCurtain,
Lord Mayor of Cork, died from shock and hemorrhage caused
by bullet wounds; that he was wilfully murdered under circum
stances of the most callous brutality; that the murder was
organized and carried out by the Royal Irish Constabulary, offi
cially directed by the British Government; and we return a ver
dict of wilful murder against David Lloyd George, prime min
ister of England; Lord French, lord lieutenant of Ireland; Ian
MacPherson, late chief secretary for Ireland; Acting Inspector
General Smith of the R. I. C; Divisional Inspector Clayton of
the R. I. C; District Inspector Swanzy, and some unknown mem
bers of the R. I. C. We strongly condemn the system now in
vogue of carrying out raids at unseasonable hours. We tender
to Mrs. MacCurtain and her family our sympathy in their be
reavement. This sympathy we extend to the citizens of Cork
in the loss they have sustained of one so capable of carrying
out their city administration."
Q. Who selected the men who sat on the jury? A. The
police always impanel the jury. There are certain names, the
names of the list of burgesses, you use, and they take these
names at haphazard. Coroners' juries are not like criminal
juries. People do not object to going and serving.
. Q. Commissioner Norris. The police were charged with the
crime. Then why did they select the jury? A. There was no
one else to select the jury at this time. When the first men
were summoned, only seven of them showed up. Then the coro
ner called upon several citizens who offered themselves as will
ing to act. One or two were members of the corporation, and
one of them suggested that as a member of the corporation he
might not be considered eligible. The coroner at first said, "I
don't see what difference that would make." And finally he
thought better not to ask them to serve. The solicitor for the
King asked what each man's occupation was, because, he said,
that on account of the evidence he was about to submit, no
policeman could sit on that jury. So on that ground several of
them withdrew.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. I would like to know if the British
Crown was represented at that inquest? A. Oh, yes.
Q. And that all the formalities had been complied with that
had been complied with in the days of peace? A. Yes.
Q. And that they, by the presence of their authorities, recog
nized it as an official procedure? A. Oh, yes, it was an abso
lutely official court in that case.
I would like to say, in addition, that at first they had only the
Crown solicitor to represent them; they later brought in the
most eminent King's Counsel in the country to represent them.
I would like to say of that man, Mr. Wiley, a very eminent man:
it was easy for us to see that all through the inquest he was
acting honorably, and that he got a complete shock when the
evidence showed so conclusively that the police had committed
this murder. Before the evidence was half through, he with
drew on the plea of business elsewhere. He had to go some
where else. Before he went away he said that, perhaps, from
his position he might not be believed, but that he spoke from
his heart in sympathizing with Mrs. MacCurtain and the fam
ily. A short time after that Mr. Wiley, a very young man who
could have risen high in his profession, resigned from his posi
tion and cut off all connection with his party, the Unionist
Party, which could have helped him to reach as high a position
as Sir Edward Carson.
,,
Feb. 23, 1921]
The Nation
Testimony of John Tangney

John Tangney was born in Castleisland, County Kerry, Ire
land and is now living in New York. He is twenty-five years
old, was educated in the national schools and by the Christian
brothers, and from October, 1915 to July, 1920 served as a
member of the Royal Irish Constabulary. He was stationed
variously in Clonmel, County Tipperary, Midstone, County
Cork, Cork City, Limerick City, and Clogheen, although Ballylooby in County Tipperary was considered his permanent as
signment.
Q. Mr. D. F. Malone. What were the instructions given
you regarding the use of firearms while you were in training
as a policeman? A. Unless a personal attack was made upon
you, you were never under any considerations to use firearms.
Q. After you had passed your training and were an ac
cepted member of the R. I. C, what was the first time or stage
at which these orders were changed? A. No definite order for
a change was issued. It came about gradually. Except for
self-defense the firearms were mainly for show purposes, until
the new orders came.
Q. Were orders to use these arms for purposes of aggres
sion ever issued? A. Yes, latterly.
Q. When were the first orders of that kind issued? A. In
October, 1919.
Q. What were those orders? A. First, this circular came
down from Dublin Castle saying that a batch of political prison
ers had escaped from Lincoln Jail. Their names and descrip
tions were given in this official document, "The Hue and Cry,"
as it is termed. Their descriptions and ages were given. The
first order was that they were to be arrested if they came
within our notice anywhere. That was the wording of the first
article. They were to be treated just the same as a criminal.
Following that there was the receipt of an ordercalled a con
fidential articleby the sergeant of the station on November
4, stating that if these political prisoners were seen they
were to be shot dead if they offered the slightest resistance.
They named one political prisoner in particularMr. Stack. I
did not know what position he held, but since I left the force
I found that he was an Irish member of Parliament.
Further questioning revealed the fact that although prac
tically all the young men of Ireland are on the run, none of
them have been given up or informed on by the Irish population.
Thousands of pounds have been offered as rewards, but to no
purpose.
Mr. Tangney then continued to tell of the orders, issued by
General Deasey, which were the next steps in the use of fire
arms for other than defense. General Deasey was a brigadier
general in the British army, acting as divisional commissioner
for the southern province of Munster, in command of the mili
tary and police.
Q. Mb. D. F. Malone. Before we get to the orders, when
did this new force, the Black and Tans, come to Ireland? A.
Of course, I saw them going through the country, but the first
who came to our barracks came in April, 1920.
Q. Chairman Howe. Were they efficient in their duties?
A. They absolutely knew nothing about police duties. On
one occasion there was a county inspector whose duty it was
to visit the barracks. He was trying to instruct these fellows,
and we were all in the barracks, for we had to go to school to
him. The inspector asked one fellow, what was his power of
arrest, and the fellow said he didn't know. The inspector tried
to make it simpler for him. He said, "If you see a man on
the street, and you ask him to give you his name and address,
and he refuses, what would you do?" And this Black and Tan
said, "If I met a man on the street and asked him his name
and address, and he refused, I would lift him right under the
313
jaw, and the next thing I would use my bayonet. That is what
I would do."
Q. Now tell us about General Deasey. What were his
orders? A. The original orders were issued in May, 1920, and
were that all policemen should go to massit mentioned Roman
Catholics particularly, that they were to go to mass in forma
tion. The two in front were to take revolvers and the last two
were to take rifles, held at the ready with bullets in the breach
until mass was over. And when mass was over they were to
march through the crowds the same way. If there was any
hostility shown, they were to shoot. That was the general tenor
of the orders. It might not be the exact words.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. Do I understand that these mili
tary officers were up in front of the church with drawn rifles?
A. Yes, sir, ready to fire.
Q. Was this for self-protection during the service, or was it
to preserve order in the church during divine services? A. The
order did hot state that it was for self-preservation. Anybody
who read the order could see that it was to try and goad the
people on. And more than that, it related particularly to the
Roman Catholics.
Q. Was that for every service? A. Just for the Roman
Catholic services, but for both of those. Four men were to go
to one service and four to the other.
Q. Mr. D. F. Malone. Was there any other order? A. Yes,
in the barracks. There were six Black and Tans present when
General Deasey came to the barracks, and he was questioning
them about Sinn Feiners and the movement that was going
on in the southern part of the country. He said that in case
they were able to identify a person with Sinn Fein sympathies
passing the barracks or going near the barracks, to bayonet
him and not to waste good powder on him.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. Was that before the raids were
made on the barracks? A. Yes, they had not been raided then.
It was a most peaceful district.
Q. Commissioner Addams. I would like to ask you whether,
at the time when this order was given about the squads of
police going to church under arms, there had been any dis
turbances in any of the parish churches? A. No, there had
never been in any of the churches with which I am acquainted.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. It was to terrify the people?
A. Yes, anybody who read the order would see that. It was
to terrify people. Redman and Foley were the first Black and
Tans that came to the Ballyporeen barracks, and they had
special instructions given to them in the office apart from the
rest of us. None of those fellows used to go to any service,
although they were supposed to be Protestants. After this
order was issued by General Deasey, I noticed from my own
observations that during service while the four men were in
the Catholic church, none of the others left the barracks. And
then they had bombsa couple of hundred bombsin the
barracks.
Q. So that they held these men at the barracks in reserve?
A. Yes, they held these six men in reserve in the barracks
during the service. My idea was that if anything turned up
at service, they could pounce upon them with the bombs and
rifles loaded.
THE FEIS INCIDENT
Q. Mr. D. F. Malone. Mr. Tangney, will you now tell us
about the feis incident. A. That happened in June, 1918. I
was stationed at Ballylooby at the time. On Saturday night
an order came that two men should proceed fully armed and
equipped to Tipperary Town. We proceeded there, and found
about fifty police gathered together. We got no definite orders
until Sunday morning. Then we were lined up in the barracks
square, and there was an inspector named Lowndes, who ad
dressed us. We thought it was a declaration of war of some
kind. He said there was going to be a feis in Lisvelanethat
is a country gathering where there is Irish dancing and Irish
music and the like. He said, "The military authorities have
forbidden this feis to take place, but from information that we
The Nation
314
have received, the people are going to hold it anyway. But we

are going to put it down. And any man who is not willing to
do his duty this day had better drop out of the ranks. No
man said anything, so we lined up and proceeded out on the
streets where there were five military lorries.
Q. Did you know the mother of the child? A. I did, sir.

Q. How did it happen that the mother did not know that
there was a curfew law? A. They were after some boys on
the run, but she did not know about that.
Q. But why did she not know about the curfew law?
There were
two armored carsnot tanks, but armored cars, with machine

guns, that went along, too. We proceeded to Lisvelane, and
when the people, coming along from mass, saw these lorries,
the military, the police, and all the other war material, they
fled in terror like bees. Horses went away from their owners'
hands and jumped into side ditches, taking carts, passengers,
and all. When finally we arrived in the village there were
certain police tolled off to assist the military. Their orders

were that if they saw anybody going toward the village, they
were to turn them back, and fire, if necessary, to turn them
back. Then, this County Inspector Lowndes and the two young
officers, who were in charge of the military, adjourned to an
adjoining saloon and got stupidly drunk. There were some
Irish terriers outside the saloon door, and the officers took
these dogs and threw them at each other, trying to get them to
fight. Yes, they said, we will have to put the dogs to fight,
for the Irish dogs will not come out and fight us. Finally,
we went home, the military flashing (firing) revolvers and
yelling all the way back. I myself had to take a revolver out
of the hand of a soldier who was stupidly drunk.
Q. What was the reason given for this raid? A.
except that this feis was advertised to be held.
[Vol. 112, No. 2903
an hour early because they were after these boys on the run.
Q. M.R. D. F. MALONE. What other experiences have you
had with the Black and Tans? A. About three nights before
I left Ireland, I was saying good-bye to some friends, and it

was about half ten; and I met an officer and some Black and
Tans as I was going home, and they told me to put up my hands,

and I said I could not because I could not lay the baby down,
and they said I must, and I told them I could not on account
of the baby, but that they could search me, and they did. They
tore open my clothes and searched me while I held the baby in
my arms. And they got through and did not find anything. It
was about an hour afterward when I got home. I really dont
know how I got home. And I was all wet.
Q. It was raining? A. Yes, it was raining very much.
Q. I suppose that they searched the baby for firearms? A.

Oh yes, they did. They opened his clothes and searched him.
Q. Were they gentle and considerate about it?
Nothing,
Q. CHAIRMAN Howe. Do you know of any other feis or cele

brations broken up? A. Yes, they were broken up. Previous
to that it was the common practice all over the country to hold
them, and they have been broken up.
When asked if the Royal Irish Constabulary and the Black
and Tans fraternized together, Mr. Tangney replied, Oh, no.
They [the Black and Tans] were roughnecks. He further de

scribed a fight which took place in the barracks, six Black and
Tans, roaring drunk, fighting each other like idiots.
Mr. Tangney resignedat the sacrifice of his pensionbecause
there was nothing more for him to do but leave the military to
Could
she not read? A. She could, sir. But the curfew law was
usually ten o'clock, but on this particular night it was nine
o'clock, and the mother did not know it. They had put it on
A. No, sir,
they were not. They were very rough, sir, and when they got
through they pushed me into the door.
Q. COMMISSIONER WALSH. Were you on the street?
A. Yes,
Sir.
Q. And they pushed you into what door?
A. They pushed
me into the door of the hardware store.
Q. CHAIRMAN Howe. On the street of the village? A. Yes,

Slr.
CoMMISSIONER WALSH. About that little girl who was shot,

that child of eight years; how badly was she injured? A. The
mother said that she was shot in the spine.
Q. It was very serious, then? A. Yes, sir. The mother
said she might be injured for life.
butcher.
Testimony of John Joseph Caddan

The Testimony of Mrs. Anna Murphy
John Joseph Caddan was born in Adare, County Limerick,

nineteen years ago. In February, 1920, he enlisted in the Royal
Irish Constabulary and resigned less than four months later,
unable to stop in such surroundings or to take part in the
things they were doing. I didnt fancy the way they were
Mrs. Murphy was born in New Ross, County Wexford, Ire

land, and received her education in the national schools and in
a boarding school in Sligo County. Her husband came to this
country seven years ago and she followed three years later.
About two years ago she returned to Ireland on account of her
health with her only child, staying with her parents at New
Ross, a small market town, peaceful and quiet.
Galway, the city in which Mr. Caddan was stationed, was quiet
enough until the sacking of Tuam. Two policemen had been
Q. MR. D. F. MALONE. When were the troops, the Black and
lorries, burned public houses, the town hall, and wrecked things
treating people.
shot there, so the men from the barracks went out in motor
Tans, sent to New Ross?
generally.
A. At Easter, 1920.
Q. And when was the curfew law put into effect?

August in New Ross.
Q. And you were there at the time?
A. Last
THE KILLING OF KRUMM
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Do you know whether or not any persons were shot for

violations of the curfew order? A. No, sir, not that I know of.
Q. Do you remember about the killing of a little girl? A.
She was not killed, she was shot, sir.
Q. Now, tell the Commission about that. A. Yes, sir.

Q. CoMMIssionER WALSH. When did this happen? A. That
happened about the eighth of September.
Q. Did you witness it? A. I did, sir.
Black and Tan.

Black and Tans.
Tell us about the man Krumm, the
A.
This man Krumm was one of the
He was a motor driver stationed in Du
moor, about ten miles outside of Galway. He was in town about

two weeks, getting his motor repaired. He took his time to it.
He was a generally reckless fellow and drank a lot. I know of
one case when he shot a sheep and brought it into the barracks
to be cooked.
Q. You mean that when he got drunk he ran amuck? A. Yes,

Q. What was the girl's name? A. Lillie Furlong.
Q. How old was she? A. About eight. The little girl did
not know about the curfew law, and the mother sent her out
on an errand, and the Black and Tans called to her to stop.

She was so scared that she began to run, and they fired, and
she was shot in the back. She has been in the infirmary since.
Q. She has been where?
A. In the infirmary.
sir, he was very reckless then.
This night I saw him with a
bottle of poteen.
Q. Mr. Witness, tell us to the best of your ability what that

is.
A.
It is what you call mountain dew.
Q. CHAIRMAN Howe. Irish whiskey? A. It is made in the

mountains out of barley, I think. It is pretty strong stuff.
The Nation
Feb. 23, 1921]
Well, I saw Krumm with this bottle of poteen, and he was

passing it around, and he said that when that bottle was gone,
he would get another. About twelve oclock he went up to the
station for one of the papers, the Dublin papers. I could not say
exactly what happened at the station, because I was in bed, but
the next thing I knew one of the constables came up and gave
the alarm, and said Krumm was shot. And we all had to get up
and dress and get our carbines. There were about fifty men in
the barracks, and they ran amuck then. The whole fifty came
out in the streets, no officers; they all came out together. They
went from the barracks up to the house of a man named Brod
erick and knocked at the door, and he opened the door, and they
demanded his son. A couple of them rushed in and grabbed the
candle he had in his hand, and went upstairs to get his son. The
son asked time to dress, and they brought him down. While
they were upstairs, some other men sprinkled petrol in the parlor
and the hall. They marched the son down in front of them, and
Broderick was told to stand where he was.
The mother was told
to stay in the back room where she was, and Broderick, the
father, was ordered to stand in the hall. Then they touched a
match to the house and it flashed up. The women began to
scream, and they marched the son down to the railroad station to
315
ish general, who came down there. A. Yes, the next day a Brit
ish general came down and spoke to us in the Day Room. And
he started to talk about this business. He said, This country is

ruled by gunmen, and they must be put down. He talked about
giving home rule to Ireland, and he said home rule could not be
given until all of these gunmen were put down, and he called
on the R. I. C. to put them down. He asked them what they
required in the barracks, and that whatever they wanted he
would give them, and that they were also going to get a raise
in pay. And they said they needed machine guns, and he said
that they would get them, and also tanks and more men, men
who had been in the army during the war and who knew how to
shoot to kill; and he said they would be the right men in the
right place.
To welcome the Black and Tans, witness stated, the barracks

canteen was restocked. Hard liquor, beer and ale, were sold
in unlimited quantities to the policemen. This had not been cus
tomary under the old constabulary, but was started about a year
ago. All fifty of the men in Mr. Caddan's barracks drank. Their
life consisted of about four hours duty a day on the city streets
and then drink and sleep for the rest of the time.
shoot him where Krumm had been shot.
Q. MR. MALONE. Did they leave Broderick and his wife in the
burning house? A. Well, they could not get out through the
flames very easily. They took the son up toward the station, but
he got away, they fired after him, and I think wounded him in
the leg, but I am not sure of that. He got away. Then they
turned around and saw a crowd of neighbors trying to put out
the flames, and they fired into the crowd.

Q. Was Broderick's son a member of the Irish Republican
army, or were either of them implicated in the killing of that
man Krumm? A. No, I do not think so. They probably knew
nothing about him, for he was a new man in the town; he was
just in there temporarily.
Q. What happened after this man Krumm left the barracks?
You said he had been drinking before he left. A. Yes. I heard
afterwards that he left the barracks and stopped for another
drink before he went up to the station. He got up to the station
platform and while waiting for a paper fired on the crowd, killing
a man and wounding another.
Q. MR. MALONE. What was the general character of the

Black and Tans? A. Well, they were usually very careless fel
lows, who did not give a hang about what they did. Some of
them were got up for robbery at the depot where they were
trained; some were sent to a lunatic asylum; and some of them
were ex-convicts. The rest were mostly young men who had come
over to enjoy themselves.
Q. CHAIRMAN HOWE. Did the Black and Tans get extra

money when they went on a raid? A. Yes, whenever they were
called out of the barracks.
Q. MR. MALONE. That is overtime. A. Yes, overtime.

Q. M.R. MALONE. After the Tuam affair, do you remember
the affair of the constable who resigned? A. Well, yes, that
was out in Tuam, too. I was not a witness to it. This man, his
name was Roddy, had resigned in Tuam after the town was
wrecked, and took a position with the city council. A short
time after the Black and Tans went to his home and got him
and brought him out to the lime pits near the town, and flogged
Q. Was District Inspector Cruise promoted after this? A.

him.
Then some time after they did that, they flogged him
Yes, he was promoted about a week after this.
Q. CoMMIssionER WALSH. You were an eye-witness to all

thisto the setting fire to Broderick's house and the firing into
the crowd?
again, and told him to clear out of the town with his wife and
family, which he had to do.
CHAIRMAN HOWE.
Did the Black and Tans get extra money
A. Yes.
when they went on a raid? A. Yes, whenever they are called
Q. Did you participate in any of it? A. I did not.

Q. What else happened that night? A. After that, what they
did I did not witness, for I went back to the barracks, but I heard
the next daythe men were telling about it themselves. They
went to a place where there were two young men and demanded
them.
I do not know their names. They brought these young
men down to the same place where Krumm was shot and stood
them up against the wall there. One of the men was named Con
way, I think. The order was given to fire, and just as the order
was given, Conway fell forward on his face, and he saved his life
miraculously. Some of them said, Let them have another vol
ley, and the leader said, No, we have wasted enough ammuni
tion on them.
Q. Was there any officer to lead the military
in all this?
out of the barracks.
Q. MR. MALONE. That is, overtime? A. Yes, overtime.
Testimony of Daniel Galvin

Daniel Galvin was born in Gorrynan, County Kerry, Ireland.
He is thirty-three years old, and is now living in New York.
He joined the Royal Irish Constabulary in 1907 and resigned
last year, after thirteen years' service. He got his training at
the Phoenix Park training school in Dublin, a training consist
ing of drill, gymnastics, school and police duties. After five
months he was transferred to Gort in County Galway, and a
A.
little later to a station called Tubber in the same county.
No, it was just mob action.
Afterwards they came down to another man's houseQuirk,

I believe was his name. They went in, dragged him out of bed and
brought him down to the quays, where they stood him up against
a lamp post and put twenty-seven shots into him.
Q. Who was this man Quirk? A. I believe he was a
Sinn
Feiner.
Q. He had nothing to do with the shooting of that Black and

Tan at the station? A. Oh, no, of course not. He was home in
bed.
Q. MR. MALONE. Now, I believe there was a general, a Brit
Q. MR. MALONE. Where did you go from there? A. I re

mained in Galway until I came on to Tipperary. I spent five
years in Galway. I applied to get nearer home. I applied for
Cork East or Cork West, but I was refused, because it was
adjoining my native county. And they said that if I wanted to

go to Tipperary, it would be at my own expense. I applied for
Tipperary, South Riding, and was transferred in May, 1912.
Q. Where have you been since then? A: I have been in a
district called Weyl in County Tipperary.
316
The Nation
Q. Where else were you stationed? A. I -was stationed at a

place in Tipperary called Knockmealdown that is about three
miles outside of Clonmel.
Q. Were you stationed at Clogheen? A. Yes, I was at
Clogheen about six months before I resigned.
Q. Were you in Clogheen while Mr. Crowley was there? A.
Yes.
Q. Did you hear his testimony? A. Yes.
Q. Do you know that all of the testimony he gave is true?
A. Yes, it is true. I can give you my own version of it.
Q. I want to ask you this: In all the years that you have
served in "the R. I. C. in Ireland, what do you know of the
relations between Catholics and Protestants? A. - As a general
rule in the South of Ireland the Protestants are the most pros
perous people there. In many cases I would rather deal with
the Protestants than with the Catholics.
Q. In other words, you have never heard of any differences
whatever between them? A. I have traveled a good deal all
over Ireland, south and west and east, and in my own native
county, County Kerry, and I have never heard of any trouble
between the people on account of any religious differences what
ever in those sections.
Q. What would you say about Ireland as a peaceful country?
A. It is a very peaceful country, sir.
Q. Did you have any difficult experiences with the people in
pursuing your duties as a member of the Royal Irish Constabu
lary? A. No, sir. Nobody ever made any insulting remark to
me in all the thirteen years of my service.
Q. Were there any serious crimes? A. No, sir.
Q. Any minor offenses? A. Nothing serious. Just petty
larceny or something like that.
Q. Chairman Howe. How many murders did you come in
contact with? A. There was just one case in County Galway
in the land trouble there. That was in 1907.
Q. Just one case of murder in all your experience? A. Yes,
that is right, sir.
Q. How about felonies and serious offenses? A. Nothing
like that; just petty cases.
Q. What do you mean by petty offenses? A. Petty cases like
drunkenness.
Q. How about stealing? A. Very, very limited in the coun
try.
Q. How about burglary? A. No, very little. I have never
known of any case of burglary where I was called upon to act.
Q. Were there any cases reported to your precinct? A. Oh,
there may be a case of petty larceny, that is, a case of petty
larceny like the stealing of tools or picks.
Q. But of the major crimes, there has been only one case
come to your attention in thirteen years? A. Yes, one case in
thirteen years.
Q. And drunken brawlsare they frequent? A. Not in
these days. They used to be in 1910, 1911, or 1913, but not
nowadays.
Q. What was there for 9,000 of the Royal Irish Constabulary
in Ireland to do if there was no crime? A. Well, they are dis
tributed all over the country. There were not nearly so many
as that there until the last few years. I remember only three
years ago when there were only three men in the station where
I was in County Tipperary.
Q. Chairman Howe. How about the relations of Protestants
and Catholics? Did they meet in a friendly way? Did they
visit one another's houses? A. I know of a case where the
Catholic priest and the Protestant minister went out fishing
together, and also shooting together.
Q. When you say shooting together, you mean hunting? A.
I mean fowling.
Q. Do they intermarry? A. Not very much.
Q. They traded at one another's stores, did they? A. Yes,
indeed.
Q. In other words, prior to 1918, there was very little dis
order? A. Yes, and after, and up to the present time there is
[Vol. 112, No. 2903
very little need, as far as the people are concerned, of a police

force.
Q. Mr. Malone. Now, Mr. Galvin, tell me in what way did
your duties as a policeman change by orders after the elections
of 1918? A. They were changed until I was simply only a
soldier when I left the police force. I had to carry arms and
bombs and the like. I had to have my rifle beside me at nights
in bed. We were all behind barbed wire, and with thirty or
forty bombs used sometimes at nights from the police station.
Q. Where do you date the first disorders in your district?
A. I remember that in July, 1919, the County Of Tipperary was
proclaimed a prohibited district by the Lord Lieutenant. That
required an additional force of police. That was according to
English law then. They transferred police or R. I. C. from
different portions of Ireland, even from the west of Ireland,
and from the next counties to South Riding. Pairs and markets
and public meetings and assemblies and so forth were to be
prohibited, although Clogheen and portions of the South Riding
were very quiet.
Q. Did the prohibition of fairs and markets interfere with
the normal life of the people? A. Oh, yes, very much, because
they had no way of selling their produce.
Q. Was it after the normal life of the people had been dis
turbed that the disorders began? A. Yes. It was not until
some time in April, 1919, that a hundred of the military arrived
from Manchester.
Q. Did you ever know of any attacks by the people on the
police up to the time you are stating now? A. No, not at any
place.
Q. Why did you resign from the R. I. C? A. Well, simply
because I did not like the system that they have at the present
time. When I first joined, it was different then. I did not have
any arms then. Of course they had arms then, but at the same
time I never took them out with me on duty, the same as I had
to do the last seven or eight months. We had the arms, but
they were simply for show purposes.
Q. In other words, when the R. I. C. was changed from a
police force into a military force, that was your reason for leav
ing? A. That was sufficient.
Q. Were you not entitled to a pension? A. Oh, yes, I cer
tainly would have been entitled to a pension in two years more,
in fifteen years, if I got out on a medical certificate. Or at
twenty-five years I would have been entitled to one-half of my
pay, and two-thirds on thirty years' service.
Q. Senator Walsh. You were in the station with the young
man who was here who testified about the order to go to church
on Sundays? A. Yes, I remember that order.
Q. Did you ever go to church in a squad before? A. Yes, I
went once.
Q. Now, was that order compelling men to go to church
armed for the purpose of showing military authority in the
church, or was it simply a regulation in regard to each indi
vidual's conduct when he went to church? A. My belief was
that the order was simply to incite the people.
Q. Where did you stand when you went to church? A. You
were supposed to go up to the altar aisle.
Q. And two men went up with rifles? A. Two men went up
with rifles, and two with carbines.
Q. Where did the other two men stand? A. The other two
men stood near the door.
Q. Did you stand during the entire service? A. Yes.
Q. Did you march behind the people in coming out of the
church? A. I marched behind about fifteen yards.
Q. After the people went out, did you walk down the center
aisle of the church? A. Yes, the people went out first.
Q. Was that a general order? A. It was a general order
for all Ireland, because it came from Dublin Castle.
Q. So that there was at that time and is now as far as you
know military control over the church during church services?
A. Yes, sir, that was the general impression of the people there.
Q. Commissioner Addams. Now, if a man was not going to
_____-_*=".
The Nation
Feb. 23, 1921]
317
church that morning, did they confine some in the barracks? A.

Yes, half of the party were confined.
Q. So that every time there was a church service, some would
on the Mansion House.
be there?
Q. MR. MALONE. Tell about the Richards incident. A. Well,

Crowley and a man named Grady and myself, we were sent out
on patrol duty with these two Black and Tans. We had
was being raided, that the police were searching for Michael
Collins and Robert Barton. Miss Barton, Robert Bartons sister,
was in the house at the time. We dashed across Stephens
Green, and we found a double line of police and constables
revolvers and Gillette and Richards had carbines.
About a
drawn up across Dawson Street, the entrance to the Mansion
mile outside of Clogheen there was a man named Walsh, who

was supposed to be in sympathy with the Republican movement,
House Road. The soldiers were there with fixed bayonets.

Just beyond the line there was a whippet tank, and beyond that
there were motor lorries for the soldiers that were taking part
A. Yes, some would remain in the barracks.
and Richards demanded that we show him where Walsh lived.

We wanted to know what he wanted with Walsh, and he said he
was going to shoot him.

Walsh lived.
And we refused to show him where
And he turned around to us and demanded that
we do our duty and show him the place. And we reminded him
that he was not in the army now, he was on the police force. And
he said that when he left the training depot, he was told that
he would not be subjected to any discipline whatever if he shot
any Sinn Feiners. He went about ten yards down the road and
turned and said he would shoot me if I didnt show him where
Walsh lived. Then we turned back to the barracks. We had
not gone far when Richards fired at us. When I got back to the
At the time I was at Madam Gomme
MacBride's house on Stephens Green.
Her young son came
rushing over to the house and told us that the Mansion House
in it.
The American delegates were to have a reception at the
Mansion House that evening. The car with Frank Walsh and
President de Valera approached the line of the military. The
military lowered their bayonets. Frank Walsh got out of the
car and approached the bayonet line and went up to Lieutenant
Colonel Johnson of the Dublin military police, and inquired,

What's the row? The casualness of the question must have
disarmed the Lieutenant-Colonel, because he started to laugh,
and after a long conference finally permitted the American car
to go through. After the order was given, the lorries contain
ing the soldiers were taken out through the crowd, amid the
barracks with the men, I reported him to the sergeant, and he

said he had committed a felony for threatening the lives of three
booing of the people, and the car flying the American and Sinn
men.
held at the Mansion House.
He was confined to barracks for a few days, and then
Fein flags entered through the passage, and the reception was
sent back to England, and then he came back to the R. I. C.

again under an assumed name.
Q. Before this the Mansion House had been raided by the

troops? A. Yes.
Q. What is your opinion of the character of the Black and
Q. What was the purpose of that raid, as you were told? A.

The purpose was to find Michael Collins, minister of finance of
the Irish Republic, and Robert Barton, member of the Irish Par
Tans in Ireland today? A. We did not mix with them. We

had as little to do with them as we could.
To a great extent
the people know what kind of people they are.
Testimony of Miss Ruth Russell

Miss Ruth Russell of Chicago, Illinois, was sent to Ireland
by the Chicago Daily News to study special economic, social,

and political conditions and report on them. She was in Ireland
from March 16, 1919, to the end of June, the same year, at first
in Dublin, then in Cork, Limerick, Belfast, and Dungloe in
Donegal. She gave especial attention to the study of the coun
try districts in Donegal in the northwest of Ireland. Her testi
mony before the Commission on December 15, 1920, is of par
ticular interest and value.
liament.
Q. You were acquainted with Robert Barton's sister. Did

you meet Robert Barton also? A. Yes, I met him.
Q. Is he a Protestant? A. Yes.
Q. Was he a British officer? A. He was.
Q. And reputed to be a very wealthy man? A. Yes, he has
a beautiful home at Glengarriff.
Q. Did you learn anything of the circumstances of the raid?

Was there a raid made on the private apartments of the Lord
Mayor? A. I heard that the raid was rather thoroughly con

ducted in the Lord Mayor's house. Soldiers even penetrated to
the bedroom of the Lord Mayor's wife, and searched there. But
they were not successful in finding either Michael Collins or

Robert Barton. However, both of these turned up at the recep
tion later.
Q. CHAIRMAN Howe. What was the method that you used

in your investigations in Ireland? A. I used both interviews
and personal experiences. In order to get the social conditions
in Dublin I lived in the Dublin slums for a week as a working
girl, and tried to find work there.

Q. Were you able to secure work in Dublin? A. There was
no factory work to be had in Dublin at all, or indeed in any
part of Ireland, even in Belfast. But there was domestic work
Q. Had there been any acts on the part of the Irish Republic
as the moving cause of this raid? Had any policeman or any
soldier been shot?
A. No.
Q. They were simply out to arrest these two leaders of the

Republican Government? A. Yes.
Q. Were they also leaders of the Republican army? A. Yes.
Q. But Michael Collins at that time was not a leader of the
armyhe was minister of finance, was he not? A. He was
minister of finance and captain in the Volunteer army.
Q. Do you know whether Robert Barton
to be had.
Q. What were the prevailing wages in factories at that time

for the people who were employed? A. The best woman's wage
in Dublin at that time was paid at a large basket factory in
Dublin. That ran from $4.50 to $10 a week. These were espe
cially good wages. There was a toy factory in Dublin which

paid as low as $1 a week to girls. This was astonishingly low,
in view of the fact that it costs a girl at least $5 a week to live
by herself in Dublin.
Q. So that only girls who could afford to work for those

wages or who were living at home and were supported by their
parents and were virtually undercutting the women workers
who had to support themselves could live on that wage? A.
Yes, yes.
RAID ON THE MANSION HOUSE
Q. Were you present in Dublin at the time of the raid on

Dublin Castle? A. I was present there at the time of the raid
has since been ar
rested? A. Yes, I believe that he has, and was sentenced to

two or three years' imprisonment. I do not know what for.
Q. You met a number of the leaders of the Republican move
ment in Ireland? A. Yes, I think I met almost all of them.
Q. What type of men were they? A. They were
extremely
cool-headed and intelligent. The crowd of Sinn Fein leaders

that I met at George Russell'sAE'shouse in Dublin were, I
think, the most brilliant crowd of people that I have met in my
life, and as a newspaper person I have mixed in at a good many
gatherings.
RELIGIOUS PHASE OF THE IRISH QUESTION

Q. Were they all Catholics? A. No. AEGeorge Russell
is an Ulster man, and Arthur Griffiths is a Protestant, and a
good many others were Protestants.
Q. Did you form any conclusions through your talking and
318
The Nation
living among the people as to the religious phase of conditions

in Ireland? Is there a religious basis for the present trouble?
A. No, I think that the religious feeling has been artificially
worked up in Ulster. But I think that on account of the unify
ing influence of the labor people in Ulster this religious feeling
is rapidly dying down.
Q. I wonder if I could develop this religious question a little
further. Did I understand you to say that in your opinion the
religious feeling had been artificially created? A. Yes.
Q. And does not exist among the common people generally?
A. I do not say that it doesn't exist in Ulster, but that it is
rapidly dying down.
Q. How about the rest of the country? A. Well, I think
with George Russell that there is not a feeling of religious intol
erance in the south of Ireland at all.
Q. As far as you saw, they live peacefully with one another?
Do they visit with one another and trade with one another? A.
Yes, certainly.
Q. Now, compare it with this country. Is there any more
religious intolerance than there is in this country? A. I think
not. I think that in some of the southern towns of my own
State there is more religious intolerance than in Ireland.
Q. Does it enter into the elections? A. No, not as far as I
know.
Q. Does it enter into the school question? A. Yes, it does in
Ulster. In Belfast there is a question concerning the support
of the schools; and it is rather difficult to go into the whole
school topic to explain it, although I can if you want me to.
But it is a matter of support. The Protestants feel that there
is not enough money to be had for their schools. There are
15,000 children in Belfast without school accommodations. The
arrangement for the money for the schools is that some person
so disposed -in Ireland will build a school and the Parliament
grant will support it. In Belfast they want a different system.
But the Catholics feel that their children have been fairly well
cared for under the present system, and do not want a change.
Q. There have been a number of people over in this country
who have been speaking on the Irish question, and have been
insisting that there can be no home rule in Ireland or selfdetermination in Ireland because underlying everything else is
the danger of Catholic domination. You know what their argu
ment probably is. It has a good deal of currency. What about
that statement? You would say that it is artificially created?
A. Yes. I spoke to Francis Joseph Bigger, who is a prominent
lawyer in Belfast, on that matter. Mr. Bigger is a Protestant.
He was speaking particularly of the organization of trade. I
spoke of how much we heard of the religious feeling in Belfast ;
and he said it was mostly talk, that, for instance, you do not
find Catholic people trading at a Catholic store or Protestant
people trading at a Protestant store. They go where they find
things the cheapest.
Q. We have not been able to get any witnesses from Ulster,
and since that seems to be one of the Irish issues, if you can
throw any more light on that, I would be very glad of it. Just
how is this issue raised? Who keeps it alive if it is not a real
issue? A. I spoke to labor people in Belfast. I spoke particu
larly to Dawson Gordon, who is one of the officials of the Tex
tile Workers' Federation there.
Q. Mr. Basil Manly.* Is he a Protestant? A. Yes, he is a
Protestant. And he told me that the religious issue, like the
political issue, is kept alive by the big millionaires in Belfast;
that while the workers were kept separated, they were not able
to organize. He said, for instance, that before the war a labor
organizer would go into a meeting that was held for the pur
poses of organization, and he would begin his speech. He would
no sooner begin than the crowd would say, "Are you a Union
ist?" or "Are you a Sinn Feiner?" And he would have to
answer. And according to his answer, one-half of the people
would leave the hall. The result was that before the war they
Acting aa counsel for witness.
[Vol. 112, No. 2903
had a textile organization of only about 400 members. But

during the war the high cost of living drove them to organize,
and at the end of the war there were something like 40,000
members in this organization. And since Protestant and Cath
olic workmen have come together and organized themselves, they
have doubled their wages. Spinners, for instance, earned $3 a
week; and by organization they have raised them to $7 or $7.50
a week. He said that labor meetings have taken place, some of
them in Hibernian halls and some of them in Orange halls, with
out regard to religious differences. He even told of a labor
parade in a small town outside of Belfast where one-half the
band was Hibernian and the other half was Orange, and yet
there was perfect harmony!
Q. Commissioner Norris. That means that one-half of them
were Catholic and one-half of them Protestant? A. Yes.
Q. In these meetings where they would ask the labor organ
izers if they were Unionists, that did not imply any religious
difference, did it? A. As a rule the Unionists are Protestant.
Q. You said that when someone spoke at these meetings called
for organization purposes, they always asked the question
whether they were Unionists, and depending on their answer,
about one-half of their audience would leave. Now, what I
wanted to get at is whether there is no religious question in
volved in that. A. Yes. I said that these people would ask
from the floor, "Are you a Sinn Feiner?" or "Are you a Union
ist?" And they would also ask, "What is your religion?"
Q. But I want to find if, when they would ask "Are you a
Unionist?" and "Are you a Sinn Feiner?" there is any religious
line involved in that question. A. I think that the Unionist
leaders before the war were pretty thoroughly Protestant.
Q. Well, how are they now? A. In 1919, 1 think it was, that
the International Labor Conference was held in Berne in Swit
zerland, and at that conference Ulster labor representatives,
mainly Protestants, backed the rest of Irish labor in a demand
for self-determination.
Q. Now, as I understand you in regard to Ulster, the people
seem to be divided somewhat on the religious issue, and that is
entering into this controversy that is going on there now. Is
that right? A. It has been an issue. I think it is growing less
of an issue all the time.
Q. Now, in what ways is it growing less? Do you mean that
the question as to whether certain persons are Unionists or
Sinn Feiners is decided upon the religious beliefs of the people,
or is it in less degree that way now than it was before the war
or during the war? A. Yes, I think people are forgetting their
religious prejudices through these labor organizations. When
they get together they find they are not such terrible people
after all.
Q. Is there any other place in Ireland besides Belfast where
this religious issue is involved? A. No, not that I know of.
Q. How are the people divided numerically? A. They are
almost half and half. In Ulster the Catholics are only a little
less than the Protestants.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. You mean the whole province as
distinguished from the city of Belfast? A. Yes.
Q. Commissioner Norris. Now, what kind are Protestants?
A. The rich mill owners are almost all Protestant Unionists.
Then there were a great many Protestant laborers. And then
the mass of the Catholic people were laborers.
Q. Now, is there any difference in policy on the part of Great
Britain toward Ulster and toward the balance of Ireland?
Why is it that the rich factory owners are Unionists. A. Their
industries have been protected by England.
Q. That is what I am trying to get at. How have they been
protected? A. I think they have been protected by permitting
men like Carson to work on the religious prejudices of the people
so that the rich mill owners profit by the division of the people,
especially the laboring people.
Q. Now, how do they profit? How does that result in a profit
to the rich mill owners? A. So long as the laborers are kept
apart, the labor cost of the mill owners is very much less because
Feb. 23, 1921]
The Nation
the laborers are not able to ask for higher wages. They have
not the strength of organization.
Q. And as that organization proceeds, the religious issue
disappears? A. Yes, it is disappearing.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. May I ask a few questions along
that line? You have never known a unanimity of opinion upon
any great question anywhere in the world? A. No.
Q. And there is not in Ireland today on this question of a
Republic? A. No, but I think there is possibly the greatest
unanimity there that has ever existed on a great issue in any
country of the world.
Q. Looking towards independence? A. Yes.
Q. Now, I want to get this foundation for a correct division
of the forces in Ireland. Do I gather from your testimony that
the movement for a free, independent Ireland is led by the lib
eral-thinking, intellectual forces of Ireland, and that the oppo
sition is led by the capitalistic class supported by such people
as they can influence along religious lines? Is that a summary
of the whole situation? Tell us in your own words. A. I think
that that might be considered a summary of it.
Q. That is, that the mental, thinking forces, the intellectual
class that you have spoken of as meeting, have rallied to their
support the great mass of the people, approaching an overwhelm
ing percentage, for independence and self-determination; and
opposed to them is, first of all, the capitalistic class plus such
forces in the north of Ireland as they have been able to rally to
their support by appeals along religious lines? A. Yes, but I
would like to add that in my opinion it would have been impos
sible for these brilliant young leaders to rally the forces in Ire
land behind them unless the people were driven to revolt by the
economic conditions that are pressing into them.
Q. Exactly. But that is one reason why they have been able
to get the people behind them? A. Yes.
Q. But the leaders are what we call in America the liberals
and the intellectual class? A. Yes; I don't know what you
mean by "liberal," but they are an extremely intelligent class.
Q. I mean by liberals, intelligent, forward-looking people who
have no prejudices, who are trying to find sound and funda
mental notions of life and government. Is that not true? A.
Yes.
Q. Did you find religious differences involved among the Re
publican leaders? A. No, oh, no.
Q. Is there any thought of religious differences at all among
those men and women? A. No.
Q. Commissioner Maurer. In the south of Ireland where
the Catholics are in the great majority, perhaps 90 per cent,
how did you find the workers organized where Catholics were
in the majority? Did you find them generally organized, or
were they about as poorly organized as they were in the north
of Ireland? A. I think that labor organization is proceeding
very rapidly in Ireland. The Irish Transport and the General
Workers' Union has jumped tremendously, by the tens of thou
sands, in the last year or so.
Q. Yes. The point I want to get at is this : Before you came
from Ireland, did you find that in the south of Ireland there had
been a labor movement prior to your coming to Ireland; and if
so, what kind of labor movement was it? Did it have any
strength? What did it amount to before the war began in
Europe? A. Nothing. I think that before the strike of 1913 in
Dublin labor was practically unorganized.
Q. At what part of Ireland was that? A. The big strike was
at Dublin.
Q. The religious issue did not seem to be raised in the south
of Ireland? A. No.
Q. And the Catholics and Protestants seemed to be able to
agree and get into the same labor unions? A. Yes.
Q. But in the north of Ireland, where the Protestants are in
the overwhelming majority (perhaps not so overwhelming as
the Catholics are in the south), there was religious difficulty?
A. Yes.
Q. Now, I am assuming that the Catholics in the south were
319
organized prior to and before the northern workers. Is that

true? A. I think the shipyard workers in Belfast were pretty
thoroughly organized first.
Q. Yes, I understand. But I mean the textile trades. A. No,
I don't think so.
Q. In your investigation, did you find any difference between
the wages in the south of Ireland and those in the north? A.
In the old established organizations like the shipbuilders they
were getting pretty good wages. The wages had increased in
Dublin through the Dock Workers; and through the Transport
Workers they had during the war almost doubled.
Q. That is not the point I am trying to get at. In the north
of Ireland, where the religious differences are the greatest, were
the wages in that part of Ireland anywhere near as good or
better than they were in the south of Ireland, where there was
no apparent religious difference? A. It is very hard to compare
the wages in the north and south of Ireland because there is so
much factory work in the north. In the south the men are
employed in farm labor and casual work; but in Belfast there
is more factory work.
Q. Yes, yes. So that the textile industry seemed to be located
mostly in the north of Ireland? A. Yes.
Q. What was the standard of living in the north of Ireland
when you were there? A. I think, in a way, it was worse than
that in the south of Ireland, for this reason, that the people
were so driven by factory work that on the streets as you would
meet them they would appear very thin and underfed. Even
the young girls in Belfast do not seem to have money enough to
dress up, and would wear black shawls over their heads.
Q. Did you find any particular prejudice against the word
"labor union" among the people? A. No, I did not.
Q. And what position did those men and women that you did
meet take on this question of the freedom of Ireland? A. They
were for self-determination.
Q. They were for independence, that means? A. Yes. That
has been shown by their action at the Berne Labor Conference.
Q. Yes, but resolutions adopted at conventions would not
mean as much to me as the sentiments you would gather by
living among the people themselves. You met the rank and file,
I suppose? A. Yes.
Q. Protestant men and women? A. Yes.
Q. And you spoke to them about self-determination for Ire
land? A. Yes.
Q. And what did they say? A. Dawson Gordon told me that
the political question would absolutely have to be settled before
the rise of the unions in Ulster could go on and develop as they
pught to. Labor therefore stands for the settling of the ques
tion, and believes that only self-determination can settle the
question.
Q. They are not afraid that the Pope is going to run Ire
land, then? A. No.
Q. And they think that self-determination alone can settle
the question? A. Yes.
THE SCHOOL QUESTION
Q. Commissioner Addams. I would like to ask a question
about the public schools in Ireland. The buildings are not
erected by public funds? A. Partly. I have forgotten the exact
arrangement, but it was something like this: a person who
desired to erect a school could build it and equip it at his own
expense, and then it was run by a Parliamentary grant. I
haven't thought or written about that question lately, but I could
look it up, of course.
-Q. The parish schools were already built, and the Catholic
population did not wish to be taxed by the school boards because
they had their parish schools, as I understand it. This edu
cational issue is a strong issue in Ulster between Catholics and
Protestants, is it not? A. Yes.
Q. If we could gather the point of difference there, it might
be illuminating. Or did you gather that material? A. I have
that material exactly in a pamphlet by the Vice-Regal Com
320
The Nation
mission on Education. I have it here, and can leave it with the

Commission.
Q. But the point is that the Catholic population already have
their parish schools, and do not wish to be taxed for the main
tenance of board schools. Is that it? A. Not exactly. The
schools, as I understand it, have been erected by individual
benefactors or by the expense of the pastorate, Protestant or
Catholic. And the Catholics in Ulster believe that they have been
fairly well taken care of under this system, and that the arrange
ment in the grant would make an extra expense for them; and
they believe that they would be paying, then, some of the ex
penses for other schools ; and they believe that they are already
sufficiently taxed.
Q. That is what I meant. It would be double taxation. A.
Yes.
Q. Commissioner Norms. But what about the Protestant
schools there? Are they paid for out of public funds? A. Well,
the Parliamentary grant goes to them as well as to the Catholic
schools.
Q. That is what I wanted to get at. Is there any discrimina
tion about the Catholics and the Protestants in the schools?
A. No, not that I have heard about. I don't think there is any
legal discrimination.
Q. Is there any discrimination in administration? A. No,
not that I have heard of.
Q. Can Catholic children go to Protestant schools and
Protestant children go to Catholic schools? A. Yes, they can.
Q. Now as I understand it, part of the money is paid by the
public funds and part from the churches? A. Yes.
Q. They both get support from public funds? A. Yes.
Q. Do you know how the public funds are divided? Is it in
proportion to the number of population? A. Yes, it is in porportion to the number of population.
Q. Is there any claim on the part of the Catholics that the
Protestants are getting too much from the public funds already,
or any feeling on the part of the Protestants that the Catholics
are getting too much? A. I have not heard anything about that,
but the Catholics think that under the new arrangements they
would be paying too much in taxes.
Q. What is that new arrangement? A. It has been a long
time since I have written anything on that, and the details have
escaped me.
Q. Commissioner Newman. But they think that under the
new arrangement there would be a discrimination, and that the
Catholics would be paying too much for their education? A.
That is what they believe.
Q. What opinion did you come to? A. I don't remember
forming any definite conclusion.
Q. Commissioner Addams. As I understand it, Miss Russell,
the Protestants want public schools while the Catholics are hold
ing on to the idea of parish schools: the real difference is
between two theories of education. It is not a matter of funds
so much. The Catholics are objecting because they would be
taxed for a public school system when they want their parish
schools. Is that not it? A. I did not hear the matter explained
that way when I was there. But it is very possible.
Commissioner Addams. Of course, the financial question is
implicit in it.
RELIGIOUS, POLITICAL, AND ECONOMIC ISSUES
Q. Chairman Howe. Is there underlying the Irish question,
then, a line of economic cleavage that is responsible for the
opposition to self-determination by one class and the support of
it by another? Is there an economic issue there, then, as well as
a political issue? A. Yes, I think so.
Q. Do you think that is a dominant issue, then, or a subor
dinate issue? What influences the majority in the House of
Lords and the large majority in the House of Commons? Is
that econonic, political, or religious? A. Your first question
was whether there was an economic cleavage in Ireland?
Q. Whether you could explain the Irish question on economic
[Vol. 112, No. 2903
terms rather than on political terms? A. Yes. And you also

asked if it was subordinate to the political question?
Q. Yes. When Ireland was alien-owned by alien landlords, it
was easy enough to understand that English landlords would
oppose self-determination for Ireland because Ireland might
then impair the value of their property because Ireland could
tax it or levy upon it or do anything with it. But today I
understand that between 60 and 70 per cent of the land
is owned by the Irish peasants. But the English landlords who
are left might still fear self-determination because their estates
would be broken up. A. Yes.
Q. How about the commercial class, the banking class? A.
There are ninety-six stock banks in Ireland. I think that six
out of nine are controlled in England.
Q. So that English bankers might oppose self-determination
in the banking interests? A. Yes.
Q. How about the big shipbuilders, or Harland & Wolff, Ld.
that is a Belfast firm, a Unionist firm, is it not? A. I do not know.
Q. But the shipping interests are English, are they not,
rather than Irish? A. Yes.
*
Q. And the jobbers or wholesalers or speculators who control
Irish products, are they Irishmen in Belfast or are they not?
A. They are mostly English or pro-English Irishmen, according
to the statement made to me by Dennis MacCullough, who is a
piano merchant in Belfast. He spoke of the difficulties that he
had to encounter in his business because of the discrimination
in his business against Irishmen.
Q. Because of the discrimination by whom? A. He said, for
instance, that he found it difficult to get store space from Eng
lish landlords.
Q. Commissioner Newman. Did he say anything about bank
ing accommodations? A. He did not say anything to me about
that, but Professor Smith of the University of Cork told me that
the Irish borrowers from the English-controlled Irish banks were
charged one per cent more interest than English borrowers
from English banks. Aside from that
Q. Just a moment before you leave that. Did he give any
basis, any reason for that? Is it merely because they are Irish,
or is it because of some actual economic basis? A. He said, as
I remember it, that on account of the conditions of the country,
money was made dearer there because the risk in giving it out
was greater.
Commissioner Norris. You were just finishing up when you
were interrupted for something else.
The Witness. Yes, I was going to tell about the Irish Agri
cultural Organization Society, that spoke about the difficulty the
farmers especially, had in getting money. On that point, in a
little pamphlet called "Crop Credit," the society says: "It is
rarely that the joint stock banks will lend the small sums that
the farmers require at less than 10 per cent interest deducted
beforehand. Then -there is the cost of postage or traveling ex
pense if the applicant does not live near a bank. Again, the
bank does not lend to the farmer for a period that enables him
to make a profit out of his loan; and a loan that is made to
mature too soon often cripples the borrower rather than be of
any assistance to him. But even then, it is impossible to secure
a loan in many cases, and the farmer is compelled to inquire
elsewhere."
To overcome that difficulty, the society has established about
a hundred cooperative banks in Ireland.
Mr. Basil Manly. Are there any other questions by the
Commission?
Q. Chairman Howe. I would like to draw a parallel if I
can. Last week there was a gentleman here who had been in
the Philippines for a time. He said it was not possible to
discuss independence for the Philippines in the clubs where
Americans wereAmericans who had interests there, who were
buying and selling; that the hostility to Philippine independence
sprang very largely from the Americans there who were ex
ploiting the Philippines. He named various kinds of business
and commercial interests there that were exploiting the Philip
Feb. 23, 1921]
The Nation
pines. We have not been in the Philippines very long, but in

that time the exploiting interests seem to have gained such
power that they can oppose the independence of that country.
At the same time, this same kind of interests might be back
of the opposition to independence for Ireland. Have you any
facts on that point? A. I think that Irish industry has been
suppressed there for the benefit of English industry, and during
the war I have a specific case where industry was suppressed
for the benefit of the box contractors in Liverpool. Would you
like that case?
Commissioner Norms. Yes, give us that.
SUPPRESSION OF IRISH INDUSTRY
The Witness. I spoke to Edward Riordan, who is secretary
of the Irish Industrial Development Association. It is an
association of which the Earl of Carrick, Sir Nugent Everard,
the Countess of Dessart, and other non-Sinn Feiners are execu
tive members. Mr. Riordan said that for the first two years
of the war Ireland was able to get no war supply contracts
from England. Then in 1916 a very representative committee
of all Ireland called upon Lloyd George, who was then minister
of munitions, and Lloyd George said to them (I quote exactly
from Mr. Riordan) : "It is fair that Ireland, contributing as she
does not only in money but in flesh and blood, should have her
fair share of expenditures." After that committee had called
on Lloyd George, Ireland was given five small national plants.
The insignificance of these can be seen from the fact that when
the armistice was declared there were a little over two thousand
Irish persons working in them.
Some private contractors have been able to get contracts
from England, and one of these was a box contractor. Mr.
Riordan said that, unlike the English firms, the Irish firms
received no money advances and no machinery, but took con
tracts at competitive prices, and had no guaranty that these
contracts would be continued. When the box contracts had
expired, the All-Ireland Committee went to the chief of the box
commission in London, and the minister told them that the com
mission did not care whether they got any more boxes made in
Ireland; that the box manufacturers in Liverpool had come to
them and said that they wanted no more imported boxes, that
they could make all the boxes that were necessary; that they
wanted only timber for case boards, either dried or undried;
and that they would then get the manufacture of all necessary
boxes carried out in England. Mr. Riordan wrote an article
on the subject, which is published in Studies, a Dublin maga
zine, for June, 1918. It contains that complete box contract
story.
Q. Commissioner Maurer. You say, in other words, that
when Great Britain was in America buying supplies by the
hundreds of millions of dollars worth she just gave contracts
to Ireland enough to employ about two thousand people, which
in America would not make a decent-sized village, even in war
time. And therefore Ireland is not supposed to develop in
dustrially. A. Yes, that is it.
Q. Do you know anything about the mines in Ireland? To
what extent are they developed? A. Mr. Riordan spoke about
three of the principal mines in Ireland. He said that until
the war these mines did not even have railroad connections;
that the ancient method of carting coal on donkey-carts from
the mouth of the mines was .still taking place in two of the
mines. During the war, however, there was a spur built to the
mines in Kilkenny.
Q. Have you any idea of how many men are employed in
and about the mines in Ireland? A. No, I have no idea.
Q. Well, have you any idea as to the deposits of coal in
Ireland? A. In 1881 there was an estimate made by Professor
Hall which placed the net tonnage at 180 million tons, I be
lieve. I could find the exact figures for you.
Q. Do you know anything about the grade of coal that they
have in Ireland? A. The grade of coal is not as good as that
which is obtained in Wales, but it is still quite usable.
321
Q. So that your conception of the mining situation is that

the mines of Ireland have not been developed; have not been
scratched yet; have been simply left undeveloped? A. Yes.
Q. And when that is the situation, they are importing coal
from America, when across the channel they have millions of
tons of coal that could be had much more easily, but they do
not take it. It seems, therefore, that there is a desire to pre
vent Ireland from developing as an industrial nation. Is that
your conclusion? A. Yes, that is the conclusion I have come to.
Q. Commissioner Norris. Who owns those mines you spoke
of? A. I know that of those mines near Kilkenny the Countess
Dessart is one of the owners.
Q. Mr. Manly. You said she is not a Republican. A. No.
Q. What are the facts about the minimum wage law? Is there
a difference between its application in England and Ireland, or
does it apply to Ireland at all? A. I would like to contrast the
wages there. In Belfast the women who take embroidery, for
instance, into their homes from the linen mills get, I was told by
Mollie Donovan, one of the trades union organizers, from $1.25 to
$1.50 a week by steady working. In 1915 the Ministry of Labor
in Great Britain passed a rule, a statutory rule, Order 357,
which said that a girl of eighteen working a six-day week and
eight hours a day should be paid at least $6.72 a week. There
was a postscript which said that this rule shall apply to all
parts of Great Britain, but not to Ireland. I have that ruling
order among the documents I have with me now.
Q. You were up at Donegal in the country where the co
operatives have been developed, were you not? A. Yes.
Q. What was the reason, as you learned it, for the develop
ment of the cooperatives in that section of the country? A.
In that particular section a great deal of emigration has taken
place, on account of the change of the country from tillage to
cattle-raising. When a great many people were thrown out of
jobs there, it was necessary for them to emigrate. Until the
establishment of the cooperatives, there were a great many Irish
boys and girls who had to go either to America or migrate an
nually to the English and Scotch harvests. By the establish
ment of the cooperatives there, not only the cooperative store
but the cooperative bank and especially the cooperative knitting
mill, a great many of the young people were enabled to stay
at home. During the war there were about 400 girls employed
in the cooperative knitting factory there.
Q. And these cooperative enterprises are owned by the peo
ple of that particular locality? A. Yes.
Q. Do you know, in round figures, about how many Irish
boys and women do go over to England for the harvest season?
A. I was told by Secretary Campbell of the Ministry of
Labor that there was an annual migration of about 50,000 Irish
boys and girls over to that harvest.
Q. Do you know how long that harvest season lasts? A.
No, I don't.
Q. Do you know whether they go oVer the entire growing
and harvesting season, or whether it is just for a short season?
A. My opinion is that they go over for about six months of
the year.
Q. And that is caused by the fact that in Ireland the coun
try has become primarily a grazing and dairying country?
A. Yes.
Q. And that there is not land enough developed to keep them
in Ireland; that these Irish boys and girls go over to help
harvest England's crops because they cannot get work at home?
A. Yes.
Q. You have prepared notes, have you not, Miss Russell, on
some of these questions? A. Yes.
Q. Would you briefly give some of these points to the Com
mission? A. Yes, I think I could, Mr. Manly.
The first point was in regard to the change of the country
from a tilled country to a grazing country. This, according to
Arthur Griffiths, who is the economist of the Sinn Fein move
ment
Q. You met Arthur Griffiths, did you not? A. Yes, I did.
The Nation
322
Q. What sort of man is hea scholarly man? A. Yes, he

is a very scholarly, reserved, almost taciturn man.
Q. How old is he, would you judge? A. He is in the forties,

I would say.
Q. Did he impress you as being a man of ability?
A. Yes
[Vol. 112, No. 2903
same building there was a twenty-year old girl with a little

blind baby, who said that her husband had not given her a
farthing for a fortnight, and that she was getting food for the
baby from her mother.
Q. COMMISSIONER WALSH.
Was this incident due to dissipa
tion or was it due to economic conditions?
A.
It was due to
sir, of very great ability.
Q. A man qualified, you would say, to act as an executive

of one of our states?
A. Yes, I think that he is.
Q. He is fully of that caliber? A. Yes, he is distinctly of

the executive type.
MR. MANLY.
him.
I just wanted to bring out your knowledge of
Proceed, please.
THE WITNESS. Mr. Griffiths said that at the meeting of the

Irish Parliament, which was called for the American delegation,
economic conditions. This was in the dockers quarter, and

conditions there are very bad.
Q. Is that a common situation? A. Yes, it is. There is
very little river traffic on the Liffey now. During the war there
were many boats taking timber back and forth from Ireland
over to England, so that the times were better for the dockers
than they were after the war.
Q. How many of these families live in these one-room quar
it was brought out that the principal method by which Irish
ters?
industries had been suppressed during the nineteenth century

was the changing of the country from a tillage country to a
room tenements.
grazing country. He said that during the nineteenth century

England wanted a cheap meat supply center, and there was not
room enough on her island for grazing, so she made it more
profitable for the large landowners of Ireland to raise cattle
than crops. Accordingly the large landowners turned their
entire estates into large cow lots. And as there was very
little labor needed to herd cattle, and very little labor needed in
side industries, because the cattle were and still are exported
A. In Dublin there were 25,000 families living in one
Q. Twenty-five thousand families? A. Yes. The proportion

of those in Dublin living more than two in a room is higher
than that of any other city in the British Isles.
It is more than
twice the proportion in London. I have here a government re

port which says: With regard to the number of people housed
in one-room dwellings, Dublin heads the list with 33.9 per cent
compared to London with 13.4 per cent. Edinburgh comes next
with 21.9 per cent and Glasgow next with 20 per cent.
Q. MR. MANLY. I think that perhaps the 25,000 families you
on the hoof, millions of people were thrown out of employment.
mentioned is just a slip of the memory.
Q. And that is the fundamental reason for the bad living and
working conditions that you found in Ireland? A. Yes. And
also the banking restrictions. The result of the suppression of
there?
industries is that the individual person in Ireland must choose
Q. COMMISSIONER WALSH. Do I understand you to tell me

that it is not an uncommon condition for a family of mother
between emigration and low wages in Ireland. While I was in

Ireland, Nationality, a Sinn Fein paper which has since been
suppressed, published census statistics which showed the depopu
lation of Ireland. They showed that from 1841 to 1911 the popu
lation of Ireland fell from 8,000,000 to 4,300,000. It also gave
the decrease by counties, and some of the counties lost more
than 60 per cent of their population.
I spoke of the low wages that it was necessary for women to
take when they could get factory jobs. But I did not speak of
the low wages that they were forced to take as domestics.
ECONOMIC CONDITIONS IN IRELAND
Q. What were the prevailing wages for domestics that you
A. No.
Have you your notes
George Russell told me that.
Q. CHAIRMAN Howe. What is the population of Dublin? A.

About four hundred thousand.
and father and daughters and sons to live all in one room?
A. Yes.
Q. Do you know that even in the island tribes of the South

Sea Islands the boys and girls, when they reach majority, are,
out of a sense of modesty, housed away from their parents?

A. No, I didnt know that.
Q. And yet you mean to tell me that in Dublin grown-up

boys and girls sleep and live in that one room with their
parents, and work out their lives there? A. Yes. And yet the
report that I will leave with the Commission shows that disease
due to immorality is astonishingly low in Ireland.
Q. COMMISSIONER ADDAMS. The proportion of those living
A. Well, one night in a night refuge in
in one-room tenements in Glasgow is also very high, isnt it?
Court Street I picked two possible advertisements from one of

the newspapers and asked my companions at the table which
A. Yes, it is; but Dublin is worse than any other city in the
British Isles, according to the figures given in the Emergency
Report on Housing Conditions in Dublin.
Q. COMMISSIONER WALSH. Would you want to make a com
parison between living conditions in Irish cities, Dublin, Bel
fast, and Cork, with our cities here? A. Well, the difference,
I should say, is that there is more of hopefulness in an Ameri
can citymore hope of work than there is in an Irish city.
found over there?
one of them to take.
One of them was for a general housework
girl to live with the family at $50 a year. The other ran:
Wanted, a strong, humble housework girl to live out, $1.50 a
week.
1919.
This was in 1919?
A. Yes, in
The married women must earn money enough to make
up the family budget.
Lionel Smith-Gordon of Plunkett House
Q. MR. MANLY.
You investigated the packing-house dis
The pamphlet was not permitted to go out of the British Isles.
trict in Chicago, did you not, not so long agoabout 1918did

you not? A. No. I was present at the stock-yard hearings.
But I made some budgets of the people in the Italian district
In that pamphlet he said that the annual wage of an unorgan
and elsewhere in Chicago.
ized unskilled worker was about $260 a year, and the wage of
organized unskilled workers was about $367. But he made the
point that to keep an average family of five just going on food
Q. Well, how did the conditions in the Italian district in

Chicago, the general living and housing conditions, compare
made an investigation in 1917, an investigation which was pub
lished in pamphlet form and called Starvation in Dublin.
alone cost $370. There is a deficit to make up even when work
with the conditions in Dublin and Cork? A. Well, I didnt

meet any families in my budget investigations that were living
is not slack.
in one room.
And it is the women who meet that deficit.
Q. That means that the wives and daughters must go to

work in order to keep the family above the starvation line?
A. Yes. For instance, when I was staying one night in the
dockers quarters with a widow in one of the typical one-room
tenements near the river Liffey in Dublin, the sister-in-law of
the widow came into the house early in the morning and told her
that her man had been out of work for four days, and she
wanted to know if the widow could keep the child out of the
grate that day because she had to go out washing.
In the
Q. And that was a common condition, however, in Dublin?

A. Yes. And I did not meet any people who were living prin
cipally on bread and tea, and I did meet those in Dublin.
Q. Their sole diet was bread and tea? A. Yes; all they
had while I was staying in the dockers quarter was bread
and tea and jam. I think there is a very significant statement
about the diet of the Irish people in a report of the charitable
organization called the Saint Vincent de Paul in Dublin. In

the pamphlet called, The Poor in Dublin, they have this
The Nation
Feb. 23, 1921]
sentence: A widow who, after paying the rent of her room,

has even a shilling a day to feed two or three or more chil
dren, is considered a doubtful case by the society. Yet a shil
ling a day will give the family only bread and tea and maybe
a few potatoes. Possibly a little oleomargarine may be pur
chased, but under no circumstances can the family be said to
have sufficient food.
Q. MR. MANLY. This means, if they are a doubtful case,

that they will not get charitable relief? A. Yes.
Q. CHAIRMAN Howe. Compare that with the condition of
323
babies to every thousand people, was 29.5 per cent, while for
Ireland it was 22.8 per cent.
Poverty and low vitality also result in insanity. It also

means illiteracy, for a good many children have to go to work
rather than to school. H. C. Ferguson, head of the Charity
Organization Society in Dublin, says that in Ireland 60 per
cent of the children below the age of fourteen and able to work
are at work. In Scotland, which has virtually the same popu
lation as Ireland, there are only 37,500 children employed.
which I am more familiar, the one-room cabin also prevails.
A LETTER FROM IRELAND

CoMMISSIONER WALSH., I must suspend now, for I must
leave, but before I go I would like to read into the record a
letter which I have just received from Reverend George F.
Marshall, of North Wallingford, Massachusetts:
Dear Sir: A letter received from Ireland a few days ago
is responsible for my corresponding with you now. The letter
Sometimes there is a room in the rear where there is a loom
was written on November 22. The inclosed is part of the letter.
for the manufacture of tweed.
I have made no change in punctuation or spelling. It came

from no solicitation on my part. I know that the writer is an
absolutely reliable person. He says that people going along
the roads hear the order to halt. If you stand you will be
beaten brutally. If you run you will be shot. This means
that a lot of Black and Tans scour the country roads on raid
ing parties. Their victims are chiefly people whom they meet
the farmers in Ireland; the standard of living in the west of
Ireland, where it is difficult to make a good return because

of the lack of fertility of the soil. A. The one-room cabin
prevails throughout the poorer agricultural districts of west
ern Ireland. In Sligo these cabins are made often of mud,
sometimes with a barrel for a chimney. In Donegal, with
Q. That is the domestic industry therethe manufacture

of tweed?
A. Yes.
Q. Would you say that is the situation of the typical Irish

peasant? A. Yes, I would say that the most of them are
like that.
Q. It is true that two-thirds of Ireland has passed from

landlordism to peasant ownership; and it is still as bad as
that? A. Yes. The peasant laborers sell their labor in what
is called the hiring fair, at which cattle and horses are sold.
These men stand in a pen and offer their services for as low
as one hundred dollars a year. Their employers are also the
landlords, and if they ask for a raise in wages, their employers
can evict them.
That happened while I was there.
Q. So that there has not been the improvement in rural

conditions in Ireland that we have been led to believe following
the Gladstone and the Windham Acts? A. No. During the

war there was a great increase in agricultural acreage and
prosperity. The profits of the farmers did increase, as the
bank returns show.
But according to the statistics of Pro
fessor Smith of Cork University, in Ireland this post-war

prosperity would last only about two post-war years, because
by that time England would have reestablished her former
agricultural trade relations.

Q. M.R. MANLY. Are there any further points you want to
make, Miss Russell? A. There was just the point on health,
and that is all. When I was in Dublin I went to the lunacy
department in Dublin Castle. I was given a great deal of
material on lunacy in Ireland, and in one of the pamphlets
there was a comment on the fact that the Irish in America
or overtake on the roads.

The following is from a letter written from Ireland dated
November 22, 1920: The country is in an awful state at

present. I will give you one day's work of the force that is
known as the Black and Tans. On the week before last they
left Tralee and came by Ballyfinnane and beat everybody at
the creamery most brutally; went on to Fieries and burned
Champion Sullivan's hay shed, on to Farranfore and burned
the hotel to the ground, then to Ballyhar and Currans and
burned three farm houses and hay sheds. On their return
burned Mike Kelleher's hay shed at Glanbane. Shot young

Sughreel working at the railway. Shot every donkey they
met dead, and carried off all the fowl they met and Katy
Lynch's five geese. Went on to Marmers Bridge and at the
old school took young Hoffman out of his car and shot him
dead on the road. That is one day's work. Since then there
is two shot in Bally McElligott and several wounded. On
yesterday the military fired on some youngsters at the old
castle, wounding Thom Price's son and young Sullivan of the
Railway Gates.
COMMISSIONER WALSH.
I submit the letter for whatever
weight the Commission may wish to give this evidence. I have

similar letters sent to me which I do not happen to have with
me at this moment.
contributed the highest proportion of foreign-born to Ameri

can insane asylums, and there was a comment on this fact
which read: As to why this should be, we can offer no
reasoned explanation. But just as the Irish famine was, apart
from its direct effects, responsible for so much physical and
mental distress in the country, so it would seem not improbable

that the unnutritious dietary of the majority of the popula
tion of the country, when acting over many generations, has
acted on the nervous system, and in this way has developed
those neuropathic and psychopathic tendencies which are the
precursors of insanity.
In regard to tuberculosis, I was given a good deal of ma
terial by Sir William Thompson, Registrar for Ireland, who
showed me that, according to the pre-war chart, Ireland stood
among those countries of Europe which had the greatest amount
of tuberculosis. She was fourth on the mortality list, being
exceeded only by Austria, Hungary, and Serbia. During the
war her mortality was very high. It jumped from 9,387 per
100,000 in 1913 to 9,680 in 1917.
The low vitality in Ireland results in a low birth-rate. Con
trary to what is generally expected, the birth-rate in Ireland

is not high. Compared with Scotland, for instance, the birth
rate from 1907 to 1916 for Scotland in average number of
POLITICAL LINE-UP IN IRELAND
Q. I have one question that some present have wanted to

have asked. I expect it might better be asked from some re
sponsible Irish leader, but I am sure we would be glad to have
your views. By self-determination what is meantan Irish
Republic and nothing else, or a greater degree than at present
of self-government in Ireland? A. By self-determination
they mean the right of the people to declare what form of
government they want.
Q. As a matter of fact, is the sentiment which you dis

covered in your investigations in Ireland for a republic or
for a greater measure of home rule? A. For a republic, I
would say.
Q. CHAIRMAN Howe. How universal is that?
A. It is al
most universal.
Q. Is the present political line-up in Ireland confined almost

entirely to the forces for the republic and the forces for the
present condition of union with England? That is, has the
party which we once knew as the Home Rule Party been
obliterated from the scene, and the forces we have now are
on the one hand the Republicans, and on the other the Union
iststhat is, those who still adhere to the union with Eng
324
The Nation
land? A. Yes. I knew of one man who belonged to the old

Redmond Party who was going to a meeting; and he said he
didn't know why he was going, because it was the only party
in Ireland that had no power at all.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. Dr. Howe asked you a very interest
ing question a few moments ago. That is as to what pre
dominated in the minds of the public men of England, the
political, economic, or religious argument against Irish inde
pendence. I don't want to ask too pertinent a question, but
is it not a fact that the economic argument is the dominant
one, and the political and religious arguments are used to
bolster up, to prevent any change? A. I think the political
is dominant before the public.
Q. I know; but what is the reason that the political leaders
of England are opposed to a republic? They say they are
opposed to the independence of Ireland, and then you ask them
why, and they bolster up their arguments by economic and
religious facts. A. I think the real reason is chiefly economic.
Q. Chairman Howe. And in economic you would include
all the questions about the rights and wrongs of protecting
England's army and navy? A. Yes, and the sources of her
food supply.
Q. Mr. Manly. Is not the question of the breaking up of
the Empirehas not that question an economic phase? Is not
there an economic interest on the part of Great Britain in the
preservation of the Empire? A. Yes.
Q. Commissioner Maurer. After all, the political issues,
such as a military base, and all the subjects which are inter
related with each other, would come back to the economic
issue? A. Yes.
Q. I think you would find the economic foundation re
sponsible for the question. A. Yes.
CHILD LABOR
Q. Now, I would like to ask another question. You saw the
children working in Ireland. I would like to know, have you
any idea how young some of those children are who are ex
ploited there? A. I knew a girl who belonged to the National
University in Ireland, who was interested in a club for these
children in Dublin, who told me of a little news girl who was
six years old who attended the club.
Q. She only worked as a news girl? A. Yes. Now, in
parts of Ireland the children go to these hiring fairs and sell
their services too. They go as young as nine years old. I
know of one person who went when he was nine years old to a
hiring fair and was employed for three months at ?15.
Q. $16 a month? A. No, $15 for the three months.
Q. Commissioner Addams. Was he allowed to do so be
cause his mother was a widow? That would be an exception
to the child labor law. A. This was under the Irish Educa
tional Act, that permits a child who is two miles away from
a school not to attend school. But he can work.
Q. Commissioner Maurer. How many hours are they re
quired to attend school? A. I do not know.
Q. Do they work at night? A. I do not know.
Q. Another question about these farms, describing how
they live in their cottages. As a rule, what is the acreage
of these farms? Are they large farms and these men tenants
on them, or are they small farms? A. You mean the farm
laborers?
Q. I am speaking of those people who lived in those oneroom cottages. How much ground do they till? A. They
were tenants around Donegal.
Q. They were working for someone who owned the farm
land? A. Yes.
Q. Did you have any experience with the independent farmer
who owned his own land and his own home and tilled his own
soil? A. Well, a great many of those are not wholly inde
pendent yet They are paying on their farms.
Q. Their land is covered with a mortgage? A. Yes. Of
course, as I said, they were prosperous during the war years.
Q. Mr. Manly. Relatively prosperous? A. Yes. There
[Vol. 112, No. 2903
was a big demand for agricultural products during the war,

and then they were relatively prosperous. But as I said a lit
tle while ago, this prosperity was due to die, according to
Professor Smith, professor of economics at Cork University
this prosperity was due to die in about two years.
Q. Commissioner Maurer. Do you know anything about
the fertility of the soil in Ireland? A. It varies with the
sections. The northwest is a very stony country. Huge hold
ings sell for a few dollars. In one of Lionel Smith-Gordon's
books he tells of a large holding in Donegal that sold for $10.
Q. Would not that land be good for grazing purposes?
A. No. The scrawny cattle you see there would answer that.
The soil there has to be hand spaded on account of the boulders
in the soil. And it is so unfertile that it is necessary for the
farmer to drag the seaweed, the kelp from the ocean, when
the tide is out, and put it in these big rush baskets and put
this kelp in the furrows of the soil there. They either do that
or have to go to the expense of buying artificial fertilizer.
Q. Chairman Howe. Miss Russell, you have quite obviously
been investigating economic and social conditions there. Did
you make any investigations into crime and vice in Ireland?
A. I was in Limerick when they had the big strike in the
spring of 1919. At night the city was in complete darkness
on account of the striking of even the people who were con
nected with the manufacture of light. And the force of con
stables changed from 600 constables who were employed during
the day to the night watch. I think Limerick is the only city
in the British Isles which retains the old custom of the night
watch. And I was told by a journalist in Limerick that there
were only sixty members of this night watch who took the
place of these 600 constables during the day. When the courts
were held there was no extra case of crime listed from Limer
ick during that period.
Q. Some of the Royal Irish Constabulary who were on the
witness stand last week said that on their details throughout
Ireland they had never had any murder cases come under
their notice, or arson, burglary, or any of the major crimes.
The most they had come under their attention in years of
service had been petty misdemeanors and brawls. They gave
the Commission the impression that there was little crime in
Ireland, very little crime. Did your investigation cover that
matter? Have you any statistics? A. No, I haven't any
statistics on the subject. I know that the Countess of Aberdeen,
in a magazine called The Child, in an article published in 1911,
told of the social conditions in Dublin and the great stress that
people were under for just the means of existence. And she
said that it was remarkable that there was very little crime to
get what the people need; and that there ought to be a greater
stimulus among philanthropic people to give to these people than
there had been evidence of.
Q. Commissioner Addams. You mean that under starvation
pressure there still had been very little crime? A. Under
starvation pressure, exactly.
Q. Mr. Manly. You lived for a time among the slums of
Dublin, and also were around among the people in all hours
of the day and night in other sections? A. Yes.
Q. How did the general condition of the streets compare
with the condition of the streets in New York, Chicago, and
other American cities during the same hours of the day and
night? Did you feel safe there? A. I felt perfectly safe.
I walked from the telegraph office in Limerick at two o'clock
in the morning through perfectly black streets to my hotel.
I inquired the direction several times, and was finally assisted
to my hotel by a member of the Black Watch. But there was
no interference with my progress at all.
Q. Was there at any time while you were in Ireland any
interference or any personal assault or any pickpockets at all,
in your experience? A. No. I had only one unpleasant ex
perience while I was in Ireland. It was about three o'clock
in the morning in a railroad station; but that was all.
Q. What station was that? A. At Galway.
The Nation
FOUNDED 186B
Vol. CXII
NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 2, 1921

Contents
825
EDITORIALS:
The Passing of Mr. Wilson
828
A Government Savings System
829
North Dakota and the Banks
830
Our Aliens and Our Arts
S30
The Wicked Blanton
881
ALICE PAUL PULLS THE STRINGS. By Freda Kirchwey
882
THE DAYS. By David Rosenfeld
8SS
WHAT WAGE REDUCTIONS MEAN. By George Soule
884
LABOR IS WATCHING ITS LEADERS. By Anne Martin
886
THE SEIZURE OF THE LAND IN SICILY. By Giuseppe Prezzolini. . 887
A VOICE FROM THE PAST. By George P. West
889
840
CORRESPONDENCE
841
BOOKS :
Creative Revolution. By Charles A. Beard
842
For Certain Complacent Persons. By V. L. Partington
842
Foreign Exchange. By Carl C. Plehn
848
The End of a Regime. By W. K. Stewart
343
Another Shakespeare Myth. By Winifred Smith
844
Trade and Reconstruction. By George Milton Janes
844
The Evolution of Sinn Fein. By Padralc Colum
846
The Aesthetic Attitude. By Margarete Munsterberg
846
Books in Brief
846
DRAMA:
"Macbeth" in the Void. By Ludwig Lewisohn
849
Santo Domingo'B New Freedom
851
Irish Women and the Republican Army
868
For the Library at Cork
854
To Save the Intellectual Life of Russia
854
Russia and the Concessionaires
866
OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD. Editor
Associate Editors
LEWIS S. GANNETT
FREDA KIRCHWEY
ARTHUR WARNER
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
EHNEST H. GRUENING
CARL VAN DOREN
Managing Editor
Literary Editor
Mexico; to Canada, 85.60, and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, 86.00.
WHAT in the world has come over our newspapers and,
above all, the Associated Press? It is only the other
day that the former were holding Admiral von Tirpitz up to
scorn as the typical Prussian monster, the man chiefly re
sponsible for the atrocities of the U-boat warfare and for
its ruthless character, as the very worst type of the bureau
crats who controlled the Kaiser and plunged Germany into
war in order to enslave the whole world. Yet within the
last few days the Associated Press has cabled a long inter
view with this precious rascal which is the purest German
jingo propagandapropaganda for more big battleships
and propaganda for trouble between the United States and
our Allies, Japan and Great Britain. "Tirpitz Tells us Eng
land is False in her Friendship" is one headline; Tirpitz
tells us to put our faith in big battleships and to keep our
powder dry against Japan and England! Had such stuff
appeared in a liberal weekly it would have been considered
plain proof of pro-Germanism. As it is, it strikes us as
entirely reprehensible wherever it appears. The Nation is
as eager for the renewal of friendly relations between Ger
many and the United States as any one, but it draws the
line on Von Tirpitz, Reventlow, and all their crowd against
whom it was crusading long before the war, and it con
siders the Associated Press's dispatch and the attention
given to it by our dailies as in the worst possible taste,
besides throwing a melancholy light upon the sincerity of
their professions of rage against the Kaiser's crew. Let us
have no more of this waste of space, paper, and cable tolls.
No. 2904
DISARMAMENT is meeting with all the familiar ob

stacles. Four admirals solemnly vow that we must
have control of the surface of the waters, control of the
sub-surface, and control of the air, to one admiral who
thinks that capital ships are a nuisance and played out.
As usual the war of experts is on. They can never agree
as to ships, or types, or policies, or whether the battleship
is mightier than the seaplane, whether the present sub
marine is antiquated, whether we shall have two fleets or
one, and if one whether in the Atlantic or the Pacific. In
this battling of experts just one element is supremely
lackingplain common sense, together with some regard
for the state of the Treasury. As for the Senate Naval
Committee it swallows any stuff given to it by a naval
officer; the New York World is well within the facts in
suggesting Von Tirpitz as the proper chairman for it.
Meanwhile, a semi-official Japanese spokesman insists that
Japan must build while we build, General Bullard revives,
to the cheers of the New York Republican Club, the familiar
theory that disarmament is a "mere trick" which would
mean for us Americans "the abandonment of our commer
cial and economic superiority over other nations"so much
for the brain power of this Lieutenant General! The
Woman's Party in session in Washington voted overwhelm
ingly not to work for general disarmament, so that the
sole encouraging features of last week were Senator Borah's
plucky offering of his five-year naval holiday bill as an
amendment to the Navy Appropriation Bill, and a protest
to Bonar Law by powerful British merchants against spend
ing priceless treasure on army and navy when British busi
ness is in such a grave state.
THE United States, under unprecedented taxation, may
go right on building the largest navy in the world.
Japan, despite the gravest industrial depression, may at
tempt to keep up the race. France may refuse to accept
even the principle of disarmament. Yet where governments
too long fail to respond to the needs of their harried peoples
the people themselves may take a hand. Italian workers
have shown the way. In the great F.I.A.T. plant in Turin
they are refusing to manufacture arms and war material
even for foreign countries. They have also declined to
work on lorries which may be converted into military use.
This is great news of direct action that is wholly justifiable.
MR. LLOYD GEORGE'S refusal to publish the Strick
land report on the burning of Cork is a confession
of guilt. We may feel assured that if General Strickland's
investigation had led to other conclusions than those of th<
British Labor Party report (published with The Nation r
January 26) the British Government would not have wit
held it. The Labor Commission concluded that "the fi
were caused by the Crown forces. . . . Things are
ing done in the name of Britain which must make her i
stink in the nostrils of the whole world. The honor c
people has been gravely compromised. Not only is t'
reign of terror in Ireland which should bring a b'
shame to every British citizen, but a nation is being*
326
The Nation
subjection by an empire which has proudly boasted that it

is the friend of small nations." Those were brave words,
doing honor to Britain's ancient reputation for fairness.
But Mr. Lloyd George, admitting that there have been "acts
of indiscipline," says that "we have taken very severe meas
ures in regard to a particular company involved"and de
tails them: "The officer in command has been suspended.
With regard to the rest of the company it has been dis
solved and its members put into other companies"! Such
faint-hearted action when the heart of a great city has been
burned by Crown forces discredits the officer of the Crown
who calls it "very severe" and reveals the sickly temper
in which he approaches the Irish problem. There can be
no solution until English statesmen learn to take seriously
the crimes of their agents as well as of their enemies.
LORD MILNER acts in the best of English tradition.
His report on Egyptian self-government, which has at
last been published, is a sane, restrained, wholesome docu
ment. It is far from meeting the demands of the Egyptian
Nationalists, and we should like to see it go further, but
it is not far from meeting the requirements of the political
situation in England and in Egypt. When Lord Milner
was sent to Egypt he was understood to have virtually
plenipotentiary powers; but on his return subtle influences
obtained the shelving of his report. He did the honorable
thing, and resigned as Colonial Secretary. If the Carsons
and Churchills continue to defeat all remnants of liberalism
in the British Cabinet, they may doom the British Empire
in its present form. Rejection of so moderate a program
as Lord Milner's, which gives Egypt less independence than
Canada and South Africa practice today, would be notice
to the world that the common-sense liberalism which has
made the British Empire the world force that it is, has
become a thing of the past.
"\ X THEN Congress passed the Trading with the Enemy
V V Act there was no intention to deprive alien enemies
of title to their property," says Senator King in introducing
a bill to return to German and Austrian nationals the prop
erty which was seized by the Alien Property Custodian.
"Wrongs of the German Government do not," the Senator
thinks, "warrant the confiscation of the private property of
German nationals. It would be unjust and impolitic, and
would contravene those higher conceptions of international
morality and international'duty which should obtain among
nations in this enlightened age." Those "higher concep
tions" have not played a large part in statesmanship these
past seven years, in any country, but it would indeed be
wise if Congress should vote a return to them in this mat
ter. In all our conduct of the war there was nothing more
utterly defenseless and shameful than the course of the
Alien Property Custodian. Mr. Palmer justified his actions
by announcing that they were retaliatory; but the report
of the German Alien Property Custodian (published in the
International Relations Section of The Nation for February
16) shows that there was no basis for his claim. The
Germans treated American property in Germany decently
and in accord with the tradition prevailing among honor
able nations; we acted otherwise. It is high time to
restore our good name. The precedent Mr. Palmer set
would be a sorry business if the United States, with its
growing interests abroad, were ever involved in another war.
Fortunately that fact has begun to dawn upon some of our
international financiers.
[Vol. 112, No. 2904
IN the wicked days before the war diplomats met about

green baize tables and concocted agreements in secret;
and they told the parliaments and the public just as much
or as little about their conclusions as they thought it wise to
telland that was very little. The war and the peace, it
will be recalled, inaugurated a new era, that of open cove
nants openly arrived at. For instance, Secretary Colby
writes to the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs that the
negotiations with Japan constitute merely "a plenipoten
tiary comparison of views coupled with recommendations
which are still the subject of examination" and that pub
lication of the facts concerning them would be "premature."
A few days later we read that the State Department has
received the draft form of the Japanese mandate for the
North Pacific islands, including the notorious island of
Yapbut the draft is not published. Presumably it would
be "premature" for anyone outside of the State Department
to see it. Again, we learn that the "documents relating to
the creation of the consortium for the economic development
of China through loans to the Government" are not to be
published after all. "Some Powers," we read, "are agree
able to the publication of the documents, in addition to an
agreed statement of interpretation, but one Government
wants some papers kept secret." We confess to an itch to
see those documents, and the "agreed interpretation," and
the text of the consortium itself, and feel we have a right
to see them ; but we must have misunderstood the meaning
of "open covenants openly arrived at."
A BILL like that before the New York legislature for
giving preference in the civil service to veterans of the
European War is likely to be presented, if it has not already
been, in almost all of our States in the next year or so. As
The Nation has pointed out in connection with bonus legis
lation, the great debt that America owes is to the men who
went to France not to come back. This can never be paid
unless in better citizenship and by the development of a
democracy such as their youthful vision conjured as they
sailed away. Next to them, the country's greatest debt is
to the wounded and otherwise incapacitated. This should
be paid by generous pensions, by reeducation, and if neces
sary by special employment. Other ex-service men have
few claims upon their country beyond those of other citi
zens. The worst way to deal with the question is to en
danger the efficiency of the civil service by making it a
charity home for ex-service men who cannot pass the regu
lar tests. As an opponent of the measure at Albany aptly
said, the bill would create a "roost for lame ducks" at the
expense of trained State employees and the public welfare,
and the same is true of the effort to give precedence in
police departments to men who served abroad.
WELL, Alexander Howat, president of the Kansas
District of the United Mine Workers, has been sen
tenced to a year in jail for violating an injunction against
calling strikes, and arrested on a criminal charge for calling
another strike, and the famous Kansas Court of Industrial
Relations appears in the newspaper headlines every day;
but somehow its functions seem to consist rather of punish
ing strikers than of stopping strikes. As a cure for indus
trial strife, it acts like an overdose, aggravating the dis
ease. The New York World describes the whole business
as "legal vaudeville" and calls the conception of a court to
decide when men must work "fundamentally fallacious,"
adding that to imprison Howat "sets him on a pedestal and
March 2, 1921]
The Nation
increases his influence." Meanwhile the strike continues,

and Howat issues statements which ring with a sincerity
of conviction and a readiness to go to jail for conviction's
sake which are all too rare among professional labor leaders.
"Neither injunctions nor the Industrial Court can stop
strikes," he says. "We intend to continue fighting to try
and establish some real democracy until the principles of
free men and free women are again recognized and re
established in this State. In my opinion the legislative
bodies which make the laws and the courts which interpret
the laws and the large corporations of the country are
working hand in hand and have joined together to chain
men to their jobs and crush the life out of organized labor
of the country and to establish the open shop everywhere."
WILLIAM JAMES probably never heard the word "bol
shevik" in his life, and would undoubtedly ask ex
planations if some spiritualistic telegrapher should send him
a message reporting that his moral equivalent for war was
barred by the Entente Allies because it looked too much like
bolshevism. Yet when the Bulgarian Government decided
to introduce universal industrial service, a measure which
today smacks of the Russian, in place of the old military
service, the Council of Ambassadors scratched their wise
old heads and finally forbade the measure, ruling that it
was in violation of a clause of the Treaty of Neuilly for
bidding the existence of any kind of military organization.
It may be suspected that the Russian flavor of the proposal
had as much to do with the prohibition as its resemblance
to militarism; the ambassadors have shown considerably
more worry in their own countries about phenomena which
smack of Russia than those which smack of Prussia.
SO "peace" is the object of Henry Ford's Jew-baiting
campaign. He says so in an interview printed by the
New York World. Poor fool ! Instead, by sowing dragon's
teeth of calumny and hatred, he is destroying peace. Is
Ford sincere? It matters little. Nero may have been sin
cere; the Spanish Inquisitors undoubtedly were; Kaiser
Wilhelm II also believed in himself. Enthroned igno
rance has always done more damage to the world than em
battled viciousness. And ignorance seeps through every
line of Ford's "investigation." Jews control the munitions
industry, he says; and Jews were responsible for the war.
What pathetic nonsense! Did we not hear the charge dur
ing the war that the Jews were pacifists? Slanderous lies
and vilification are no new experience to the Jews. They
have survived five thousand years of similar persecution.
Mr. Ford's libels may inflame the ignorant. Yet the best
response to his "educational articles" would perhaps be no
response.
WHEN The Nation, in its issue of February 16, de
nounced the criminality of the payment of $59,000,000 since the fall of the Kerensky Government to the
representatives of that defunct regime in the United States,
the New York Evening Post and the Chicago Evening Post
accused us of misrepresentation. We said that Nicholas
Kelley, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, testified "that
since the fall of the Kerensky Government the sum of $59,000,000 has been paid out by the United States to support
the propaganda and dinners of the Russian gentry who have
been living so high in Washington while we were deporting
the real representative of the real de facto Russian Gov
ernment." Mr. Kelley, our critics assured us, had said no
327
such thing. He had testified to such a payment, but had

said that it was used to pay for supplies ordered by the
Kerensky Government, before its fall, of American manu
facturers. That is technically true, but it in no way affects
our thesis; our critics well know that those supplies were
resold, and the proceeds used to support the propaganda and
dinners of the Russian emigres. Under-Secretary of State
Davis has recently been reported as confirming this, and
even as asserting that Mr. Bakhmeteff used part of the
American credits directly to support his "Embassy." Mr.
Davis added that American funds had "probably" financed
Mr. Bakhmeteff's recent junket to Paris. Our critics would
do well to tell their readers the whole truth.
THE latest Bolshevist outrage stiffens the remaining
hairs of our heads. The Soviet, it appears, has or
dered everybody in Moscow to go to the theater to see cer
tain Communist propaganda plays. The penalty for refusal
to attend the show is a fine, to be paid not in products of
the Soviet money-presses but in food ticketsa sort of
starvation penalty. Well, against anything like this we
fight to the death. If our Government should insist upon
ordering us to the theater, we don't propose to let any
bureaucrat pick the play for us. Why, Washington might
send us to see Lionel Barrymore in Macbeth, or Barrie's
Mary Rose, or some Midnight Follies, or John Hawthorne,
or John Drew, or Jane Cowlor another bit of anti-bolshevist propaganda like Poldekinbut we forbear. Starva
tion for a week would be endurable by preference. At the
same time we must admit there is something to be said
from the theatrical manager's point of view for this method
of making a long run a certainty. If all Moscow is to go
to it the play will certainly appear for many weeks to
"crowded houses" before it starts on its tour of the pro
vinces, from Petrograd to Lake Baikal. But for us, well,
we should prefer the sleeping sickness to enforced theater
going by order of an A. Mitchell Palmer, or a Burleson,
or a Mayor Hylan, or any other of our Commissars of
Public Safety.
THE spiritual reconstruction of mankind is in actual
progress and signs multiply that the universal city
of the mind, at least, is being rebuilt. In the London
Chapbook for January there is a note by Robert Bridges,
whose official connection with English literature as poet
laureate lends it an added weight, which is a model of the
temper that alone can save us. In November, 1918, Dr.
Bridges published a sonnet in the Times in which, to use
his own analysis, he asserted (1) that ill-treatment of
prisoners was a part of the Prussian war policy; (2) that
no one in Germany protested against it; (3) that the Ger
mans hoped the English would be provoked into similar
barbarities. "It is plain," Dr. Bridges now comments, "that
the second and third charges fall unless the first be true.
And it was not true. Yet I believed it, having been misled,
as most of us were, by the newspapers. And that being
so, I am not ashamed of retracting my words and expressing
sorrow for having written them. And I can see that as I was
misled by the English press, so the Germans probably were
by their own, and that they have the same excuse for some
of their ill-feeling as I have for mine." Thus the fierce and
bloody legends crumble in every land. But we must be on
our guard against those whose business and profit lie in
rebuilding them.
The Nation
328
The
Passing of Mr.
IF history deals gently with Woodrow Wilson it will por

tray him as one who wrought mightily by proclaiming
ideals and painting them in moving terms. If it deals with
him in the truth of justice it must also point out how
universally he failed to achieve those ideals. In so far as it
profits the world to have higher and nobler aims held up
before it, so far shall Mr. Wilson's praises be sung. He
gave first to his countrymen and then to the world new and
lofty visions, and visions and ideals are apt to endure even
after their authors turn aside from them. But how much
does the world really profit when millions believed they
beheld the dawning of a new world and the coming of peace
on earth only to have their spirits utterly dashed, to be
deprived of their last vestige of hope, to lose their last bit
of faith in an earthly salvation? Over the answer to this
question the historians will wrangle for centuries as they
seek to assay one of the most extraordinary figures in his
tory, a man unique in our American Presidency, who had it
within his grasp to rank second only to the great prophets
in the annals of mankind, before whom multitudes came to
prayand remained to scoff.
How far they scoffed with justice, we cannot yet wholly
tell. We are too near the man; the antagonisms such a
coldly intellectual and austere character, such a double per
sonality, inevitably engenders are still too keen, the dis
appointments of Paris too bitter. We cannot yet measure
fully the carrying power of some of the ideals Mr. Wilson
sponsored, nor can we, for instance, tell the outcome of
the League of Nations, which, General Smuts says, is to be
"one of the most potential things in the future of mankind,"
because it "came from the hearts of peoples and embodied
inspirations born out of the sufferings of the late war,"
the League is largely the creation of Mr. Wilson. We cannot
yet gauge how great the influence of Mr. Wilson upon our
domestic political life will prove to be, nor how far the
doctrines of his "New Freedom" will emerge after the black
political reaction in which we find ourselvesif they emerge
at all. Again, profound questions remain unsolved, to which
no critic and no adulator has yet furnished the answers.
What, for instance, changed the Woodrow Wilson who kept
us out of war in November, 1916, and declared, January 22,
1917, that there "must be a peace- without victory. . . .
Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor's
terms imposed upon the vanquished. . . . and would leave
a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms
of peace would rest not permanently but only as upon quick
sand," to the Wilson who sought war in April, 1917? Who
can explain the paradox that the author of the Fourteen
Points returned from Paris claiming that he had achieved
them? Until these deep mysteries are explained we shall
not be able fully to judge Wilson the man.
If we would write in all charity, we must needs point out
how he gave to the country the "modified Rooseveltism"
which he believed it desired ; how he revised the tariff, gave
us the income tax, and aided us to the Federal Reserve
Banking System, which has proved an inestimable benefit.
We must record as well how at that time he led the people
to hope for a real renaissance of liberalism in America, to
look' for the end of the reign of special privilege in the
United States, how he aspired to separate "big business"
from politics, and how he called for a revolution"not a
[Vol. 112, No. 2904
Wilson
bloody revolution; America is not given to the spilling of

blood [!] but a silent revolution," which never came, the
very hope for which vanished as we plunged into war and
into foreign complications. "TJut ever by the side of these
incitements to freedom and progress must be set fateful
queries. Did we, and he, "humanize every process of our
common life" as he prophesied we should under his leader
ship, or "balance the claims of property against the pro
cesses of liberty"? Did democracy come to Princeton be
cause of his gallant fight for it; or purity to New Jersey's
political life because he sat by the open door of the Gov
ernor's room at Trenton and battled for the "Seven Sisters,"
those statutes which were to place the people of that State
once more in possession of their own government? Did our
fateful entrance into the World War bring a durable peace,
or safeguard democracy, or the rights of small nations, or
establish a single one of the Fourteen Pointsthat glorious
1 1 vision of a world remade. Does not every hour's news and
every day's events since Versailles prove to the hilt the
truth of these words of Mr. Wilson :
Only a peace between equals can last; only a peace the very
principle of which is equality and a common participation in
a common benefit. The right state of mind, the right feeling
between nations, is as necessary for a lasting peace as is the
just settlement of vexed questions of territory, or of racial and
national allegiance.
; It was at Buffalo, before the American Federation of
Labor, November 12, 1917, that Mr. Wilson declared that
he had a contempt for pacifists because "I want peace, but
I know how to get it, and they do not." Today one can but
recall these words and marvel how little has been the actual
achievement for peace of the man who uttered them, how
colossal the opportunities lost, how staggering the defeated
idealism, how limited the sum total accomplished. Versailles
answers him now, and perishing Europe, and the bitter
memories upon which the terms of peace indeed "rest not
permanently but only as upon quicksand"; so do children
of a dozen nations that die by the hundred thousand today
because statesmen would have peace with victory; and the
cutting memory of our political prisoners, our tortured sol
diers of conscience, the breaches in our fundamental liber
ties, the bitternesses existing within our citizenship.
Now for truth's sake it must be written down that as
Mr. Wilson passes the curtain falls upon the greatest
tragedy in our history. William Dean Howells once de
clared that there were but two great tragic and dramatic
figures in our past, John Brown and Abraham Lincoln.
Surely we may now add Woodrow Wilson as well. For
what could be greater tragedy than to have ruled eight
years and to have left so few enduring marks upon our insti
tutions; to have preached visions and ideals to one's coun
trymen for eight years, only to yield office to the most
material, the most sightless Administration ever to begin
its rule in America If Mr. Wilson could but have learned
from John Bright that "War is the grave of all good,
whether in administration or legislation, and it throws
power into the hands of the most worthless of the class
of statesmen!" Probably only an Aeschylus could do
Woodrow Wilson justice today. Certainly no element of the
somberest Greek tragedy will be lacking in Washington
when Woodrow Wilson leaves office.
March 2, 1921]
The Nation
329
A Government Savings System

SUGGESTIONS intended to transform our Postal Savings
System into a great people's savings bank have recently
been made by Herbert Hoover, Eugene Meyer, Jr., and others
before the Committee on Reconstruction and Production of
the United States Senate. The existing organization of the
Postal Savings System was justly characterized as inade
quate and unfair, and the advantages of a new policy, both
to the Government and to the public, were set forth in a
way that deserves the widest notice and the most insistent
popular response. Mr. Hoover properly characterized as
insufficient the 2 per cent interest established by law, but
he said further:
Even the 2 per cent of the original act has been defeated
by departmental regulations. An examination of any annual
report will show that they do not receive much in excess of
1 per cent, owing to the regulations in force. For instance,
in 1918, the average deposits were approximately between $125,000,000 and $130,000,000 and the interest paid to depositors
$1,259,000. The same reports will show that profits obtained
by the Government in 1918, chiefly from redeposits in banks at
2% per cent, are given as $1,135,000. If a complete balance
sheet were made from the beginning, this return would prob
ably represent at least a 100 per cent per annum profit on any
capital invested by the Government. Such an operation in pri
vate banks would be dignified by the term "profiteering" and
a public demand would require investigation by the AttorneyGeneral.
Mr. Hoover advocated an immediate change in the depart
mental regulations which allow interest only on sums that
have been on deposit for a whole year from the first of each
month. In place of this method he would carry out the
spirit of the law by paying one-half per cent quarterly on
average deposits. But he would not stop there; he would
provide a higher rate of interest to be paid on money re
maining on deposit for as long as a year, and he would
reorganize the Postal Savings System at the top so as to
give it a more genuine banking directorate.
Mr. Meyer, formerly managing director of the War
Finance Corporation, proposes that the rate of interest on
postal savings be increased from 2 to 4 per cent, and he
would enlarge the number of post offices authorized to re
ceive deposits from 6,500, as at present, to 55,000, the total
number of post offices and sub-stations. He commendably
suggests that the Government, having established the
Federal Reserve System for the benefit of bankers and busi
ness men, ought now to provide banking facilities for the
masses. Mr. Meyer thinks that such arrangement would
bring in enough money in a year to pay off the floating
indebtedness of the Government, amounting to $2,500,000,000, and that subsequently deposits would increase to
an amount sufficient to pay off a large part, if not all, of
the Victory Loan of more than four billion dollars. Mr.
Meyer may or may not be right in these amazing calcula
tions, but he has hit the nail on the head in coming out for
an interest rate of 4 per cent on postal savings deposits.
Certain bankers may cry that it is unsound and impossible,
but we have a right to question their motives. The banking
interests in general fear any curtailment of their activities
and their profits, and will be found opposing any genuine
evolution of the Postal Savings System just as the express
companies, and the railroads that control them, fought sue-
cessfully for so many years the introduction of the parcel

post. The United States was one of the last countries of
the civilized world to establish a parcel post. No one would
think of abolishing it now. Is it also going to bring up the
rearguard in extending to its people banking facilities that
will be safe and at the same time give to the small de
positor a fair return on his savings?
Most European countries do better by the depositors in
their post-office banks than do we. For a period before the
World War France was paying 3 per cent on deposits, and
that at a time when such interest was about the maximum
obtainable on Government bonds or other first-class securi
ties. As a plain business proposition it would seem to be
good sense for the Government to borrow money of the
people at 4 per cent rather than pay more for it in other
ways. The situation is not what it was before we entered
the European War. At that time the Government did not
need to borrow money; it acted as a trustee in accepting
deposits through the post offices as a convenience to the
public Now conditions have changed. The Government
must borrow money to meet its current expenses and in
terest charges. The Treasury only recently put out an issue
of short-time certificates at 5% per cent. These, it goes
without saying, were offered in large denominations to
banks and not to the general public. Such interest is not
for the small investor ; he is still invited to buy war savings
stamps at 4 per cent.
It may be objected that a Postal Savings System paying
4 per cent would injure the savings banks. Mr. Meyer
does not think so. He points out that in countries where
the postal system is strong savings banks are also prosper
ous, and he believes that his plan would stimulate thrift and
save many small investors from fraud and folly. In any
event savings banks could probably find a fair field for
themselves by paying slightly more than the Government.
Of course it is not desirable that savings banks should be
forced or encouraged to raise their rates to borrowers, but
they are already earning more on bonds and other invest
ments than formerly. The savings banks of New York City,
for instance, are paying 4 per cent at the present time; but
they were paying that before the World War, since when
interest rates generally have risen at least 1 per cent.
What are savings banks doing with their larger earnings?
Is it all needed for administrative expenses and salaries?
One thing certainly could not continue if the Postal
Savings System were to pay 4 per cent. The Government
could not go on redepositing in commercial banks at 2V2
per cent. This is the crying scandal of the present system,
that the Government should take advantage of the poor and
ignorant to get their money at 1 per cent, that it should
make a present of it to the banks at 21/2 per cent, and that
the latter, according to evidence furnished by the Con
troller of the Currency, should then extort from 10 to 30
per cent on some of their loans! We may as well face the
issue frankly. The Postal Savings System, as it exists, is
not conducted to benefit the people; it is run so as not to
worry the banks. Are we going to continue it on that basis,
or are we going to turn it into a great Government sav
ings institution, paying to the depositor the full value that
his money earns minus only administrative expenses?
330
The Nation
North Dakota and the Banks

THE newspapers lately have printed dispatches telling
of an agreement between leaders of the National Non
partisan League and a group of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and
Chicago bankers whereby the latter undertook to help North
Dakota out of its financial difficulties at the price of the
State's abandoning important parts of its industrial pro
gram. Early reports gave the outstanding demands of
the bankers as the liquidation of the State-owned Bank of
North Dakota and its reorganization as a rural credits insti
tution, like that of South Dakota; a reduction of the powers
of the Industrial Commission; and the abandonment of the
Home Building Association. In return, the financiers of
fered to take $6,000,000 worth of State bonds. On behalf
of the League it was denied that the concessions exacted
were anywhere near as sweeping as these, while later reports
are that the banks have decided not to take the bonds even
on the conditions outlined.
Two things, however, are already clear. One is that,
whatever happens, the North Dakota industrial program is
likely to be curtailed or postponed in substantial particu
lars. If the State cannot float its bond issue direct, ita
own officers will have to apply the knife; if bankers take
the bonds, they will demand their pound of flesh. The other
thing that needs no further revelation is the frank, direct,
and unabashed control of the policies of a sovereign State
exercised by the financial interests in and about it. North
Dakota's plight is due mainly to these financial interests
and only in a lesser degree to recent hard times. Had the
State been allowed to float its bonds when they were ap
proved by referendum of the people in 1919, it would prob
ably have been spared its present difficulties. But the flour
mills, the elevator companies, and, beyond all, the banks
saw a chance for a first blow at the system of marketing
and credit service at cost for which the farmers were work
ing, and the bond issue was stopped by injunction. It was
not until last June that obstruction was finally cleared away
by a favorable decision by the United States Supreme Court.
By that time the general financial situation had made the
sale of a bond issue difficult. On top of this setback another
monkey-wrench was thrown into the machinery last Novem
ber. The law creating the Bank of North Dakota had re
quired that all State, county, and municipal funds be de
posited in it, but at the last election enemies of the League
succeeded in getting through a referendum making it pos
sible for counties and municipalities to withdraw their
money. This depleted the already insufficient funds of the
Bank of North Dakota, and it was obliged to call its loans
to country banks. All this was happening at a time of great
industrial depression among farmers, and the result was
the closing of many small financial institutions, not as
many in North Dakota, however, as failed in Georgia in
the same period. The country banks were recently re
ported as ready to cry quits and help straighten the State's
finances, but have apparently lacked the resources or the
willingness to do so. The big banks of Minneapolis, St. Paul,
and Chicago" were then called upon, but their interest in
saving the financial situation in North Dakota is, of course,
less than their desire to save the system of exploiting the
farmer that has made some of them rich. Hence the pound
of flesh which they demand.
Probably there is still a way out, without compromise, if
[Vol. 112, No. 2904
the North Dakota officials have the courage and the time
to take it. Since the bond issue was first offered, the rate
of interest has been raised to a yield of 5% per cent,
which with the fact that the securities are exempt from
income tax should make them attractive to investors. There
is every reason to believe that these securities of one of our
great agricultural States could be sold direct to the public
if offered in the East and properly advertised. But in any
event the industrial program of North Dakota is not dead,
nor have the farmers of that State failed in their effort
toward economic freedom. At the worst, the result is only
postponed, and regardless of what happens in North Da
kota, similar experiments will be made elsewhere. North
Dakota's plight is a shining example of ruthless and open
nullification of our present democracy when it attempts to
run counter to the great financial interests that are the
dominating power. Within the present year, these interests
have floated a loan for South Dakota, without conditions,
because that State has not challenged their suzerainty. The
position of North Dakota ought to convince all observers
of the futility of mere political action. The real lesson for
the workers is not to keep out of banking but to get into
it up to the neck. Money is the munitions of the industrial
fight, and the workers can no more expect a supply from
those who oppose them than the Allies could have borrowed
shells from Germany during the European War. It is time
for organized labor, farmers, and small business men to stop
railing at the money power, and to begin to compete with it.
Our Aliens and Our Arts

THE rumor that the Drama League intended to bar
Charles Gilpin from its annual dinner because he is a
Negro, though it had been voted that he belonged among the
ten persons who during the past year have made the most
distinguished contribution to dramatic art in the United
States, called forth a protest among the other guests of
honor which was as gratifying as it was prompt and em
phatic. Seven of themJacob Ben-Ami, Dudley Digges,
Mary Garden, Robert Edmond Jones, Eugene G. O'Neill,
Lee Simonson, and Gilda Varesiannounced that if Mr.
Gilpin were not invited they themselves would not attend;
neither, it is probable, would David Belasco and Arthur
Hopkins, though they made no announcement; and the
members of the Theater Guild issued a public statement
directed against this alleged discrimination. That the
rumor has subsequently been called hasty by the Drama
League and that matters may be adjusted does not de
stroy the significance of the episode. These distinguished
artists have clearly shown that they leave to the gentlemen
of the Ku Klux Klan and to the mob, North or South, the
dainty business of discriminating against a man by reason
of his African descent, no matter how engaging his person
ality or how distinguished his accomplishment. Whatever
the United States may be, the world of art is a republic.
The episode is the more significant in view of the contro
versies here and there stirring over the true color and
quality of the national genius. At one extreme are the rockbound nativists, the besotted Anglo-Saxons, who point with
rapture to the Puritan tradition and with pride to the older
days of Little America before the Civil War. This party
tends to a certain strange combination of violent patriotism
and nostalgic hankering for England which makes them
March 2, 1921]
The Nation
often ridiculous. At the other extreme are certain coteries

in New York that know and care nothing for the traditions
of the nation's heroic days, neglect the American past, ridi
cule the home-bred simplicity of the bulk of the population.
This party is as a rule contemptuously cosmopolitan ; and it
too is often ridiculous. The conflict between the two brings
up strange thoughts in the philosophical spectator. Con
sider, for instance, the war of the Anglo-Saxon party upon
the party of the Continent. For the most part the argu
ment turns upon the nine points of possession. "We were
here first," say the Anglo-Saxons, "and we have borne the
burden and heat of the day. The land and culture are ours."
When we hear this we cannot help thinking of the descend
ants of the Dutch who settled New Netherland. In Irving's
day they were still grumbling at the nasal, grabbing saints
to the east of them. Nor can we help thinking about the
Red men whom Dutch and English alike encroached upon
and crowded out. Once the Anglo-Saxons start the argu
ment for priority they start toward the ludicrous. As to
the culture of the United States being merely that of Eng
land transplanted, the notion is silly. Many elements have
gone into the mass, and new elements are being added every
year. The new come in as a rule on the proletarian level
and only gradually rise to expression and significance; but
they do rise and they are making a new nation of us. Yet
the fabric of American culture is primarily English, no
matter what patterns have been written on it.
Why may not brothers dwell together in unity? We have
come hither from all the corners of the earth for motives
not half so different as we sometimes think. The children
of the Puritan who came to escape the religious persecu
tions of the ecclesiastical hierarchy of England in the sev
enteenth century ought to understand the mood of the Jew
who in the twentieth has come to escape the Black Hundreds
of Russia. The children of the Scotch-Irish whom the Brit
ish government drove out by political and economic
oppression in the eighteenth century have no right to
withhold their sympathy from the children of the Ger
mans whom the German governments drove out by similar
oppressions a century later. A natural bond unites the chil
dren of our former slaves with all who in various genera
tions of our history have been exploited and despised toilers
at our heaviest tasks. Shall those of us who were here first
turn now and persecute the new-comers as the Puritans did
when heresy crept in? Shall those who came later over
power and oppress their hosts as the Protestants served the
Catholics in Maryland? Our hope lies rather in our fusion
of many cultures. We are still, for all the changes that have
taken place in three hundred years, a laboratory for the Old
World, where a great human experiment is being carried
on. Of late we have proved lamentably recreant to our duty
in the political sphere: hatreds and recriminations and
tyrannies have sprung up; the established order has set
itself against all progress in the direction toward which we
have always moved. How much, then, is it essential that we
shall keep these antagonisms out of the sphere of art and
letters and learning, where they must always be meaning
less ! Let us have schools which vary in their programs as
all varied cultures do; Byron and Wordsworth were con
temporaries, Brahms and Wagner, Rousseau and Voltaire.
Let realism war with romance, naturalism with traditional
ism, perennial beauty with temporary utility. But in the
name of Apollo and all the joyous gods let these matters not
be marred by snubs due to racial or national antipathies!
331
The Wicked Blanton

WHEN Representative Blanton of Texas recently was
howled down by his colleagues in the House of
Representatives, the papers connected the affair with his
campaign for the Democratic nomination for United States
Senator from Texas. As a matter of fact, his distinguished
colleagues do not care a fig for the Senatorial primaries in
the Lone Star State; but they had a grudge against Repre
sentative Blanton. He is not clubby.
If there is one thing which brings a Congressman into
general detestation among his colleagues, it is a refusal to
be clubby. The House usually meets about eleven in the
morning, but very few Congressmen find it convenient to
attend at so early an hour. There is seldom a quorum
present. Business has to be done, and under the rules of
the House bills can be passed even without a quorum if no
squeamish or unclubby Congressman calls attention to the
fact. But morning after morning, just as a vote is immi
nent, Mr. Blanton, of Texas, or Mr. McClintic, of Okla
homa, rises and cries out, "Mr. Speaker, I make the
point of order that there is no quorum present." "It is
clear that there is no quorum present," the Speaker re
plies. "The Doorkeeper will close the doors, the Sergeantat-Arms will notify the absentees, and the Clerk will call
the roll." So the gong sounds, and the indignant Congress
men in the House Office Building are routed out, and have to
parade through the subway into the Capitol where they
stay just long enough to answer to their names, and then
trot back to their offices. It is truly very distressing.
So in high Congressional style the gentlemen from the
various States of the Union planned a surprise party for
Mr. Blanton. It seems that Mr. Blanton had sent a state
ment to the newspapers of his State which gave the im
pression that he had stood like a lone stone wall against
the attempts of his fellow-Congressmen to raise their own
pay. Mr. Sumners, also of Texas, led the counter-attack:
Here is a man standing in his place here who has taken an
oath with the people of my nation to support and defend its
institutions, and he sends a statement to Texas that is false
as hell. ... I would suffer that right arm torn from its
shoulder this dayand I believe it is true of the other brave
men from my Statebefore we would undertake at this time
to increase our salary. . . . Ah, they say that all is fair
in politics. My God, all fair in politics in an hour of the
world's peril when my nation stands upon the highest pinnacle
ever reached by a nation in the world's history, and holds in
its hands the hope of the ages!
Mr. Sumners indignantly declared that it was not Mr.
Blanton who had stopped the pay increase; he added:
We used to have an old coon dog who was no good to trail
a coon and who was no good to fight a live one. When you
shot a coon out of a tree and he was" dead, and when every
dog in the neighborhood knew that he was dead, then this old
coon dog of ours was the fightenest dog on earth.
Mr. Blanton attempted to reply. But Mr. Madden, Mr.
Snyder, Mr. Knutson, Mr. Hicks, Mr. VenJrie, Mr. Camp
bell, and Mr. Strong objected loudly and at length. Mr.
Blanton could only state that Mr. Sumners also wanted the
nomination for Senator from Texas. Whereupon, having
devoted the better part of an hour, with an unusually full
attendance, to punishment of Mr. Blanton, the House turned
to other matters. It is inspiring to have Congress rise to
such heights of patriotic indignation against the unclubby.
[Vol. 112, No. 2904
The Nation
332
Alice Paul
Pulls
the
Strings
By FREDA KIRCHWEY
THE spirit of the National Woman's Party convention
at Washington last week was summed up in two strik
ing sentences. Said a disheartened delegate after the last
day's session : "This is the machine age." Said one of the
leaders of the Party to another delegate who tried to plead
for a free consideration of a real program : "At a convention
human intelligence reaches its lowest ebb." That was what
it amounted to: the leaders acted on the theory of an
amiable contempt for their followers; the rank and file,
either cynically or enthusiastically, watched the wishes of
the leaders become the law of the convention. With quiet
precision the Woman's Party machinea veritable tank
rolled over the assembly, crushing protestants of all sorts,
leaving the way clearfor what? If anyone left the con
vention with a distinct idea of what the Party will do now
that it has solemnly disbanded and solemnly reorganized,
it is, perhaps, Alice Paul and the Executive Committee and
some members of the Advisory Council and a few State
chairmen. The rank and file, not realizing that their in
telligence was at a low ebb, are vaguely disappointed. They
do not know what their party will do; they only know that
no action was taken in behalf of the Negro women, who have
not yet got the vote in spite of the Nineteenth Amendment ;
that birth control and maternity endowment and most of
the questions that stir the minds of modern women were
ignored; that disarmament was ruled out; and that the
program finally adoptedthe majority report of the resolu
tions committeedeclared vaguely against "legal disabili
ties" and for "equality" leaving the future definition of
those terms and their translation into action to the execu
tive board. The only specific application of the word equal
ity appeared in the demand that it be "won and maintained
in any association of nations that may be established"!
It may, of course, be asserted that since this mild and
hypothetical program was adopted by a vote of the conven
tion it was therefore the will of the convention, but one is
forced to wonder whether the result would have been the
same if a dissenting delegate or a minority committeeman
had presented the winning report, and if Alice Paul's pro
gram had included disarmament or birth control or the
enfranchisement of Negro women. I, for one, would back
Miss Paul's chances on either side she chose to support.
When the minority report recommending disarmament was
before the house it was opposed vehemently by several ardent
militarists of the order who declare: "I am as much against
war as anybody in this room, but when the world is on
fire ..." From the point of view of the leaders this
opposition was undesirable; the majority report would only
be weakened by militarist adherents. Presently the floor
was taken by a well-known pacifist who set herself squarely
on the side of immediate, complete disarmament and then
proceeded on otiier grounds to an effective attack on the
disarmament program. Later in the day this same pacifist
who is also a radical and a feministhad a program of
her own in the field in opposition to the majority report.
This new dissenting program was specific. It demanded,
in addition to the removal of the legal disabilities of
women, the rewriting of the existing laws of marriage,
divorce, guardianship, and sexual morality on a basis of
equality; the abolition of illegitimacy; the establishment of
motherhood endowment and of the legal right of a woman

who chooses homemaking as her profession to an equal share
in the family income; the repeal of all laws against the
dissemination of information regarding birth control.
These proposals were sternly opposed by the machine.
The leaders declared that such a program was too vague;
they declared that it was too definite; they declared that it
was too comprehensive; they claimed that the majority pro
gram could be interpreted to include all those demands and
more besides. But in expounding the majority program
they were cautious ; not one of the leaders specifically stated,
for example, that it should be interpreted to cover the
question of birth control. "And after all, that's the acid
test," said one of the younger delegates. The new program
received the support of a few of the less orthodox members
of the Advisory Council, but its most persuasive advocates
were among the young Party workers who charged that the
majority report offered no more inspiration than the pro
grams of other women's organizations which they had long
been trained to look down upon as cautious, respectable, dull.
Again the leaders were worried; they couldn't let the idea
get about that only middle-aged respectability stood for the
majority report. And presently a couple of the younger
workers rose from their seats and opposed the radical pro
gram and swore by all the suffrage prophets that the major
ity report offered inspiration enough for any feminist. And
it was well known to those who hung about in the lobby or
watched the play from the wings, that Alice Paul had
spoken the word necessary to make the pacifist oppose dis
armament and the young radicals oppose the radical
program.
Some day the story of the working of the National
Women's Party machine will be told. It will be an interest
ing story, full of strange contradictions. It will tell of valiant
self-sacrifice and magnificent defiance coupled with an in
congruous willingness to appeal to the tradition of feminine
weakness. It will be full of idealism and steadfast purpose
and yet of a readiness to use any trick or pretense that
might bring that purpose nearer to fulfilment. It will tell
of independence and individual heroism existing side by
side with obedience bordering on subservience. It will show
sympathy and ruthlessness walking together. But that story
cannot be written until the people who know it get out from
under the spell of the Alice Paul legend. Today any attempt
would be futile.
The effortsfinally successfulof the birth control ad
vocates to secure a chance to speak at the convention would
form an amusing chapter of that story. At the second day's
session representatives of women's organizations with legis
lative programs made brief addresses stating their aims.
Even old-time enemies of the Woman's Party were given a
place. For weeks before the convention the head of the
Voluntary Parenthood League had been in correspondence
with the Party leaders demanding her chance to be heard.
First the leaders refused, then they demurred, finally they
surrendered; but their written objections to the presence
of this organization on the platform of the convention were
redolent with the faint fragrance of Victorian delicacy and
reserve.
The effortswholly unsuccessfulof the representatives
March 2, 1921]
The Nation
of the colored women would form a tragic chapter of the

same story. A delegation of sixty women sent by colored
women's organizations in fourteen States arrived in Wash
ington several days before the convention. They requested
an interview with Alice Paul so that they might take up
with her the question of the disfranchisement of the women
of their race. They were told Miss Paul was too busy to
see them. They said they would wait till she had time.
Finally, grudgingly, she yielded. The colored women pre
sented their case in the form of a dignified memorialwhich
read as follows:
We have come here as members of various organizations and
from different sections representing the five million colored
women of this country. We are deeply appreciative of the
heroic devotion of the National Woman's Party to the women's
suffrage movement and of the tremendous sacrifices made under
your leadership in securing the passage of the Nineteenth
Amendment.
We revere the names of the pioneers to whom you will do
honor while here, not only because they believed in the in
herent rights of women, but of humanity at large, and gave
themselves to the fight against slavery in the United States.
The world has moved forward in these seventy years and
the colored women of this country have been moving with it.
They know the value of the ballot, if honestly used, to right
the wrongs of any class. Knowing this, they have also come
today to call your attention to the flagrant violations of the
intent and purposes of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment in
the elections of 1920. These violations occurred in the Southern
States, where is to be found the great mass of colored women,
and it has not been made secret that wherever white women
did not use the ballot, it was counted worth while to relinquish
it in order that it might be denied colored women.
Complete evidence of violations of the Nineteenth Amendment
could be obtained only by Federal investigation. There is,
however, sufficient evidence available to justify a demand for
such an inquiry. We are handing you herewith a pamphlet
with verified cases of the disfranchisement of our women.
The National Woman's Party stands in the forefront of
the organizations that have undergone all the pains of travail
to bring into existence the Nineteenth Amendment. We can
not then believe that you will permit this amendment to be
so distorted in its interpretation that it shall lose its power
and effectiveness. Five million women in the United States
can not be denied their rights without all the women of the
United States feeling the effect of that denial. No women
are free until all are free.
Therefore, we are assembled to ask that you will use your
influence to have the convention of the National Woman's Party
appoint a special committee to ask Congress for an investiga
tion of the violations of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment in
the elections of 1920.
Miss Paul was indifferent to this appeal and resented the
presence of the delegation. Their chance Of being heard at
the convention was gone. A Southern organizer told the one
active supporter of the colored womena white woman and
a delegate from New Yorkthat the Woman's Party was
pledged not to raise the race issue in the South; that this
was the price it paid for ratification. But no such sinister
motive is necessary to explain the treatment of the colored
delegation; they were simply an interruption, an obstacle
to the smooth working of the machine. Their leading mem
bers were not allowed to ride in the elevators of the Hotel
Washington where the convention was held, until finally
they made a stand for their rights. And only by the use of
tactics bordering on Alice Paul's own for vigor and persis
tence, did their spokesmanthe delegate from New York
get a moment to present a resolution in their behalfa reso
333
lution which was promptly defeated and which left the

question precisely where it stood.
The attitude of Alice Paul and her supporters toward
these disturbers of the peaceNegro women and birth con
trol advocates alikewas the attitude of all established au
thorities. "Why do these people harass us?" asked Miss
Paul. "Why do they want to spoil our convention?" The
answer, that never occurred to her, was this: "For the very
same reason that made you disturb the peace and harass
the authorities in your peculiarly effective and irritat
ing way: because they want to further the cause they
believe in."
In the lobby, among the futile opponents of the machine,
there was much discussion of the cause of their leaders'
hostility to all that was new and clear-cut. The great fight
ing issue was gone; if the organization was to continue it
must turn its attention to other issues and work for them
one at a time or several together, not only in Congress but
in the States. Would the leaders evolve out of their vague
program an issue which they could again attack with mili
tary precision and on which they could hope again to raise
their disciplined volunteer army? Would they justify their
tactics, as they had so often done before, by the brilliant suc
cess of their results ? Or were they only greedy of power,
eager to hold the final decision close in their own hands,
unwilling to trust to the desires of their followers? Or
were they, perhaps, only half awake to the fulness of life?
Absorbed in a task of immense proportions, for years they
had forfeited, as soldiers must, the common enterprises of
lifelove, marriage, children, the economic struggle. Had
they thereby lost touch with the plain demands of modern
women who are more interested in their opportunties for
personal expansion and economic freedom and the right to
bear children when they choose than they are in the presence
of women in the councils of an unborn or dying league of
nations? The opponents of the machine never decided
those questions ; the Alice Paul legend hung too closely over
them and its phrases sounded in their ears through the
closed doors of the convention hall.
The Days
By DAVID ROSENTHAL
The days come upon the world
Like wolves;
Yet there is no armor
Against the days.
There are doors of iron
Against the fists of wind and rain;
There are walls
Against the storm;
But where shall the stones and hills run
When they are besieged by the days?
Where shall a man hide?
*
In a deep cave?
*
In a house of stone?
The days will slink in
And open their mouths
Like wolves;
For wherever a man is
There is a hungry day eating him.
334
What
The Nation
Wage
Reductions
Mean
By GEOEGE SOULE
IF I were an employer announcing a wage reduction at
this moment I should feel a little embarrassed. It is
taken for granted that I should be a just employer, wanting
to do the best possible thing by my workmen, and that I
should be well informed. My information would show me
that during the rise in the price level from 1914 to 1917,
the average wage did not rise as rapidly as the cost of
living. In these three years the wage-earners were, on
the whole, able to buy fewer things than they had bought
before the war. During the same period, however, my
profits and buying power had increased enormouslyeven
after the inroads of taxes. Perhaps I was abstemious,
perhaps I invested the greater part of my profits in my
own or some other business, but the chances are I loosened
the purse strings a little. During short periods in 1918
and 1919 some of my employeesbut not allpossibly did
reach and surmount the price level. Yet their advance was
not comparable to the rise in business earnings, which were
piled up in unparalleled profits and surpluses. Now the
cost of living has gone down a little from the peak of last
July, but not more than 15 per cent. The earnings
of labor have automatically been reduced by the fall in
over-time and full-time employment. No workman is now
as well off as he was in 1913 unless his income amounts to
twice as much as it did in that year. Yet I am going to
him with, perhaps, a 20 per cent wage reduction. I am
about to push him down again below his pre-war level. By
doing this I admit that in dealing with my workmen
it is a case of "heads I win, tails you lose." They lost coming
up by being late, and they lose going down by being early.
But it wa3 taken for granted that I am not only well
informed, but also just. Why, then, do I enforce this
premature wage reduction? Let us assume that my policy
in not raising wages more rapidly from 1914 to 1919 was
necessary. But why do I compound the injustice now?
There are, doubtless, many ungenerous employers who
are reducing wages merely because unemployment gives
them the opportunity. For them there is no excuse, and
the remedy is the simple one of a resistance as strong as
organized labor is able to muster. But I am not in that
class. What other reason can I give? My workmen point
to their wages and the cost of living. They point to my
former profits and my surplus. And they ask me to explain
the discrepancy.
In the first place, I demonstrate that my former earnings
do not help me now. I spent them as they came along.
Part went into my salary and the other executive salaries.
Part went into taxes. Part went into dividends paid to my
shareholders. Some, perhaps, went into loans to finance
my customersespecially customers abroad who are taking
a long time to pay. It is quite possible that a large slice
went into stock dividendsthat is, that I issued new capi
tal stock and gave if away to myself and to other owners
on the expectation of continued large earnings and this
part now represents a liability instead of an asset. Part
went into new plant and machinery which is now lying idle
and must be carried on my books at a loss for awhile. And
part went into surplus. Profits, as such, have largely
vanished with the collapse of business. Even my goods on
[Vol. 112, No. 2904
hand, which I have called an asset and reckoned as profits,

have shrunk so much in price that my profits are less than
I thought. I cannot pay new wages out of past profits.
But what about my surplus? If I have been wise, a large
share of my earnings were not spent, but "saved." Yet the
surplus does not consist of gold dollars in my safe, or in
the safe of a bank. Of course I wanted to draw interest
on it, and so I used it to buy stocks and bonds, mortgages
or other commercial paper. The interest which I derive
from these sources may be large, but most of it, in the
shortage of present profits, must be applied to the payment
of interest on my own bonds and loans. Not until after
all other demands are met can it be used for wages. And
the surplus itself cannot be converted into currency without
selling the stocks and bonds in which it is invested. But
the market is now at its lowest ebb for years. If I should
sell now, I would lose enormously, and since my first duty
is to the owners of my company rather than to its em
ployees, I do not sell unless I must in order to meet abso
lutely necessary expenses and keep out of bankruptcy.
The only other way I can get moneyaside from present
earningswith which to pay wages, is to borrow it. But
the rate of interest is high, and the chances are that I have
already borrowed to the limit in order to meet the demands
of my creditors, whose claims of course come before those
of the workers. And so the banks will not let me have any
more money. Therefore there are only two choices before
me, aside from failure. One is to shut down entirely and
pay my workmen nothing. The other is to reduce wages.
There is no flaw in my logic. It is the logic of present
facts. Why, then, should it embarrass me to explain it to
my employees? Because in doing so I have demonstrated
that industry cannot be operated without injustice to the
wage-earner. Those who are not responsible for the man
agement of industry suffer most from its mismanagement.
I have proved that the rights of all the various classes of
owners come before the subsistence of the worker. The
earnings of industry are salted away in such a manner that
the workman cannot get at them. My profit has shrunk,
to be sure, and it shrank before I cut wages. But the extra
stock which I issued has to be protected. The owners of
the surplus have to be protected. The holders of bonds and
loans have to be protected. There is no protection left for
the worker. Only he has no legal claim on meexcept for
yesterday's wages. He has not capitalized his earning
power. Others have capitalized it, and others own it. I
cannot fire my stockholders and bond-owners and banks,
but I can fire my workmen. I cannot lower the interest on
my loans, but I can lower wages. Wages represent the
most liquid element in the situation.
When I lower wages, then, I make one of two damaging
admissions. The first is that I am a reckless autocrat.
The second is that the system of production and distribu
tion is arranged in such a way as to bilk the man who
works but does not own, in spite of anyone's good inten
tions. Can I blame him for protesting with all his might?
He protests often without knowing why he suffershe
judges simply, according to the obvious results. In this
case he is likely to lose, because at the moment I happen
to be stronger than he is. When he does know what is the
matter, will he not protest in such a way as to eliminate
the favored classes in business? If I wish to avoid that
probability, it is up to me to devise some way of making
the earnings of labor a first charge on industry.
The Nation
March 2, 1921]
Labor
Is
Watching
335
Its
Leaders
By ANNE MARTIN
" T ABOR, look out for your leaders. These leaders you
J4 raise up are often your chief betrayers . . . and
steer the workers into the shambles of capitalist political
parties on election day," was the preelection warning of
Debs from Atlanta prison.
Many workers in Nevada realize its truth. They are in
revolt against the policy carried out in the election last fall
by leaders of the Plumb Plan League and by Labor, its
mouthpiece. The League is composed of sixteen railway
labor organizations, twelve of which are craft unions and
are affiliated with the American Federation of Labor. The
other four are the great railway brotherhoods. All have
local unions in Nevada.
The chief of the politicians in control at the Machinists'
Building, the Washington headquarters of the Plumb Plan
League, is Mr. Edward Keating, Democrat, ex-Congressman
from Colorado, manager of the League and of Labor, and
closely affiliated with Mr. Gompers, who is opposed to the
Plumb plan. Mr. Keating is also chairman of the legisla
tive committee of the sixteen organizations of railway
workers composing the League. These workers support the
headquarters and the paper with their hard-earned dollars,
and pay Mr. Keating's salary, in the hope of getting a Con
gress elected that Will repeal the Esch-Cummins railroad
law, "the crime of 1920," and put through the Plumb plan.
Nevada, the "battle-born" Republican State, admitted
into the Union in 1864 to give President Lincoln increased
strength in the Senate, has for many years been under the
control of the Democratic Party. Although one of the larg
est in area, it has the smallest population and vote of any
State, owing to merciless exploitation of its natural re
sources and public utilities. The average vote in recent
years has been about 25,000. As several thousand of these
are votes of organized railway labor, the Democratic poli
ticians and "dukes of railway labor" in Washington con
trolling the Plumb Plan League and its paper had high hopes
of reelecting a Democrat to the United States Senate from
Nevada, in spite of the impending national Republican
victory. Nevada was the one Western State which they
counted on winning.
In the late election there were three candidates for
the United States Senate: Ex-Governor T. L. Oddie, the
Republican nominee; Senator C. B. Henderson, the Demo
cratic incumbent, and myself, nominated as an Independent
by petition of several thousand voters of the State.
Throughout the campaign my two opponents offered the
people no pledges but their party platforms, and a tariff
on beef and wool to win the support of the live-stock in
terests. Neither, of course, stood for the Plumb plan or
the repeal of the Esch-Cummins law. Senator Henderson
as a railroad and corporation lawyer, backed by the ex
ploiters of raw materials and public utilities of the State,
the railroads, banks, mine operators, and land and live-stock
companies, was both hand and tongue tied on these issues.
His record on the Esch-Cummins law was not to his credit.
It is true that he played up to his Nevada labor constituency
by voting against the anti-strike provisions of the Cummins
bill, but throughout the long "struggle" in the Senate for the
legislation demanded by the railroads he did not open his
lips to point out its iniquities against labor and the people.
I made the chief issue of my campaign against him his
failure to fight against or even vote against the Esch-Cum
mins act, and charged him with dodging his vote on the
most vital issue of his term of office. His defense was that
I misrepresented him and that he had opposed the bill. But
all that the Congressional Record reveals in the way of op
position is his stereotyped statement at the final vote: "I
have a general pair with the junior Senator from Illinois.
I am informed if he were present he would vote 'yea.' I
therefore withhold my vote. If at liberty to vote, I would
vote 'nay.' " Organized labor in Nevada learned in this
campaign that the pair is used chiefly as a subterfuge to
deceive the voters, and that no sincere and determined
fighter against a bad bill allows himself to be tied up and
prevented by a general pair from voting against it. This
lesson I drove home in my speeches and in paid advertise
ments in the newspapers at twenty cents a line, my only
means of communicating with the people, since the columns
of the press were closed to me.
As the Independent candidate I went before the people
on a platform advocating the general principles of the Plumb
plan, the repeal of the Esch-Cummins law, the right of labor
to strike, and the restoration of civil liberty. During a
five months' campaign I made one hundred and fifty speeches
for these issues, traveling nine thousand miles by automo
bile into remote mining camps and rural districts. I
reached practically every precinct in the State. As the
campaign developed, my platform was indorsed by the twelve
railway craft unions and by miners' and other labor unions
of Nevada, which pledged themselves to do everything in
their power for my election. Indorsement of my two op
ponents was denied on the ground that their labor records
were unsatisfactory. My Democratic opponent had been
supported by Nevada railway labor in 1918, during the war,
but it refused to indorse him in this election because of his
failure to fight and vote against the Esch-Cummins law.
Officials of the American Federation of Labor and leaders
of railway labor in Washington, directed by Mr. Keating,
made persistent efforts and finally peremptory demands for
the unqualified indorsement of Senator Henderson, on the
ground that his labor record was "100 per cent favorable."
But the railway unions remained steadfast in their indorse
ment of me and the principles for which I was fighting.
Labor was beginning to "watch its leaders."
Interviews with Mr. Keating, Mr. Jewell, Mr. Stone, Mr.
Lee, Mr. Wills, and other "grand chiefs" last spring in
Washington, after I had announced my candidacy for the
Senate, prepared me for opposition from national labor offi
cials, but I never dreamed to what lengths they would go.
Mr. Keating told me that my fight against the Esch-Cum
mins law and for the Plumb plan, which I had already be
gun in newspaper and magazine articles, did not interest
him; that Senator Henderson's record of "not voting" on
the railway law because of a general pair was entirely satis
factory to labor officials; that his failure to fight against
it was also satisfactory; that he had done all that was ex
pected by not voting for it! I asked Mr. Keating to keep
"hands off" in Nevada if he would not support me in the
336
The Nation
fight I was making for the principles of his organization,

but he would give no assurances. Within a few days I
learned that an editorial commending my platform, written
by Mr. Frederic C. Howe, then a writer on Labor, was sup
pressed. I learned that Mr. Keating used his power as
manager of the paper, which had a large circulation in
Nevada, to kill all news of my candidacy, although avowedly
capitalist newspapers in the country were featuring it. I
knew that he ignored many letters of protest from Nevada
labor leaders against his policy of silence. But disillusioned
as I am about the leaders of the Plumb Plan League, I was
not expecting the misrepresentations that were poured into
the paper as soon as my candidacy developed strength.
Here is a sample of a series of articles published during
the critical weeks before election, designed to turn the labor
vote from me to my Democratic opponent:
HENDERSON NEVER "DODGED" A VOTE IN U. S.
SENATE
Record on Cummins-Esch Bill Right at Every Point
Senator Charles B. Henderson of Nevada was one of the
few senators who voted right on every roll call during the long
fight over the Cummins-Esch railroad bill. Now he is a candi
date for reelection, and the representatives of special privilege
are turning heaven and earth to defeat him.
They are persistently circulating the report that he "dodged"
the final vote on the Cummins-Esch bill. The story is without
a shadow of foundation, but it is being circulated all over
Nevada.
The fact is that Henderson was in Washington during the
entire struggle. When the final vote was taken on the CumminsEsch bill he was paired with Senator McCormick of Illinois, who
was known to be in favor of the bill. In order that his position
might not be misunderstood, however, Henderson took the floor
and publicly announced that he was opposed to the bill, but that
because of his pair with Senator McCormick it was impossible
for him to vote. On the same roll call Senator La Follette of
Wisconsin was also paired against the bill, but no one has ever
thought of suggesting that La Follette was "dodging." Hen
derson's opponents figure that Miss Anne Martin, who is an
independent candidate for Senator, will get a sufficient number
of votes from the workers to permit the reactionary candidate
on the Republican ticket to slip through. They know that Miss
Martin has not a ghost of a show of being elected, but they
figure that every vote cast for her will be at least half a vote
for their candidate.
Senator Henderson stood by the workers when they needed a
friend, and they will be guilty of gross ingratitude if they do
not stand by him now. The trick of running independent can
didates in order to divide the labor vote is an old one, and it has
proven successful on too many occasions. It is to be hoped that
the Nevada voters will not be deceived by it.Labor, October
23, 1920.
This article is, of course, most misleading in its reference
to Senator La Follette. It fails to state that the Wisconsin
Senator made a series of powerful speeches against the
railroad law and did his utmost to defeat it. He was paired
on the final vote owing to absence caused by serious illness.
The Nevada Senator was present throughout the "fight,"
but did not lift a finger against the law which mortgages
the people to the railroads, and on the final vote allowed
an absent Senator to kill his vote by a general pair from
which he did not seek release. But Labor insistently adver
tised his record as 100 per cent favorable, while continuing
to align me with "reactionary tricksters." Its articles were
copied throughout Nevada by newspapers supporting Mr.
Henderson.
[Vol. 112, No. 2904
There was but one possible result of this deliberate cam

paign of national labor leaders against their own cause.
On election day the labor vote was split between Senator
Henderson and myself. Mr. Oddie, the Republican candi
date, was elected. The vote in round numbers was 11,000
for Mr. Oddie, 10,000 for Mr. Henderson, and 5,000 for me.
The figures, however, do hot indicate the State-wide senti
ment which existed for my election. Nevada has the largest
proportionate shifting labor population of any State. It
has twice as many men as women, but half these men are
disqualified as voters. Thousands of miners, railway, and
ranch workers who supported me were forced by labor con
ditions to move from place to place and were thus disfran
chised under our election laws. We were also seriously
handicapped by lack of money for necessary educational
work to counteract the misrepresentations so widely circu
lated through Labor. With an addition of $2,000 to our
campaign fund we could have secured a much larger vote.
Labor expressed itself about the Nevada election in the
following editorial (November 13, 1920) :
Because the workers of Nevada divided their forces on elec
tion day Senator Charles B. Henderson will be succeeded by a
reactionary. Thus a promising young progressive is retired to
private life and labor is once more charged with forgetting its
friends.
The trick by which Henderson was defeated is as old as the
history of American politics, and the amazing thing is that the
workers of Nevada "fell for it."
Henderson fought the railroad bill from the beginning to the
end of the long struggle. . . . His record was as nearly 100
per cent right as any friend of labor could desire. Every re
sponsible leader of labor in the country eagerly certified to the
truth of that statement.
"Big Business" was anxious to defeat him but realized that
it could not induce the workers to support its candidate. So it
seized upon the independent candidacy of Miss Anne Martin
as affording an opportunity to divide the labor vote.
Every one familiar with the situation knew Miss Martin had
no chance to win. She went before the voters on a so-called
"radical" platform, but devoted the greater part of her time to
attacking Henderson. She went so far as to publicly declare
that he had "dodged" on the railroad bill.
As Labor pointed out at the time, there was no foundation
for the charge, but some voters believed it and believing it
voted against the man who had courageously defended their
interests.
Miss Martin came out of the contest a poor third but she
secured enough votes to accomplish what the reactionaries had
hoped forthe defeat of Henderson.
It is to be hoped that workers everywhere will profit from the
experience of Nevada and in future contests refuse to permit
their gallantry to override their common sense.
The paper continued its Nevada campaign long after
election. In its issue of November 27, 1920, it warns us
that "the result of the election has opened the eyes of the
workers," and "the next time the reactionaries put an
'independent' candidate in the field for the purpose of divid
ing the labor vote they will be treated to a genuine surprise
party."
Besides misleading many members of the rank and file
of labor from the only labor candidate to the Democrat,
every one of these articles is an attack on my integrity aa
an independent candidate. But there are more important
battles to win than a libel suit against a "labor" paper for
whose alleged principles I am fighting. It is common knowl
edge that the Republican press of Nevada attacked me as
March 2, 1921]
The Nation
violently as the Democratic press. Both parties feared my

candidacy. With an honest "labor first" policy at Washing
ton we had an excellent chance of beating them both. As it
is, the result of the election was the exchange of one re
actionary for another, and "opening the eyes of the work
ers"but to the fact that they cannot trust their leaders.
They see that the people in sweeping the Democrats out of
office and putting the Republicans in, were like the mice
who elected a white cat to rule them, and who were soon
so exploited that they demanded a change. A majority was
persuaded by their leaders that all that was wrong was the
color of the cat, so they put the white cat out and elected
a black one in his place. Nevada labor leaders saw the truth
of this parable in the election, and five thousand of the
people saw it. More will see it in 1922. The growing inde
pendent vote is bound to be a factor in all future elections.
One of my staunchest supporters, a high official of Nevada
railway labor, told me the other day :
337
"I registered this year as a Democrat, but from now on

I'll have nothing to do with either party. They both exploit
us. When I boosted for the Plumb Plan League and got
subscriptions for Labor in the shops and on the road, I
thought I was helping to start an independent labor move
ment. But our leaders only wanted to use us as an annex
of the Democratic party. We're through! Do you know
where the boys at headquarters put the stacks of papers
they send us from Washington every week? In the stove.
The game our national leaders played in the election, put
ting the Democratic Party first and labor second, has fin
ished them and their paperour paperwith us. They
tried to make us reelect a railroad lawyer, simply because
he's a Democrat. They forgot we fellows out here knew
all about him. Debs is right. * We can't trust our leaders.
They try to steer us into the parties, which are dead against
labor; but their scheming is of no avail. One big union
for us!"
The Seizure of the
Land in
Sicily
By GIUSEPPE PREZZOLINI
THE seizure of the land by the peasants in Italy is far
more important than the seizure of the factories by
the workers, because Italy is eminently and by tradition
an agricultural country in which industry is relatively
recent. For this reason everything which concerns agri
culture touches the most sensitive cords of Italian social
and economic life. But for the same reason the agricul
tural problems are most difficult to understand.
In the first place there is no uniformity; the country is
long and variegated. Northern Italy has a climate and soil
similar to that of Central Europe, but Sicily and southern
Italy are more like Northern Africa than any part of Italy.
In northern Italy there are fertile plains, furrowed by
canals and perennial streams of water, green meadows,
rich and fertile soil, snow which covers the plains in winter
and lasts for six months, and abundant rain. In southern
Italy there is an absence of woods and snow on the bare
mountains, dryness which lasts for months, swift-rushing
streams which expand when it rains, but are dry for months,
hills, stones, and rocks everywhere, clay and compact dirt
and few very fertile regions. In northern Italy the peasants
live in the country; in southern Italy they live grouped to
gether in regions, hours and hours away from their places of
work. In northern Italy the air is good, there are many
roads, and the railroads are developed; in southern Italy, a
great many of the inhabitants succumb to malaria. There
are very few roads, and the settlements up in the moun
tains are far away from the railroad. In northern Italy
people can travel with safety; in southern Italy men and
herds are always in danger if they are not armed.
Hence the economic conditions are very different indeed.
In northern Italy the management is of an industrial type,
either farmers in associations or tenant farmers who till
the soil themselves, and many small industrious land
owners. In southern Italy large estates in the hands of
absentee owners who enjoy unearned incomes in the city,
tenants who sublet from others, peasants who work by the
day, now in one place and now in another, who do not own
anything, not even a house. In northern Italy, intelligent
proprietors, technically equipped with machinery and ma
nure, organized in powerful associations, and on the other

hand closely united in unions, either socialist or Catholic.
In southern Italy, backward proprietors, ignorant of mod
ern agriculture, with no fluid capital, disorganized masses
which are drawn together only by the stimulus of electoral
excitement or misery.
Naturally these distinctions which I am making are not
entirely true to life. There are regions around Naples
and on the coast of Sicily which are extremely fertile, and
are divided up among small landowners, and in Venetia
there are regions where malaria and large landed estates
prevail. In general, however, the distinctions are true and
characteristic of the agricultural revolution which is go
ing on.
Let us examine the South first of all and particularly
Sicily where the struggle is greater and carried on in the
open. In Sicily large landed property prevails. One-sixth
of the island is owned by 173 people in a population of
four million inhabitants; one-third is owned by 787 people.
The agricultural class (725,000 people over ten years of
age) possesses almost nothing. The landowners in general
live away from their lands in the Sicilian towns, in Rome,
abroad. They rent their lands to people peculiar to Sicily
called GabeUoti who advance them the money for the year's
crops, frequently rerenting to others who in turn sublet.
Thus the peasant has to pay three or four middlemen. The
Gabelloto is the financier of the agrarian management of
the proprietor; he is usually a peasant who has grown
rich, a usurer without scruples, who tries to get what
profit he can from the land without improving it, not being
sure of having it again and running the risk also of losing
the harvest by the frequent droughts. He employs a per
sonnel of tyrants (rural guards, superintendents, etc) to
keep the peasant under strict guard for fear that he should
eat the seed instead of sowing it or rob the harvest or go
to work on other lands. The Gabelloto pays the master
and the peasant in advance, but he cannot rob the master
and he can rob the peasant; and out of the advance pay
ments which he gives the peasant he takes from 30 to 50
per cent of the interest. It is not to be wondered that the
The Nation
338
Gabelloto is the most despised and hated person in Sicily.

The seizure of the land on the part of the peasants is
principally a revolt against the Gabelloto, and the occupa

tion began with those properties administered by them
(feudi dati a gabella). Naturally a few at a time they
went from uncultivated lands to the semi-cultivated and
[Vol. 112, No. 2904
The Land for the Peasants, spread everywhere.
The
promise made by the Government during the war, the

rewards announced to the faithful defenders of the coun
try, had their effect indeed.
In fact one of the characteris
tic figures of the agitation is a certain De Rysky, formerly
even to those well cultivated; from properties administered
a major in the army; and the Catholic who led the first
invasions in the province of Palermo is a Dr. Terranova,
by the Gabelloto to lands cultivated directly by the owners
also a soldier.
themselves. The Duke of Bivona, a Spanish grandee, owns

a large estate in Ribera, given over to taxes. He came to
Italy last year to sell it to his Gabelloto. At Rome he found

envoys of the Catholic cooperatives and of the unions of
ex-soldiers who offered him three million lire for a part of
it. He did not accept, but went to his estate to secure
better terms. During the night the Catholics and soldiers
made an agreement, attacked the fortress with stones, be
sieged and invaded it, and forced the duke to agree to give
up the land they wanted. This, I can say, has been the
only act of violence of the whole agitation which has al
ready brought about the occupation of no less than a third
of the island. It must be recognized that the Sicilian
peasant has a pretty good disposition. The occupation
already sanctioned by the Italian Government, according
to a statement by Minister Micheli, amounts to a hundred
thousand hectares, forty thousand of which are around
Rome.
The seizures have indeed taken place in a peaceful man

ner.
Crusades of peasants from the crowded cities would
leave for tenures six or eight miles away, walking in fours,

preceded by their leaders and flags, sometimes red, some
times black, sometimes tri-colored, and sometimes all three
kinds. On foot and riding on mules the population would

take possession of the land, planting their banner and
The participation of the Catholics is very important.

They were the first to incite the peasants against the lands,
and the other parties had to follow them in order not to be
conquered themselves. Not only the laity, but even priests

and monks led the invasions. In Alcano, Padre Ferran
telli, a Dominican, led the struggle against the Gabelloto
and the proprietors.
In Calabria a nervous young priest,
a certain De Cardona, always threatened to burn houses
and woods; to which one of his hecklers said: Im sorry,

I am not of his opinion because I am a Christian!
The Government has made several decrees authorizing

the occupation of the lands not under cultivation, provided
they should be passed on by a commission made up of pro
prietors, peasants, and representatives of the Government,
and finally Minister Micheli has recognized the right of
breaking the contracts of the Gabelloto when they have been
sublet. Thus a greater victory was gained.
Except in a small triangle of about 10,000 hectares in
the province of Trapani, the harvests have been reaped

regularly and the work goes on. In that triangle alone
the Socialists who are anxious to obtain the lands to work
them collectively dominate, which is repugnant to the men
tality of the Sicilian peasant and the proposals of the Gov

ernment.
There is no political revolution in the rest of
land, accompanied perhaps by gendarmes who prevented

disorder but had not been able to stop the invasion, and
from there they would telegraph the King or the Prefect,
Sicily and southern Italy. It is a question of the rising of

the peasants who are gaining consciousness against age
long extortionists. The press and the conservative par
ties themselves have greeted the movement sympathetically.
It is the end, it is hoped, of the Gabelloto and his abuses,
announcing their taking of possession, and asking for the

authorization even to defend the land against the owners
by means of the gendarmes. There is often an agreement
and the rising of a class of small landowners whose neu

trality can only be conservative.
The agricultural problem in the South cannot be con
between two neighborhoods, between two associations. Only
sidered solved, however, even if a great step forward has

taken place. The large landed property, indeed, is not only
stationing their guards there.
They would go back to the
once did a conflict break out between two neighborhoods
which had built trenches on disputed territory.

There has never been violence against the proprietors.
The Sicilian peasant, accustomed to centuries of feudalism,
still has respect for the master. The proprietors on their
a large estate, it is an economic organism which is caused
part have been rather revengeful against the leaders of
by the lack of capital which forces the farmer to run into
the peasants. The owners who did not find that they had
the support of the Government, which had been persuaded
debt. The Government must help the spontaneous move

ment to divide up the large estates not only by giving legal
form to the profitable invasions, but also by remedying
the disordered conditions prevalent in Sicily today which
has frequently forced the inhabitants to form secret organ
izations (mafiaocesca) to obtain that defense of person and
to leave a beneficial social movement alone, allied them

selves with the mafia and intrusted their own defense to
it. Giovanni Orcel, head of the socialist peasants of

Palermo, fell a victim to some unknown person, but all
maintain that he was a victim of the proprietors.
The awakening of today is due to the war.
In the first
by lack of water, by malaria which prevents men from liv

ing where they work, by lack of roads and safety which
necessitates keeping flocks and herds in the country, and
property which the Government does not guarantee.
Too
frequently it has been the custom of all Italian govern
place all the peasants who stayed at home became rich.
ments to consider Sicily as a province where bad officials
Those who fought became accustomed to a rather better

standard of living. Wine and coffee entered into their
menus. Then the war accustomed them to organization

and discipline. It was easy for the officials who went home
to find their soldiers and organize them in associations and
soldiers' cooperatives. The years of discussion created a
ferment in all minds. The phrase of a Sicilian deputy,
are sent as a punishment, where the carrying of arms has

been allowed for electoral reasons, where whoever is an
adversary of the administration is sure of never having
justice at the hands of the deputy who votes for the gov
ernment. A policy of energetic impartiality and useful
public works can alone prevent the conquests of the peas
ants which have just taken place from becoming useless
the Hon. Drago, to a Socialist-Reformist Congress in 1919,
in the next few years.
The Nation
March 2, 1921]
A Voice From the Past

By GEORGE P. WEST
HE president of the Chamber of Commerce, who was

also a director of the Better America Federation, chair
man of the Law and Order League, and vice-president of
the Society for the Promulgation of Patriotism and Right

Thinking, laid down his pen, leaned back in his mahogany
office chair, and lit a cigar. The muscles of his face relaxed.
He had just placed his O.K. on six publicity statements and
a form telegram which was to be sent that night to every
member of Congress. It demanded a new law for the estab
lishment of a psychological bureau in the Department of
Justice, by which subversive thinkers too crafty to disclose
their seditious cerebrations by either writing or speaking
might be detected and adequately punished. As he sat there,
in momentary repose, he allowed to glow in his brain the
pleasant consciousness that he had done his full duty as a
citizen that day. But almost at once he recollected that
339
from his pocket.) The ideals of 100 per cent Americanism

as laid down by us have been universally accepted. Forty
five State legislatures have enacted our entire program of
laws regulating speech and the press. In thirty-eight States

the penalty for speaking disrespectfully of the least of our
principles is twenty years in prison. We have procured the
dismissal of 68,000 school teachers and 23,000 ministers on
charges of teaching or preaching un-American doctrines.
We have censored thousands of sermons and as many college

lectures. We have rebuked more than 900 newspaper editors,
and disciplined others by advertising boycotts organized by
us. Our lecturers have spoken directly to over 40,000,000
persons, and our literature has been placed in the hands of
every man, woman, and child in the country. We have
assisted the Department of Justice in 18,000 prosecutions,
and the prison sentences if they ran consecutively would

cover the period from the beginning of the Christian era to
the present day.
Smith paused for breath.
We have a very capable young publicity man, he said.

I am giving you his figures. They are in round numbers,
republics are not grateful, and he frowned slightly. Was it
you will understand.
all worth while?
Suddenly he looked up, startled, and saw standing across

the flat-topped mahogany desk from him a tall, commanding
figure in a tri-cornered hat and a uniform of blue trimmed
and lined in buff. The hair was powdered, and he started
as he recognized the features. There could be no mistaking
Just so, spoke the figure standing before him. In a

word, the American people may fairly be considered today a
product of your teachings. Its young men and women have
grown to manhood and womanhood steeped in the traditions,
grounded in the principles, that you and your colleagues
have chosen for them? Every contrary influence has been
them.
proscribed and suppressed?
If this appearance had been merely the then President of

the nation, John Smith would have remained entirely at his
ease. He knew how to treat these political fellows with just
the right blending of ironic respect for the office and the
slightest possible contempt and condescension for the man.
As it was, his savoir faire failed him only for a moment. It
was not for nothing that once a month, at finance committee
meetings, he was accustomed to meet and propitiate the
doddering old figure whose billions towered over the desti
nies even of Smith himself.
And it was with the bow
reserved for that sacred figure that he now acknowledged

the presence before him.
The blue-and-buff figure jerked his head slightly in im
patience of ceremony. Standing there with his arms folded
under his cloak, he said:
You are John Smith, I believe?
Smith bowed.
You are president of the Chamber of Commerce, and

director of the Better America Federation, and chairman
of the Law and Order League, and vice-president of the
Society for the Promulgation of Patriotism and Right Think
ing?
Smith's breast swelled and his chin rose a little in spite
of himself.
I am, he replied with admirable simplicity.

The voice resumed.
And I am to understandthe excel
lent Hamilton told me only this morningthat the policies
I can answer, without boasting, yes, said Smith.

He began to realize now the size and importance of his
own task. The figure before him took shape now as the
quite out-of-date leader of a mere three million colonists.
As he answered, he tapped the mahogany desk a little im

patiently with his lead pencil.
The blue-and-buff figure resumed speaking. The voice

that issued from it now was pitched in a solemn and judicial
key.
My duty then is plain. I have come to you after com
pleting a tour of the country. Please understand this: I
demonstrated during my last term in the Presidency that I
have no illusions regarding the populace and their need of a
strong hand. It is entirely of your results, not your meth
ods, that I am to speak.
Those results I have closely regarded. I have mingled
with the people. I have traveled on the trains. I have
attended the moving-picture theaters. I have visited the
industrial suburbs of Pittsburgh and the stock-yards district
of Chicago. I spent an entire evening listening to your jazz
orchestras and watching your young people dance. I have
watched the children leaving your high schools and have
stood at the doors of thedo you call them beauty parlors?
and there watched them enter and go through the process of
rouging their cheeks and plucking their eye-brows. I have
visited the haunts of your most eminent bootleggers. I have
even read the stories in your popular magazines and listened
urged by yourself and your colleagues have been completely
to the speeches of Representatives in Congressmen whose
successful? I am to understand that you have succeeded in
candidacies were indorsed by you. I have seen a representa

tive Southern lynching and have watched young men of the
American Legion tar and feather an organizer for the Non
getting a quite unanimous approval and acceptance of your

principles, of the standards of thought and conduct set forth
in the constitutions of these societies of yours?

Controlling his voice and trying not to speak boastfully,
Smith replied: We have been eminently successful, Your
Honor. (Here Smith referred to a notebook, which he drew
partisan League. I have seen other young men station them

selves on lonely street corners or even in crowded thorough
fares and rob, slay, and assault. I have looked down on the
Stock Exchange and the Chicago wheat pit. I have attended
The Nation
340
the churches. I have visited your jails. I have sat in your

divorce courts. I have seen the bread lines. I have even
listened to the conversation in the smoking compartments
of your sleepers."
The voice, which had proceeded steadily and slowly,
stopped for a moment. When it resumed, the tone had
changed. Now it rang like steel.
"Until you yourself told me," it said, "I should scarcely
have ventured to place the responsibility for what I have seen
this day. In the world of spirits I have met men responsible
for muchfor ancient slaveries and medieval massacres.
But their field of operations was nothing compared with
yours. To stand here and confess to me, its Father, that
this country as it exists today is the product of standards
deliberately imposed by you
"
He broke off. His voice at the end had risen to a shout.
Now he dashed his cloak aside and with one sweeping ges
ture drew a heavy saber from its scabbard at his side. He
lifted it high.
"As Father of my Country
" he cried, then stopped,
and the uplifted saber fell clattering on the mahogany table
as his arms were pinioned from behind.
Unnoticed by the Father of his Country, John Smith had
touched a push-button on his desk, and three burly operatives
from the Department of Justice had advanced toward the
blue-and-buff figure from the corner where they had been
hidden in a secret closet.
John Smith laughed scornfully and relit his cigar.
"Take him to the Tombs and telegraph Palmer," he said.
"Tell him to file a charge of sedition and criminal anarchy."
The three detectives seized the blue-and-buff figure and
hustled it toward the door.
Smith stood watching them in cynical satisfaction. He
called after them :
"Hold on a moment! Give him the third degree. He
probably has confederates. Mentioned a fellow by the name
of Hamilton!"
Smith rang for his publicity man.
In
the Driftway
THE Drifter has always looked back with longing on the

days of romance and high adventure that are no more.
He pictures a royal banqueting hall with a wise jester at the
king's knee, and at the foot of the table a score or more of
serfs with iron collars around their necks, all bearing a
strong resemblance to Gurth the Swineherd. The sound
of a trumpet is heard ; the king pounds lustily on the table
with the bone (or is it jeweled?) handle of his hunting knife,
and enter the pages bearing aloft great bowls and platters
of noble joints and robust stews and steaming pasties.
The king lifts high his tankard; from somewhere above him
a hand (there is always a hand there to minister to his
wants) fills it to the brim with rich, brown ale (the Drift
er's king, be it noted, is no foreign weakling who prefers
wine) ; and just as the king with a magnificent sweep of
his arm is about to quench his thirst in a mighty draft,
a strong hand reaches out and quickly relieves him of the
cup! Is this treason? Does the king become empurpled
with rage and sever the offending hand from the obnoxious
wrist? Not at all. This is merely the Official Taster of
the King's Household running his daily risk of being neatly
and quietly poisoned by the king's meat and drink.
[Vol. 112, No. 2904
Those were stirring times in which to live! What have

we to offer in their place? No longer does the wassail
bowl weigh down the groaning board (the Drifter is not
quite sure what a wassail-bowl isbut no matter) ; no
longer does the king tear his meat apart with his knife
and his fingers, and toss the scraps to the dogs under the
table. Most of the time the king, as pictured in the allrevealing Sunday supplements, looks like an ordinary little
man with mild, ineffectual eyes and a pointed beard, and
undoubtedly his table manners are above reproach. But
staywhen the Drifter reads that the king rides out in
state, "in a wonderful gilt coach drawn by eight black
horses," it does begin to seem like old times again. And
when the papers report that extra guards were employed
at the opening of Parliament, and that the ancient practice
of searching the vaults beneath the Parliament Buildings
was carried out more thoroughly than ever, all because
there was fear that there might be attacks by unemployed,
or Sinn Feiners (or Egyptians, or Indians, or Mesopotamians), the Drifter sinks back in his chair with a sigh of
relief. All is not lost. The king may no longer eat with
his knife and fingers, but he seems to be no more popular
with certain of his subjects than in the good old days of
wassail-bowls and foaming tankards.
SALT loses its savor, and so does the Bible if it be over

much read in a churchly atmosphere. The Drifter
confesses that the sonorous verses of the King James Ver
sion have occupied very few of his spare moments these
many months. But there has come to his desk a propa
ganda pamphlet which has led him to re-read familiar
phrases the meaning of which had been obscured by much
repetition. The Sermon on the Mount is published as a
propaganda pamphlet by the Association to Abolish War,
of 14 Roanoke Avenue, Boston. The Association tried to
publish it in 1917, but its secretary was officially informed
that such a procedure would be regarded by the Depart
ment of Justice as pro-German. Now, with a large black
and un-Bible-like heading, "Now it can be printed," the
Association resumes publication of the forbidden words.
The Drifter can understand Mr. Palmer's reluctanceor
was it Mr. Gregory's?to permit wide circulation of these
pages in the maudlin days of 1917. But why permit it
today? "I say unto you, love your enemies. . . . And
every one that heareth these words of mine, and doeth
them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man who built his
house upon the sand; and the rain descended, and the
floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house;
and it fell, and great was the fall of it."
*****
PROPAGANDA by headline is a subject that interests
the Drifter, and he is glad to share a nice instance
of it which fell under his eye on the first page of a New
York newspaper recently. Over the announcement that the
Standard Oil Company was to cut off its 10 per cent wage
bonus, one of the captions read thus: "Plant managers
believe Americans will take action in good part, but doubt
foreigners." The inference is obvious: one who accepts
lower wages graciously is a good American ; one who makes
a fuss is a dangerous alien. Q. E. D.
The Drifter
March 2, 1921]
The Nation
Correspondence
How War Comes About
Sib: Contributions to your issue of February 2 bear evi
dence of the fact that our relations with Japan have arrived
at a point where war between that country and the United
States is said to be quite out of the question. We learn that,
as Mr. Lamont assures us, "there is every reason why the two
nations should be on the closest and friendliest footing." One
is reminded by all these unmistakable signs of peace of the
articles which used to appear regularly, almost up to the day
hostilities were declared, on the unreasonableness of believing
that there could ever be war between two great commercial
nations like Great Britain and Germany. For one thing, busi
ness would not allow it, because war is too expensive. For
another, education and enlightenment had gone so far that the
relic of savagery called war could not receive the moral sup
port of the civilized peoples of Europe. Even the victors would
be losers: this was said to be understood all around and would
prevent war. Men not less eminently practical than Theodore
Roosevelt and Andrew Carnegie saw in William II of Ger
many a peace-lover disguised in a uniform and in Germany's
great army an instrument for maintaining the peace of Europe.
We know now how hollow were all those judgments. Shall
we again put faith in the prognosticators of peace? Many will
do so, for man seems to be as eager to run away from facts
as a mouse from an army of cats. For others, the ordinary
prophets of peace have lost much of their persuasiveness. For
instance, Mr. Lamont tells us that the Japanese militarists
want war truly enough, but other classes in Japan favor peace,
because, unlike the militarists, they no longer "think the world
is ruled by force rather than by ideas." The militarists in
Mr. Lamont's version of their attitude are certainly mistaken.
Ideas do rule the human world. But where do we get our
ideas? More particularly, why are certain ideas more dynamic
than others under given conditions? The world is full of
ideas. Why do certain of them show an unusual activity and
tendency to dominate us at times, as against a hundred others
that take on a sickly hue and slink off lingeringly to die?
Hasn't interest something to do with accepted ideas? An in
terest may become "rationalized"; it becomes an idea, a con
cept, a system of law, of ethics, of philosophy. The use of
force to further an interest (now elevated into an idea) has
not been altogether unjustified in the past by law, ethics, and
philosophy. While we may concede that force does not rule
the world, it will hardly be denied that ideas or interests
direct force. Once two highly active elements like an idea and
force are well combined, they make an explosive compound that
generally spells war.
Let me briefly describe a few conditions today, which, whether
reasonable or not, are factual. We now have unemployment
in all the industrial countries. Wages are coming down, pur
chasing-power is reduced, a surplus of unconsumed goods ac
cumulates at home. We need foreign markets, so we hear, in
which to unload surplus goods. We also need opportunity for
exportation of surplus capital to make satisfactory profits.
Home markets in none of the industrial countries can absorb
what we have produced. Without an adequate turnover, what
becomes of the possibility of paying returns on investments?
Thousands of business men must be thinking of the flush times
of 1917-18, just as millions of wage-earners probably recall the
high wages of those years. Farmers remember the prices they
received in war-time. Capitalists have hardly forgotten that
money can be made out of war contracts. Suppose all indus
trial countries have a surplus to exporta surplus, be it re
membered, with unsupplied wants at home. Suppose a limited
purchasing power in the foreign markets, for it is doubtful
if the people abroad have the money with which to absorb the
341
surplus of all the industrial countries. Suppose aggressive and

ambitious rival capitalistic imperialisms having values to main
tain and interests to serve by converting this surplus into money
in a limited foreign market. Granted all this and you have the
mechanism of society adjusted for driving inevitably on to war.
Unemployment and under-consumption temporarily disappear
in war-time. We know from our war-experience that wageearners, merchants, and farmers, under a proper psychological
coaching, are capable of an energetic and self-sacrificing pa
triotism. A united nation results, discontent is allayed, class
conflicts are blunted, and social solidarity waxes strong. We
are converted for the time being from an economically stag
nant, under-consuming nation into one in which the turnover
is large and profitable for everybody.
As a policy war fits more neatly into our interests as at
present conceived than a fundamental change in our economic
mechanism which would not leave an unconsumed surplus of
goods to worry about. Sentimental advocacy in favor of dis
armament or peace is lamentably weak as a mover of things
compared with a belief that war can bring economic prosperity
and perpetuate control of economic forces in its present hands.
Until I see the necessity for exportation of goods and capital
replaced by the organization of adequate economic development
and consumption at home, arguments as to the "reasonable
ness" of peace and friendship with Japan, for instance, are
likely to leave me, for one, quite unconvinced. I shall live in
the expectation of another war and adjust my life accordingly.
Portland, Oregon, February 3
H. D.
"The White Woman's Burden"

Sir: I read William Pickens's article in the October 6 issue
of The Nation and wondered if white women and white men
would allow such an outrage to be repeated in the future. I
am glad you have taken the matter up with the National
Woman's Party. I am not a member of said party, but if they
stand ready to take the responsibility of making the fight for
forcing the enfranchisement of the American colored woman,
I am ready to join their ranks.
The East has its problem of the foreign-born women, but if
they become citizens they have a right to a voice in the govern
ment under the Nineteenth Amendment. Why should the "South
handle its own problems," or the "Californians solve their own
problems," or any other part of the United States, as regards
the right of the American woman to vote? The Nineteenth
Amendment has been ratified. By what right can those who
have charge of the registration offices disfranchise any woman
for the reasons set forth by Mr. Pickens?
If, as Susan P. Frost says, in your symposium in the issue of
February 16, "the Negro population in communities of the
South, either predominates numerically, or is at the rate of half
and half," that same Negro population is doing its part in the
building up of the South, and because of that work the women
as well as the men are entitled to cast their votes for the
candidate who has their best interest at heart.
The Africans were brought into the United States by the
white man and sold as slaves to the white man. We fought a
war with the South to make those slaves free men and women,
giving to them the right to citizenship of the United States.
We seem still to have another war to fight: that against race
and color prejudice.
Ellenville, N. Y., February 17 Lide Geilhard Goldsmith
Why, Indeed?
Sir: "Pittsburgh's Prostituted Press."
Pittsburgh?
San Francisco, January 8
But why pick on

Newspaperman
The Nation
342
Books
Creative Revolution
Creative Revolution: a Study in Communist Ergatocracy. By
Eden and Cedar Paul. Thomas Seltzer.
THE wild welter of kingdoms, empires, republics, democracies,
and city states stretching across the centuries from Sargon
the Great to Warren Gamaliel Harding has been accompanied
by an equally wild welter of political philosophies. Every little
system must have its reason for existence founded in the very
nature of things. Bolshevism could not escape the ills of the
flesh. The philosophers are at work. History, economics, and
all other disciplines are once more summoned to abase them
selves at the foot of those with the will to power.
The new philosophy of bolshevism, according to the Pauls,
runs in this vein: The history of western Europe since the
commercial revolution of the sixteenth century has been the
history of the bourgeois. The extension of the suffrage to the
working and peasant classes was a bourgeois scheme for im
posing bourgeois psychology on the proletariat. Fabian social
ism, conceived in a spirit of contempt for democracy, was merely
an effort of the bourgeois to conquer the proletariat. Guild
socialism was another "theory which a group of able young
bourgeois intellectuals (the heirs in this generation of the
energy which went to the making of Fabianism thirty-five
years ago) have been for sometime endeavoring to impose upon
the working-class movement." Parliamentary government with
universal suffrage is not only a failure but a delusion practiced
by the bourgeois at the expense of the proletariat.
But the day of real deliverance is at hand. The true illuminati, the enlightened minority of the proletarian vanguard,
with the will to power intend to sweep away delusions and con
quer the bourgeois, once for all shatter their ideals, and estab
lish the dictatorship as a preliminary to "Freedom." Soviets
will take the place of parliaments. Then the minority, having
educated the unconscious masses in communism, will allow
freedom to trickle slowly down to the bottom of the new society.
Class conflicts will disappear and all will be well (or fairly
well) in the kingdom of heaven. The signs of the supreme
stroke of creative revolution are all about us. There are the
shop councils in Germany, the delegues de Vatelier in France,
and "the marvelous growth of the I. W. W." in the United
States. The path broken by the Bolshevists shows the way
and the proletariat follows. Of course a million or more bour
geois may resist the hundred thousand Spartacans bent on exer
cising the will to power and may by their own folly precipitate
a bloody strife. If so, then the blood will be on the heads of
the bourgeois; but the pain will be short and forgotten in the
bliss that is to follow.
The Pauls admit that this may be poetry. Still, they say,
the poets only vaguely foreshadow coming events; they are the
true prophets. If some poor "bourgeois intellectual" points to
the millions of peasants and farmers in Russia, France, and
the United States who till the soil at their feet, and suggests
that here is a stumbling block in the way of the communist
march, he is swiftly disposed of. The Pauls inform him that
"Human freedom with all its limitations is precisely one of
those phenomena wherein is displayed the triumph of life over
material causation." They go on to say: "We continue irre
sistibly to believe that our own will is the one 'real cause' in
the world!" Thus Bergson and the apostles of free will justify
the proletarian dictatorship. Verily learning has strange bed
fellows.
Inasmuch as the Pauls admit that they are writing poetry,
it is useless to quarrel with them. The poet has a licence not
allowed to the poor drudge who wrestles with documents and
statistics. Their genial enthusiasm for their new-found truth
is genuine and moving. Among a people that has brought forth
[Vol. 112, No. 2904
William E. Gladstone, George Bernard Shaw, Gilbert Chester

ton, Sir Edward Carson, Alexander Dowie, and William A.
Sunday, they may go far. Soon we may expect to hear the
hammers ringing as the pantheon is reared for the gods of the
new cultand this will be the last of the cults, for there is to
be no more imposition on the proletariat by "bourgeois intel
lectuals."
Charles A. Beard
For Certain Complacent Persons

ATnCTXCQ.il Political Ideas 1865-1917. By Charles Edward
Merriam. The Macmillan Company.
/CHARLES EDWARD MERRIAM has here brought his study
of American political theory down to present times. The
book is an admirable supplement to the earlier work, and covers
a field as yet little dealt with as a whole. It is a systematic
examination of liberalism under a democratic guise, seeking to
understand and control the steady drift toward industrial
centralization; and as such it will find a place in many a class
room. A mass of detail, gathered from much reading, is tucked
away in the compact chapters. Names and titles crowd upon
each other's heels, till occasionally the work becomes little more
than an expanded bibliography with convenient sign-posts.
Such handbook treatment of lesser phases is not undesirable, as
it is supplemented by detailed exposition of major tendencies,
and the main purpose of the study is kept sharply to the fore,
namely, to reveal the confusions of our village liberalism in the
presence of an engulfing industrialism. The author has been
perhaps too generous in his recognition of politicians and
reputed statesmen who scarcely deserve to be taken seriously.
A partial justification, of course, lies in the open fact that such
men have been the spokesmen of powerful interests, and as
such cannot be ignored; and possibly the student may have
taken a sly pleasure in exhibiting them in their intellectual
rags. In a book that includes so much it may be unfair to
demand more, yet one would like to have had a fuller con
sideration of the subtle judicial encroachments that have re
sulted from the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
To many critics the extensions of the "due process of law"
theory seem too significant to pass over lightly. More serious
is the obscurity that results from a failure to clarify the
sources of the successive programs of reform. It is historically
important to segregate the contributions of the larger economic
groups, as the farmers, the trade unions, and the chambers of
commerce, and to examine the relation of each program to the
larger movement of democratic liberalism. To what sources,
for example, do we owe the initiative and the referendum, the
recall, the Australian ballot, and the demand for proportional
representation? These movements are discussed, but it is not
made clear from what economic groups they have emerged.
As a commentary upon our political intelligence the book is
disheartening. The fault does not lie with the author, whose
patience in wading through a mass of timid commonplace is
no less than heroic. The fault lies deeper. It is often charged
that we are the most ignorant of civilized peoplessurely we
are the most complacent in our ignorance. We have so long
been content to be intellectual parasites on Europe that when
we assert our sovereign competency to do our own thinking
as in the realm of politicsour sterility is revealed. Histori
cally we are the product of an unreasoned laissez-faire experi
ence; we have analyzed little, and what passes for political
thinking has been largely formal and mechanistic. Only under
the impact of European thought, at times of revolutionary
strain, have we become sincere. Pragmatic old John Adams, in
spite of his shortcomings, was probably the most original of our
political theorists, and since he broke off the Davila discourses
in disgust at the clamor they caused we have contributed little
to the stock of political thought. During the greater portion
of last century lawyers and third-rate economists were our
chief guides, and to them we owe the sterility of the dark ages
March 2, 1921]
The Nation
from 1865 to 1900. An occasional legal philosopher like Justice

Holmes, a few sincere students like the logical Burgess with his
Prussian theory of the state, Frank J. Goodnow, Woodrow
Wilson, and, in the field of economics, Henry George, provide
some slight relief from the mass of mediocrity. About the
only gleams of light in the present volume flash from the latter
part, where the author considersquite too brieflythe contri
butions since 1900. Novelists like Robert Herrick, poets like
Carl Sandburg, and thinkers like Thorstein Veblen are of dif
ferent caliber from men like William Graham Sumner and
Professor Walkerthey at least are not complacent. Intelligent
Americans cannot well be proud of the meager record summed
up nakedly by Professor Merriam; but we can at least read it
and consider our shortcomings.
V. L. Parrington
Foreign Exchange
Foreign Exchange. By Albert C. Whitaker. D. Appleton and
Company.
ipHE foreign exchanges have been doing many queer things
* during and since the war. The fluctuations in values are
affecting materially the daily life and well-being of millions of
people in all parts of the world. Novel and frequently unsound
explanations of the new values are current. The purchasing
power of the money circulating in many countries which form
erly had a gold standard has been cut loose from gold and the
moneys of different countries can no longer be reduced to a
common denominator. The par exchange has little significance,
where once it was of first importance. That sensitive governor
of international prices which has as one arm the course of
exchange and as the other arm the flow of gold, and which like
the governor of a steam engine normally adjusts the power to
the load, has recently been adjusting frequent and violent
fluctuations in the load.
That the nature and meaning of the foreign exchanges are
but little understood is evidenced by the common expression
often voiced that trade is hampered by the low value of the
mark, the franc, or other monetary units. The fact is that the
low values of these monetary units merely reflect other condi
tions which themselves hamper trade because they are economi
cally unsound. So far as the foreign exchanges themselves are
concerned, it matters little whether the prices of marks, of
francs, or of lire be high or low. What does matter is the un
certainty of their value tomorrow, next month, or ninety days
hence. Trade can get along fairly well when the range of
fluctuations in the prices of foreign money is within calculable
bounds, as it used to be when the cost of shipping gold, "the
gold points," fixed a limit on either side of par. Today there
are no regulating gold points for the simple reason that there
is no par.
Professor Whitaker did not write this book to meet the
present interest in the disturbed conditions of the foreign ex
changes. He has been at work on it for many years, and
while he uses present conditions as exemplifying the principles
by the sharp contrast between the normal and abnormal, he has
not deviated from his main purpose of setting forth a complete
and systematic study of all the forms and principles of foreign
exchange. Yet, in a way, the book is all the more timely by
reason of the fact that it has not been prepared merely to
satisfy a temporary interest; by setting the present problems
in their proper perspective it gives one a clearer view. Thus,
for example, when he says, speaking of exchanges between
countries on a fiat paper money basis: "The price of exchange
'in one fiat country upon another fiat country may naturally
enough run over a greater range of variation than that found
for any other kind of exchange. The fundamental point is that
neither of such countries can by export convert its standard
money into that of the other, and the steadying influence
of such movements as gold export and import between gold
countries is entirely lacking." Here he merely states the
343
universal principle which explains the present situation in full.

The book begins with the concrete forms of money, of com
mercial paper, and of the documents and other instruments of
foreign exchange. This is an excellent method because it starts
the student or other reader on the ground and affords him a
firm foundation for the discussion of processes and principles.
The author then proceeds to show the various features that
enter into the foreign exchange market and all the different
types of dealings in bills of exchange, taking first the simpler
ones and leading up to such complicated processes as those of
arbitrage. The book is accurate, wide in scope, and a monu
ment of industry.
Carl C. Plehn
The End of a Regime

And the Kaiser Abdicates. By S. Miles Bouton. Yale Uni
versity Press.
VT EITHER the flamboyant cover nor the rather sensational
* * title of this book is a fitting symbol for the sobriety and
circumspection of its contents. It is a very informing bit of
writing by a man who has first observed carefully and then
reflected maturely on what he has seen and heard. The author
had been resident in Berlin as an Associated Press correspond
ent for several years before the war. He was in Vienna when
the Dual Monarchy declared war on Serbia, and in Berlin dur
ing mobilization and the declaration of war on Russia and
France. He was with the German armies on all fronts as
correspondent during the first two years of the war, and was in
Berlin two weeks before America severed diplomatic relations
with Germany. He spent the summer of 1917 in Russia, and
in the following winter watched the progress of affairs from
Stockholm and Copenhagen. During the three months preced
ing the German Revolution he claims to have been in daily
touch with many proved sources of information. He was the
first enemy correspondent to enter Germany after the armistice;
he attended the opening sessions of the National Assembly at
Weimar in February, 1919, and remained in Germany until the
end of March, witnessing both the first and second attempts of
the Spartacans to overthrow the Ebert-Haase government.
Certainly Mr. Bouton's credentials are excellent. He
is in a position to give his readers some much-desired in
formationfor example, on the state of mind of the German
people immediately before and just after the armistice. He
seems also to be without material bias. His account of the
internal affairs of Germany from the middle of the war to the
end of 1919 shows a sympathetic attitude toward the people
of that country which apparently even earned for him the
reputation of being pro-German. His point of view is that of
a rather advanced liberal who wishes to understand socialism
but is not captivated by its creed. He holds with Bjornson that
patriotism is a stage of transition, and he thinks that the real
significance of the German Revolution is that it was conceived,
agitated, and carried out by the proletariat; it was the "little
man" who played the big role.
The author gives much information of a general nature as a
background for his account, but his real narrative may be said
to begin with the rioting at Kiel in the summer of 1916, an
occurrence about which we have been comparatively ignorant.
From that point on he brings out clearly and with considerable
climactic effect the gradual undermining of German confidence
and the eventual breakdown of German morale. The food short
age, the U-boat losses, the effects of the Allied propaganda, the
shock of America's intervention, the changes in the chancellor
ship, the realization of the serious military reverses in the
summer of 1918, the Lichnowsky revelations (so strangely di
vulged), and, finally, the defection of Bulgaria and Austria are
some of the dramatic points in the march of events which
quickens toward the inevitable denouement. It is probable that
many readers will find this preliminary history even more in
teresting than the author's account of the Revolution itself,
344
The Nation
with the essential features of which we are already fairly

familiar. But the events focusing about the abdication of the
Kaiser and the proclamation of the republic are graphically
enough told for all their lack of dazzling stage-setting. "The
old German governmental system made less noise in its col
lapse than did the kingdom of Portugal some years earlier.
It simply disappeared. Fuit Germania." And the popular
character of the "greatest revolution of all times" is shown by
the fact that in Berlin hysteric cheering followed the announce
ment that the German Empire had become history.
Mr. Bouton finds deep significance in the two attempts of
the Spartacans to carry the revolution farther. He is sure that
internationalism is on the march. And through the failure of
the Treaty of Versailles to achieve anything commensurate with
the requirements of the age, he sees the issue forced upon all
of us, Americans as well as Europeans: shall this internation
alism be Red or White?
Some of the author's incidental judgments are of interest.
He regards Maximilian Harden, whose frankness of utterance
we admired most unqualifiedly during the war, as essentially a
poseur. Karl Liebknecht, he thinks, had neither great ability
nor high moral courage, but only destructive energy and reck
less fanaticism combined with inordinate personal vanity.
W. K. Stewart
Another Shakespeare Myth

Sous le Masque de "William Shakespeare" : William Stanley,
VI' Comte de Derby. By A. Lefranc, professeur au College
de France. Paris: Armand Colin. 2 vols.
THE war has left its trace of mutilated judgment even on
the hitherto unchallenged domain of French scholarship.
M. Abel Lefranc's elaborate study of William Stanley, sixth
Earl of Derby, as author of the plays usually called Shake
speare's, would perhaps have been a different book had it not
been for the almost feverish adoration of England which during
the years 1914-1918 caused so many outpourings of French
praise. Admiration of Britain's tradition, of her great aris
tocracy, of her court, indeed of almost everything in the island
and its history, breathes in every page, beginning with the dedi
cation to "his excellency, Lord Derby, ambassador from Great
Britain to France . . . " and its hope "that these pages may
serve to witness . . . the fraternity of soul of two great
peoples, forever united by their glorious common destinies."
Such a feeling of kinship would not alone, of course, be
enough to explain the book's genesis. Behind it is another trait
of the dominant school of French governmental and academic
minds; a fear and distrust of the unlettered mass of men and
a clearly defined conception of what they cannot do. M. Le
franc's whole theory rests on the assumption that Shakespeare's
plays could not have been written by an actor whose only life
records are of base intrigues, law-suits, and "mean" persecu
tions, inconceivable in their avarice when associated with the
author of such noble figures as Hamlet and Prospero. The
same hard and fast interpretation of human nature and its
possibilities underliesM. Lefranc admits the debtthe books
of the Baconians and Mr. G. G. Greenwood's skeptical investi
gations of "the Shakespeare problem"; in essence it -goes back
to the classicist critics with their rulings about character de
corum and their narrow delimitations of what this or that kind
of person might or might not be or do.
M. Lefranc's idea of an aristocrat as cultured, generous, and
sensitive to the subtle meanings of experience colors his whole
hypothesis, even to the degree of blinding him to the obvious
fact that his hero was the center of almost as many lawsuits
as was the despised "Stratfordian actor" and to the further
fact that several contemporary remarks give reason for think
ing the sixth Earl of Derby by no means the paragon of ideal
aristocratic virtue which, according to M. Lefranc, the creator
of Hamlet and Prospero must have been.
[Vol. 112, No. 2904
Is the book, then, merely another of the negligible myths about

Shakespeare, to be consigned to limbo with the works of Miss
Delia Bacon, Sir E. Durning-Lawrence, Frank Harris, and
other imaginative and more or less ignorant lovers of the plays?
By no means, for in spite of its impossibly hypothetical point
of departure, its inductive method misapplied, and its main
theory, it is full of interesting by-products of research. Its
painstakingly constructed history of William Stanley, whose
family was so long and so intimately connected with Shake
speare's troup of actors, its careful studies of several of the
plays, particularly of "Love's Labour's Lost," make it well
worth the reading of even impatient scholars. M. Lefranc's
positive contributions to knowledge must not be ignored, espe
cially the questions for future study which he often poses most
acutely. To be sure a man of more "humor"an English trait
admired but not shared by this French professorcould never
have spent years on building so easily destructible a theory on
a foundation of "doubtless," "perhaps," "probably,"phrases
that occur again and again where actual proof of important
statements is needed. Yet the French mind demands a rounded
aesthetic completeness, a frame into which to fit its detailed
discoveries; so M. Lefranc is, after all, true to his classic na
tional traditions in the construction of this new, ingenious, and
attractive legend about the poet who still refuses and probably
always will refuse to be fitted into academic schemes of what
he "must" or "should have" been.
Winifred Smith
Trade and Reconstruction

International Commerce and Reconstruction. By Elisha M. Fried
man. E. P. Dutton and Company.
THE growing interest in foreign trade is seen in the increased
numbers of books on that subject. In this volume, Mr.
Friedman has brought together the facts of recent history and
the statistics of recent economic changes. The need of the hour,
he assumes, is to consolidate the commercial gains which have
accrued to the United States during the years of the World
War.
The subject is discussed in some nine chapters, which may be
readily divided into three main heads: first, the principles of
commerce and American trade policy; second, nationalism and
internationalism in commerce; third, the facts concerning trade
promotion, policies in trade regulation, and proposed after-war
policies on the part of Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy,
Japan, and the minor Powers. Appendixes are added which give
the full text of such important trade documents as The Paris
Resolutions, Final Report of Committee on Commercial and In
dustrial Policy After the War, The Covenant of the League of
Nations, and Economic and Related Clauses of the Treaty with
Germany. A very complete bibliography shows the sources of
authority and suggests further reading.
The immediate problems in international commerce are said to
be the psychology of victory, the fact of depreciated exchange,
and the supply of credit. The preliminary tasks are the restora
tion of credit and the avoidance of further inflation. Remedies
proposed are the free movement of gold and early reduction of
the volume of paper money outstanding, the extended use of the
commercial bill of exchange, cooperation in international invest
ment, and, perhaps, an international system analogous to the
Federal Reserve banking system.
Concerning an American foreign policy, the author says that
"it will behoove the United States to formulate a definite foreigntrade policy, if for no other reason than that all the other
nations are doing so." Such a proposal involves "promotion of
trade by the joint development of foreign markets by associations
formed under the Webb Law, the establishment and mainte
nance of a merchant marine, the opening of free ports, the ex
tension of education in foreign trade, the promotion of trade
research by government and private agency, cooperation among
the various government bureaus and between government
March 2, 1921]
The Nation
and business, and between our political and our industrial

organization. Finally, the tariff constitutes a most important
factor in our trade policy." A distinction should be made be
tween the industries that will become self-sustaining and those
that will not.
Concerning our recent foreign commerce, some economic stu
dents regard it as a pathological case and not as a normal con
quest of marketsan unhealthy and somewhat accelerated de
velopment. Says Professor Litman in a recent article: "In the
past five years the excess of our exports over imports was
$13,963,976,000. This astonishingly large favorable balance of
trade was the result of an artificial violent cause. It was largely
due to the urgent demands of people who were frantically seek
ing goods and were willing to pay any price for them." The
statement that because these exports were financed by long-term
government loans and not by mercantile credits they represent
a phenomenon of a purely transitory nature, is probably some
what exaggerated. Too much emphasis, however, should not be
placed on war-time gains.
In the political sphere, Mr. Friedman believes that the de
velopment of some kind of a league of nations is bound to favor
the further development of commerce and will diminish eco
nomic danger and risks, the universial barriers to commerce.
Trade is an affirmation of internationalism of which war is the
negation.
George Milton Janes
The Evolution of Sinn Fein

The Evolution of Sinn Fein. By Robert Mitchel Henry. B.
W. Huebsch, Inc.
SINN FEIN is an outlook, an idea, an approach to a political
reality; it is only vaguely an organization. Consequently
the understanding student, in tracing its history, will speak
about "The Evolution of Sinn Fein." It is an index to Professor
Henry's comprehension of the movement that he has attached
such a title to his volume.
Sinn Fein begins by taking possession of the separatist po
litical organization Cumann na nGaedhal. Mr. Henry is under
the impression that the Cumann was a new organization formed
in 1900; actually it was the Celtic Literary Society transformed.
It creates skeleton organizations for industrial and cultural
projects; afterward it enters the drill-halls of the Volunteers;
meanwhile Padraic Pearse and James Connolly, both outside
of Sinn Fein, draw two groups of Volunteers together and
create the Irish Republican organization; Sinn Fein comes into
this organization; Dail Eireann, the Irish Republican Parlia
ment, is established and Sinn Fein becomes its spirit. Varying
in organization it also varies in the direction of its effort. In
the beginning it claimed the restoration of the Constitution of
1782; it was constitutional then, and advocated passive resist
ance. Now it demands complete national self-determination,
that is, the recognition of the established Republic; as incar
nated in Dail Eireann, Sinn Fein has its national army and its
Minister of Defense.
It is an approach to a political reality, but the reality pre
sents itself in different terms to different groups of its adhe
rents. Unless Mr. Griffith is a much changed man, the reality
he envisages is a centralized capitalistic state; the followers
of James Connolly, on the other hand, are for a socialized re
public; the younger intellectuals are for "Social Gaelicism,"
which might be translated as a cooperative commonwealth or
a de-bolshevized soviet republic. Sinn Fein, then, represents
an evolving idea. "Ireland for the Irish" is part of that idea;
"attainment through individual effort" is the other part of it.
The present reviewer wrote for the journal Sinn Fein and
for its predecessor The United Irishman from 1903; he has
been intimate with Mr. Griffith, and he acted on various com
mittees; he can testify to the extent and the exactness of the
information shown by the present historian of the movement.
Mr. Henry brings out two significant facts. The first is that
345
Sinn Fein was turned from a passive to an aggressive force

through the entente arranged between two Volunteer bodies by
Padraic Pearse and James Connolly; the second is that Sinn
Fein in its present militant temper is largely the creation of
the enemies of Irish NationalismSir Edward Carson, Mr.
David Lloyd George, and the British Chief of Staff, Sir Henry
Wilson.
Sinn Fein being an idea and that idea being implicit in Irish
conditions for a generation or more, it is difficult for the his
torian to put his finger on the place where Sinn Fein as a
definite movement begins. The formation of the National Coun
cil out of Cumann na nGaedhal and the '98 Clubs in 1905 and
the publication of Mr. Griffith's pamphlet "The Resurrection
of Hungary" mark the beginning of an organization and the
creation of a body of opinion. But preparations had been
made for this articulation. Indeed, if we look upon Sinn Fein
as an idea, the realization of which would mean the reconquest
of Ireland by the Irish, we must go twenty years further back
for its nativity. Mr. P. S. O'Heagerty, whom Thomas Kettle
used to call "The Saint Paul of Sinn Fein," thinks that the
formation of the Gaelic League marked the turning-point in
Irish history.
Nevertheless, when Mr. Griffith transformed the transformed
Celtic Literary Society (founded by William Rooney, whose in
fluence upon separatist policy is puzzling to Mr. Henry) he
articulated something that was to be of incomparable service
to Ireland. Perhaps it was not in the organization and the
various skeleton organizations that the virtue lay, perhaps it
was in the talismanic word that he found for the movement;
most likely it was in his own devotion to the idea, in the sup
port he was able to give it by the best journalistic pen in
Ireland, his own, and by that political vision of his that was
more real than that of any other man in the country.
He led the Irish people toward the discovery of a racial
tactic. For as there is an English tactic of acceptance and
compromise, as there is a German tactic through solid organi
zation, as there is a French tactic that may be illustrated by
Marshal Foch, so there is an Irish tacticsomething that draws
out the special power of the race.
That tactic is aggressive defensea holding on that keeps
up the spirit of a charge. The aggressive defense of the tuath
the petty state of Celtic Irelandbroke down the power of the
Normans without the winning of a decisive battle by the Irish.
The aggressive defense of the chieftains prevented the sub
jugation of the country by the enormous power of England for
six generations. The tactic ceased to be employed after the sur
render of Limerick. It was divined by Parnell, but its revival
was left to Arthur Griffith, and more obviously to the military
leaders who have been produced by the Volunteer movement.
It is idle to suggest that the present history of this momen
tous movement is neutral. It is obvious that as between Sinn
Fein and Unionism, as between Sinn Fein and Carsonism, as
between Sinn Fein and the effete Parliamentarianism it en
countered, Sinn Fein, to Mr. Henry, is the only creative move
ment in the country. But he is no advocate for Sinn Fein; he
writes as a disinterested critic. And the temper, the detach
ment, and the information of the book make it wholly admir
able. The narrative is flowing, and the writer has the power
of making illuminating statements, as when he says of Parnell :
"To him the British Empire was an abstraction in which Ire
land had no spiritual concern; it formed part of the order of
the material world in which Ireland found a place; it had, like
the climatic conditions of Europe, or the Gulf Stream, a real
and preponderating influence on the destinies of Ireland." There
is in the book, too, a cool eloquence, as in the closing para
graph :
"The means at the disposal of Sinn Fein at present hardly
seem adequate to accomplish its object. It may bring about
the moral and intellectual independence of Ireland; it may
secure a certain measure of economic independence: but to
secure political independence, in face of the forces ranged
The Nation
346
against it, seems impossible. But what it cannot do for itself

may in the future be done for it by the moral forces of which
it is a manifestation. It may in the future be recognized by the
conscience of mankind that no nation ought to exercise politi
cal domination over another nation. But that future may still
be as remote as it seemed in the days of the Roman Empire."
"The Evolution of Sinn Fein," with Mrs. Alice Stopford
Green's "Irish Nationality" in the Home University Library,
make together an outline of Irish history such as is often
sought for. These two volumes supplement each other chrono
logically, and together they tell the story with insight and his
toric sense.
Padraic Colum
The Aesthetic Attitude

The Aesthetic Attitude. By Herbert Sidney Langfeld. Harcourt, Brace and Howe.
IT is a welcome trait of Mr. Langfeld's graceful book that
it is addressed to the general reader. Although the author
writes as an experimental psychologist whose approach to
aesthetic problems has been preeminently a scientific one and
who bases his conclusions on the results of laboratory experi
ments, his treatment of the aesthetic reactions does not at all
resemble the method of the proverbial scientist who dissects the
delicate butterfly. Sciencein this case psychologykeeps its
place of humble servant to beauty. Mr. Langfeld is careful,
also, to avoid the setting up of norms. He recognizes that
aesthetic criterions are in a state of fluxthat sounds which
are thrilling dissonances to our ears today may become familiar
commonplaces in some remote tomorrow. Thus it is not the
speculative philosopher who speaks, nor yet too insistently the
experimental psychologist, but the aesthetician pure and simple.
We feel that the author is not a cloistered academician, but a
man of the world. He has the aesthetic attitude. Beauty has
revealed herself to him in Florentine galleries, on woody Maine
islands, at sparkling dinner tables. The writer's spontaneous
first-hand response to aesthetic impressions makes his psycho
logical arguments all the more convincing.
The first part of the book is given to a definition of the
aesthetic attitude as it manifests itself in the contemplation
of natural beauty and of objects of art. Mr. Langfeld reviews
the interpretations of other philosophers, and although he points
out the insufficiencies of their theories, it must be said that
fundamentally his own agree with theirs after all. Indeed, it
is charmingly consistent with the aesthetic attitude that the
gentle polemics in the book and the critical reviews of previous
theories are resolved in a final harmony of common aim and
essential agreement.
The author objects, for instance, to the insistence of Munsterberg and his pupil, Miss Puffer, on the "detachment" of the
onlooker and the "isolation" of the beautiful object as the
essential elements in the aesthetic attitude. On the other hand,
Mr. Langfeld devotes a whole chapter to what he considers the
key-note of aestheticism : the activity named, according to
Professor Titchener's brilliant translation of the word
"Einfiihlung," Empathy. The psychical act of Empathy is a
"feeling into" a scene or object of art in such a way that the
motor responses to the perceptionwhether or not these are car
ried out in actual muscular reactionsobey without resistance
the dictates of the lines, colors, tones, and the like. Now Munsterberg's theory of aesthetics as set forth in his "Eternal Values"
dwells especially on the responsive nature of the attitude which,
in order to be aesthetic at all, must obey the will of the beau
tiful object, whether this will is expressed in the upward point
ing of Gothic arches or in the rise and fall of a melody. The
emphasis on "repose" in the object of beauty to which Mr.
Langfeld objects refers merely to that absence of resistance
which his Empathy also demandseven as there may be repose
in a gentle downward glide which nevertheless is also a
movement.
[Vol. 112, No. 2904
The functions of Empathythe aesthetic effects gained by

the rousing of motor responses through the movement and
force of lines and the distribution of weightare made lucid
by graphic illustrations from the fine arts. In the chapters on
Unity and Balance, which include a dissertation on the "golden
section," on the exact proportions of lines and spaces in their
relative attractiveness, the psychologist never loses sight of the
considered picture or statue or scene as a whole; he never, in
cool analysis, forgets its "naive" appeal. Indeed, he emphasizes
not only the unity of form and the unity of content, but that
tine qua non of art productionthe unity of content and form.
Free from the aesthetic snobbishness of some critics, moreover,
although he insists on a nice distinction between the aesthetic
and the ethical attitude, Mr. Langfeld is willing to recognize the
dangers to aesthetic enjoyment from shocks to the moral sensi
bilities and, on the other hand, to recognize the helpful influence
of associations, imagination, and the emotional setting of the
onlooker. Finally, beauty adheres not to the object enjoyed,
nor, indeed, to him who enjoys it, but "to a specific relation
of the two." But this relation is not difficult to win, for "Art
demands but one thing, that we remain loyal to its beauty."
Margaret Munsterberg
Books in Brief
',rpHE Course of Empire" (Boni and Liveright) is a collec* tion of speeches by R. F. Pettigrew delivered during
his twelve years' service in the Senate of the United States.
It is edited by Scott Nearing, who contributes a brief and in
teresting introduction on the significance of the period of
American history from 1893 to 1901, the epoch covered by the
Senator's addresses. As everyone knows, Mr. Pettigrew,
though elected as a Republican from South Dakota, soon broke
with his party over imperialist and capitalist policies and found
himself almost continually in the opposition. He was a man of
undoubted native talents, a wide reader, and a devoted Ameri
can of the old school. More than one-half of this volume deals
with the annexation of Hawaii and the Philippines; the other
half embraces speeches on free land, the railroads, the trusts,
bond sales, big business, taxation, press censorship, the Boer
War, and miscellaneous matters. The point of view throughout
is that of a radical Populist, but it must not be thought that
the speeches are mere "rant." They are very well documented
and sprinkled with authorities. They represent the honest and
thoughtful views of a man who traveled far and wide and
studied earnestly and was driven by his conscience into oppo
sition to imperialism with all its hateful accompaniments.
Every teacher who has occasion to present American history
and desires to present it as it is should read this volume
through. Every editor, especially those accustomed to use
heavy shotted guns against radicals and pacifists, should have
to take a Chautauqua course in it. Nevertheless, a certain
melancholy interest is associated with these cerements from
the Congressional Record. They recall the vain and hopeless
resistance of the good and honest to the iron march of relent
less destiny, the reaction of an eighteenth-century perfectionist
against Mausers and "Water-Cures" and all the other unfortu
nate signs of imperial power. The underlying assumption
always is that those who sit in darkness are really very nice and
orderly people, if only let alone by the wicked white manan
assumption quite as much without warrant as the missionary
view of imperialism. We cannot have a world order without
a world more or less standardized into common ideas of right
and wrong, and that is a work of action, creation. Negative
virtues, though pleasing to contemplate by the fireside, are not
likely to prepare a Hottentot, a Matabele, or a Tagalog to wear
a high hat with comfort at the world's grand consolidated
league of the people's own when it assembles at Geneva in the
year 2000. Still, those serve who stand by the side and urge
us to be good.
March 2, 1921]
The Nation
T ORD MACAULAY once wrote of Queen Anne that "when

*-J in good humor she was meekly stupid and when in ill humor
she was sulkily stupid." Later historians have not always
accepted Macaulay's conclusions, but on the matter of "good
Queen Anne's" general incompetence there has not been much
disagreement. The tendency has been to minimize the impor
tance of the Queen as a political factor and to find the directing
forces in the personal or factional combinations of the time, of
which there were many. But now comes Mr. William T. Morgan
with a detailed and carefully prepared study of "English Polit
ical Parties and Leaders in the Reign of Queen Anne" (Yale
University Press) in which he informs us that our earlier
views as to political movements in the last Stuart reign have
been incorrect and need revision on many points. Though Mr.
Morgan does not claim that Queen Anne was highly gifted or
even moderately intellectual, he argues (quite successfully, it
seems) that she was the directing force in the government. She
was a Stuart and held to Stuart principles with all the stub
born tenacity characteristic of the Stuart race. Holding strongly
to the older ideas of royal prerogative, she resisted every effort
on the part of ministers or parliament to encroach on her sov
ereign rights. Though she allowed her ministers to compose
her speeches, she edited them with great care and permitted no
statement of policy to stand unless it met her approval. On
the other hand the author shows quite conclusively that the
Duchess Sarah, who is usually credited with great power at the
royal court during the first half of the reign, had, after all,
very little political influence. Next to the Queen the most prom
inent character in Professor Morgan's narrative is the muchdespised Robert Harley. The older view that Harley was a
shifty intriguer who only at rare intervals could come to an
important decision is shown to be wholly baseless. Harley was
a shrewd, resourceful, active man, the leading politician of the
time. He enjoyed the Queen's confidence throughout the reign,
not only while a member of the ministry but even after his
associates had induced the Queen to dismiss him. The author
emphasizes the activities of Defoe, especially his services as
secret political agent. An important part of the study deals
with certain customs and conditions out of which the English
system of cabinet government developed in the following reign.
Queen Anne had neither a prime minister nor a cabinet in the
modern sense of those terms. But she found it expedient, chiefly
because of her ill health, to leave the conduct of the administra
tion in large measure to a chief minister, first to Godolphin,
later to Harley. During Anne's reign it also became customary
for a small group of the more important ministers to meet
somewhat regularly to prepare business for the larger cabinet
council. It was the Queen's purpose to govern without regard
to political groups; but circumstances finally forced her to re
organize her government in such a way as to secure the support
of one or the other of the organized political parties. In all
these three respects, the chief minister, the informal meetings
of trusted ministers, and the dependence on party support, the
tendency was toward the modern form of parliamentary govern
ment.
THE second volume of John Bach McMaster's "The United
States in the World War" (Appleton) evinces, like the
first, great skill in narrative, particularly in grouping large
phenomena and putting them into a sightly perspective. The
story covers not only the end of the war, including such topics
as the campaign against submarines, war work at home, and
fighting in France, but the armistice, the peace conference, and
the treaty from the time of its negotiation till that of its rejec
tion by the Senate. Without resorting to the sensational meth
ods of some writers on the Conference of Versailles, Professor
McMaster has presented a narrative as readable and appar
ently as objective as that of a news report. Not only his style
but his methods of accumulating data and even his opinions
are journalistic. Apparently he relied for his facts almost
entirely on newspapers and, even for foreign countries, chiefly
347
on American newspapers. Where they have common prejudices

he shares them; where their opinions balance one another he is
as impartial as a judge. Thus, while he fails to put himself at
the point of view of any other nation and cordially detests
the Germans, whose claims he once designates in what is a
probably unintentional pun as "all bosh," he is scrupulously
fair and even colorless in his account of American politics. He
presents the side of President Wilson and the side of the Senate
in their own words, fully, adequately, without revealing his own
bias. Thus it is that his work, patriotic, matter-of-fact, "100
per cent American" as it is, seems nicely calculated to appeal
to the audience for which it is intended. It fills a want and
deserves a wide popular circulation. One type of mind feels in
the recital of details and of facts a certain "thickness" of
realityto adopt William James's phrasethat more complex
minds discover only in the formulation of general laws and
relationships. The former will find in Mr. McMaster an excel
lent and interesting guide; the latter, including most scholars,
statesmen, and publicists, will wish that he had added to his
array of facts some evaluation of his own, some expression as
to the causes, effects, and meaning of the whole thing.
-trlCTORIA DE BUNSEN'S papers on life in rural England
* at the end of the last century in "Old and New in the
Countryside" (Longmans) are written with personal knowl
edge of the old social and economic order but sympathy with
the vital changes brought about by the war. She does not
mourn that "society as we have known it is crumbling in many
different parts of Europe." Her shafts of witty sarcasm are
reserved for the lady of the Hall in England who supplemented
incredible wages by puddings and beef tea, blankets and flannel
petticoats, and for the complacent Victorian belief that "the
miseries of the Door were expressly permitted by the Almighty
in order that the rich might find opportunities of service, and
thus of developing the Christian virtues." She finds, however,
that "while suffering humanity must be dealt with in the mass
in the complicated intricacies of modern society with its vast
industrial machine," we may have learned to declaim and
attend meetings instead of serving, and lack a certain quality
of sympathy and human touch that gave warmth of character
to the generation that preceded us. Among the classes fa
vored by birth and fortune in London, Victorian standards in
politics, art, and philanthropy prevailed until the eighties.
"The dwellers in Belgravia and Kensington stood for wealth,
respectability, and that sense of duty to others which Tenny
son had immortalized." King's College for women, Toynbee
Hall, the new Tate Gallery, Gladstone's Home Rule Bill, and
the South African war all did something to make the first
timid breaks in the complacent "unity" of English society, now
so violently rent apart by the effects of the war. The chapters
on Clayberswicka country townare as realistic as the novels
of the Five Towns, but written by one with broad and keen
sympathies who not only records but analyzes and seeks for
remedies.
IN "The Publishing Family of Rivington" (London: Rivington) Mr. Septimus Rivington supplies us with a well-docu
mented account of the fortunes of his predecessors in this
famous English firm. The annals proper begin when Charles,
the first of the publishing Rivingtons, who was born during the
invasion of England by William of Orange, took over the busi
ness of one Richard Chilswell, called in his day the "Metro
politan of booksellers." One son of Charles was articled to
Samuel Richardson in 1746 (the date in the text is wrong) and
subsequently succeeded him in his printing business; another
son, James, took into partnership James Fletcher, and Riving
ton and Fletcher became the publishers of Smollett's "History
of England," thereby clearing ten thousand poundsa record
for those days. We read in "Cranford" that their successors
J. & J. Rivington were to have had "the honourable responsi
bility" of publishing a sermon by Miss Matty's father. This
348
The Nation
was about 1774. In the early years of the nineteenth century

the firm became booksellers to the Society for the Promotion
of Christian Knowledge and soon they had on their lists the
books of some of the leading TractariansPalmer, Hurrell
Froude, Isaac Williams, and Manning, who had not yet gone
over to Rome. Later on they published the "Tracts for the
Times" which were transferred to them from another house.
Thenceforward most of the important Oxford sermons and theo
logical literature, from Pusey to Scott Holland, appeared above
the Rivington's imprint. From the house of Rivington came
some of the best textbooks for younger students of the classics
in the closing years of the last century. The author of this
book may well be proud of the family record: "there has never
been a year from 1711 to the present day when a Rivington has
not been a member of a publishing firm."
UNDER the title "Industry, Emotion, and Unrest" (Harcourt,
Brace and Howe) Mr. Edward Thomas endeavors to set
forth the factors which most profoundly affect the industrial and
social sides of modern economic life. The facts are portrayed
by incidents, somewhat as is the law in the "case system" of in
struction in law schools. The deportation of laborers in Arizona,
the Lawrence strike, illegal arrests, and other concrete cases
are cited to show why injustice breeds unrest. Concerning
business methods, the bankruptcy of a popular cigar dealer is
explained thus: "It appeared that one of the large chain cigar
stores corporation had felt this dealer's competition, had bought
the lease of his store over his head, and had forced him out.
This happened twice, and then he was bankrupt." A business
man commenting on the incident said: "What could be expected,
fighting a big corporation? They had the money and the right
to succeed, and he didn't have the money. That's life." Con
cerning the institutionalism of the churches the. writer observes
that "following Christ in Galilee and pagan Rome was a risky
adventure while in our large cities today it is the badge of
middle class respectability and a comfortable bank account."
The closing chapter suggests several methods of bettering con
ditions, such as the establishment of cooperative stores, the en
listment of young people in constructive social service, the ap
pointment of a chancellor for labor to adjust disputes, and
training of foremen and superintendents in economics, psy
chology, and related subjects. The value of the book lies not so
much in the remedies proposed as in the vivid presentation of
actual conditions.
A S Agamemnon proverbially owes his reputation to Homer,
so the fifth Harry of England, friend of Falstaff and con
queror of Agincourt, is indebted for his popularity chiefly to
the magic of a still greater poet. Like most biographers, Mr.
R. B. Mowat has fallen in love with his subject, "Henry V"
(Houghton Mifflin), and while highly estimating Henry's genius
as a statesman and a general, rebuts the Shakespearean legends
about the prince's wild youth as very slenderly supported by
the sources. Save as it is recorded that Prince Hal "labored in
the service of Venus as he had served Mars," and that he now
and then waited in disguise for his own receivers and "dis
trained them of their money," there is no contemporary founda
tion for the scenes at the Boar's Head, Eastcheap, immortalized
by the dramatist. "Une legende parfois ment moins qu'un docu
ment," says Victor Hugo, and most of us will not give up our
gallant Hal and his fat friend "not on compulsion, nor for any
reasons, were raisins as thick as blackberries." Particularly,
Mr. Mowat labors to show that the story of the prince's sum
mons before a magistrate and commitment for contempt of
court is without foundation and applies, if to anyone, to an
earlier monarch. But whatever wild oats he may or may not
have sown, he reaped a great harvest of glory by his war with
the English and Welsh rebels the Percies and Glendower, and
by his great victory of Agincourt. Solid reasons for provoking
war with France he had none, but, like Frederick the Great to
whom Mr. Mowat compares him, he felt the need of winning
[Vol. 112, No. 2904
martial glory, of writing his name large in history among those

conquerors whom mankind has rewarded by deification.
IT has always been difficult for an American to penetrate the
maze of French politics. The multiplicity of parties, their
shifting relations, the anomalous position of the President and
the Senate, have all been hard for Americans to understand.
Professor Edward M. Sait's "Government and Politics" (World
Book Company) is a scholarly work, seeking to meet this need.
As a study of the constitutional relations of the President,
cabinet ministers, Senate, and Chamber, it is at once authorita
tive and good reading. A chapter on Political Developments
gives a rapid sketch of the political history of the Third Repub
lic, which lapses into conventionality only in its description of
war-time politicians. The exposition of the political parties is
clear and in the main correct; the comparison of the French
courts with the American is enlightening. Raymond Leslie
Buell's "Contemporary French Politics" (Appleton) is a hastier
and more turgid book. Mr. Buell spent a few months at a
French university after leaving the A. E. F., and collected an
amazing number of party platforms, draft laws, magazine arti
cles, and newspaper clippings which he has thrown together in
this book. Friendship with a Socialist editor enabled him to
present an admirable story of the leftward trend in the Socialist
party from 1917 to 1919, but his chapter on syndicalism is mis
leading. He has a chatty chapter on the French press, a per
fectly conventional statement of the French attitude to the
treaty, and valuable summaries of the present-day status of
the woman suffrage and regionalist movements and of the move
ment for a form of "professional government" which might be
described as capitalistic sovietism.
'"PHE preacher, the advertising copy writer, and the journalist
* will alike find much to help him in Francis P. Donnelly's
"The Art of Interesting" (Kenedy). Although Father Don
nelly has taught rhetoric in several American Jesuit colleges,
his book is not a textbook of rhetoric. It is a series of stimu
lating essays warring against the dulness which empties
churches and fills waste baskets with unread letters, newspapers,
and magazines. Dulness is conventional, abstract, impersonal.
It may be clear, but it does not attract and fascinate a reader
by the form of its expression. It is a brown paper parcel in an
age that wages advertising campaigns over an improvement in
the package. The enemy of dulness is interest. The writer
or speaker can interest his audience by his directness of ex
pression, by his emotional force, by his ability to arouse antag
onism, by his novelty, and especially by stimulating the imagi
nation. Such a writer makes his reader see and hear the
things which are told him. And one who wishes to gain this
power of interesting people is here supplied with exercises
calculated to develop imagination by the classical pedagogy of
imitation. For Father Donnelly is a sound classical scholar.
He has done us the service of showing conclusively that the
underlying principles of classical rhetoric are fundamentally
valid todaythat Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian knew not
only how to make speeches, but how to preach sermons, write
editorial articles, and sell groceries. It is unfortunate that the
inclusion of essays printed elsewhere mars the unity of this
most interesting book, for Father Donnelly knows how to
interest as well as how to talk about it.
A/I R. SPECTATOR noted with disapproval the existence of
* * certain "Grub Street biographers, who watch for the
demise of a great man like so many undertakers, on purpose
to make a penny of him." The race has outlived Grub Street,
and to this day the obsequies of the great are no more com
plete without biographers than without bouquets. The Count
Fleury, who assumes responsibility for the editing of the
"Memoirs of the Empress Eugenie" (Appleton) from various
letters and journals, would scorn to be associated with Grub
Street, but the work is marked by the copious and loose-jointed
March 2, 1921]
The Nation
triviality of journalism in spite of the assurance of the pub

lisher that it has long been withheld from publication "by
special request." Readers who expect either sober history or
that atmosphere of well-bred impropriety generally associated
with the genre of court memoirs will be disappointed. There
is material of the racy sort in the story of this comparatively
obscure girl who captured an emperor, and there is tragedy in
her later years, but the author skips all this and makes her as
proper but not as picturesque as Victoria, by concentrating his
attention upon amazingly trivial details of court life. The gen
eral tone is one of resolute apology for all things connected
with the Empire, but whatever facts of historical interest exist
are hidden under a mass of details concerning court functions
and royal visits, which appeal to snobbery no more exalted than
that of a nurse-maid.
TASTES change with the generations, and what satisfied our
fathers and grandfathers may not please at all the more
outspoken mind of the children. Our elders wept with Thaddeus
of Warsaw and read Manzoni's "Betrothed" with avidity, but to
the readers of today both are tiring in the extreme. The same
is true of biographies. The inflated rhetoric and eulogistic
bombast that soothed the American soul in the middle of the
last century tortures the modern mind with its grandiloquence
and fondness for panegyric and is slowly giving way to a treat
ment compact of directness, impartiality, balance, and perspec
tive. Of this process we have an excellent illustration in the
lives that have been written of Jonathan Trumbull, governor of
Connecticut during the Revolution. Stuart's life, issued in
1859, is eulogistic, partial, and discursive, but it pleased our
grandfathers. "The Life of Jonathan Trumbull" (Little,
Brown) written by the late Jonathan Trumbull, a great-greatgrandson, is of the kind that would have satisfied our fathers
accurate and reliable, but still prejudiced and filio-pietistic. Mr.
Trumbull knew all that there was to be known about his ances
tor, but he knew less about Connecticut, still less about the other
colonies, and almost nothing about Great Britain or her policy.
The result is a dull life of a second Aristides the Just. We
still wait for a scholarly account of Trumbull, written with more
knowledge and less patriotic fervor, that shall satisfy the crit
ical mind of the present generation.
JUDGE HENRY G. CONNOR'S "John Archibald Campbell"
** (Houghton Mifflin) contains less the story of a man than
the analysis of a mind. Campbell, Associate Justice of the
Supreme Court from 1853 to 1861, had a distinguished career at
the bar of Alabama before he was called into the judicial service
of the United States, and after his resignation, having failed in
his efforts to stay secession and to avert civil war, he served the
Confederacy, resuming the practice of his profession in 1865
and continuing at the bar until his death in 1889. Thus in one
sense he had no career, but his claim to the remembrance of
posterity lies in his connection with some of the greatest legal
cases of our history, involving the interpretation of the Consti
tutionthe Dred Scott case, the Slaughter House cases, the
Jackson vs. Ludeling case, and many others. Judge Connor has
analyzed Campbell's arguments in these cases with great clear
ness and understanding and his book is fascinating to one who
enjoys following the working of a powerful legal mind.
JOHN G. NEIHARDT'S "Song of Hugh Glass," recently
" issued in a school edition (Macmillan), is a delightful addi
tion to the too scanty list of current books for school use.
The author's autobiographical note and historical preface, in
which he tells of the lasting impression made upon him by his
first view of the Missouri River and suggests something of the
epic quality of the historical material of the Northwest country,
make a fitting and fascinating introduction to the poem. The
book, also, is attractively printed and bound. But there is a
feature about it which moves to vigorous protest. It has an
appendix of over fifty pages of editorial notes in fine print,
349
a train load of ponderable freight attached to this epic express.

Here one finds not merely God's plenty, but sad satiety; not
merely a feast, but a plethora. In these are all the printed
trappings which contribute much toward making great litera
ture merely "classics" to the schoolboy and schoolgirl"Dead
books which no one reads except when he must"
'T'HREE new titles just added to The Modern Library (Boni
* and Liveright) agreeably illustrate the range of this ad
mirable series. One is the sensitive translation which Lafcadio
Hearn made of Flaubert's "The Temptation of St. Anthony,"
here accompanied by the Addenda of curious material passed
over in the text of the translation. Another is L. MacBean's
"Marjorie Fleming's Book" with John Brown's "Marjorie
Fleming," surely one of the most engaging volumes in all the
literature of childhood, and a timely one at this moment when
the child is undergoing a literary exploitation never before
equaled. If by comparison with these two Havelock Ellis's
"The New Spirit" seems not quite so fresh, it is because the
spirit which was indeed new in 1890, when the book was first
issued, has now been a good while in the world, and the more
alert members of the present generation will find a good deal
that seems accepted doctrine in these broad and bland essays on
Diderot, Heine, Whitman, Ibsen, Tolstoy, and Huysmans. As
an introduction to these particular authors, however, few books
are more useful. The Modern Library will soon need to add
titles more modern than the slightly passe books of the nineties.
The series already boasts a volume of Voltaire. Why not a
selection from Lucian?
Drama
"Macbeth" in the Void
fJ^HE production of "Macbeth" by Mr. Arthur Hopkins, Mr.
* Robert Edmond Jones, and Mr. Lionel Barrymore (Apollo
Theater) raises an old and fundamental question. Neither an
uninstructed dislike nor a sophisticated approbation touch it at
all. When Mr. Hopkins declared that he and his associates
had left behind "all compromise with realism," he flung that
essential question nakedly at us and anyone moderately fa
miliar with certain artistic tendencies of the day could have
foretold the result. The mimetic function of art was to be
reduced to a minimum. Mr. Jones himself could not have
dreamed that it would quite cease from activity. Our eeriest
and wildest imaginings still draw their elements from experi
ence. His jagged boards cut by pointed arches have their ulti
mate origin in medieval architecture; the masks of his weird
sisters derive, after all, from the lineaments of the human face.
The imagination cannot work in the void, and abstract beauty
is a contradiction in terms. What is the utmost, then, that the
artist can do? He can strip art of one element of concreteness after another; he can get to an irreducible minimum; he
can take this irreducible minimum and "stylicize" it. Thus
he can get as far from realism as possible and land straight
in a hard and shallow formalism. For these irreducible sym
bols have an ugly tendency to become as constant and as rigid
as hieroglyphics. The rococo period also stripped life in art
and shut up the residuum in symbols and substituted for the
rough and beautiful multiformity of the world the gardens of
Watteau and the meads of Pope.
The perfectly sincere intention of such an unwillingness to
compromise with reality is to raise art to a higher significance,
to omit everything that is not packed with meaning, to make
a play, for instance, as Mr. Hopkins put it, "a play of all times
and all people." But in this train of speculation there is in
volved a false analogy. If it were possible to drain art so
wholly of the concrete and the fluctuating as to universalize its
meaning in that bleak and literal sense, it would cease to be
art and become mathematics. An algebraic formula expresses
[Vol. 112, No. 2904
The Nation
350
an exact and universal truth. But it is not a truth that will
make the pulse quicken; it is not a truth that can be touched
with hands. This ultra-symbolism may, with the utmost so
briety, be said to be flying into the face of Providence. Man
is no abstract spirit. To make him typical is to traduce him.
Nor is he merely clothed in his flesh and his world. He is
embodied so and only so. He and his world interpenetrate
each other. To tear the two asunder is to maim both beyond
healing, and to rob both of significance by obliterating their
essential characters. There can be nothing in art which was
not first in life. Hence art is significant in proportion to the
richness of its vital content in terms of flesh and gear and grass
and stones and winds. Stick to the elemental, if you choose.
Nakedness can be great, but not symbolic swathings about a
core of nothingness. Life has an atmosphere which art can
project. Abstract atmosphere does not exist. The most en
trancing fragrance is still the fragrance of some earthly object.
Particles of its material substance detach themselves and thud
faintly against the olfactory nerve. We cannot smell anything
unless there is something to smell. We cannot feel anything
from art unless art is the expression of life in a concrete,
recognizable embodiment.
This is no plea for historical accuracy or creeping correct
ness or a pedantic adherence to the Shakespearean text. It
was, for instance, quite legitimate to divide "Macbeth" into
three moral episodes centering respectively in the murder
scene, the banquet-hall scene, and the sleep-walking scene. It
was, indeed, a high and sensitive intelligence that set the play
to this spiritual and artistic rhythm. But those scenes them
selves with their heavy and monotonous coloring, their cubist
lumber, their asymetrical polygons and lathe triangles, are
dreary beyond measure. And they are dreary not because they
mean only the essential but because, from the nature of things,
they can mean nothing at all. At the end of the banquet-hall
scene there is a single moment of human forlornness and of
mortal ache. That moment could be felt because here, at least,
candles burned and tables bore pewter cups and there arose
the semblance of a habitation of man. But that image fades
once more from the eye and the mind and Lady Macbeth
falters, holding a pathetically real little lamp, among decora
tions so meaningless, because so unrelated to reality, that all
the pity of her distracted soul cannot shield our nerves from
the assault of the boat-like hulks in the foreground.
The final and supreme oddity of this production is that
Macbeth, the "man possessed" of Mr. Hopkins's explanation,
is impersonated by Mr. Lionel Barrymore as a creature of no
tragic austerity, no vision of fatality, no splendor, and no
gloom. He is rough, sordid, unintelligent, ignoble. He is not
a hero caught in the toils of fate ; he is a beast in a trap. The
husky voice, the lumbering movement, the shifty vision, the
tangled beard, the feeble exultation and ferocity all combine
to project the idea of a common, heavy, spiritually soggy man
who never approached the stature of his fate. Perhaps this is
a legitimate interpretation of the murderous Scotch thane who,
according to Holinshed, was always known to be "somewhat
cruell of nature." Nor is it to be denied that Mr. Barrymore
carries out his conception with an unrelenting consistency. But
what conceivable relation could such a conception of Macbeth
have been thought to sustain to the mystical abstractions which
employed the mind of Mr. Hopkins and the eye of Mr. Jones?
Miss Julia Arthur's Lady Macbeth, though feeble and subdued,
does not, at least, wrench herself out of the frame of these
eerie pictures and bring the whole decorative scheme tumbling
down. Of the entire production, then, the final word must be
that the best and strongest forces in our living theater, that
fine intelligence and something not unlike genius, have been
wasted here for the want of some close and scrupulous reflec
tion on the character and the possibilities of the artistic proc
ess itself. One's consolation is that those forces are actually
with us and that a single mistake cannot greatly enfeeble or
diminish them.
Ludwig Lewisohn
Herald Square
New York
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largest
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International
Relations
Santo Domingo's New Freedom

I. Rear Admiral Snowden's Proclamation
"AN initial step in the direction of the complete selfli government of the Dominican people" was an
nounced from Washington on December 24, 1920. The
"initial step" was outlined in a proclamation by Rear
Admiral Thomas Snowden, U. S. N., Military Governor of
Santo Domingo, issued on December 23, and published the
same day by Listin Diario (Santo Domingo City).
Whereas, The friendly purposes of the United States in the
employment, pursuant to rights derived from the Treaty of
1907, of its military forces within the Dominican Republic for
the restoration of public order and the protection of life and
property have been substantially achieved; and
Whereas, It has always been the desire and intention of the
Government of the United States to withdraw its aid as soon
as it could do so consistently with the said purposes and as soon
as the improved conditions in Santo Domingo to which the
United States has sought to contribute should give promise of
permanence ;
Now, therefore, I, Thomas Snowden, Rear Admiral, U. S. N.,
Military Governor of the Dominican Republic, acting under
the authority and by direction of the Government of the United
States, declare and announce to all concerned that the Govern
ment of the United States believes the time has arrived when
it may, with a due sense of its responsibility to the people of
the Dominican Republic, inaugurate the simple processes of
its rapid withdrawal from the responsibilities assumed in
connection with Dominican affairs.
Announcement is, therefore, made that a commission of
representative Dominican citizens will be appointed, the per
sonnel of which will shortly be announced, to which it is my
purpose to attach a technical adviser. This commission will
be intrusted with the formulation of amendments to the Con
stitution and a general revision of the laws of the republic,
including the drafting of a new election law. Such amend
ments to the Constitution and such laws, or such revision of
existing laws, as may be recommended by the commission,
upon approval by the Military Government in occupation, will
be submitted to a constitutional convention and to the National
Congress of the Dominican Republic, respectively.
Thomas Snowden, U. S. N.,
Military Governor of Santo Domingo.
II. The New Sedition Laws
The Rear Admiral's proclamation came two weeks after
the promulgation of new laws against sedition and defa
mation announced in Executive Orders Nos. 572 and 573,
published in Listin Diario for December 8.
Executive Order No. 572. Law against Sedition.
By virtue of the powers vested in the Military Government
of Santo Domingo, the following Executive Order is promul
gated to secure peace and order in the Dominican Republic:
Article 1. Public speeches, and the publication of articles
in reviews, periodicals, pamphlets, dailies, placards, or in any
other printed or written form, are prohibited in any of the
following cases:
(a) When the speech or article contains anything which
favors, aids, or recommends anarchy, or anything known under
the name of bolshevism ; or
(b) When it contains any expression, precept, or doctrine
which advocates or proposes the overthrow by force of the
Military Government, or resistance to any law or legal order
of the same; or
(c) When it is so hostile to the Military Government, or
Section
the Government of the United States, or its policy or officials,

civil or military, or when it criticizes them in such a form as to
show the intent to provoke unrest, disorder, or revolt; or
(d) When it exposes or represents conditions existing in the
Dominican Republic in such a form as to show intent to pro
voke disorder or revolt.
In carrying out this Article, the term intention will be in
terpreted in accordance with the temper or character of the
article or speech and the usual interpretation of the terms
employed.
Art. 2. The right of assembly and free speech will not be
limited unless it is necessary in order to maintain the public
peace.
Art. 3. Infractions of the present edict will be regarded as
offenses against the Military Government, and its tribunals
have the power to decide the cases which are subject to the
disposition of this law. The author of a speech or article, the
person who publishes it, and those who knowingly aid or in
stigate its editing, printing, or publication, will suffer the same
penalty as those directly responsible for it, and there are also
included those responsible for the administration of the review,
periodical, daily, or other publication in which the article
appears, or the one in charge of the meeting-place or hall in
which the speech is made.
Art. 4. In addition to the fixed penalties, which can in no
way be lessened, the review, daily, or other document, printed
or written, which contains articles involving an infraction of
this order will be prohibited or suspended; and the meetingplace or hall in which a speech is made which violates the
provisions of this law will be closed.
Art. 5. Whoever violates any provision of this order will be
subject to a fine of not more than $3,000 American gold, or
public labor of from one month to five years, or both. The pro
visions of the Penal Code, regarding the penalty of public
labor, will not apply to violations of this law.
Art. 6. Paragraphs 2, 3, 4, and 5 of Executive Order No.
385 [an order prohibiting publication of articles hostile to the
Military Government] are revoked.
Art. 7. All laws or provisions of laws contrary to this law
are revoked.
Thomas Snowden, Rear Admiral, U. S. N.,
Executive Order No. 57S. Law against Defamation.
By virtue of the powers vested in the Military Government
of Santo Domingo, the following order is promulgated:
Article 1. Defamation and insult are judged as crimes ac
cording to definitions and penalties in this law.
Art. 2. Defamation or public insult directed against the
Government of the United States of America, or any of its
officials or administrators, will be punished by a penalty of
not more than two years' imprisonment, or fine of $1,000, or
both.
Art. 3. Defamation is the allegation or imputation of an
act which attacks the honor or the reputation of the person
or group to which it refers. Insult is any expression of
affront, any insinuation or term of disrespect, which does not
contain the imputation of an actual fact.
Art. 4. Defamation of any other representative, agent, or
employee of the Government of the United States of America,
or of the Military Government, will be punished by a fine of not
more than $500, or by imprisonment for not more than six
months, or both.
Art. 5. Insinuations made against an official, representa
tive, agent, or employee, whether by name or otherwise, do not
constitute defamation or insult, when such insinuations are
true. The person making the charges must prove the truth
of his allegations and accusations.
Art. 6. Defamation or insult directed against an official or
The Nation
352
[Vol. 112, No. 2904
administrator, not identified by name or in any other way, will
have expressed the desire to accomplish the restoration of the
be considered as directed against the Government.
Dominican Republic with all the inalienable attributes of its

absolute sovereignty, and without any reduction of its terri
ART. 7. Persons committing offenses against this Executive

Order will be tried and judged by the tribunals of the Military
Government of Santo Domingo.
ART. 8. All laws or provisions of laws contrary to this order

are revoked.
tory;
WHEREAs, The proposals expressed by the United States of

America in its Proclamation of December 23, 1920, for the
amendment of the Constitution and the revision of the laws
THOMAS SNowDEN, Rear Admiral, U.S. N.,

of the Dominican Republic with the approval of the American

military forces, which hold the country in subjugation, con
stitute an order given by one who has no right to give it, and
III. THE NATIONAL PROTEST
deprive the Dominican people of everything in their funda
A protest by the National Dominican Union, a patriotic

organization including almost all Dominican citizens in
public life, was issued and published in Listin Diario on
mental institutions which serves today as a protection and

defense against the imperial aims of the United States Gov
December 24, 1920, the day following the Admiral's procla

mation. It recited the story of American intervention as
Dominicans see it, and declared it would recognize no
steps taken in the execution of the proclamation.
WHEREAs, The National Dominican Union was founded for
the purpose of saving the Dominican people from the danger

of exploitation;
WHEREAs, Its first and unalterable object is the restoration

of the Dominican Republic to its former status of an abso
lutely free and independent state;
WHEREAs, On May 16, 1916, the United States landed mili
tary forces in the Dominican Republic, intervening contrary to
international law;
WHEREAs, On November 29, 1916, the United States over

turned by violence the Constitutional Government of the Domin
ican Republic, proclaiming the nation to be under military
occupation, governed by the forces of the United States of
America;
WHEREAS, The United States of America, in its Proclamation

of 1916, in order to give an honest appearance to the violation
of Dominican independence, claimed an infringement on the
part of the Dominican Republic of obligations stipulated in
the Dominico-American Convention of February 7, 1907;
ernment;
WHEREAs, The Dominican people, whose virility and dignity

have been irrefutably tested by history, do not need or accept
protectors, nor do they feel disposed to tolerate without pro
test any arbitrary and despotic foreign voice within their do
mestic walls;
WHEREAS, The day is already at hand when the Dominican

people will reap the benefits of their vigorous resistance, and
the United States of America will retire convinced of its error,
because the Latin-American republics, Europe itself, and even
a very considerable part of the American people, have become

aware of the international injury perpetrated by the Govern
ment of that powerful nation against Dominican territory and

institutions; and the voices of these other republics are raised
against this abominable crime, and they are knocking with

ever-increasing force at the gates of the temple of supreme
international justice;
Therefore, The National Dominican Union protests, in the

name of the Dominican people, against the Proclamation issued
by the United States of America in the territory of the Domin
ican Republic, on December 23, 1920, signed by Thomas
Snowden, called Military Governor of the Dominican Republic,
and firm to the end resists all the declarations, announcements,
orders, and nominations contained in the said Proclamation,
and declares to the United States of America and to the whole
WHEREAS, The United States of America, after having de
world that the Dominican people maintain intact their supreme
ceitfully deprived the Dominican Republic of all its armed
aim for the immediate restoration of the Dominican Republic

with all the inalienable attributes of its absolute sovereignty
and without reduction of its territory, and declare substantially
null and void all the acts accomplished by the use of force
or under the compulsion of the Military Government in the
forces, has kept the Dominican people subdued by force of

bayonets for four years, although Santo Domingo at no time
renounced its sovereignty nor accepted, directly or indirectly,
the abusive authority of the occupying State, and although
there has not passed a single day in which it did not protest
against this foreign interference in its internal affairs, re
sisting and repulsing it with all the means at its disposal;
WHEREAS, On December 23, 1920, the United States of Amer
ica issued another proclamation in which it again referred to

supposed rights derived from the Convention of 1907, and ex
pressed the desire to withdraw its support imposed upon the
Dominican Republic without its consent by means of a com
mission of Dominican citizens, whose duty it was to reform the
Constitution of the Republic, to amend its laws, and to enact
an electoral law completely agreeable to the Military Occupa
tional Government, such amendments and reforms to be finally

submitted to a constitutional assembly and the National Con
gress, respectively;
WHEREAs, There is absolutely no just basis for military oc

cupation and exploitation of the Dominican people by the
United States of America, nor has that country any right to
enact or revise laws, amend the Constitution, convoke electoral
commissions, or subject the electoral power to the control of
foreign armies;
WHEREAs, The Dominican Republic, in spite of the military

occupation, is still a sovereign state, not recognizing, nor able
to recognize, any political authority within its own territory,
except those powers which have been granted in accordance with
its own laws;
WHEREAS, The Dominican people, through their provincial
assemblies, their National Union, and their national assemblies,
execution of the purposes enumerated in the Proclamation of

December 23, 1920.
[Signed] DoN EMILIANo TEJERE, President, etc., etc.

Santo Domingo, R. D., December 24, 1920
IV. A PROVINCIAL PROTEST
Even more vigorous was the protest of the provincial

junta of the National Dominican Union in San Pedro de
Macoris, issued on January 20, 1921.
It repeated the con
ditions set by the Dominicans appointed by Admiral

Snowden and pronounced them inadequate.
WHEREAS, In accordance with the Proclamation of the Mili
tary Government of December 23, 1920, and of the so-called
Wilson Plan, Rear Admiral Snowden has invited a group of

Dominican citizens to form the Commission of Representative
Dominicans charged with the preparation of amendments to
the Constitution and with a general revision of the laws of the
republic, with the assistance of a technical adviser from the
United States;
WHEREAS, The Dominican citizens invited by Rear Admiral

Snowden to form the aforesaid Commission have accepted this
invitation subject to the following conditions:
(a) That the American technical adviser be suppressed, or
that he function as a counselor of the Military Government,

not of the Commission;
(b) That the Commission be composed of not more than
March 2, 1921]
The Nation
seven members, including the president of the Supreme Court

of Justice, Sr. Rafael Justino Castillo; and
(c) That in case of disagreement between the Commission
and the Military Government regarding drafts of laws drawn
up by the former and drafts prepared by the latter, both drafts
shall be submitted to the Constituent Assembly and to the
National Congress of the republic, so that these may decide;
Whereas, The conditions of acceptance set by the Dominican
citizens asked by Rear Admiral Snowden to form the Com
mission of Representative Dominicans do not safeguard the
Dominican people from the dangers to which execution of the
Proclamation of the Military Government made on December
23, 1920, called the Wilson Plan, subject it;
(a) Because these conditions leave intact the declaration
made by the Military Government in its proclamation that the
American intervention in Santo Domingo is based upon rights
derived from the Dominican-American Convention of 1907;
(b) Because these conditions leave intact the indirect asser
tion made by the Military Government in its proclamation that
life and property in the republic were not effectively safe
guarded before the intervention;
(c) Because these conditions do not prevent Rear Admiral
Snowden abrogating the right of the Dominican executive to
function prior to the Dominican National Congress;
(d) Because these conditions permit elections to be held in
the republic under an electoral law promulgated by the Mili
tary Government and under the influence of the bayonets of
the intervening power;
(e) Because these conditions recognize a right which the
intervening power assumes to introduce reforms in our Con
stitution and in general to revise our laws;
(f) Because these conditions do not give the Commission of
Representative Dominicans the power to see to it that its draft
laws and reforms are accepted integrally by the Constituent
Assembly and by the National Congress of the republic elected
under the influence of the bayonets of the intervening Power;
Whereas, If the Commission of Representative Dominicans
referred to in the Proclamation of the Military Government
of December 23, 1920, be formed, even under the conditions
noted above, it will have a double character as assistant to
the Military Governor and as intermediary between him and a
Constituent Assembly and a Dominican National Congress, in
respect to reforms and amendments of the Constitution and to
the laws of the republic and approval of them; and in such a
double capacity as assistant and intermediary the Commis
sion would assume no responsibility to the Dominican people;
Whereas, Once the Commission is formed under these con
ditions, and once the draft laws and reforms prescribed in the
proclamation and in the Wilson Plan have been elaborated,
Rear Admiral Snowden will call upon the Dominican people
to elect the Constituent Assembly and the National Congress
of the republic charged with the approval of such laws and
reforms; and these elections will take place under the influence
of North American bayonets, and that persons are sure to be
elected who are pleasing to the intervening Power and disposed
to accept laws and reforms perfectly adapted to the imperial
ist projects of the United States in Santo Domingo;
Whereas, Once these laws and reforms are approved by
the Constituent Assembly and the National Congress of the
republic such laws will seem to have been made and agreed
to by the Dominican people even though they may partition
its territory and derogate the attributes of its sovereignty;
Whereas, In such circumstances the Dominican people would
lose the rights which it has so tenaciously defended during the
four years of the occupation, and would be reduced to the con
dition of a protectorate or slave people subject to the United
States of America;
Therefore, the junta of the Dominican National Union of
the province of San Pedro de Macoris resolves:
That it shall declare publicly that it protests formally against
the formation of any Commission of Representative Dominicans
353
which, with or without conditions, would be ready to cooperate

in the execution of the proclamation of the Military Government
of December 23, 1920, and of the so-called Wilson Plan; that
it repudiates all acts of such a Commission and reserves its
public rights; and that it invites all Dominican citizens resi
dent in the province of San Pedro de Macoris to deny their
cooperation in executing the proclamation of the Military Gov
ernment of December 23, 1920, called the Wilson Plan, with or
without conditions.
Dr. Aybar, President; Enrique Valdes, Vice-Presi
dent; Gustavo Julio Henriquez, F. Tavares, Jr.,
Secretaries; F. A. Kidd, Treasurer; Santiago
Lamela, Francisco Cordero, C. M. Guerra, Mem
bers of the Executive Committee.
Son Pedro de Macoris, January SI, 1921
V. Labor's Appeal
Representatives of Dominican labor unions on December
10, 1920, addressed an appeal to Dr. Francisco Henriquez
y Carvajal, the president of the Dominican Republic, re
moved and superseded by the American military authori
ties, who is working for Dominican independence while liv
ing in exile. The text is taken from Listin Diario of De
cember 10, 1920.
To the President of the Republic,
Dr. Francisco Henriquez y Carvajal:
The workers and common people unite with their fellowcountrymen in the cry for the independence and liberty of
their beloved nation.
The local federation of labor, which represents all of the
workers' unions, adds its voice to the appeal for the restora
tion of national sovereignty formerly recognized by all civilized
nations.
The workers, the Dominican people, offer you another testi
mony of their feeling, for you to set before the world as a
proof that there is not one of us who does not long for liberty.
We greet you on behalf of the nation.
[Signed] Manuel Leonor, president of the Marine Union;
Fermin Silie, president of the Carpenters Union;
Enrique Remirez, president of the Tobacco-Work
ers Union;
Francisco Tejeda, president of the Chauffeurs
Union ;
Delanoy, president of the Tailors Union;
Fernando Gautier, president of the Bricklayers
Union;
Maxi Meyer, president of the Shoemakers Union;
Eliseo Grazal, president of the Ironworkers Union;
Ricardo Gonzales, president of the Bakers Union;
Francisco Cos, president of the Barbers Union;
Timoteo Santiago, president of the Painters Union;
D. Bassa, president of the Teamsters Union.
Irish Women and the Republican Army

AN important national organization of women in Ireland
has issued and spread broadcast the following procla
mation supporting the activities of the Irish Republican
Army:
Ireland and England are engaged in a warfare in which Eng
land is the aggressor.
Irishwomen look to the Irish Republican Army to protect
their lives and to defend their liberties, and feel the same pride
in their national army as do the women of other countries in
theirs.
It is an army of volunteers composed of the manhood of the
nation from the*ge of 18 who have enrolled themselves for
the defense of their country.
The Nation
354
In 1916 they fought for the establishment of the Republic

and, though overwhelmingly outnumbered, the stand they made
won the world's attention and rallied the majority of the Irish
people to the Republican standard.
In the General Election in 1918 the people declared, unmistak
ably, for a Republic.
Early in 1919 the Republic Government (Dail Eireann) was
established and began to function. The British Government
persistently ignored the free vote of the Irish people, and, not
only refused to evacuate Ireland, but began more aggressive
measures against the people.
There was only one course for the Irish Republican Army as
for any national army : to continue to protect the lives and liber
ties of the citizens and to carry out the decrees of the duly
elected representatives of the people.
In all they have done we, the women of Ireland, are with them
and will be till the end.
We repudiate the calumnies of our enemies.
We will not tolerate the imputation that our heroic soldiers
are a "murder-gang."
We rank with the world's bravest our men who fight against
tremendous odds in face of the resources of an empire.
We glory in their heroism under torture and in their deeds of
valor in the field.
We know that Ireland's honor is safe in their hands.
The enemy violates all rules of civilized warfare by torturing
and hanging prisoners of war and by refusing humane treatment
to the wounded.
Our men, in spite of the difficulties entailed by guerrilla tac
tics, adhere to the laws of civilization and humanity.
The proclamation of martial law (12th December, 1920)
States that it is a crime involving the death penalty to carry
arms or to harbor anyone doing so.
"(b) After the 27th December, 1920, any unauthorized person
found in possession of arms, ammunition, or explosives will be
liable on conviction by a military court to suffer death.
" (d) Note wellThat a state of armed insurrection exists,
that any person taking part therein or harboring any person
who has taken part therein, or procuring, inviting, aiding, or
abetting any person to take part therein is guilty of levying war
against His Majesty the King, and is liable on conviction by a
military court to suffer death."
The women of Ireland consider it a crime for any young Irish
man of military age not to carry arms in the defense of his
country, and that it is an even greater crime for any person of
Irish blood to refuse to harbor and assist our brave soldiers.
Irishwomen scorn a proclamation that would make them
traitors to their country. They will prove no less true to their
soldiers than Nurse avell to England's.
For the Library at Cork

AN appeal has been made by citizens of Cork for assist
ance in restoring the public library in that city, which
was destroyed by British Black and Tans in December.
The statement issued by the library committee is as follows :
On the morning of Sunday, December 12, 1920, the only
free library available for the 100,000 citizens of the city and
environs of Cork was burned to the groundthe last victim
of the great holocaust in which the City Hall and the principal
business houses also perished.
The destruction of a library large or smallwhether it be
in Alexandria, Louvain, or Corkalways appears a crime
against humanity, a violation of the sacred neutrality of the
world of letters, art, and scholarship. Our little library with
its 14,000 volumes, the slow garnering of twenty-eight years,
could lay no claim to valuable manuscripts or incunabula,
though many of our Irish printed books were very rare. Yet
the library, besides providing a newsroom containing all the
[Vol. 112, No. 2904
leading papers and periodicals, recorded during the past year

100,000 issues of books for reading and reference. Our books
are now a heap of ashes; our library but four bare walls.
We have secured temporary premises. But the finances of
the city are, for obvious reasons, unable to render us much
assistance; and even in normal times our revenue from the local
rate did not exceed 780. We are, therefore, forced to issue
this urgent appeal for books to reestablish our library, which
was patronized almost exclusively by working men and women,
serious young students, and also school children, for whom we
had a special juvenile section.
Gifts of books, large or small, will be very gratefully re
ceived. A special book-plate, inscribed with the name of the
donor, will be put on every book. As we must rebuild from
the beginning, practically every class of book will be useful.
Irish language and history, general literature and history, dic
tionaries and works of reference, religion, poetry, drama, and
art, science, technology, economics, sociology, fiction, juvenile
literature, sports, travel, and fine arts.
While desirous of competing in no way with the urgent call
for funds now issued by the Cork Relief Committee, we confi
dently appeal to all those who, without distinction of creed,
race, or class, wish to help in this humanitarian and educa
tional reparation. We appeal in particular to all those who
are members of the great world of letters and artdramatists,
poets; authors, editors, scholars, teachers, clergymento con
tribute, were it only a single volume each, to our peaceful en
deavor to reestablish a free public library in our devastated
city. Educational, literary, scientific, and charitable institu
tions may also, we hope, be led to send us books. And there
must be very many individual booklovers who will be only too
happy to spare from their libraries a few volumes to contribute
to the happiness and education of others less fortunate.
We earnestly request editors especially to bring this appeal
to the notice of their readers.
Signed on behalf of the Library Committee:
Thomas O. Dennehy, B.A., Chairman.
James O'Hayes, M.A.
Alfred O'Rahiely, M.A., B.Sc, Ph.D.,
Registrar, University College, Cork.
To Save the Intellectual Life of Russia

AN appeal for aid for Russian scientists and men of
letters has been issued by a British committee com
posed of such writers and scholars as H. G. Wells, Sir Israel
Gollancz, Sir Richard Gregory, Dr. P. Chalmers Mitchell,
and others. It is hoped by the committee that Americans
as well as Englishmen will respond to the appeal.
We have recently been able to get some direct communication
from men of science and men of letters in North Russia. Their
condition is one of great privation and limitation. They share
in the consequences of the almost complete economic exhaus
tion of Russia; like most people in that country they are illclad, underfed, and short of such physical necessities as make
life tolerable.
Nevertheless a certain amount of scientific research and
some literary work still goes on. The Bolsheviki were at first
regardless and even in some cases hostile to these intellectual
workers, but the Bolshevik Government has apparently come
to realize something of the importance of scientific and literary
work to the community, and the remnantfor deaths among
them have been very numerousthe remnant of these people,
the flower of the mental life of Russia, has now been gathered
together into two special rationing organizations which insure
at least the bare necessities of life for them.
These organizations have their headquarters in two build
ings known as the House of Science and the House of Litera
ture and Art. Under the former we note such great names
March 2, 1921]
Robert M. Feely, PRESIDENT
The Nation
355
James S. Keily, vice-president
John A. Hastings, secretary

P. S. Condon, treasurer
INSURANCE
LIFE
CASUALTY
HEALTH
PHONE VANDERBILT 8652

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COMPENSATION
BURGLARY
AUTOMOBILE
MARINE, Etc.
ALL AMERICAN BROKERS, Inc.

19 WEST 44th STREET
NEW YORK CITY
Editor of The Nation,

20 Vesey Street, New York, N. Y.
February 17, 1921.
Dear Sir:
As a matter of vital national interest, as well as for your individual concern, we desire to call
your attention to the purpose and object of our enterprise.
We propose a sound constructive economic plan to meet one of the most important problems con
fronting us as a Nation today, and as such we believe it merits the careful consideration of every pro
ducer, manufacturer, banker, and merchant in the country as a matter of both public and private interest.
Insurance, which is the third largest industry in America, exceeded only by that of steel and oil, is
practically controlled by British interests. Almost $600,000,000 is annually paid to British insurance com
panies by Americans. This money is used by them to build up and encourage British industry and trade,
and is a means of permitting them to flood our markets with British manufactured wares, thus depriving
many Americans of employment and laying a handicap upon the further development of American enter
prises. Insurance furnished by competitors can be used to comb the profits out of any trade.
It is our intention, by a vigorous and energetic campaign, to divert this enormous sum of $600,000,000
to American insurance companies, who will reinvest this money in American industries, provide employ
ment for additional American labor, and better enable American merchants to meet British competition
everywhere on a much stronger basis.
We urge cooperation of American agriculture, American banking, American shipping, American
manufacturing, American labor and American insurancepatriotic cooperation of all American enterprises
as it is to the best advantage of the United States today and will best build the foundation of future
opportunity for the coming generations of American citizens.
By its scope and nature the operations of the ALL AMERICAN BROKERS, INC., will affect
the prosperity of every man, woman, and child in the United States, as such an organization will have
potentialities for national service as important as those of any economic movement undertaken in the last
decade.
We invite the readers of The Nation to consider this proposition as an opportunity for public
service in an unusual degree. We shall be pleased to be of service to them in the placing of their insurance.
Insurance of every description effected in American companies exclusively at the lowest possible
rates.
"AMERICA FIRST" is our watchword
"SATISFACTORY AND EFFICIENT SERVICE" is our guarantee.
Cordially yours,
JAH EFF
Secretary.
The Nation
356
[Vol. 112, No. 2904
as those of Pavlov the physiologist and Nobel prizeman, Kar
pinsky the geologist, Borodin the botanist, Belopolsky the

astronomer, Tagantzev the criminologist, Oldenburg the orien
talist and permanent secretary of the Petrograd Academy of
Science, Koni, Bechterev, Latishev, Morozov, and many others
familiar to the whole scientific world.
Several of these scientific men have been interviewed and
affairs discussed with them, particularly as to whether any

thing could be done to help them. There were many matters
in which it would be possible to assist them, but upon one in
particular they laid stress. Their thought and work is greatly

impeded by the fact that they have seen practically no Euro
pean books or publications since the Revolution. This is an
inconvenience amounting to real intellectual distress. In the
hope that this condition may be relieved by an appeal to British
scientific workers, Professor Oldenburg formed a small com
mittee and made a comprehensive list of book and publications
needed by the intellectual community in Russia if it is to keep
alive and abreast of the rest of the world.
It is, of course, necessary to be assured that any aid of this

kind provided for literary and scientific men in Russia would
reach its destination.
The Bolshevik Government in Moscow,
As yourskin insured 2
cold and wi
"TOILET LANOLINE
is one of the best
tions for the skin.
by the greatest der

lips and hands, rough
ons, pimples and all eruptions of the
Lanoline is
for
Besa, a
the Russian trade delegations in Reval and London, and our
skin.
own authorities have therefore been consulted, and it would
and burns, and prevents the pain incident
appear that there will be no obstacles to the transmission of
exposure.
Emollien
this needed material to the House of Science and the House of
soothing.
5. :
Literature and Art. It can be got through by special facilities
####" * *
It is the best of all protectives for cuts

tecti
bland
remedy for
even under present conditions.

PREPARED B"
Many of the publications named in the Oldenburg list will
PLEXO PREPARATIONS,
Inc.
NYCW YORIC
have to be bought, the costs of transmission will be consid
erable, and accordingly the undersigned have formed them

selves into a small committee for the collection and administra
Sole Agents and Distributors
tion of a fund for the supply of scientific and literary publica

tions and possibly if the amount subscribed permits of it, of
other necessities, to these Russian savants and men of letters.
General Drug Co., N.Y., o& N. Moore St.
We hope to work in close association with the Royal Society

and other leading learned societies in this matter.
The British
| ||
ZAY
The Instrument
Science Guild has kindly granted the Committee permission to

of the Immortals
use its address.
We appeal for subscriptions and ask that checks should be
made out to the treasurer, C. Hagberg Wright, LL.D., and

sent to The British Committee for Aiding Men of Letters and
Science in Russia, British Science Guild Offices, 6 John Street,
Adelphi, London, W.C.2
The TrueNature and Source of Vitamines or life Elements

By HENRY LINDLAHR, M.D.
The latest and most vital message from the pen of this
well-known authority on dietetics and drugless healing
methods answers the greatest question as to the true
Russia and the Concessionnaires
source of life, heat, energy, resistance, and recuperative

power. It explains the philosophy and technic of fasting;
shows the relationship of vitamines to mineral elements
S a result of the number of definite proposals for the
exploitation of the natural resources of Russia made to
the Russian Soviet Government by European countries and

the United States, the Council of Peoples Commissars
states that it is determined to make public the terms on
which concessions may be granted to sound foreign indus
trial organizations. The text of the decree which follows is
taken from the Russian Press Review for December 1.
1. The concessionnaire will be allowed a share in the pro

duction, as provided by the contract, with a right to export
and to microzyma; proves the fallacy of the calorie theory;

revolutionizes the science of dietetics.
. This treatise from beginning to end abounds in aston

ishing revelations concerning the most important prob
lems in dietetics and in the treatment of human ailments.
Paper bound. Nearly 50 pages. Postpaid 50c.

Special discount when ordered in lots of six or more copies
515 S. Ashland Boulevard
Chicago, Ill.
same abroad.
2. In cases, where special technical improvements will be

introduced on a large scale, the concessionnaire will be granted
trading privileges (as the supply of machines, special contracts
for large orders, etc.).
3. In accordance with the nature and conditions of the con
cession, long term concessions will be granted to secure the full

compensation to the concessionnaire for his risk and for the
technical equipment invested in the concession.
4. The Government of the Soviet Republic guarantees that

workers.
Joseph Dietzgen was an intimate associate of Karl Marx,
and Marx gladly left to him the task of developing the revolutionary
lated in two volumes:
Philosophical Essays contains his shorter and more elementary writings,

including a critique of religion and Ethics. Cloth, $1.50.
the volume is named Letters on Logic and The Nature of Human
Brain Work.
Cloth, $1.50.

American writer.
Working on independent lines, refuting the idealism
the property invested by the concessionnaire in the enterprise
will not be liable to nationalization, confiscation, or requisition.
March 2, 1921]
5.
The Nation
The concessionnaire will be granted the right to engage
workers and officials for his enterprises on the territory of the
Soviet Republic on condition that he will observe the laws of

the Republic concerning labor, or a special contract would be
entered into guaranteeing the workers and officials certain
conditions and protecting their lives and health.
6. The Government of the Soviet Republic guarantees the
concessionnaire against any one-sided modification of conditions
of concessions by regulations and decrees of the Government.
President of the Council of Peoples Commissaries,
nd

These publications tell of good investment steeks, which
:*::.
: #":
can.
oa
period
of twenty
months.
us in 1908.
You can
secure
extending ever a
originated by
is
"
n
- --
Write for 17-NA
V. ULIANOV (LENIN)
Head of Department, BoNCH-BRUYEVICH
Secretary, L. FotiEVA
Moscow, Kremlin, November 23, 1920
SLATTERY=0
The actual attitude of the Soviet Government toward
granting concessions to foreigners is suggested in a recent

speech of Lenin in which, according to the Economic
Review (London) for December 24, he states that Americas
desire to purchase Kamchatka makes it evident that she
wishes to obtain a military base against Japan. Lenin con
40 Exchange Place
tinued:

We should only lease the territory for ten years because there
is a danger that Japan might rob us of Kamchatka. In any
case we could not exploit the territory with the resources at our
disposal. Moreover, we are leasing several million dessiatines
of forest, divided up like a chess board, in the Archangel govern
ment. In the intervening and non-leased districts our workers
can learn Western technical methods. The granting of conces

sions betokens not peace but war in another shape. If the capi
talists deceive us and try to circumvent our laws we have our
New York


Ask for NN-59
E. M. FULLER & CO.

Members C
lidated Stock Exch
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extraordinary commission for combating speculation, and this

will know how to defeat their machinations.
Should war result
the foreigners property will remain ours.

progresses on a zigzag path.
The Revolution
New York
Newark Cleveland Chicago

Boston
We have no intention of con
fining ourselves to force in order to conquer the bourgeoisie.

The new Far Eastern Government at Chita, claiming
jurisdiction over all territory east of Lake Baikal, in
cluding presumably the peninsula of Kamchatka, takes a
position definitely opposed to concessions to foreigners, or
at least to foreign Powers. In a speech to members of the
Chita Government, the Prime Minister, Mr. Krasnoschekov,
outlined the foreign policy of the Far Eastern Republic.
The main task of our Government is outlined in the paragraph
official PEACE 5TAMP
: AMERICAN PEACE Society
Monthly Official Organ American Peace Society

Founded 1828
Edited when national and international

currents converge.
Favors a law governed world, a peace
through justice.

articles by specialists, and reasoned edi.
and is to be.
of our Declaration relating to the integrity of our territory.

Therefore any attempt by any Power to gain a part of our
territory will meet with the most determined resistance. No

territory will be ceded by the Government and no special privi
lege or rights will be given to any of the Powers. We also deem
; Advocate of Peace
*: ...
ARTHUR DEERIN CALL, Editor

GEORGE PERRY MORRIS, Asst. Editer
| American Peace Society

FRTEREE
it our duty to state that no extra-territorial rights will be

Washington, D. C.
granted to any country. . . . We are determined to establish

here an independent state. All rumors in China and Japan that
the Far Eastern Republic is only a screen concealing Soviet
Russia and nothing better than a farce, are entirely groundless.
The American Empire

Love Letters from a Portugese Nun, 25c.
These stray leaves have drifted down to us through a period of over two
centuries and seem as fresh as if but written yesterday. Here was a nun
who loved a French cavalry officer and who wrote with exquisite and incon
ceivable charm, with the accent of passion and love. There is nothing in
the English language to compare with this throbbing translation. This nun
loved, and she knew how to voice her emotions.
APPEAL TO REASON. GIRARD, KANSAS.
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The Nation
358
[Vol. 112, No. 2904
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The Nation
FO UN DE D
NEW YORK, wedNESDAY, MARCH 9, 1921
Vol. CXII
No. 2905
vidual to exercise his right, privilege, or immunity to pro
Contents
EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
EDITORIALS:
Mr. Harding's Cabinet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Food Taxesfor Whom?... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
No More Political Asylum . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Professor and His President. . . . . . .
THE BLACK TROOPS ON THE RHINE
WHAT IS HAPPENING IN NORTH DAKOTA. By Oliver S. Morris...
THE GERMAN INDEMNITY: A BRITISH VIEW. By J. A. Hobson...
THE SILESIAN PLEBISCITE. By S. Miles Bouton. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
IRISH AND AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE. By Lincoln Colcord.....
THE CREATIVE IDEAL. By N. J. Ware............................
IN THE DRIFTWAY.
By the Drifter... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
CORRESPONDENCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
BOOKS:
The American Inquisition. By Thomas Reed Powell........ . . . . . . .
Gorki's Tolstoy.
By Dorothy Brewster. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
On the English Parliament. By R. L. Schuyler. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Ecclesiastes in Virginia. By C. V. D. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Notable New Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .* * * * * * * * * * * * *
359
362
363
pose, discuss, advance, agitate for, or promote by lawful

means any Federal statute or any amendment of a Federal
statute, or any amendment of the Federal Constitution.
A ten thousand dollar fine and a five-year sentence are pro

vided for any State or local officials seizing books or private
- - - -
367
370
papers without a warrant and for any Federal official who
371
373
374
375
376
injures, oppresses, threatens, or intimidates any person in

the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege
Secured or guaranteed to him by the Constitution.
Per
haps most important of all is Section 7 of the bill, which

377
879
380
881
381
makes it a criminal offense for Federal officers to make seiz

ures and searches without warrants.
Had such a bill been
law we should not have seen such incredible flouting of the
DRAMA:
A Note on Dramatic Dialogue.

By Ludwig Lewisohn. . . . . . . . . . . . .
The
The
1.86 5
Paris Allied Decisions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Disarmament Notes
...
The Experts' Report on Reparations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

An Allied Holding Company for Austria. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
381
383
385
386
388

Associate EDITORS
LEWIS S. GANNETT
FREDA KIRCHWEY
ARTHUR WARNER
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
ERNEST. H. GRUENING
CARL WAN DOREN
MANAGING EDITOR
LITERARY EDITOR
Constitution in the last few years by lawless officials who

had so solemnly taken the oath to uphold it. If the new
Congress is true to itself, true to our traditions and to the
founders of America, this measure will be the very first to

become a law. In some benighted portions of America like
Pennsylvania and Alabama it would have the effect of restor
ing republican government and the fundamental liberties
of the people which local officers have been and are now
denying to them.
SUBSCRIPTION RATES-Five dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and
THE NATION, 20 Vesey Street, New York City. Cable Address: NATIon, New
NE more scrap of paper has been tossed into the

Allied waste basket, already stuffed full with dis
N order to head off the usual letters assuring us that

Mr. Harding really did very well and obtained on the
whole a good Cabinet and asking what we should have done
in his place, we submit a possible Republican slate which
speaks for itself:
Secretary of State
JOHN BASSETT MOORE of New
York, or SENATOR KNOX of
Pennsylvania.
Secretary of the Treasury FRANK A. VANDERLIP of New
considered and reconsidered. The treaty of Svres, which

jigsawed the map of Turkey and imposed paper debts whole
sale, has, as Mr. Lloyd George delicately put it, been af
fected by the march of events. The Allies have boldly de
cided to send a commission to study the question of racial
carded clauses and obsolete commissions and decisions un
Secretary of War
York.
GENERAL TASKER H. BLISS of
Attorney General
Pennsylvania.
CHARLES E. HUGHES, of New
York.
Postmaster General
Secretary of the Interior

Secretary of Agriculture
JULIUS ROSENWALD of Illinois.

SAMUEL W. MCCALL of Mass
achusetts.
HERBERT HOOVER of California.
SENATOR EDWIN F. LADD of
Secretary of Commerce
Secretary of Labor
CHARLES NAGEL of Missouri.

JULIA LATHROP of Illinois.
Secretary of the Navy
distribution on the spot, and the result is sure to be a re
duction of the unethnically bloated territory allotted to

Greece. The Turks clearly leave the London conference
winners of the diplomatic match. The delegation from the
Constantinople Government which has its expenses paid by

the Allies, and the delegation from Mustapha Kemal's
Angora Government which defies the Allies, refused to
speak to each other in public, but by a curious coincidence
the demands which they presented were virtually identical,

and the outcome is that the suggestion of reparations pay
ments by Turkey has been abandoned, and the boundary
question, which Venizelos thought he had settled, is to be
decided all over again.
The Turkey of 1921 may limp a
bit, but diplomatically speaking, it is no goose.
North Dakota.
ENATOR BORAH has again proved his right to the

intellectual leadership of the Senate by his introduction
in the dying Congress of a bill providing for the immediate
removal from office of any United States official unlawfully
HEN there is this question about mandates. There

seems to be some doubt as to just who got what
spoils how. Japan claims Yap, and seems in a fair way to
hold it, but the United States protests that it has not been
consulted, and that the former German colonies are, by the
terms of the Treaty of Versailles, to be distributed not by
interfering with the civil rights of the individual. The bill

further provides fines of $5,000 and $10,000 for State or
the League of Nations but by the Principal Allied and

Associated Powers, which includes us. And we are quite
right, though our rightness is one of the most amusing
local officers who interfere with any attempt of any indi
flukes that fortune ever played Mr. Wilson.
Mr. Wilson,
360
The Nation
it will be recalled, did his very best to tie up all the de

cisions of the peace to the League which his people have
rejected. There is also the question of the Near East
mandates; it seems that England and France, without
bothering even to consult the League, which they dominate
thoroughly enough, have effected a swap of mandates in the
Syrian desert, so that England can now obtain her long
cherished dream of an all-rail route from the Mediterranean
to India. All of which is very much in the historic manner
of military victors, but it makes Article 22 of the Treaty
of Versailles rather bitter reading : "To those colonies and
territories," it begins, "which as a consequence of the late
war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the states
which formerly governed them and which are inhabited
by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the
strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should
be applied the principle that the well-being and development
of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization and that
securities for the performance of this trust should be em
bodied in this Covenant." Sacred trust indeed !
THE Red Armies of Russia have had their victories on
several fronts, but none so overwhelming as the vic
tory over the combined forces of the League of Nations won
by the Moscow Radio Station under the able command of
Foreign Minister Chicherin. By a simple dispatch of mes
sages^to Switzerland, to Italy, to Rumania, to Austria,
and to Czecho-SlovakiaM. Chicherin, single-handed, has
stopped the advance of the League of Nations army,
through the territory of its own members, to Vilna.
Whether the Russian Foreign Minister is wholly respon
sible for the refusal of these countries to allow the League
army to pass may be a matter of some doubtparticularly
in the countries involved. But the French Foreign Office,
which takes the Bolsheviki more seriously, if possible, than
they take themselves, is reported to have laid full blame for
the halting of the League Army upon the invincible dis
patches sent out from the Radio Station at Moscow.
ARGENTINA shows the same utter lack of humble re
spect for the great Powers that she showed in retiring
from their League at Geneva. They ask her to take meas
ures to prevent Germany's exporting war materials to
Argentina because they have prohibited such export in their
Treaty of Versailles. Whereupon Argentina replies that
she has not heard of any German plans to export war ma
terials to Argentina, and that she has not ordered any,
but that on general principles she sees no reason to take
such measures simply because the great Powers wish it.
These small nations are getting out of hand; such talk
lacks the deference to which the great Powers are accus
tomed. Apparently, similar notes have been sent to other
neutrals. The newspaper accounts of the incident add an
interesting item: "James W. R. MacLeay, the British Min
ister to the Argentine, said he understood the principle
object of these notes was to prevent German war ma
terials from reaching Russia."
FROM the hints that have been allowed to appear in the
press it is evident that Pilsudski's mission to Paris was
only a partial success. He secured a promise of help in the
economic stabilization of Poland and in the reorganization
of its army, a promise of technical and material, if not
military, assistance from France in case Poland is attacked ;
[Vol. 112, No. 2905
and he agreed to a joint determination of the foreign policy

of both countries in central and eastern Europe and to the
constitution of a Franco-Polish company to exploit Galicia's
oil wells. What he presumably went for he did not get
a promise of either direct military aid against the Bolshe
viki, or of financial aid from the French bankers, who showed
no disposition whatever to go to Poland's assistance. The
French Government now knows, as a recent dispatch stated,
"that French soldiers would never obey orders to go off and
defend Poland in the eastern marches," or it has come to
realize that its continental adventures are a rather extrava
gant form of dissipation. Poland received only half a loaf.
WHEN even Brigadier-General Crozier, commanding
the Black and Tans in Ireland, resigns in protest
against Governmental interference with the disciplining of
men caught red-handed in the act of looting, the policy of
empire in Ireland is indeed fallen low. The news of the
week is appalling, a daily record of sickening tragedy.
Governmental tribunals officially declare that a state of war
exists, and thereupon a court martial sentence of death is
confirmed upon an Irishman guilty of the single crime of
possessing a pistol, and his fiancee and friends, kneeling out
side the prison gates, hear the shot that fulfils the sentence.
Five others are shot for participating in an ambush, and in
reprisal the Irish kill British soldiers in the city of CorkMurder begets murder, and there is no end to the reprisals
and retaliations for reprisals. Can British ministers still
stand up and declare that their policy of force is bringing
peace to Ireland? General Crozier's resignation is at least
a faint ray of hope. When the British officers in charge
sicken of their work, the time may come when British min
isters will lose stomach for their task. The real hope is in
liberal England; Mr. Asquith's speeches are brave and do
him honor; but will not Britain rise to save its name?
LORD MILNER has spoken words on the subject of
Egypt that fall pleasantly on ears too long accustomed
to stories of terror and atrocity in the further corners of
Britain's Empire. "The spirit of Nationalist Egypt," he
said in his report to Parliament, "cannot be extinguished,
and an attempt to govern the country in the teeth of a
hostile people is a difficult and disgraceful task." He urges
that the liberation of Egypt be agreed to without delay. In
spite of certain reservations intended to protect England's
special interests, the report is fine and truly liberal in its
tone, and if the Government acts upon it the world will have
a chance to modify its opinion about the present tendency
of British imperialism.
SO the Lever Act is unconstitutional. Attempted prose
cution of sugar profiteers uncovered that interesting
fact. Chief Justice White finds that Section Four of the
act did not "constitute a fixing by Congress of an ascer
tainable standard of guilt," that the scope of the section
was "as broad as the human imagination," and that "the
degree of guilt was left to ever changing standards." We
do not quarrel with the Supreme Court's ruling; the Lever
Act was a hastily drawn measure, and like many war-time
acts, was far from a model legal document. But it is inter
esting to note that this act was successfully used by Federal
attorneys, aided by the lower Federal courts, to kill the
coal strike, and met defeat only when it attempted to deal
with profiteers. Congress, in passing the bill, had no dream
March 9, 1921]
The Nation
of punishing strikers, but intended punishment of profiteers.

The act achieved the unintended goal, but its unconstitu
361
sprang. Thus of about 350,000 immigrants admissible

in a year, the largest quotas are allowed to the United
tionality was discovered when it attempted the goal in
Kingdom, Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, in the
tended. Such a sequence of events, whether it be proper

legal process or not, inevitably tends to discredit the courts
and leads wide circles of our people to believe that the
order named, although most Russians are excluded under

our present passport regulations. Senator Colt of Rhode
Island has stated that the Senate measure is calculated to
restrict immigration further even than the Johnson bill.
This is likely, because the Johnson measure made liberal
courts are used as tools of business interests.

HEN President Wilson refused to pardon Eugene
Debs the latter issued a statement to the press in
which he said among other things: It is Woodrow Wilson
who needs a pardon from the American peopleand, if I
had it within my power, I would grant him the pardon that
would set him free. . . . There is not in my heart the
slightest trace of bitterness or resentment. I am compas
sionate; I do not condemn Mr. Wilson. He is the most piti
ful figure in history. As the result of the publication of
this statement, the Administration in Washington denied
to Mr. Debs all prison privileges, refused to permit him
to receive mail or reading material, or to write a letter even
to his wife. It is also reported that he has been placed in
solitary confinement in the isolation building at Atlanta.
This is so absolutely characteristic of the Wilson Adminis
tration that we are really rather inclined to believe that it is
a fitting exit for it to go out of office with this small revenge
to its credit upon a man whose spirit soars far above that
of any member of the late Government.
|
O any friend of labor the accounts of the meeting in

Washington of the union chiefs of the American Fed
eration of Labor are profoundly depressing. To be sure they
declared war on the open shop, but it is apparently to be a
war of the pen, waged with a publicity bureau, which shall
among other duties inform the country of labor's stand on
this question. Such a program amounts to little more than

a confession of helplessness in the face of adverse economic
conditions.
The American Federation of Labor has neither
the philosophy nor the power needed to hold its own through
bad times, and for all its fine gestures of pugnacity it can
only talkand wait. It would do well, however, to talk
about its troubles and to try to find a way out of them rather
than waste words of invective on the dangers of foreign
agitators and the sins of the Soviet Government of Russia.
The spleen it displays when it approaches these subjects
reveals its own lack of a constructive, hopeful program, and
will do little to strengthen it in the quarter where it most
lacks strengthamong our foreign-born workers.
N many ways the immigration bill finally shaped in the
Senate is more objectionable than the earlier exclusion
measure introduced by Representative Johnson in the
House. Mr. Johnson made the mistake of assuming an
emergency due to a flood of incoming aliens which did not
exist, but his bill was frankly temporary in character and
did not pretend to establish a settled policy. On the other
hand, the Senate measure, although limited in operation
to fifteen months, is based upon a principle of selection

by nationality that is as unscientific as it is unfair.
This
is the worst of all times to emphasize the old superstitions

based upon race and nationality, while to limit the arrivals
from any one country to 3 per cent of the persons of that
nationality resident in the United States gives an obvious
advantage to the regions from which our early immigration
exceptions in favor of relatives of persons already here, and

this covers a large proportion of present arrivals.
HE history of typhus is that of human wretched
44
ness. The words of Hirsch, the German physician,
are pathetically significant today. Eastern Europe has be

come typhus-landa waste of hunger, cold, sickness, de
Spair-across whose man-drawn frontiers these four gaunt
horsemen of war's shambles ride unhindered.
Across three
thousand miles of isolating ozone their poisonous exhala

tions are wafted upon us. As an actuality typhus, before
the war, had ceased to exist here.
Medical men took its
extinction for granted. It had historical interest only

akin to the black plague or the more recent hospital gan
grene.
Its tombstone was indeed a monument to civiliza
tion, to modern science. Now this mysterious pestilence

stalks again in our midst; and with mankind still steeped
in blood and hate this silent revisitor may ravage far. It
is Italy, foremost among Western European nations to
recognize and attempt adjustment to a changed world, which
is now valiantly stemming this ancient and newest death.
Italy has created a true cordon sanitaire on its northeast
ern border which restricts the typhus area and holds back
the exposed would-be emigrants to the United States. This
is the kind of immigration restriction which all may indorse;

this, the one frontier which justifies its they shall not
pass.
AIL brought in 33-1/3 hours from San Francisco to
New York?
It staggers the imagination, but there
the fact is. Seven fifty-pound pouches of mail left San

Francisco on Tuesday morning, February 22, and arrived at
Mineola, Long Island, the next afternoon, being brought at
an average speed of 81 miles an hour including stops. Were
we not a people dulled to the marvels of science, so extraor
dinary a feat must have thrilled the country. It was only
a short time ago that the transcontinental pony express
seemed to Americans an amazing achievement when it car
ried the mail from ocean to ocean within three weeks.
Then
came the seven-day trains, cut gradually to four and a half,

and now the aeroplane in 33 hours, which will indubitably
soon be a round twenty-four hours. How remote now
seems Jules Verne's hero who struggled across the continent
by train, by balloon, by snow-boat, by horse, to accomplish
his trip around the world in eighty days! The Government
is building or purchasing several great Zeppelins which are
counted on to carry passengers from New York to San Fran
cisco in a trifle over two days and one of them may be in
service next summerand this is after all but the beginning
of the development of aviation. Regrettable as it is that one
pilot lost his life in the transcontinental flight, the Gov
ernment does well in encouraging such feats. The pony
express riders frequently paid for their daring with their
lives; the mail pilots are acquiring a skill and knowledge
without which commercial advances will be impossible.
They are among the real heroes of science.
[Vol. 112, No. 2905
The Nation
362
Mr.
Harding's
MR. HARDING'S Cabinet gives no room for surprise or

disappointment. Bacon declared a long time ago that
"men's thoughts are made according to their nature," but
that "their line in action is after that to which they have
been accustomed." What else could anyone have expected
from one of Mr. Harding's training and mental caliber? We
have a Cabinet about as ill equipped to deal with the ter
rible problems confronting the world as could well be put
together and one utterly remote from that liberalism and
spirit of progress for which thoughtful men and women
long. Indeed, there is one distinctly laughable phase in the
plight of those numberless trusting Americans who went
about during the campaign saying: "Well, at least Harding
will surround himself with big menthe best brains of the
country will be in his Cabinet." To the multitudes of these
there is nothing left save to chart the names of Hughes and
Hooverdubbed the "deodorizers" in the press.
For Mr. Hoover's consent to serve we are most grateful,
particularly in view of the conditions which he has suggested
and Mr. Harding has accepted. His decision spells genuine
self-sacrifice. His presence insures the attendance at Cabi
net meetings of one man who thinks in terms of humanity,
who has been serving mankind according to the best that is
in him ever since he went to Belgium's relief in 1914, who
understands and can gauge European conditions as few
others. Should he leave the Cabinetand we cannot just
now look for his remaining a member longit will not
contain a single person who knows or understands condi
tions across the ocean although the fate of the Administra
tion may readily be settled by the trend of events abroad.
With Mr. Hoover excepted the Cabinet is essentially of
Gopher Prairie quality. We make only a qualified ex
ception for Mr. Hughes, whose mind, always austere, has
been set and hardened by his six years on the Supreme
Court, who still lives in part upon his excellent reputation as
Governor of New York. The character of the campaign he
made for the Presidency in 1916 was revealing, though the
splendid stand he took against the expulsion of the Social
ists from the New York Legislature in 1920 can never be
forgotten. It is for the Charles E. Hughes of this latter
episode that we must hope. He is confronted by a similar
opportunity in the case of Haiti and Santo Domingo. As
Attorney-General, Mr. Hughes would have been in place;
we believe he would in that office have set his face rigidly
against those abuses of the American bill of rights which
have so disgraced Mr. Palmer's career as Attorney-General.
But to choose as Secretary of State a man totally unfamiliar
with diplomacy, or European affairs, is to revert to the old
American idea that any man can run any job. Had Mr.
Harding really sensed the need he must have turned to
Senator Knox, or to so learned, deeply-versed, and clearthinking a man and scholar as John Bassett Moore.
From Mr. Hughes the descent is rapid. For one so im
bued with the ideals and ethical standards of the bar as he
it must be hard, indeed, to sit at the same table with
Harry M. Daugherty of Ohio, whose own neighbors would
not elect him a delegate to the last Republican Convention.
In him the Cabinet touches low water mark; the AttorneyGeneralship is thus spent in payment of a political debt.
So, too, the Postmaster-Generalship. That unfortunate de
partment, in such dire need of reorganization and compe
Cabinet
tent administration by the ablest business man available,

some one of the type of Julius Rosenwald of Chicago, or the
best efficiency engineer to be had, is once more delivered
over to the practical politician of the Administration, to
Will H. Hays, as in the past to Burleson, to Hitchcock, to
Clarkson, to all the rest of the long line. To give the Treas
ury into the hands of perhaps our richest banker may
be expedient, but it is not good sense nor good politics
when there was available a Frank A. Vanderlip who com
bines financial ability with marked liberalism and a rarely
enlightened understanding of foreign affairs. On top of this
the army is handed over to a State Street banker of most
mediocre abilities, whose political joblessness owing to his
defeat for reelection to the Senate in a traditionally Re
publican State, has apparently made it necessary to "take
care of him." The Interior is confided to Senator Fall,
whose chief interest seems to be a desire to get us into
trouble with Mexico. As for the Navy Department, that is
bestowed upon a good fighting man, the son of one of the
best diplomats the United States ever had in the Far East,
while the Department of Labor goes to a millionaire whose
claim to fame rests on the fact that he, years ago, held
a membership card in a union of iron, steel, and tin workers.
Against him labor has rightly protested.
In truth it is a good, old-fashioned Big Business Cabinet,
without a woman in it, without a representative of the
masses of the laboring people, without any one whose name
at once suggests liberalism and democracy. It is, barring
Mr. Hoover, exactly representative of those who believe
that our Government under a Republican administration
lives for the preservation of existing privilege, for the keep
ing of the present order intact, for making rich and pros
perous those who contribute to the success of and dominate
the Republican Party. The horrid thought of the laws
with "teeth" in them that a crusading and uncontrolled
Attorney-General could enforce will trouble no one. There
will be no bringing of suits as under Mr. Knox in the Roose
velt regime. It is to be hands off business with full steam
ahead and the almighty dollar as the great objective. Then,
too, the public should realize that this is to be an imperial
istic and aggressive Administration seeking the biggest
navy in the world. If Mexico does not mind her p's and q's
then will the fate of Santo Domingo, of Haiti, and of Nica
ragua be hers no matter what it may cost the United States
in lives and treasure. And Mr. Harding's is a pro-League
Government in its make-up, with the exception of Senator
Fall. If it dares urge the League with mild reservations
then a split in the party becomes inevitable. Well, the
sooner it comes the better: the country needs sharp divi
sions, it needs a clear-cut breach, after the moral and politi
cal disintegration inseparably following after any war.
Political feeling and thought are all but dead in the coun
try. Too many say with Marlborough: "As I think most
things are governed by destiny, having done all that is
possible, I submit with patience." The true patriot fights
on, without the patience of contentment or compromise. Be
holding those to whom the country's destiny is now in
trusted, liberals who contend not for office but for men and
principles must more resolutely and more steadfastly than
ever steer their own course, and consecrate themselves
anew to their own aims. There is a glorious fight ahead.
*--
--~~-T->
**
--"
The Nation
March 9, 1921]
363
Food Taxesfor Whom?

N many quarters the so-called emergency tariff has
been dismissed as an effort to fool the farmers.
It is
that, but it is also an attempt to fool the entire public, and

as it probably represents the program of the Republican
majority in the new as well as in the old Congress, the
measure deserves more than a laugh, even though at this
writing the expectation is that President Wilson will not

sign the bill. As already suggested in these columns, the
enactment of a tariff with the avowed purpose of helping
the farmershowever futile the ideais probably intended
to smooth the way for protective duties in the interest of
manufacturers, announced as an early purpose of the new
Congress. Indeed, examination of the emergency tariff,
as finally shaped, shows that at least two duties for the
direct benefit of manufacturing interests were slipped into
that measure itself. There is a tax of seven cents a pound
on cotton manufactures and of forty-five cents a pound on
wool and hair manufactures, both in addition to existing
rates.
It is obvious that if a tariff on farm products is to help

agriculturists, it can do so only by raising the cost of food
and indirectly everything elsefor all consumers, farmers
included. The Nation is unalterably opposed to stimulat
ing industry in this way. Such a course leads inevitably
to granting favors to one class after another in the much
talked-of vicious circle that means higher and higher
prices. But it is doubtful if the price of many of America's
farm products can be raised by the expedient of a tariff.
A tariff can be efficacious only where imports exceed ex
ports. To take a hypothetical case, suppose we export 100
exported 184 million pounds last year and imported only

9 million pounds. And how can apple raisers profit by a
tariff, in view of the fact that we exported nearly 2 million
barrels of this fruit, fresh, and 8 million pounds, dried,
last year? With regard to meat and dairy products, it is

true that imports of butter exceeded exports last year, but
we sold 414 million pounds of preserved milk abroad as
against 23 million pounds purchased. It is also true that
we imported more cattle and sheep, and more lamb and
mutton, in 1920 than we exported, but our foreign sales
of hog products are enormous beside our trivial purchases,
and our exports of beef, although diminishing, are still

ahead of imports.
The total value of meat and dairy prod
ucts exported last year was 544 million dollars, as com

pared with 64 million dollars' worth imported.
In respect to our most important and widely-cultivated

farm products it should be apparent that a tariff can be of
no assistance, but the drafting of such a measure has
afforded the opportunity to subsidize at the expense of the

entire country a few localized crops like lemons and olives,
and to incorporate two duties highly dangerous to the
American consumer. We refer to those on sugar and wool,

of which products our imports are greatly in excess of our
exports. Sugar, already bearing a duty about one cent a
pound, has another cent added by the emergency tariff,

while the rates on wool, ranging from fifteen to forty-five
cents a pound, are exceedingly serious. Sheep raising is
rarely profitable except upon cheap or poor land, and the
growth of this country makes it undesirable to encourage
the industry except in restricted areas where it can pay
bushels of barley a year to Europe while importing 50
its way against foreign competition.
bushels from Canada. Plainly the 50 bushels from Canada

are sent here for reexport or to take the place of 50 bushels
of our own grain going to the foreign market. In either
case there is an excess of exports over imports of 50
It is much easier, of course, to fool the farmer with a

tariff than to give him what he needs. He needs to be
bushels. The price of this excess 50 bushels is fixed by the

European demand. Canada will sell to us at the same price,
because if she asks more we will not buy (having more than
and he needs to have his foreign markets restored.
we need for ourselves already), while if we demand a lower

rate from her, she will ignore us and sell to the European
market direct. This principle holds true wherever exports
exceed imports. In such circumstances a customs duty
cannot affect the domestic price at all.
Now if one glances through the schedules of the emerg
ency tariff, he will find that in respect to a majority of
the important items, exports do exceed imports. The pres
ent low prices of grain, for instance, are one of the chief
Sources of distress among our farmers, but the figures of the
Department of Commerce show that in the calendar year
1920 we exported 218 million bushels of wheat as against
35 million bushels imported, 17 million bushels of corn as
against 7 million bushels imported, and 392 million pounds
farmer's foreign markets depends largely on the improve

ment of European exchange. While the money of Europe
is as depreciated in terms of our own as at present, Euro
of rice as against 142 million pounds imported. How can

duties on these products, as proposed in the emergency
tariff, help our grain growers? Likewise with tobacco,
of which we sold 479 million pounds abroad in 1920 and
purchased only 82 million pounds. In respect to cotton,
of which we produce about two-thirds of the world's crop,
the food taxers do not dare to be so absurd as to propose
a general tariff, but they do fix one on the long-staple
variety and on cottonseed oil, although of the latter we
brought closer to the consumer, so that he will get a larger

share of the already too high prices that the latter pays,
Pub
licly-owned warehouses and cooperative marketing will help

to bring farmer and consumer closer.
Restoration of the
pean countries must restrict their purchases in our markets
to the barest minimum. We can help to restore the pur

chasing power of European money by buying European
products, which will establish credit against which pur
chases can be made. Europeans can buy our goods only if
we take theirs in return.
During the war our exports got
abnormally ahead of our imports.
In order to develop our
exports now, we must also develop our imports. A tariff

either on farm or manufactured products will be a further
barrier to the restoration of foreign trade; higher domestic
prices will be a similar impediment. Within the last twenty
years the United States has become a great manufacturing
nation, but she cannot continue as such without getting
back into the industrial family of nations. The alternative
is national isolation and a change from factory to farm
work on the part of thousands of our workers. In the long
run this might be good both for them and the country, but
it would be attended by tremendous loss and hardship, while
the already distressed farmer would find himself with more
rather than less competition.
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2905
364
No More Political Asylum

ALMOST without remark by the press, and unrealized
or unregretted by the great body of the public, the
right of political asylum in America disappears. An an
cient species of freedom in which this nation had gloried
since its birth is sacrificed to the autocracy of the age.
Let the Kossuths, the Mazzinis, and the Garibaldis of the
future take notice! There is no open door in America
for them now.
What was originally intended as war-time legislation
only was accepted as permanent policy by the United States
Senate on February 18, when, fathered by Lodge of Massa
chusetts and Harrison of Mississippi, a rider was added to
the diplomatic and consular appropriation bill, specifying
that "the provisions of the act approved May 22, 1918,
shall, in so far as they relate to requiring passports and
visas from aliens seeking to come to the United States,
continue in force and effect until otherwise provided by
law." At this writing there is every reason to believe that
the House will accept the amendment and that President
Wilson will sign the measure that carries out the wishes
and continues the present practices of his Department of
State. The law of 1918, specified in the Senate rider, re
quires all aliens wishing to come to America to provide
themselves with passports issued by their own country
and visaed by an American consul. Otherwise, aliens
are not permitted to land. If this law was ever justified,
it was only as a war measure to protect us from possible
enemy spies or agents. Its most visible result, both during
and since the war, has been to control the movements of
persons whose political or economic views have been ob
jectionable either to their own governments or to ours.
This legislation relating to the entrance of aliens to this
country has its complement in the law requiring our own
citizens to obtain passports before proceeding abroad. At
the same time that foreign radicals or other "undesirable
aliens" are prevented from coming to this country, Ameri
cans of similar persuasion are imprisoned within the con
fines of the United States. Of course, the whole arrange
ment plays admirably into a system of international
espionage. The spies of our Department of Justice ex
change information through diplomatic channels with the
European secret police, and our Department of State co
operates with European officialdom to thwart all persons
and movements that are conceived to be dangerous to the
prestige of the existing regime of reaction.
It is worth noting that this pet scheme of our Depart
ment of State, which Senator Harrison championed as "one
way of restricting immigration," does not meet with the
approval of the Bureau of Immigration. Anthony Caminetti, Commissioner General of Immigration, in his annual
report for 1919, suggested that it would be desirable to
extend the immigration inspection service abroad to the
extent of stationing immigration officials at important con
sulates for the purpose of advising and assisting intending
immigrants. This he thought could be done "with or with
out the use of passports," and he did not propose that immi
gration officials abroad should have final power to exclude
immigrants. In view of this position, the continued exer
cise of final power of exclusion by the Department of State
alone could hardly be pleasing to Mr. Caminetti, and it is
not surprising to find him saying in his last annual report :
While the Bureau took strong ground last year in favor of a

continuance of the so-called visa system, owing to the war situa
tion then pending in many countries, it was on the assumption
that, if continued, provision would be made for the exercise of
authority to be vested in the Department of State and the De
partment of Labor, so that the enforcement of the immigration
laws might be secured at the source of much of the then ex
pected increase in immigration, this not only to meet the neces
sity to safeguard our country from the entrance of dangerous
elements but to save from the hardships of an ocean voyage
inadmissible applicants who would find on arrival at our sea
ports that they must return to their former homes. Instead of
relieving this condition, the continuance of the visa system with
out the insertion of the qualifying provisions expected by the
immigration service has had in part, under the amendatory
laws on the subject, the opposite effect so far, and bids fair, un
less some way can be found to remedy the situation, to produce
congestion at our immigration stations, and to increase the diffi
culties of regulating immigration under the act of 1917.
The most hopeful aspect of the situation is that it is be
coming increasingly possible, for those who are Red enough
to snap their fingers at government regulations and travel
where they please without regard to formalities. The ridi
cule that this excites may accomplish more than the de
mands of justice in breaking down the intolerable system
of surveillance and restriction that bullying and scheming
officialdom would impose.
The Professor and His President

THE choice of James Rowland Angell as president of
Yale represents a break with Yale tradition even
sharper than that which occurred when the trustees chose,
in President Hadley, a layman for a post which had always
been held by clergymen. The new president is not even a
graduate of Yale. In respect to his special training and
experience, however, Dr. Angell will fall, it seems likely,
into the Yale tradition without great difficulty. Although a
psychologist of note, he has presumably been chosen for his
tried skill as an administrator, particularly for the work he
did on classification of personnel in the army. His standing
as a scholar, that is to say, must have had less to do with
his selection than his capacity for large affairs. Much the
same qualities, no doubt, will influence the trustees of Cor
nell in the choice now pending of a successor to Jacob Gould
Schurman.
Without believing or hinting for a moment that American
universities, as at present constituted, can dispense with a
sort of administration which belongs rather to the methods
of business than to those of learning, we feel inclined once
more to call attention to the excessive and autocratic power
which college presidents have in this republic. The Scottish
principal or the Continental rector would not know what to
do with so much power if he had it. And he would not
have it, for the simple reason that his colleagues would not
allow him to. If ever one were disposed to say that a com
munity deserves no better government than it has, it would
be in the case of our universities. Responsibility lies upon
the professors perhaps quite as much as upon the trustees
who have visualized a university as an industrial enterprise
and have conducted it on the basis of that analogy. In the
vast expansion of university instruction which has gone on
during the past century, the professors have been so busy
with the development of their particular departments of
instruction that they have neglected their own interests
March 9, 1921]
The Nation
and, in the long run, the highest interests of the universi

ties. The simplest illustration of this fact may be found in
the matter of salaries, which instead of increasing with the
increase of living costs have decreased, absolutely in a few
places, and relatively almost everywhere. Professors have

not been so well paid that they could lightly welcome reduc
tions, nor have they been such altruists as appearances
might seem to indicate; neither have they fallen off in
ability and prestige as much as is often charged against
them by their more impatient critics. The truth of the
matter is that they have shut their eyes to what was going
on, more or less like the citizens of our rapidly expanding

cities, and have left the government of their communities
in the hands of persons who have carried it out in the spirit

of all governors who are uncontrolled by those whom they
govern.
There has been a vicious circle operative here. The pro
365
The Black Troops on the Rhine

AJOR GENERAL HENRY T. ALLEN, commander of
the American troops in the occupied Rhineland, and
an officer who does honor to his country, has made a very
interesting report upon the use of French colored troops in
the Rhineland. From January, 1919, to June, 1920, the

average number of black troops in the French Army of the
Rhine was 5,200, and of colored races, ranging from Mo
roccans to Malgaches, 20,000. In June, 1920, the black
regiments were withdrawn; there remain the North Afri
cans, the Malgaches, and a few black individuals in other
regiments. General Allen finds that the Germans have
used the presence of these colored troops as the basis for
a violent and exaggerated anti-French propaganda, and that
fessor, overworked because of the increase of his opportuni
some German newspapers have honorably admitted such

exaggeration. Up to June 1, 1920, 66 cases of alleged
ties to teach, has resented being called in to help the admin

istration and has left the task to those paid for it; the ad
ministrators, finding the professor heedless and busy, have
sexual crime were officially reported to the French military

authorities against their colored Colonial troops in the
left him alone and have allowed his burdens to grow and his
remuneration to diminish. Consequently it has come about

that a most undesirable gulf now usually sunders the teach
ing and the administrative staff of our universities. The

president no longer teaches; rarely indeed does he enjoy
great honor as a scholar among his own faculty, which is
likely to have several men easily his superiors in intellectual
grasp and achievement; at one of the State universities which
has recently acquired a new president it is matter of com
mon, cynical agreement among his colleagues that though

he is himself a trivial person he is likely to persuade the
legislature to raise their salaries and so will have performed

the highest function to be expected of him. On the other
hand, the university president too often, even when his
instincts are not toward autocracy, has come to think of
himself as a sort of impresario, who, having all manner of
queer and temperamental creatures to deal with, must deal

with them with the impresario's combination of respectful
pressure and contemptuous tact.
Hope probably lies somewhere in this sundering gulf, but

it lies in widening the gulf not in bridging it. The primary
cause of the abuses of the current system is that a college
presidency has carried with it the prestige of learning as
Rhineland; in 28 cases the offenders had been punished, the

sentences running from thirty days in prison to ten years
at hard labor.
General Allen believes that there have been
other cases not reported. These are, he says, in my opinion

cases such as generally occur in any land when soldiery
is for a long time quartered upon the population.
There spoke an honest soldier. The crime is the occupa
tion rather than the presence of black troops. Although, as
General Allen points out, the discipline of the African troops
is less perfect than that of their white comrades, they are
no such brute barbarians as they are pictured in the exag

gerated propaganda here and abroad. And the presence
of colored troops is no such special gall to Germans as
it would be to Southerners in this country. Neither Ger
many nor France establishes any such absurd color-line as
most Americans observe. General Allen refers to many
cases of marriage freely contracted by German women with
black soldiers. Gall and wormwood as any military occupa
tion is to the occupied, and tyrannical as the occupiers are
almost sure to beas the Germans were in Belgium and as
we are in Haitithere are always cases of personal friend
ship and even love crossing the gulfs of hate and race.
A mass of stories of tyranny by the French forces of occu
pation has come to our attention.
Much of it has been
well as the credit of that expertness which is expected of

obvious exaggeration.
a good executive secretary. What is needed is a disassocia

tion of these two functions.
We have been at pains to secure as
precise data as possible, and we print herewith a sober,
The universities need compe

restrained letter from the mayor of one of the cities occu
tent business management; very well, let them have a busi
ness manager able to carry out the policies of the faculties.

Many conditions also urge that among the professors there
pied by the French, and a summary, by a person whom we

know to be reliable, of cases in which the French authori
ties have compelled the Germans to establish brothels for
should be a chairman or president of high rank and respon

the use of the French troops.
Because of the nature of the
sibility. Very well, let him be chosen. But to demand that

occupation, we cannot divulge the names of our informants.
he be at once an intellectual leader and a superb man of
affairs is generally too much and merely spells disappoint
ment.
We believe this information to be authoritative; and we

believe it the right of Americans to protest in a friendly
And to invest a business manager with the dignity
way to a friendly nation against such abuse of power. Pro

and authority which belong to a true intellectual leader is
merely absurd. It is a division of the office that the times
seem to call forperhaps with a rector chosen by the pro
fessors, either for a term of years or permanently, and a
man of affairs selected by the trustees. There might be
some conflicts of jurisdiction, but at best they would be
only details. Putting all the power in the hands of the
executive has not been so successful as to make any one
want really to continue the old system.
test such as that which certain groups have recently been
making in a spirit of low race prejudice we believe harmful

to the humane ends which all Americans must wish to
attain. Suppression of such protest meetings as those now

being held by German-Americans would be absurd and con
trary to a long and honorable American tradition, but exag
geration and passion only tend to obscure facts which justify
protest. THE NATION doubts the wisdom of these meetings
in which the emphasis is placed upon race prejudice.
The Nation
366
The letter from the mayor of N reads:
SIR: We have three times as many French soldiers quar

tered in our city today as we had German soldiers here in time
of peace. Among them are
Negroes from Madagascar.
We have heard nothing of their leaving. These colonial troops
seem in general to be rather harmless, but when under the
influence of alcohol or of sex they cannot be counted upon.
The latter is especially serious as it affects the general safety.
It can not be denied, indeed, that here and there German women
are to be found who voluntarily have intercourse with individ
ual or even with many Negroes. As the occupation prolongs,
this is increasingly true. Constant personal contact in private
houses with so-called washwomen or women who do ironing
makes it easy to begin such relationships, especially when the

men are relatively well-to-do and the women in bitter need. The
physical and moral confusion of many classes of people con
sequent upon the experiences of the war and after-war years
also plays its part. And the fact that, whether rightly or
wrongly, good relations with members of the occupation are
considered as a talisman against all other dangers due to the
occupation, counts in overcoming the last scruples. And there
is a possibility that now and then a perverse sex feeling plays
its part, too.
Yet while all this must be admitted, it does not lessen the
responsibility of a civilized people which utilizes such troops in

exercising its sovereign rights against another civilized people,
and thereby maintains a continual sexual menace, from the
point of view of physical health, of hygiene, and of the race.
[Vol. 112, No. 2905
troops. The city put the execution of the order in the hands
of a brothel-maintainer, who covered the costs by the profits.
2. The mayor of Landau was ordered, January 6, 1919, by
Major Watrin and General Laroque of the Eighth Army to
establish a public house for the French troops of the Landau
-garrison. Shortly after the house at No. 7 Kaufhausgasse,
belonging to the Schneider family, was seized. Three other
families besides the Schneiders lived in this house; other homes
had to be found for them on short notice. Up to April 21, 1920,
the city had paid out 10,837.25 marks for equipping the house
and for accessory costs.
3. A brothel was established in Ludwigshafen upon order of

the French local commander early in 1919. Two houses were
asked at first; but after negotiation this was reduced to one
house. The city authorities bought two houses for 90,000
marks, and equipped one for 43,000 marks.
The business was
let out, and it is hoped to cover the costs by the rental.

4. In Mainz the French chefferie du gnie ordered the Ger
man Military Building Office to establish a brothel in the
Luenette Erbenheim for a battalion of Algerian tirailleurs.
The rooms are no longer used as a brothel, but as a prison.

The building costs amounted to 70,000 marks, paid by Germany.
5. At the Kostheim camp the same French authorities com
pelled the same , German office to establish a brothel for Al
gerian tirailleurs.
The brothel is occupied by Arab women.
The building costs amounted to 109,802.76 marks.

6. At Fort Weisenau bei Mainz the municipal garrison au
thorities were ordered by the French chefferie du gnie to

build a brothel.
After four weeks the rooms were transformed
Various cities have been formally compelled to establish brothels
into a dining-room for French officers.
which, however, are also used by the white troops, men and
were 1,500 marks.
officers. Sometimes the cities are compelled to acquire the houses

needed. This was true in Speyer and in Ludwigshafen, for
instance. The business itself is carried on in those cities by
entrepreneurs who are also responsible for recruiting the neces
7. In Bingen a brothel was established upon order and turned

over to a private entrepreneur. The costs, 40,000 marks, are to
be covered by interest at 5, and amortization at 2% per cent.
8. At Langenschwalbach the city turned over the establish
sary personnel. In many cities, among them those named, there
ment of a brothel, ordered by the French, to an entrepreneur.

9. At Hoechst am Main two brothels were established, at a
cost of 29,000 marks, upon order of the French authorities.
seem to have been no particular difficulties, although sometimes

more or less gentle pressure may be exercised to induce women,
even those already on the rolls of the morals police, to enter
the public houses when the need arises. There is no doubt that
the existence of such houses lessens, although it does not do
away with, annoyances to German women on the streets. But
cases of the kind mentioned constantly recur even now.
Many
women, because of natural shame, or of fear of the inconven
iences connected with or following upon investigation, do not

report such cases. Furthermore, the better public refrains from
going outside the city in daytime or on the streets at all at
night to such a degree that the danger is much reduced. But

this lack of security is in itself a heavy burden upon the people.
The serious consequences of the mere shock to a respectable
woman when molested by a Negro do not need to be explained.
In short, it is a harsh experience for the cities which suffer it.
I have endeavored to give a short and objective statement of
conditions and have expressly refrained from anything which
might be regarded as libelous by the occupation.
, in the French Occupied Zone, February 4, 1921.
, Mayor of one of the occupied cities.
*
The summary of cases in which the French ordered the
Germans to establish brothels for the use of French troops
The building costs
10. At Wiesbaden two brothels were established upon demand

by the French, at a cost of 58,542.32 marks, besides which the
city provided equipment costing 100,000 marks, which the man
ager of the brothel is to pay for in monthly instalments of
1,500 marks.
11. At the maneuvering ground at Griesheim near Darmstadt
a brothel for North African troops was established in stall 39
upon order of the French. It cost 14,890 marks.
12. At Idstein a brothel was established upon order at a

cost of 27,000 marks.
13. At Speyer a brothel was established early in 1920 upon

order of the French local commander. The city paid 50,000
marks to buy two houses; the business is rented out, the renter
paying for the equipment, and it is hoped that the rent will pay
for the purchase costs.
14. In Diez two brothels were established by the city upon

order, at a cost of 3,580 marks.
15. At Siegburg a brothel was ordered established during

the armistice period. A building belonging to the national
government formerly used for offices and a printing-shop was
seized for the purpose.
The total costs amounted to 152,069.03
marks, but the house has not yet been used by the occupation
authorities nor freed for other uses.
follows:
A. In the American and British zones the occupation authori

ties have not asked that brothels be established.
B. In the Belgian zone such requests were made locally,

but were allowed to drop.
C. In the French occupied zone brothels were demanded and
established at the following places:
1. The city of Kaiserslautern was ordered verbally and in
writing, early in 1919, by the French military authorities
(Major Derville) to establish a brothel for the occupation
16. At Bad Ems the mayor was forced by the French occu
pation authorities to establish a brothel after he had refused
several times and been threatened with punishment.
The
brothel is chiefly used by Americans coming from Coblenz.

The business is so lively, especially at night, that sometimes
14 automobiles are parked in the street in front of the house.
Apart from the fact that Germany has to pay for the costs of
the automobiles, the conduct of those using the brothel affects
injuriously the business of the city of Bad Ems.
establishing the brothel was 6,000 marks.
The cost of
March 9, 1921]
What
The Nation
Is
367
Happening in North Dakota

By OLIVER S. MORRIS
" A COLLAPSE of the Socialist experiment"this is

11 the way the fight for control waging between the
Nonpartisan League and its opponents in North Dakota has
been widely and triumphantly heralded by the press of the
United States. Subject to the same assaults and the delib
erate attempt to wreck its structure of government it
would be equally possible to describe the collapse of the
administration of the Hawaiian Islands, or of the British
Isles, or of any community that depends somewhat on inter
course with the rest of the world. Shut it off from food
or raw materials or, as in the case of North Dakota, from
credit, meanwhile making every attempt to sabotage it
from within, and it is not surprising that the organization
thus affected should sense that it is engaged in a conflict.
There has been and is a bitter struggle in North Dakota.
That is what the North Dakota "collapse" amounts to.
The North Dakota State Government has never been able
to sell the bond issue of $17,000,000 authorized by the 1919
legislature to finance the industrial program, adopted by
the State as a result of the organization and political suc
cess of the Nonpartisan League. The constitutionality of
the bonds was attacked early in 1919 by suits in the State
and Federal courts, but upheld by the United States Su
preme Court last summer, when it became possible for the
first time to sell the bonds. But since then two things have
prevented their salethe extremely poor condition of the
bond market and the propaganda against the Nonpartisan
League and against the State which has adopted its program.
Nevertheless, the State proceeded with the industrial pro
gram, temporarily financing the construction of the ter
minal mill and elevator and other projects through the
Bank of North Dakota. The bank, established by the 1919
legislature, had been given custody of all the public funds
of the State. The total resources of the bank have ranged
from around $14,000,000 to about $23,000,000, mostly public
funds of the State. The bank in all has loaned $1,135,000
to finance the State industrial program and other State de
partments, $2,882,035.92 on first mortgages on farm land
to relieve the stress of the farmers, $70,596.90 on ware
house receipts representing stored farm products, and $2,464,041.38 to private banks. The February 15 statement
showed that the bank had loaned to farmers, and to State
departments to carry out the Nonpartisan League program,
a total of nearly $4,000,000, whereas at the same time the
bank had made loans to private banks and had redeposited
public funds in private banks to the extent of $8,000,000.
This was the condition after the bank had succeeded during
the present crisis in calling in a large part of the public
deposits in private banks.
At the election last November the League Opposition
captured the lower house of the legislature, and put through
a law, initiated by petition and indorsed by the bankers of
the State, making it optional with local officials whether
the Bank of North Dakota was to have public funds other
than those of the State Government itself. Under the ini
tiated law the bank will lose custody of the permanent,
sinking, and current funds of counties, cities, school dis
tricts where the officials are hostile to the League. The
effect of this law and the refusal of the big financial
interests to take North Dakota bonds, coupled with the

financial stringency of the after-the-war deflation period
felt in all States, ruinous prices for farm products, and
repeated crop failures in North Dakota, has been to put
the State face to face with a financial and political crisis
for which few if any parallels can be found.
Western North Dakota, prior to last year, had crop fail
ures for three successive years. Last year's crop, a mod
erate one only, the farmers refused to sell at prevailing
prices. There are over 900 private banks in North Da
kota, most of them small banks in farming communities.
When the law supported by the bankers and the League
Opposition went into effect last December, over half the
banks of the State were in precarious condition, through
no fault of the League or the State administration, and
since that time events have happened thick and fast.
Threatened with deprivation of a large part of its resources,
the State bank could no longer extend aid to private banks,
and was even obliged to demand from private banks repay
ment of their loans and return of the redeposited public
funds. The State industrial commission immediately or
dered work stopped on the big terminal mill and elevator at
Grand Forks, and shut down the work of building homes
under the State Home Building Act. Many counties and
other political subdivisions of the State, politically controlled
by enemies of the State administration and its industrial
program, demanded their public money from the Bank of
North Dakota when the initiated law went into effect. Pri
vate banks began to close their doors voluntarily, or on
order of the State bank examiner, unable to make collections
fast enough to meet cash demands. Several closed weekly
until at present over forty have suspended. The Bank of
North Dakota, under the law, was to be examined period
ically like other banks of the State ; it was to issue monthly
statements and report to the industrial commission at regu
lar intervals. Also it was required to report to each session
of the legislature, and both the legislature and the industrial
commission had authority to examine the bank at any time.
But as soon as the bank opened in the summer of 1919 the
League Opposition pointed out that the industrial commis
sion, the State bank' examiner, and the legislature were in
control of the Nonpartisan League, and that really there
was no machinery for an impartial report on the financial
condition of the bank. Charging gross irregularities and
hinting at "big graft," the Opposition demanded permission
for the State auditor to examine the bank. It was intimated
that the bank was being used to finance the Nonpartisan
League or some of its allied newspapers, or even League
leaders' private business enterprises. The State auditor was
one of the three officials originally indorsed and elected by
the League who turned against the movement early in 1919,
and became a bitter political enemy. With no authority to
examine the Bank of North Dakota, he nevertheless pre
sented himself with his accountants, but was refused access
to the books: precisely what the Opposition wanted. They
raised a cry that there must be something "rotten" in the
bank if its management was afraid to have him examine it.
In the resulting law attacking the bank the State adminis
tration paid for the mistake of not permitting an audit. Not
The Nation
368
that there was anything wrong in the bank, for subse

quently, when the Opposition got access to the books, they
found nothing; but it was bad politics.
The League Opposition in 1920 initiated two laws affect
ing the State bank: one for no longer requiring public
money except that of the State Government to be deposited
in the State bank, and another authorizing the State audit
ing committee, controlled by the three hostile State offi
cials, to audit the bank.
The popular feeling aroused over
the false charges and the refusal to let the State auditor in,
carried by narrow margins both these initiated laws in
the 1920 election. The League strove desperately to show

the people that passage of the law taking the public money
from the Bank of North Dakota would cripple the State
industrial program and precipitate a financial crisis, but
the sentiment in favor of the law for the alleged impar
tial examination of the bank carried both measures.
To understand the situation as it is now, the reader
should know that the Opposition, organized as the Inde

pendent Voters Association, or the I. V. A. for short,
ran its candidates both in the primaries and general elec
tion last year on a platform approving in general and in
principle the Nonpartisan League program. They demanded

a thorough and fair trial for the State industrial program,
proposing merely some minor changes in the industrial

laws and their administration to make them more work
able and efficient, and to drive the leaders of the League
from the public crib. Had they opposed the industrial

program they could not have captured control of the lower
branch of the legislature.
They concentrated in the cam
paign on carrying the laws affecting the Bank of North Da

kota, and due to the popularity of the law providing for
additional examination of the bank and their approval of
the League program, they won a majority in the lower house,
which has ranged from one to five votes on recent critical
roll calls. The Leaguers captured all the administrative
offices of the State, except two or three minor ones, turning
out two of the three turncoat officials, and remain in control
of the industrial commission and the upper house.
When the law against the Bank of North Dakota went
into effect and the private banks of the State began to
close, the Opposition, including the bankers, realized their
mistake. They saw that they had brought the State face
to face with financial disaster.
Furthermore, they saw
that they had forced the State to stop work on its enter
prises, and would have to assume the blame for blocking the
program to which it was so overwhelmingly committed.
Unless they could do something, they realized that what

progress they had made in the late election in turning the
League out of control would be undone at the next election.
The anti-Nonpartisan League press and leaders of the

I. V. A. began to argue for harmony and for compro
mise of some kind, resulting in a convention of the State
bankers at which it was decided to aid the Governor and
the industrial commission in selling the State bonds. The

sale of these bonds, or a large proportion of them, would, of
course, immediately relieve the situation. It would give the
Bank of North Dakota funds to offset the withdrawal of
public moneys under the initiated law, and to protect its

loans on farm lands and to private banks. It would enable
the industrial program to proceed.
There was great elation in the League ranks when the
Opposition thus offered to help sell the bonds. The League

had always maintained that, if the bankers of the State
[Vol. 112, No. 2905
had aided instead of fought the State in its efforts to carry
out the organized farmers' program, the bonds would have

been sold without difficulty.
Eastern financial interests,
they pointed out, could not refuse to buy gilt-edged bonds

backed by the taxing power of the whole State if the North
Dakota bankers really wanted the bonds sold. But when a
committee of bankers demanded as a consideration for
their aid the promise of the State not to enter on any

more socialistic enterprises and the reduction of the Bank
of North Dakota to a mere rural credits bank, similar to the
Federal land banks, Governor Frazier and the industrial
commission promptly refused. They said it would be trad
ing to the bankers the sovereignty of the State and involved
betraying the people, who at many elections and referen
dums had backed up with big majorities the industrial
program, which even the League Opposition had come to
accept.
This was the situation when the legislature met in Jan
uary. The State administration found that its action in
rejecting the bankers' offer met the unanimous approval
of the League majority in the Senate and of the Leaguers
who constituted nearly half of the lower house. The I. V. A.
majority of the House and the League majority of the Sen
ate at once deadlocked. The House organized an inves
tigation of the State bank and other State industries, and
the Senate immediately did likewise. The House claims to
have discovered many minor irregularities, but nothing
very serious has been proved, though witnesses have made
sensational charges. A leading witness of the I. V. A.'s has
been arrested for perjury. The Senate claims to have found
the enterprises properly conducted. No legislation that will
solve the State's problem has come or is expected to come
out of the deadlocked legislature.
A. C. Townley, president of the National Nonpartisan
League, was in Kansas and Nebraska supervising organiza
tion work of the League during November, December, and
January. He was invited to go to North Dakota by the
State League organization to give his advice shortly after
February 1. He went, and his advice was that the State
reopen negotiations with the banks regarding the sale of
the State bonds. He felt that the rejection of the first offer
of the bankers, without an effort being made to make a
counter proposal, put the State and the Nonpartisan League
in a position of rejecting a measure aimed at saving the
community financially.
When Mr. Townley arrived in Bismarck he found condi
tions ripe for further negotiations. The Bank of North
Dakota had ordered collectors to call on private banks hold
ing Bank of North Dakota funds. They were authorized to
force payment of the money to the State bank regardless
of the consequences to the private banks. This had scared
the Opposition. Business men of Fargo and other cities
of the State had again called for a compromise, and were
urging some kind of an agreement between the two politi
cal factions. Consequently Mr. Townley's advice to resume
negotiations with the bankers was followed. As a result,
officials of the Bank of North Dakota met with North Da
kota and Minneapolis and St. Paul bankers at Minneapolis.

The State bank officials asked that these bankers agree to
help float at least $6,000,000 of the State bonds. It was
felt that that much money would avert a more serious crisis
and put the State on the way finally to solve its problem.
Word that these negotiations were under way aroused

the politicians of the Opposition.
It is safe to say that they
The Nation
March 9, 1921]
would not like to see the bonds sold and the League pro
gram carried out, though for obvious reasons they do not

openly so express themselves. Neither would these anti
politicians be glad to see the present financial crisis suc
cessfully passed over. . They want to use the situation to
get back in power. So the politicians and newspapers com
menced a contemptible campaign to discredit the new nego
tiations even among Leaguers.
Sensational stories were
published to the effect that Mr. Townley had agreed to

surrender the League program, liquidate the Bank of
North Dakota, abandon the home-building program, and

otherwise to sell out the State and the farmers, in order to
get $6,000,000 in bonds sold.
Officials of the State bank told the conference of bankers
that the only body with authority to agree to any demand

for alteration of the organized farmers program was the
legislature, but they pointed out that should the bonds be
sold and the League program thus be permitted to be car
ried out it would be unnecessary for the State bank further
to finance the State industries, and that thus its chief func
tions would naturally be those of a farm loan bank. This
was all there was to the Opposition claim that Mr. Townley
and State officials had agreed to liquidate the State
bank.
The North Dakota bankers have not feared so much
369
bank has not got under way with this announced plan.
The effect of diverting deposits from private banks,
coupled with the State bank's effort to force private banks
to pay their obligations to the State bank, is bringing on
another and perhaps the final phase of the crisis. The
result can only be guessed. The Opposition claims that this
policy will wreck 200 to 300 more private banks, and is
considering inaugurating a recall against Governor Frazier
and League-elected State officials. The I. V. A. held a con
vention at Bismarck just after the new negotiations at
Minneapolis were announced, but pressure from the bank
ing and business interests caused the convention merely to
refer the matter of a recall to the organization's executive
committee, for future action one way or the other, as
events or political expediency justified. Since the failure
of the Minneapolis negotiations, the I. V. A. press is urg

ing the recall, and the formal demands of the I. V. A. poli
ticians go far beyond what the banking and business in
terests had openly demanded as a condition of floating the

bond issue. They threaten to proceed with the recall unless
the following demands are carried out:
That State Attorney General William

of the Nonpartisan League, elected with
than Governor Frazier last fall, resign
that the Bank of North Dakota be put
Lemke, an officer
a larger majority
his public office;
completely out of
what the Bank of North Dakota was actually doing as what

it might do under its broad charter. Its charter permits it
business, and that the industrial commission be placed in
to carry on all kinds of banking functions. It can establish
They also threatened that, even should the bankers take

the bonds, they would carry on the recall and their bitter
branch banks in competition with the private banks. It can

accept saving deposits. The bank, however, declared in 1919
that it would confine its activities to making land loans to
farmers and loans on farmers' warehouse receipts, to ac
cepting deposits only from individuals from outside the
State, and to financing the State enterprises pending the
sale of State bonds.
In addition to this the bank has ac
cepted deposits from banks of the State which wanted to

keep their reserves in the State bank, and has rediscounted
paper of private banks in the State on the same plan as
Federal Reserve banks. Its only other function has been
to act as a State clearing house. This business has not been
in competition with private banks. But the bankers feared
what the bank might do under the charter, i. e., establish
branch banks in direct competition with private banks for
deposits and commercial business.
control of the I. V. A."
factional strife to capture the State offices, and this prob

ably had no little effect in influencing the bankers at the
Minneapolis conference to refuse their cooperation.
And
the I. V. A. probably wanted it to have that effect.
In
the meantime the Bank of North Dakota is refusing to

honor any more demands by hostile county officials for
their funds on deposit in the State bank, and some of the
counties have brought suit to collect. State checks and
Warrants are being held up. Business in the State is dis
organized and banks are getting into worse instead of better
condition. The State industrial program is held up, and

the legislature continues deadlocked. Political feeling is
bitter and intense beyond description.
The officials of the Bank of North Dakota at the Minne
apolis conference might well have recommended a legislative

amendment to the bank's charter precluding direct competi
tion with private banks and confining its functions prac
tically to what they have been, to the land loan business

OLIVER S. MORRIS is the editor of the Minneapolis Non
partisan Leader.
The Minneapolis bankers meeting, how
THOMAS REED POWELL is professor of constitutional law

at Columbia University.
ever, after considering the matter a few days, flatly refused

to aid in selling any part of the bonds. They claimed
Eastern financiers were prejudiced against the State and
the bonds, and unless the Eastern bankers would take the
J. A. HoBSON is the well-known British economist, and

author of The War in South Africa, The Science of
Wealth, Towards International Government, De
bonds they could not be floated. We cannot carry them

without Eastern help, they said. Immediately after the
S. MILES BOUTON has been an Associated Press corre
Minneapolis turndown the Bank of North Dakota announced
spondent in Germany for a number of years and is the

author of the recently published book And the Kaiser
with farmers.
that it would establish branch banks in the chief cities of

the State, and would enter into direct competition with
mocracy. After the War.
Abdicates.
LINCOLN COLCORD is an American journalist and author
the private banks.
The bank hopes, through the loyalty
of friends of the League, to attract a large part of the sav
of The Game of Life and Death and The Vision of

War.
ing deposits of the State to its coffers and to take over

N. J. WARE is professor of sociology at the
from private banks a considerable part of the profitable

commercial banking business.
As this is written the
of Louisville.
University
370
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2905
The German Indemnity: A British View

By J. A. HOBSON
London, February 14
HE recent decision by the Allied Governments regard
ing the terms of the reparation required for Germany
is a new and grave peril to the peace, social order, and
economic recovery of Europe. Responsible persons in all
countries and of different political attachments had long
come to realize the danger of leaving a huge unnamed finan
cial penalty hanging over Central Europe and spreading its

paralyzing influence throughout the European system.
As
distinguished from those wild minds which, concentrating

upon the damages attributed to Germany, insisted only upon
assessment of her liabilities, these were concerned with the
consideration of her assets, so as to discover what sum she
could afford to pay and over what period of time, consistently

with her political and economic stability and the welfare of
the recipient countries. It was generally agreed that under

the circumstances in which the Versailles Treaty left Ger
many, reduced in territory and population, diminished in
her coal, iron, and other industrial resources, deprived of
her shipping, her foreign property, and trading connec
tions, and otherwise crippled in commercial opportunities,
with an almost desperate condition of internal finances, it
was of the first importance that the reparation demanded
of her should be a fixed sum consistent with her economic
Government will have to get this surplus out of its business

classes, who receive it, by process of taxation, they evidently
cannot get the whole of it. But with this qualification we
may take the export surplus as the measure.
Now consider first, in this light, what seems to some the

moderation of the first two annual payments, of 100,000,000
with the added 12 per cent. Since Germany depleted of a

large part of her rich natural resources will be compelled
to import a larger proportion of the raw materials needed

to produce her export goods than in pre-war years, the
absolute size of her export trade, to yield a surplus of 100
millions with the 12 per cent, must be very large. With
total exports worth 700,000,000 against imports worth
500,000,000, writes Mr. Keynes, leaving Surplus exports
worth 200,000,000, she could just pay a fixed sum of
116,000,000, plus the export proportion of 84,000,000
(making up 200,000,000 in all). That is to say the lowest
of the annual payments, with the added 12 per cent, would
amount to something like 200,000,000, to be paid in surplus

export goods.
Now it is not seriously arguable that, using every effort

to stimulate her foreign trade, Germany should now be
able to produce even half this export surplus. In the five

years preceding the war her imports of goods exceeded her
exports by 74,000,000 upon an average. This excess, how
recovery and therefore moderate in amount and extending

over a period not exceeding thirty years. Although the
treaty, in violation of the pre-armistice pledge, by adding
pensions and allowances made a total liability far exceeding
what could possibly be paid, its terms contained a formal
recognition of these principles in the instructions laid down
for the work of the Reparation Commission. The new
Paris decision violates each of these principles. The size
verting Germany from a creditor into a debtor nation: the

Versailles Treaty has swept away all the other invisible
exports and has left Germany since the armistice with an
ever, was more than offset by her invisible exports, i.e.,
interest on foreign investments, profits on shipping, bank

ing, trading, etc., and left a substantial net export surplus.
But war finance disposed of the foreign investments, con
of the determinate sums is based on no consideration of
export deficit estimated in 1920 to approach 150,000,000.
capacity to pay. Attached to these named sums, amounting

in the aggregate to 11,300,000,000, is a large but wholly
indeterminate demand for 12 per cent upon the export trade,
It is not possible for any Allied statesman to show how

this deficit can be converted into a surplus even approach
to the fantastic character of which I make later reference.
version could only be achieved by a large reduction of im

ports and a simultaneously large expansion of exports. But
since the great bulk of her imports consists of foreign mate
rials and foodstuffs necessary to support her productive in
The payments are planned to extend for nearly half a cen

tury after the war is over, the economic bondage tightening
on an unborn generation of the German people.
I need not argue here the manifest injustice and inhuman
ity of these demands. It is sufficient to present a few con
siderations which show its complete impracticability and
the injuries which any attempt to enforce such payments
must entail upon the economic world and the Allied nations
in particular.
Since Germany possesses no considerable quantity of avail
able gold or of salable foreign securities, even to meet the
ing the sums Germany is called upon to pay.
Such con
dustries and her laboring population, and any increase of
exports must cause a considerable expansion of these Sup

plies, it is manifest that, even were all luxurious and other
unnecessary imports excluded, no considerable net reduction
of imports would be possible. It would, therefore, be neces
sary to look almost entirely to expansion of export goods
to enable any reparation to be paid. But the body of the
peace terms and the post-war policy of the Allies have been
first years' instalments, while the preposterous size and
intricately designed to extirpate as far as possible German
duration of the payments preclude the raising of any large

sum by sale or mortgage of internal capital resources, vir
trading facilities in foreign countries and by various pro
tually the only means by which payment can be made is

export trade. The maximum amount which the German
Government can possibly be made to pay is fixed at the
surplus of export over import values.
For that is the only
sum of international money (gold marks) at her disposal.

Any valid computation of reparative payments must, there
fore, fasten on this sum of annual export surplus as the

test and measure of capacity to pay. Since the German
hibitions and discriminations to stop their reestablishment.

Each Allied Government, moreover, is busily devising means
to stop Germany from sending into her markets any goods
which may compete with and undersell the goods which her
own national industries produce or are deemed capable of
producing, or from sending into neutral countries goods

which would there displace its export goods.
The Allied reparative policy thus aims at stimulating a
German export trade, which each Ally acting on its own
March 9, 1921]
The Nation
account endeavors to defeat. A humorous turn is given to

this policy by the addition of the proceeds of a 12 per cent
export duty to the body of the annual payments. This is
expressly intended, we are sometimes told, to offset the
unfair advantage given to Germany in her export trade by
reason of the state of her exchange. But this effect can
only be achieved by reducing the aggregate of German
export trade and so diminishing the export surplus in which
alone the reparation payment can be made. That is to say,
it seeks to reduce the real payment made by Germany, from
the fixed instalment plus the 12 per cent, below the level
which the fixed instalment taken by itself would have yielded.
This absurd result can only be evaded by another equally
absurd, though far more probable, viz., the passing on of
the export duty to the foreign consumer of the export goods,
by which means the Allies would themselves pay a substan
tial part of the reparation they were supposed to get.
Finally, if there were any way of making Germany pay
the added export duty, the payment could only be made in
more export goods flooding foreign markets and achieving
a sale by undercutting the home prices.
But it is needless further to expose the folly and futility
of the proposal. If some miraculous stimulus could enable
Germany to pay even the smallest of these annual instal
ments, the process would imply a swamping of our markets
with cheap German wares and a shrinkage of our own export
trade in foreign markets. The bare suggestion of such a
payment at a time like this, with unemployment confront
ing us in almost all our staple industries, is a record of
political fatuity. And yet this is precisely what the Allied
decision requires Germany to do and us to suffer! We
have argued the case on the most modest terms of payment,
the 100,000,000 annual instalment for the first two years.
But the scale of subsequent payments reaches the very
limits of absurdity. If by a supreme effort of self-abnega
tion the recipient nations consented to digest this first large
"dump" of German cheap exports, so far from winning
immunity they are confronted with a series of ascending
efforts which in eleven years require them to assimilate a
flood of German goods capable of yielding an export surplus
which would pay 300,000,000 per annum, with an extra
12 per cent, amounting to, say, 400,000,000 in the aggre
gate, for a whole generation. Thus German trade, so care
fully extirpated by the Versailles Treaty, must not only be
restored but must flourish everywhere, offering the bitter
est competition to the reviving trade of the Allies. For the
obligation to produce year by year this huge export surplus
for reparation would compel the German Government to
take every possible measure to assist its export trade by
such subsidies or other aids to industries or such commercial
treaties as lay within its power to make. If the Allied Gov
ernments exercised the rights they seem to claim, to inter
fere with these domestic fiscal and political arrangements
of Germany, their interference could only have the effect of
further disabling their creditor from meeting the obliga
tions they had forced upon him.
One observation I would make upon the extension of the
terms of payment beyond the period laid down in the treaty.
This extension, imposing the heaviest burdens upon the
unborn and innocent, not only offends justice and humanity,
but is an act of economic folly disabling the whole process
of reparation. For the economic effort necessary to achieve
such reparation as Germany could and ought to make can
not be evoked in a people condemned to hopeless servitude
371
for well-nigh half a century. No sound economic recovery

and no productive progress in the arts of industry are
possible for a people aware that their utmost efforts cannot
enable them to complete their annual task, and that, even
could they do so, enlarged demands, backed by constant
menaces of political destruction, continually stare them in
the face.
The attempt to carry through this policy must lead to the
further collapse of the internal finances of Germany and to
the gravest social and political disorders. Any attempt to
compel payment by Allied seizure of territory or customs
and Allied regulation of the internal affairs of Germany,
could only alter for the worse the fundamental economic
facts upon which I have dwelt. It could not increase, but
must diminish, the reparation that can be got.
A sane policy of reparation would fix now a reasonable
and a practicable sum to be paid within a single generation
by instalments which should begin, say, three or five years
hence, when Germany, assisted by the removal of all ob
stacles to her foreign trade and by such credits as would
facilitate her industrial, financial, and commercial recovery,
was in a position to produce an export surplus. The instal
ments would rise from a small beginning by annual incre
ments which would reach a maximum, say, in fourteen
years' time and which would gradually sink in size toward
the end of the period. In such a way dislocation of industry
in the recipient nations would be reduced to a minimum, and
the largest aggregate amount of reparation, with the least
amount of trade disturbance, would be obtainable.
Is it too late to urge the Allied Governments to a recon
sideration of the reparation issue, having regard to the
dangers to the economic recovery, the political safety, and
the future peace of Europe which lie in the recent decision
of Paris? The futility of this grasping, grinding policy is
not less apparent than its inhumanity. It can bring no
healing to the nations. No real League of Nations is com
patible with the enforcement of such a servitude. "Mag
nanimity in politics," wrote Edmund Burke, "is not seldom
the truest wisdom." But if such wise magnanimity be be
yond the reach of our victors, it should at least be possible
for them to listen to the protests of enlightened self-interest
against the unbridled policy of their latest plunge down the
road to political and economic ruin.
The Silesian Plebiscite

By S. MILES BOUTON
Berlin, February 7
AMERICAN experts in the line of rigging elections could
learn much from studying the work of the Inter-Allied
Commission which has made the regulations for the coming
plebiscite in Upper Silesia. I am not basing this statement
upon charges made by German propagandists, but upon offi
cial documents issued by the Commission itself. They make
interesting reading, albeit saddening for anyone who be
lieves in a square deal for everybody, whether friend or foe.
An American can only be glad that we are not mixed up in
the affair. Nominally the English and Italians are both
represented on the Commission, and they have some troops
in the district, but they play almost no role whatever. It is
a close Franco-Polish corporation.
Application blanks for registration for the plebiscite have
372
The Nation
been printed by the Commission, and are being circulated

among eligible voters by various Polish and German socie
ties. Each blank bears both Polish and German instruc
tions, the Polish first. The blanks given to the German
societies for distribution are called "Muster zu Gesuchen"
(very bad German, by the way), but those delivered to the
Polish societies for distribution among their friends are
merely "Gesuche." It is therefore possible for the Com
mission to know whether the person signing the application
is likely to vote for Germany or for Poland. It is a sus
picious circumstance.
Query No. 8 is, in both Polish and German, merely
"name." No. 9 says in Polish, "if married, maiden name."
The German is merely "maiden name." The result is that
hundreds of unmarried women, having first written their
name, set down the same name again under No. 9, there
being no "if married" to warn them. In such cases the
Commission demands a marriage certificate, which, of
course, cannot be produced. This adds greatly to the Ger
mans' difficulties in getting all their voters enrolled, and
will in many cases result in delaying the final filing of ap
plications until after the last day, disfranchising many Ger
mans who would have been enrolled had the Polish been hon
estly translated.
The same "mistake" occurs in another blank, designed
for persons born outside Upper Silesia, but resident there
since January 1, 1904. "Married, widowed or single; if
married, maiden name," says the Polish instruction. The
German translation again omits the "if married." It is
hard to believe that this is accidental.
All persons born in Upper Silesia before January 1, 1900,
are entitled to vote, even though they now live outside the
province. Only a negligible number of these are Poles. Peo
ple did not emigrate from a German province, with its high
standard of living, order, and cleanliness, into the Poland
of the Czars ; they went to other parts of Germany. There
are tens of thousands of them, and with but few exceptions
they will vote for Germany if they get a chance to vote.
The Inter-Allied Commission knows this, and it has set up
requirements which make it extremely difficult for thou
sands and impossible for other thousands to vote at the pleb
iscite. All such persons must give the exact date on which
they left Upper Silesia and furnish two witnesses living
there who know them personally. Obviously this is impos
sible for thousands who left their native soil decades ago.
They can neither give the exact date nor find anybody who
knows them now. A case in point is that of a man who
declared that he could find no witnesses in Upper Silesia
"because he left there so long ago." He moved away in
1870, fifty years ago, as a child, and has never been back.
His application was returned indorsed: "Insufficient appli
cationrejected."
The Germans declare this one regula
tion will cost them thousands of votes. They believe that is
the intention, and they are probably right.
The Commission's regulations covering the plebiscite were
issued on December 30, 1920. They refer in various places
to "proofs of identity." In the plebiscites in East and West
Prussia in June of last year the Inter-Allied Commission
laid special stress on birth certificates, which it required
whenever they could be furnished. This is in accordance
with the invariable European custom of regarding such
certificates as among the valuable documents establishing
identity. And so the Germans naturally began sending in
certified copies of them with their applications.
[Vol. 112, No. 2905
Eight days before the last day for registration, the Com
mission gave notice that the usual birth certificates would
not be accepted as "proof of identity." On the contrary,
"a pass, hunting license, etc., even though expired," would
be accepted. "This," say the Germans, "is an obvious chi
canery and dishonesty. Certificates of birth cannot be se
cured except from the authorities of the place of birth and
upon the basis of the official records. Forgeries could easily
be detected. But any pro-Polish head of a small munici
pality along the Polish border can issue a hunting license
or a pass." In any event, the Commission's sudden and
complete change of front, its rejection of the very proofs
which it required last June, plainly calls for an explanation.
There is a small strip of land on the southwest corner of
Upper Silesia which was to go to Czecho-Slovakia in case
the vote in the whole province should favor Poland. It was
generally assumed that it would remain with Germany if
the vote should be for Germany. But this is not true. The
Inter-Allied Commission has provided in Article 6 of its
regulations, that if the plebiscite turns in favor of Germany,
this strip of land "will not be definitely assigned to Ger
many until after an investigation of all representations
which the German Government can make in respect of it."
Heads I win, tails you lose. 'Tis an old game.
All that I have written rests, as I have said, upon docu
ments issued by the Commission itself. The following asser
tions come from Upper Silesians with whom I have talked.
I cannot check them up, but they accord with scores of sim
ilar reports, and the narrators made the impression of in
telligent and honest men. They declare that the Poles, with
the tacit consent of the French, are stopping at no outrage
or crime to terrorize the German inhabitants. There are
sections where no German woman dare venture on the streets
after dark for fear of falling into the hands of bands who
call themselves "disrobing commissions," and who act as a
disrobing commission could be expected to act. There are
places where the inhabitants are so terrified that they dare
not talk with each other. The papers of two days ago report
the case of the chairman of one of the local sections of the
Association of Loyal Upper Silesians, who "was shot dead
from behind as he was going home." There is no comment
in the papers ; such cases happen so frequently that no com
ment is needed.
The superstitions of the more ignorant are being played
upon in various ways. Handbills have been distributed to
the Roman Catholic populationthe great majority of the
peopledeclaring that a delegation of Upper Silesian Poles
visited the famous shrine of the Virgin Mary at Czenstochau,
and asked her whether she desired Upper Silesia to remain
German or become Polish and that she distinctly said
"Polish."
Despite all the efforts of the Poles, and of the French,
who see in Upper Silesia's vast riches the possibility of
getting back some of the money sunk in the Czar's Russia
and who realize that there isn't going to be any Poland in
a few years, the Germans are confident. If the plebiscite
be honestly conducted, they declare, it will prove as great
a disappointment for their enemies as did the plebiscites in
East and West Prussia. The Poles and French made the
peace conferents believe that there was a big Polish popu
lation in both these provinces, longing to be transferred to
Poland. So plebiscites were ordered. East Prussia gave a
vote of 97 per cent in favor of remaining with Germany,
West Prussia of 92 per cent.
March 9, 1921]
The Nation
Irish and American
373
Independence
By LINCOLN COLCORD
IT constantly is amazing, to one of American revolutionary
descent, to reflect how little is made of the analogy be
tween the American and the Irish Revolution. We see many
attempts, of course, to draw a comparison between the
present revolt in Ireland and the American Civil War; but
this plainly is no analogy. The real analogy lies in the
earlier period. In the true sense of historythat is, in
terms of the motives which inspire men and of the objec
tives which they seekIreland stands today in much the
same position as that occupied by the American Colonies in
1776. In both cases, the goal is independence from the
British Crown; in both, economic exploitation, which is to
say, British Colonial Government, is the dominating factor.
In both, also, a Tory Government in Britain precipitates the
issue in stupidity and violence, while Liberalism, in the
Opposition, protests vigorously.
Modern history stresses the importance of George III in
the American conflict, in the laudable effort to throw re
sponsibility on an alien monarch and demonstrate that Eng
land's attitude toward the Colonies was not native to her.
Yet, in terms of fact and policy, it cannot be denied that
it was a British Government which George III dominated
in this matter; the nation supported the policy, the Govern
ment remained in power; and Lord North was no more of
an alien than is Sir Hamar Greenwood. It is no dispar
agement of the splendid Liberal protest of 1776 in England
to recall that it never reached the point of seizing power,
and that it fell far short of staying the processes by which
the American Colonies were permanently estranged as a
political entity from the mother country.
But it is in the simple state of mind of governments and
people on both sides of the controversy that the analogy
between the Irish and American Revolutions finds its main
support. I venture to affirm that the mental and emotional
attitude of the Irish patriot of today toward the British
Crown is precisely the attitude of the American patriot of
1776. He is dealing with the same set of termsimperial
ism, coercion, arbitrary and absentee control. He is taking
the same broad standto refuse to submit to the sover
eignty of Great Britain. He is making the same claimto
set up his own sovereignty, unfettered and unlimited. In
short, the Irishman psychologically stands pretty squarely
in the shoes of our forefathers, thinks the same thoughts,
is inflamed by the same hatreds, objects to the same things,
seeks the same ends, and finds himself confronted by the
same power. It would be nothing strange to the young
Irish patriot, drilling among the hills, if a hundred and
fifty years should suddenly drop away and he should find
himself among the huddled band of barefoot rebels at Valley
Forge; without a break, he could join the conversation
where he left it off in Ireland the moment before.
On the other hand, I venture to affirm that the attitude
of Government, as well as of British Liberalism, toward
the American Colonies in 1776 finds its repetition in their
attitude toward Ireland today. Liberalism warned that if
the conflict went on in the narrow rut of intolerance and
oppression, the die would be cast for nothing short of in
dependence for the Colonies. Government, representing
Toryism, fumed and blustered, refused to swallow its pride,
invoked the force of arms, and made matters worse with

every fresh stroke of policy. In the eyes of Toryism, the
Boston Tea Party was a lawless raid, an outburst of an
archy. The Battle of Lexington was a murderous assault
by sneaking traitors on the forces of the Crown. Washing
ton and his army were nothing but rebels, bandits, destroy
ers of law and order. Paul Jones was a pirate of the blackest
water. Jefferson was an intellectual radical, a traitor to
his class and the existing authority, the worst brand of
agitator. The whole cause of American independence stank
in the nostrils of Toryism, both in England and America.
Today it is the enterprise for Irish independence which
stinks in the nostrils of Toryism. The Irish Republican
Army is looked upon as a band of rebels and cutthroats.
Patriotic demonstrations become lawless raids and outbreaks
of anarchy. Sinn Feiners are all agitators and extremists.
Opinion everywhere is directed away from the basic issue,
to wit, that Ireland refuses to recognize the sovereignty
of Great Britain, and that every event in Ireland must be
judged from this standpoint. Perhaps all Sinn Feiners are
agitators and extremists. Perhaps all American patriots
were in 1776. Such values are relative rather than absolute ;
and we should be interested only in getting a clear view
of the Irish case, apart from cant and propaganda.
For instance, how would it have gone with the American
Colonies had they been situated next door to England?
Would we have given up the fight; would our fierce ardor
for independence have been quenched by the proportions
of the task? Never! (I take it that this still would be a
legitimate claim.) But with only the Irish Channel to cross,
Great Britain could have poured troops at will into our
land; the broad Atlantic was our most powerful ally.
Practically all the physical power would have remained on
the side of the British Crown; and especially so had we
faced modern conditions of armament. What course, then,
would we have been likely to follow? In all human proba
bility, we would have organized a secret patriotic movement
and taken to guerrilla warfare, just as the Irish have done.
Washington, instead of marching and counter-marching his
inadequate troops to the confusion of the Crown forces,
might have been elected Lord Mayor of Cork instead, and
thrown down the gauntlet to the Government in a hunger
strike. Tactics and leadership go on in changing guise.
The Irish, as I understand it, take the position that Brit
ain has no right to police Ireland; the police are looked
on as a branch of the Army of Occupation, and are shot
without warning when practicable. The British Govern
ment, of course, calls it murder. Allowing for proper dif
ferences in the physical and geographical situation, it seems
to me that this is about the same position as that taken by
our New England farmers in 1776 when they shot down the
Redcoats without warning from behind the stone walls of
Lexington. The British Government called that murder,
too. The "embattled farmers" of Lexington were not forced
by the practical exigencies of the case to desist from open
warfare, to go into Boston and kill off individual officers
of the Crown; but they were acting on the same principle, a
principle which, unfortunately for Ireland, has been driven
beyond the bounds of traditional revolutionary practice.
374
The Nation
We were indeed fortunate to have escaped the necessity

for carrying forward our revolt under the conditions which
obtain in Ireland. Ireland's struggle has been longer and
harder than ours; she has paid the price a hundred times
over of her geographical position; and now it seems as if
she were destined to run blood for the next few years. Yet
stranger things than Irish independence have happened.
If her leaders do not betray the cause (and they will not)
it is entirely possible that she may win it. There appears
to be no intrinsic reason against Irish independenceonly
political and diplomatic reasons, which, as history amply
proves, are no reasons at all. I have to read a single argu
ment of the British Government on this issue which might
not have been advanced with double force (and probably
was) against the independence of the American Colonies.
Beyond the granting of that independence, however, and a
second brief conflict to prove the decision, nothing terrible
has taken place between the two countries to this day.
Who can say that our relations with Great Britain would
have been as sound as they are today had we failed to gain
our independence in 1776?
I am not at all animated by anti-British sentiment in this
matter, although beyond question I am animated by sym
pathy for Irish independence. The two positions are not in
compatible, for I am not an Englishman; to my mind they
are thoroughly American, in every sense of the word. How
shall we continue to glorify the memory of Lexington, to
acclaim the "shot heard round the world," to honor our
Revolutionary heroes, to teach the Boston Tea Party in our
schools as a daredevil patriotic prank, to celebrate the prin
ciples and to perpetuate the traditions of 1776how shall
we continue to do all this and at the same time accept the
attitude of Toryism toward the Irish Revolution? Nations
cannot endure without consistency. Patrick Henry recently
was elected to our Hall of Fame. What for, if not for ex
actly the same sort of record which the young leaders of
Sinn Fein are rewriting today in Ireland?
There was a time, while our own revolution was yet fresh
in the hearts of succeeding generations, when the great
American Republic stood before the world as the friend of
peoples everywhere struggling for freedom. It was our
proudest boast, our most cherished tradition; and in more
than one instance we embodied it in foreign policy. Are
we now coming to be ashamed of our former revolutionary
attainments and practices; have we fundamentally shifted
our national ground? Are we in process of canonizing our
revolutionary heroes as saints of reaction? Are we trying
to sidestep our splendid tradition of liberty by attributing
to extremism every present-day effort for independence, and
by branding every foreign patriot as a traitor to govern
ment and society?
If so, we are confronted by two obvious correlated facts :
first, that we ourselves are now definitely committed to im
perialism; second, that our own patriots, the real upholders
of our vital traditions, the advocates of true Americanism,
are destined to be branded as extremists, as traitors to gov
ernment and society. We are preparing to make Mexico our
Ireland, and to intrench the forces of Toryism beyond the
reach of criticism or orderly political control. One thing
is linked with another; and if we deny liberty abroad, we
have lost liberty at home.
Next week's Nation will publish an important article en
titled Cardinal Bourne and Ireland.
[Vol. 112, No. 2905
The Creative Ideal

By N. J. WARE
WE talk glibly of the labor problem as if it were
something outside ourselves, to be isolated and dis
cussed as a strange, exotic phenomenon in the best of pos
sible worlds. So much has the alien done for us. So far
have we moved since Hawthorne pitched dung at Brook
Farm. So successfully has the spirit of the nineteenth
century enslaved the spirits of the twentieth. For the labor
problem is not an isolated phenomenon at all Neither is it
exotic. Instead of coming with the immigrant, it was the
immigrant who delayed its coming. Labor unrest is real
enough, but it is no more real than the unrest among farm
ers, the unrest of young people, of women, artists, and
intellectuals generally.
The common characteristic of all those of us who are
protestants in modern life is not poverty nor labor by hand.
Our common characteristic is that we are all, in greater or
less degree, creators. And our protest is against the in
creasing dominance of those who are merely owners and
exploiters. What we experience is a renaissance of the
creative spirit trying to throw off the spirit of the nine
teenth century, the spirit of possession.
There have always been rich and poor, just as there have
always been the strong and the weak. But it was not until
the nineteenth century that men ceased to gain wealth and
so regard it, as a by-product of some creative activity. In
no previous time was acquisition pure and simple regarded
as normal and right. Our capitulation to the acquisitive
purpose is not complete. We still find some regions in
which creative activity dominates. A physician may make
money, but his main purpose is to make health. A gentle
man receiving his board and lodging and a small allowance
for uniform and pocket money will face death operating
a battery of guns made by a business man for profit.
Why does not a doctor raise his charges in the face of
an epidemic? Why did profits in American corporations
rise over 300 per cent from 1914 to 1917, while the incomes
of professional classes rose hardly at all? What is the
difference between building a church and preaching in it?
The difference is simple, of course. In the case of the
professions, control has remained in the hands of the
creator and 'reward has remained a by-product of service.
In the case of business, control has long since passed out
of the hands of the producer, master, journeyman, artist,
inventor, and into the hands of the owner per se, the ex
ploiter, the speculator, and service has become the hand
maiden of profit.
Until 1800 or thereabouts in America men regarded
wealth as a by-product of some creative service. The way
to wealth was the perfection of that service. There was
such a thing as professional honor in the crafts and trades,
the creators had control, unprofessional conduct was the
exception. A silk dress was made of silk and not of old
tin. Men might get relatively wealthy growing corn, but
they could not get beastly rich buying it and selling it
again. Men gained money making woolens but they did not
get fabulous sums for withholding woolens.
The beginning of the change that we call the industrial
revolution came about when Yankee traders, who had made
The Nation
March 9, 1921]
exceptional profits dealing with backward peoples, found

themselves with money on their hands, and the Southern
and Western markets became potential consumers of manu
factured goods. The new markets not only required a
larger output than the craftsman could well supply, but they
required wholesale as contrasted with custom work,
i. e., that goods should be made and stored in advance of
sale instead of as a result of sale as formerly.
This was the opportunity for which the new capitalists
were looking. They stepped into the breach and began
organizing wholesale production for the new national mar
ket.
375
Thus it is wrong to isolate the labor problem.
Labor is
the most self-conscious group working against degradation,

but all moderns feel the strain of the conflict and indeed are
participants in it. The farmer sees something wrong in

an ideal that rewards the manipulator and punishes the
producer. Struggling against a mortgage and an unkind
heaven, he sees the holder of the mortgage wax fat and
the Smart city man make millions, juggling with corn that
the farmer created by the grace of God and much sweat
ing toil.
The professional classesthe physician, the clergyman,
Thus was control transferred from the creator to the
the teacher, the librarian, the journalistare increasingly
exploiter and the psychological structure of the industrial

revolution completed. The acquisitive purpose of the trader
supplanted the creative purpose of the master-craftsman,
inventor, artist.
Two more steps were necessary to make the industrial
revolution complete: the inventions and the factory system
arose to buttress the new purpose in industry and were
deflected from their true function by the exploitive pur
poses of the owner of capital. There is a feeling abroad
that the machine is evil, and as we know it the feeling is
readily understood. But the moral quality of the machine
rests in the use to which it is put and this upon the pur
pose of those who control it. The inventor regards the
conscious of the pressure. The architect cannot fail to see

the unmistakable link between his enforced idleness of the
machine as a substitute for human toil.
In Anderson's
new story, Poor White, there is an interesting comment

following a description of the heavy labor of cutting corn
by hand:
Hughs [corn-cutting machine] took all the heavier part of
the work away.
past two years, when building was urgently needed, and

the amazing revelations of the Lockwood Committee in
New York State that all construction materials are con
trolled by small groups in the interest of neither housing,

nor general business, nor the public, nor the community,
nor even their own reasonable benefit, but for their own
extraordinary, incredible, manifold, skyrocketing profit.

The engineer, in the face of evident and needed projects
for liberating vast forces of nature for the use of mankind,
has long felt the oppression of pathetic dependence on the
financier's O. K., judged by the latter not in terms of
service, not even in terms of profit to himself, but of suf

ficiently great profit.
The men went along smoking their
In the Driftway
pipes and talking. The horses stopped and the driver stared
over the prairies.
His arms did not ache with weariness and
he had time to think.
The wonder and the mystery of the
wide, open places got a little into his blood. At night, when the
And therein lies the issue around
which the new and better world will recrystallize.
HEN the Drifter was at the age where children are

exposed to Sunday school, he learned the goodly tale
of a Christian knight who, on one of the Crusades, fell into
work was done and the cattle fed, he did not go at once to bed,
but sometimes went out of his house and stood for a moment
under the stars.
This is the result of machinery introduced by the pro

ducer. Compare the following account of a laborers work
in the steel industry for the result of machinery intro
duced under the exploiter:
Job of labor in the clean-up gang in pit of open-hearth fur
naces: the pit is the half-open space where the furnaces are
tapped into ladles and poured into ingot molds. As the hot
metal comes from the taphole, much spills and must be broken
with picks when half cooled and cleaned out and slag and
scrap separated into different cars.
The job is: clean up cinder when ladle is dumped, break clay
covers from valve pipes, pile pipes at side of pit, repile pipes
Affix chains for swinging them to black
on flat car.
smith's door, repile in shop. Get straightened pipes back to

shop by same series of steps; same going and returning for
broken chains.
Affix hooks to ladles, when crane shoves ladle
in your face.
Clean out all hot cinder and scrap under all
furnaces.
Take cinder by hand or barrow to cinder boxes.
Clean hot overflow metal or slag from tracks. Very hot work.
Heavy work, but considered here as one of the easier jobs.
Hours 14 on night turn, 10 hours on day turn, long turn of 24
hours every two weeks.
the hands of a heathen Turk. The cruel Moslem harnessed

his captive to a plow, and whipped him as he would have
whipped an oxand the Drifter gathered that the lot of
a Turkish ox was not a happy one. After many years of

toil in the fields, the poor knight was finally ransomed and
returned to his Christian home.
But no sooner had he been
restored to his ancestral estate than a new Crusade began,

and again he answered the call. This time his side won,
and he took prisoner the very Turk who had captured
him and harnessed him to a plow.
The knight took his
prisoner back to the West; and after the feasts of victory

had been properly celebrated, visited the captive in his
dungeon. What do you expect? he asked. Retribution,
answered the Turk. Yes, said the noble Christian knight.
Christian retribution. We Christians forgive our enemies.
Go home in peace. Be merciful henceforth, and may God
be with you. Alas, the poor Turk replied, beating his
breast. How could I have known that such mercy existed
on earth? I have taken poison and am about to die. But
before I die, O noble Christian, teach me, I beseech you, the
religion that begets such nobility. Whereupon the Chris
tian hastily initiated his prisoner into the mysteries of the
faith, and the Turk died a Christian.
*
The last stage of the industrial revolution took place

when the commercial house became solely a banking house.
Then the last vestige of the creative function passed away
and the purely acquisitive took its place. Modern industry,
one might almost say modern life, has passed into the
Even at Sunday school age the Drifter felt a certain

fairy-tale quality in this story, remote enough from the
world in which the owners of cherry trees chased little
hands of money lenders.
as he believed any of the stories that he learned in school
boys who pilfered cherries.
But he believed it as much
The Nation
376
or Sunday school, and in the hours immediately following

his release from Sunday school he sometimes longed for an
opportunity to exemplify the noble Christian spirit that
welled up in him. He was disappointed that he found no
Turks to practice on, in the streets through which he
passed homeward bound. Today he supposes that the story
has been eliminated from the Sunday school books. For
nowadays good Christians preach that the Turk was the
truer Christian. Had the Christian knight been a 1921model eight-cylinder Christian, he would have seized most
of the Turk's possessions, half starved his children, loaded
him with heavy chains, and fixed his ransom at the equiva
lent of forty-two years hard labor. What mollycoddles and
spineless jellyfish the old-fashioned Christians were!
The Drifter
Correspondence
Conduct of Americans Abroad
Sib: The presumption of exaggeration in the statement of a
competent American observer that "many American soldiers
and not a few of the American officers treated France as if
they did not care a damn who owned it" while they were "over
there" will be weakened by the following extract from a letter
from St. Lucia, a British possession, essentially of French
civilization, in the West Indies:
Some American warships called at Castries last week and, while
the men as a whole did not behave as badly as they had done re
cently at Martinique and Barbados, some of them lived up to their
reputation. . . . Two drunken sailors went into C.'s drug store
and, after begging insistently for cigarettes and making themselves
a nuisance generally, one of them asked the proprietor whether
he thought he was drunk. Mr. C, who neither drinks nor smokes,
said "Yes, you are drunk," whereupon the man replied with a coarse
insult. As C. made for the man to throw him out of the store, two
of the women clerks caught the druggist by the arms so as to
avoid a scene. While they held him, the drunken coward suddenly
struck him on the mouth, breaking his lip and knocking out his
teeth, and then ran out of the store with his companion. The
brutes were not pursued, for fear they might bring their friends
and break up the store, and an ontci.il complaint would only have
led to costly and futile international discussions, at most.
Imagine the impression that people in the West Indies, and
in many other places, have of Americans, the Americans that
they see and know. That impression was confirmed only the
other day when Marines in Nicaragua destroyed the plant of
a newspaper which had dared to criticize their conduct. In
stead of trying to correct this impression by seeking to remove
its causesnational bad manners and disrespect for other peo
plesthe Americans who stay at home clamor for vengeance
when a member of their armed forces gets killed for becoming
a law unto himself in another land. Instead of inculcating the
real discipline of self-restraint and manly tolerance in the
members of these forces as well as other citizens, the authori
ties content themselves with the relentless persecution of all
and sundry grog in the shade of the Stars and Stripes, only to
let loose all the pent-up energies of the demon rum in some
hapless alien haven. American civilians, in such cases, do so
love to tell, often with vivid imagination, how "the boys" beat
up the town and knock down the policemen, confident as they
all are that a patriotic press at home and a departmental court
of inquirers will find no reason to reduce the heavy-fisted
trouble-seekers from their high estate among the divinely ap
pointed benefactors of mankind.
There is renewed talk, in Congress and in the press, about
the acceptance of the West Indies in payment of European
war debts to the United States, and some superficial visitors
profess to have found in the islands a strong sentiment in
[Vol. 112, No. 2905
favor of such transfer of sovereignty. It may be that some

West India merchants see in the annexation of the islands to
the United States a sure way to remove the exchange premium
on the dollar which is making prohibitive the price of flour and
salted codfish; but if a plebiscite will have any weight in the
settlement of the war debts of the parent countries, it is certain
that the people of Martinique and Guadeloupe will prefer to do
what they can as Frenchmen in feeling and in fact, and the
natives of the other islands as Britishers by force of necessity,
rather than to constitute American punching bags or problems
in colonization and race assimilation.
Jaime C. Gil
How Not to Settle the Race Problem

Sib: Mr. Bruce Bliven, writing on The Japanese Problem
for the February 2 issue of The Nation, quotes a San Joaquin
rancher as saying: "I won't let my children go to school with
them [the Japanese] and I won't have anything to do with
them if I can help it." How long is.it going to be before we
have any different spirit governing international affairs if one
generation after another is brought up in the atmosphere of
animosity shown by this father? Children left to themselves
have no such feeling toward each other and associate freely
with each other.
In the part of Oakland in which I live there is a large floral
establishment conducted by Japanese. The men employed there,
at least some of them, have their families with them so that
there are children attending the public school. They go back
and forth with American children, play with them in the school
yard, go to the public library together and to a common Sunday
school, and there is no complaint on the part of teachers or
parents that American children are harmed by association with
their darker-skinned playmates.
Let our children alone. They do not need to be inspired with
hate and animosity toward those whose parents happened to be
born in another part of the world. Past generations and their
method of dealing with each other have not settled international
problems. Why inspire coming generations with these same
worse than futile, wicked, and dangerous ideasa failure in
the past, increasingly a failure, increasingly a danger for the
present and future?
Oakland, Cat, February 8
Gertrude H. Warwick
Trade the Caribbean Islands for the Debt

Sir: What's all this rubbish about canceling the French
debt? The next thing we will hear that we have to cancel the
British debt, too. If the economic situation in Europe calls for
such heroic measures, if we have to relieve perishing Austria,
ward off bolshevism in the Central European countries by re
lieving France and England, there is a very simple, effective,
and just method of so doing.
France possesses several small islands in the Caribbean,
principally the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe. They
are not much use to France. They might not be of much use
to the United States, although their acquisition would certainly
please a great number of people in this country who believe in
our "manifest destiny in the Caribbean." On the other hand,
these Americans who rightly resent our indecent and utterly
unjustifiable seizure of Haiti and Santo Domingo (which we
will, of course, have to return to their rightful owners) cannot
disapprove of the wholly legitimate procedure of purchasing, an
historically American method which we used in acquiring
Florida, the Middle Northwest and Alaska, and the Danish
West Indies.
Then there are the British Bahamas, the British Lesser An
March 9, 1921]
The Nation
tilles, the Bermudas, the island of Jamaica, to say nothing of

British Honduras.
Come, gentlemen, financiers, and economists at home and
abroad, if you want cancelation, let us talk business! Set your
valuation on your Caribbean possessions. (You will make it
high enough, we have no doubt.) Then give us, if you can, a
single valid reason against this proposal if you really need and
desire relief, through cancelation or postponement of your just
interest charges as they fall due.
Edward T. Huidekopeb
European Imperialism vs. Cancelation

Sir: I just finished reading an article in The Nation, issue
of January 19, by Mr. Pierrepont B. Noyes, "Shall We Cancel
France's Debt?"
I think that such a suggestion at this time, while France is
being ruled by the iron heel of militarism, is positively dis
gusting. It would not be a benevolent act, but simply a loan
to carry on further military exploits such as backing such
monarchical renegades as Baron Wrangel, and the imperialist
friends of France as Poland, to carry on new wars against a
broken-down, poverty-stricken nation that has democratic am
bitions and has been begging the world for peace ever since
the armistice. Those of us who try to keep on the feather edge
of the world's events cannot help but think that the next impe
rialistic military aim of France is to help finance either Belgium
or Hungary to carry on her dirty work. Why should we be
taxed to help France carry on such rotten exploits?
If France is so near bankruptcy and is so sincere in wanting
peace and economy (which the world needs so badly) , why did
she vote against disarmament at the meeting of the first Con
gress of the League at Geneva? The present ruling bunch in
France seems to have more imperialistic ambitions than Prus
sia ever had, and she needs a lesson. If bankruptcy will furnish
that lesson then I say let her have it. Such imperialistic an
archy must be stopped at all cost or democracy will become a
mockery.
Morocco, Indiana, January 19
Guy E. Roadruck
That Extraordinary Parallel

Sir: In a recent issue you speak of the "extraordinary par
allel between the cause of our thirteen colonies in 1776 and
that of Ireland today," and express a desire that the facts in
the case be widely known. As I am neither a propagandist nor
a controversialist and am not likely to be charged with ignorance
of the subject or with an ex-parte desire to interpret history in
the interest of either Great Britain or Ireland, I can perhaps
aid you in making some of the facts known. No such parallel
exists. The likeness that you mention is of so superficial a
character as to deceive only those who are willing to be deceived.
This is generally the case with historical parallels when drawn
between events separated by long periods of time. The situation
can best be tested by looking at the matter from an angle slightly
different from that usually adopted. You speak with confidence
of this "extraordinary parallel" as if it were something that
really existed and should be given consideration in discussing
the Irish question of today. Are you sufficiently confident to go
a step farther and maintain that had the American colonies,
in the years from 1774 to 1776, received from the British Gov
ernment of that day such concessions as Great Britain has made
to Ireland in the last twenty-five years, including so favorable
a representation in the British Parliament, they would have
risen in revolt in 1776?
Yale University, February U
Charles M. Andrews
[See Lincoln Colcord's article in this issue.Ed. Nation.]
377
Books
The American Inquisition
Freedom of Speech. By Zechariah Chafee, Jr. Harcourt, Brace
and Howe.
\X7E have had much freedom of speech about freedom of
' speech. From soap-boxes and from platforms of the
National Security League have come competing vociferations of
shallow minds that equally fail to appreciate the intricacies of
the problem they dispose of so cavalierly. The great merit of
Professor Chafee's book is that he understands the complexity
of the issue of free speech and places his readers in a position
to reach intelligent conclusions of their own. One does not have
to agree with him in order to derive enlightenment from what
he has to say. There are some, of course, like Mr. Archibald
Stevenson in the Times Book Review, who will like to believe
that "the book is interesting only because it illustrates a passing
phase of incorrigible sentimentality." But such a belief can
be enjoyed only by one who is woefully stupid or who adopts
the easy device of reading the book by title only. Mr. Chafee
writes with zealwith incorrigible zeal, if you will; but the zeal
is only motive power; at the wheel is an acute and effective
intellect. In substance he has given us three books in one: a
legal treatise, a history, and a propagandist essay. Each, per
haps, would have been stronger of its kind had it not been inter
woven with the others ; yet the three together are much stronger
than any one would be alone. Propaganda is not at the
moment a word of favor, but of such were the "Areopagitica"
and the essay "On Liberty." If Mr. Chafee does not uniformly
maintain the majesty of Milton or of Mill, his quips and his
jibes will not be distasteful to the large majority of his readers,
and in most instances they are justified by the provocation if
not by the most punctilious canons of taste. They keep even the
legal discussion from becoming dull or dry. Each of the three
authors is a dramatist who never fails to hold the attention of
his audience.
The first three chapters, composing nearly half of the book,
are concerned with the enforcement of the Espionage Acts of
1917 and 1918. At the outset, the author rejects both of the
extreme views that the Constitution guarantees unlimited free
dom of speech or that the First Amendment goes to sleep in
time of war. This latter position is approached by Professor
Corwin who declares in the Yale Law Journal that "the elbowroom accorded Congress by the 'necessary and proper' clause is
admittedly broad, and it is a sound maxim that the Constitution
does not grant power in one place to withdraw it in another."
This alleged soundness is effectively exploded by Mr. Chafee
when he points out that "if the First Amendment is to mean
anything, it must restrict powers which are expressly granted
by the Constitution to Congress, since Congress has no other
powers." He reminds us, too, that the First Amendment concededly does not limit the States and that it and the others
adopted at the same time were promised in advance in order
to secure the ratification of the Constitution by allaying the
apprehensions that the newly created national government
might emulate George III in trampling upon the liberties of the
people. Yet these restrictions on governmental powers are not
absolute. Mr Chafee recognizes that some utterances are pun
ishable, notwithstanding the First Amendment. He accepts
the principle laid down by Mr. Justice Holmes for a unanimous
Supreme Court that "the question in every case is whether the
words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a
nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will
bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to
prevent." Mr. Chafee quarrels with the Supreme Court only
when the majority of that body seem to him to forget the test of
"clear and present danger" and to sustain convictions for words
that have only a "tendency" to bring about the substantive evils
that may be guarded against. Certain it is that some of the
378
The Nation
utterances for which men have been imprisoned have done no

other harm than to enrage the few determined parlor patriots*
who were the only ones to hear them. Whether the danger test
would require the reversal of any of the convictions that have
run the gauntlet of the Supreme Court is another question and
one on which agreement with the author, though possible, is not
inevitable. Proof of the danger was certainly lacking. The
jury was allowed to "infer" it. The freedom with which the
newspapers printed in full the statements assumed to be fraught
with such grave danger raises a question not easily answered
by those who cherish the convictions of the defendants and
insist that those convictions were imperative to insure the
winning of the war.
The atmosphere in which some of the prosecutions were con
ducted is shown by the third chapter with its vivid account of
the famous Abrams trial before Judge Clayton. For lack of
dignity and for confusion of intellect the presiding julge seemed
to seek his models in the broadsides of the defendants whom he
was prosecuting. Other district judges must in cooler times
be equally regretful that court stenographers took down what
they said. Among notable exceptions pointed out by the author
are Judge Learned Hand and Judge Augustus N. Hand in New
York City and Judge Amidon in North Dakota. Mr. Chafee
pays a tribute, too, to the worthy conception of duty entertained
by John Lord O'Brien of Buffalo and Alfred Bettman of
Cincinnati, who held the posts of Assistants to the Attorney
General in charge of the administration of the Espionage Act.
"Great praise," he says, "must be given to their thorough in
vestigation of hundreds of convictions, as a result of which sen
tences imposed by the judges were in many instances com
muted by the President to a small fraction of their original
length." Yet much of the story is one of a judicial system
acting in a rage. The widespread manifestations of this
travesty on the blindfolded lady with the even scales show the
limited importance of the precise line drawn by the Supreme
Court in interpreting the Constitution. Mr. Chafee's recital
makes it clear that in times of passion juries will run wild in
spite of all the formal principles of constitutional law that may
be laid down, and that the restricted reviewing power of trial
judges and of appellate courts will often prove incapable of
reversing verdicts that quite plainly are animated by abhorrence
or vindictiveness rather than by a sane judgment that the
constitutional or statutory limits of free speech have been
exceeded. His accounts of the administration of the law make
somewhat scholastic his acute discriminations between the tests
laid down by the Supreme Court and those which he thinks
should have been adopted. Obviously, the issues of constitu
tional law are relatively minor elements in a much greater prob
lem. Nine men in Washington cannot hold a nation to ideals
which it is determined to betray. Whether justice is done to
the particular defendant is important, but in the long run less
important than whether a nation does justice to itself. Its
standard should be its own honor and dignity rather than the
deserts of some misguided recalcitrant or the limits of its consti
tutional power. The author's recognition of this leads him
frequently to point out the folly of what he concedes may be
constitutional. Sometimes he seems to impair the integrity of
his concessions by the sharp thrusts he makes at details that
follow naturally therefrom. This quite likely is due to the fact
that he is writing three books and not one only. The historian
and the propagandist interrupt the lawyer. Their rudeness,
however, should be pardoned for the greater importance of what
they have to say. So much that is neither illegal nor unconstitu
tional offends other canons equally worthy of respect.
Many sincere apologists for the excesses in the enforcement
of the Espionage Acts have much to say about the special
dangers of disaffection in time of war. They remind us that
when killing is going on we cannot expect much tenderness
toward talk. This, however, does not go to the question whether
"Parlor patriots" Iif this phrase could only have been coined earlier and
used properly it might have hindered a hundred excessesC. V. D.
[Vol. 112, No. 2905
suppression is the best plaster for drawing the disaffection.

The wise man even in his wrath will consider whether his
means contribute toward his ends. With the cessation of
hostilities, the most grievous impediments to such consideration
are removed and the advent of an open season for sanity may
be hoped for. Yet events since the armistice demonstrate that
sanity has far from fully asserted itself. The habit of jailing
men whose opinions are distasteful is not a war-time anomaly.
Determined seekers readily find new witches for old. The war
has left in its train a succession of proscriptions of opinion that
greatly surpass the unwisdom of anything done before. In
spirit if not in results the period through which we are passing
is one that historians may look back upon as the American
Inquisition. The study of this period and of its forerunners in
England and America fills the second and more important half
of Professor Chafee's book. His pages are so packed with de
tail that any summary is necessarily inadequate. Our enacted
and proposed peace-time legislation against sedition and our
-deportation of aliens have been justified as directed only against
preachers of force and violence. For such preachers Mr.
Chafee asks no quarter, but his story of how such laws are
actually enforced leaves one in grave doubt whether protection
against force and violence is their motive. It could hardly have
been to protect against force and violence that the Socialist
members were excluded from the New York Assembly. It is
not to protect against force and violence that teachers of So
cialist proclivities are dismissed from the schools. It is not
abhorrence of force and violence that leaves the Rev. Mr. William
Sunday at liberty to say: "If I had my way with these ornery
wild-eyed Socialists and I. W. W.'s, I would stand them up
before a firing squad and save space on our ships." For threats
of force and violence, for bad manners, for intemperate
harangue, for violation of law, Mr. Chafee points to examples
among the prosecutors that rival any of the offenses they pro
fess to condemn. The line of cleavage between what has been
proscribed and what has been permitted runs as often between
opposing opinions and desires as between differing ways of
urging them. One of the most tragic features of the inquisi
tion is the extent to which the officers of the law and their
backers have stolen the temper of the objects of their zeal.
Whatever of legal right and of practical wisdom there may be
in the things that have been done, there remains the stain of
the spirit and the methods which have inspired and accompanied
them.
Such are the impressions forced upon the reader by Mr.
Chafee's recital. Subtract what you will for possible errors of
detail, and the impression still remains. Hear what his critics
have to say, and the impression is enhanced rather than dimin
ished. The worst offenses have been committed in the conduct
of the deportations. The constitutional prohibitions against
unreasonable searches and seizures have- received scant re
spect. The procedure laid down by statute has too frequently
been disregarded. Patent and confessed wrongs have been
left unredressed. The violence of the purging process has been
such as to increase the very evil it professedly seeks to eradi
cate. In the name of orderly government we have been dis
orderly. In fear of the new Russian regime, we have emulated
its predecessor. The victims have not been so numerous that it
would be unwarranted to require their sacrifice to any serious
national need. But the smallness of their numbers is itself
proof of the absence of any such need. More important still is
the certainty established by Mr. Chafee that such need as has
been present might have been met by respectable methods. He
shows how the normal law against violence and anarchy and
the normal criminal law of words are adequate to punish those
who counsel wrongful deeds. He points out that spectacular
raids are less likely to get the dangerous offenders than to
corral the harmless folks who satisfy their instincts by attend
ing meetings. The worst feature of the substantive provisions
of the deportation statute is that it makes membership in
vaguely described associations one of the tests of who shall be
The Nation
March 9, 1921]
deported. Stirring phrases in apocalyptic platforms may readily

be made the excuse to impute threats of violence to the tamest
souls who pay as little heed to their party pronouncements as

church members commonly pay to their prescribed creed. As
Mr. Chafee remarks: those Republicans and Democrats who
shout for the deportation or imprisonment of the entire Com

munist Party because of certain clauses in its platform might
recover their sense of humor long enough to ask themselves
if they ever indorsed every plank in their respective party

platforms.
. Let us deport men for the injuries they do
or, if we must, for what they say, but stop condemning them
for the grandiose phrases of a party creed.
To current history and to a discussion of its legal and consti
tutional aspects Mr. Chafee adds accounts of former experi

ences of a similar sort. He shows how the tradition of liberty
has developed out of the defeats of those who have stood in its
way. Thus he gives the requisite background for the thoughtful
appraisal of the events of recent years. To one who perceives
the lessons of history, the facts of the present speak for them
selves. It is easier to be sure that we have gone too far than
to know just where we should have stopped. Those who will
not draw the line where Mr. Chafee draws it will still find his
book a great help in deciding where they will draw it for them
selves.
This is its greatest merit.
It gives the data for an
intelligent judgment. The legal aspects of the problem no longer

remain mysteries for the layman. Apparently worthy words
in a statute no longer seem wholly worthy or innocuous.
It is
made clear that the merits of a law must be tested by what can
be done in the name of the law. As a compendium of informa
tion Mr. Chafee's book deserves the widest reading. There is
room for difference of opinion as to his personal equation and

his manner of expressing it.
Some may think that he uses a
hundred pop-guns when one Big Bertha would be better.
He is
379
Gorki, as he watched him during those months in the Crimea

in 1901. Sometimes the old magician sat in a corner, tired
and gray, as though the dust of another earth were on him;
remote, indifferent to people, alien to all, a solitary traveler
through all the deserts of thought, in search of an all-embracing
truth which he has not found.
Which he has not found, declares Gorki. For he was not

satisfied with Tolstoy's truth. Truth-seekers seldom are con
tented with one another's fragments of the scattered body of

truth. It was perhaps inevitable that Gorki and Tolstoy should
disagree on many points. They were of different generations;
one sprang from the top, the other from the bottom of Russian
society. His interest in me is ethnological, noted Gorki a
little resentfully; I belong to a species not familiar to him.
He at first suspected Tolstoy of playing the barinusing the

vulgar language of street and market-place because he judged
his guest incapable of comprehending any other. Later he
understood that Tolstoy employed the salty peasant words
simply because they were the most expressive.
But Tolstoy
could play the barin when he chose, as over-familiar admirers

sometimes learned to their cost; the grand aristocrat arose
under the peasant beard and crumpled blouse, and the noses
of the simple-hearted visitors became blue with intolerable
cold. Gorki takes an artist's delight in the exquisite pointed

ness of his murderous words on these occasions. With Gorki,
he was not the barin but the cross-examiner. His questions had
a deadly directness, often a touch of mischievous malice: You
dont like me? What do you think of yourself? Do you love
your wife? And to lie to him was impossible. He puzzled
over Gorki: You are funny
very funny. . . .
Your mind I dont understandit's a very tangled mindbut
your heart is sensible. His probing was interesting, yet it
made the victim squirm a little; he is the devil, and I am still
not wholly free from that intensity of emotion that is a potent
a babe, and he should leave me alone.
factor in the excesses of intolerance from which we have suf
dently not very comfortable companions.
fered. This sometimes regrettably comes out in irony, innuendo,

and sarcasm. The philosophical considerations in favor of
freedom from oppression on account of opinion are elucidated
less profoundly than might be desired. Too often they come in
the interstices or as flying buttresses rather than founda
tions. Fortunately this does not very greatly matter when we
charming, as Rolland's Polichinelle observes, but what a tem
can turn to Milton and to Mill.
We must remember that Mr.
Chafee was writing on the firing line and that something else
would have been sacrificed had he waited for perfect poise.
We owe him so much for writing three essential books that we
can readily forgive him for not including a fourth.

THOMAS REED POWELL
Gorki's Tolstoy
Truth-seekers are evi
Cousin Truth is
perament!
It was pleasanter for Gorki when the artist in Tolstoy was

uppermost.
He relates a striking little incident in which the
artist speaks with unembarrassed directness. Tolstoy had been

reading at twilight a scene from his Father Sergius. At the
end, closing his eyes, he said distinctly, The old man wrote
it wellwell! It came out with such amazing simplicity,
his pleasure in its beauty was so sincere, that . . . my
heart stopped beating for a moment, and then everything around
me seemed to become fresh and revivified. It is of Tolstoy
the thinker, the seer, however, that the most beautiful single
passage of the book is written. Gorki came upon him sitting
among the stones on the beach, a smallish figure, in gray,
crumpled, ragged suit and crumpled hat, with his head on his
hands, the wind blowing the silvery hairs of his beard through
Reminiscences of Tolstoy. By Maxim Gorki. Authorized Trans
lation from the Russian by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard
Woolf.
B. W. Huebsch, Inc.
To:
somewhere divides people into those who accom
modate the truth to their lives and those who accommodate
their lives to the truth. A small band, the truth-seekers; to

catch two of them within the covers of one little book, to watch
each explore the other's personality and measure the other's

truth, is the rare opportunity afforded by Gorki's fragmentary
reminiscences of Tolstoy. Among the truth-seekers Gorki has
conquered the right to stand near Tolstoy by his steadfast
courage in facing and studying the perplexing and sometimes

appalling events of the Russian Revolution.
Others have found
it more pleasant to test the Revolution by their truth, instead

of testing their truth by the Revolution. The truth that is re
vealed is often ugly; truth will continue to be rough, writes
Gorki in a recent estimate of Lenin's character, until men make
it as beautiful as their music, one of the finest truths they have
created. As long as truth is rough, the truth-seeker will be
lonely. The loneliness of Tolstoy again and again impressed
his fingers. He was looking into the distance out to sea. . . .

It was a day of sun and cloud, and the shadows of the clouds
glided over the stones, and with the stones the old man grew
now bright and now dark.
He seemed to me like an
old stone come to life, who knows all the beginnings and the
ends of things, who considers when and what will be the end
of the stone, of the grasses of the earth, of the waters of the
sea, and of the whole universe, from the pebble to the sun.
This was the explorer who scattered about him the living
seeds of indomitable thoughts.
I do not know, wrote Gorki after Tolstoy's death, whether

I loved him; but does it matter, love of him or hatred?
Even the unpleasant and hostile feelings which he roused were
of a kind not to oppress but rather to explode the soul. Gorki
disliked Tolstoy's unspeakably vulgar talk of womentalk
marked by a cold hostility, with something personal as if he
had once been hurt and could neither forget nor forgive.
He
was irritated by Tolstoy's perverse peasant attitude toward

science.
But he was most hostile when he detected in Tolstoy
the despotic inclination to give a sanction to his teaching by
The Nation
380
suffering and martyrdom, to turn the life
of Count Leo Niko
the skin of a living thought, which may vary greatly in

color and content according to the circumstances and the time
in which it is used. It is, perhaps, the varying content of the
word parliament that will make the deepest impression on the
laevich into the saintly life of our blessed father, boyard

Leo. He felt that it was an attempt to use violence on those
who could not accept his teaching on its own merits, a desire
to get hold of my conscience, to dazzle it with the glory of
reader of Mr. Pollard's book.
In the earliest definition of an
English parliament the word is used in the plural number:
righteous blood, to put upon my neck the yoke of a dogma.
This is keen comment on the non-resistant who may withhold

the physical only to deal the spiritual blow. Gorki told Tolstoy
that he liked active people, who resist the evil of life by every
means, even by violence. And violence is the chief evil!
exclaimed Tolstoy. In non-resistance Gorki felt the danger Of
mere passivity, always too alluring to the Russian Oblomov,
And he feared the creation of a Tolstoy legend that would hold
a peculiar danger for the disillusioned, weary Russians
[Vol. 112, No. 2905
habet enim rea, curiam swam in consilio suo in parliamentis suis;
and it is with parliaments, not with a fixed and stereotyped

institution, that parliamentary history has to deal. There is
little enough in common between those parleys of the council
that Edward I held at Westminster for the better ordering of
justice, in which Maitland saw the heart and essence of the
earliest English parliaments, and the institution in which the

British state now finds its legal embodiment; and the present
in the
aftermath of the 1905 revolution. Lacerated and starving, they
House of Commons bears little resemblance to those obscure
long for a legend. They long so much for
meetings of knights and burgesses in the chapter-house of West

minster Abbey during the late Middle Ages. When the revolu
alleviation of pain
and they will create just what he desires, but what is

not wanted, the life of a holy man and a saint. Gorki would
have none of the saint. To him Tolstoy was a tormentingly
beautiful man. Let him remain a sinner close to the heart
tionary syndicalist confidently assures us that parliament is

bankrupt, he implies that is a rigid institution. Its friends
may, if they will, derive aid and comfort from Mr. Pollard's
pages.
of the all-sinful world.
The book leaves an unforgettable impression of two truth

seekers, and gives a glimpse of a third, for Chekhov is there,
too. A small volume harboring these three Russian truth

seekers and truth-tellers and artists takes its place on a shelf
of recent books with an effect like that when Tolstoy himself
entered a room: He would come out looking rather small, and "
immediately everyone around him would become smaller

than he.
One need not be a stand-patter, and defend every
anachronism of the present-day parliament, to have faith in the

future of an institution that has back of it the history of the
| English parliament. Mr. Pollard knows this history, and there
fore he can proclaim his belief in parliament and yet say that
DOROTHY BREWSTER
the House of Lords is moribund.
The title that the author has chosen for his book suggests a
point of view that is all too common among institutional his
torians today. If the term evolution were used to denote
nothing more than consecutive change, no fault could be found
with it; it would be as correct to speak of the evolution of par
liament as of the evolution of species. But the word comes to
us from biology, and it carries with it, almost inevitably, the
On the British Parliament

Longmans,
conceptions and hypotheses of that science. When the historian
Green and Company.

HIS is a book that all serious students of English constitu
uses it he loses sight of the fact that there is one evolution of

species, another of stars, another of steam engines, and another
of parliaments; he thinks only of biological evolution. Thus
Mr. Pollard can gravely write that the history of parliament is
mainly concerned with the evolution of institutions from a com
The Evolution of Parliament.
By A. F. Pollard.
tional history will have to take into account, though it is

not addressed exclusively to them.
It is rather a collection of
more or less closely articulated essays on various phases of Eng

lish parliamentary history than a systematic account of the
development of parliament; the author makes no attempt to
deal with many subjects that fall within the scope of his title.
It is as a specialist in the history of England in the sixteenth
century that Professor Pollard is best known to scholars, and it
was his study of the Tudor constitution, he tells us, that led him
mon protoplasm and with their mutual struggles for recogni

tion and predominance. And when he asserts that in the
Middle Ages institutions are not made but grow, he implies
that at some point of time the mechanical process was substi
tuted for the biological, a proposition that he would probably

not care seriously to defend. It is true, of course, that institu
tions are never made brand new, without precedent, in historical
back to the Middle Ages for answers to questions which it
isolation. There is such a thing as institutional heritage and

environment, and from it the boldest revolutionist cannot wholly
raised; historical curiosity combined with an academic inter

est in politics to expand an introduction to the constitutional
history of the Tudor period into an essay on the place of
parliament in the past, the present, and the future of the Eng
escape. No man or body of men deliberately planned the par

liament of England; neither did any man plan Westminster
Abbey. But it does not follow that either parliament or the
lish state. Like Professor McIlwain in his High Court of

Parliament, Mr. Pollard leans heavily upon Maitland's Intro
abbey grew.
duction to the Memoranda de Parliamento, published in the
forgets his biological metaphor, as, for example, when he ac
Rolls Series in 1893, an essay that may properly be called
counts for the disappearance of the sovereign's corporeal pres

ence from parliament not on the analogy of an atrophied organ
epoch-marking in the historical study of the medieval English

parliament. Mr. Pollard says modestly that there would have
Mr. Pollard is much more convincing when he
or the elimination of the unfit but by the fact that Edward VI

was a mino" and the next two rulers were women.
been less reason for his book had Maitland's essay not been
ignored in England for nearly a generation. An American
reviewer trusts that he will not be charged with chauvinism if
he adds that it would be equally true to say that there would

have been less reason for its publication if American books on
English constitutional history were better known in England;
for it is not going too far to assert that the most significant work
in this field during the last fifteen or twenty years has been
done by American scholars. Much in Mr. Pollard's volume that
would seem most novel to an Englishman who had learned his
constitutional history in Taswell-Langmead, or Medley, or even
in Stubbs, is to be found in the brilliant essay that Mr. McIlwain

published ten years ago.
The most philosophical of living American jurists reminds us
that a word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, but
The eigh, 2n chapters into which the book is divided are of
uneven merit from the point of view of historical scholarship.

Some of them, especially those on The Myth of the Three
Estates, The Fiction of the Peerage, and The Growth of the
House of Commons, are valuable contributions to the literature
of English parliamentary history; others add little to what was

already known; still others are avowedly not history at all. Yet
all of them are worth reading, and some will repay close study.
R. L. SCHUYLER
The Pauper Witch of Grafton

a poem by Robert Frost, will appear in The Nation in an
early issue.
The Nation
March 9, 1921]
Notable New Books
Ecclesiastes in Virginia
Figures of Earth.
By James Branch Cabell.
Robert M. Mc
Bride and Company.
Th:
are two main epic cycles of Poictesme, which deal

respectively with the deeds of Jurgen and the deeds of
Manuel.
Dom Manuel is the Achilles of Poictesme, as Jurgen
is its Ulysses. Jurgen recently emerged upon the world, ad

ventured remarkably, and got his come-uppance from the Tum
ble-Bugs, as Mr. Cabell has pointed out. Now emerges Manuel,
Count as well as Achilles of his realm, and runs his not-too
heroic race. He wanders less widely than Jurgen; his experi
ments are less varied; there is about him, on the whole, less for
the Tumble-Bugs to find fault with. He is, in short, an artist,

who desires above all things to shape certain figures out of clay
but who finds himself drawn away from his art to the world
by divers obligations, such as being the Count and the Redeemer
of Poictesme and
the husband of Niafer and
381
the lover of
Alianora and Queen Freydis of Audela and the twilight Suskind

and the father of Melicent (to mention no others).
He does
make a few figures of earth that almost satisfy him, puts life
into them, and turns them loose, but Grandfather Death comes
for Manuel when he has accomplished no more than making
himself a hero in Poictesme. Heroism, of course, as always in
Mr. Cabell's books, turns out in the end to have been vanity.
Looking back, says Manuel to Grandfather Death, . . .

I seem to see only the strivings of an ape reft of his tail, and
grown rusty at climbing, who has reeled blunderingly from
mystery to mystery, with pathetic makeshifts, greedy in all
desires, and always honeycombed with poltroonery.
Charles Bradlaugh. By J. M. Robertson.Auguste Comte.

By F. J. Gould.Thomas Henry Huxley. By Leonard
Huxley.Robert Owen. By Joseph McCabe. London:
Watts.
Four volumes in the new and admirable series called
Life-Stories of
Famous Mensome of the chief protagonists in the great struggle for

freedom of thought and inquiry. Other volumes are promised.
The Best Short Stories of 1920 and The Yearbook of the Amer
ican Short Story. Edited by Edward J. OBrien. Small,
Maynard.
The annual appearance of an anthologist with whom every critic will
disagree at some point or other, but whose bibliographical labors every one
may profit by.
From Authority to Freedom.

liams and Norgate.
By L. P. Jacks.
London: Wil
A biography of Charles Hargrove, which is worthy of a place beside

Edmund Gosse's Father and Son and The Autobiography of Mark Ruth
erford.
French Foreign Policy (1898-1914).

Century.
By Graham H. Stuart.
A scholarly history of the Entente-building period of French diplomacy,

ever a knight errant in its soul.
Radiant Motherhood.
By Marie Carmichael Stopes.
Putnam.
A sex book by an intelligent and informed physician who has not,

however, been able to avoid British sentimentality in her language. There
is at least one extraordinary expurgation in the American edition.
While Europe Waits.
By Pierrepont B. Noyes.
Macmillan.
An important little book, a large part of which appeared in The Nation

for January 19.
The curious will look long but not successfully in Figures of

Earth for the thread of allusion that made Jurgen most
alluring to certain of its readers. Here there are several kinds

of allusion. The eagle of the Apsarasas talks remarkably like
a certain President, and Manuel by similar aphorisms uttered
during his war for Poictesme nearly wins to his side the cavalry
and battering-rams of Queen Stultitia of Philistia.
Concerning
the habits and uses of the stork in that same land of Philistia
the book has some quaint and valuable discussions. Satire is

not remote from the account of the messianic hosts who go to
win Poictesme back from Asmund's tall marauders.
And it
might be hard to find better parodies than appear in the chapter

Magic of the Image-Makers, wherein are reported four unsuc
cessful versions of the Rune of the Blackbirds. In fact, Fig
ures of Earth lacks the unity and the seriousness of Jurgen;

it plays with its theme. In what else, pray, says Alianora
to Manuel, does man differ from the other animals except in
that he is used by words?
Man has only the body of
an animal to get experiences in, and the brain of an animal to

think them over with, so that the thoughts and opinions of the
Drama
A Note on Dramatic Dialogue
D'c dialogue is of two kinds. In the older
and, it
has often been thought, nobler kind the dramatist lends
the characters his own energy and beauty of speech and they
are differentiated one from another primarily by the sentiments
they utter and only secondarily, if at all, by the manner of that
utterance. Stylistically the speech of Jason and Medea, Othello

and Iago, Alceste and Philinte is one. Whether such dialogue
be written in verse or prose does not affect the method involved.
Bernard Shaw, despite an occasional use, as in certain scenes
of Major Barbara, of the raciest vernacular, shares with his
characters his own wealth of energy and eloquence and wit.
Among the Neo-romantics this stylistic unity is even more per

vasive, and in Yeats and Hofmannsthal, kings and poets, ghosts
poor dear must remain always those of a more or less intelli

gent animal. But his words are very often magic.
and clowns use the identical forms and cadences of speech.

The second kind of dramatic dialogue, which may be called
the naturalistic, makes such a selection from the actual speech
It is a strange and charming thought that the year which
of men as to produce an illusion of reality. Here the language
saw The Age of Innocence and Main Street and Miss Lulu
Bett and Moon-Calf and Poor White published should
have seen the writing of a legend which recalls Count Anthony
of the characters is adjusted to their class and occupation, their
Hamilton and Sterne and Lord Dunsany, a legend all fun and
no propaganda, with so much learning and so little argument,
actual mentality and range of expression, and individual pe

culiarities of speech are studied and suggested. The occasional
use of naturalistic dialogue is old. It is found in Horace's
account of the bore he met on the via sacra, in Swift's Genteel
The movement of the
and Ingenious Conversations, in one magnificent passage after
book is slow because it is so sly; irony lurks behind every syl

lable, peeping; the story never runs on by the mere momentum
of narrative. There are not enough stage directions to explain
dramatic medium is recent. That cultivation dates from Haupt
with so much style and so little zeal.
another of Tom Jones.
But its conscious cultivation as a
From
manns Before Dawn (1889) and the early acts of Brieux's

Blanchette (1891). It is not found in either Augier or in
Ibsen, both of whom use a kind of dialogue no less lifted into a
unity of style because that style is sober and pedestrian.
Figures of Earth it is a good many miles to naturalism. But

the joy of stumbling upon a book of this day and year that is as
cheerful as the lucubrations of the optimistic and yet shrewd
and wise and beautiful and learned enough to hold a civilized
man through all its subtleties to the end!
C. V. D.
not ask himself: Ought there to be a third kind of dialogue?

That question has no meaning in art. He must ask himself:
Can there, in the nature of things, be a third kind? If a dra
matist strives, as Mr. David Liebovitz did in John Hawthorne
the business of the fable.
To catch all the allusions one must
be learned in all the books of myth and tradition that have been
writtenand in several that have not been written.
The dramatist who feels an original creative impulse need
382
The Nation
the other day, to make very simple people speak, he can either
lend them a heightened medium for all they would say if they
could, as Arthur Symons did so beautifully in "The Harvesters,"
or he can select all that is vivid, strange, and passionate in
their own actual speech, as Hauptmann did so incomparably in
"Rose Bernd." But when he takes their vernacular, as Haupt
mann did, and tries -to use that vernacular as Symons used the
medium of "The Harvesters," he creates a confusion of styles
which at once renders impossible that suspension of disbelief
which is dramatic, no less than poetic, faith. To point out the
veracity of this detail or that is futile. He has used the true
details of speech, but he has used them in a manner that robs
them of persuasiveness as art. For art can produce nothing
closer to reality than an interpretative illusion of it. And the
artist can fail of this object with well-observed details almost
as easily as with those that have been observed ill. We are
convinced by every word that Beatrice Cenci utters; we are
equally convinced by the speech of Jones in Galsworthy's "The
Silver Box." But Jones's vernacular used in an attempt to pro
duce the timeless human intensity of Beatrice would issue in
feebleness and discord.
The average American playwright uses a semi-naturalistic
dialogue romanticized by a bad tradition drawn from both plays
and books. The people of Mr. James Forbes talk as shoedealers and insurance agents think they talk just after they
have read their favorite magazines. Mr. Eugene Walters once
had his moments of veracity. But, as a rule, the dialogue of
popular plays is an imitation of the speech that people like to
assign to themselves in their day-dreams, full of false gaiety
and spurious nobleness. The serious dramatist cannot, of
course, use this method. His choice is forced upon him. His
manner must be akin to Shelley's or to Galsworthy's. He will
hesitate to use the former for artistic as well as for practical
reasons. The stylicized drama, whether in prose or verse has,
as a matter of hard fact, not even the sympathy of our better
actors and our better audiences. The reason for this is not
pertinent here. The fact remains. Hence our American dra
matist is almost under the necessity of observing and making
a selection from the actual speech of his contemporaries.
At this crucial point another difficulty confronts him. Culti
vated Americans talk more bookishly and are more alienated
from the vernacular than the corresponding class of Europeans.
They use slang and common turns of speech with an ironic
under-tone. The reason is that our common speech is not folkspeech, but a corrupt newspaper English filled with the ephem
eral catch-words of sport and trade. An educated Irishman
can talk like an Irish peasant and still talk beautifully; an
educated American cannot talk like a clerk in a cigar-store
without a grin. We have islands of folk-speech in New Eng
land and in the South. But the sporting page of the news
papers, the Victrola record of songs sung by Nora Bayes, and
the slang of the drummer are rapidly obliterating the dialects
that savor of the earth. The best, then, that the dramatist
can do is, probably, to follow the novelists who use the corrupt
speech of the populace naturalistically but with a constant and
communicated awareness of its true character. That is what
Sinclair Lewis did so admirably in "Main Street," and what
Miss Zona Gale did equally well in "Miss Lulu Bett." That
both the speech in question and the author's awareness of its
quality can be transferred to the stage has been amply illus
trated by the first act of the dramatized version of Miss Gale's
story. If the playwright, finally, desires to deal with the mi
nority of cultivated and sophisticated Americans, he has but
to turn to modern literary English, using it with what sim
plicity and colloquial ease he can command. And here, again,
the novelists from Edith Wharton to Joseph Hergesheimer have
set him excellent examples. But whatever style he uses must
be used consistently and purely. Good dialogue, as Galsworthy
has pointed out, must be like hand-made lace. One thread of
foreign material or inharmonious color breaks the web and
destroys the illusion.
Ludwig Lewisohn
[Vol. 112, No. 2905
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International
Relations
The Paris Allied Decisions

THE Allied Conference which met at Paris, January 24
to 29, 1921, reached decisions of the utmost importance
to all Europe. These decisions, in so far as they concerned
Franco-German relations, were transmitted to the German
Government in three parts, a covering letter, a note detailing
the reparations agreement, and a document specifying the
conditions under which Germany should complete the process
of disarmament. These three notes are here given as trans
lated from Le Temps (Paris) for February 1, 1921. Al
though cast in categorical form, they will probably be some
what revised at the present London conference.
The Covering Letter
Mr. President: The Conference of the Allies met at Paris,
January 24 to 29, 1921, and made the following decisions:
1. As regards disarmament of Germany, the Allies ap
proved the conclusions formulated in the note attached hereto;
2. As regards reparations, the Allies unanimously approved
the propositions formulated in the document which is also at
tached hereto.
In permitting further extensions of time for disarmament,
the Allies have in the past and do now take account of the diffi
culties experienced by the German Government in carrying out
the obligations resulting from the treaty. They firmly hope that
the German Government will not compel the Allies, who confirm
their previous decisions, to envisage the serious situation which
would arise should Germany continue to fall short of her obli
gations.
Authorized delegates of the German Government will be in
vited to meet with the delegates of the Allied Governments at
London at the end of February.
A. Briand
Paris, January 29, 1921
The Reparations Agreement
Article 1. To satisfy the obligations laid upon her by Arti
cles 231 and 232 of the Treaty of Versailles, Germany must pay,
apart from the restitutions prescribed in Article 238 and all
the other obligations of the treaty:
1. Fixed annuities, payable half at the end of each six
months period, as follows:
(a) Two annuities of 2 billion gold marks, from May 1,
1921, to May 1, 1923;
(b) Three annuities of 3 billion gold marks, from May 1,
1923, to May 1, 1926;
(c) Three annuities of 4 billion gold marks, from May 1,
1926, to May 1, 1929;
(d) Three annuities of 5 billion gold marks, from May 1,
1929, to May 1, 1932;
(e) Thirty-one annuities of 6 billion gold marks, from May
1, 1932, to May 1, 1963;
2. Forty-two annuities, beginning May 1, 1921, equal to 12
per cent ad valorem of Germany's exports, payable in gold two
months after the expiration of each six months' period.
In order to assure full execution of paragraph 2 above, Ger
many will give the Reparation Commission every facility for
verifying the sum of German exports and for the necessary
supervision.
Art. 2. The German Government will immediately deliver to
the Reparation Commission bearer bonds payable on the dates
prescribed in Article 1, the amount of which shall be equal to
each of the six months' payments prescribed in the aforesaid
paragraph.
The Reparation Commission will be instructed to facilitate
the realization by the Powers which so request of the share
Section
due them according to agreements made among the Powers.

Art. 3. Germany may at any time make advance payments
upon the fixed portion of her debt. Such advance payments will
be applied to the reduction of the fixed annuities prescribed in
Article 1, paragraph 1; these annuities will be discounted at 8
per cent to May 1, 1923; at 6 per cent from May 1, 1923, to
May 1, 1925 ; at 5 per cent after May 1, 1925.
Art. 4. Germany will not undertake any credit opera
tion outside her own territory, either directly or indirectly,
without the approval of the Reparation Commission. This
applies to the governments of the German Reich, of the Ger
man states, to the German provincial or municipal authorities,
as well as to companies or enterprises controlled by the afore
said governments and authorities.
Art. 5. In pursuance of Article 248 of the Treaty of
Versailles all the assets and revenues of the German Empire
and of the German states shall be applicable to guarantee com
plete execution by Germany of the provisions of the present
arrangement. The proceeds of the German customs, land and
sea, including the proceeds of all import and export, and acces
sory, taxes, constitute a special security for the execution of
this agreement. No change which might diminish the proceeds
of the customs shall be made in the German customs legislation
and regulations without the approval of the Reparation Com
mission. All German customs receipts shall be deposited to
the credit of the German Government by a receiver-general of
the German customs, who shall be named by the German Gov
ernment with the approval of the Reparation Commission.
Should Germany default in any of the payments prescribed
in this arrangement:
1. All or part of the proceeds of the German customs in the
hands of the receiver-general of German customs may be seized
by the Reparation Commission and applied by it to the execu
tion of the obligations which Germany has failed to fulfil. In
such a case, if it deem it necessary, the Reparation Commission
may itself assume the administration and collection of the cus
toms receipts;
2. The Reparation Commission may also formally invite the
German Government to make such increases in its tariff schedule
or to take such other measures to increase its resources as the
Commission may deem indispensable;
3. If this formal invitation is without effect, the Commission
may declare the German Government in a state of bankruptcy
and may report this situation to the Allied and Associated
Powers, which will then take such measures as they may deem
justified.
Henri Jaspab (Belgium)
D. Lloyd George (Great Britain)
Aristide Briand (France)
C. Sporza (Italy)
K. Ishii (Japan)
Paris, January 29, 1921
The Note Concerning Disarmament
Military Clauses
1. The Reichswehr (army of 100,000 men), (a) Legislation:
The most recent draft military law presented by the German
Government has not yet been voted. Moreover it makes im
portant omissions, particularly in connection with the abolition
of compulsory military service, which is prescribed for the
Empire, but not for each of the German states. Furthermore
complementary troops and other undefined military organiza
tions are suggested.
(b) Organization. The effectives of certain services and a
large number of military employees are not included in the
army of 100,000 men. The number of officers and of military
employees attached to the central administration (the Ministry
of National Defense and subsidiary organizations) is far above
the number authorized by the treaty (916 instead of 300).
384
The Nation
2. Delivery and Destruction of War Material. Despite the

considerable quantity of this material already delivered and
destroyed, the disarmament of Germany is still far from being
completed. In particular: There is a considerable surplus due
to the fact that the reduction of the army to 100,000 men has
not been accompanied by the delivery of the corresponding ma
terial; a large amount of material has accumulated in the troop
headquarters, depots, and arsenals; the German Government
presumes to retain as replacement or practice material far
larger quantities than those prescribed in the treaty. Finally,
many arms are still in the hands of the civilian population.
On the other hand, the German Government, in its note of
December 24, refused to execute the decision of November 8 of
the Conference of Ambassadors, and has deferred delivery of
the artillery material of Kustrin and of Lotzen-Boyen, and the
delivery of the heavy artillery of KSnigsberg in excess of that
permitted by the Interallied Commission of Control;
The German Government, in its note of January 5, asked to
retain for its land fortifications a considerable quantity of
material not provided for in the treaty, including in particular
2,600 machine-guns (besides those authorized for the army of
100,000 men) ;
The German Government has refused to execute the decision
of December 27 of the Council of Ambassadors and has appealed
from this decision to the Allied Governments. It has thus post
poned delivery of unauthorized material for the maritime forti
fications; it presumes to retain 1,086 cannon instead of the 420
authorized by the Interallied Military Commission of Control;
Furthermore, the suppression of the military establishments
and factories provided for in Article 168 of the treaty, and the
destruction of the war machinery provided for in Article 169
have not been carried out in the conditions prescribed;
3. Home Defense Organizations. Disarmament of the home
defense organizations has only been begun. The dissolution of
these organizations has not been achieved. The German Gov
ernment in its notes of December 9 and 22 claims to have the
right to retain these organizations and to postpone their dis
armament in Bavaria and East Prussia to a date not yet fixed,
which it will set.
4. Security Police. Most of the unauthorized arms of the
Security Police have been delivered. But the Security Police
(Sicherheitspolizei) has simply been transformed, with its old
composition and organization, into the Protective Police
{Schutzpolizei) . Hence the dissolution prescribed at Boulogne
has not been achieved.
Decisions of the Allied Governments.1. The Reichswehr
(army of 100,000 men).The German Government is formally
invited :
(a) To hasten the vote of the military law, at present before
the Reichstag, after making the modifications necessary to
bring it into harmony with the peace treaty, especially as con
cerns compulsory service, which should be suppressed in each
of the states as well as in the Empire. These steps should be
taken prior to March 15, 1921 ;
(b) To bring the details of the organization of the Reichs
wehr (army of 100,000 men) into harmony with the text of
the treaty, especially to suppress the surplus of officers and
employees of the central administration. These steps should
be taken prior to April 1, 1921;
2. War Materials. (a) As regards war material in general
the German Government is formally invited to hasten delivery
of the balance of this material, particularly, (1) of the material
due to the reduction of the German army to 100,000 men; (2) of
the material accumulated in the troop headquarters, in the
depots, and in the arsenals which the German Government asks
to keep as replacement and practice material; (3) of the arms
remaining in the hands of the civil population;
(b) As regards cannon for fortifications, the German Gov
ernment is informed in reply to its note of December 24 that
r.o armament is to be retained for Kustrin and for LotzenBoyen, and that the fort of Konigsberg must have no more than
[Vol. 112, No. 2905
the armament authorized by the Interallied Military Commis

sion of Control, to wit, 22 heavy pieces;
(c) As regards armament other than cannon for the land
forts, no armament other than that accorded by the test of the
treaty (Article 167) can be permitted;
(d) As regards armament of the sea forts, the Allied Gov
ernments maintain the decision of December 27 of the Council
of Ambassadors, maintaining the decision of the Interallied
Military Commission of Control, to wit, 420 pieces instead of
the 1,086 asked by the German Government.
The steps enumerated in paragraphs (a), (b), (c), and (d),
above, must be taken prior to February 28, 1921 ;
(e) As regards factories, tTie German Government is for
mally invited: (1) To recognize the classification of factories
authorized to manufacture war material in future, as drawn up
by the Interallied Military and Naval Commissions of Control;
(2) immediately to effect the necessary transformation or de
struction of war machinery in accordance with Articles 168
and 169 of the treaty.
3. Home Defense Organizations.The Allied Governments,
in reply to the German notes of December 9 and 22, maintain
the principle of disarmament and dissolution of these organiza
tions, as fixed by the protocol of Spa and the Boulogne note,
in execution of Articles 177 and 178 of the treaty; they agree
to the following delay made necessary by the de facto situation :
The legislative texts prescribing dissolution of all the home
defense organizations, and prohibiting their re-formation under
penalty of punishment, should be published prior to March 15,
1921. The dissolution of all these organizations will be carried
out as rapidly as possible, and should be complete by June 30 at
latest. The arms belonging to these organizations will be de
livered as follows: (a) all of the heavy arms, and two-thirds of
the portable arms, will be delivered on March 31, 1921 ; (b) the
rest of the arms and munitions shall be delivered on June 30,
1921.
4. The Security Police.The Allied Governments, in reply
to the note of January 3 of the German Government, confirm
the decisions of the Boulogne note of June 22, which declared
that the police should preserve its character as a local organ
ization, have in no manner or degree a centralized organization,
and should not possess more equipment in arms than that fixed
by the Interallied Military Commission of Control. They fur
thermore recall to the German Government that the total of
the police forces should never exceed 150,000 men.
Naval Clauses
1. Because of the failure of the German Government to exe
cute the Spa protocol of July 9, 1920, as regards paragraph 5,
(b) delivery of the documents asked, (c) cessation of obstruc
tion, and (d) delivery of war material; and also because viola
tions of Articles 188 and 191 concerning the total destruction
of submarines and their new construction have occurred, the
German Government is formally invited: (1) To complete the
delivery of all the documents asked by February 28, 1921;
(2) to complete disarmament of all the reserve ships by April
30, 1921; (3) to complete the destruction of all warships under
construction, excepting only those transformation of which has
been authorized, by July 31, 1921; and immediately to destroy
completely every submarine or part of submarine; (4) to com
plete without further delay the delivery and destruction of all
the surplus war material referred to in Article 192; (5) to de
liver to the Allies unconditionally the entire fleet of light cruis
ers and destroyers asked by the Council of Ambassadors in its
note of September 20, 1920, in accordance with its decisions.
Such material as does not fall within Article 192 of the treaty
will be credited to the reparations account.
2. The German Government is also informed that the Inter
allied Naval Council of Control will continue to define what is
war material, as the Council of Ambassadors decided on Sep
tember 3, 1920. This material should be delivered without
further delay, in accordance with Article 192, to be destroyed
March 9, 1921]
The Nation
or rendered useless in the eyes of the Commission, for military

purposes, or otherwise disposed of to the satisfaction of the
Commission that it will not be utilized for such purposes.
3. The laws promulgated by the German Government in
execution of the naval clauses of the treaty are in some cases
inadequate. The German Government is formally invited to
remedy this.
Am Clauses
Violations. 1. Germany has not delivered all the airplanes,
seaplanes, motors, dirigibles, hangars, dirigible accessories,
wireless and photographic equipment, hydrogen factories and
reservoirs, machine-guns and qther aeronautical equipment
(Article 202). There remain to be delivered according to some
calculations, for instance, 1,400 airplanes and 5,000 motors.
2. Germany has since July 10, 1920, resumed aeronautical
manufacture, despite the decision of the Allied Governments
at Boulogne, on June 22, and it has attempted to export such
manufactured material despite the formal orders of the Con
trol Commission (Article 201).
3. Germany has refused to furnish the compensation de
manded by the Allies for the seven Zeppelins destroyed in 1919
(Article 202).
4. Germany has not paid the sum of 25,000,000 marks still
due as compensation for the material improperly exported
(Article 202).
5. Germany claims the right to use aircraft in its police
organizations (Article 198).
Decisions of the Allied Governments. 1. The German Gov
ernment will facilitate the search for hidden material, and all
the deliveries called for by Article 202 will be completed before
May 15, 1921.
2. Germany must assure execution of the Boulogne decision,
to wit, not to resume manufacture and importation of aeronau
tical material until three months after the date on which the
Interallied Aeronautical Commission of Control shall have de
clared Article 202 completely executed.
3. Germany must pay the compensation demanded for the
destruction of the Zeppelins, the details of which will be fixed
in a separate agreement.
4. Germany must pay the 25,000,000 marks hereinbefore
indicated prior to March 31.
5. Germany must comply with the decision of the Council
of Ambassadors of November 8, 1920 (C. A. 91, III), regard
ing prohibition of the use of aircraft in police organizations.
Furthermore, to assure application of Article 198 of the
treaty, which forbids it to possess any military or civil aircraft,
Germany must accept such definitions as may be made by the
Allied Powers in order to distinguish civil aircraft from the
military aircraft prohibited by Article 198. The Allied Gov
ernments will assure themselves by constant supervision that
Germany fulfils this obligation.
The Allies have at various times taken account of the diffi
culties experienced by the German Government in fulfilling the
obligations resulting from the treaty. In the present note,
they grant further postponements. They firmly hope that the
German Government will not compel the Allied Powers, who
confirm their previous decisions, to envisage the serious situa
tions which would arise should Germany continue to fall short
of her obligations.
The Disarmament Notes

THE decisions of the Paris Conference regarding dis
armament came as the climax of a long series of notes
exchanged first between the German Foreign Minister and
the head of the Interallied Military Commission of Control
in Berlin, and later between the French and German Gov
ernments.
These notes, published in L'Europe Nouvelle
(.Paris) for January 9 and 16, 1921, are here summarized.
385
The Paris Conference note is in large part a reply to the

German note of January 2.
November 29. General Nollet of the Interallied Military
Commission of Control at Berlin wrote to the German Foreign
Minister, Herr Simons, asking what steps the German Govern
ment had taken or intended taking to hasten disarmament and
dissolution of the home defense organizations.
December 9. Herr Simons replied that the German Govern
ment was not juridically obligated to dissolve the home defense
organizations, which were purely local, non-military, police
organizations. These organizations were, however, temporary
in nature, and had arisen in response to an emergency and
would disappear when the national state was better able to
preserve order everywhere. Germany had, however, agreed at
Spa to dissolve the Einwohnerwehr, and this process would be
complete by February except in Bavaria and in East Prussia.
In Bavaria because of the persistent fear of another Communist
uprising, and in East Prussia because of the unsettled condi
tions to the East, the Einwohnerwehr could not yet be dissolved.
December 11. General Nollet replied to the effect that
the Commission could not accept Herr Simons's arguments or
conclusions. The Commission believed the home defense organ
izations to be in fact "organizations which might facilitate
mobilization"; they should be dissolved. Conditions in Bavaria
and in East Prussia did not, in the eyes of the Commission,
warrant retaining the Einwohnerwehr, and the admission of a
special regime for those regions would set a dangerous prece
dent for others. Furthermore, the number of arms delivered to
the Commission was far from adequate. The Commission again
asked details as to further plans.
December 22. Herr Simons replied, contending that while
Article 178 of the treaty forbade "all measures appertaining to
mobilization," it did not forbid those which might facilitate
mobilization; under such a construction, railroads, tax lists,
etc., might be ruled out. He disputed or explained the data
which the Commission had contended showed the home defense
organizations to be military in nature. He gave a list of the
arms surrendered, and asked that the correspondence be sub
mitted to the Allies.
December 23. General Nollet replied, stating that the Com
mission had not observed complete or partial suppression of the
security police in any part of the realm; that the Ordnungspolizei was in large part the old security police; that the Com
mission "noted the violation of the stipulations of the peace
treaty and of the Boulogne note" and asked that the security
police be immediately and entirely dissolved, and the number
of the police be reduced to the level permitted by the treaty,
and that a list of all police officials be given the Commission.
December 25. Herr Simons replied, protesting against the
statement that Germany had violated the treaty, reserving a
full reply for a later date, and stating that the German Gov
ernment had been unable to obtain a statement of what was
required of it by the Boulogne note until October.
December 26. The Council of Ambassadors met at Paris,
read the correspondence between General Nollet and Herr
Simons, decided to refer the matter to the Allied Governments.
December 31. The French Government addressed the Ger
man Government, stating that the German Government has
agreed at Spa on July 9, 1920, in order to execute the Treaty
of Versailles, to (1) disarm immediately the security police and
the Einwohnerwehr; (2) deliver immediately all arms in the
hands of the civilian population; (3) take immediately the
steps necessary for the abolition of compulsory military service
and to organize the army on a basis of long-term service; (4)
deliver to the Allies for destruction, and to aid in the destruc
tion of, all arms and military material above the quantity
authorized by the treaty. In return the Allied Governments
had granted an extension of time to January 1, 1921, for the
reduction of the army to 100,000 men. But at the expiration
of that time limit, the French Government was compelled to
386
The Nation
note: (1) Fewer arms had been delivered than had been sur
rendered by civilians to the German authorities; (2) Germany
had not yet stated when the arms of the Einwohnerwehr would
be delivered; (3) disarmament of the security police had not
been completed; (4) the security police had not been dissolved,
despite the Allied note of June 22 extending the time limit to
September 22; (5) the Einwohnerwehr still existed in Bavaria
and in East Prussia, in violation of Article 177 of the treaty;
(6) the German legislation regarding military service was not
fully in accordance with the treaty; (7) the surplus war ma
terial had not been delivered, and Germany even asked to retain
some of it without authorization in the treaty; (8) although
the Germans claimed to have reduced the army to 100,000 men,
unauthorized liquidating organizations still existed, and there
was systematic obstruction of the execution of the air clauses.
The French Government noted "these violations of engage
ments solemnly contracted by Germany, violations which the
Allied Governments would have to consider."
January 1, 1921. Herr Simons replied at length to General
Nollet's note of December 23. He declared that the text of the
regulations for reorganization of the Prussian police had been
discussed with representatives of the Commission and modified
in accordance with suggestions made; and that these regula
tions had served as a model for the other states. Reorganiza
tion had proceeded on this plan after it had been approved in
consultation with the Commission. The old security police
had been a centralized organization, the troops living in bar
racks, equipped with cannon, mine and fire-throwers. Almost
all heavy arms but the authorized machine-guns had been sur
rendered; the higher officers had been discharged, there being
no use for them in the new local police; naturally many indi
viduals formerly in the security police were taken into the new
organization, and some of them still wore the old uniform for
reasons of economy. The number of police had not been in
creased contrary to the treaty; civilian judicial and adminis
trative police officials were not to be included in the maximum
figure permitted.
January 2, 1921. The German Government replied to the
note of December 31 of the French Government. (1) It had
destroyed 413 mine-, flame-, or grenade-throwers, 2,597 ma
chine-guns, 761,674 rifles or pistols, -362,669 parts of rifles or
machine-guns; and arms voluntarily surrendered to the num
ber of 376 mine-, flame-, or grenade-throwers, 6,536 machineguns, 612,056 rifles and pistols, 179,495 parts of rifles and ma
chine-guns had been, with very few exceptions, delivered to the
offices of the Reichetreuhandelsge8ell8chaft, which delivers this
material to the blast furnaces charged with its destruction. All
these arms had, however, been rendered useless when they were
surrendered. There remained only some 500 guns which would
shortly be delivered. (2) The home defense organizations had
delivered most of the arms which they had declared, and the
delivery would be complete by the end of January. The Ger
man Government had not formally refused to dissolve the
guards in Bavaria and East Prussia; it had expressly declared
that it did not think of escaping that obligation; but because
of the peculiar political situation it was for the time being im
possible to disarm there as rapidly as in the rest of Germany.
(3 and 4) The security police no longer existed. The German
Government referred to its note of January 2 to General Nollet. The arms of the police force, except for a few machineguns, had been reduced to the total set by the Commission. (5)
The German Government had already stated that it did not con
sider local continuation of the Einwohnerwehr a violation of the
treaty; it was a temporary expedient which it was the interest
of the state to dissolve as soon as possible. (6) By the law of
August 21, 1920, the German Government had fulfilled its Spa
agreement to suppress compulsory military service at once.
(7) The Government must contest the charge that it had
not delivered all the surplus material of the old army. It had
delivered 50,000 cannons, more than 5,000,000 rifles, 60,000 ma
chine-guns, and 20,000 mine-throwers. The Commission had
[Vol. 112, No. 2905
often exceeded the requirements of the treaty; it had admitted

this on occasion in withdrawing its claims. It sought to limit
the engineering and other equipment of the Reichswehr as much
as possible; the German Government was obliged to retain
material, partly because of the small number of factories, also
because it would soon be obliged to repurchase at a higher
price. It proposed to submit these questions to special com
missions of experts subject to the Interallied Commission. It
had discussed in detail in its note of December 24 to the Council
of Ambassadors the question of artillery for the forts of
Konigsberg and Kiistrin. (8) The liquidating bureaus were
civilian bureaus and would be closed by April 1, 1921. The
Government was not obstructing the execution of the air
clauses; it had been faced with a series of demands which in its
opinion were incompatible with the provisions of the treaty.
Only a very small quantity of aeronautical material remained
to be delivered. The Government was doing all it could to dis
cover material which might be hidden. "The German Gov
ernment recalls that according to the declarations of the Allied
Governments themselves, the question was whether the Govern
ment was loyally endeavoring to keep its promises. It can
say of itself that it has in all loyalty done all that it could."
The Experts' Report on Reparations

A PRELIMINARY conference of technical experts of
the various nations concerned in the reparations ques
tion met at Brussels from December 15 to Christmas, and
in the early days of January. It presented to the Supreme
Interallied Council which met at Paris later in January the
following study of the question of reparations, accompanied
with extensive and detailed annexes. The general report as
here given is translated from L'Europe Nouvelle (Paris) for
January 30, 1921. It will be noted that the annual payment
of 3 billion gold marks here suggested for the first five
years, was reduced by the Allied Premiers to 2 billion for
the first two years, but that the other suggestions were for
the most part adopted.
I. Observations.
1. It is impossible at the present time to give a definitive
opinion upon the general situation of Central Europe, upon the
danger of bankruptcy caused by an unprecedented fiduciary in
flation, and upon the intrinsic real value of wealth which is
today represented only by a mass of paper money. German
exports benefit by the fact that wages and the costs of raw
materials in Germany have not increased in proportion to"the de
preciation of the mark abroad. It is difficult to calculate how long
this situation will continue. In a general fashion it should be
recognized that the economic situation of Germany is much
better than its financial situation. A cleaning-up of its financial
situation will permit Germany's economic potentialities to de
velop, and it may be expected that Germany will experience con
siderable prosperity as soon as its financial and monetary diffi
culties have been resolved; but it is almost impossible to say
when that will be.
However that may be there is a major interest in making
known to Germany immediately the total of her charges for the
years of the immediate future, so that she may be able not only
to arrange to meet them but to begin at once to carry out her
obligations. It is therefore necessary to fix the means of pay
ment for these first years even if the methods of later payment
be not determined until the situation becomes clearer. Imme
diate indication to Germany of her obligations for these first
years need not mean waiting until the end of the period before
making known to Germany the sum total of its debt. The occa
sion for such a determination is beyond the task of the Brussels
experts. They believe it their duty, however, to call the atten
tion of the Allied Governments to the desirability, whatever
March 9, 1921]
The Nation
their decision regarding the determination of the total debt may

be, of denning at once Germany's obligations for the years of
the immediate future in order to facilitate the work of
reparation.
^ Aj.
2. The number of years foMrhich the obligations are defined
should be sufficient to permiSEermany to. balance her budget
and to remedy her monetary instability. A"^mre thorough study
would determine the number; it seems to be five (1921 to 1926).
It would be a mistake to attempt to balance the German budget
by loans; it should be done by increasing her revenue and de
creasing her expenditures. Germany could thus: (a) Cease
to issue paper money; (b) resort to loans only to obtain indis
pensable raw materials and defer payment until they have been
transformed by German factories, or to consolidate the floating
debt, or to pay a portion of her reparation debt in advance.
The present financial chaos of Germany is chiefly due to the
fact that the German Empire has constantly resorted to the
floating debt and to issue of paper money when it was its duty
to ask a greater fiscal effort from the country.
As regards the ordinary budget the direct taxes are high
enough and may be too high when the present fiscal system
comes into full effect; the indirect taxes, however, are inade
quate, especially the taxes on alcoholic drinks and perhaps the
customs duties. It may further be observed that the fiscal sys
tem provided in the new budget has not yet yielded the expected
return; and the effect which the heavy taxes on capital, moat
of which liave not yet been collected, may have upon the future
development of Germany should not be neglected. There is room
for reduction of some of the expenditures inscribed in the ordi
nary budget although an important reduction in the total ex
penditures cannot be hoped for; thus personnel may be reduced,
but it is to be feared that such economy will be compensated by
pensions and by the extra expenses necessary to balance wages
with the cost of living. The plans for the extraordinary ex
penses have been generously made without sufficient relation to
the facts; they are certainly too high.
II. Suggestions
1. Germany shall pay three billion gold marks per year for
the five-year period suggested above. The later annuities shall
be higher, but for the time being shall remain undetermined.
Details of application for this period shall be studied and settled
at Brussels. The principle of this plan is submitted for the
approval of the Allied Governments.
2. These annuities might be delivered in kind or paid in
cash, including such payments as would be made as a per
centage upon the sales abroad of certain large German organ
izations. The Allied Governments might approve the principle
of a minimum of payments in kind. Suppression of the ad
vances made by the Allies in return for deliveries of coal.
Determination by the Reparation Commission of precise rules
for evaluation of the deliveries in kind specified by the treaty,
the price of other deliveries being determined by special agree
ments to be made.
3. Pledges and guaranties. (1) The annuity constitutes a
first charge on all the German revenues, as defined in Article
248 of the Treaty of Versailles. However, so long as the annuity
is paid, no administrative intervention in German public finances
can follow. (2) Germany agrees to establish special taxes if
the normal revenues are inadequate. Customs, indirect taxes
(on alcohol, coal, etc.) in particular may be suggested. (3) If,
and only if, Germany fails to carry out the obligations noted in
(1) and (2) above, the Allies have the right to seize the
customs-houses. They may also ask Germany to cut certain
classes of expenditures out of her budget, especially, as para
graph 12 of annex II of part VIII of the Treaty of Versailles
recognizes, to postpone interest upon and amortization of the
internal debt.
4. Upper Silesia. Interallied supervision of the distribution
of coal will be established after the plebiscite, in order to
insure a just division of the coal.
387
5. Possible Alleviations in the Methods of Application of the

Treaty. No concession can be made upon the following points:
(1) Limitation of the early reparations payments to payments
in kind, postponing payments in cash to later annuities; (2)
reduction of coal deliveries to a lower level than that fixed at
Spa; (3) continuation of Allied advances made in return for
coal deliveries; (4) denial of the suggestion of Herr von Stauss
at Brussels that such German properties sequestered in the
Allied countries, as have not been liquidated be restored to their
former owners; and of the plan of Herr Melchior to deposit in
neutral countries as collateral for German loans securities be
longing to German nations now in the hands of the Allied
Governments; (5) suppression of the Upper Silesian plebiscite.
On the other hand it seems that certain alleviations might
be granted Germany, both in the interest of justice and to
facilitate a general agreement. The Supreme Council is asked
to indicate its attitude upon the principles of the suggestions
here presented, the details to be worked out by the Conference
of Brussels.
(1) Armies of Occupation. Limitation of the sum repayable
to the Allied Governments for cost of the armies of occupation
to 240 million gold marks per year, as suggested in the note of
the Prime Ministers of June 16, 1919. This limitation would
be far less important for Germany if the cost of the armies of
occupation were included in the total of the annuity. The
interallied technical delegates are to meet immediately to settle
all questions relative to the cost of the armies of occupation;
they will establish contacts with the various Allied war minis
tries and obtain from them all pertinent information; they are
to submit to the Supreme Council prior to April 1, 1921, a report
giving the sums thus far expended by the various armies of
occupation, and containing politic suggestions on the one hand
for economies to be realized by the Allied armies as well as by
the German Government, and on the other hand for equitable
rules for distribution among the Allies;
(2) Simplification of the various reparations accounts, and
of the other financial obligations charged against Germany by
the treaty. This simplification is as desirable for the Allies as
for Germany; a clear summary of the situation should be
drawn up, showing all the payments which the treaty obligates
Germany to make which compete with the reparations payments.
In the interest of reparation, reductions or special methods of
payment should be suggested. As regards Germany, she should
be informed of her obligations, and the present system of sud
den and unexpected demands for payment, which is very harm
ful to the German coal supply, should be renounced.
(3) Economic Relations. A general declaration should be
made to Germany that the Allies do not intend to utilize the
provisions of the Treaty of Versailles to oppose the legitimate
development of German commerce.
(4) Ships, (a) Abandonment of the clauses of the treaty
which require Germany to construct new tonnage for delivery
to the Allies, (b) Possibility of leaving to Germany for (blank)
years a part of the tonnage now in existence which she has not
yet delivered; (c) Restitution to Germany for (blank) years
of (blank) tons which she has already delivered, exclusively in
freighters, no passenger ships, Germany in return to withdraw
her veto upon emigration permits by Allied lines and to guar
antee fair treatment to Allied shipping lines.
(5) Debt to the Allied Compensation Offices. The balances
owed by Germany to be paid by her in monthly payments for
two years, the amount to be fixed by agreement among the
Allies.
(6) Reprisals under paragraph 18 of annex II of part VIII
of the Treaty of Versailles. It is probable that the Allies
intend to follow Great Britain in renouncing the right of
reprisal against certain classes of private property belonging to
Germans. This renunciation might be extended to all forms
of private property.
(7) German property sequestered in the Allied countries.
Small properties to be exempted.
388
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2905
An Allied Holding Company for Austria

THE question of aid for Austria came up at the January
25 session of the Paris Conference. M. Seydoux, as
sistant commercial director of the French Foreign Min
istry, proposed an interallied loan of $250,000,000 to Aus
tria, but this was opposed by Mr. Lloyd George, Count
Sforza, and others, chiefly on the ground that no funds
were available. The matter was referred to a sub-committee
consisting of M. Loucheur, Sir Robert Horne, and M. Giannini. This sub-committee presented, at the session of Jan
uary 29, the proposals given below, commonly known as
the "Loucheur Plan." The text is translated from L'Europe
Nouvelle (Paris) for February 5. This plan was approved
by the Conference, which also decided that the Allied Gov
ernments should renounce their debits against Austria.
Adopting the principle of no direct intervention of the states
in a program for restoring Austria, the following plan is sug
gested and recommended:
Nothing whatever can be accomplished unless Austrian
finances are reorganized. In the present situation a complete
supervision of her public finances is necessary; Austria will
accept it, and even demands it. An international commission
should be formed, composed of representatives of the interested
states, and assume a double mission:
1. To control the state budget and to clean up public
finances. The first task should be to realize a program of ad
ministrative reforms and economies. It should in particular
reduce the number of public officials, and cut out waste and
abuses. Upon the commission would fall the task of supervising
the issue of paper money, which should occur only with its
authorization and within fixed limits;
2. To administer, or have administered by an Industrial,
Commercial, and Banking Company under its supervision, the
public revenues devoted to the guaranty of foreign credits un
dertaken by the state. This commission might function like the
International Debt Commission of Greece. The functions of the
company in administering the revenues would be analogous to
that of the company administering the Greek monopolies.
The Industrial, Commercial, and Banking Company might be
formed with a capital of 200 million francs. The capital might
be distributed as follows: 30 millions subscribed by British in
terests; 30 millions by French interests; 30 millions by Italian
interests; 30 millions by American interests; 80 millions divided
among the neutral and successor states. If Austrian interests
should desire to share, 50 millions might be reserved for them,
thus bringing the total capital of the company to 250 millions.
The company would establish credits for Austrian industries,
or have them established, to permit them to import at once the
raw materials necessary for the resumption of economic life.
It would supervise the rational use of these raw materials and
their manufacture into exportable commodities. It would aid
Austrian agriculture, supplying the necessary fertilizer and
agricultural material. It would assure the importation of food
stuffs necessary for the life of Austria, after approval by the
International Commission. The company might be charged by
the Commission with industrial reorganization of the railroads.
And with the monetary reorganization of Austria.
The company could be formed in February 1921. The financial
groups of each of the countries could be invited to meet at
Paris before February 10, 1921. On the other hand, it is in
dispensable that a decision be made in time to make the first
advance to Austria ($30,000,000) at the beginning of March.
As the company would not have had time to study the question
adequately, it would seem that each of the financial groups
should, for this first advance, obtain from its Government the
necessary guaranty, but the company should obtain the neces
sary guaranties from Austria.
Li':< V:r '
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That is, insured
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41 BARCLAY STREET
The Nation
FOUNDED 1865
Vol. CXII
No. 2906
"
Contents
889
EDITORIALS :
The Allies' "Reckless Adventure"
8"
Maintaining Law and Order in Albany
393
A Call for "the Public"
394
The Uses of the American Academy
394
Medicine Hat
396
THE CONDITION OF SOVIET INDUSTRIALISM. By Lincoln Colcord 396
CARDINAL BOURNE AND IRELAND. By P. D. Murphy
398
ON THE ROAD. By Haniel Long
399
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVELISTSIII. Theodore Dreiser.
By Carl Van Doren
400
WOMEN AND THE LAW. By Sue S. White
402
WHY THE SHERMAN ANTI-TRUST LAW HAS FAILED. By Gilson Gardner
403
406
CORRESPONDENCE
405
BLIND GENTIANS. By Abbie Huston Evans
406
BOOKS :
FeminismGood, Bad. and Indifferent. By Katharine Anthony
406
Those Victorians. By Norman Foerster
407
War and Strikes. By George Soule
408
Another Henry Adams. By Mark Van Doren
409
American Chronicles. By L. L
409
Books in Brief
410
DRAMA:
The Experimental Stages. By Ludwig Lewisohn
410
Lenin on the State of Russia
412
The Development of Soviet Power
415
Russian Industry
415
Rail and Water Transportation in Russia
417
Associate Editors
LEWIS S. GANNETT
FREDA KIRCHWEY
ARTHUR WARNER
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
ERNEST H. GRUENING
CARL VAN DOREN
Manaqino Editor
Literary Editor
Mexico; to Canada, $5.50, and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, J6.00.
York. Chicago Office : 1 170 People's Gas Building. British Agent for Subscriptions
PEARLS from the President, dated March 4:
I must utter my belief in the Divine inspiration of the
founding fathers.
Since freedom impelled and independence inspired and na
tionality exalted, a world super-government is contrary to
everything we cherish and can have no sanction by our Republic.
This is not selfishness, it is sanctity.
Perhaps we shall never know the old levels of wage again,
because war inevitably readjusts compensations and the neces
saries of life will show their inseparable relationship, but we
must strive for normalcy to reach stability.
No one may justly deny the equality of opportunity which
made us what we are. We have mistaken unpreparedness to
embrace it to be a challenge of the reality, and due concern for
making all citizens fit for participation will give added strength
of citizenship and magnify our achievement.
There is a luring fallacy in the theory of banished barriers of
trade, but preserved American standards require our higher
production costs to be reflected in our tariffs on imports.
Believing in our higher standards, reared through constitu
tional liberty and maintained opportunity, we invite mankind
to the same heights.
Service is the supreme commitment of life. I would rejoice
to acclaim the era of the golden rule, and crown it with the
autocracy of service.
Reconstruction, readjustment, restorationall these must
follow. / would like to have them.
When revolution threatens we unfurl the flag of law and
order and renew our consecration. . . . Our revisions,
reformations, and evolutions reflect a deliberate judgment.
ORWARD, marchstraight to the rear!" This is the

X
inaugural command of our new Commander-in-Chief,
President Harding. We are not even to be allowed to stand
still, but are to advance backwards just as rapidly as pos
sibleto normalcy by way of stability. Normalcy, of course,
means the good old world of 1890 or 1900. Quite naturally,
the Republican Senators thrilled over this inaugural. Sena
tor Watson of Indiana finds it "magnificent" ; Senator Lodge,
"admirable"; Senator New, "wonderful"; Senator Kellogg,
"remarkable"; Senator Nelson, "fine"; Senator Cummins,
"admirable and sound"; Senator Phipps, "clever and inter
esting"; Senator Jones, "clear and splendid"; Senator
Ashurst, "manly and eloquent"; Senator Brandegee, "ad
mirable in every way" ; while a Democrat, Pomerene of Ohio,
declared it to be "splendid," and affirms that he himself is
thrilled "by the fine patriotic spirit that it breathes." Our
metropolitan press, too, long accustomed to meaningless
words, treats the inaugural with greatest respecteven the
World doubting politelyeach one interpreting Mr. Hard
ing's phrases about world affairs to its own tastes and
desires. At the risk of our lives we set down our pious
wish that no one will laugh, for if any man should begin
to laugh aloud the country would rock.
EARNESTLY desirous as we are to be very kind to Mr.
Harding, we are none the less regretfully compelled
to charge him with borrowing thought at the outset of
his career. It is on behalf of Mr. Hosea Biglow. He also
declared that:
We've gut all the ellerments, this very hour,
Thet make up a fus'-class, self-governin' power:
We've a war, an' a debt, an' a flag; an' ef this
Ain't to be inderpendunt, why, wut on airth is?
An' nothin' now henders our takin' our station
Ez the freest, enlightenedest, civerlized nation,
******
I say nothin' henders our takin' our place
Ez the very fus'-best o' the whole human race,
A spittin' tobacker ez proud ez you please
On Victory's bes' carpets, or loafin' at ease. . . .
Mr. Harding says:
"There comes to Americans the profound assurance that
our representative Government is the highest expression and
the surest guaranty of both [liberty and civilization]."
"Amid it all we have riveted the gaze of all civilization
to the unselfishness and the righteousness of representative
democracy, where our freedom never has made offensive
warfare, never has sought territorial aggrandizement
through force, never has turned to the arbitrament of arms
until reason had been exhausted."
"When the Governments of earth shall have established a
freedom like our own and shall have sanctioned the pursuit
of peace as we have practiced it, I believe the last sorrow
and the final sacrifice of international warfare will have been
written." Hosea Biglow also remarked:
No, never say nothin' without you're compelled tu,
An' then don't say nothin' that you can be held tu,
Nor don't leave no friction-ideas layin' loose
For the ign'ant to put to incend'ary use.
390
The Nation
ET us be thankful that in the hurried, harried moments

when one administration went out and one came in :
The Senate refused to pass the naval appropriation bill
and the soldier bonus measure;
Mr. Wilson killed the immigration bill and the emergency
tariff;
The bill appropriating $18,600,000 for hospital care for
former service men was passed;
Congress failed to provide for a continuation of the Coun
cil of National Defense;
The new President did not startle us by saying anything
at his inaugural address that we had not expected;
Open diplomacy beganat least in respect to the White
House gates;
The newspapers were thoughtful enough to tell us how
the Coolidge boys made themselves at home in Washington ;
Andwhether Mr. Harding succeeds or fails as a pinch
hitterBabe Ruth went into training at Shreveport,
Louisiana.
SENATOR KING and Senator Borah are entitled to the
greatest credit for the skill with which they handled
the naval appropriation bill in the Senate and their suc
cess in putting it over until the next session of Congress.
But for these men this inexcusable bill, with a hundred mil
lion dollars added after it came from the House, would have
gone through. Now there is at least a breathing spell, and
in that time public opinion ought to arouse itself if the bill
^s to be finally defeated. The country should deluge Mr.
Harding and Secretary Denby with protests against the
naval building program, if only on the ground that it will
inevitably lead to war with England if it is persisted inas
The Nation thinks it would. At the same time we hope that
the mail of Senators Borah and King and of the new Secre
tary of War, Mr. Weeks, will be full of letters of thanks
it is gratifying to find that Mr. Weeks, a graduate of An
napolis, is reported as opposing Secretary Denby at the first
exchange of the Harding Cabinet upon this naval program.
This is the time and the chance to keep down our enormous
navy waste, and we hope that every reader of The Nation
who believes that disarmament is the key to peace will take
up his pen at once and make his views felt in Washington.
WHEN this country a few months ago learned of the
murder of Drs. Friedlander and Cantor by bandits
in the Ukraine, the Soviet Government received its inevita
ble share of denunciation. Yet last week, Dr. Phineas Kotkov,
a native of Russia, professor of theology in the New York
Jewish Theological Seminary, was attacked by bandits while
walking to his home in Brooklyn, receiving injuries from
which he died, two days later. He was killed in the heart of
this great nation's metropolis. Now, for years our jingoes
have sought to make the death or injury of any American,
even in remote and notoriously bandit-infested parts of
Mexico, a pretext for intervention. Yet not long ago, two
innocent Mexicans were killed by a Colorado mob, and
Mexico did nothing about it. Recently a Mexican official sta
tioned in New York took the humorous precaution during
the height of the epidemic of hold-ups to telegraph his Gov
ernment to provide additional protection for him. It is
obvious that the lives of our own citizens as well as of for
eigners are never wholly safe, and not merely in the lawless
sections of the rural South and Southwest, but in our largest
cities. The war, which loosed men's passions, intensified
[Vol. 112, No. 2906
economic distress and cheapened the value of human life, has

of course contributed to the general insecurity, and inter
national claims of redress must be judged in the light of the
laws and temper of the country where the injury is com
mitted, as well as of the dictates of common sense.
PRESIDENT OBREGON is a man of great faith but
little wisdom if he actually believes that Mexico may
expect sympathetic treatment at the hands of the new Ad
ministration because President Harding has "expressed best
wishes for all nations and the desire for friendly relations
with the entire world." While Mr. Harding talks generali
ties, Albert B. Fall, the new Secretary of the Interior, talks
specifically, and states in a letter to the National Association
for the Protection of American Rights in Mexico the exact
terms on which the American Government must insist as a
prerequisite to recognition by the United States. "So long
as I have anything to do with the Mexican question," says
Mr. Fall, "no Government in Mexico will be recognized, with
my consent, which Government does not first enter into a
written agreement practically along the line suggested."
The line suggested includes the appointment of a commis
sion to ascertain damages done to American persons and
property in Mexico and to Mexicans and their property in
the United States; the settlement of boundary disputes; a
demand that various sections of the Mexican Constitution,
particularly Article 27, should not apply to Americans; the
future protection of Americans and American property in
Mexico ; and certain financial arrangements. Secretary Fall
states that his information, obtained verbally from the
Department of State, was "to the effect that the American
State Department has practically adopted the majority of
these suggestions as a basis for action between the two
countries preliminary to the recognition by this Government
of the Mexican Government."
A STRONG smell of oil pervades the operatic warfare
recently waged on the frontier of Costa Rica and
Panama. In fact that tiny stretch of isthmus holds most of
the elements both of Richard Harding Davis romance and
of international tragedy. There was a little revolution in
Costa Rica in 1917, with which oil had something to do, and
our Government refused to recognize the new Government.
But British oil interests had no such qualms, and secured
handsome concessions from the unrecognized Tinoco Gov
ernment. Last August there was another revolution, and
the new Government, which we promptly recognized, can
celed the British concessions as invalid. Meanwhile Amer
ican oil interests were very busy prospecting along the
Panama border. Now, this border had been a bit ill-defined,
even before President Roosevelt arranged the revolution
which made Panama independent of Colombia President
Loubet of France arbitrated regarding the frontier in 1900,
and allotted the Coto district on the Pacific coast to Costa
Rica. Chief Justice White of the United States Supreme
Court in a further arbitration fourteen years later decided
in Costa Rica's favor regarding a strip on the Atlantic
Coast. Neither of these decisions had been executed. Costa
Rica's recent invasions of Panama were in execution of them.
THE Costa Ricans carelessly blew up a bridge belonging
to the United Fruit Company, an American corpora
tion. This was a serious error. Apart from the fact that the
United Fruit Company controls more than 60 per cent of the
active capital in Costa Rica, including that invested in rail
March 16, 1921]
The Nation
roads, and that one of its officials is said to hold personally

more than one-half of the bonded debt of the republic, the
act meant measures "to protect American interests." That
phrase is a deadly one in Central America ; it has been used
to much effect in Panama, Santo Domingo, and Nicaragua.
It inevitably causes cynical suspicion of the best-intended
efforts at peace-making, and Mr. Hughes' effort seems to be
honorably to apply the Loubet and White decisions. But the
smell of oil persists ; the British Government is pressing the
interests of its concession-holders whose concessions were
canceled; and the Costa Rican Congress is studying all the
oil concessions, and fondly meditating upon a law passed in
1913 which declared all petroleum deposits in the republic to
be the property of the state, subject only to period leasesa
law which is reminiscent of that Article 27 of the Mexican
Constitution which seems to be the stumbling-block to recog
nition of Mexico. If only these Central American republics
had no oil deposits, they might find independence easier!
EACH week conditions in Ireland appear to have touched
the nadir of horror, yet each week that wretched coun
try sinks deeper into savagery and despair. Even the code
of "civilized" warfare is increasingly abandoned. Now the
Mayor and the ex-Mayor of Limerick, aroused from their
beds in the dead of night, are murdered in the arms of their
wives, and the community, terrified by crown forces, dares
not even summon a physician to tend the dying. This latest
piece of "Schrecklichkeit" is alleged to be in retaliation for
the killing of Brigadier-General Cumming, though the am
bush in which he and several other British soldiers were
shot occurred in West Cork. Had such things happened in
Belgium in 1914, the world would have gasped in horror,
and England would have been the first to cry "shame."
Yet when in 1921, day by day the slaughter proceeds more
savagely, England remains stolid and unmovedunless in
the loss by the Government of three out of five recent byelections one may find some scant indication of an awaken
ing public conscience. Those who have believed in liberal
England cling to each such faint straw of hope, for in the
end liberal England must turn the tide. Meanwhile with
no honorable effort at settlement being made, Great Britain
is rapidly consuming her dwindling moral capital.
NO more vicious and dangerous decision has ever been
handed down by the Supreme Court of the United
States than that in the case of the Milwaukee Leader, an
nounced last week. Its effect on the future of the Leader
will be disastrousbut that is the least of the matter. This
decision establishes an absolute, permanent censorship in
the United States. On the basis of any printed matter
which the Postmaster-General chooses to consider illegal,
that official can take away the second-class mailing privi
leges of a publication, not temporarily but permanently or
until the Postmaster-General concludes that the publication
has, in the words of Justice Clark's decision, "mended its
ways." Such a publication could have recourse to the'
courts; but even a favorable decision could immediately be
nullified, as it has been in the case of the New York Call,
by the Post Office Department appealing from the decision
and securing a stay. Before a final decision could be reached
in the Supreme Court, a process usually taking two or three
years, any ordinary publication would be ruined. This is
not a war-time decision ; it grants permanent despotic power
to one single government official. The dissenting opinions
391
of Justice Holmes and Justice Brandeis had their usual

effect of throwing into sharper relief the mean vision and
the reactionary bias of the rest of the court; and the words
of Justice Brandeis, in summing up, should be written down
and remembered: "If, under the Constitution, administra
tive officers may, as a mere incident of the peace-time ad
ministration of their departments, be vested with the power
to issue such orders as this, there is little of substance in
our bill of rights, and in every extension of governmental
functions lurks a new danger to civil liberty."
THAT Champ Clark possessed fine personal qualities is
perfectly obvious from the many sincere tributes of
respect and grief which have appeared since his death.
He was a rugged old Roman, a high type of the politician
of the old school, upright and outspoken, who rejoiced in
most unusual popularity among those who worked with
him during his long Congressional service. It was this
popularity which stood him in such good stead at the Demo
cratic Convention in Baltimore in 1912, where he obtained
a majority vote and came so near a two-thirds vote and
the nomination that it is said to have hinged upon one man
who was actually on the way to the platform to come out
for Mr. Clark when he was stopped. Mr. Bryan could also
have nominated Mr. Clark. At that time there was wide
spread satisfaction that the prize fell to Mr. Wilson, so
great were the hopes he had aroused by his "new freedom"
and his demand for a peaceful revolution in our political
life. Mr. Clark's election, it was felt, would mean only
the continuance of machine politics and a rather provincial
viewpoint in the White House. But now that eight fateful
years have passed it may well be a cause for speculation
whether the country would not have been better off had
Champ Clark become President. He certainly would never
have put us into the war, and, unless we are misinformed,
was never very happy over our going in, or over many of
the incidents of our being in.
THE interdependence of the drama and the national
philosophy of life is both pertinently and amusingly
illustrated by the dilemma of the contemporary Russian
stage. Shall dramas embodying bourgeois ideals of prop
erty or morality be played or not? Lunacharski, the com
missar of public enlightenment, has taken the affirmative
view; Bucharin, leader of the extreme Left, the negative
one. A public controversy ensues ; Ostrovski, founder of
the national theater of Russia, is played by the innumer
able workingmen's theaters. Yet he is fiercely attacked
by the intellectuals as hopelessly "petit bourgeois." The
National Theater of Moscow limits its repertory to "revotionary dramas," such as Buchner's "Danton's Tod" ; Stanislavski escapes from controversy into romance; the little
stages of the capital play exclusively Gorki, Tolstoy,
Andreev, the pieces of a certain Sofia Belaja, and occasion
ally Hauptmann and Hejermanns. The problem is a very
real one. Dramatic crises must have psychical actuality.
Many deal with the family. But the traditional laws that
govern the family are but crystallizations of the canonical
law which, in its turn, is a crystallization of purely meta
physical concepts. But since the Communist state repudi
ates these concepts ab initio, a large portion of dramatic
literature loses its significance. The question is an intri
cate one and calculated to stimulate reflection in both the
social reformer and the lover of art.
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2906
392
The Allies'
" Reckless Adventure
No such great gulf yawned between the German and the

THE ultimate consequences to Germany and Europe of this
Allied
proposals as the newspapers and the statesmen mis
reckless adventure can only be guessed at, but the march
led
us
into supposing. The statesmen on both sides drew
of Foch may too easily prove before many months be passed
up their proposals rather to placate angry home opinion
to be a march to perdition. If Europe falls into ruin by the
than, like business men, to search out some satisfactory
desperate action of the Allied Governments, it will be on them
working compromise. The Allied statesmen made their
and not on Germany that the curse of posterity will fall.
reparations total sound as large as possible; the Germans
These are not the words of a Berlin newspaper but the
made theirs sound as low as possible. Otherwise Briand
sober opinion of the London Daily News, while the Man
and Simons might have lost office; and such considerations
chester Guardian declares that "on the day that Allied
weigh more heavily with statesmen than the needs of peo
troops proceed to occupy fresh territory outside that as
ples. The German total was reckoned in present-day capital,
signed by the treaty, they will have committed a lawless
without interest; obviously the total payment, with accu
act which only the weakness of their adversary could pre
mulated interest, if stretched out over thirty years, would
vent from being treated as an act of war." In our judg
be far greater. The Allied proposal was figured in yearment the Allied decision to march into Germany is a defeat
by-year payments for forty-two years ; obviously the present
for democracy, for it means that the Prime Ministers of
value of the later payments is really only a fraction of the
France and England, confronted with the bitter and irra
sums which Briand dangled before his French constituents.
tional passions which their own political speeches had
Former President Poincare, Premier Briand's bitterest
aroused, were unable to face economic facts and seek an
jingo opponent, calculated that the Allied proposals, dis
economic solution of an economic problem, and instead
counted at 8 per cent, had a present capital value of only 58
sought escape in a dramatic gesture. That is all the "sanc
billion gold marks, or at 9 per cent, which he said was a
tions" are. They will not add a penny to the reparations
current rate for European loans in the American market,
fund; they set back instead of advancing the quest after
of only 52 billion gold marks. This neglects the variable
the real amount that the Germans should pay; and they
factor of the proposed tax on German exports, a proposal
delay the reconstruction of devastated France because they
which the conservative London Economist said was so crude
only add to the military expenses which Germany must meet
and questionable a demand that it "almost looked as if it
before the peasants of Northern France can have the money
had been intended to make the payment required impos
they so sorely need. Furthermore, this action again makes
sible." Now the German proposals, as originally made,
a scrap of paper of the Treaty of Versailles. As the Man
came very close to this. They assumed a total payment of
chester Guardian says, "It cannot be too often repeated that
a present capital value of 50 billion gold marks. From this
the peace treaty gives no authority whatever for the course
they claimed that the reparations payments already made
now being pursued." The Germans were right in protest
should be deducted. The treaty provides that these pay
ing that the action was contrary to the treaty. And if the
ments shall be deducted from the total reparations bill; the
Allies continue to breach it, to flaunt it, and to show that
Allied proposals made no mention of them. The Germans
they do not intend to be bound by its provisions, how can
claim that these payments involve a total value of 21 billion
they expect the Germans to respect it and believe that it
gold marks, including notably merchant marine deliveries
is inviolable and sacred?
to a value of 7 billion, imperial and state property of 4Vfe
Far more than that this action means, we believe, the
billion, railway rolling stock of 1% billion, the Saar mines
beginning of the downfall of France, both morally and eco
at 1 billion, etc. The Reparation Commission provisionally
nomically. The British newspapers admit that it spells
estimates the value of these deliveries at less than one-half
the triumph of the French over Lloyd George. It was only
the German total, but obviously their evaluation is a matter
a few weeks ago that he was declaring that Great Britain
for careful computation in conference, not for blustering
would never, never consent to further occupation of Ger
ultimatum. The later German proposals accepted, subject to
man territory; in fact, we were informed that Millerand
certain conditions, the Allied proposals for the first five
and Lloyd George were near a break on this very issue.
years, and suggested a reassessment of possibilities then.
Whether this was mere stage play, we cannot tell. Nor
Negotiation could have reached a satisfactory compromise;
do we know to what influences and for what a price Lloyd
instead the statesmen delivered campaign orations, spouted
George has surrendered, but the surrender is there, and
ostensibly at their adversaries in conference but intended in
the imperialists and militarists of France have once more
fact for the mob outside, and made agreement impossible.
won a great victory, an empty and an idle victory, because,
It is indeed a policy ruinous for Europe, the more so in
as we have said, it will help France neither economically nor
that it is a confession of incompetence which bodes ill for
financially. On the contrary, it will increase the wave of
the future conferences which must inevitably come. The
hate against France in the Central Powersa hate which
economic issues will rise again to plague the Premiers;
is already so ominous for the future of Europe. It will
these have by a dramatic pose satisfied for the moment the
enormously strengthen the hands of those in Germany who
hungry politicians, but they must in the end face the hungry
would make an alliance with Russia, and the Allies will be
refugees struggling bravely to rebuild their homes. The
lucky indeed if they do not meet with an obstinate deter
problem which the Allies must ultimately meet is not one
mination on the part of Germany to refuse to do any busi
of cowing disarmed Germany by a show of glittering and
ness with them whatever under a treaty which the Allies
expensive force; it is the problem of agreeing with Ger
themselves no longer respect, and which Briand truthfully
many upon some possible plan of reparations. They are
declared to be dead. It cannot but further alienate from
today farther than ever from solving it.
France neutral and American opinion.
March 16, 1921]
The Nation
393
Maintaining Law and Order in Albany

ALBANY, capital of the Empire State, has been having
a street-car strike. As is usual in such cases, the
street car company called in so-called detective agencies
to supply strike-breakers and "guards," and as is usual in
street-car strikes, there has been much violence. The Al
bany strike is of particular interest because of the public
revelation of the violent role played by the "guards" hired
to maintain law and order.
The Albany strike began on January 29. The company
had announced that beginning that day wages would be
reduced from 60 to 45 cents per hour. The men said that an
agreement between the company and themselves required
that "if any controversy shall arise between the company
and the employees as to the rate of wages to be paid after
the expiration of the agreement, the same shall be referred
for determination to arbitrators, . . ." It was another
of the many cases in which corporations, when times are
hard and labor apparently abundant, refuse to maintain
their agreements to arbitrate wage differences.
Ten days after the strike began, the company attempted
to resume service with the aid of professional strike-break
ers accompanied by "guards" in charge of a gentleman who
was paid $30 a day for his services. The attempt was un
successful. The company complained of lack of police pro
tection; State police were called in. A prosperous jitney
business sprang up, and the sympathy of the people seemed
rather with the strikers. Occasional cars made lone trips,
but service in any real sense of the word was not resumed,
and almost nobody patronized the cars that did run. There
was sporadic stoning of cars. In such cases the mounted
State troopers rode into the crowds.
Two detective companies (at least) had been called to
the company's aid. Bergoff Brothers and Waddell, famous
labor fighters, were on hand; so were guards from the
Cosgrove Detective Agency, of Newark, New Jersey. This
agency has a half-page advertisement in the New York City
Classified Telephone Directory which reads in part:
Two decades of successful and ethical service to the principal
business interests of America. Vouchers such as the business
man would demand. Industrial service of the better sort based
on facts only. Labor troubles effectively controlled by replace
ment of workers trained to fill your needs and turn out your
production. . . . The name Cosgrove is the hallmark of de
pendability, efficiency, integrity, and responsibility in all that
pertains to legitimate detective service.
Cosgrove's guards did not figure largely in the news
papers in the early days of the strike. But on February 25
a reporter for the Knickerbocker Press, who was engaged
in pinning the arms of a strike sympathizer who seemed
about to throw a stone, found himself caught in an in
discriminate attack on strike sympathizers led by John J.
Cosgrove, Jr., nephew of the head of the firm. The re
porter was clubbed and taken to the police station, where
he turned the tables by accusing his captor, and naturally
his story had full publicity. Three days later crowds which
had gathered to watch a strike-breaker car in Watervliet,
a suburb of Albany, were cleared off the streets by State
troopers, and many took refuge in stores lining the street.
Behind the troopers came an automobile in which sat young
Cosgrove and a detail of Cosgrove "guards," hired to help
maintain order. Let the Knickerbocker Press continue:
They leaped out, armed with clubs, and entered the cigar
store. The two troopers also are said to have entered, and
were in control of the situation. The Cosgrove "guards," how
ever, on entering the store, swung their clubs right and left,
hitting heads wherever they had an opportunity, and felling
several persons to the floor. The four men who were seriously
injured were John Blaney, John McCloy, Thomas Stanley, and
Leo Carr. McCloy and Carr had their heads split, and rushed
from the store with blood streaming down their faces. Later
Dr. H. T. Wygant took six stitches in the wound of McCloy.
When the Cosgrove "guards" came out of the store they were
asked by Watervliet police who were in the street what author
ity they had to club persons or attempt to arrest anyone.
They answered they had no authority and were promptly placed
under arrest. ... In a search of the "guards' " automobile
the police found a blackjack, two revolvers, one an automatic,
and three night sticks. Cosgrove and McGrath each had a
gun in their possession, Watervliet police charged. When ques
tioned regarding the ownership of the car, the men said it
belonged to Superintendent Charles A. Coons of the United
Traction Company. . . .
"Ethical service to the principal business interests"! "In
dustrial service of the better sort"!
The sequel was a statement by the Mayor that "un
authorized thugs brought into the city by the traction
company are responsible for what happened," a statement
by the Commissioner of Public Safety that "lawless per
sons sent by the traction company to assist the operation
of cars in Watervliet will not be countenanced by city offi
cials," and a demand by the assistant superintendent of
the State troopers that the traction company withdraw
its guards, which it did. The story, naturally, was featured
in most of the Albany papers; the New York Times had a
brief report of it ; but the Albany Evening Journal appeared
after the event with the true but misleading headline "Strike
Situation Quiet Today on All Lines in Troy and Albany;
Repairs made to wires in Watervliet with troopers on
guard; Company planned to resume traffic on Albany-Troy
line this afternoon; Weatherwax reiterates statement that
company hopes to reduce expenses and thus lower fare."
On page 12 of the Evening Journal, buried in a long column
with no headline to hint its presence, the careful reader
might have discovered mention of the Watervliet incident
and of the arrest of the six guards, charged with assault and
incitement to riot; the front page double-column head said
only, "Strike Situation Quiet Today in Troy and Albany."
Albany is a small city, and the story of its anti-strike
"guards" will be little known outside the twin cities. Nor
was much national attention paid to the strange events
during the street-car strike in Denver last year, when Gen
eral Wood took charge of the situation, and, almost as his
first act to maintain law and order, ordered the professional
strike-breakers and pseudo-guards out of the city. Nor
does the violent history of West Virginia and the lawless
company guards there excite our Congress or our people.
But the Cosgroves, and the Baldwin-Feltses, and the Bergoff-Waddells today constitute a great national industry,
an industry which serves its own employers ill, throws
blame for violence on innocent workers, and deceives the
public. The lawmakers who are composing anti-strike bills
would do well to devote a little study to the problem of
anti-spy bills. The poison of the spy is infinitely more
venomous than the waste of strikes.
The Nation
394
A Call for "the Public"

THE interest of "the Public" is paramount. Newspapers
never tire of repeating this in commenting on strikes.
The interest and power of the public have been invoked
again and again to suppress strikes by applying compulsion
to the workers. The lockout of the New York clothing work
ers is now beginning its fourth month. What does the
public know about it? What has the public done as the
result of such knowledge? Who is acting for the public
now?
In this case the public has not had to wait until months
after the trouble was over in order to get an impartial state
ment of the facts. In the New York clothing industry, as
governed until the manufacturers broke off the agreement
with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, there was an
officer known as the Impartial Chairman, or continuous
arbitrator. Jointly paid by manufacturers and union, this
officer was in intimate contact with their difficulties; it was
his duty to make adjustments, and in doing so he was looked
on as being in some sort the representative of the public.
The chairman, Dr. William M. Leiserson, lived up to his
responsibilities to the public. After the break between
union and manufacturers, he put his duties to them in a
subordinate category and he made "a report to the public"
out of the fullness of his knowledge of the inside history of
the conflict. It was a risky step for anyone who might have
ambitions toward continuing in demand as an impartial
chairman.
His expressed intention to make this report certainly sent
up the eyebrows of the union, and the manufacturers' lead
ers threatened a libel suit. Yet Dr. Leiserson sent his
report to the Governor, to other authorities, and to the
papers. When the dust settled it was generally observed
that the result of the report was a skinned nose for the
union, but that the entire cuticle of the New York manufac
turers had been deftly removed and was drying on the
fence. Dr. Leiserson clearly assigned the blame for the
trouble to a clique among the manufacturers. This clique,
he said, had been led by a union-smashing lawyer. The
report concluded:
The duty of the public in a case like this seems clear. It
should insist upon a thorough airing of the facts, the expulsion
from the situation of the agitatorsthe lawyer and the group
who brought on the strike. It should see to it that negotiations
are resumed on the basis of the original issue of decreasing
labor costs. This can easily be brought about if the authorities
and the newspapers, the official and recognized representatives
of the public to whom this report is submitted, will bring the
pressure of public opinion to bear on both parties to take this
action.
Five weeks have passed since the public got the report; it
has not been controverted on points of fact, and yet its
recommendations have not been acted on. The duty of the
public has been made clear, yet the public has been as if
paralyzed. Would the duty have been easier if it had not
been so clearly to the advantage of the union? Where are
all the valiant defenders of the public who spoke up when
there was trouble in steel, in coal, in railroads?
The Amalgamated's membership has depended entirely on
itself and other unionists for the sinews of war. The mem
bership in one city alone (Chicago) raised in six weeks a
quarter of a million dollars for relief in New York. The
membership has not asked a cent from the public. Does it
[Vol. 112, No. 2906
show resentment against the public because of inaction in

support of a well-established just cause? Apparently not.
Unions are used to expecting nothing. The Amalgamated
has gone ahead, tracing the New York work sent out to
small country towns and organizing the workers found there.
Shortly after Dr. Leiserson's report, the Amalgamated's
organizers in one such town, Hammonton, N. J., were
mobbed by the police and other citizens and thrown out.
They were a couple of girls, both just about elbow-high to
an average man. They had tried to hold a meeting. Their
deportation might have been regarded as "action on the part
of the public."
Judging by the record, then, intervention by the public
seems to be in inverse ratio to the strength of the union's
case. When the public hears nothing but the propaganda of
the employer, it cheerfully sanctions the use of injunctions,
accompanied by all the police power of the state. When it
receives a confused account which does not determine where
the blame lies, it intervenes in its own interest on the prem
ise that "both sides are wrong" and both must surrender
somethingthus encouraging employers to attack unions
with no other cause than that the public will sanction slic
ing off a pound or two of the union's former gains. But
when the case is clear, when the information is exact and
from an unquestionable source, and when it demonstrates
that the employers are in the wrong, the public retires to
seclusion, leaving the contestants in the heat and dust of
battle. Or do we wrong the public? Is this lay figure
which has been paraded before us with such solemnity not
the public at all, but simply a painted idol trotted out to
impress the populace when the rich men of the tribe grow
timorous? Does its divinity lie simply on the lips of the
hired sycophants who bow before it?
The public is paramount, though in this instance it is
more noticeably absent. Would the Amalgamated be deemed
ribald (as well as radical) if it asked, what does the public
paramount to?
The
Uses of the
American
Academy
CERTAIN of the members of the American Academy of
Arts and Letters have begun to inquire whether that
body has not been too content to rest upon its oars, too con
tent to be a club of gentlemen who out of modesty hide
behind their own records while the practice of art and lit
erature among the rising generation escapes their aid
and runs off into heedless eccentricities. To some of the
members at least the recent public meeting in honor of
William Dean Howells was a sort of announcement that the
Academy exists for the recognition and encouragement of
good literature and art, a meeting aimed to call the atten
tion of Americans at large to an institution which of late
hasto state it franklybeen overlooked by the American
artistic world at large. How, these members are wonder
ing, may the Academy increase its services and its contribu
tions to our various arts? We venture to make a few quite
practical and specific suggestions, prefacing them with the
remark that the Academy ought to admit women as a matter
of course on exactly the same terms as men. That Edith
Wharton, for instance, is not a member of the Academy
while this or that person of half her gifts and achievements
March 16, 1921]
The Nation
is a member, merely deprives the Academy of an honor

without, so far as we can see, bringing it any advantage
whatever.
The Academy might well make a larger use of the arts of
publicity in order that as extensive a part of the popula
tion as possible may know about its existence, which in many
quarters is not even suspected. Now that the Academy has
a sum of money which will before long permit it to erect a
building of its own, it has an opportunity to seem more real
than it ever has. It needs, however, to do more. Relatively
few persons will see the building or understand what it
means. The purposes of the Academy would be excellently
served if it issued some sort of periodical bulletin, which
might be sent at least to all newspapers and public libraries,
which would report the literary activities of the members,
announce the election of new persons to the Academyand
of course also to the Instituteand announce the prizes for
meritorious work which the Academy would do well to offer.
On the whole the Academy can do nothing capable of such
valuable service as the offering of judicious prizes judi
ciously awarded. Most of its members will admit that there
will always be dissent from the judgments of the Academy.
England has never been able to develop an academy even
faintly comparable to that of France, and even in France is
there not an Academie Goncourt in protest against official
respectability? The American Academy, like other acade
mies, will presumably always wait long before electing even
the most gifted man to membership, and will naturally elect
only those artists upon whom there can be general agree
ment. The individual, therefore, will perhaps not often
profit greatly by election to the Academy, though the more
hospitable Institute may be of use to him. But every year
there are books and plays and paintings and musical com
positions and criticisms of such things which should be
recognized by just some such competent official body. Even if
the Academy were not able to offer prizes of much intrinsic
value, there would nevertheless be a very decided value in
the mere fact of the award, with the resulting attention
called to scrupulous work. And not only the artist would
benefit. Public awards of this sort would be sure to arouse
public discussion. It would mean something for the cause
of art every time some merely popular work, already much
in the eye of the public, were passed over for the sake of a
work of higher, finer merit.
We assume, of course, that the only grounds which the
Academy could allow itself to take would be that prizes must
be awarded on the basis of essential merit. Let the Academy
be open as it will to the vitality in popular work, still it
will, we take it, tend always to be conservative. If it allows
itself to be influenced by the political or social coloring of
new art, it will put its weight too often on the conservative
side of controversies and so lose its credit with forwardlooking artists. But form, beauty, grace, workmanship
these are what the Academy must consider. And here it
must make no compromise. Art in America is daily cor
rupted by the high prices paid for meretricious work while
good work goes begging. The American Academy should
not leave to the individual artist the task of standing alone
in his ideals; it should range itself once and for all on the
side of good art and good scholarship and make its fight
there. While there is every possibility that this or that
award would be challenged in a dozen quarters, and while
good work might now and then be overlooked, it is still
worth while to make the attempt.
395
Medicine Hat
AEOLUS of Aeolia, according to Homer (or whatever
man or woman it was who wrote the "Odyssey"), was
the father of the winds, stilled or vexed them as his in
clination went, and on occasion could do up a bagful for
the future use of some seafaring visitor like Ulysses, who
indeed handled them rery foolishly and came to grief. But
what, some hundred per cent Canadian might inquire, has
Aeolia on Alberta? In that province sits Medicine Hat,
father of the winds of a vaster continent than Homer
dreamed of, where the Chinook comes down from the Porcu
pine Hills like the wolf on the fold, licks up a winter's snow
in an hour or so, and starts a row among the weathers that
spreads till it fills the entire Dominion and then spills over
into the United States, let tariff provisions be what they
will. In a day all Montana feels it; then the Bad Lands
and Gopher Prairie, Chillicothe and Fond du Lac and Chat
tanooga, Sandusky, Roanoke, Altoona, Poughkeepsie, on to
Satan's Kingdom among the Cornwalls in Connecticut, to
wind-battered Nantucket, to Fundy and Passamaquoddy,
even, before the row is over. It is all very well to live in
Whitehall, Indiana, and brag that you are at the center of
the country's population; yet this is as nothing when com
pared with living at the very source of meteorology, sit
ting, as it were, on the lid of the storms and seasons.
What, indeed, has Aeolia on Alberta? Nothing in reality
but a Homer. The fable-makers have failed us. No one
has discovered the cave among the Porcupines, as Master
Virgil found one among the Aeolian Islands north of Sicily,
where the winds lie idle when they are not working and
from which they issue upon the proper permit. No one has
imagined an old witch who cooks up zephyrs and schneefressers in some midnight cauldron. No one has told the
tale of a Northwestern Pandora peeping into her forbidden
strongbox and turning the cyclones loose on the world. Nor
has any more autochthonous legend come into being: such
as that at Medicine Hat the Shaman of the Winds undoes
his medicine bag and dumps out his hoarded treasure; or
that there stands the Hat of Hats through which the autho
rized Manito talks when there is a fresh blizzard on.
Believing as we do that Canada must be left to develop
its own domestic traditions as Canada will, we do not ad
vise the Homers of that neighbor, but leave them to their
own devices. The weather, however, which Medicine Hat
manufactures and thrusts upon the circumjacent territories
is international. As such it should come under some sort
of international regulation. What right has Canada to
unload its abundant, cheap, easily-produced weather upon
us? We have our infant weather industries only a few
aeons old, and they must be protected. We have skilled
weather-makers who must not be thrown out of jobs. More
over, our own weather is of a standard which we prefer,
and know to be superior. To import the product of Medi
cine Hat is to break down the American standard by ir
resistible foreign competition. These things must not be.
With all the strength of our true blue Americanism we cry
out against them. We demand that the Council of the
League of Nations, before we enter the League with any
reservations whatsoever, place in the hands of a competent
committee the question of making Medicine Hat a neutral
zone, with the United States recognized as the nation which
has a prior interest in its activities.
The Nation
396
The
Condition
of
Soviet
[Vol. 112, No. 2906
Industrialism
By LINCOLN COLCORD
"TS Russia in a state of industrial collapse? Are the
1 Bolsheviki to blame for it?" The American public
is still asking these rudimentary questions about the Rus
sian situation. The busy citizen who expects an imme
diate and decisive answer to them never stops to reflect how
impossible it is to get a satisfactory answer fixing the blame
for the present economic depression in his own country.
Some say the tariff, some say conditions of credit, some
say profiteering, some say overproduction, some say the
Treaty of Versailles, some say our failure to ratify the
treaty; and no one, of course, would be satisfied with a
sweeping statement attaching the blame to capitalism per
se. Nor is any one simple explanation given for the in
dustrial sickness which is universal throughout Central
Europe.
The first question may be answered briefly. Soviet Rus
sia is in a state of industrial collapse. It is not on record
that the Bolsheviki have ever attempted to deny it. From
Soviet sources can be obtained more drastic and authorita
tive statements of fact disclosing this condition than any
made in counter-revolutionary quarters; one has only to
examine the documents in this week's International Rela
tions Section to find evidence of this. It is a curious side
light on public opinion that the impression has been
created that the Soviets do deny it; in consequence of
which, the mere statement of the fact itself of industrial
collapse derives value as anti-Soviet propaganda. Starting
with the full admission of industrial collapse, the whole
matter of blame for this condition falls unavoidably in the
realm of opinion. A thousand causes contributed to the
Russian economic debacle; no single force or event can be
instanced to account for it. Every avenue of argument
leads to a cul-de-sac of preconception.
There are certain facts, however, bearing directly on
the issue, which cannot be ignored. They are matters of
familiar knowledge; of knowledge so familiar that their
significance is beginning to be lost sight of as factors in
the Russian industrial situation. The following recapitu
lation of these facts is merely an attempt to apply the
logic of events to a subject which often seems in danger
of escaping both logic and reason.
1. The Industrial and Economic Collapse of the Old
Regime
This is a phase of the question on which there are
scant data, but a volume of evidence. The Revolution
itself is the best evidence. Nothing short of the com
plete economic breakdown of the old regime could have
induced such a fundamental social upheaval. It is hard
for us even to imagine conditions in Russia at the begin
ning of 1917. The nation had lost in killed and wounded
more than all the other Allies combined. The country was
impoverished by the waste and inefficiency of the Czar's
war administration. Transportation, commissary, and mu
nitions supply systems had begun to fail. Stores were used
up, and nothing had properly been provided against the
future. The morale of the army was shattered. The peo
ple had lost confidence in the Government.
Then came the first Revolution in March, 1917. The
army began to disband and go home, millions of armed

soldiers streaming across the face of the country. Under
Kerensky, the dwindling authority of government at
tempted to stem this human tide impelled by economic
forces, to drive Russia back into the war. This only in
creased the confusion. Lawlessness succeeded chaos, terror
succeeded sorrow and suffering. The old regime vanished,
leaving only the wreckage of its economic engine. The
country was undone. It was at this moment that the
Soviets came to power. The task of restoring order was
colossal; this bore indirectly but powerfully on the indus
trial problem. In spite of the popular impression abroad,
order was restored, though it was a year before the coun
try had settled down under the new regime. Looking
solely at the industrial problem, however, it is evident
that the Soviets took control at the moment of lowest ebb.
Whatever productive organization remained in operation
was dedicated to war uses which had vanished with the
army.
Over against this must be set the stores of unassembled
machinery and unused material which fell to the Soviets
as a final legacy of Czarist incapacity. To utilize all
this required technical knowledge. Here we touch the chief
difficulty which the Soviets faced at the beginning of their
regime. Practically all the technical knowledge and ability
in Russian industry, the managerial capacity, was counter
revolutionary in its sympathies. It destroyed books and
records and machinery, in the best methods of sabotage.
It refused to work for the Soviets. Its influence was
exerted only to cripple still farther the existing industrial
system.
In the province of factory management, another popular
error needs to be corrected. It is still believed by the
average American citizen that, under the Bolsheviki, fac
tories are managed by "soviets" of the workingmen. As
a matter of fact, this fallacious practice was corrected
by the Bolshevik leaders as soon as they were able to con
trol the wild social forces loosed by the Revolution. From
the first, Lenin has preached individual management in
industry and rigid labor discipline. These principles were
adopted throughout the Soviet industrial system two years
ago, and have been operative ever since. It is amusing to
note that the American who protests vigorously against
the strength of labor discipline under the Bolsheviki will
in the same breath accuse them of practicing "soviet"
management in industry; not stopping to put two and two
together.
Briefly, then, the Soviets took charge of a broken-down
industrial plant; and the economic rehabilitation of the
country had to be undertaken without experienced tech
nical direction.
2. The Problems Raised by Military Intervention
The Soviets have been forced for the past three years
to divert over 75 per cent, and in some periods as much
as 90 per cent, of their industrial production to war uses.
This, in turn, has thrown an even greater relative burden
on the transportation system. New industries had to be
fostered for the production exclusively of war materials,
March 16, 1921]
The Nation
at the expense of starving more useful branches of the gen

eral industrial plant. In addition, hundreds of thousands
of Communists had to be taken for the army; and most
Communists are industrial workers.
These are not slight facts. Instead of turning the whole
industrial plant of Russia to peaceful uses, with all the
available labor strength, in an effort to feed and clothe
the people, to supply agricultural machinery and civilian
transportation, to bridge the gap between city and country,
and thus to revive economic stability within the principles
of communism, the Soviets have been compelled by military
invasion and foreign support of counter-revolution (in
both of which America has participated), to throw prac
tically their whole industrial effort in the opposite direc
tion, making soldiers of artisans and mechanics, condemn
ing the cities to want and semi-starvation, failing to pro
duce those goods which alone would constitute a medium
of exchange with the peasantry, burdening the railroad
system with military activities, and rendering economic
stability still more difficult of attainment.
3. The Effect of the Blockade on Russian Industry
This has been of key importance. Even before the war,
the development of Russian industry was sporadic and de
fective. There were great textile factories, but all the
looms had been imported; there were vast industrial estab
lishments of every description, but little actual machinery
was made in Russia. Thus the industrial plant itself de
pended almost wholly on foreign sources for repair parts
and extensions. The production of machinery is the most
highly technical branch of industry. The creation in three
years' time of a machine-making industry adequate to sup
ply the needs of the existing Russian plant, with most of
the available technical knowledge refusing to participate,
and with the country in the throes of invasion and civil
war, was a sheer impossibility. Without such an industry,
however, the existing plant was largely at the mercy of
the blockade; while the problem of plant extension was
well-nigh insuperable.
Everywhere in Russia may be found machinery, both in
dustrial and agricultural, which could be put in operation
in a day's time by replacing some broken minor part. This
part might be worth a few dollars, and could be ordered
from the stock of dozens of machinery concerns in Europe
and America. Yet the blockade has condemned the ma
chine to inactivity; and all the ingenuity in the world
could not supply the missing part without a machine-making
industry. This fact has borne harder on the railroads than
in any other quarter. There was but one locomotive works
in Russia before the war; this plant turned out a negligible
proportion of the yearly requirements of the Russian roads.
The Soviets have bent their main energies to this problem,
and have made strides toward its solution; yet hundreds
of locomotives and cars constantly have been laid up for
lack of minor repair parts. It is easy to see the immediate
effect which freedom to buy railroad equipment in West
ern markets would have on the condition of Russian in
dustry; for transportation dominates the whole industrial
field.
The blockade has not deprived Russian industry of raw
materials, since Russia has her own raw materials; yet,
by limiting the efficiency of transportation, it has just as
surely affected the raw materials situation. The same, of
course, is true of the fuel situation.
397
4. The Physical Plan of Russian Industrialism

Russian industry was started by the great landlords;
from the beginning, it was a forced and artificial enter
prise. Factories were located in the most unnatural posi
tions, without respect to their relation to raw materials,
fuel, and markets, but with respect only to the factor of
cheap labor. Great industrial communities would be estab
lished in some locality where the peasants were being
forced from the land; while both fuel and raw materials
had to be transported thousands of miles to these factories,
and the goods which they produced had to be transported
back to market.
The industrial city of Petrograd was in this sense a
wholly artificial creation. Peter the Great founded the
city on piles in the midst of a marsh; even before the era
of industrialism, its development was notoriously artificial.
As factories were built, and the city became a great indus
trial center, all its fuel had to be brought from the Donetz
Basin in the lower Ukraine. The Soviets, faced by the
problem of transportation, and with the Donetz Basin for
two seasons overrun by counter-revolutionary forces, had
largely to abandon Petrograd as an industrial center. It
was drastic, but absolutely necessary. The wrong location
of the Russian industrial plant everywhere bears heavily
on the factor of transportation. The Soviets have had to
take steps toward the general re-location of the plant,
while at the same time they tried to keep the plant run
ning in its present location. Their ultimate plan is to
re-locate and extend the Russian plant in conformity with
the natural physical factors of industry, namely, fuel sup
ply, raw materials supply, transportation, and distribution.
In this scheme the substitution of electric for fuel power
has a large place.
In other words, the evils which have crept into the physi
cal plan of our own industrial systemthe location of fac
tories at the whim of capital, far from fuel centers and
sources of raw materials, and the consequent duplication
of transportation, which ultimately has to be paid for by
the consumer in the price of the finished producthad been
carried to absurd and insupportable lengths in the establish
ment of Russia's infant industry. Distances are greater
in Russia, and the factor of transportation influences .the
industrial problem there in larger proportion than any
where else in the world. Unless these evils of industrial
location were corrected at once, they would soon grow so
formidable as to put an economic limit to all development
in that direction. They could not be corrected except by
drastic action. Thus some plants are running, while some
have been abandoned; and statistics do not by any means
tell the whole story.
5. What Soviet Industry is Expected to Do
There is a final consideration which has constantly to be
borne in mind. Industry under communism can never be
the same thing as industry under capitalism. It would be
a critical error to apply our own standards to Soviet in
dustrialism, and on this basis to measure its success or
failure. Under capitalism industry is built on a founda
tion of private profit-making; this factor is paramount to
the continuation of production. Under communism indus
try is held to be a public function, is operated in the welfare
of the public, and the factor of private profit-making is
wholly eliminated. The prime object of capitalist industry
The Nation
398
is to make more money for the shareholders. In communist

industry there are no shareholders, and the prime object
is to produce the most and best goods at the least cost.
Under capitalism the laws of competition and of supply
and demand are supposed to furnish the necessary checks
and balances to keep the profit-making incentive within
bounds and to maintain economic stability. Under com
munism these laws are disregarded, and industry is con
trolled by a highly centralized .administrative agency which
both estimates the demand and directs the production of
the supply.
We are not here concerned with the relative merits of
these two conceptions of the function of industry ; we merely
are interested in the vast difference between them which
the facts bring out. Industry in Soviet Russia is bound
to travel paths unfamiliar to us and to disclose unexpected
results. Factories for the production of non-essentials will
not flourish for a long time. The closing of certain lines
of industry may be considered a step in the public welfare.
The limitation on freedom to start production wherever
money can be made will seem irksome to us. The fact that
Cardinal
[Vol. 112, No. 2906
the welfare of the workers is a paramount consideration,

and that the welfare of capital does not enter into the
reckoning, since there is no capital in our sense of the
word, will seem unaccountable to those reared in an indus
trialism where the welfare of capital is the first charge
on production.
In fact, the whole conception of a publicly functioning
and bureaucratically controlled industrialism lies so far
outside the bounds of our experience as to render any view
of the enterprise obscure. The fundamental divergence
from the principles and practices of capitalism will appear
everywhere in Soviet industrialism, affecting every aspect
of the system. What seems to us like failure may, in the
eyes of communism, be the best success. What is in fact
a failure financially, may have infinite social value and be
precisely what communism has been striving to accom
plish. Indeed, this divergence already has begun to ap
pear; and unless it is steadily borne in mind, no correct
estimate of the condition of industry in Soviet Russia can
be formed. We cannot understand the system unless we
know what it is intended to do.
Bourne and Ireland

By P. D. MURPHY
CARDINAL BOURNE'S condemnation of Sinn Fein in

his recent Lenten pastoral, and the spirited reply
thereto of Art O'Brien, president of the Gaelic League of
London and also of the London branch of the Irish SelfDetermination League, may be regarded as the opening
shots in a campaign of which the world is likely to hear
more in the near future. To those who have knowledge of
the facts the wonder is that matters have not come to a
head long before this. There is no love lost on either side,
and though a public quarrel with a Catholic prelate is the
last thing Sinn Fein desires, it will not deviate a hair's
breadth to avoid one should the issue be joined, as it now
seems to be.
The Cardinal, who is himself Irish on the mother's side,
has seldom looked with favor on Irish aspirations. An
intimate personal friend of Lord Edmond Talbot, chief whip
of the Tory Party, as he also was of Lord Edmond's brother,
the late Duke of Norfolk, his Eminence is everything that
the Irish people most dislike in a dignitary of the Catholic
church. The son of poor parents, he has sought his friends
among the wealthiest and most reactionary members of his
flock. He is a dyed-in-the-wool Tory, a self-confessed mili
tarist, and an imperialist of the Rhodes-Chamberlain school.
In the days when Redmond had Ireland more or less solidly
behind him, the Cardinal's attitude toward the Nationalist
Party was one of supreme indifference when it was not of
open hostility. The bone of contention then was religious
teaching in the elementary schools. The Liberal and Labor
parties were opposed to religious instruction; and since it
was from these that Redmond hoped to receive some meas
ure of autonomy for his country, his relations with them
amounted almost to an alliance. The Tories, on the other
hand, dared not oppose religious teaching in the schools,
not because they favored the Catholic point of view, but
because they could not run counter to the Church of Eng
land, which was at one with the Catholics in this matter.
In desperation John Dillon, who at the time was Redmond's
chief lieutenant, took the whole question to Rome, and the

Holy Father, after hearing his presentation of the facts,
intrusted the task of safeguarding Catholic education in
England to the Nationalist Party. But Bourne declined to
budge. He was too firmly in the grip of the Duke of Nor
folk and the other Catholic peers, who were Tories almost
to a man.
Long before this, however, the Cardinal's relations with
the Irish members of his congregation had become strained
almost to the breaking-point. When the building of West
minster Cathedral was nearing completion the question of
internal decoration and arrangement was a topic widely
discussed by the Catholics of the archdiocese. As the bulk
of these were Irish either by birth or descent it was decided,
no doubt as a matter of policy, that the cathedral was to
have an altar dedicated to St. Patrick. The Irish imme
diately opened a subscription list to defray the expense of
installing the altar, but they reckoned without their host.
No sooner was the Cardinal informed of what was being
done than he put his foot down and ordered those respon
sible to return all subscriptions to the donors.
Again at the Eucharistic Congress held in London some
few years before the war there were mutterings of disap
proval at the scant recognition accorded to Ireland. Not a
single Irish Catholic layman was invited to take part in the
proceedings, though the program was packed with the names
of English and foreign Catholic nonentities. The Cardinal
(then archbishop) was in charge of the arrangements, and
the Irish, not only in London but throughout England, were
not slow to inform him of the feelings they entertained
toward him over the matter.
Then there is the little-known case of Roger Casement
and the abortive attempt of the English Cardinal to get the
Vatican to move against the priest who was in attendance
on the brilliant but ill-fated Irishman during his last days.
Casement was born into the Catholic Church, but in after
life he fell away from it. While occupying the condemned
March 16, 1921]
The Nation
399
"
cell in Pentonville prison he desired to be reconciled to the

Church, and expressed a wish to see a priest. In such cases
of the Throne of Peter of that historic warning. In that

lies the strength of the Sinn Fein position and the weakness
the Church ordains that the reconciliation can be effected
of Cardinal Bourne's; and in that, too, no doubt, lies the
only after the priest has obtained the consent of his ecclesi
astical superiors, unless there are cogent reasons to the con
trary, when he is at liberty to act on his responsibility. The
priest in this instance happened to be an Irishman, and he,
deeming the circumstances to be such as to warrant his dis
pensing with higher authority, received Casement back into
the Church, whereupon Cardinal Bourne sent for him and
reason why the Vatican, despite the efforts of the British

Government, has steadfastly refused to condemn Sinn Fein.
rebuked him for his action.
The Fifth Report of the hearings before the American

Commission on Conditions in Ireland will appear in the
next issue of The Nation.
If the matter were allowed to
rest at that no great harm would have been done, but the
Cardinal went to Rome to get the Pope to take disciplinary
action against the offending clergyman. Now it so hap
pened that there was in Rome at this time, as rector of the
Irish college in that city, one of the most distinguished
On the Road
By HANIEL LONG
ecclesiastics that the Irish branch of the Church has thrown
up in the last quarter of a century. This was the late Mon

signor O'Riordan, who was at one time assistant to the late
Dr. O'Dwyer of Limerick, the first Irish prelate to come
out openly in favor of Sinn Fein. After the rising of
Easter week English propagandists were particularly active

in Rome, and to Monsignor O'Riordan fell the task of
countering the English spokesmen. When, therefore, Cardi

nal Bourne arrived in Rome he found the ground so well
prepared that the Vatican flatly refused to proceed against
Roger Casement's confessor. Not only that, but the Cardi
nal himself was taken to task for his attitude in the case,
and only for the earnest entreaties of the English envoy
at the Vatican, backed by the appeals of the British Gov
ernment, Bourne would never have returned to London as
Cardinal archbishop of Westminster.
It will be seen, therefore, that the quarrel between Cardi
nal Bourne and the Irish is not of today or yesterday, nor
is it the result of a single act, but rather of a settled policy
due to the political affiliations of his Eminence. And when
the Cardinal's position is analyzed the weakness of it imme
diately becomes apparent. The bulk of his congregation
is Irish either by birth or descent, and the same is true
also of his clergy. England is not producing sufficient

priests for her needs, and Ireland is the principal source
of supply for the English-speaking world. Today Irish
priests are avoiding the English mission as the average man
would avoid the plague, and if this is maintained, as there
is every reason to believe that it will, the Cardinal may
be compelled to close some of the churches in his arch
diocese.
In his Lenten pastoral Cardinal Bourne recalls that he is

the second occupant of the See of Westminster who has had
At Dawn.
At dawn the trees gaze down

in the moving mirror of the river;
and a white cottage
steps out of the shadows
and gazes down;
and a boy comes out of the cottage
and runs to the diving board,
and he too pauses, and gazes.
At dawn the whole world
is narcissine.
Country Postman
Along dusty roads
murmurs the postmans Ford,
a blackbee going from farm-house to farm-house
(great white blossoms, waiting
under the fans of elms).

Pittsburghers
At midnight the stars,
white talons of eternity,
attempt to seize us;
but we are hiding
beneath black roofs of tombs,
black plumes of smoke.
Earth.
Earth is a long coast

fronting the quiet
of eternity;
and in our night-time stars go by
like the far-away lights of ships.
to warn his flock against Irish insurrectionary movements.
The other was, of course, Cardinal Manning, who denounced

Fenianism in 1867. But Manning's stand was not so open
as Bourne's. Fenianism was denounced by Rome and by all
the Irish bishops. Manning simply sided with his superiors

and confreres in 1867, whereas Bourne is today playing a
lone hand if one excludes the Bishop of Cork, Dr. Cohalan,

a man of no political strength and of very little ecclesiasti
cal moment. Then, too, Fenianism was at best only an Irish
faction, whereas Sinn Fein is the Irish nation. An Irish
archbishop of an earlier generation once felt constrained
to point out to the Pope of his day that while Ireland could
exist without Rome, Rome could not exist without Ireland.
It is conceivable that should the occasion again arise Ireland
would not want for a prelate to remind the present occupant
A Certain State University

Did you picture her an athletic girl
racing onward with the Torch
did you see her young and aflame?
Nay, she sits day after day
in her arm-chair, napping.
She is obese, deaf,
bundled in shawls.
The Audience at the Symphony

These souls,
like living fish thrown back into a sea,

are vanishing in the depths
where they are safe.
400
The Nation
Contemporary American
[Vol. 112, No. 2906
Novelists
By CARL VAN DOREN

( III} THEODORE DREISER
MUCH conrerned about wisdom as Theodore Dreiser
is, he almost wholly lacks the dexterous knowingness which has marked the mass of fiction in the age of
0. Henry. Not only has Mr. Dreiser never allowed any
one to make up his mind for him regarding the significance
and aims and obligations of mankind, but he has never
made up his mind himself. A large dubitancy colors all
his reflections. "All we know is that we cannot know."
The only law about which we can be reasonably certain is
the law of change. Justice is "an occasional compromise
struck in an eternal battle." Virtue and honesty are "a
system of weights and measures, balances struck between
man and man." Prudence no less than philosophy de
mands, then, that we hold ourselves constantly in readi
ness to discard our ancient creeds and habits and step
valiantly around the corner beyond which reality will have
drifted even while we were building our houses on what
seemed the primeval and eternal rock. Tides of change
rise from deeps below deeps; cosmic winds of change blow
upon us from boundless chaos; mountains, in the long geo
logic seasons, shift and flow like clouds ; and the everlasting
heavens may some day be shattered by the explosion or
pressure of new circumstances. Somewhere in the scheme
man stands punily on what may be an Ararat rising out
of the abyssor only a promontory of the moment sink
ing back again; there all his strength is devoted to a dim
struggle for survival. How in this flickering universe shall
man claim for himself the honors of any important an
tiquity or any important destiny? What, in this vast acci
dent, does human dignity amount to?
For a philosopher with views so wide it is difficult to be
a dramatist or a novelist. If he is consistent the most
portentous human tragedy must seem to him only a tiny
gasp for breath, the most delightful human comedy only
a tiny flutter of joy. Against a background of suns dying
on the other side of Aldebaran, any mole trodden upon
by some casual hoof may appear as significant a personage
as an Oedipus or a Lear in his last agony. To be a novelist
or dramatist at all, such a cosmic philosopher must contract
his vision to the little island we inhabit, must adjust his
interest to mortal proportions and concerns, must match
his narrative to the scale by which we ordinarily measure
our lives. The muddle of elements so often obvious in Mr.
Dreiser's work comes from the conflict within him of huge,
expansive moods and a conscience working hard to be ac
curate in its representation of the most honest facts of
manners and character. Granted, he might reasonably
argue, that the plight and stature of all mankind are essen
tially so mean, the novelist need not seriously bother him
self with the task of looking about for its heroic figures.
Plain stories of plain people are as valuable as any others.
Since all larger doctrines and ideals are likely to be false
in a precarious world, it is best to stick as close as possible
to the individual. When the individual is sincere he has
at least some positive attributes; his record may have a
genuine significance for others if it is presented with
absolute candor. Indeed, we can partially escape from the
general meaninglessness of life at large by being or study
ing individuals who are sincere, and who are therefore

the origins and centers of some kind of reality.
That the sincerity which Mr. Dreiser practices differs
in some respects from that of any other American novel
ist, no matter how truthful, must be referred to one special
quality of his own temperament. Historically he has his
fellows: he belongs with the movement toward naturalism
which came to America in the nineties, when Hamlin Gar
land and Stephen Crane and Frank Norris, partly as a
protest against the bland realism which Howells expounded,
were dissenting in their various dialects from the reti
cences and the romances then current. Personally Mr.
Dreiser displays, almost alone among American novelists,
the characteristics of what for lack of a better native term
we have to call the peasant typethe type to which Gorki
belongs and which Tolstoy wanted to belong to. Enlarged
by genius though Mr. Dreiser is; open as he is to all man
ner of novel sensations and ideas; little as he is bound by
the rigor of village habits and prejudicesstill lie carries
wherever he goes the true peasant simplicity of outlook,
speaks with the peasant's bald frankness, and suffers a
peasant confusion in the face of complexity. How far he
sees life on one simple plane may be illustrated by his short
story "When the Old Century was New," an attempt to
reconstruct in fiction the New York of 1801 which shows
him, in spite of some deliberate erudition, to be amazingly
unable to feel at home in another age than his own. This
same simplicity of outlook makes "A Traveler at Forty"
so revealing a document, makes the Traveler appear a true
Innocent Abroad without the hilarious and shrewd selfsufficiency of a frontiersman of genius like Mark Twain.
While it is true that Mr. Dreiser's plain-speaking on a
variety of topics euphemized by earlier American realists
has about it some look of conscious intention, and is un
doubtedly sustained by his literary principles, still his can
dor essentially inheres in his nature: he thinks in blunt
terms before he speaks in them. He speaks bluntly even
upon the more subtle and intricate themesfinance and
sex and artwhich interest him above all others.
On the whole he probably succeeds best with finance.
The career of Cowperwood in "The Financier" and "The
Titan," a career notoriously based upon that of Charles
T. Yerkes, allowed Mr. Dreiser to exercise his virtue of
patient industry and to build up a solid monument of fact
which, though often dull enough, nevertheless continues
generally to convince, at least in respect to Cowperwood's
business enterprises. The American financier, after all, has
rarely had much subtlety in his makeup. Single-minded,
tough-skinned, ruthless, "suggesting a power which invents
man for one purpose and no other, as generals, saints, and
the like are invented," he shoulders and hurls his bulk
through a sea of troubles and carries off his spoils. Such"
a man as Frank Cowperwood Mr. Dreiser understands.
He understands the march of desire to its goal. He seems
always to have been curious regarding the large operations
of finance, at once stirred on his poetical side by the in
toxication of golden dreams, something as Marlowe was in
"The Jew of Malta," and on his cynical side struck by the
mechanism of craft and courage and indomitable impulse
March 16, 1921]
The Nation
which the financier employs. Mr. Dreiser writes, it is

true, as an outsider; he simplifies the account of Cowperwood's adventures after wealth, touching the record here
and there with the naive hand of a peasanteven though a
peasant of geniuswondering how great riches are actually
obtained and guessing somewhat awkwardly at the mystery.
And yet these guesses come nearer to the truth than they
might have come were either the typical financier or Mr.
Dreiser more subtle. You cannot set a poet to catch a
financier and be at all sure of the prize. As it is, this
Trilogy of Desire (never completed in the third part which
was to show Cowperwood extending his mighty foray into
London) is as considerable an epic as American business
has yet to show.
Cowperwood's lighter hours are devoted to pursuits al
most as polygamous as those of the leader of some fourfooted herd. In this respect the novels which celebrate
him stand close to the more popular "Sister Carrie" and
"Jennie Gerhardt," both of them annals of women who fall
as easily as Cowperwood's many mistresses into the hand
of the conquering male. If Mr. Dreiser refuses to withhold
his approbation from the lawless financier, he withholds
it even less from the lawless lover. No moralism overlays
the biology of these novels. Sex in them is a free-flowing,
expanding energy, working resistlessly through all human
tissue, knowing in itself neither good nor evil, habitually
at war with the rules and taboos which have been devised
by mankind to hold its amative impulses within convenient
bounds. To the cosmic philosopher what does it matter
whether this or that human male mates with this or that
human female, or whether the mating endures beyond the
passionate moment? Viewing such matters thus Mr.
Dreiser constantly underestimates the forces which in civil
society actually do restrain the expansive moods of sex.
At least he chooses to represent love almost always in its
vagrant hours. For this his favorite situation is in large
part responsible: that of a strong man no longer gener
ously young, loving downward to some plastic, ignorant girl
dazzled by his splendor and immediately compliant to his
advances. Mr. Dreiser is obsessed by the spectacle of
middle age renewing itself at the fires of youthan obses
sion which has its sentimental no less than its naturalistic
traits. What he most conspicuously leaves out of account
is the will and personality of women, whom he sees, or at
least represents, with hardly any exceptions as mere fools
of love, mere wax to the wooer, who have no separate identi
ties till some lover shapes them. To something like this
simplicity the role of women in love is reduced by those
Boccaccian fabulists who adorn the village taproom and
the corner grocery.
Mr. Dreiser is reported to consider "The 'Genius,' " a
massive, muddy, powerful narrative, his greatest novel,
though as a matter of fact it cannot be compared with "Sis
ter Carrie" for insight or accuracy or charm. His partiality
may perhaps be ascribed to his strong inclination toward
the life of art, through which his 'Genius' moves, half hero
and half picaro. Witla remains mediocre enough in all but
his sexual unscrupulousness, but he is impelled by a driving
force more or less like those forces which impel Cowper
wood. The will to wealth, the will to love, the will to art!
Mr. Dreiser conceives them all as blind energies with no
goal except self-realization. So conceiving them he tends
to see them as less conditioned than they ordinarily are in
their earthly progress by the resistance of statute and
401
habit. Particularly is this true of his representation of the

careers of artists. Carrie becomes a noted actress in a few
short weeks ; Witla almost as rapidly becomes a noted illus
trator ; other minor characters here and there in the novels
are said to have prodigious power without exhibiting it.
Hardly ever does there appear any delicate, convincing an
alysis of the mysterious behavior of genius. Mr. Dreiser's
artists are hardly persons at all; they are creatures driven,
and the wonder lies primarily in the impelling energy. The
cosmic philosopher in him sees the beginning and end of the
artistic process better than the novelist in him sees its
methods. And the peasant in him, though it knows the
world of art as vivid and beautiful and though it has investi
gated that world at first hand, still leads him to report it in
terms often quaint, melodramatic, invincibly rural. Con
sider the hundreds, perhaps thousands of times, he calls
things "artistic."
Two of his latest books indicate the range of his gifts
and his excellences. In "Hey Rub-A-Dub-Dub," which he
calls "A Book of the Mystery and Wonder and Terror of
Life," he undertook to expound his general philosophy and
produced the most negligible of all his works. He has no
faculty for sustained argument. Like Byron, as soon as he
begins to reason, he is less than half himself. In "Twelve
Men," on the other hand, he displays the qualities by virtue
of which he attracts and deserves a serious attention.
Rarely generalizing, he portrays a dozen actual persons he
has known, all his honesty brought to the task of making his
account fit the reality exactly, and all his large tolerance
exercised to present the truth without malice or excuses.
Here lies the field of his finest victories, here and in those
adjacent tracts of other books which are nearest this simple
method: his representation of old Gerhardt and of Aaron
Berchansky in "The Hand of the Potter" ; numerous sketches
of character in "A Hoosier Holiday" ; the tenderly conceived
record of Caroline Meeber, wispy and witless as she often
is; the masterly study of Hurstwood's deteriorationthis
last the peak among all Mr. Dreiser's successes. ( Not the
incurable awkwardness of his style nor his occasional merci
less verbosity nor his too frequent interposition of crude
argument can destroy the effect which he produces at his
bestthat of a noble spirit brooding over a world which in
spite of many condemnations he deeply, somberly loves.
Something peasantlike in his genius may blind him a little
to the finer shades of character and set him astray in his
reports of cultivated society. His conscience about telling
the plain truth may suffer at times from a dogmatic toler
ance which refuses to draw lines between good and evil or
between beautiful and ugly or between wise and foolish. But
he gains, on the whole, more than he loses by the magnitude
of his cosmic philosophizing. These puny souls over which
he broods, with so little dignity in themselves, take on a
dignity from his contemplation of them. Small as they are,
he has come to them from long flights, and has brought back
a lifted vision which enriches his drab narratives. Some
thing spacious, something now lurid now luminous, sur
rounds them. | From somewhere sound accents of an author
ity not sufficiently explained by the mere accuracy of his
versions of life. Though it may indeed be difficult for a
thinker of the widest views to contract himself to the
dimensions needed for realistic art, and though he may often
fail when he attempts it, when he does succeed he has the
opportunity, which the mere worldling lacks, of ennobling
his art with some of the great light of the poets,
The Nation
402
[Vol. 112, No. 2906
to the custody of the child against all persons, including the

mother, but the right to custody may be forfeited by misconduct
or lost by misfortune.
As a general principle, upon the separation of the husband
and wife, the father is entitled to the custody and control of
the minor children, because he is bound for their maintenance
Women and the Law

By SUES. WHITE
OURTS have been and still are distinctly masculine
and support.
institutions. They must become human institutions,

and they can do so only through the participation of women
in the administration and application of the law. This is
just as important as the rewriting of laws to wipe out the
technical discriminations against women.
Perhaps it is
more important. Women should be encouraged to enter the

legal profession and to sit as judges and jurors. Until
they are fairly represented throughout the entire structure
of the law the chances are that they will never receive justice
in the courts.
The operation of the Federal suffrage amendment has

made eligible for jury service the women of a number of
States who were formerly disqualified by the use of the
words voter or elector as the primary qualifying terms.
In at least one of these States, Iowa, it is reported that an
extremely cautious jury commission resolved to give the
women a year's immunity in which to render themselves
competent for jury service. In other States, such as
Florida, Minnesota, and Maryland, the word male is used
as the primary qualifying term. In Georgia there is a
general statute providing that women may not perform any
civil function unless especially authorized by law, and in
other States, where they are qualified for jury duty by the
suffrage amendment as electors, such as Texas, Massachu
setts, and Delaware, the courts have not yet acknowledged

women's eligibility as jurors.
In the law itself, apart from its interpretation, discrim

inations against women still exist as relics of the common
law which has been patched up here and there by statutes.

It is unnecessary to go into details. A few examples will
To entitle a wife separated from her husband to the custody

of her children, it is not enough to show that he is occasionally
drunk, though not so as to interfere with his business.
Even as between the father and mother, the right to the

custody of their child is generally in the former, unless the child,
on account of tender years, or being a female, imperatively re
quires for its well-being that attention which a mother's love

and care can alone supply.
There is a general impression that the married women's

acts have removed all inequality as to property. This is
not true. Mere separate property laws do not contemplate
any recognition of the wife's contribution to the economic
standing of the family through her labor in the home.
Usually, where separate property laws are in effect, they
mean little if anything for the wife, unless through inherit
ance from her family or by work outside of the home she
acquires something which she may hold as a separate estate.
In Florida, she may have her separate estate, but it remains
in the care and management of the husband. Such
statutes are always strictly construed, and mean no more
than they say by strict technical interpretation. Georgia
has a separate property law, yet the earnings of the wife

belong to the husband, unless there is express or implied
consent on his part that they shall be retained by her.
As to eligibility for office, the qualifying word male will

have to be removed from the statute book in many States.
Georgia's comprehensive prohibitive statute against women
holding any civil office or performing any civil functions
unless specially authorized by law excludes from its opera

tion only a few minor offices.
An instance of legal discrimination in grounds for divorce

suffice.
It is a fundamental rule of law that the husband has the
right to fix the place of abode, implied from his duty to

provide a home. Unfortunately, while the implication often
fails, the fundamental rule prevails. As a Georgia court
is found in Kentucky. One of the causes of divorce allowed
the husband is adultery by the wife, or such lewd, lasciv

ious behavior on her part as proves her to be unchaste, with
held: The house in which the husband and wife live is the
out actual proof of an act of adultery. There is no corre

sponding ground for divorce to the wife; but one of the
house of the husband, though the wife pays the rent and
grounds for divorce to the party not in fault is living in
supports the husband. In California, where there is an

express statutory provision that for the purposes of voting
the residence of the husband is the residence of the wife,
the wife must support the husband out of her separate prop
adultery with another man or woman.
erty if he has not deserted her, or if he has no
Separate
property and is unable by reason of infirmity to support

himself. The result is that such a husband, supported by
the wife, would be the head of the house. This rule applies
not only to the wife but also to the residence of the child,
and may
affect the rights of inheritance and Succession,
which vary in the different States. It underlies the Federal
The result of this
provision is that one act of adultery by the wife is ground

for divorce by the husband, but one such act by the husband
is not ground for divorce by the wife. Again, a cause for
divorce to the husband is where the wife is pregnant by
another man without the husband's knowledge at the time
of the marriage. There is no provision giving the wife a

divorce if the husband is proved to be the father of an
illegitimate child without the wife's knowledge at the time
of his marriage.
Such instances only suggest the extent of the legal dis

From the man
statute expatriating American women who marry foreigners.
abilities still affecting American women.
It constitutes the wife a deserter within the meaning of
who is made by the law responsible for his wife's debts, even
though she may be in business for herself, to the woman
who is allowed no control of her own earnings, everyone is
the divorce laws if she refuses to live in the home which

the husband selects.
Most of the States have equal guardianship laws, but in

interpreting such laws, the courts recognize the common
law rule that the father is the natural guardian of the child
and has the preferential right to control its estate and per
son. The following decisions are typical:
The father is head of the family and is
prima facie entitled
concerned with these glaring injustices.
Their abolition is
the next step in the fight for women's equality. And this
task the National Woman's Party, which has played so im
portant a part in demanding and securing the passage of the
Nineteenth Amendment, is determined to carry through to
the finish.
March 16, 1921]
Why the
The Nation
Sherman Anti-Trust Law
403
Has
Failed
By GILSON GARDNER
ANTI-TRUST laws do not prevent or reform trusts.
Twenty years of futile and expensive litigation has
proved this. It is the testimony of the Federal Trade Com
mission that trusts are bigger, more inclusive, and more
tyrannical than ever. William B. Colver, when a member
of the Commission, said graphically that the trust of today
is to that of the old days when there was an outcry against
Standard Oil and the Beef Trust as the modern highpowered automobile is to the old one-lunged horseless wagon
of ten years ago.
Formerly trusts combined the production of some one
commodity. Nowadays the trust combines, in addition,
competing, or possibly competing, commodities. By owner
ship, interlocking directorates, secret and public agreements
trusts monopolize the production and sale of hundreds of
commodities as diverse in character as a can of beef and
a volume of Ibsen. According to their own catalogues the
meat packers, for instance, deal in no less than 483 distinct
commodities, their activities ranging from owning banks
to making buttons.
And what about the Sherman law? And the Federal
Trade law and the Clayton law? And what about the de
cisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the
Standard Oil case, and the Tobacco case, and the Northern
Securities case? Are laws and Supreme Court decisions
of no avail?
They are of no avail. Look them over. About seventeen
years ago there occurred that great "victory" over those
who would bring the principle of combination into the rail
way business. Under President Roosevelt, Philander Knox
as Attorney General won the Northern Securities case. The
wicked trust-makers were wiping out competition between
the two leading railway systems of the Northwest, and the
Government enjoined them under the Sherman law. But
the real unification of the two railway systems was accom
plished by joint ownership secured through a bond issue
underlying both properties. In the court's decree this bond
issue was not disturbed and competition between the two
railway systems never was restored.
After the Government's "victory" over the Standard Oil
Trust the owners of Standard stock received a collection
of stock certificates of different shades, representing their
ownership in the component parts of the Standard Company,
and they went on drawing the same dividends, and the man
agers went on with the same management as before. The
value of the securities as listed on the stock exchange at
once went up and the cost of products to the consumer did
the same. The Supreme Court decision against the To
bacco Trust was substantially the same as in the Standard
Oil case and the consequences were the same. The under
lying ownership which is the basis of control was not dis
turbed, and the court made no effort to disturb it. Many
years ago Congress passed a law that railroads should not
own or operate coal properties. In the Reading case the
Supreme Court reversed that act and there has never been
any pretense at separation of mining properties and the
carrying companies which make possible price control and
monopoly. In the Steel Trust case the Supreme Court an
nounced a "rule of reason" to the effect that efficiency and
economy are served by certain of the largest and best

trusts and that the court would therefore put its judgment
against the letter of the law and refuse to interfere. The
experience of the Beef Trust with the so-called Anti-Trust
law are ludicrous. First there was the effort of Attorney
General Moody, of the Roosevelt administration, to bring
the Beef Trust to law. But the Commissioner of Corpora
tions or somebody had inadvertently given the trust gentle
men an "immunity bath" by investigating them; so the
prosecution fell to the ground, amid cheers and jeers.
Early in the Wilson administration the Federal Trade
Commission started an inquiry into Beef Trust methods,
presumably to see if the packers were practicing only "fair"
competition. The only effect of this has been to bring the
thumbs of the packer gentlemen to their noses and to unite
them in a sort of Indian war dance around the Federal
Trade Commission, their publicity agents beating the tom
toms and their advertising agents piling on the faggots.
Meantime Attorney General Mitchell Palmer, instead of
going through the customary motions of enforcing the Sher
man law, puts himself in the position of government fixer
for the packers, and amiably shows them how to avoid
further trouble at his hands. Which species of activity
under the old English law, when applied to serious offenses,
was called "compounding a felony" and was itself made
felonious.
If there are any other efforts which the Government has
made to "enforce" the Sherman law they might be cited to
the same conclusion, namely, that the law has accomplished
nothing but expensive and futile litigation. Trusts have
not been abolished or curbed. The size of holding corpora
tions has not been reduced. No regulative control has been
applied, and the cost of the product to consumer has not
been lessened. Why? Are our courts and government offi
cials so corrupt that a law drawn in the interest of the
people cannot be enforced ? Or is the trouble with the law ?
The trouble is undoubtedly with the law. The Sherman
law is the product of an unsound economic theory. It is
based on the assumption that a statute law can be enforced
against an economic lawthe theory that a government
edict can determine the price of bread. That this cannot
be done was learned at the outbreak of the French Revolu
tion. And it has been demonstrated over and over again
in every country of the world affected by the late war.
Even in the famine-ridden Central Powers countries there
has never been a day when money would not buy food; nor
a day when governments could force a single price for food.
Competition and the law of supply and demand are always
superior to a government edict.
"Conspiracy" in restraint of trade is what the Sherman
Act talks about. "Every contract, combination in the form
of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy in restraint of trade
is hereby declared to be illegal." Could any court enforce
such a law if it wanted to? Suppose Mr. Swift calls Mr.
Armour on his house phone at midnight and they agree to
support Mr. Cudahy in refraining from raising the price
of hogs on the following day, what is Mr. Justice White
going to do about it? Who is going to tap the wires to
get the evidence which will start a lawsuit to prevent a
404
The Nation
meeting of the minds of the five men engaged in the pack

ing industry? Illustrations might be multiplied indefinitely.
"Combination?" "Contract?" "Conspiracy?" No statute
can prevent them. Probably no statute can punish them.
A secret business agreement is a thing beyond the law.
"In restraint of trade" is what the law talks about. The
wiping out of competition is what the legislators had in
mind. Agreements and conspiracies wipe out competition.
The wiping out of competition results in higher prices or
poorer service. What the act aimed to get was lower prices
and better service, and these things it was hoped to get by
restoring healthy competition. But these gentlemen went
at it with the idea that a statute could make men compete
who found it to their commercial interest not to compete.
The law says to the Steel Trust gentlemen, "You must cut
one another's throats. You must underbid and slash prices,
in order that the consuming public may get cheaper steel.
You must not meet in Gary dinners. And you Beef Packers,
you must not use the telephone between each other's houses.
You must not consult the same attorney. You must not
own the same refrigerator cars. You must regard one
another as commercial prey and prey on one another and
not on the public." The Sherman law is silly. It was con
ceived in economic ignorance and brought forth an economic
fallacy.
One element in trust control the law and courts could
control, to a certain extent, namely, ownership. But except
in the case of land and material things like refrigerator
cars, railroads, and manufacturing plants even that control
would be difficult. But with these the legislators have not
wished to interfere. Even the ownership through stock
companies is permitted practically without limit.
Is there then no way to "curb the rapacity of trusts"?
During the late war the governments of the world found
a way. But it was not by edicts against agreements. It
was a very simple way. For example, when they wished
to curb the effect of undue competition among purchasers
of wheat, they created a "revolving fund" and became buyers
and sellers of wheat. England became the "owner" of every
bushel of wheat which entered her empire. The United
States through the Sugar Board became the principal owner
and the chief buyer and seller of sugar in the United States.
The Government went into the field of capital and through
the War Finance Corporation became a source of supply of
capital to those who needed it, competing thus with the too
timid or too monopolistic private capital. Competition was
restored by competition. When necessary, Government
competition was put up against private competition, and the
result was more reasonable prices.
If the forty-eight States should take it into their heads
to set up public abattoirs for the killing of their State
flocks and herds the competition might be salutary to the
Big Five. It would, at least, be more effective as a remedy
against monopoly than Mr. Sherman's "thou shalt nots."
Or, if the Federal Government should become so war-social
istic as to set up regional stock yards where the com
mercial demand seemed to need them, the next time a war
occurred the packers might be less flagrant profiteers. If
the Government should decreeby a tax law or otherwise
that no mining lands should be held out of use metal
products might become more abundant and cheap. If ware
houses and other strategic terminal facilities were freed
from private exploitation and treated as public utilities
under public ownership and management, the effects would
[Vol. 112, No. 2906
be quite different from those produced by the Sherman

law.
It may be that our trusts should not be interfered with.
It may be that the laissez-faire plan is the best that can be
devised, and that any effort to protect the many against the
few who are strong or cunning is a waste of effort. That,
of course, is a question to be debated and settled quite apart
from the problem of how the thing might be done. But
admitting a desire to do something the roads are open in
several directions.
The Federal Trade Commission was a new experiment in
the attempt at restoring competition. It has to do with
"unfair" competition. Competitive practices which are un
fair come under the ban of this new law. Commercial
bribery, spying, egregious misrepresentation and bludgeonry
are the things which interest the Federal Trade Commis
sion.
Not officially, of course, but in practice, this Commission
concerns itself only with middle-sized business. The unfair
competition of the many-languaged immigrants for a chance
to live on a plane of bare subsistence does not interest the
Federal Trade Commission. Neither does the competition
of the Brindell building trade combine in New York or the
Steel Trust, or the Harvester Trust, or the Fertilizer Trust,
or any other of the big trusts. But when the middle-sized
varnish makers or twine makers or stationery makers get
to roughing it too hard they are called in, given a lecture,
and told to cut out the rowdy stuff. And this they are
generally glad to do. Competition among the middle-sized
economic personages is like the exhibition wrestling match
at the country fair. It is vigorous and earnest so far as it
goes; but there are rules. Biting and gouging are barred.
In the competition among the economic giants commercial
assassination is the regular order of the day and starvation
by Russian blockade is a conventional method.
In these days when it is very much the thing to make
"surveys" of social and industrial conditions it might be
informing to have a survey of competition. What is the
condition of competition today in the industrial world?
Where does it flourish most healthily? Where is there
least competition? Where most? What is the result where
competition is bitter and what is the result where it is least
bitter? Is competition the life of trade, or isn't it? And
who made that profound statement anyway? If competi
tion is good how much of it is good and when does it be
come bad?
The Federal Trade Commission says the modern Trust
presents a problem which Congress and the courts have not
even considered. Isn't it about time to begin to con
sider it?
Contributors
Lincoln Colcord is an American journalist and a fre
quent contributor to The Nation.
Sue S. White, chairman of the Tennessee branch of the
National Woman's Party, is a member of the national
council of the new organization of the National
Woman's Party.
Gilson Gardner has been a Washington correspondent
for twenty-five years ; for the last sixteen for the News
paper Enterprise Association.
P. D. Murphy is an Irishman, formerly a journalist in
London, and now a resident of New York.
March 16, 1921]
The Nation
In the Driftway
THE Drifter turned into Fifth Avenue and walked north
slowly. Life was exceedingly difficult; the famine in
China grew apace; President Harding's cabinet was depress
ing; and another war seemed sickeningly imminent. He
passed people who seemed not even to know of these things
happy, laughing people, thoughtful people, dull and stupidlooking peopleand this was still more depressing. He re
solved to keep his eyes glued to the sidewalk which was
properly gray and hard and dusty. Perhaps it was some
strange and sudden sound, or the flash of color from a
woman's hat, that made him turn his head. What was his
astonishment to see at his side a slender youth with steady
eyes and an incredibly quick and lithe stepand not one
stitch of clothing to cover his nakedness! The Drifter
gasped and looked quickly about him, but no one seemed to
notice this unconventional and totally unclad being treading
the streets in broad daylight. No policeman rushed out of
the nearest building with a blanket. People walked quietly
or noisily about their business as ifthe Drifter passed a
dazed hand across his eyesas if the figure were invisible.
*****
"I X 7 HO are you?" the Drifter dared to whisper to the
V V stranger. The youth smiled again. "I am Spring,"
he said quietly. "Look up. Is not the sky a new and clearer
shade of blue? Smell the air. Has it not a freshness that
you have not known for a year? I did that. The earth is
waking; I come even here." It was undeniably so, even on
Fifth Avenue; across the street the Drifter saw an Italian
with a tray of crocuses and pansies, even delicate pink
anemones. But he refused to be heartened. "How can you
come back to so sad a world?" he said. Spring nodded.
"I know," he replied. "You would think that. Man animals
are very stupid. They howl and fight over a bone all year
round. But I come just the same. And the grass grows,
and trees bud, and flowers open, and even the sea becomes
warm and mellow and curves more tenderly about the sand.
But the heart of man is still locked in the cave of winter.
He refuses to roll joyously upon the earth. It is seldom that
he even sees me. But I do not despair. Some day" His
voice died away, and as the Drifter started eagerly to reply
the youth vanished. He rubbed his eyes again. Had it all
been a dream? But no, there was the blue sky and the
fresh, clean-smelling air, and the Italian selling crocuses.
He found himself walking with a quicker step and keeping
his eyes not on the gray, hard, and dusty sidewalks, but on
the strip of blue that showed between the buildings and a
white cloud that sailed across from roof to roof.
The Drifter
Correspondence
Tariff Comment
Sir : Like most boys and girls of Yankee stock I was brought
up to regard begging and borrowing as shameful. What is a
protective tariff except a vast and hideous system of borrowing
so managed that it is, in last analysis, nothing but sheer rob
bery? A comparatively small proportion of the citizens of the
United States, through subservient Representatives in Congress,
extort from all the inhabitants a tax equivalent to the difference
405
between the prices of all articles wherever produced that would

naturally find a market here and the prices artificially aug
mented by the tariff.
If I prefer to use for shaving the Euxesis of the worthy
Widow of A. S. Lloyd of Londonwhich together with its comi
cal label in decent English and French of Stratford-atte-Bowe,
at the rate of three tubes for a dollarI must now, in order to
help some American manufacturer, whom I never saw and do
not know, but undoubtedly a millionaire with a limousine, pay
twice or three times as much for an inferior article or for the
English product. I object to having even my American neighbor
extract from me that small sum. Ex uno disce omnes. This
Robin Hood borrowing is a disgrace; it is immoral; it comes
near being a crime; and those that participate in its stolen
fruits are smutched by it, and all of us who permit it without
protest are to that extent guilty.
Any kind of borrowing or stealing is bad enough, but en
forced tribute is unpardonable.
Boston, February 26
Nathan Haskell Dole
Gopher Prairie College

Sir: One of the things I have against Sinclair Lewis is that
he made Gopher Prairieism so hard to say. One just must say
it. Occasions arise which make it imperative to say it. And
now to the grief of one of these occasions I have to add the
sorrow of using this awkwardest new word of the decade. This
grief of mine is real. I write to you not to be smart about it,
but because I smart on account of it. The grief is that I have
discovered Gopher Prairie College and that she is my own
beloved alma mater. To me, remote from her for many years,
she was and yet remains in heart and mind cherished and
wrapped up in dreams of her. Dreams of her splendid purity.
Of her love and hospitality to truth from whatsoever quarter.
Of her fine pointing to the stars. Dreams of the dreams she
gave to me in youth. Of her uncontamination. Of her sureness, of her serenity. And of the day when I should return to
her, as a pilgrim who goes to worship, there in her cool, friendly
halls to purify myself and catch again an echo of those young
dreams.
But now! Now I feel the pain of a son who has caught his
mother in immorality. That it is but an academic mother does
not change the quality of the pain.
The frank confession of her sin is here in a beautiful booklet
that lies before me. For Alma Mater is out for Two Million
and, to get it, I am sure she has pawned her soul to an ad writer.
I cannot think that she did this thing herself. On the cover,
under dear and beautiful old Center Hall, stand these brazen
wordsPure American. And within these things follow:
This part of the State is inhabited almost exclusively by people
of old American ancestry. The College has its being, therefore,
in an atmosphere saturated with ideas and habits of thought
which are distinctly and purely American. In a time of uncer
tain leadership and confusing utterances, it is important that
young men should be educated in an atmosphere of real loyalty.
The College is not ashamed of being old-fashioned enough to
believe in the United States and the form of government which
has stood the test of nearly a century and a half. . . . Stu
dents are taught that they are a part of the national structure,
and loyalty to country is a cardinal virtue. . . . Without
casting the least reflection on the policy of co-education, the
College is and expects to remain a college for men only.
Our beloved Alma Mater was founded by men of deep and
abiding faith. God forbid that we should depart from the
essential features of their teaching in this respect.
Unless the religious atmosphere of the College is maintained,
they fought poverty and malaria in vain. . . . American
History and Polity are taught with completeness and power so
that our young men shall not only be informed in the details
of the romantic story of the nation, but shall also learn to re
spect and love its government and Institutions. . . . If we
[Vol. 112, No. 2906
The Nation
406
were asking for a penny to add to our curriculum imitation

research, or any other side show whatsoever for advertising
purposes, then we ought not to receive the penny. . . . The
College has no dogma to defend. No restraint has ever been
or will ever be placed upon freedom of thought. [Would an
interlinear "pony" add "if unexpressed"?] However, certain
beliefs which may be outlined as follows have been woven into
the fabric of the College: the religion of Christ is the only
satisfactory solution of individual and social problems. Politi
cal and economic changes must come by way of evolution, not
revolution. As a people, we must abide by the great AngloSaxon tradition in matters of government Hence, radical social
ism and communism are heresies which must be fought and
destroyed. If we need a new political creed, we shall make
one. We shall not need to go to the haunts of German socialism
or to the steppes of Russia for models or materials.
These are the closing words, and one wonders why they ever
went as far as the stony hills of Samaria for anything; for
"materials" now so perverted. But one thing seems sure. They
will not have to go that far for the Two Million. If a "creed"
like this will not get it4 what will? And under which glorious
tree, I wonder, of that fine old campus shall I find, when at last
I do go back, the Golden Calf set up?
C. G. J.
Views of Verse
Sir: Please accept my most earnest congratulations on the
two prize poemsPrelude: When the Dead Awaken, by James
Rorty, and May Jones Takes the Air, by Roy Helton. These
poems should receive not only prizes, but praises of every
exhilarating variety.
Springfield, 111., February H
Vachel Lindsay
Sir: I asked, at the proper time, a poet, who is also a friend
of mine, why he was not going to make "a try" for The Nation
poetry prize. "Oh," he said, as I see now clairvoyantly, "be
cause of the award!" I was a little puzzled; but waited pa
tiently till the issue of February 9, and then read the following
lines of the joint prize winner:
And two of them are happy-drunk, and they sit in the street
with mud on their uniforms that was never there before;
And one of them gets down on his hands and knees like a sev
enty-flve, and barks:
Blah! . . . Blah! . . . Blah-blah! And the other squats
down opposite him in the mud. . . .
Don't you think that he, being a poet, was justified in "stay
ing out"? Were Mark Antony still living, I imagine he would
apply his famous comment on judgment and reason to other
things than merely the murder of Caesar.
William8port, Pa., February 11 0. R. Howard Thompson
The Pedestal of Principle

Sir: I have just read your comment (page 326, March 2)
on the Kansas prosecution of Alexander Howat. You say that
to imprison Howat "sets him on a pedestal and increases his
influence."
You do not get the Western viewpoint. Alexander Howat is
looked upon by the people and courts of Kansas as a lawbreaker.
Does it put an automobile thief or highway robber on a pedestal
to arrest and imprison him for breaking the law? If Howat
has violated the Kansas laws he will surely pay the penalty,
and whether he likes the laws of Kansas or not he would do
better to obey them while he is in the State or else seek more
congenial surroundings.
Kansas City, March 2
HOMER REED
Blind Gentians
By ABBIE HUSTON EVANS
I saw them under the tree and angrily cried
"It is against nature thus to be denied!"
I saw blind buds that God made grow,
Never to do as flowers do, never to blow.
Bees fumbled at them. (God, I sweat to think
What bitterness may be for me to drink!)
Bees fumbled at them by the linden tree.
(What can happen to a flower can happen to me!)
Books
Feminism Good, Bad, and Indifferent
Taboo and Genetics. By M. M. Knight, Iva Lowther Peters,
Phyllis Blanchard. Moffat, Yard and Company.
Foundations of Feminism. By Avrom Barnett. Robert M. McBride and Company.
The Passionate Spectator. By Jane Burr. Thomas Seltzer.
rT,HE whole woman question has derived new interest and
* increased prestige from the success of woman suffrage.
The sudden release of the franchise has acted like a magical
ice-breaker which makes self-expression easily and riotously
possible. Fresh protagonists of feminism rise up daily in un
expected quarters and new converts from both sexes are mo
mentarily added. Enthusiasm abounds, but too rarely is it
tempered by discipline. Here is a man who rationalizes his
uxorious disposition and calls it feminism, and here is a woman
who rationalizes her native self-indulgence and calls that
feminism. To add to the general vagueness and confusion,
we have Mr. W. L. George proclaiming himself before an inter
national public as a Feminist with a capital F, while Charlotte
Perkins Gilman responds but coldly to the title with or without
the capital. The situation is certainly bewildering.
A book like "Taboo and Genetics" appears like a clean and
clarifying Gulf Stream cleaving the turgid waters. It should
be widely and studiously read by women. The authors have
combined three studies of the foundation of the family, writ
ing from the respective standpoints of biology, sociology, and
psychology. The biologist leads off, reassuring us at the start
with the statement that "it is time to abandon the notion that
biology prescribes in detail how we shall run society," and
furthermore that "we must stop trying to apply the sex-ways
of birds, spiders, or even cows (which are at least mammals)
to human society, which is not made up of any of these." One
is willing to trust one's self to a biologist like this. Having
thus put the science in its place, the author proceeds to make
it very interesting and relevant. The latest theory about the
determination of sex and the still later experiments in con
verting individuals of one sex into individuals of the other
are briefly outlined. Lester Ward is tenderly laid on the shelf
to make way for the English gynecologist, Dr. Blair Bell, and
the German surgeon, Dr. Eugen Steinach. These two authori
ties have produced surgical evidence on the bisexuality of the
normal human being which dramatically corroborates the theory
of laboratory biology that a genetic basis for both sexes exists
in each individual. Maleness and femaleness are a question of
developmental emphasis, it would appear. If you would take
a Moll Flanders early enoughthough it would have to be
very early indeedyou could convert her into a Beau
Brummel. From the earliest cell-beginnings, maleness and
femaleness go together. This is why the stately priority of the
March 16, 1921]
The Nation
female element in life, so widely celebrated in the good old

days of Lester Ward, is no longer acceptable.
It is rather surprising to find the author advocating, as the
practical conclusion of these theories, a rigid three-child system
for the family. "It would seem socially expedient to encour
age each woman to have her own three children, instead of
shifting the burden upon the shoulders of some other." "For
each one . . . who has no children, some other woman
must have six instead of three." Why shouldn't some women
have six, and some have three, and some have none, especially
if individual women have varying degrees of femaleness as has
been maintained in the preceding 125 pages? Possibly the
author means by this categorical arrangement to counteract the
kind of insect-sociology which has led to the idea of a special
group of females set aside exclusively for breeding. If so,
the intention deserves to prosper. But this whole section,
which otherwise deals most intelligently with the subject of
birth control, seems to consider maternity too much as a matter
of social coercion and too little as a matter of invincible impulse.
The sociologist contributes a study of the institutionalized
sex-taboo. Some interesting pages are devoted to the witch,
her origin and nature, and to the sex-antagonism of the Church
Fathers which culminated in the witchcraft persecutions. The
author agrees with Ellen Key that Christianity did not in
point of fact greatly improve the position of women. Through
the doctrines of Christianity "man's fear of woman found a
frantic and absurd expression in her supposed devil-worship.
As a result, the superstitions about witchcraft became for cen
turies not only a craze, but a theory held by intelligent peo
ple." At the opposite pole from the persecution of the witch
was the worship of the Virgin Mother, who became the legiti
mate patroness of the medieval Lady and of her nineteenth
century successor, the Model Woman. "The characteristics of
the Model Woman must approximate those of the Holy Virgin
as closely as possible. Her chastity before marriage is im
perative. Her calling must be the high art of motherhood.
She must be the incarnation of the maternal spirit of woman,
but her purity must remain unsullied by any trace of erotic
passion." The natural result of this teaching is the double
standard, which brings in its train prostitution, venereal dis
ease, and frigid wifehood. In the face of such facts, the brave
words of the author deserve to be echoed: "If it be true that
the only solution for the double standard whose evils show
most plainly here is a new single standard, which has not yet
been found, then it is high time that we find what the standard
is to be, for the sake of the future."
The final section of the volume deals . with the psychology
of the sex-problem. The theories of Watson, Adler, Kempf,
Hinkle, and others are applied to the question. Many points
of the discussion hinge on principles of Freudian psychology,
but the name of Freud does not appear in the text or in the
bibliography. The omission seems especially striking, for in
stance, on page 255, where an explanation of the Oedipus com
plex occurs without any indication of its original source. The
unwary and uninitiated reader might easily be led to attribute
the Oedipus complex to an American author referred to in the
text. The same conspicuous absence is noticeable in connec
tion with other mention of distinctively Freudian ideas. To essay
to deal with the psychology of sex nowadays without mentioning
Freud is like trying to give "Hamlet" with Hamlet left out.
Mr. Avrom Barnett's "Foundation of Feminism" is built of
the same general plan as the preceding volume. The founda
tions are biological, psychological and physiological, and so
ciological. Most of the book is occupied with proving that
Lester Ward's gynecocentric theory of life has collapsed. So
far as I am concerned, I was convinced more thoroughly, ex
peditiously, and urbanely by the other book. The sarcasms
of this destroyer are rather heavy and are likely to miss fire.
He has read widely, but his interpretation of books and move
ments is not incisive or suggestive. "Whatever may be the
outcome," he says of the woman movement, "we may assure
407
ourselves of a new type of womanhood." Anything for a

change, so to speak. Most of us are adventurous enough to
feel that way about it, though we would like something a
little less vague and characterless than this pictured ideal:
"The new woman will first of all possess an intellect; she
may or may not retain the so-called graces; but she will be a
better mate, a more efficient mother, and a true, living, breath
ing, inspired, and aspiring individual."
"The Passionate Spectator" is currently supposed to be a
novel about feminism, though why I cannot guess, unless it is
because the heroine announces near the end of the story: "in
a luminous flash, I understood Bubbles [her sister] and femin
ism!" Judging from the circumstances preceding this flash,
her idea of feminism was a sort of compound of feminine Don
Juanism and sheer hedonism. To be sure, the heroine sup
ported herself for several years after she left her husband,
but it is hard to consider that as anything heroic in this day
and age. In the main she appears as a self-indulgent and
self-pitying woman who is betrayed by a series of faithless
men. She had the most lamentable luck with them. They be
trayed her for this and that, but chiefly to go off and marry
rich women. She ends by planning to deceive her husband,
who is the only decent man in the story, by making him be
lieve that the child that is coming is his. Her saintly aunt,
who is idealized all through the story for her philosophy and
humanity and is invariably referred to as "Sweet Aunt Caro
line," actually promotes this piece of infamy and gives it her
blessing. We are led to infer from the saintly aunt's confes
sions that she has practiced the same kind of deception on her
own husband. The curtain goes down on "Sweet Aunt Caro
line" saying to her niece: "The truth won't go in the regular
world" and "Women in their hearts have no respect for men."
These pronouncements represent the ethical heights to which
our heroine has been brought through years of disappointment
and conflict. In this cheap and futile cynicism her troubled
soul has come to rest.
If such novels are going to be multipliedand there will
probably be more of them, for the spirit of Mary MacLean is
again abroad in the landwe must learn to recognize crude
egoism when we see it and not confuse it with the ardent
longing within every human being for a personality and for
self-expression. We must furthermore learn to recognize it
as the natural over-compensation for the self-sacrificing and
self-immolating ideal of womanhood which has so long and
unremittingly dominated our literature. It is the tradition of
the Model Woman which at last drives a rebellious victim to
the point of "blowing up" in just this kind of novel.
Kathamne Anthony
Those Victorians
A Survey of EngliSh Literature, 18S0-1880. By Oliver Elton.
London: Edward Arnold. 2 vols. (Issued in the United States
by the Macmillan Company as Vols. Ill and IV of A Survey
of English Literature, 1780-1880.)
PROFESSOR ELTON brings to the task of surveying Vic
torian literature three qualifications that ordinarily flour
ish only in separate men: sound scholarship, wide sympathy,
and originality of judgment. Sound scholarship is shown in
the author's wide and thorough reading, in the all but total
absence of errors of fact, misquotation, and the like, and in the
justification offered for the choice of dates, 1830-1880. Catholic
sympathy is shown in the capacity to recognize the merits of
opposites, to respond to the achievements of both eighteenth
century reason and of romantic imagination, of both minute
scholarship and perilously attenuated idealism, of personalities
as unlike as Carlyle and Pater, Browning and Rossetti, Dickens
and Swinburne. Originality of judgment is shown everywhere,
in the form of a deft sundering of confused values, the higher
of which are made to stand forth of themselves rather than
408
The Nation
explicitly pronounced to be each. Mr. Elton plainly would avoid

the old judicial criticism, and does avoid its excesses; yet there
is no doubt in the reader's mind as to the author's verdict on
the claims of the thronging Victorians, and that verdict is nota
ble for freshness, independence, originalitythe originality
not of eccentricity but of an eager, unimpeded insight
The method is unusual. Although Mr. Elton shows his firm
command of the social, psychological, and intellectual forces of
the age, and his familiarity with biography, these aspects of
the work, which are well in the foreground in such typical
modern surveys as Courthope's "History of English Poetry"
and Hugh Walker's "Literature of the Victorian Era," are
here in the background, or, more accurately, are partly assumed
and partly diffused through the study of the literature itself.
The author is free, therefore, to concentrate on the actual books
of the period, and to give them an analysis that extends to eight
hundred well-filled pages. If we miss the personal and his
torical explanation of why the literature was what it was,
which a philosophic method would afford, we gain a full and
rich discussion of the literature regarded as art.
Literature, to Mr. Elton, is first of all an art, and it follows,
in his judgment (a judgment uttered with more than Arnold's
ex cathedra dogmatism), that "our greatest critic since Cole
ridge" is not Matthew Arnold, but Walter Pater. The judg
ment may in time seem to be right, but Mr. Elton is not wise in
letting his customary neutrality desert him, nor is he fair to
Arnold. He has not read Arnold with that "understanding"
that he extols, else he could not commit the error, against which
Arnold himself warned his readers, of regarding such terms as
"moral" and "conduct" in a narrow spirit that smacks of Puri
tanism. He misses no chance to take a fling at Arnold, who
is denied the benefit of Mr. Elton's almost unfailing sympathy
and insight; and his friend Clough shares his fate, receiving
but two pages of comment, no more than Aytoun and Dixon,
while Patmore gets six.
Save in the instance of Arnold, however, Mr. Elton's critical
creed nowhere works serious havoc. A survey conceived as an
impartial record of achievement gains more than it loses from
the conception that criticism, in the old sense, is to be shunned.
In the main the author avoids it with a wide margin. Thus he
says of "The Ring and the Book": "Our ancestors would have
called it a Gothic production. But we must leave Browning his
own plan." We have no right, that is, to object to Browning's
plan as such, the great question being whether he has carried
it out well. Mr. Elton's constant effort is to see precisely what
the artist attempted, and to determine his degree of success in
approximating his goal. Pointing out that ideas in themselves
are the affair of philosophy or history, he prefers to err, if err
he must, by making too much of what is indubitably the con
cern of artform. If this view leads him to imply that, since
literature is first of all an art, Spenser and Miltonthe
supreme artists, as he says, of the English Renaissanceare
also the supreme creators of literature in that movement, in
which Shakespeare is conventionally the outstanding figure,
it is at the same time a view that leads to passage after passage
of the aptest illumination of the art of the Victorians, passages
that strike one instantly by virtue of their sympathy and under
standing, their acumen and pointed expression, their figurative
fitness, their revelation of an unusual aesthetic susceptibility.
For example, of Meredith: "Some demon drives him, in his
dealings with language, to give an extra turn to the screw, and
to break the screw"; of Dickens: "His vices of speechdisso
lute sentiment, blank verse, and the restincreased his vogue
at the time, and carried him to the ends of the earth; but they
did so on the wings of his virtues"; "The paradox of Swinburne
is this, that while in all his volumes there is hardly a line which
fails of its intended melody, we are from first to last alive to
the fatal distinction between the blameless writing that we can
not remember and the perfect writing that we cannot forget";
of Carlyle: "With all his tricks, with certain real and too
manifest vices of language, he has not only a millionaire's stock
[Vol. 112, No. 2906
and fund of speech, but a certain fundamental and nail-hitting

tightness in the use of it The vices are those of a man; the
bad pages are those of a man raging, at any rate, and not mere
musical wind, like so much of Ruskin, or sheer sterility, like so
much of Newman."
Norman Foerstee
War and Strikes

War-Time Strikes and Their Adjustment. By Alexander M.
Bing. E. P. Dutton and Company.
A LTHOUGH the title of this book might make its publication
seem a little belated, it is of present interest aside from
its value as an historical record. The labor situation during
the war was not an island cut off from the past and the future;
we must understand it in order to interpret events that are
recorded daily in the newspapers. Mr. Bing is an employer
and a "practical business man" of large experience; he served
the Government in various capacities as a labor adjuster; and
he has made an exhaustive study of the official documents
dealing with his subject. His book is authoritative in every
respect, and is by far the most competent, the most compre
hensive, and the most just account of labor adjustment during
the war period that has been issued.
Its substance is composed of a survey of the various agencies
of mediation and adjustment, of their policies and their princi
pal decisions. Informing and surrounding this substance is
the interpretation which relates it to public policy. When the
war began, the nation had no consistent policy with regard to
industrial relations; there was no standardization of wages,
hours, or methods of control on any principle whatever, and
large sections of industry were scarred battle-grounds between
organized labor and employers. Unionism had not been recog
nized and granted a place in the body politic. Upon this
chaos the war imposed an enormous demand for products, and
a necessity of drastic readjustment in the relation between
various forms of production. The inevitable result was an
increase in the economic power of the worker. There were far
more jobs than men to fill them, and in consequence there arose
a ruthless competitive bidding up of wages, an enormous labor
turnover, congestion, discontent, and strikes. The Government,
seeing this loss of productive power, was at length forced to
intervene.
The reactionary employer resented the form of this inter
vention, believing that because the Government insisted on
collective bargaining, it had a bias in favor of organized labor.
The only policy he could understand was one of repression.
He wanted to be left free to fight the unions on the industrial
field, calling in on his side when necessary the political and
military power of the Government to redress the balance of
economic power which circumstances had given the worker.
But more moderate men rightly saw that such a policy would
have been disastrous, as well as grossly unjust. The only
possibility was an industrial truce. The economic power of
the unions, if uncurbed, would have led to extravagant victories.
It was unwise to curb that power with conscription and ma
chine guns. Therefore it was curbed with compromise. Labor
gave up a large part of its fighting ground in exchange for
certain defined concessions to be established by arbitration.
And these concessions the Government enforced on reluctant
employers by virtue of its own economic power as a purchaser
and banker. The results, as shown by Mr. Bing, while they
were marred by imperfections in detail, and were not wholly
satisfactory to either side, succeeded on the whole in the chief
purpose of maintaining production.
After the armistice, many people of good intentions favored
the continuation of the sort of adjustment developed during
the war. It would have been entirely logical, as a public
policy, to use the same methods in shifting production back to
peace basis with a minimum of friction and conflict. But the
reactionary employers were not willing to prolong the truce,
The Nation
March 16, 1921]
and they were in the saddle. The Government no longer had

the power to coerce them, even if it had had the will, because
it had lost its power over purchase and credit. And labor, on
its side, was almost eager to accept the gage of battle, so long
as unions were not to be officially recognized, on account of
the restraints to which it had been subject during the war.
The civil war in industry which took place in 1919-1920 was

a small indication of what would have happened if the ruling
employers had been given their way during 1917-1918. Enor
mous interruptions of necessary production were the inevitable
result of a failure to recognize organized labor and to develop
just standards of remuneration and working conditions.
The
employers, however, failed to blame themselves for this condi

tion, and are now taking advantage of a temporary economic
superiority further to embitter and confuse the nation's indus
trial policy. The liberal-minded are tempted to assess this
situation in terms of moral judgment. To do this, however,
is to run the danger of the sort of mistake which employers
themselves have made.
Nobody can reach greater heights of
moral self-justification than a business man who is and has

been for years out to destroy organized labor. Cool surveys
of the facts, such as Mr. Bing has made, are more likely to
lead us to a revision of industrial policy in harmony with
economic and social reality.
GEORGE SOULE
Another Henry Adams

Letters to a Niece and Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres. By
Henry Adams. With a Niece's Memories, by Mabel La Farge.
Houghton Mifflin Company.
TH:
409
and cared-for, so that if a cobra happens to be taking his

morning walk at the same time with you, you need not offend
him by treading on his tail. This is a real advantage to me,
for I do not like cobras. Some people seem to think a cobra
only a snake, and speak only trivially of him; but to me, a
cobra is what he was to the Brahmin and Hindus, clearly a
Snake-deity; and when he stands up and flattens his neck and
sways about, he looks to me forty feet high, with a mission
to civilize Europe and America. . . . I dont feel so about
the elephant, who is a dear good fellow, and when I meet him
taking his bath in a stream, and he comes up to suggest that

I might give him a banana or cocoanut, I never feel as though
he were a deity or his trunk a civilizer, though he is carved
all over every temple in India; but the cobra is another story
altogether, and has a human air of condensed venom and power
such as would make the fortune of a newspaper-editor.
Four years later he was deep in French cathedrals: Amiens,
Rouen, Caen, Saint-Lo, Coutances, Mont Saint Michel, Le Mans
and, of course, Chartres, the finest thing in the world, with
its Virgin whom he could less and less forget, who came even
tually to represent for him the one divine remnant on earth of
pity, pardon, love, strength, truth. A study will have to be
made some day of Adams's ideas about woman, the only subject
on which he could not be cynical. No other system or
principle of life but had death in it; woman, as the very
transmitter of life, was eternal verity. Toward such a study
the Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres, first printed here, sug
gests a step:
Help me to feel! not with my insect sense,
With yours that felt all life alive in you;

Infinite heart beating at your expense;
Infinite passion breathing the breath you drew!
slender but important volume will refresh and en
MARK WAN DOREN
lighten such readers of The Education of Henry Adams
as have had no previous means of correcting their impression

that its author's sole process first and last was perplexed and
desiccated cerebration. These niece's memories (to Adams
all members of the younger generation who would read him
were nieces) ignore the hypercareful historian, the dry, satiri
cal novelist, the weary autobiographer, the intellectual sufferer,
in favor of the generic Uncle, the worshiper of children

and the Virgin, the emotional sufferer, the brusque and melan
eholy kindly man, the man who, as John Hay once asked Saint
Gaudens to show in a medallion, was half angel and half por
cupine. In his poem called Buddha and Brahma, composed
on the Indian Ocean in 1891, Adams reflected:
Gautama's way is best, but all are good.
He breaks a path at once to what he seeks.
By silence and absorption he unites
His soul with the great soul from which it started.
But we, who cannot fly the world, must seek
To live two separate lives; one, in the world
Which we must ever seem to treat as real;

The other in ourselves, behind a veil
Not to be raised without disturbing both.

It is that ideal life behind the veil which here appears, the
life of a peculiarly private philosopher who, baffled by reason
and research, resorted to wonder and worship and simple play.
The letters were written at various intervals between 1890
and 1908 from Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti, Fiji, Australia, India,

London, Syria, Paris, and Washington. They begin in the
South Seas, that refuge at one time or another of every kind
of spirit under the sun, whither Adams went in 1890 with
John La Farge to idle awhile and paint a littleto learn what
ever it was about line and form and color that New England
had failed to teach him. There and everywhere his corre
spondence was full of the finest and gentlest fooling. Witness
this account of the Ceylon cobra, sent from the Red Sea the
next year:
I have never met walks so beautiful as those about Kandy.

They have, too, the advantage of being broad and graveled
American Chronicles
Zell: A Novel. By Henry G. Aikman. Alfred A. Knopf.
Blind Mice. By C. Kay Scott. George H. Doran Company.
moral history of America is being written in a series of
books that have the virtue of stating all their criticism
TH:
by implication. They avoid the discursiveness of the younger

or Wellsian school of British novelists and let the operations
of the intelligence be coincident with the creative act.
Thus
they forego a certain liveliness and nimbleness but gain in

solidity and strength.
full of knots.
The texture is homely and the web is
Yet one feels that the stuff will stand strain
and will probably outlast a good many changes in the literary

weather.
The value of these books is in their material and in
the author's grasp of that material. There is in them little

grace or charm or distinction and the prose is often rough and
gritty. Beside Joseph Hergesheimers Linda Condon, for in
stance, Mr. Aikmans Zell may seem very much like a pile
of cobblestones beside a statue.
But if all your roads are
bogs, the cobblestones are indispensable.
They will help com
munication and civilize the land, while the statue stands remote
and lovely waiting for a generation not yet born.

Between Mr. Aikmans first book, The Groper, and his
second book, Zell, there lies an extraordinarily swift devel
opment.
The Groper was awkwardly tentative and helpless
and lumbered blindly about.
What distinguishes Zell is a
sureness of knowledge and touch both strong and tender, flex

ible and firm. Its people are among the most soundly and
vitally rendered in our recent fiction: Herman Zell, the Don
Juan of the cheap hotel lobby, Agatha with her acrid, unstilled
sex-vanity, Winifred who, because she experiences her mother's
fate more intelligently, reaches pathos and avoids grotesqueness,
Ruby, the odiously pinchbeck and pretentious, and Avery Zell
himself, whose incomparably typical fate it is that he has no
fate of his own at all but tries to squeeze a feeble and sterile
410
The Nation
satisfaction from his own undeviating will to obedience. These

creatures are all admirably well done. But they have been
equaled. What has not been equaled is Mr. Aikman's insight
into the precise character of their relationships. Here he dis
plays a special talent and makes his special and important con
tribution to our fiction.
The intricacy of human relationships is caused by the inevi
table dishonesty of the emotions involved. In Detroit or Colum
bus or Nashville the exact emotion that should accompany a
given human relationship is fixed and taken both tacitly and
loudly for granted. It is supposed to change in neither char
acter nor intensity, and the evidence of any such change is taken
as a public affront to that private morality which everybody
holds to be his business. It follows that, since self-sustaining
souls are few, most people try to play up to public expectations
even in the hidden places of their own minds and fall into
inextricable emotional confusions. It is these confusions that
Mr. Aikman has so expertly and refreshingly rendered. Agatha's
attitude to her Herman should have been, by all rules, one of
sad and noble indignation. Hence she forces herself into public
actions that would normally express such an attitude. In reality
and beneath her simulated wrath she aches for him on any
terms, since on any terms he keeps her less naked and povertystricken than she can be alone. But she plays her proper and
prescribed part and destroys herself. Thus, too, Avery Zell
knows well enough that he married Ruby out of nervousness,
cowardice, and weakness. But since love, in its rarest and
most burning form, is publicly assumed to be the cause of every
decent marriage, he supposes that he must love her and is
constantly appalled by the quality of what he genuinely feels.
Such, however, is his need of a self-approbation which shall be
a reflection of public approbation that he shifts the entire emo
tional basis of his fate and is proud of not having shirked the
real issues of life when that is what, above all things, he has
so completely and muddle-headedly done. In the profoundly
ironic delineation of this process in Avery's consciousness and
circumstances Mr. Aikman gathers force and vision and even
acquires an occasional happy compactness of speech, so that
"Zell," uncommonly intelligent and fascinating from the start,
has the rarer virtue of an energetic and inevitable close and
leaves one with a very large sense of its author's possibilities.
"Blind Mice" is a drier and a harder book than "Zell." It
grew out of sharp and acrid perceptions and has little warmth,
little sympathy, little of that brooding consciousness of man's
pitiful estate which forms the creative mood of the best natu
ralistic fiction. Without analysis or comment of any kind Mr.
Scott presents through a series of very accurately heard and
recorded conversations a small group of characters, two of
whom, Mrs. Merwent and John Winter, he has explored with
a harsh but marvelous thoroughness. Mrs. Merwent stands at
the center of the book. This "moral idiot" constitutes its motive
and creates its action. She is woman, she is fate, yet she is
immensely individualized. Her portraiture is done with a
merciless clarity. Mr. Scott is bent on tracking down all her
subterfuges, her appalling falseness and self-absorption, her
instinctive trickery, her brazen sentimentality, her intellectual
deadness. And he succeeds so completely that her psychical
image remains etched on the brain and leaves the reader with
a genuine terror of those qualities in many women which have
assumed such monstrous but wholly convincing proportions in
herself. That terror gives, better than any critical phrase, the
measure of Mr. Scott's pertinacity and power.
L. L.
Books in Brief
T TNDER the title of "Speculation and the Chicago Board of
^ Trade" (Macmillan) Professor James E. Boyle of Cornell
University presents the results of an intensive study of the
marketing of grain. Five chapters are devoted to such sub
jects as fundamental economic functions of a market, Chicago
[Vol. 112, No. 2906
as a grain market, the Chicago Board of Trade viewed as a

piece of marketing machinery, and the Chicago Board of Trade
and the problem of speculation. The emphasis, however, is put
on the problems of future trading and speculation. The con
clusion is that organized speculation is beneficial because it
stabilizes prices, registers prices, furnishes a wide and con
tinuous distributing risk, and is an enemy of monopoly. Con
cerning the evils attendant on speculation the writer believes
that the Board of Trade has the power in itself to cure most
of the evils arising from the abuse of speculation and should
do so largely as a matter of self-interest. The fact is stressed
that such a market has arisen as a result of development and
is based on actual needs and conditions. The remedy for such
evils as exist is not abolition of speculative institutions but
correction and adaptation to present conditions.
/^"\NE of the best-known names in Persian literature is that
of Saadi, the poet and moralist of Shiraz, who lived in
the thirteenth century of our era. An excellent volume in
French has recently appeared on the life and works of this
noted writer. It is from the pen of Professor Henri Masse,
of Algiers, and is entitled "Essai sur le poete Saadi" (Paris:
Paul Geuthner) . The book gives an admirable account of the
life and travels of this famous poet and dervish, who journeyed
through many lands of the Orient. It deals in detail with Saadi
as a thinker and man of the world, as well as a consummate
literary artist in Persian verse and prose. A valuable bibli
ography is appended to the volume.
Drama
The Experimental Stages
"DRITISH comedy of the better sort is saved from triviality
*-* by a certain amount of brain work. Is there any Ameri
can comedy that does not get mired in sentiment or falseness
somewhere before its end? The initial assumptions of the
action in a farce by Arnold Bennett or A. A. Milne are as
wildly absurd as they are in one by Avery Hopwood or Clare
Kummer. But the ironic vision asserts itself and the civilized
mind feels at home. Thus, when an interval of lightness and
brightness is needed, the directors of our experimental stages
are tempted to get their material from abroad. It is a pity,
since the ironic fancy playing upon a foreign society can hardly
fail to have its points dulled. But anyone who is offended by
the policy of the Neighborhood Playhouse or the Theater Guild
in this matter should find or produce an American comedy that
is honest in outlook, however tangled in plot, and see what
would happen.
"The Great Adventure," by Arnold Bennett, the piece se
lected by the Neighborhood Playhouse, is really very much bet
ter than the author's more pretentious dramas. No one is
expected to believe that the great painter's valet was buried
in Westminster Abbey in his stead. What one does believe
in is the essential characteristics of the people involved. And
these might have been defined and exhibited in a dozen dif
ferent ways. It is true that a first-rate artist may be not only
shy as a man but sincerely eager to escape that mixture of
interference and selfish adulation known as fame; it is true
that he may find his happiness in his work and in the company
of a simple-hearted woman who does not understand it but
who adores him. The artist and thinker is lonely. For imper
fect sympathy he oftens pays an abnormal price. Thus it is
clear that the implications of the farcical action are both seri
ous and important; they are embodied through characters that
smack of Dickens but have softer outlines and more flowing
gestures. The best of these is the little cockney woman played
with exactly the right note of prosaic serenity and inner warmth
by Deidre Doyle. Amid the posturing and false enthusiasm
and cold expertness of the others, her frank ignorance of art
March 16, 1921]
The Nation
is like a balm. She gives the painter a heart, a home, and a

chance to reflect and work. The scenes in her sitting-room
are played with a beautiful sincerity. Those in the last act
are done with real polish and brilliancy, and one leaves the
play with the conviction that the Neighborhood Playhouse
has set itself a new standard of significant and harmonious
execution.
The execution of the Theater Guild is always of a high order.
A small cast that includes Laura Hope Crewes, Dudley Digges,
Erskine Sanford, and Helen Westley, made it, in the produc
tion of A. A. Milne's "Mr. Pim Passes By," of the finest and
most glittering texture. The play itself is more frivolous in
undertone than Arnold Bennett's, because Mr. Milne barely
grazes the theme he has himself selected. The supposed re
appearance on the mortal scene of Mrs. Marden's first husband
suddenly drives into the open the inner realities of George
Marden, J. P. He is devoted to Olivia, but he feels that he
must give her up because, well, because right is right and
wrong is wrong and the provisions of the law are the limits
of his conscience. The report is proved false and Olivia gets
a new rug and her own way in regard to both her husband's
ward and her new curtains. But could she have skimmed so
iridescently over the tremendous thing that had, after all,
so irrevocably happened? Brightly and wittily as Mr. Milne
writes he cannot persuade us of that. "What has been is,"
Schnitzler says in his quiet way. "That is the deep sense of all
happenings."
Mr. Augustin Duncan and the players associated with him
present "Cradle Song" (Times Square Theater) translated by
John Garrett Underhill from the Spanish of Gregorio Martinez
Sierra. It is a work of plaintive beauty, an idyl of the con
ventual life with a deep pang at its core. The white-robed
nuns sway and flutter softly and subdue their demeanor to
the tranquillity required of the brides of God. But the little
foundling left at their gate makes the sterile motherhood of
their hearts cry out and a glow of fever begins to burn at the
edges of that white calm. The second part of the play in
which the foundling has grown up is more unequal. The long
speech of the girl's wooer strikes a false note. Its passion
sounds metallic and its professions of honor are both fulsome
and hard. But the action reassumes its natural rhythm, a
rhythm that is idyllic rather than dramatic and moves toward
a close more fitting for an elegy than for a play. The produc
tion is beautifully sensitive. Nothing, given the play's char
acter, could be better than the groupings and movements and
gestures of the nuns through which their unexpressed pathos
is symbolized. Whitford Kane, in the only male part, is mellow
and homely and moving; Louise Randolph, Angela MacCahill,
and Mary Carrol are charming in both appearance and ex
pression.
The Provincetown Players have the distinction, among these
various organizations, of striking the only native note. They
present an American tragedy by Evelyn Scott, named feebly,
though with a grim enough intention, "Love." The play is
notably better than its title. Its action, up to the final un
happy moment, is straight and true; its dialogue is veracious
and well-molded. Its special virtue is in its method of motiva
tion. Mrs. Scott knows that motives are never quite pure,
purposes never quite single, and that the driving forces toward
a given action are never all present in the conscious mind.
We do not rationalize first and then act. We act first and
then rationalize the partial contents of an imperfectly re
membered state of consciousness. This knowledge Mrs. Scott
presents adequately and even eloquently in her second act. Her
ending is less wise. A shot off-stage is only a gesture of dra
matic helplessness. The modern dramatist must soon face the
fact that, omitting accident, no stories end and no problems
are solved. They change or fade. Life in its totality alone
has a beginning, a middle, an end. But Mrs. Scott will reach
that perception too. She has subtlety, skill, and promise.
LUDWIG
411
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New York
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Cabell's First Novel Since

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FIGURES OF EARTH
By JAMES BRANCH CABELL
The first book written by Mr. Cabell since the
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appearances": the story of Manuel of the High
Headhe who was once called Pigtenderand
of how, by dint of doing the expected thing, he
rose from herding the miller's pigs to become
Count of Poictesme.
Set in the mythical country of Poictesme, in that
C legendary time when "almost anything is more than
likely to happen" it is an integral part of that group
romance to which belong Jurgmn and Domnei. Like
them it is told with the impudent whimsicality and
superb artistry which have won for Mr. Cabell his
present high place in contemporary letters.
*
At all booksellers. $2.50 net
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NATION
New York
International Relations Section

Lenin on the State of Russia
T the opening session of the Eighth All-Russian Con
gress of Soviets, Premier Lenin presented a compre
hensive survey of conditions in Russia, both military and
economic. The following report of his speech was trans
lated from the Petrograd Pravda of December 23.
against Russia.
Thanks to these circumstances, our relations with bordering
THE WAR WITH POLAND
We all know, of course, how this war was forced upon us

by the former landlords and capitalists under the weight and
spur of the capitalist nations of western Europe. You know
that in April of last year we offered the Polish Government
peace on terms undoubtedly more advantageous to it than the
present terms, and that only under the pressure of absolute

necessity, after the failure of conciliation
although we have shown the most steadfast peaceful disposi

tion, we are at the same time prepared in a military way and
any attempt to drag us into war will only lead to an aggra
vation of the terms they will receive after the war as com
pared with what they could have obtained without war.
This is not merely a threat. It has been demonstrated al
ready in the case of several countries; it is an advantage which
we will not relinquish and which will be forgotten neither by
our neighbors nor by any of those participating in the policy
states become better and better.
With a whole row of coun
tries on the western boundary of Russia we have already con

cluded a definite peace, recognizing their independence and sov
ereignty in accordance with the principles of our policy. With
regard to the Government of Latvia, I must say that at one
time relations seemed to be taking a turn for the worse, ap
with Poland, we
proaching even the possibility of a termination of diplomatic

were constrained to enter war, a war which, in spite of the heavy
reverse suffered by our overstrained armies before Warsaw,
ended with a peace far more favorable to us than the one we
had previously proffered.
The preliminary pact with Poland has been signed and dis
intercourse, but at the last moment it became apparent that

the former Latvian policy had been changed and a great many
misunderstandings were brushed aside. There is now a real
hope that in the near future we shall have close economic
relations with Latvia.
cussions are now proceeding toward the signing of the final

SUCCESS OF RUSSIAS POLICY IN THE EAST
peace treaty.
The Entente policy, which looks to military intervention and

violent suppression of the soviet power, is gradually losing
support as we draw country after country away from the
coalition of our enemies over to those standing in unmistakable
friendship toward the soviets on a platform of peace.
The
number of the nations which adhere to the peace negotiations
is growing, and it can be stated with great confidence that in

the near future a final peace treaty will be signed with
Poland, so that one more serious blow will thus be dealt to
the unity of the capitalistic nations which are striving to
wrest away our power by military means.
THE CRUSHING OF WRANGEL
Our temporary setbacks in the war with Poland and our
During the past year our policy in the East has achieved
great success.
We greet the organization and consolidation of the Bokhara
and Azerbaijan Soviet Republics.
We also welcome the coming ratification of the treaty with

Persia, whose friendly regard is already assured because of
the deep-rooted interests uniting the workmen of Soviet Russia
with all people who suffer under the oppression of imperialism.

We must also mark the fact that we are ever more and
more certain of friendly relations with Afghanistan and like

wise more so with Turkey.
You can therefore see that the fundamentals of our policy
are correct and the amelioration of our international position
rests on a sound foundation.
difficult situation at certain moments of the conflict were due
to the fact that we had to struggle against Wrangel, who had
NEGOTIATIONS WITH ENGLAND
been officially recognized by one of the imperialistic Powers
With reference to the negotiations with England, I have to

state that these discussions are going on at the present time
and that we are on the eve of signing a trade agreement.
Unfortunately these negotiations have been somewhat pro
and was receiving unlimited military assistance as well as

material help of every other sort. To end the war as quickly
as possible it was necessary to effect a rapid concentration
of forces in order to strike Wrangel a decisive blow. You
know what extraordinary heroism our Red Army displayed in

overcoming barriers and fortifications such as even the mili
tary experts and authorities considered impregnable. This is
one of the most brilliant pages in the history of the Red Army,
on which is written the story of its decisive bravery and the
remarkable speed of its victory over Wrangel.
Now that we are sure the capitalist masters cannot inter
rupt our work as easily as before, we may resume with greater
security the internal reconstruction which is so near and in
dispensable to us and which has for so long demanded our

attention.
However, we must remain on the alert; we must
not take it for granted that we are now assured against war.
The capitalist Powers and the remnants of Wrangel's army
are not yet destroyed, and other White Russian organizations
still continue their labors to reconstruct these or other mili
tary units and hurl them upon Soviet Russia at an opportune

moment.
We must, therefore, preserve our military preparedness at

all costs; we must increase the fighting capacity of the Red
Army and maintain it in all readiness.
RUSSIA AND HER NEIGHBORS
All the neighboring Powers had realized our desire for peace,
and now after three years they ought to be convinced that,
tracted, not through any fault of ours.
As far back as last
July, at the height of the Soviet army's success, the English

Government officially submitted to us the text of an agreement
assuring the possibility of a trade arrangement. At that time
we responded with our complete approval, but since then a
struggle between different factions in the English Government

and British Empire has retarded the transactions.
We are ready to sign the trade agreement, and if it has not

yet been done the blame falls solely on that faction in English
government circles which, despite the will of the majority
not only of the workmen but also of the bourgeoisie, desires
to break up the commercial agreement and once more get a
chance to repeat the attack on Soviet Russia.
Should such a
policy continue much longer, it will further aggravate the

financial condition of England; the more it delays the half
agreement which is now necessary between bourgeois England
and the Soviet Republic, the nearer will the English bourgeoisie
come to the point where it will be forced to accept not a limited
arrangement but a full one.
CONCESSIONS
Among the most important laws adopted by the Soviet Gov

ernment during the current year is one which is closely con
nected with the trade agreement with Englandthe statute
of November 23, covering concessions. The text of this law,
March 16, 1921]
The Nation
as well as supplementary data, has been widely published.

Steps were also taken to get this decree into western Euro
pean countries as soon as possible.
We trust that our economic policy will be successful from
the practical standpoint. We do not at all conceal the dangers
connected with such a policy on the part of the Federated
Soviet Republic, in a country extremely weak and backward,
so long as this Soviet Republic remains a lonely borderland
of a capitalistic world. I must quote here a remarkably en
lightening statement by a certain nonpartisan peasant of the
Arzamas district at a meeting of the Soviets of the NizhniNovgorod province on the subject of concessions:
"Comrades, we send you to the All-Russian Congress, and
we say to you that we peasants are willing to hunger three
more years and freeze and submit to contributionsonly do
not sell out our mother Russia for a concession!"
I am infinitely glad of a frame of mind such as this, which
has spread far and wide. For us it is highly important that
throughout the toiling masses, and not alone among the work
ers and peasants, there has developed a degree of political
and economic experience which enables and makes them value
freedom from capitalism more than anything else, which makes
them scrutinize with the utmost keenness and suspicion any
step carrying with it a new threat of a return to capitalism.
Assuredly we shall listen attentively to such expressions, and
we must add that there is no chance of selling Russia to the
capitalists. The business in hand is concessions and each
agreement for a concession is limited by a definite term, a
definite arrangement, and definite guaranties, which have been
very closely considered and which will be more than once dis
cussed and examined by the delegates at the present conven
tion and at subsequent meetings. This temporary arrange
ment has nothing to do with selling Russia, but it is the recog
nized economic attraction for capitalists, so that a few eco
nomic allowances to them will give us the opportunity of ob
taining sooner the machines and locomotives without which we
cannot bring about a complete and rapid reconstruction of
our internal economy.
We have no right to neglect anything that may help to im
prove the condition of the workers and peasants.
Economic Restoration
We have now weaned a goodly number of powerful empires
from making war upon us, but for how long we cannot be cer
tain. We must expect that at the least opening these imperialist
vultures will attack us again. We have to be prepared for that.
On this account we must build up our economic life; we must
stand solidly on our own feet. It will be impossible to rebuild
it quickly without the best machinery from the capitalist coun
tries.
It is necessary that the workers and peasants should be in the
same mood as the nonpartisan Arzamas peasant, who declared
that he was not afraid of privation. In concessions he sees the
possibility of new attempts by the bourgeoisie to restore the old
capitalism. This is wonderful ; this gives us a guaranty that the
watch and ward over our interests will not be the business of
the soviet organs alone, but also of each workman and peasant.
From War to Construction
The present political moment is characterized by the fact
that we are living through a transitional, breaking-off period
when from war we go over to economic building. This should
remind us of the general political problems of the soviet power
and the peculiarities of this change.
The dictatorship of the proletariat was successful because it
had the power to enforce and compel. The dictatorship of the
proletariat is not afraid of compulsion, because the working
class has the right to resort to compulsion, since it advances in
this way the interests of the toilers and the exploited.
The Kolchak and Denikin experiments convinced the peasant
that no middle policy is practicable, that the policy of the
413
Soviets, a policy of straightforwardness, is correct, that the

iron leadership of the proletariat is the only guide, the only
leadership which does guard the peasants from exploitation and
oppression. And only because of the fact that we convinced
the peasants, only because our policy is rooted in a firm, un
hesitating conviction of its justice, did we obtain such a gigantic
success. Now we must bear in mind that on moving over to
the labor front we face the same problems as before but in
new surroundings and on a larger scale.
While we were at war with the White Guards, we witnessed
in the peasant and working masses a height of enthusiasm and
energy which did not and could not exist in other countries.
This was the reason why in the long run we conquered a very
powerful enemy. Here is justified one of the profoundest prin
ciples of Marxism: The wider the swing and the broader the
Bweep of historical actions, the greater will be the number of
people taking part; and the deeper the reactions we want to
produce, the higher will be the level to which we must raise
our interest and understanding.
In order to carry conviction in this necessity, we must have
millions and tens of millions of workers.
New Economic Problems
At the present time there appear new economic problems
the problem of creating a unified economic plan, a task for
which it will be necessary to secure the cooperation of literally
all the members of the trades unions for the purpose of achiev
ing an undertaking which was alien to them under capitalism.
Let us now ask, Does there exist here the condition for a
swift, indubitable victory, a condition such as arose during the
war? Are the members of the trades unions and most of the
nonpartisan elements convinced of the necessity of our new
methods, of our great tasks of economic construction? Are
they as deeply convinced of that as they were convinced of the
necessity of giving everything for war, of sacrificing everything
for a victory on the military front?
The answer is undoubtedly, No! They are not sufficiently
convinced of that. It is necessary to see to it that the peasant
masses and the members of the trades unions understand that
Russia belongs to us, that we workers and peasants by our
activities, by our labor discipline, we alone are able to transform
the old conditions into a great economic plan. Outside of that
there is no salvation. We must see to it that literally all the
members of the trades unions are interested in production and
that they realize that by increasing productivity Soviet Russia
will be able to score a victory on the economic front. It is
then that Soviet Russia will put an end to the terrible condi
tions, to the lack of food and fuel which she is now experienc
ing. If we do not understand this, we shall perish.
Truthful Propaganda
Our fundamental task is to impress the millions of workers
with the necessity of victory on the economic front.
This is the task of the Central Bureau of Economic Propa
ganda. This is the task of the All-Russian Central Soviet
of Trades Unions, of all party workers, of the entire apparatus
of the soviet power. This is also the task of the entire propa
ganda which we have hitherto conducted, which gave us our
first successes, for our propaganda in the whole world tells the
workers and peasants the truth. All other propaganda the
world over tells lies.
We must now transfer our propaganda to a subject which
is far more difficult, which relates to our daily work. We must
convince the workers and peasants that without a combination
of forces, without new -forms of political union, without new
forms related to this compulsion we shall not issue from the
abyss of economic collapse. But we have already begun to
come out of it.
Agricultural Production
We were and have remained a country of small peasant hold
ings, and the transition to communism is immeasurably more
414
The Nation
difficult for us under these circumstances than under any other.

That this transition may be effected, we need participation on
the part of the peasants ten times more thorough than obtains
at present. The fundamental task which we are now facing is
to convince the peasant masses of the necessity of state duty
in the interest of all the toilers of Soviet Russia; also to unite
the communist laborers and utilize their experience.
All our means of propaganda, all our political resources, all
our education, all our party resources, all our means and ener
gies, all these we must muster for the purpose of reaching the
nonpartisan peasant, and only then we shall have a real foun
dation for our law relating to the development of agricultural
production. It is only when we shall have secured the assist
ance of the majority of the peasants, only then shall we be
able to raise the standard of agriculture and agricultural in
terests. This cannot be done without mobilizing all energies
to assist the nonpartisan peasant We recognize ourselves to
be indebted to the peasant. We took his bread on credit for
paper money. We must pay our debt, and we shall do so by
restoring our industries. But in order to restore we need a
surplus of agricultural production. This is an indispensable
condition for the restoration of our* economic life.
Industrial Construction
Let me pass now to the manner in which our industrial con
struction is shaping itself. Within a few days each commissar
will present to you a mass of factual material. This material
overwhelms one with its abundance, and one must be able to
choose from it what is most essential for' our economic plan.
One of these reports is before you; it relates to the status of
our provisioning. You can see from it that the stores of grain
in 1915 amounted to 320 million poods, that in 1918, after the
imperialistic war and at the beginning of the civil war, the
amount of grain had dropped to 50 million poods. In 1919,
when we had somehow managed to organize our provisioning
agencies, that amount began to grow and reached 100 million
poods, and in 1920 it reached 200 million poods.
Thus you see that beginning with 1918 the stores of grain
doubled. But this amount is too small; we must raise it to
about 300 million poods. Without such a quantity we cannot
restore industry or transportation. Without it we cannot ap
proach the great task of electrifying Russia. This amount will
be used to feed the workers employed in the industries and upon
it we must also draw to assist the peasants suffering from bad
crops. This store will eventually also be used for bonuses. . . .
It is not enough to tell the workers and peasants, "Improve
your labor discipline!" We must reward those who after meas
ureless suffering continue to show heroism on the labor front.
We must reward the workers with better conditions of life.
The fuel problem is no less important than the provisioning
situation. From Comrade Rykov's theses you will gather that
an improvement has been made both in firewood and in naphtha.
Owing to the enthusiasm of the workmen of the Azerbaijan
Republic, naphtha begins to come to us in larger and larger
quantities. In the Donetz Basin, due to the special measures
taken by the Donetz Basin Plenipotentiary Commission, the
mining and delivery of coal according to our estimates should
increase from 25 million poods per month to 50 million per
month. The commission, having established contact with the
local workers, must and will get a rise in production to the
necessary amount.
In the department of fuel production we have another great
success to point to, namely, the application of hydraulic methods
to the production of peat, which we will put into practice in
the near future. We possess immense tracts of peat, but up
to the present we have not been able to utilize them because
underground work is terribly hard. Under the capitalist regime
hunger drove men to the work, but in a socialist country that is
unthinkable. We must seek out every way of getting at this
underground wealth by machinery. The production of peat by
hydraulic methods also obviates the necessity of employing
[Vol. 112, No. 2906
skilled workers, for with the new method untrained laborers

can be employed. Our economic success will be measured by
the success of the chief peat commission, and without a victory
over the fuel famine we cannot be victorious on the economic
front.
As regards transportation we have on hand a plan worked
out over a period of several years. Here we have actual re
sults already. In the resolutions of Comrades Yemshakov and
Trotzky there are indications that the six-year term for which
Order No. 1042 was designed has been reduced to three and a
half years in view of the fact that the work is ahead of schedule.
That is the way we must work in other economic branches also.
It is necessary to carry out the economic plan according to a
definite program, and the progress of its execution must be
registered and encouraged. The masses must not only know
but also feel that the shortening of the period of hunger, cold,
misery wholly depends upon the carrying out of our economic
plans. All the programs of individual branches of production
must be strictly coordinated and bound together. We need a
unified economic plan. In this connection we face the problem
of unifying the economic commissariats and creating an eco
nomic center. We have already proposed the necessary bill. . . .
On the order of the day of our congress there is also the very
important problem of improving the soviet apparatus. We
must strive to achieve this improvement on the basis of the
practical experience of recent years.
I shall dwell on the last question which is on the order of
the day, namely, electrification. The report on this problem,
upon which the prosperity of proletarian Russia depends, will
serve as a prologue to a series of similar special reports which
must henceforth find a place in our congresses.
The Beginning of an Epoch of Happiness
I believe that this moment is an important turning-point.
Upon the platform of our all-Russian congresses there will
appear not only statesmen and administrators, but also engi
neers and agronomists. It is the beginning of the happy epoch
when politicians will speak more rarely and the attention of
our congresses and conferences will be fixed upon economic
construction, the enrichment of Soviet Russia by new creative
experience. This turning-point must affect our organizations,
our newspapers, our organs of propaganda. Politics we have
learned. There we cannot go astray. Creative economic con
struction, the increase of our productivity, must become our
policy now. Engineers and agronomists must take their place
in our ranks. We must learn from them, check up their work,
and move onward.
From the report of the State Commission for Electrification,
created by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee on
February 27, you will see what a tremendous work has been
done in that field. Upward of one hundred of the best special
ists in the All-Russian Soviet of Public Economy have devoted
themselves to that work and as a result we have a printed
volume of investigations, which will be distributed among you.
This book in my judgment must become the second program
of our party, for without electrification we cannot begin real
construction. The restoration of agriculture, industry, trans
portation, and the other branches of our economic life will be
possible only if we gradually carry out this program of elec
trification.
We have achieved victory on the military fronts because the
consciousness of danger increased our forces tenfold. Now, in
order to conquer capitalism definitely, we must grow so strong
economically that a restoration of the capitalist regime will
become unthinkable.
Communism is soviet power plus electrification of the whole
country. Only when the country is electrified and when agri
culture, industry, and transportation are on a sound technical
foundation, shall we be able to achieve final victory.
The electrification plan is designed, both materially and
financially, for a period of not less than ten years. The plan
March 16, 1921]
The Nation
gives an estimate of the amount of cement and brick necessary

for the work of electrification. It provides for an expenditure
of 1.2 billions of gold rubles, which, of course, exceeds our gold
reserve. The proportion of our provisions which we might
utilize is also small. So we must pay for the electrification by
concessions. Part of the expenses we might also cover by
exporting timber. It is a problem of the greatest economic
importance and we must call the attention of the broad masses
of the workers to it. These problems must be debated in our
conferences and conventions everywhere.
I attended the solemn opening of an electric station in a
village situated in the Volokolamsk District. One of the peas
ants who spoke at the celebration said: "We peasants have
always lived in the darkness, but now a preternatural light
shines upon us." Of course, it is not this light that is preter
natural, but the fact that peasants lived in darkness and under
oppression. Each factory, each electric station must become a
center of enlightenment. And if Russia is covered by a whole
network of electric stations and power machines, our com
munistic economic construction will become the example for
future socialist states in Europe and Asia.
The Development of Soviet Power

THE following sections of the report of Zinoviev at the
Eighth Congress of Soviets are taken from Pravda for
December 29:
We can distinguish three periods in the history of the soviet
power. The first may be called the "Smolny" period for short.
I mean the time when the government sat in the "Smolny" at
Petrograd.
In those days the Soviets were organs of immediate uprising
for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. They were agencies for
arming the people and seizing the power. They were military
organizations. Their task was narrowly military, that is, to
overthrow capitalism, the white guards, and take the power
into our hands. During that period a well-planned All-Russian
centralization was out of the question.
The second period of the life of Soviet Russia we are closing
at this convention. It comes to an end with the complete de
struction of Wrangel. It has been a time during which the
Soviets have become agencies for the mobilization of the city
and the village for war in its most varied forms. This period
has been too long and has resulted in great disasters for us.
Our local organizations were undermanned and we had to give
up the most elementary requirements of political democracy.
During that time an excessive centralization, sometimes simpli
fied, arose among us. We understood that in order to conduct
the war successfully, we needed a general staff unifying all our
work. This necessity made us soft as wax. We yielded too
easily to centralistic and ultra-centralistic demands. We could
not and we did not wish to offer resistance because over our
heads hung the Damocles sword of war, and we believed that it
was better to overdo centralization than to jeopardize the suc
cess of our military efforts.
The third period, into which we are now finally passing, is,
properly speaking, the one of which we dreamed on the eve of
the October Revolution, when millions of peasants went into
battle with the thought that we would drive out the bourgeoisie
and apply ourselves to economic construction. Now, after three
years of war, we begin what the masses thought to begin imme
diately upon the October Revolution ; and our chances of success
are great. Now the third period in the history of Soviet Russia
starts and many things must change. The role of the Soviets
must change. They are no longer agencies of uprising, as they
were at the beginning. They are no longer agencies for mobil
ization. No, the Soviets must now become organs for mobilizing
the city and village for economic construction. That is the
immediate aim of our revolution, for all revolutions rotate
415
around the questions of bread, housing, and a better life for

the toiling masses. . . .
We never assumed any obligation to cure our country of all
its diseases in three years. Nevertheless, our work will enter
into history as the greatest historical achievement that the world
has ever witnessed. In spite of the inexpressibly adverse con
ditions we have created a harmonious apparatus covering a
country whose territory occupies one-sixth of the globe. We
have formed this system in its fundamental outlines. We have
elaborated a plan of work. We have reached the point where
our laws are executed, and the Soviets have penetrated the very
life of the people and have become an everyday reality. . . .
During the three years of soviet work 1,279 provincial and
district conventions have been held with a membership of 124,230 delegates. These data are, of course, incomplete. The mem
bership of the provincial executive committee in typical prov
inces was made up of 87.5 per cent communists and 12.5 per
cent non-partisans during the first half of 1920. For the second
half of 1920 we have data on 12 provinces. According to these
data the percentage of communists is now 99 per cent. . . .
In Moscow there are 231,140 soviet employees. In Petrograd
the Soviets employ 175,969 persons.
The rest of the speech is devoted to a description of the
growth of bureaucracy in the Soviets and the measures to
be taken to combat it. Among other examples of bureau
cratic red tape Zinoviev cites the following case: "The first
state factory, Goaznak, in Moscow, needed ten black knives.
Although these knives were in Moscow itself and were
required by a factory doing essential work for the country,
it took four official reports in the course of two months and
four days to get them."
Russian Industry
THE more important sections of the official outline of
the report submitted by the chairman of the Supreme
Council of National Economy, Rykov, to the Eighth AllRussian Congress of Soviets, are contained in the following
translation, taken from the text published in Pravda for
December 23:
In spite of continuous civil war and blockade the soviet power,
through the efforts of the organized working class, has not only
succeeded in saving our national economic life from destruction,
liquidating private property, and organizing the economic rear
which insured the victory of the Red Army, but also in creating
an impetus to new achievements, both in organization and in
technique. . . .
During the present year a genuine improvement has taken
place in several fundamental branches of our national life.
Thus, for the first third of the harvest year of 1919-1920, that is,
August, September, and October, 57,576,000 poods* of grain
and grain fodder were stored. For the same three months of
1920-1921 the grain stores amounted to 140,652,000 poods, that
is, an increase of 24 per cent. The improvement in the fuel sit
uation may be seen from these data: Calculated in terms of
wood, the aggregate consumption of fuel in 1919 was 7,155,000
cubic sazhensf; during the first ten months the total, expressed
in the same terms, was 11,083,000 cubic sazhens. The consump
tion of fuel during these ten months is therefore 150 per cent
higher than the consumption of the entire preceding year. The
situation is even clearer when you consider the production of
fuel. Thus the production of coal in 1919 amounted to 36,881,000 poods, while for the ten months of 1920 it amounted to
341,232,000 poods. The production of peat in 1919 amounted to
671,000,000 poods, in 1920 to 823,000,000 poods. Firewood ag
gregated 4,200,000 cubic sazhens in 1919 and 9,400,000 cubic
* One pood Is a little more than 86 pounds,
t One saxhen equals 7 feet.
416
The Nation
sazhens during the ten months of 1920. A still greater difference

obtains in liquid fuel. In 1919 the consumption of liquid fuel
amounted to 50,000,000 poods, while during the ten months of
1920 it amounted to 116,900,000 poods, exclusive of light naphtha
products and machine oils.
The improvement of transportation may be seen from the
increase in industrial transportation. In 1919 there were 11,130
freight cars dispatched per month on long through hauls and
4,053 on short local hauls. The corresponding figures for 1920
are 19,572 and 5,354 respectively per month. The increase thus
amounted to 75 per cent
In joining the Soviet Republic the border provinces enabled
us to provide the cotton mills with raw material to the amount
of 350,000 poods of cotton on January 1, 1919, and 1,221,000
poods on November 1. In connection with this we increased the
number of operating mills. Thus, in October 29 spinning mills
with 576,577 spindles were in operation instead of 17 mills with
290,582 spindles in June. The production for October amounted
to 11,500,000 arshins* of cloth as compared with 4,000,000 arshins
for July. The woolen mills have also received more raw material
and in October their output amounted to 2,200,000 arshins as
against 1,000,000 arshins for July.
The fact that the south became soviet territory had even a
more marked effect upon the tobacco, soap, dairy, and other
branches of industry. In April the tobacco factories of Moscow
had raw material for two months, while the Petrograd factories
had only enough material to last a few days. On October 1 the
Moscow factories had 93,000 poods of raw material, while the
Petrograd factories had 200,000 poods, enough to last ten
months.
Since the middle of the present year several blast furnaces
have begun to work. Last year not one of them was in opera
tion. On December 1, 19 such furnaces were in operation in the
Ural, Donetz, and Central Russian regions and their number is
constantly increasing, particularly in the Urals, where early in
December 10 blast furnaces, 12 Martens furnaces, and 25 rolling
mills were in operation. At the same time the situation of the
heavy metals industry remains threatening, and according to
the program of 1921 it is proposed to produce only 30,000,000
poods of cast iron (that is approximately half of the minimum
amount needed) and 45,000,000 poods of iron.
The following data will characterize the growth of our pro
duction and the proposed activities in 1921:
Proposed Production
Commodity
Production in 1920
in 1921
Wood and timber 10,500,000 cu. sazhens. 19,000,000 cu. sazhens.
Coal
431,744,000 poods
718,000,000 poods.
Naphtha
71,000,000 poods
298,745,000 poods.
Salt
40,000,000 poods
58,100,000 poods.
Slate
2,160,000 poods
12,215,000 poods.
Gold
95 poods
276 poods.
Platinum
23 poods
68 poods.
Glass
26,781 cases
149,030 cases.
Matches
609,196 cases
1,228,300 cases.
Sugar, granulated 7,500,000 poods
25,514,000 poods.
Soap
817,000 poods
1,080,000 poods.
Belting, rubber. .
347,000 arshins .. . 1,320,000 arshins.
Tobacco
9,355,000 units
21,400,000 units.
Sulphuric Acid..
676,000 poods
2,743,000 poods.
Lamps
645,000
1,830,500.
Electric Energy. 180,000,000 kilowatts. . 244,700,000 kilowatts.
Paper
1,855,000 poods
3,000,000 poods.
Cotton Goods
135,000,000 arshins ...780,000,000 arshins.
Nevertheless, this increased program of production will only
slightly satisfy the needs of the population and of the
industries.
This rise of our industries finds the Republic at a moment of
enormous reduction, and in some cases of almost total lack, of
One arshin la about 28 inches.
[Vol. 112, No. 2906
materials, manufactured and semi-manufactured, which were

inherited by the soviet power from the bourgeois regime. Thus,
in 1918 there were up to 1,500,000,000 arshins of manufactured
goods in the factories and depots of the Republic. At present
we have a reserve of only some 40,000,000 arshins. As for metal,
on January 1, 1921, we shall have 9,000,000 poods instead of
44,000,000. We must take this fact into consideration in plan
ning to meet the needs of production and consumption.
Our immediate task is to concentrate our attention on our
heavy metals industry and on increasing the reserves of all sorts
of raw materials without abating, however, our efforts along the
line of improving our provisioning, fuel, and transportation sit
uation. In this connection the development of our industries in
the Donetz Basin and in the Urals, those rich sources of coal
and metal, assumes a special importance.
The rational and energetic utilization of the resources of the
Donetz Basin and the concentration of our forces upon the
restoration of its industries are being pushed to the fore by
the present moment. The rebirth of the coal industry, which the
civil war had destroyed, and the resumption of operations by the
large metallurgical mills of the south must be the turning-point
in our future economic development. At the same time we must
increase the production and shipment of liquid fuel. The sharp
decrease in the output of naphtha at Baku in 1920 and the diffi
culties of shipping it on the Volga, as well as the constant threat
to Baku on the part of the predatory Entente, make the increase
of productivity at Baku imperative. It also renders urgent the
necessity of developing new naphtha fields, notably first of all
in the Emba region, and the transmission of naphtha by pipe
lines. The available reserves of naphtha at Baku (about 200,000,000 poods) and the proposed production of 1921 there (170,000,000 poods) will satisfy the needs of industry for liquid fuel
in 1921, that is, provided we shall be in a position to transport it.
The problem of shipping naphtha will become especially acute
in 1923, when the old reserves will be exhausted, while no de
cisive measures will be taken to raise the productivity of Baku
and the other naphtha regions and to increase the carrying
capacity of our railroad and water transportation.
The necessity of increasing and developing the production
and storage of raw materials, the reserves and sources of which
have considerably decreased, is inseparably bound up with the
development and improvement of our economic activities in agri
culture, especially in the regions which are sources of raw ma
terials. In this connection we must first of all develop the cotton
industry of Turkestan and the flax industry in the northern and
northwestern parts of Russia.
The strengthening of the international position of Soviet Rus
sia and the pending possibilities of a more intense economic
intercourse with foreign countries necessitate the formation of
reserves of commodities for foreign exchange. This in turn re
quires a series of measures aiming at the development of our
agriculture, cattle raising, and metallurgy, so that they may not
only satisfy the needs of our own industries, but may also yield
a surplus for export.
This same circumstance determines the possibility of a policy
of concessions which, attracting technical energies and funds
from other countries for the development of the productive re
sources of Soviet Russia, will enable us to initiate the exploita
tion of the vast regions of northern and eastern Russia and set
up on the territory of Russia a number of industries where the
application of the western European and American technique is
necessary. The negative aspect of the penetration of capitalistic
enterprises into the Republic will be paralyzed, or is paralyzed,
by the further growth of class-consciousness and the revolution
ary enthusiasm of the working class, as well as by the consist
ent development and strengthening of socialist economy.
The foregoing paragraphs comprise about half of Rykov's
outline. The concluding sections are devoted to a discussion
of labor technique, plans for economic development, and
problems of industrial organization under the communist
system of production.
March 16, 1921]
The Nation
Rail and Water Transportation in Russia

THE report on Russia's transportation system, delivered
by Yemashamov, Commissar for Transportation, was
reported in Pravda for December 28 as follows :
We may point to an indubitable improvement in transporta
tion work, an improvement both qualitative and quantitative.
In the first place, the year 1920 gave us an important increase
in our railway net. Whereas toward the beginning of the year
the aggregate mileage amounted to 33,000 versts, toward the end
of the year it totaled 60,000 versts. At the beginning of the year
our railroad system carried 6,000 freight cars per 25 hours. At
present we are handling 12,000 such cars. The number of en
gines has also increased greatly. We now have 17,700 engines
and 41,900 cars. Thus, in spite of the unfavorable conditions
under which our transportation repair is going on, we can point
to a marked improvement in the state of our road stock.
The conditions under which our repair shops operate are
known to you all. The shops have been largely destroyed. Many
of them have no window panes in spite of the winter season.
The equipment of the shops which we have recently taken over
is destroyed. The most important parts of the machinery are
lost or have been ruined by the enemy. Nevertheless, we must
say that we are acquitting ourselves pretty well of the tasks
outlined for us in Order No. 1042. At the beginning of the year
we had 3,833 effective engines. Now we have 7,461. . . .
The brilliant execution of Order No. 1042 has enabled us to
advance the schedule, and if the spare-part factories permit we
shall be in a position to repair all our engines, not within four
and a half years, as was planned, but within three and a half
or even three years. In spite of the fact that the repairing of
cars is going on as efficiently as the repairing of engines the
number of "sick" cars is growing and amounts to 23 per cent.
An indispensable requirement for the normal functioning of
transportation is efficient telegraphic communication. At pres
ent 32,500 of the available 38,000 telephones of the Republic
need radical repair. Out of the existing 10,000 telegraphic in
struments 8,000 demand substantial repair. The electric signal
system is even in a more deplorable state. It needs repair in its
entirety. Taking into consideration our repair facilities, our
materials and labor resources, we have worked out a plan for
restoring our telegraph system in two years dated from January
1, 1920.
It is further necessary to call attention to the critical state
of our railway trackage. From the outbreak of the war the
renewal of worn ties and rails was discontinued in many places.
At present the tracks are in a condition conducive to disasters.
A project for their repair is being worked out at present and will
require a period of five years. In a whole series of sections it
is necessary to clean the road. We need 120,000 men for that
purpose. Of course this number will vary depending upon the
amount of snow, etc.
The railway fuel situation cannot be considered satisfactory
at present. Wood is still the predominant material. As for
coal, the Donetz mining region is not in a position to meet all
the needs of the railroads.
With regard to water transportation, the amount of freight
carried has increased considerably in comparison with 1919.
This year we have transported 582 million poods by water,
whereas last year we carried only 340 million poods. The prob
lem of repairing the craft cannot be discussed here in default
of statistical data. If we get enough materials and metal, there
is no doubt that here, too, the repair program will be carried out.
This program provides for a tonnage in 1921 not below that of
1920.
In conclusion it is necessary to say that the administrative
apparatus of our transportation is definitely formed, so that the
administrative agencies exist not only on paper, but also in
reality. The entire system is sufficiently strong, and the task of
those at the head of transportation is to perfect it.
417

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The Nation
418
The
BRASS
CHECK
[Vol. 112, No. 2906
WEEKLY!
Some time ago we threatened to start a publication with the above name, to keep up with the increasing dis
honesties of the capitalist press. We meant the suggestion playfully, but it would seem that the capitalist press is
going to drive us to it!
Last November the author of "The Brass Check" was the Socialist candidate for Congress in the 10th California
District. During the campaign not a single newspaper in Los Angeles quoted a word from the campaign speeches of
this candidate. A few days before election the Los Angeles "Times" published a big display article, with heading
all the way across the page: "HERE ARE ALL THE CANDIDATES." The list was completesave for one
name, that of the author of "The Brass Check." On the day after election, all five Los Angeles newspapers printed
on the front page a "box" giving the returns for all the principal offices. The list began with the vote for United
States Senator. It then gave the vote for the 9th District. Then, it skipped entirely the vote for the 10th Dis
trict, which is three-fourths of the city of Los Angeles, and went on to give the vote for the minor offices. On the
second day after election, the newspapers repeated this incredible performance, and the boycotted candidate sent tele
grams to the Socialist papers of the country, stating how the returns were being suppressed.
There is published in New York city an organ of the Old Style Tory virtues called the "Weekly Review."
In this paper an ex-Socialist, W. J. Ghent, published an article charging that the author of "The Brass Check" had
been inaccurate. Ghent had found one sentence of comment on the returns in one newspaper the day after election,
and two sentences the second day after election. He furthermore showed that the Los Angeles "Times" had pub
lished the complete returns on November 6, four days after election, and the official revised returns on November 20.
To this the author of "The Brass Check" replied that all his telegrams had been sent on November 3 and 4, so that
what the "Times" had published on November 6 and 20 did not touch the question of his veracity. As to the earlier
matters, Ghent had made his case by suppressing all mention of the "boxes" containing the returns, with the vote in
the 10th District omitted.
The "Weekly Review" delayed for two months to publish this explanationin the meantime sending it to Ghent,
so that he might prepare an answer. This answer of Ghent was a charge that the author of "The Brass Check" had
lied ; that he had sent a telegram to the New York "Call" on November 6, subsequent to the publication of the com
plete returns in the Los Angeles "Times." By accident the author found out about this new charge before it was
published in the "Weekly Review," and he obtained from the telegraph companies certified evidence that he had
sent no telegrams to the New York "Call" except on November 3 and 4; he had sent none on November 6. The
telegram referred to by Ghent had been sent by another party, and sent on November 5, not November 6that is, it
had been sent prior to the publication of the returns by the Los Angeles "Times" on November 6 !
This documentary evidence was submitted to the editor of the "Weekly Review," as a test of the Old Style
Tory virtues. Having the evidence before him that his charges were false, here is what the editor of the "Weekly
Review" did : he published the charges of Ghent, and returned the evidence of Upton Sinclair unpublished and unmentioned ; he wrote a letter, admitting that he had the evidence before him, at the time he sent the charges to press ;
but he returned the evidence for lack of space, and he published the false charges because he already had them in
type ! The charges are now being reprinted in capitalist papers from Philadelphia to Sacramento, and were last heard
from in the "Standard," organ of the Ethical Culture Societies!
Meantime, "The Brass Check" is reported as the book most in demand in one public library after another. A
friend informs us that in Los Angeles there are forty reservations for it! Scores of college boys are writing us
about it, one declaring that he heard the book discussed in three different class-rooms in one day! The book has
reached the Governor-General of the Philippines, who writes enthusiastically about it. Also it has reached Japan,
whence come three letters in one month, asking to translate it. The Economy Book Shop of Chicago telegraphs
for 1 ,400 copies, having had 750 the month previousand this a year after publication !
The London "Nation" gave "The Brass Check" a two-page review a year ago. Now, our shipments of 6,500
copies having reached London, the "Nation" of January 29 gives another page. We quote one paragraph, so that
you may see how the Wild West looks from a London study!
"If you wish to read a lively book of adventurereally desperate big-game hunting, in a country apparently
full of man-eaters that stalk the hunter invisibly and generally get him, and rogue tuskers that wait securely in
ambush to flatten out innocent wayfarers who trespass in tabooed grovesread the 'Brass Check.' It is by Upton
Sinclair (Hendersons, 8s. 6d.), an author who has written about jungles before, I am told, though I have never
read him. One gathers from Mr. Sinclair that Sven Hedin, Shackleton, Doughty, and other pioneers in lands
where you find rocks but no ruth, had simple tasks compared to that of an American newspaper reporter who tries
to tell what he knows ; for the sub-title of this book is 'A Study of American Journalism.' It appears from it that
there is work still for stout-hearted pioneers in New York which will make Buffalo Bill's excitements in the Wild
West seem but table tennis. What are grizzly bears to High Finance? What the Sioux warrior Rain-in-the-Face to
Mr. Hearst? Young men who are looking for an exciting life but are deploring the softness of a modern existence
should read Upton Sinclair and admire the opportunity he shows could be theirs."
Prices of "The Brass Check" and other books published by Upton Sinclair are: Single copy, paper 60c post
paid; three copies $1.50; ten copies $4.50. Single copy, cloth, $1.20 postpaid; three copies $8.00; ten copies $9.00.
UPTON SINCLAIR, Pasadena, California
The Nation
FOUNDED 1865
Vol. CXI I

Contents
419
EDITORIALS:
The Supreme Court Strike* at the Press
422
True Leadership
423
Rent Laws; Then What?
424
The Pathos of Romance
424
Brunch and the New Child Labor
425
THE AMERICAN CONGOBURNING OF HENRY LOWRY. By
William Pickens
426
THE MILWAUKEE LEADER CASE. By Zechariah Chafee, Jr
428
THE NEW LITERATURE IN AMERICA. By Ludwig Lewisohn
429
EVERYBODY WINS AT LEGHORN. By Eugene Lyons
480
THE CORDWAINERS' CASEAFTER A CENTURY. By Albert De
Silver
482
IN BEHALF OF DR. SIMONS. By Walther Schuecking
438
433
CORRESPONDENCE
434
BOOKS:
A Columbus Iconoclast. By Theodore Stanton
436
Political Theories. By Walter James Shepard
487
New Schools for Old. By L L. Kandel
438
The Safe Critic
439
DRAMA:
The Tyranny of Love. By Ludwig Lewisohn
489
Lenin's Letter to the Italian Socialists
442
Serrati Answers for His Party
448
The Line-up of the Factions in Italy
445
The Italian Socialists and the International
447
An Appeal to the Italian Workers
447
OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editoh
Associatb Editors
LEWIS S. GANNETT
FREDA KIRCHWEY
ARTHUR WARNER
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
ERNEST H. GRUENING
CARL VAN DOREN
Managing Editor
Literary Editor
Mexico ; to Canada, $6.50, and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00.
THE NATION, 20 Vesey Street, New York City. Cable Address: Nation, New
WHO is barbarous, and who is civilized? For six years
endless repetition established that the Germans were
totally depraved, brutal, Hunnish. Didn't they make war
on civilian populations? Didn't they practice frightfulness? Didn't they take hostages, use poison gas, bomb
helpless cities from the air? The Allies on the other hand
represented humanity, warfare only for the right, practiced
in a civilized mannerin fact the antithesis of everything
Teutonic. As a reminder of these truths the Allies have
just renewed their demands for the immediate punishment
of the German "war criminals," especially the Gotha and
Zeppelin captains who raided England and France. But
here comes Major General Sir Frederick Sykes, Britain's
Controller General of Civil Aviation and flatly indorses the
German policy of frightfulness. "War must be carried into
the enemy's country," he asserts, "his nerve centers shat
tered, and the morale of the nation as a whole shaken. This
can be largely effected by air attack on industrial and po
litical centers." The occasion of General Sykes's utterance
was the announcement from Washington of the discovery
of a new liquid, infinitely deadlier than any heretofore
manufactured. Three drops, if they touch the skin of a
person, are lethal. A single airplane spraying it can kill
every living creature in an area seven miles long and one
hundred feet wide. Does anyone shudder at the thought?
Do the recent self-constituted platform and press exhorters
of loathing at such horrors when committed by Germans
utter a syllable of protest? On the contrarythere is smug
satisfaction that we are going the Germans one better.
No. 2907
THE Allies, and the whole world, are having another

excellent example of the utter uselessness of force.
The troops of Foch have occupied more German territory
and the "sanctions" of London are in effect. With what
result? As yet hone whatever. The additional Germans
under French military rule are resigned and apathetic. Dr.
Simons has been upheld in Berlin and the German Gov
ernment shows no signs of yielding. In the Rhine industrial
sections production is slowing up rapidly, which means that
the Allies have succeeded only in still further weakening
the German power to earn money with which to restore
devastated France and pay possible indemnities. Even in
Paris the failure of Foch's move is so clear that the talk
of establishing a Rhine republic is again heard. The
Allies may well beware; passive resistance is the most
effective weapon in the world. If they should find them
selves compelled to take over and govern all of Germany
they will wish they had let her severely alone.
SINCE President Wilson reserved to himself the exclu
sive services of a rear admiral in the navy as Physicianin-Waiting, we suppose it is only natural that President
Harding's dignity should require a brigadier general in the
armyindeed, we think he was rather modest not to have
insisted on a major general. The interesting thing is that
the new Presidential medico never wore a uniform until
last week. He is 62 years of age, and the law declares that
no one over the age of sixty shall be appointed. But the
White House knows how to get around a thing like that;
this regulation is suspended in war time, and are we not
still at war with Germany? And so by the simple device of
appointing Dr. Sawyer a brigadier general in the United
States Army Reserve and then assigning him to active duty,
President Harding gets the exclusive services in uniform
of his dear old neighbor and physician from Marion, while
Dr. Brigadier Sawyer rakes in the $6,000 a year salary of
a brigadier general in the army plus all the allowances of
the rank. Thus everybody is happy, and only fault-finding
cranks like the editors of The Nation will point out that
this is a bad example of honest graft for the President to set.
THE police of Philadelphia have added to their already
unsavory reputation in respect to the illegal suppres
sion of public meetings by the arrest on March 6 of Eliza
beth Gurley Flynn and several others who were making an
appeal on behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti in a hall a permit
for the use of which had been obtained by the Amalgamated
Clothing Workers. It is said that the police had been "in
formed beforehand" that the meeting was of a seditious
character. The complaint entered against the arrested per
sons, who were held in bail for trial, is a gem that is worth
reproducing exactly. It reads:
Having in possession sediticous Liteture and and arranging
for and agreeing to participate in an illegal meeting contrary
to an act of Assembly in such cases made and provided for
Suspicion of being an Organizer of Radical movements and
Organization and meeting against the peace and dignity of the
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
420
The Nation
FROM time to time we have had occasion to criticize

the American Legion, but we hope never to do so on
a mistaken basis of fact. There is considerable danger of
this now when reactionary "Americanism" is everywhere
trying to disguise itself in a cloak of patriotism and seek
ing to use former service men to pull its chestnuts out of
the fire. In almost any mixed crowd of a score or upward,
there are likely to be at least one or two former soldiers.
They may not belong to the American Legion, and they
may be present as spectators rather than participants, but
in any case of disturbance or outrage there is always some
body shrewd enough to spread the idea that the action was
organized or led by members of the Legion. In this they
find the press more than ready to cooperate, and dis
patches placing the responsibility on former soldiers are
sent out either without investigation or with deliberate pur
pose to deceive. Worse even than this, newspapers do not
hesitate to act as agents provocateurs, and by asking Ameri
can Legion posts if they do not propose to stop this or that,
incite disturbances which they later gleefully chronicle.
THESE considerations came to us forcibly when we
picked up the newspapers of March 14 and noted that
members of the American Legion were said to have incited
the mob in Kansas that tarred and rolled in the grass two
organizers of the National Nonpartisan League. For at
the same time we had before us a copy of the Nonpartisan
Leader of March 7, containing a letter to the editor from
A. H. Vernon, commander of the American Legion of Min
nesota. The letter referred to another that had been re
ceived from the Legion in Kansas, in which the latter body
asked assistance in correcting the impression that it was
opposing the Nonpartisan League, to which "many Ameri
can Legion members belong." Commander Vernon's letter
was sent to 400 newspapers in Minnesota. The Leader,
noting the result in St. Paul and Minneapolis, found that
of the seven dailies only one printed the letterthe Min
nesota Daily Star, owned by Nonpartisan League and labor
interests. In the circumstances we are disposed to take
with several grains of salt the effort to make the American
Legion appear as the instigator of the outrages against
Nonpartisan League men in Kansas. We suspect that
crooked business and servile newspapers are more to blame,
as they have been in other recent mob episodes.
AS already suggested in these columns, the Republican
leaders do not propose to drop the emergency tariff
merely because Mr. Wilson vetoed the measure passed at
the last session of Congress. A similar bill is signaled from
Washington as the first important job of the new legisla
ture. But it appears that the farmer, who was used as a
decoy last winter, is no longer needed. Secure in their con
trol of Congress and the Presidency, the Republicans are
coming out from behind their ambuscade, and according
to a Washington dispatch to the New York Herald, the plan
is to frame the emergency measure "upon the basis of the
Payne-Aldrich law of 1909." Of course the memory of the
people is proverbially short; otherwise it would seem a
little rash to come out so flat-footedly for a measure which,
more than anything else, wrecked the last Republican ad
ministration. But Boies Penrose, chairman of the Senate
Finance Committee, belongs to the Old Guard, and is re
ported as saying that he will "use a little force if neces
sary" to put through the scheme which he advocates.
[Vol. 112, No. 2907
ONE need not know the extent of the rebellion against

the Russian Government nor be able to predict the
outcome in order to point out some facts which have ap
parently been deliberately submerged or distorted in the
daily press. The papers almost unanimously have called the
uprising a protest against the "communistic experiment,"
against the soviet system, against the "Reds." But the
counter-revolutionists, we discover in the same dispatches,
are going forward with the old slogan on their shields,
"All Power to the Soviets," and they have declared that their
fight is for the restoration of the soviet system which has
been modified and emasculated by the present Government
The chances are that the insurrectionists will fail before
the armies of Trotzky; and the chances are even stronger
that if they should succeed they would be unable in the
present state of the world to restore the Soviets to free, undictated power, or to produce a more perfect communist
state. Probably they could not even provide more bread for
the workers. But these are the things they appear to want.
So the Paris emigres and the newspapers of every country
had better examine their new allies carefully, lest they dis
cover when the smoke dies away that they have been en
couraging a set of men who are redder than the hated
"Reds"; who are Bolsheviki, without the faintest touch of
compromise with capitalism or imperialism or militarism.
NOT long ago the League of Spanish Workers sent out
an appeal to the proletariat of the world for a boycott
of Spanish commerce, to force the Government to renounce
its campaign of terrorism against the working class. Twice
decrees of suppression had been issued by Premier Dato,
"dictator of Spain," resulting in wholesale arrests and
brutal violation of the rights of Spanish workers. Consti
tutional guaranties had been abrogated and the jails were
filled with people whose only offense was lack of identifica
tion papers at the time of their arrest. Dato replied to
this appeal in Epoca, declaring that all the demands of the
Spanish working class would be granted. This announce
ment was followed a few weeks later by a message of the
League to the workers in other countries, calling for aid in
defense of their very existence. The message declared that
the promises made by Dato showed him to be a "cynical liar,"
and that not a day went by without the massacre of Spanish
workers, on the streets, at their work, even while they were
eating. On March 8 Premier Dato was assassinated.
WHAT the Fascisti are trying to do in Italy, it seems,
is to upset and interrupt a pleasant, orderly, peace
able revolution. Under the moderating hand of Giolitti a
process of expropriation and confiscation has been steadily
under way. Estates have been divided up among the peas
ants, factories are operating under a sort of modified work
er's control, and Socialist administrations have been elected
in some 2,200 communes and several hundred provinces.
The Government has prepared an interesting proposal for
joint control of industry by the workers and owners which
is now under discussion. But the Nationalists and their
White Guards, the Fascisti, are displaying a heroic oppo
sition to change that not only breeds disorder from day to
day but encourages the Socialists in their assumption that
civil warfare is a necessary if undesirable element in revo
lution. Gunplay and riots and beatings are, one might aay,
the disorder of the day in Italy, and every act of violence
makes violence more inevitable.
March 23, 1921]
The Nation
AGAIN the goose-step. In the Denver Post we read

that Judge Robert E. Lewis of the United States
District Court has denied citizenship to an applicant be
cause fellow-workers of the latter testified he had said he
wanted to vote for Debs for President in order that the
Socialist leader might be elected and released from prison.
The applicant for citizenship denied having said he wanted
to vote for Debs (although such an expression would have
been both legal and understandable) but admitted saying
that he believed Debs would be set free if elected. Judge
Lewis is quoted as saying thereupon:
I don't say that Debs ought not to be pardoned. Perhaps he
ought. Maybe he's been in prison long enough. And if he
should be pardoned we will accept the fact as good citizens,
without criticism. But Debs was convicted by a competent
court and a jury of twelve competent men. The man who
criticizes the act of that court and jury is not a good citizen.
This, of course, is the goose-step par excellence, the result
of a muddled conception of democracy. It is the duty of all
to obey the law, including any legitimate application of it
by the executive or judicial power. It is equally the duty
of all (not merely their privilege) to criticize the law and
any executive or judicial application of it.
SENATOR CUMMINS'S proposal for a Congressional in
vestigation of the railroad problem should be put
through at once. The public mind has been clouded by
propaganda, and a full and thorough airing of the situation
could do only good. The railroad workers have three able
men to present their case in the persona of B. M. Jewell,
of the Railroad Department of the American Federation
of Labor, W. Jett Lauck, economist, and Frank P. Walsh,
counsel. The wisdom and justice of the workers' contention
are increasingly clear. A few months ago the railroads
were crying that return to private ownership would solve
all their ills. They got the return, and a generous Govern
ment subsidy as well. But private management has only
run the road3 deeper into debt, and increased the deficit.
Now there are rumors that some of the financial interests
behind the railroads are feeling the way toward joint action
with the workers for a return to some form of Government
ownership. Whenever a monopolized industry becomes un
profitable, the financial interests behind it forget their hor
ror of Government ownership and seek to unload. A full
investigation may well expose the inefficiency of private
management of the railroads, the hollowness of the railway
managers' solemn pretenses, and might point the way to an
effective system of democratized Government control.
MEANWHILE the railroad labor controversy is in full
blast. A few railroads defied the Railroad Labor
Board's insistence upon conference with the employees be
fore wage cuts are announced or appeal is made to the Board
for right to make wage cuts, but most of them have dis
covered that the method prescribed by law is safer and
quite innocuous. They "confer" with their employees, not
nationally, but road by road, which breaks up the opposi
tion; when the employees refuse to accept wage cuts, they
appeal to the Board. The Board is being flooded with such
appeals, and its previous utterances indicate that while it
insists upon execution of the letter of the law, it will prob
ably finally grant to the railroads the reductions they ask.
And the workers, in the end, will probably accept.
421
RIGHT heartily we approve this week's drive on behalf

of suffering Ireland. In view of the failure of the
Red Cross to aid the destitute and suffering Irish there was
nothing left for private beneficence but to go ahead. It is
all nonsense to say that this is butting into the private con
cerns of our ally and that it is another clever scheme to
drive a wedge in between England and ourselves. If Eng
land's troops will destroy creameries and lay waste towns
and burn and slay right and left, besides creating complete
business unsettlement and much unemployment, she has no
right to protest against any one who yields to the humane
desire to succor the victims of this dreadful civil war, which
has already done $200,000,000 damage. The desire to aid
is not to be controlled by any preconceived notions as to
who is wrong and who right in the struggle, nor will it wait
upon an inquiry as to exactly who is to blame, any more
than Mr. Hoover stopped to ask questions in Belgium. It
is enough that Ireland slowly perishes; that this last week
as every other brings news of bloody reprisals, of death in
ambush and on the road, of the midnight assassin on both
sides. No effective way to peace is yet in sight. If it came
tomorrow it would still be a duty and a privilege to help
relieve the crying suffering for which British militarism
bears the chief burden. The address of the American Com
mittee for Relief in Ireland is 1 West 34th Street, New
York. It asks for $10,240,000 immediately and should
get it.
ANOTHER effort to give to one of our large cities a
clean, honest, and reliable newspaper has come to an
end in Chicago. The American Daily Standard has sus
pended publication there after an existence of a trifle more
than two months. In doing so it blames the public and busi
ness men of Chicago for their failure to show any interest
in it or to make any effort to support it. It was meant to
be a Christian daily, something for Protestants after the
style of the Christian Science Monitor for the Christian Sci
entists. It called itself "a Christian newspaper striving to
serve the cause of clean journalism in America," and it
made a creditable beginning, while foolishly believing that
the best elements in the city which has to choose mornings
between Hearst's American and the Chicago Tribune for
its reading matter, would prefer something else than a
choice between the journalistic frying-pan and fire. All of
which but reinforces the old point that the American public
does not yet desire better daily newspapers than those it
now has.
THE Board of Trustees of the Corcoran Gallery of Art
in Washington announces a gift of $100,000 from
ex-Senator William A. Clark to perpetuate the William A.
Clark Prize Awards, which since 1907 have been important
items in the life and usefulness of the Corcoran Gallery.
So large a gift, hardly to be paralleled elsewhere, should not
be overlooked by any one interested in the future of Ameri
can art. Regrettable though it is that the Government has
seen fit to offer so little encouragement to the arts and that
the whole matter has been left to the sporadic accident of
private generosity, still in the interval before a better order
can be brought into existence, if it ever can, just such
awards as these do something to make the life of the Amer
ican artist less haphazard. They give him recognition and
consequently a status in the public eye, and to this extent
add something to the progress of our civilization.
422
The Nation
The Supreme Court Strikes at the

WE have already expressed our opinion in no uncertain
terms of the decision of the Supreme Court in the
case of the Milwaukee Leader, of which Victor Berger is
editor. It is of utmost moment to the freedom of the press,
yes, to every citizen who believes in the Bill of Rights and
values his civil liberty, but, so far as we are able to observe,
it has stirred the press hardly at all. In its essence the
Court has decided, with two justices, Holmes and Brandeis,
the liberal minority, dissenting, that the Postmaster General
has the right to exclude from second-class mailing privileges
for an indefinite period any newspaper whose opinions he
does not like. The theory and practice heretofore have been
that a given issue could be excluded for obscenity, or for
such a political vagary as preaching anarchy, or for fraud ;
but the Supreme Court has now decided that this privilege,
which is a matter of life and death to all journals with a
large mail circulation, can be indefinitely forfeited if the
Postmaster General sees fit. It was, of course, the case of
Berger which the Court was deciding and it did not hesitate
to show its feeling about him. It affirmed the finding of the
lower tribunals that his utterances were made "with intent
to promote the success of the enemies and that they con
stituted a wilful attempt to cause disloyalty . . . and to
obstruct the recruiting and enlistment service of the United
States [something which no one who has followed Mr. Berger's course carefully will believe], in violation of the Es
pionage Act." But the precedent established far transcends,
of course, the case of Mr. Berger personally, for it may pro
foundly affect the press for a long time to come.
The majority of the Court puts the issue squarely. It
declares that since the second-class privilege is granted by
permit only after the Postmaster General is convinced that
the character of the paper warrants his doing so, any revo
cation of that permit may also be indefinite if he concludes
that the past conduct of a paper gives him the ground for
beliefas the Supreme Court declares the Milwaukee Leader
didthat it will continue an obnoxious policy. This remark
able position is not related to the status of war. It is a
peace-time censorship which the Supreme Court thus be
stows upon the Post Office. Therefore the new Postmaster
General would be within his rights if he suddenly decided
that all of the Hearst publications were not of a character
worthy to profit by the low second-class rates, that they
were subtly encouraging "hostility to and violation of" cer
tain laws, and therefore suspended their mailing rights in
definitely. In view of the tremendous hue and cry against
Hearst at the time that the assassination of McKinley was
laid at his door, it is quite within the range of possibility
that the then Postmaster General might have revoked the
mailing privileges if he had had any idea that the power
expressly defined by Congress as permitting the barring of
the mails to merely a single issue also gave him the right to
pass upon the general behavior of any newspaper and to
punish it for its opinions or manners.
Now, on its face there is something tempting to many
about this position of the Supreme Court, since it appar
ently empowers the Postmaster General to establish a cen
sorship of the press. The press is so far degraded that
many people are hoping for some kind of control. They
recall the damnable work done by the Hearst papers in pre
cipitating the war with Spain ; the public is aware now that
[Vol. 112, No. 2907
Press
they are doing about everything they can to provoke hostili

ties with Mexico, Great Britain, and Japan. Why not have
the Postmaster General take away the privilegenot right
by which this journalistic pest obtains a service of trans
portation from the Government at one-eighth its cost? Why
deprive anybody of the privilege after we are in a war if
the man who deliberately helps to embroil us with others
goes scot free? Why should we not have a censorship of
the press through the Postmaster General? Because free
dom of the press is guaranteed by the Constitution, the
now much abused and discredited founders of our Govern
ment having realized that without a free press the Republic
could not survive, and because it is infinitely better for
America to endure license and roguery than that any attempt
should be made to throttle a press which, good or bad, is in
the last resort the chief and final defender of our liberties.
In his dissenting opinion Justice Brandeis sees very clearly
where this will lead us to. This new power carries with it,
he says, the "vague and absolute authority practically to
deny circulation to any publication which in his [the Post
master General's] opinion is likely to violate in the future
any postal law." "If," he adds, "under the Constitution,
administrative officers may, as a mere incident of the peace
time administration of their departments, be vested with
the power to issue such orders as this there is little of sub
stance in our Bill of Rights and in every extension of gov
ernmental function lurks a new danger to civil liberty."
Why should the Supreme Court be constantly striking at
American liberties? It was not long ago that it rendered
a decision in the Berea College case which, as Justice Brewer
pointed out, would justify the forbidding of Jews to assem
ble on the market place of a city like Detroit save between
.certain hours, such as two and four p. m. Talk about the
guardianship of our liberties! One would think that the
words of Justice Brandeis and Justice Holmes would arouse
the press from one end of the country to the other. But it
is dead to its own shackling, and it long has been. For
more than a decade past the Government has been inter
fering with its liberties, but just as long as its money mak
ing is not affected the press is indifferent to such attacks
upon itself. When, however, the pocket nerve is touched,
as, for instance, when the Government heavily increased
the postal charges, then there was an outcry from one end
of the country to the other, and the publishers found that
they could get together and make extremely vigorous pro
tests at Washington. So in New York State this winter
we have similarly seen united action by the country pub
lishers to continue the substantial graft they get from the
State by the annual printing of all the laws passed by the
Legislatureone of the numerous pieces of official pap
which plunder the taxpayers. But when it comes to
anything affecting the spirit and soul of the press and its
liberty, these editors cannot even find time to comment upon
it in their editorial columns. A few, like the New York
Tribune, are shameless enough to applaud their own enslave
ment. What clearer measure could there be of the decad
ence of our press? If it is not true to itself and to its ideals
it certainly cannot be to the country. If it has no respect
for its own liberty and rights, why need it be surprised if
the country regards it today much as if it were a painted
hetaera?
March 23, 1921]
The Nation
True
423
Leadership
BUT it is not enough to be put in positions of leadership;

we must know whither to lead. We must have our minds
open to facts of every kind. We must understand evidence and
proof. We must have a sense of the larger historical and moral
values. We must have intellectual courage. These four things
open-mindedness, critical judgment, vision, and courage\
mark a man out as one to be trusted and followed. It is a
common complaint that our politicians are destitute of courage
of any kind. I do not believe that this complaint is well
founded. What is called lack of courage is chiefly lack of con
viction; and this lack of conviction springs from lack of knowl
edge. Men would not sacrifice the large interests of tomorrow
to the small interests of today if they had any clear idea of
what was going to happen tomorrow. In the absence of any
such clear idea, they are content to drift with the crowd in
stead of staking their political future upon unknown hazards.
These are fine words of President Hadley, of Yale, well
spoken to his undergraduates. Indeed, there are few mes
sages more needed today, when multitudes sigh in every
clime for the leadership which appeareth not, when no man
can vision just what the world needs, when those who insist
that their little panacea will cure all the world are less and
less listened to or trusted. It is not single-tax, nor land
reform, nor proportional representation, nor disarmament,
nor reorganizing our legislatures along group lines after
the Soviet manner, nor communism, nor nationalizing our
basic industries and public services, which alone and singly
will lead us out of the chaos into which the war has plunged
us. Nor can any group of these reforms produce the mil
lennium quickly. Only a quack will offer us a cure-all in
these times. Only a dangerous egotist, or a blind man, will
assert that he knows just what is the whole way out.
Usually it is the narrowly opinionated who would sell us the
immediate and complete specific; those who know that all
would be well if we would only smash all the labor unions,
or all the capitalists, or keep out all the foreigners, or might
ily resolve to be all 100 per cent Americans. Such under
stand neither evidence nor proof. They have become en
raged at a class, or a cult, or a race. Extirpate that, they
stupidly insist, and all will be well with us and business.
Again, it is the time to beware of the man with a com
pleted program. Editors are being particularly besought
these days to catalogue their remedies for our ills from
number one to twenty-five; if they do not the stupid and
tiresome old plaint of being shrill in destructive criticism
and lacking on the constructive side is hurled at them. But
he who would today lay down a complete platform would
at once fail as lamentably as did Republicans and Democrats
alike last summer at those humbug gatherings of theirs
termed conventions. Any editor or statesman who is pos
sessed in any degree of the sense of the "larger historical
and moral values" for which President Hadley calls finds
himself unfitted by it to assume finality. Indeed, if Mr.
Hadley or any one else could see his way clear in every
troubled field of human relationship and human endeavor
he would have no difficulty in proclaiming himself dictator.
No man, king or president, is big enough today for the task.
The most that can be done today is to grope step by step.
Woman suffrage, peace, disarmament, free trade, a world
court, a parliament of manthese point in the right direc
tion, for they are of the fiber of democracy, justice, and
Christianity. To limit oneself to them is neither to drift
with the unthinking crowd nor to show a limited vision.

Men may be, as Mr. Hadley believes, sacrificing the large
interests of tomorrow to the small interests of today be
cause of ignorance of what is to happen tomorrow, but that
is unavoidable. Less than ever can we look into the future.
There are new and unprecedented situations confronting
us; we cannot, for instance, assert that we are but living
the French Revolution over again, or turn to Girondists
and Jacobins for parallels. That the newer social philoso
phies and political doctrines sink deeper today is obvious
if one contrasts the spread of education as compared with
that in the pre-Napoleonic era. The great classes are stirred
to their depths at this hour as they never were in the up
heavals of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries when labor
had not begun to organize. But while we differ from Mr.
Hadley as to how far people ought to be able to pierce the
veil of the future, there can be no question that he is right
that this is not the time for men without convictions or
principles. It is well to be open-minded; Mr. Harding was
within his rights in consulting men of varying views, but
whether he will succeed in the end depends entirely upon
whether he has convictions and principles and the knowledge
with which to elucidate and defend them. One may have
only the knowledge of a rail-splitter, yet have enough to
lead men if there goes with it a definite philosophy, a defi
nite chart of life, a definite and sound position toward
human rights and aspirations. Critical judgment, vision,
and courage are all in order today, but most of all the
leader must believe in something with all the strength and
passion of his nature and be ready to perish if need be for
that belief. The world is satiated with men who trim and
compromise and become "practical"which means a readi
ness to barter a part of their convictions. If proof of that
is needed it is the way the masses of Europe rose to Woodrow Wilson in 1918 only to fall back more discouraged than
ever when he, too, began to compromise and barter in Paris.
The masses do sense the larger moral values even when they
are voiceless. They respond invariably to the man who is
absolutely true to himself. Yet this politicians never learn.
All of which leads us to the fact that the great problem
of today when governments and their plain people are usu
ally at odds is whether the human character is capable of
bearing the tremendous responsibilities that go with the
governing of millions. Can men have the power of a Clemenceau or a Lloyd George or a Wilson and remain true to
democracy, to the real aspirations of the masses and peoples?
It gives one pause to contrast Lloyd George, the pro-Boer,
fighting his government in war-time and denouncing its
burnings of towns and its deadly reconcentrado camps in
the Transvaal with the Lloyd George who is responsible for
the bloody reprisals in Ireland. Our colleges and college
presidents must ask themselves whether we can so build
character that vast power over his fellow beings will
not make tyrants or Czars or Kaisers of each one to whom
power comes. Many a man has taken office with the cour
age and conviction, critical judgment, and open-mindedness
for which President Hadley pleads, only to yield to the in
vidious effect upon himself of the authority he wields. It
is the readiness to suffer and to sacrifice all for principle
and conviction which alone seems to keep the hearts of
public men pure and undefiled.
The Nation
424
Rent Laws;
Then What?
THE New York Legislature of 1920, which began the year

by putting out the Socialist members and ended it by
passing the rent laws, perhaps the most socialistic legislation
in the history of the commonwealth, has been upheld in the
latter by the Court of Appeals, the highest tribunal of the
State. It is proposed to take still another appealto the
United States Supreme Courtbut so far as New York is
concerned it has finally affirmed legislation which, during
the existing housing shortage, virtually takes the power of
fixing rents on residential property from the landlords and
vests it in the courts. This legislation required a landlord
wishing to raise rents beyond what his tenants thought
reasonable to take the case before a magistrate; and made
it impossible to evict a tenant against the tenant's will
except for personal occupancy or in the case the building
was to be rebuilt. With one of the seven justices dis
senting, the Court of Appeals has upheld the exercise of
the police power, in an emergency, on such broad lines that
it might lead to as great a revolution in the control of
property by a State as the Federal Government has attained
by means of the clause in the Constitution giving it the
power to regulate interstate commerce. The decision has
two distinct aspects. One is its influence on legislation and
judicial interpretation in widening the use of the police
power. The other is its effect on building. Will it stimu
late or retard it?
"The law is an ass," someone once remarked irately, and
the opinion has been echoed, often with justice, many times
since. To this view Justice Pound, who writes the decision
of the New York tribunal, replies: "The law of each age is
ultimately what that age thinks should be the law." A fine
and historic conception, that; one which rightly would
identify law with common sense and common opinion, and
would prevent the law from ever becoming a greater ass, at
least, than the generation which formulates it. There is
some nice balancing of words in Justice Pound's decision,
but its net effect is a much-needed and encouraging assertion
of the supremacy of human rights over those of property.
He says:
Either the rights of property and contract must, when neces
sary, yield to the public convenience and the public advantage
or it must be found that the State has surrendered one of the
attributes of sovereignty for which governments are founded,
and made itself powerless to secure to its citizens the blessings
of freedom and to promote the' general welfare. . . . The con
clusion is, in the light of present theories of the police power,
that the State may regulate a business, however honest in itself,
if it is or may become an instrument of widespread oppression ;
that the business of renting homes in the City of New York is
eminently such an instrument and has therefore become subject
to control by the public for the common good ; that the regulation
of rents and the suspension of possessory remedies so far tend
to accomplish the purpose as to supervene the constitutional
inhibitions relied upon to defeat the laws before us.
Of course the decision is a two-edged sword. In a coun
try that is as hamstrung by accumulations of written law
and judicial interpretation as is the United States, the
opinion affords, on the whole, a much to be desired means
of carrying out the public will without resorting to revo
lutionary processes; but just because it makes it easier for
any temporary majority to have its way, it lessens, of
course, the protection of the minority which constitutional
[Vol. 112, No. 2907
law is chiefly designed to secure. Such guarantees always

have been overridden, sanction or not, at the behest of
hysterical and powerful majorities. Hope of maintaining
them lies not in asserting these guarantees as inherent
rights of the minority, but in convincing the majority that
they are equally important for its own welfare and for its
own safety.
When we turn from the judicial aspects of the decision
to its effect on building, we are in an altogether different
sphere. The New York rent laws were never intended
to encourage building; they were passed to protect tenants
from exploitation in the face of a serious shortage of homes.
It cannot be said, however, that these laws have restricted
building because this had already ceased before they were
passed, and has not been resumed in other States where no
such legislation exists. The New York Legislature of 1920
had two duties: one, to protect the public from exploitation
in a crisis; the other, to relieve that crisis. The first task
was accomplished, the second remains as insistent as ever.
Experience in the last few years, fortified by the studied
judgment of the best technical opinion, proves that private
effort is today no longer to be depended upon to construct
homes the rent of which the average man can pay. Hope
lies in cooperative enterprises assisted, perhaps, by public
capital ; or in direct construction for sale or lease by munici
palities, States, or the Federal Government.
The
Pathos of Romance
THE professional or amateur attendant upon first or

second nights never sees the audience for whom plays
are written; the reviewer who seeks to develop the critical
or creative temper of his countrymen tends to forget the
character of the people in numberless "parlors" all over
the land who are absorbed in books which he quite rightly
despises. Thus, wholly against his will, the critic becomes
more and more aloof and is tempted to talk sagely in the
void. He associates with the sophisticated and the lettered ;
he reduces even New York to a village by the exclusiveness
of his contacts; popular plays, magazines, and books end
by merely irritating him like the bad and conventional din
ners which he finds so soon as he abandons the few restau
rants which cater to his tastes. He regards the reading
matter of his neighbors in the same spirit in which, dragged
to a "banquet" by some pertinacious friend, he regards the
filet of sole, the roast chicken, and the ice-cream. How
can people eat the eternal and tasteless stuff and apparently
enjoy it?
They can because, alas, they do like it. This is the intimate
truth which our mandarin often misses. They have not
risen on stepping-stones of their dead tastes to civilized
variety in food. While he fidgets in vain for a bite of
Camembert or even Gorgonzola with his coffee, the vanilla
ice-cream slides like nectar down their innocent throats.
And the reason why he is doomed to be so steadily offended
by the spectacle is that he leaves to curse instead of
remaining to help. He attributes such tastes to inborn
stubbornness or malignity and forgets their involuntary
poverty, pathos, and obedience. He sits at his desk and
writes scalding reviews. Perhaps if he went out into the
land preaching a gospel of freedom and beauty his suc
cessors could afford to be gentler. He himself, as things
are today, might be mobbed or jailed or clapped into an
March 23, 1921]
The Nation
asylum. But the very ferocity of such resistance would

teach him to grasp the pain of the monotony and spiritual
subservience in which most people live.
He should, at least, occasionally attend the fifth or tenth
night of a popular play and watch, preferably from a
shadowy box-seat, the close-packed faces in the stalls. Except
for some quite young girl's here and there he will see no
happy faces. Neither will he see many unhappy ones.
Rather such as are helpless, lightless, and ineloquent. The
features are unmolded by experience; the soul does not
break through. He will see again and again an expression
of old and long blunted discontent, of an inner irk hope
less of its own cure. And in the handsome garments and
too handsome jewels he will learn to see not merely vulgar
display but a pitiful attempt to substitute sterile things
for vital satisfactions. Here, he will conclude, are people
whose entire ethos has forbidden them to train their sensi
bilities, to possess adventure and romance, to so much as
graze the infinite possibilities of human intercourse. They
have never, he will reflect if he is not above quoting Brown
ing to himself, "starved, feasted, despaired, been happy."
They have been taught to regard experience itself as sinful
and dangerous. Business and awkward dinners and noisy
teas and reserve and repression and decorum and conven
tionality have left them with a few yards of fur, a handful
of diamonds, and neither memories nor hopes in their im
poverished hearts.
They do not want art because they cannot want it. Art
counts upon experience, upon inner wealth, upon acute sen
sibilities; it counts, to use a trite phrase, upon an answer
ing chord. It seeks to clarify and interpret experience and
to intensify the consciousness of life. What consciousness
of experience can "The Tyranny of Love" or "Candida" or
"The Sunken Bell" or "Evelyn Innes" or "The House of the
Dead" or "Linda Condon" heighten in the broker from
Washington Heights or the buyer from Kansas City? Both
are "clean-cut," conservative Americans. They were once
capable of all experiences and responses. But a deeply in
grained and loudly emphasized tradition has kept their lives
as barren as a mass of flint. Hence what they want is not
art but a day dream, not reality but frank and gross delu
sion, not an interpretation of life but a substitute for the
lives they have never dared to live. They sit at Sheldon's
"Romance" and dream themselves into a glorious folly of
youth which they have never committed, rejoice in audaci
ties they never attempted, escape into an atmosphere which
good form always made them feign to despise. Had they
but known the thing they would smile at its pinchbeck
imitation here. But having no experience, how shall they
have discrimination? They have never put the day dreams
of their youth to the test of reality. Hence a representa
tion of those crude imaginings on the printed page, the
stage, or the screen, still gives them the only release they
know from the crushing dulness of their lives.
Such is the pathos of the false romance that fills the
world with books and plays which annoy the sophisticated.
It is no failure in taste that makes these productions pop
ular, and no educational process will provide a remedy. To
have taken college courses in English will not introduce
you to those vital experiences which largely make litera
ture comprehensible. The task of the American critic has
little to do with style or technique. Beauty and truth will
arise spontaneously if he can only break the too rigid forms
of life itself, if he can only trouble the waters of the soul.
425
Brunch and the New Child Labor

BRUNCH, as we suppose everybody knows, is, or better
was, that halfway meal between breakfast and lunch,
which indolence or impecuniosity long ago invented. The
lie-a-bed-lady and the Quartier Latin student alike resorted
to it, the latter in pretense that it was a "second break
fast" and hence very frugal; after which he tightened his
belt an extra hole and made shift to pass long hungry
hours until the time for the one square meal his purse
afforded. But now the name brunch has been arbitrarily
appropriated for a new repast midway between the mid
night terpsichorean supper and breakfast. One dines at
seven if one is of the jeunesse, goes to the theater, and is
dancing by eleven-twenty. At midnight the stomach craves
a light repast, say a chicken or lobster salad, or oyster
patties, or both, or a rarebit with its inevitable bottle,
topped off by a sandwich and an ice, all eaten hastily be
tween dancesor, if there are two attending orchestras
and there is no cessation of the inspiring jazz for a single
moment, during toddles. And then, about five, nature asserts
itself once moreand brunch appears. No conventional
breakfast if you please, save for the coffee, but some trifle
garlanded with sausages and batter-cakes, and doughnuts
of course, as dainty and sugared as our grandmothers never
knew how to make them. And once more camel-walks and
other steps from the Zoo until the light steals in and the
last goodbys are said. Then home to the regular bacon
and eggs, and a nap"no sleep till morn where youth and
pleasure meet"or, if one lives in a college town, to the
recitation-room with perfect digestion, a clear conscience,
and the happy thought of a college degree by one brave
night nearer.
We are for brunch: the more sausages and doughnuts
and griddle-cakes andyespie, the better. The stronger
the fare, the stronger the dancing boy. or girl. How shall
they survive an exhausting night's rout without something
solid to set their teeth into? For, take it from us, this
all-night dancing is a deadly new child labor uncontrolled
as yet by unions, either of parents or children. There is
no six- or eight-hour night, nor yet a 44-hour week, much
less one of forty hours. Between what "society" prescribes,
and the jazz-bands compel, our youth is being exploited
nowhere more so than in vacation time. That those of
tender age are not spared appears from a plaint that lies
before us. Writing to a parents' society for the protection
of their offspring from themselves and from each other a
noted headmaster writes: "It is our belief that never
before have the boys returned to school so worn and wasted
by the social round of the Christmas holidays. I was
strongly tempted to . . . put off the beginning of reci
tations until a combination of mild out-door play and long
sleeping hours should show the desired effect upon the
physical condition of the boys." What is our Child Labor
Committee about? Why does it bother itself with condi
tions in factories in the South or in Alaska when our danc
ing parlors cry out for reforming statutes? Where are
our churches and the W. C. T. U.? While we wait to hear,
we beg that no hot-headed radical lay ruthless hands on
brunch. In the matter of food at least the new child labor
is better than the old. And for the domestic doughnut in
dustry we shall fight as for the flag under which we live and
love and jazzcome what may.
426
The
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2907
American Congo Burning of Henry Lowry

By WILLIAM PICKENS
THE valley of the Mississippi River from Memphis to

the great delta may properly be termed the "Congo"
of America. It includes the States of Arkansas, Louisiana,
Mississippi, western Tennessee, and eastern Texas. The
quest of this Congo is not for rubber and ivory, but for
cotton and sugar. Here labor is forced, and the laborer is
a slave. The slavery is a cunningly contrived debt-slavery,
to give the appearance of civilization and the sanction of
law. A debt of a few hundred dollars may tie a black man
and his family of ten as securely in bondage to a great
white planter as if he had purchased their bodies. If the
Thirteenth Amendment, which has never been enforced in
this region, means anything, it is that a man's body cannot
be held for an honestly contracted debt; that only his prop
erty can be held; and that if a contracting debtor has no
property, the creditor takes the risk in advancing credit.
Otherwise a law abolishing slavery could be easily evaded,
for the wealthy enslaver could get the poor victim into
debt and then hold his body in default of payment. Wages
could then be so adjusted to expenses and the costs of
"keep" that the slavery would be unending. The only way
for this debt-slave to get free from such a master is to get
some one else to pay this debt; that is, to sell himself to
another, with added charges, expenses of moving and
bonuses. By this method the enslaver gets his bondmen
cheaper than in a regular slave system, for in the debtsystem he does not have to pay the full market price of a
man. The effect is to allow the ignorant and the poor un
wittingly and unwillingly to sell themselves for much less
than an old slaveholder would have sold them. The debtmaster has other advantages, in that he is free from lia
bilities on account of the debtor's ill-health or the failure
of his crops. The debtor takes all the risk; and in case of
misfortune or crop failure, gets deeper into debtmore
securely tied in bondage.
This is the system that obtains in the great Mississippi
Valley, and it has not been modified for thirty years or
more. The evil of this system is responsible for all of the
massacres of colored people and for nearly all of the hor
rible lynchings and burnings of individual Negroes that
have lately taken place in this region. The recent most
barbarous of all burnings of a human being, that of Henry
Lowry, at Nodena, Arkansas, near Memphis, Tennessee, is
directly and immediately traceable to this debt-slave sys
tem. The newspapers of that section, which described in
great detail the Negro "murderer's" deed of killing a white
planter and the savage torture which the farmers inflicted
upon the slayer, either pretend not to know the cause of
all this or deliberately ignore it. Some of the newspapers,
whose representatives saw members of the white planter's
family and found out everything else, said that "no reason
could be ascertained" as to why the Negro shot the white
man. And other papers invented or accepted a beautiful
little fiction : that Lowry had chased a colored woman for a
mile or more trying to kill her; that this colored woman
finally ran into the home of 0. T. Craig, the planter, for
protection; that the planter stepped out to "remonstrate"
with Lowry, when the latter shot him dead, incidentally
killing his daughter, a Mrs. Williamson, who stood near
him, and wounding his two sons, Hugh Craig, thirty-five

years old, and Richard Craig, twenty-seven years old. As
we know the South, we should have to be very simpleminded to believe this, even if we had not gone immediately
to the section and found the facts otherwise. For a Negro
in Arkansas to do what the papers of Memphis say Lowry
did, that Negro would have to be a maniac; and so the
papers tried to be consistent by asserting that he was
"drunk," one even going so far as to report that a still
had been found at his house.
Let us look at the facts. We should always bear in mind
when there is trouble across the color line that we never
read the side of the colored people in these papers, and
also that many white people say over their dinner tables
and to a few of their colored servants what they will not
say in public. About two years ago Henry Lowry, the
Negro, came from the State of Mississippi to work on the
farms of 0. T. Craig, a large planter in Mississippi County,
Arkansas. With him came his wife and a six-year-old
daughter. He was well-behaved and industrious, and knew
nothing of whiskey and stills. Even the Memphis news
papers admitted finally that he was an honest, hard-work
ing, inoffensive Negro. They admitted this to make it
sound reasonable to assert that he ran a still and got
drunk !
O. T. Craig, the planter, owned all the land thereabout.
The colored tenants could own nothing, and Craig con
trolled everything. He hired, paid, and fired the colored
school teacher, for such schooling as he allowed. His son
Hugh was his farm manager. His son Richard, "Mr. Dick,"
was a "bad man" to the colored people. He was postmaster
and clerk of court. As the Lowry case proves, the mail
of the colored tenants could be opened at any time, and
they got such "justice" as the landlords willed. Craig and
his household, therefore, were about all the "government"
the black tenants knew. The Constitution does not follow
them into the backwoods of Arkansas.
A few weeks before Christmas Henry Lowry ran afoul
of the policies of the debt-slave system by going to Craig
and asking for a settlement; that is, a summing up of the
debits and credits for the two years or so, and a delivery
to Lowry of the balance due, if any. Christmas was com
ing; and it is thought also that Lowry wanted to move
away, which the Craigs perhaps knew, as they controlled
the mails. And Lowry knew that if he attempted to move
away without having written evidence that he was debtfree, all his household goods would be "attached," and he
and his family might be attached, too. But although Craig
could have "settled" on his own ex parte figures, as is the
rule, he refused to have any settlement at all. That would
be bad policy; to concede these Negro tenants a reckoning
might lead to other presumptions on their part. Who
knows? If they can ask for a settlement once in two years
and get it, they might come to ask for monthly statements,
with bills and receipts. And what would become of debtbondage, if the debt-master must keep true and actual
accounts? Craig would not settle. Moreover, any pre
sumptuous Negro who insisted upon a settlement must be
answeredemphatically. So Richard Craig struck Lowry
March 23, 1921]
The Nation
and admonished him not to come again for a settlement, for

there would be no settlement.
Lowry was a man of forty years or more, and being
indignant, he said among his fellow-blacks that he would
go back again and insist upon a settlement. Now, there
was a woman named "Bessie," who was cook for the Craigs,
about twenty-five years old, and on perfectly friendly terms
with "Mr. Dick." She is the principal in the fiction about
the colored woman who was being "protected" from Lowry
by the Craigs. She had reported that Lowry had said he
would "come back," and on Christmas day, when she saw
him coming, she simply ran into the house where the Craigs
and their guests were at dinner and reported that Lowry
was coming. She was not chased a mile, for she was the
cook, and the Craigs were eating her Christmas dinner.
When Lowry arrived on the porch he announced that he
had come again to ask for a settlement, and the senior
Craig, with appropriate language, told him to leave the
place, and emphasized his remark with a billet of wood
which he hurled through the door, striking Lowry. And
as Craig and his family and guests came pressing through
the door, Lowry was backing off the porch as if fearing and
seeking to escape from bodily harm, when bad-tempered
"Dick" rushed out of the door and shot Lowry. It is said
that others also were menacing the Negro with guns. But
not until he was shot at, and as he himself claims, hit by
a bullet from the Craigs, did Lowry pull his gun and shoot
unfortunately killing the father and the married daughter
and wounding the two sons.
Immediately the newspapers, especially those of the near
by city of Memphis, began to work up a lynching by adver
tising the "outrage," the "Negro murderer," and "bad whis
key"without one word of explanation or one syllable of
editorial comment upon the underlying cause of all this.
Lowry had escaped and was caught in El Paso, Texas, on
the 19th of January, being traced through a letter which
he had written to a friend in an effort to get news to his
wife and child, who had been moved into the Craig back
yard for "protection." The colored people whom Lowry
mentioned in this letter as his friends were thrown into
jail, with others whom he did not mention but who were
known to be officers of the Odd Fellow Lodge to which he
belonged. Two wives were jailed with their accused hus
bands.
Governor McRae, of Arkansas, tried to forestall a lynch
ing by ordering the deputy sheriffs who had gone to Texas
to bring Lowry to Little Rock. The Governor had said
that Lowry would have a fair trial. The nearest route
from El Paso to Little Rock would lie through Dallas and
Texarkana and would not pass anywhere near the scene
of the original trouble. But the deputies took Lowry sev
eral hundred miles out of the way, down through New
Orleans, so as to bring him to the waiting mob in Missis
sippi County. The mob leader received a telegram from
New Orleans to meet a certain train in Sardis, Miss.
We have here a good example of the contempt for local
law, and a good indication of the incapacity of the coun
ties and States to protect prisoners who are the objects of
mob feeling or to punish those who are guilty of interracial
lynchings. This mob paraded itself unhindered through
three States; going from Arkansas through Tennessee to
Mississippi, announcing its purpose boldly to the officers
of another State, then waiting leisurely at the railway sta
tion and a hotel, "overpowering" the deputies in the face
427
of the public, and parading again with its victim through

three States past the great city of Memphis to the spot in
Arkansas where the burning was scheduled to take place.
Some of the mob even stopped at a principal Memphis hotel,
tipped off the news so that the afternoon papers could an
nounce the exact hour when the lynching and burning would
take place, and "celebrated" with a good dinner. The papers
announced the burning for six p. m. and it actually took
place at 6:30. The spirit of all the news in the papers
tended to make heroes out of these lynchers, who had cap
tured a handcuffed Negro from conniving officers. The
papers spoke of them as being "all men."
Meanwhile all law was prostrate, as if it were non
existent. Everybody seemed to know just when and where
the burning was to take place, except the sheriff of that
county. The papers say that there were six hundred
lynchers and sightseers from all the surrounding commu
nities. The Memphis papers even had a correspondent on
the scene to cover the affair for them. But there was no
evidence of the power of the State or the nation to protect,
not Lowry but civilized law. The torturers burned the vic
tim for nearly an hour before he died. They began with
his feet, sprinkling dry leaves by the handful on a slow
fire. But after they had thus burned off all the lower part
of his body and his abdomen began to burn, they decided
to prevent the anti-climax of a slowly breathed out life;
they poured gasoline over all the upper part of the body
so that the victim expired in a great flame.
According to the sheriff of the county, who managed to
be absent when the burning took place, "every man, woman,
and child," white of course, in that county wanted that
burning to take place. And yet some Southern members
of Congress got wrathy when a witness before the Census
Committee testified recently that in some communities of
the South the majority of the white population is lawless
in its attitude toward Negroes.
Seven other colored people, two of them perfectly inno
cent women, would have met the same fate in that same
hour if the Arkansas roads had not been so bad. These
others were in jail in Mississippi County, accused or merely
suspected of having helped Lowry to escape. Indeed, the
afternoon papers had almost jubilantly announced that at
least three would be burned at six p. m., and maybe "an
even half dozen." But the automobiles of the mob sank
in the mud up to the hub so that they could not reach the
jailed Negroes that night, and the next day the governor
had two of the prisoners hurried across the State line into
Missouri and had five others brought to Little Rock and
incarcerated in the State penitentiary. For once bad roads
proved to be the best roads for bad civilization. As an ex
cuse for the anticipated murder of these prisoners, the
papers had said that Lowry had "confessed" that they
helped him, and they told much about his talking and
"joking" with the mob all the way from Mississippi to
Arkansas and that he had talked and answered questions
even while they were burning his limbs off up to his abdo
men. We learn from better sources that the Negro said
never a word except when the mob brought his wife and
little daughter to see him burning. He spoke to them.
Several times he did try to eat hot ashes or fire and die,
but the kindly mob would kick the embers out of his hands
and out of his reach. Even members of the mob admitted
to colored people: "He was the gamest niggernever said
a damned word I" All this newspaper talk about his answer
The Nation
428
ing questions and eating and jesting is an evident attempt

to lend an air of romance to a bestial crime.
In one respect this murder did not reach the low depth
of barbarism usually attained in orgies of this kind. The
mob did not fumble in the ashes for the charred bones and
other "souvenirs" as is usual in such Southern Roman holi
days. This charming custom incidentally is commentary on
a civilization that is trying to work up a feeling of right
eous indignation about alleged instances of cannibalism in
Haiti. There is no evidence that these exist. If they did,
however, it is questionable whether, as a visitor to our
shores remarked not long ago, "it would not be somewhat
less revolting, in view of the utilitarian motive involved,
than the sadistic carnival which has become an approved
and established ritual in the South at regular intervals
throughout the year."
The Milwaukee Leader Case

By ZECHARIAH CHAFEE, JR.
NO decision of the United States Supreme Court has
gone so far in sustaining governmental powers over
the press as its opinion on March 7 in United States ex rel.
Milwaukee Social Democratic Publishing Co. vs. Burleson,
which upheld the ex-Postmaster General's order of October,
1917, denying second-class mailing rates to Victor Berger's
Milwaukee Leader. Although the case arose under the
Espionage Act, its most important effect will probably be
in extending the power of the Postmaster General to pe
nalize discussion in time of peace.
The precise point decided may best be understood from
a brief statement of the post-office statutes. Congress has
specified certain matter as non-mailable, for example,
obscene literature, lottery prospectuses, and prize-fight
films. Sending such matter is a crime, and the Postmaster
General may exclude the offensive document from the mails
by an administrative order issued without a jury trial and
virtually uncontrolled by the courts. His decision that a
letter or circular or issue of a magazine falls within a class
forbidden by Congress will not be judicially reversed unless
it is "clearly wrong." This has long been settled law. The
Espionage Act of 1917 merely added a new kind of non
mailable matter, unlawful opposition to war.
The important feature of the Milwaukee Leader case is
that while the statutes made only those particular issues of
the newspaper non-mailable which actually were found to
violate law, Mr. Burleson claimed the right to penalize sub
sequent issues of the same newspaper however innocent in
character. For this purpose he made use of an entirely
distinct post-office statute. The Mail Classification Act of
1879 provides four classes of post-office rates for different
kinds of mail. Second-class rates are granted to periodicals
which "must be regularly issued at stated intervals" and
published "for the dissemination of information of a public
character." Since these rates are from eight to fifteen
times lower than the third-class rate for other printed mat
ter, it is clear that the refusal of a second-class permit to a
newspaper denies it any profitable use of the mails and
places it at the mercy of competitors who enjoy the lower
rates. The Postmaster General may withhold or revoke the
permit if he finds that the publication does not fulfil the
requirements of the Classification Act, for instance, that a
newspaper has missed several issues, or that successive
[Vol. 112, No. 2907
numbers of Frank Meriwether stories do not constitute a

periodical.
These powers are wide but unquestioned. Mr. Burleson
went much farther. Although the Classification Act no
where said that the existence of non-mailable matter in past
issues forfeits second-class rates for future issues, he held
that because the Milwaukee Leader had frequently violated
the Espionage Act its second-class permit should hence
forth be revoked. His right to do this is sustained by a
majority of the Supreme Court speaking through Justice
Clarke, Justices Brandeis and Holmes dissenting.
The Court's finding that the Leader had been violating
the Espionage Act before its suppression emphasizes the
bad tendency of what was said with no questioning as to its
clear and present danger. "Articles denounced the draft
law as unconstitutional, arbitrary, and oppressive, with the
implied counsel [italics mine] that it should not be respected
or obeyed." Soldiers in France were represented as be
coming insane, and conveyed from the front in long trains
of closed cars. (Dr. Thomas W. Salmon in the American
Legion Weekly for January 28 reports over 7,000 insane
veterans in the United States.) "The Food Control law
was denounced as 'Kaiserizing America' "the same law
recently denounced by Chief Justice White. As usual, the
bad intention of the writers, although an essential element
of the crime, was inferred from the bad tendency. "These
publications," says Justice Clarke, "were not designed to
secure amendment or repeal of the laws denounced in them
as arbitrary and oppressive, but to create hostility to, and
to encourage violation of, them."
All this may be conceded without affecting the main issue,
if the Postmaster General decides that a newspaper has
published non-mailable matter in past issues, may he revoke
its second-class permit for all future issues? Nothing in
the statutes expressly gives him this drastic power. In the
Masses case, Mr. Burleson contended that when one issue was
barred from the mails, the magazine ceased to be a "regu
larly issued" periodical under the Classification Act. This
was obviously unsound, for the statutory requirement refers,
not to the propriety of the reading matter but to its in
tended and actual appearance at stated intervals. The
Leader was issued even when it could not be mailed. Justice
Clarke adopts different reasoning, that the second-class rates
are granted on the assumption that the periodical will con
tinue to conform to law, both to the requirements of the
Classification Act and to prohibitions against printing non
mailable articles. A newspaper which has published such
objectionable matter in several issues may reasonably be
expected to continue violating the law. It would not be
possible, he says, for the government to maintain a reader
in every newspaper office in the country to approve every
issue in advance. Consequently, an offending newspaper
must have its permit revoked until it submits satisfactory
evidence of its repentance. "Government is a practical in
stitution, adapted to the practical conduct of public affairs."
There is force in this reasoning, and indeed most strong
exercises of executive power are justified from the ojffieial
point of view by the need of thorough enforcement cAt lavf.
On the other hand our Constitution, with its Bill of lights,
recognizes the necessity for some sacrifice of administrative
efficiency in order to prevent wrongs to individual
hence
it prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures "nan& gâr"
antees trial by juryand in order to maintain nt i0ther pur"
poses of society such as the discovery and d-ruck^jjuiuation
March 23, 1921]
The Nation
of truth on public questions. Moreover, Justice Brandeis

shows that it is practicable to exclude illegal matter without
a revocation of second-class rates, for there is more oppor
tunity to inspect this class of mail than any other. It is
the only kind which has to be submitted to the local post
master for examination before it is mailed. And however
desirable the Postmaster General may consider the powers
claimed in this case, the dissenting judges hold that Con
gress did not see fit to grant them.
The correctness of this decision is far less important
than its consequences. It is nowise limited to war cases,
and enables the Postmaster General to suppress any news
paper with a few articles which are unmailable on any
ground. Thus without any jury, without any court, for it
is rarely possible to say he is clearly wrong, he can punish
by extinction a periodical which ventures to discuss prob
lems of sex and family life which he considers obscene
though many others think them valuable. The wide powers
exercised by the Government in war prosecutions have been
defended on the ground that the control over speech was
in the hands of a jury, which was all that the founders
meant by freedom of speech. This decision gives no such
chance for the expression of public opinion on the value of
the periodical. Moreover, prosecutions come after the opin
ions and facts presented have reached the public, while a
censorship may prevent the public from learning them at
all. And the Postmaster General's powers are vague. They
are like the law in Restoration France which allowed the
government to suppress any journal, "if the spirit result
ing from a succession of articles would be of a nature to
cause injury to the public peace and the stability of con
stitutional institutions." Such a law is utterly foreign to
the tradition of English-speaking freedom.
Finally, if the Postmaster General is to possess these
vast powers over opinion, his selection becomes a matter
of great importance. Such powers can only be properly
exercised by a man of judicial temper and training, con
fident of the value of freedom of thought. Such qualities
can hardly be said to have distinguished Mr. Burleson. Will
they be displayed by Mr. Hays?
The New Literature in America

By LUDWIG LEWISOHN
WITHOUT banners or battle-cries, without groups or
schools, a new literature has arisen in America. The
physiognomies of its individual talents are sharply defined.
There is the suave beauty of Hergesheimer and the gnarled
roughness of Dreiser; "Main Street is liberal and fullblooded, "Miss Lulu Bett" spare and precise. Masters prac
tices a laconic speech, Lindsay chants, Aiken and Leonard
still sing, and Robert Frost murmurs his frugal music. But
all these men build their works on an identical foundation
and on a common soil. Isolated dramas, such as Eugene
O'Neill's "Beyond the Horizon," and isolated novels, such as
Mary Borden's "The Romantic Woman," range themselves
upon the same ground. Other writers, like Lee Wilson
Dodd in his "Book of Susan," though they weary and break
down, are intensely aware of the road which they cannot yet
take. Our new literature, verse and prose, is naturalistic.
The prevalence of naturalism in our literature is a symp
tom of both intellectual health and creative vigor. It has
been said, often by people who should know better, that
429
naturalism is a mere preference for ugly and morbid things.

It has been said that naturalism is to idealistic art what
photography is to painting. These fallacies are old, but they
are persistent and popular. Naturalism is a method based
upon an impulse which is, in the last analysis, philosophical.
It starts with no initial preference for one sort of subjectmatter over another. It attacks every subject with the same
absence of antecedent qualifications. It does not go in
search of the ugly and the morbid on the one hand, nor of
the superficially comely or healthy on the other. Its voyage
is always a voyage of discovery ; it is always setting out for
unseen shores and coming upon uncharted waters. It may,
to use our American examples, deal with wealthy and fash
ionable people, as in "The Romantic Woman," with sturdy
farmers or sea-faring men as in- the plays of O'Neill, with
outcasts and proletarians and plutocrats and artists, as in
the books of Dreiser. What it seeks everywhere is the con
cretely characteristic, the natural history of man and of
society, the materialif anyone must have it sofor new
categories and fixed values and useful formulations. But
it avoids the drawing of conclusions ; and what, for instance,
irritates traditionalist critics in Dreiser is not Dreiser's
creative facts but that romantic impulse in him which ex
ercises itself in crude and premature speculation. The story
of Hurstwood is truth itself. But when we have said that
there is a Hurstwood in every man we have drawn the ulti
mate conclusion that any naturalistic artist should permit
himself. Any further formulation does not widen the truth
but dilutes it. Just beyond is a passionate but empty
doctrinalism.
Naturalism is born wherever the intelligence that is both
critical and creative sets out to understand and conquer the
unfathomable world. That intelligence exercises its critical
faculty when it establishes a contact with reality which is
quite pure and quite immediate. It exercises its creative
faculty when, by subduing the world to its artistic uses, it
heightens and enriches its own consciousness and, through
its records, the consciousness of mankind. "Isn't that just
like life? Haven't you known just that?" is but a brief and
simple expression of the true character of the world process
from which there arises not only aesthetic pleasure, but
ultimately tolerance and liberty and peace.
Here and there, though in ever narrowing circles, it is
felt that the naturalistic method and temper is alien to the
traditions of our national life. The truth is that whenever
the nation has found resonant and permanent expression,
that expression has shared the mood and temper of the
naturalists. Whitman feeling only "underfoot the divine
soil, overhead the sun," desired also that man in literature
should be treated "as he is in himself in his own rights."
"I am just as much evil as good and my nation is," the poet
declared and added: "All the things in the universe are
perfect miracles, each as profound as any." That comes
very near Goethe's belief in the self-sufficingness of experi
ence and the power of man to spiritualize all experience.
And, like Goethe and the naturalists, Whitman sweeps aside
anterior notions of ugliness and degradation and sin. "Undrape, you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded."
It is this aspect of naturalistic literature, its deep and
austere humanity, that makes it so sanative an influence
amid the heat, the turmoil, and the moral malignities of
society. To it there are no outcasts ; none are disinherited,
none wholly guilty, none stale or discarded. Thus beauty
and truth, art and humanity meet and are at one.
430
The Nation
Everybody Wins in
[Vol. 112, No. 2907
Leghorn
By EUGENE LYONS
Leghorn, January 22
THE Goldoni Theater in this city was built in 1847, and
nothing has been done since that day to make it com
fortable. Five monotonous tiers of boxes rise in a straight
line from the deep pit. Here three thousand representa
tives of the strongest political force in Italy, the Socialist
Party, were subjected to a six-day test of endurance. For
inflammable Italians they stood it heroically. Torrents of
talk poured from the speakers' tribunal on the stage. The
choicest flowers of Latin invective were bandied to and fro.
A furious week of polemic and demonstration, at the end
of which the delegates, sadly bewildered by the contradic
tions of their faith, voted generally in accordance with
instructions from their constituencies.
On the face of it the Centrists, under the banner of
unity waved by G. M. Serrati, were victorious. They polled
98,028 votes as against 58,695 for the Communist faction,
and 14,212 for the Reformists. The party machinery re
mains in their hands. About 140 of the 156 Deputies
are with them. But the first fruit of the triumph of
unity was schism. Worse. In the rebound from the force
of the break Serrati and his followers found themselves
further to the right than they relish. They are outside
the Third International notwithstanding their fervid pro
tests of loyalty, lumped by an unsophisticated public opin
ion with the Independent Socialists of Germany, with
the Mensheviks of all landsa fellowship distasteful to
most of them.
Immediately upon the official announcement of the vote
the Communists abandoned the Goldoni singing the "Inter
national," and in the San Marco Theater began the organ
ization of the Communist Party of Italy, section of the
Third International. The task before them was not easy:
to begin at the beginning in the formation of a new party,
fighting not only the capitalists but their erstwhile com
rades ; to conquer for communism every factory, every labor
organization, every cooperative. Yet they launched the
work with fervor. They had polled about one-third the
total vote represented in Leghorn, a larger share than had
been acceded to them by prophecy, and surely large enough
as the nucleus of a new party. Some of the delegates an
nounced that they voted with the "Unitarians" because in
structed to do so, but that they would have voted for the
Moscow program if they had had any choicethe delegations
from Como and Brescia, for instance, representing 8,000
votes, made it known that they were Communists although
an imperative mandate from home obliged them to sustain
Serrati. The Reformists were with the Centrists, and the
new party could proceed in the certainty that theirs is a
homogeneous organization, governed by an iron discipline.
They were the only party recognized by Moscow; and the
Italian working class, they believed, is with the Third Inter
national and the Russian Revolution. In leaving you, a
Communist speaker has told the majority, we take with us
all the trophies of the revolutionary movement.
The self-styled "Concentrationists," frankly social-demo
cratic and collaborationist, although they polled little more
than 14,000 votes, feel with justice that the real victory is
theirs. Lenin had said, "Put out the Reformists," and
Lenin was disobeyed. The "Unitarians," for all their holy

professions of unadulterated communism, were all too easily
reconciled with a verbal acceptance of party discipline, and
the Turati-D'Aragona element, which had come steeled for
the indignity of an ouster, is still in the party. So far as
they are concerned results are approximately the same as
after the Bologna Congress, when they also submitted to
discipline, but managed to head off revolution last Septem
ber notwithstanding.
The bourgeois press was with the Serratiani from the
beginning, much to the discomfiture of the same Serra
tiani, and now exults over the victory of "good sense."
Its beloved Italians have done the Russian meddlers dirty,
and nationalism is vindicated. The victory of the "Uni
tarians" is in itself balm enough for bourgeois spirits, but
the split which followed is rubbing it in with a vengeance.
Not only is Italian independence vindicated, but the
strength of the Socialist Party is curtailed. Thus every
bodyCommunists, "Unitarians," Reformists, and even the
bourgeoisiewon at Leghorn.
The Congress was opened with the reading of a message
from the Executive Committee of the Third International,
signed by practically all the members of the committee.
It was listened to attentively out of respect for its origin,
notwithstanding the fact that its contents were unpalatable
for the majority.
We have followed in the columns of your journals [it said
in part] the struggle of the last months between the diverse
tendencies of your party. Unfortunately the actions of the
Communist-"Unitarians," at least the actions of the heads of
the faction, have confirmed our most unfavorable expectations.
In the name of unity with the Reformists, the "Unitarians"
are as a matter of fact ready to separate from the Communists
and also from the International.
Italy traverses at present a revolutionary period and it is
for this reason that the Reformists and the Centrists seem to
be more to the left than those of other lands. Day by day
it has appeared to us more clearly that the faction headed
by Comrade Serrati is in reality a faction of Centrists.
The decision of the Second World Congress of the Communist
International obligates each adherent party to break with the
Reformists. Those who refuse such schism violate an essential
law of the International and put themselves outside the ranks
of the International. The Italian Communist Party must be
formed at any cost. Of this we have no doubt. And to this
party will come the sympathy of the proletariat of the entire
world and the support of the Communist International.
The Congress was closed, just before balloting began,
with another message from the Third International, in
the form of a letter read (probably written also) by its
accredited representative, the Bulgarian Kabakchieff. He
virtually repeated Zinoviev's words: if you give asylum to
the Reformists you league with our enemies. Only the
Communist faction will be recognized by us. But he was
not listened to, his "papal bull of excommunication" was
hissed and its messenger maligned. In the days of
argument that intervened the Communist offensive had
forced the Centrists into open rebellion against the Moscow
International.
As Kabakchieff began his final address a group of "Uni
tarians" released a white pigeon which circled the theater
March 23, 1921]
The Nation
and settled among the Communists. It was a practical

enlargement of the epithet "emissary of the Pope in Mos
cow" hurled at the Bulgarian in the course of the week's
proceedings. No Italians can very well misunderstand the
religious significance of the dove. The Communists in
toned the "International" and their adversaries launched
the national revolutionary hymn, "Bandiera Rossa." A
speech of a half-hour's length took all morning to read, so
uproarious was the opposition.
The line of demarcation between Communist and "Uni
tarian" had been defined more clearly, more unequivocally,
with every argument advanced by either side or the other.
Promptly after the Communists bolted, the majority made
it known that they do not accept the severance with the
International as final. They will knock at the doors of the
Communists because they are Communists at heart, for
Russia and for the world-wide proletarian revolution. But
these assertions lose solidity in face of the open hostility
toward the Moscow International rulings and the scorn
heaped upon Moscow by the Centrists throughout the
Congress.
The "Unitarian" motion, which now remains the expres
sion of the Italian Socialist Party, begins with a laudation
of the party record: The unanimous opposition to the war;
the great increase of power since the Bologna Congress,
less than fifteen months agoa membership of 81,000 ex
panded to 216,000; forty-seven Deputies reinforced to 156;
2,220 socialist communes where formerly there were only
350; twenty-five socialist provincial governments instead of
only three. The motion then asserts the party's "enthu
siastic solidarity with the Communist International of
Moscow," and even accepts the twenty-one pointswith
reservations. The Italian Socialist Party, it asserts, has
never had reformism as a tendency and so cannot oust
it. True enough, there are individual members who act
unbecomingly, but these will be subjected to strict super
vision. Strong in its faith in the party, the Leghorn Con
gress therefore confirms "its immutable loyalty to the tra
dition and disciplined unity of action and of organization,"
and declares itself against collaboration with the bour
geoisie.
The support of this straddle program was double-bar
reled. On the one hand there was the intellectualized defense
by men like Serrati and Baratona. They insisted that
Reformists have never really gotten a foothold in the party,
that precisely because they believed in the Russian Revo
lution they would bring to it a strongly unified party. They
argued that the demands of Moscow were exorbitant, far
above those made to the French Socialists, the English,
the Bulgarian. On the other hand there was the senti
mental appeal, best typified by Constantino Lazzari.
Lazzari occupies a place in the heart of Italian Socialists
not unlike that of Debs in the affection of American
Socialists. He is among the founders of the party, "old in
years and old in sorrows," as he put it himself. He
touched the heart of the Congress as he stepped to the
rostrumold, bent, gray, trembling in the sincerity of his
emotion. Forty years it took us to construct this marvelous
edifice, he pleaded with the Communists; why would you
have us destroy it now that it is at last complete? You
are young, audacious, intelligent, but you do not love the
party as I do. You would trample upon its finest tradi
tions, alter its name, and for what reason? Why can we
not go on as we have been going, acquiring more power,
431
without violating the great principles of humanitarianism

and democracy?
When Lazzari finished he was applauded warmly by both
sides. Garlands of flowers were thrown from the balcony.
The Congress had understood the appeal, showed its appre
ciation, then proceeded to disregard it. After the old man,
Umberto Terracini took the floor. A more striking con
trast could not have been made by the most astute stage
manager. Smartly dressed, younga mere boy of twentyseven, self-confident, half-insolent, the very personification
of the Bolshevikhe stepped to the tribunal. Not a word
of regret for the past. This is a period of revolution and
we have no time for pious slobbering. There is a bigger
unityinternational unityto which we must sacrifice
everything, even the comradeship of some who have been
together with us until today. Italy is on the brink of the
Communist revolution and we must purge the party of all
the uncertain, of all the old, of all the sentimental.
Terracini argued for proletarian preparedness, in the
military sense of the word, as opposed to the pacifist-evolu
tionary attitude of Lazzari. If violence must beand you
who talk of revolution cannot deny that it mustthe one
way to make it less brutal is to prepare the workers for it.
He evoked the memory of the metal factory seizures. If
the workers who occupied the factories were not massacred
it was because of the extreme weakness of the bourgeoisie.
"Comrades of the Federation of Metal Workers," he turned
to the box where D'Aragona and Baldesi were shaking
their heads sadly at the effrontery of the young fellow, "I
do not blame you for the outcome of the September events.
I blame you for having put the proletariat into such a
terrible situation without first arming them!"
Baldesi took up the challenge next morning. His retort
was more clever than satisfying. "A terrible situation,
indeed," he said in effect, "yet it was you, the hot-headed
Communists, who were ready to precipitate the revolution
despite the fact that the workers were unarmed." In fact,
he insisted that by countermanding revolution he and his
fellows had saved the blood of the workers. They had
practically won control of the factories. The proposal was
at this very moment on Giolitti's desk. "It took fifty-four
years to win the eight-hour day," he smiled, "give us a
little time to win control."
The Congress by its vote gave him time. And the first
task of the newly organized Communist Party will be to
wrest the industrial organizations from the hands of its
present leaders. The Confederation of Labor holds its
national convention soon at Livorno, after seven fat years
without consulting the mass. The first fight between
D'Aragona and Lenin will take place at that gathering.

Eugene Lyons is an American journalist in Rome, Italy.
Zechariah Chafee, Jr., is professor at the Harvard law
school.
Albert De Silver is chairman of the legislative com
mittee of the New York City Club.
Walther Schuecking, professor of International Law
at the University of Marburg and a member of the
present Reichstag, is one of the foremost German
liberals.
William Pickens is field secretary of the National As
sociation for the Advancement of Colored People.
The Nation
432
The Cordwainers'
CaseAfter
a Century
By ALBERT DE SILVER
JOURNEYMEN cordwainers in the cities along the At
lantic seaboard began in the first decade of the nine
teenth century to be affected by the unsettled economic con
ditions of the time. The master cordwainers had reduced
their wages in more than one locality, and the journeymen
accordingly banded themselves together into a "club or
association" and took council as to what they might best
do to remedy their situation. They determined upon a
scale of pay and announced that none of their members
would work for any master who paid less, nor for any who
employed a journeyman cordwainer who was not a member
of their association. Strikes were declared in Philadelphia
and in New York in 1806 and in 1809. Both were followed
by criminal prosecutions. The New York indictment
charged the defendants with having conspired "unjustly
and oppressively to increase and augment the wages of
themselves and others," and to injure other journeymen,
not members of their association, by refusing to work for
any master cordwainer who employed such non-members.
The defendants were convicted. The Court, in charging
the jury, expressly refused to decide whether a combination
to raise wages was criminal at common law, but held that,
whether or not such was the case, the defendants were
guilty because by striking to enforce a closed shop they had
adopted means which were unlawful in that they injured
the non-union journeymen.
The story of the development of the law of industrial
relations is an account of gradual progress away from the
doctrine of the Cordwainers' case and toward a more liberal
view. Indeed the Court of Appeals in the cases of Kissam
vs. U. S. Printing Co. and Mills vs. U. S. Printing Co., 199
N. Y. 76, recognizes the right qf a national labor organiza
tion to call and enforce a strike against an employer to
compel him to discharge all his non-union employees, and
in Bossert vs. Dhuy, 221 N. Y. 342, the same court sus
tained the legality of the use of the secondary boycott for
a like purpose, so long as the boycott was within the in
dustry and motivated by a desire to better the condition of
the members of the union as distinguished from a design
to inflict malicious injury upon the employer. The Cord
wainers' case had been pretty generally forgotten, and the
few observers of industrial relations who remembered it
agreed that its authority had been so successfully under
mined that it could be disregarded, until recently it was
"dug from among the causes c6l6bres of an almost forgot
ten age," to use the court's own language, in an opinion
handed down by Mr. Justice Erlanger of the New York
Supreme Court granting a temporary injunction pending
trial in the case of Skolny vs. Hillman. Other similar in
junctions have been granted in recent months. But the
grounds upon which Justice Erlanger based his opinion
illustrate vividly a trend in judicial thinking which rightly
gives concern to many observers of the industrial conflict.
Skolny, the plaintiff in the present case, one of the New
York clothing manufacturers who recently abrogated the
agreement with the union, went about hiring new operatives,
and as fast as he succeeded he caused them to sign indi
[Vol. 112, No. 2907
vidual contracts of employment whereby they agreed to

work for him from week to week and agreed further not to
join the Amalgamated Clothing Workers or any other union.
The Amalgamated established a picket line about Skolny's
shop and endeavored to dissuade new strike-breakers from
working there and to persuade those already working to
leave and to join the union. Skolny commenced suit for an
injunction to restrain the picket line and applied for tem
porary injunctive relief pending the trial of the action.
The affidavits filed set forth that he was conducting an open
shop, that the members of the Amalgamated had conspired
to force him to shut down until he agreed to unionize his
shop, and alleged further that the union had called a strike
against him in pursuance of the conspiracy, and that the
picket line was accompanied with coercion, threats, assaults,
and intimidation. The union replied with answering affida
vits which asserted that it had not called a strike but had
been the victim of a lockout, and which denied the allega
tions of violence, threats, and intimidation.
Justice Erlanger granted the temporary injunction, bas
ing his decision on three grounds: first, that the union was
endeavoring to induce a breach of the contracts of employ
ment in seeking to persuade the strike-breakers to leave
their jobs ; second, that when violent and unlawful picketing
is alleged by the plaintiff and denied by the defendant, the
plaintiff is entitled to the benefit of the doubt pending the
trial ; and, third, that the situation revealed a strike for the
closed shop, which had been held unlawful in the Cord
wainers' case of 1809. The first point assumes that the
individual worker and a large employer of labor stand upon
an equal footing so that a contract made between them may
be said to be entered into freely on both sides and without
duress. Such a view is hardly based upon a realistic atti
tude toward modern industry, particularly where there is
seasonal unemployment. Unhappily it received the prestige
of the Supreme Court of the United States in 1917 in the
case of Hitchman Coal and Coke Co. vs. Mitchell, 245 U. S.
229, when the United Mine Workers were enjoined from
organizing in the non-union counties of West Virginia. But
that case applies only to an industry engaged in production
for interstate commerce, and in spite of the respect due to
the opinion of the Supreme Court, it cannot be urged too
strongly that the Courts of the various states are not bound
by it and should look upon the question with an eye devoted
more to the facts of modern industry and less to the logic
of assumed voluntary contractual relationships. Nor has
it always been the case in applications for temporary in
junctions that the plaintiff received the benefit of the doubt
when essential allegations are denied. It is clear that in
industrial disputes such a rule carries the possibility of
grave injustice, for a plaintiff with a talent for exaggera
tion can secure a temporary injunction which frequently
will break a strike, before a trial can reveal the facts.
As regards the citation of the Cordwainers' caseon it
may well be held that Justice Erlanger fell into error. The
decision is significant because it shows how the present-day
tendency to look upon labor organizations with suspicion
may cause our judges to neglect the lessons of the inter
vening century whenever the old view of labor organizations
is presented to them by industrious counsel. The Cord
wainers' caseafter a centuryis still a warning of dan
gers against which organized labor and the courts must be
on their guard. Industrial relations in 1921 cannot safely
be judged by the standards of 1809.
March 23, 1921]
The Nation
In Behalf of Dr. Simons

By WALTHEK SCHUECKING
THE collapse of all the military and annexationist dreams
at the end of the war brought with it a profound
change of heart in Germany and led large numbers of people
to the honorable idea of a policy of justice, which was to
find its visible incorporation in the League of Nations.
When Clemenceau first expressed France's readiness for a
league in November, 1917, he had indeed added that Ger
many must not be admitted, but even the neutrals regarded
that as a sorry jest, not to be taken seriously. The Entente
had too often promised a universal league. So when the
Treaty of Versailles did bar Germany, and the League was
revealed as a sort of alliance of victors, the idea inevitably
lost credit in Germany. This development was intensified
by painful impressions made by the activities of the League.
The defenselessness of Germany before the French invasion
of the Maingau had a deep negative influence. The sessions
of the League at Geneva naturally did not tend to make it
popular in Germany. They showed too plainly that the
entire organization was still dominated by the interests of
individual imperialist Powers.
Under such circumstances it was much to the credit of
the Foreign Minister that he did not let even this occasion
pass without expressing profound belief in the principle
of a true league of nations. I could hardly name
another man of whose resolute determination upon law
and the rule of law I am so deeply convinced as I
am of Simons's. He has served law all his life in vari
ous and high legal positions; it is natural that he should
profoundly believe in the substitution of law for force in
international relations, through the League of Nations.
All believers in the idea of a league in whatever country
must recognize in him their apostle. But only a very
different Entente policy can bring us nearer the goal.
The scornful laughter with which the conservatives
greeted mention of my name is typical of the pan-German
attitude to advocates of a league of nations. Each new
humiliation forced on us from abroad strengthens that
group, and even moderate elements are turning away from
the idea that a league founded by the Entente might ever
become a true league of nations. They forget that the
great ideas of history have seldom found at once the com
plete realization for which their leaders and prophets had
striven; they forget that Germany as a member of
the League could win a leading position among the
many neutral states which take the idea of achieving
justice through the League seriously; and they forget that
Germany inside the League would have a forum where it
could bring its complaints and grievances before all man
kind and prove them.
The growing bitterness against the Entente demands in
creases the bitterness against the League founded by the
Entente, and sympathy for any league lessens proportion
ately. This chain of causes and effects should be under
stood ; friends of a true league abroad should seek to bring
about a change; for in the end the future of the idea of
the League of Nations is dependent upon the active par
ticipation of the German people. Present-day conditions
cry aloud the necessity of a real league of nations as the
only possible way toward intellectual, economic, and political
restoration of the ruined civilized world.
433
In
the Driftway
IT'S a topsy-turvy world. A recent Associated Press dis

patch says that an appeal is being made to the King of
Spain to intercede with the United States to restore liberty
to Santo Domingo. Time was when republics sought the
aid of republics to throw off the yoke of kings. .But in
this year 1921 republics appeal to kings to help shake off
over-fat republics. Perhaps, had Ireland sought to win
favor for her cause with the Mikado of Japan instead of
with republican America, she might have found more effec
tive sympathy. Let Haiti appeal to the Empress of Abyssinia.
*****
THE Drifter always welcomes any evidence of the wide
dissemination of knowledge. He is one of the most
vociferous boosters for Wells's "Outline of History." He
would have school-children as familiar with the size and
distance of Betelgeuse as with the date of the discovery of
America. So he ought to welcome natural history on the
lips of a major-general. The Drifter read with much in
terest the words of General Robert Lee Bullard at a recent
National Republican Club luncheon. Drawing upon his
Philippine experiences, this veteran related his observations
of "the monkey in the trees with only his hands; the man,
who, living like the monkey in the trees, was carrying a
stick, club or a stick spear; the little black man with his
bow and arrow; and the American with modern arms. It
is significant," concluded General Bullard, who was pleading
for more armament to make the world safer for democracy,
"that from the monkey to the American, the state of their
culture corresponded exactly to the state of their armament.
The monkeys that in the struggle of life had sense enough
to pick up and use a stick as an arm developed into men.
The others remained monkeys." The Drifter mused. Some
how he had gathered that it was the monkey which
first was able to run that developed into man. He also had
an impression that the monkeys that first took up ballistics
for offensive and defensive "purposes were still heaving co
conuts from the higher branches. And then the Drifter
shuddered as he reflected what an uncultured race we Amer
icans had been during the first century or more of national
existence, when our army was negligible and our navy fourth
or fifth among the Powers. He wondered whether General
Bullard would admit unhesitatingly that Germany was the
most cultured nation in July, 1914, when the state of its
armament easily led the world.
*****
BEING an utterly irresponsible soul the Drifter finds
life hard. One of the hardest things in life, for him,
is to decide where to eat when alone. Company suggests
all manner of quaint restaurants; solitude makes choice
difficult, and doubly difficult the choice of food from a long
and alluring menu. At such times the Drifter envies David.
David has watched the suns and clouds of twenty months,
and never yet borne the burden of selecting a place to eat
or what to eat. The problem of free will concerns him
not; his life, clearly, is determined for him. The Drifter
would like a ubiquitous parent to select his food for him.
If he had never savored bouillabaisse, his palate would not
crave it; if he had never tasted baked beans on a Vermont
farm, he would not rebel at the baked beans at Joe's.
Variety is the poison of life; it ruins satisfaction in the
inevitable and commonplace.
The Drifter
The Nation
434
[Vol. 112, No. 2907
Correspondence
SIR: The article by Freda Kirchwey called Alice Paul Pulls

the Strings in your recent issue is too accurate a general
The Future of the Woman's Party
impression of the National Convention of the Woman's Party
SIR: The article by Freda Kirchwey, in your issue of March 2,

entitled Alice Paul Pulls the Strings, was not before me at the
time the one based on my report as research chairman of the
Woman's Party was prepared. I thank you for permitting me
to add this postscript, dealing especially with certain specific
criticisms which Miss Kirchwey has made.
I do not intend to be personal in my reference to her article.

It is undoubtedly true that there were many delegates in at
tendance at the Womans Party Convention who were strongly
in favor of the three resolutions she refers to; and I had a
fourth, which was my own pet proposition that also went by
the boards. I felt quite strongly that the convention should
go on record specifically for a fair representation of women in
legislative, administrative, and judicial offices, and in the con
trol of political parties and all other organization (even in
cluding radical groups!). It is a disgrace that of the half
thousand lawmakers at the national Capitol there should be only
one woman.
It is men who vote wars and armaments.
Although my pet proposition was not adopted in definite

words, I have not a doubt that the convention intended to
embrace within its purpose not only this but everything neces
sary to wipe out the practices that stamp women with in
feriority. Perhaps it remains for the Womans Party, by con

stantly harping on one string, to keep woman's part in all
organized effort in a position to command respect.
According to my view, it is because the Woman's Party is a
in Washington last month to justify any attempt on my part

to further elaborate on such an able picture of the proceed
ings of the convention.
Nevertheless, as a member of the
Woman's Party, I hope that you will give me a little space,

because I would like to bring out the fact that the Womans
Party as a whole was not opposed to taking up the matter of

the disfranchised Southern women, but that many of the dele
gates were most urgently in favor of doing so. I have worked
for seven years with the Woman's Party and I feel that I can
present the inner side of the convention proceedings, while I
am perhaps not qualified to give such a general summing up

as an outside observer. The fact that I was the one delegate,
a white woman from New York, who fought for the colored
women, is principally owing to the circumstance that I placed
the matter of disfranchisement ahead of every other matter both
because of the quality of menace and because I believed that
the object of the Woman's Party, the Federal Suffrage Amend
ment, had not been won as far as the full purpose was con
cerned. The point I made concerning the dangerous precedent
established by unchallenged disfranchisement of any element
of women in the country

delegates, and after I had
vention from the platform
delegations came to me to
brought the question home to the

succeeded in speaking to the con
on the matter, a number of State
tell me they would vote in a body
with me, and also many individual delegates, including a num

ber of Southern women, one of whom voted against her entire
State delegation.
All new ideas have heavy weather at first, and the Women's
feminist organization and is needed as such that it did not take
Party was no exception in this regard, because they had assem
up disarmament or the race question.
This point can easily
bled in Washington, flushed with their belief that victory was
be seen as to both of these matters, and upon the disarmament
theirs and that the dreary fight was at last ended. Many dele
gates knew nothing about voting conditions in the South. Why
should they? Our newspapers, as a whole, are not apt to give
proposition is clear cut and needs no further explanation. As

to the Negro resolution, there was considerable misunderstand
ing. The elevator incident is beside the question, but as a fact

the Womans Party was in no way responsible for any embar
rassment to the Negro women, but on the other hand it was
through members of the party that the matter was straightened

out so as to relieve them of embarrassment. I hope that none of
them were made to feel by any member of the Woman's Party

that their presence was resented, and certainly they were treated
us much real information, and the official organ of the Womans
Party, The Suffragist (soon to be renamed The Free Woman,

may it prove prophetic!), has published one article only in
its November issue by H. E. C. Bryant called Southern Women
Vote, which merely mentioned the places where they did vote,
and none of the places where they did not. The fact that my
with greater general courtesy than would have seemed possible
motion urging the convention to appoint a special committee'

on disfranchised women was defeated was not at all aston
in so large a convention.
ishing, and the vote against it was by no means a heavy one.
As to the contention made in their
behalf, the whole point was that the Woman's Party, as an

organization, is concerned only with discriminations on account
Catskill-on-Hudson, March 8
ELLA RUSH MURRAY,
National Advisory Council, National Womans Party.
of sex, and they were understood as asking us to protect them

against discriminations on account of race.
Thinks the Allies Should Pay
The other resolution to which Miss Kirchwey refers was a

bill of particulars introduced by Crystal Eastman as a workable
program. The chief objection to it, as expressed in the speeches

opposing it, was because of its limitations. It is possible that
in some exceptional instances this was argued in order to side
step the controversial questions, but certainly as a matter of
fact a reasonable interpretation of the purpose of a feminist
organization will eventually call for a determination of its
position upon everything included in Miss Eastman's program

as well as many things which she did not particularize. Whether
the doctrines of birth control advocates are accepted or not,

certainly women, in the future, must have their say in laying
SIR:
Concerning the propaganda to cancel the Allies' debts
to the United States:
If Germany is supposed to be able to
pay fifty-three thousand millions of dollars, the Allies

should easily be able to pay ten thousand million dollars to the
United States.
The Allies control almost the entire world to
draw money from; their trade, commerce, and industries are
free and unhampered; they own the Seven Seas; they own every
thing and everybody, except the United States. Their propa
young and struggling, comes of the same stock as the old and
ganda shows that they think they may own the United States
also. England keeps an army of one hundred thousand men
in Ireland, several hundred thousand in Asia, and maintains her
enormous sea armament. If she is able to do this she is also
able to pay the United States. The same is true of France who
has a great purpose and a great future. In Miss Kirchwey's

opinion, the stock has run out and there is neither purpose nor
future. I give Alice Paul credit for the best that I hope for,
and Miss Kirchwey blames her for the worst that she appre
maintains an army of seven hundred thousand men. Under

these circumstances \I think the Allies are able to pay and
should pay. If the United States yields to the Allies, the ten
thousand millions will be used to further subjugate and oppress
hends. Here, it would seem, lies our fundamental difference.

Washington, D. C., March 9
SUE S. WHITE
humanity.
Pillager, Minn., February 11
down the rules of sex ethics.
The new Woman's Party, in my opinion, though it may be
A. G. BERTEL
March 23, 1921]
The Nation
435
Irish and American Independence

deal, he will find an answer to his question as follows:
The
SIR: The article in your March 9 issue by Mr. Lincoln
plain truth of it was, we had been allowed for so long to be so
Colcord on Irish and American Independence is one of the few

sane expressions of an American view in our day. Its clear
nearly free that we determined to be entirely free, no matter

what England conceded.
presentation of the underlying reality in Ireland's cause stirs
The parallel between the cause of the Americans of 1776
a throb, and the logical conclusion is inescapablewe Ameri
and the Irish of today is absolute.
cans must exert our moral pressure for Irish liberty, or abandon
the principle that has made our own nationhood worth while. It
is not only Mayors of Cork that are on the run. Our own
American ideal is menaced. The conflict goes to the root of
liberty. We are facing the question: Do we really mean to
yield up America? In this day of inspired propaganda it is
rare indeed to find a writer so clear in principle as Mr. Colcord,
and so firm in front. Would that all Americans might see the
issue with his vision and face the peril with like uncompromis
correspondent writes of concessions to the Irish that were
ing loyalty to America.
Haddonfield, N.J., March 7
JOSEPH W. PENNYPACKER
And the fact that your
never conceded, and of the possibility of such concessions to

the Americans from 1774 to 1776 that could not have been
conceded because they always had more than Ireland ever re
ceived or has been offered, contradicts his claim that he does
not wish to interpret history in the interest of England.

New York, March 11
JOSEPH FORRESTER
SIR: The article in The Nation of March 9 on Irish and

American Independence represents a great advance toward an
understanding of the position of Ireland as against England

or the British Empire, to use a synonym.
SIR: Your attempt to draw a parallel between the present

Irish situation and that of the Colonists in 1775 suggests a
remark made by the Marquis de Chastellux, Major-General of
Lafayette's Expeditionary Force, who wrote in 1782 an account
of two Voyages dans lAmrique Septentrionale, the second
short of showing a complete understanding of it. There may
of which carried him through New England.
His visit to
Boston is described with many interesting details; he saw the

field of Bunker Hill, and comments on the battle at some length,
noting that it was a fortunate thing for the Americans that
they lost the battlefor otherwise the British would have seen
But it falls far
be a subjective similarity between the patriots of 1776 and

those of 1916-21; their aims may be similar and their methods.
But what a difference in the origin of the difficulty! The Amer

ican Colonies were coloniesthey owed their origin either to
England or to some other portion of the Old World. Ireland had
a national existence since the very dawn of history! The same
Irish people inhabited the land of Ireland and used her harbors
for trade with the Continent when Caesar was making his recon
the Colonies and the Mother Country, and the separation would
noissances in Britain and writing his Commentaries to tell us

of their barbarous mode of existence in the larger island. While
the Teutonic hordes were pouring down from the North on the
outposts of the Roman Empire, the Irish people were still
not have taken place.
enjoying a national existence under their own laws and cus
how much they were in earnest, and, it being not too late for
pourparlers, an arrangement would have been made between
What England might have offered us, she has already offered
Ireland; besides, there were not two sides here, as there are
in Ireland todaywe had no Ulsterites.
Northampton, March 10
ROBERT WITHINGTON
toms, by this time purged of pagan crudities under the subli

mating influence of Christianity. When Charlemagne was
crowned Emperor, Ireland was still an independent state, and
her commerce was an important factor in the life of many of

the peoples of the Continent. When Charlemagne thought of
establishing a school in his palace, he turned to Ireland for
In The Nation for March 9 a correspondent says there
teachersthey were to be found nowhere elseand so the
is no parallel between the cause of the Americans of 1776 and
learned Alcuin, a graduate of Irish schools, was installed as

director of the imperial school; there is extant yet a letter in
SIR:
the cause of Ireland.
He says, further, that he is neither a
propagandist nor a controversialist, and has no desire to in
which he tells his old professor, Colgan (who died 794 or 795),
terpret history in the interest of either England or Ireland.
that he is sending him a quantity of olive oil for distribution

among the bishops for use in preparing the sacred oils. When
the Normans invaded France, Ireland was still a sovereign
And he asks the Editor if he thinks the Americans would have
revolted if they had received from England such concessions
as England has made to Ireland during the past twenty-five
state, and although she also felt the force of their invasion
years.
of all Northwestern Europe, she finally broke their power

under the leadership of Brian Boru on Good Friday, 1014. It
What concessions has Ireland received from England during

the past twenty-five years? Excepting land purchase, Ireland
has not received from the Crown a single concession that was
not at the same time conceded to England. Not even that
patriotic Englishman and contemner of the Irish, the author
of The Oppressed English, could think of any concession to

Ireland but land purchase. Now, land purchase means that
England loans to the Irish farmer who wants to buy his farm
sufficient money to do so, and the loan is repaid in a specified
was only a century and a half later that any strife between
England and Ireland began. And then it began through the

invasion of Ireland by buccaneering expeditions organized by
the bastard sons of Henry II of England. If America had ever
been peopled by a race forming an organized state with sover
eign rights, the parallel would indeed be close! Besides, why

forget history before 1172?
Washington, March 5
(REV.) JAMES A. GEARY,
number of years, with interest; and the author mentioned
characteristically calls that transaction on the part of England,

charity!
Before 1776 the Americans were as self-governing and as
independent as Canada is today. How, then, could such con
cessions as Great Britain has made to Ireland have been made
to the Americans? They always had far more power of self

government than would have satisfied Ireland some years ago.
If your correspondent will read A Straight Deal, in which

America as compared with England is given a rather crooked
[Mr. Colcord did not attempt to present the whole case for
Irish freedom. If he had, the independent culture, the differ
ence in race, and various events in Irish history from earliest
times, would doubtless have been cited. But while these fac
tors strengthen Ireland's case, they were distinctly not within

the scope of the article on Irish and American Independence,
which aimed merely to point out the analogy between the Colo
nies in 1776 and Ireland today, and the consequent claim of the
latter to American sympathy.EDITOR THE NATION.]
The Nation
436
[Vol. 112, No. 2907
was to reach Asia; and, finally, that it is only after having
Books
found the island he was looking for and which he now saw was
A Columbus Iconoclast
lying much more to the west than he had imagined, that he

supposed he had reached Asia and then said for the first time
that it was Asia which had been his objective.
The Columbian Tradition on the Discovery of America.

Henry Vignaud. Clarendon Press.
By
La Tradition Colombienne et la Dcouverte de lAmrique.
By
My antagonists hold that the proof of Columbus really in

tending to go to Asia is found in the letter which the Catholic
Kings gave him for the Great Khan, one of the Asiatic poten
Henry Vignaud. Paris: Socit des Amricanistes.

Henry Vignaud celebrated last November, in feeble
bodily condition, his ninetieth birthday, his mind is as
strong and clear as ever, as is witnessed by the titles of the
little books put at the head of this noticehis latest contribu
tions to that iconoclastic Columbus campaign which he has been
valiantly waging for the past quarter of a century; and I may
add, in further proof of his remarkable mental vigor, that he
is now engaged, so he told me when I visited him recently at
his home near Paris, on a most important work for which I
have been collecting notes and documents for many yearsa
Historical and Critical Catalogue of all the old maps showing
the gradual progress of the discovery of the world from the
mention of Paradise down to the year 1600. It will be the labor
of my life, and as it is nearly finished, I hope to publish it
before I pass away, especially as intellectually I do not feel any
depression and am able to work all day.
to destroy this impression, the Columbus family put up, as
The first of these booklets under review is a treatise on the
evidence that the undertaking of 1492 had Asia in view, the
discovery of America and the part played therein by the as

tronomer Toscanelli, and is a memoir addressed to Professor
assertion that it was advised by Toscanelli, and produced a letter

from that astronomer in which this advice is given. The letter,
however, was a forgery, but its effect was to accredit the tale.
Tito's
Hermann Wagner, of the University of Gttingen, and Pro

fessor Carlo Errera, of the University of Bologna, in answer to
their criticisms of Mr. Vignaud's magnum opus, Histoire de
la Grande Entreprise de 1492, and, along with the second

booklet, sums up and completes the facts and reasons stated in
this latter work, which may be given as follows in this state
ment by Mr. Vignaud, here published for the first time in these
words:
The accepted history of the discovery of America is that

Columbus, observing that Portugal and Spain had to send their
ships by the very long route of the east, around the Cape of
Good Hope, in order to reach the islands of India, where goods
much needed in Europe were purchased, told the merchantmen
of those countries that there was a shorter way of reaching
those regions, viz., by steering via the west rather than via the
east, in other words to reach the Levant by turning towards
the Ponent. During many years he tried to convince Portugal
and Spain that he could do this, and finally succeeded in per
suading the latter to give him a fleet, with which he sailed from
Palos in 1492, reached the West Indies, and returned, imagin
ing that he had found the islands near Asia, among which was
Cypangu or Zipangu, that is, Japan.
Such is the universally accepted theory as to the way
America was discovered. The discovery was made while try
ing to reach the eastern region of Asia.
It was a scientific
discovery based on cosmographical calculations, and its object

was to give to Spain the monopoly of the trade with the Far
East by furnishing her a short route thither.
I deny all this.
I contend that Columbus had no other
object than to find an island with regard to which he had gath

ered information, and in order to establish my assertion, I show,
in the first place, that this story of the way America was discov
ered comes from Columbus alone, that is to say, from him, his
son, and Las Casas, who was a friend of the family and had all
Columbus's papers, and from Herrera, the great Spanish his
torian, who admits that he got all his facts from Columbian
sources; and in the second place, I point out that not one of
the writers of the period ever heard that Columbus intended to
sail for Asia, but all of them state that his object was the dis
covery of the very island which he did discover; that all the
acts and all the utterances of Columbus before this discovery
show he was aiming only to find eastern islands; that in the
long Journal of his voyage, he does not once intimate his purpose
tates. My reply is that this single fact cannot destroy the long
and important chain of facts which go directly contrary to that
one, and that the giving of this letter was due to some reason
unknown to us. I have suggested that it may have been written
to please Pinzon, who was anxious to find Cypangu and whose

cooperation was necessary to Columbus. If that explanation is
not good, another must be found. But those who hold that this
letter shows the true object of Columbus must also show how
it can be made to agree with all the other facts which contra
dict it; which they have not done and persist in not doing.
If now it is asked why the Columbus family invented the
singular story that the object of the expedition was Asia, it may
be stated that when Columbus returned and declared that he
had found a new route to Asia, he was not believed, his own
companions even saying he had done nothing more than discover

an island pointed out to him by a common sailor.
So in order
In a word, the only basis for the claim that in 1492 Columbus
sailed for Asia is of Columbian origin and is supported by the
single fact of the letter to the Great Khan, whereas it is con
tradicted by all the other facts and not confirmed by a solitary

one.
But neither Professor Wagner nor Professor Errera, who

is at the head of the Geographical Institute of his university,
was convinced by the first opuscule, as is shown by the follow
ing letter which I received from Professor Errera recently:

Even if we leave to one side the question of the Toscanelli
letter, Mr. Vignaud cannot deny this fact that the expedition
guided by Columbus had, if not as its principal aim, at least

as one of its aims, the reaching of Zipangu, an island supposed
to be situated quite near the country of the Great Khan. In
fact the expedition carried letters of credence for that sovereign.
Now, what was then known about Zipangu could have come
only from Marco Polo and the maps attached to his narrative,
and these maps placed Zipangu east of the country of the Great
Khan, at the eastern extremity of terra cognita. To cross the
western ocean in order to find Zipangu and the country of the
Great Khan could, therefore, only mean to go by the Ponent to
the Far East"buscar al levante por el poniente. This was
not Columbus's idea. Was it suggested only by Pinzon, as Mr.
Vignaud contends? I cannot here reply to these questions,

which would lead to a long discussion, but limit myself to
pointing out that in accordance with the demonstration of Mr.
Vignaud, Zipangu and the country of the Great Khan were not
the aim of Columbus's voyage.
But surely they were one of
the aims. I stop at this conclusion, which speaks for itself, and
repeat a wish which I have expressed before, viz., that the
learned societies of America undertake the making of new and
methodical researches in the archives of Europe, the only way

of obtaining light on the mystery which still envelops the his
tory of Columbus's expedition and on the contradictions of
which this history is full. I should add that it will always
be a source of merit for Mr. Vignaud to have thrown so much
light on these contradictions.
In answer to this letter, Mr. Vignaud writes me:
All this has no bearing on the real question, which is

whether or not Columbus undertook his expedition in order to
reach Asia by a new and shorter route than the one then fol
lowed; and speaking in an earlier letter, he says: Biggar,
March 23, 1921]
The Nation
the Canadian publicist, tells me he is going to review my

pamphlet [the first at the head of this article] and adds: 'You
do not convince me.' In fact he has always been hostile to my
contentions. Professor Raymond Beazley, of the University
of Birmingham, has published a criticism which, though very
complimentary to me, rejects my conclusions. These critics
deny but give no reason for denying. I may add, by the way,
that I have just addressed to Professor Errera a letter whose
object is to show what those who maintain that America was
discovered by Columbus while attempting to reach Asia via
the west are obliged to show, but which not one of them has
done. This letter, I believe, puts the case briefly in the true
light."
This letter is given in the second of the opuscules put at the
head of this article and the same argument in a briefer form
is presented in the longer communication to me printed above.
In fact, we have in this letter to Professor Errera an epitome
of this whole contention which is scattered through a score of
separate publications by Mr. Vignaud, in English, French, and
Spanish, whose titles are found at the beginning of this same
opuscule. The booklet is addressed not only to Professor
Errera but also to the members of the Paris Academy of
Inscriptions and Belles Letters, "which has twice made me
their laureate and done me the honor to elect me one of its
corresponding members," Mr. Vignaud writes at the end of his
memoir, then adding the important request of this learned body,
that "it examine the reasons which, to my mind, justify my
conclusions and then give its own opinion as to their value."
But whatever foreign critics may think of Mr. Vignaud's
argumentation, it has met with serious consideration in the
historical departments of several of our own universities, as
was shown in the letters of certain professors on the occasion
of his birthday last November. Thus, Professor Percy Alvin
Martin, of Stanford University, and Professor Sidney B. Fay, of
Smith College, Northampton, have put some of Mr. Vignaud's
questions into their examination papers, while Professor Julius
Klein, of Harvard, wrote: "I have had the pleasure of dis
cussing with my class some of your memorable contributions
to the literature of the age of the discoveries."
Theodore Stanton
Political Theories
A History of Political Theories from Rousseau to Spencer. By
William Archibald Dunning. The Macmillan Company.
DROFESSOR DUNNING has written extensively in various
* fields of history and political science, but his chief fame
will always rest upon his three volumes on the "History of
Political Theories." The first of these appeared in 1902, the
second in 1905, while the one under review, covering as it does
the far more difficult because more recent period, is the product
of the last fifteen years of ripe and mature scholarship. From
Plato and Aristotle to Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer the
thought of the world relating to the state is reviewed, criti
cized, and appraised with reference to its relation, both as cause
and effect, to the actual course of political events. It is a monu
mental task ably and admirably performed; an achievement
of eminent utility and worth. Janet's "Histoire de la science
politique," which appeared in 1887, in two volumes, is the only
other work which seriously attempts a similar general review
of political theories from antiquity to our own time. It is an
achievement which is not likely to be frequently repeated.
In his concluding volume the author refuses to trace the his
tory of ideas beyond the year 1880, not, as he says, "because
this year is a particularly logical stopping point," but in order
"to bring the history to an end while it is still history, and thus
save the author from the temptation to deal with ideas which
cannot, in the nature of things, be seen yet in their true per
spective." Mr. Dunning is not an advocate, but throughout an
historian. To the reviewer he appears too consciously self-
437
restrained in this respect. An occasional pointing of the moral

of his discussion of some earlier system of ideas or political
doctrine would be welcome. Even in dealing with Hegel and
the other German idealists there is a studied avoidance of any
reference to the baleful consequences of their ideas in the years
just past. One cannot fail to contrast this impartial aloofness
with the method of Mr. Harold J. Laski in his little book on
"Political Thought from Locke to Bentham," which is replete
with suggestions having a contemporary interest.
One turns with eagerness to the author's concluding chapter
on The General Course of Political Theory, expecting to find
here perhaps the distillation of his lengthy and profound stud
ies in the form of constructive proposals or pertinent criti
cisms, but in vain. His conclusions are doubtless important,
but they can scarcely serve as a beacon to guide us through the
morass of contemporary politics.
Speculation on the subject of the state, he says, has from
the beginning been related to two general subjects: "first, the
organization and institutions through which this control [of
man by man] should be exercised ; second, and more fundamen
tal, the source, origin, and rational justification of governmen
tal authority in any form." With regard to the first, "there
is some evidence of progressive modification in theory in the
twenty-three centuries" covered by his three volumes. In doc
trine as in practice the world today does not admit the principle
of human slavery. But "in respect to the broad forms of or
ganization in which political authority may be manifested, the
history of theory shows little variation." Representative de
mocracy, it is conceded, is a comparatively novel form of gov
ernment. The distinction between state and society and the
elaboration of the doctrine of sovereignty are, however, the only
other notable evidences of progress. With respect to the second
problem, that is, "on what principles the relation of authority
and submission can be explained and justified," the author's con
clusion is that "Greek thought on this problem in the fourth
and third centuries before Christ included substantially all the
solutions ever suggested." "Anarchistic individualism was
preached by Sophists and Cynics; constitutionalism by Aristotle
and the other upholders of the nomoi; nationalism is but a
theory of the city-state writ large; societarianism has never
been more completely formulated than by Plato. In twentythree centuries the movement of thought has but swung full
circle. Such is the general lesson of the history of political
theories."
Is a science of politics then impossible? What profits this
endless speculation concerning the state, if after more than
two millenniums we have made no appreciable advance beyond
the thought of ancient Greece? Has political philosophy no
other function than to supply weapons to the contending parties
in the never-ending but ever-shifting struggle for power? Or
does Mr. Dunning minimize the real and permanent accom
plishments in the field of political thought?
That political theory as well as political action moves in
cycles; that the general explanations, the theoretical justifica
tion, of the complex of political forces and their concomitant
expression in political institutions tend to recur in succeeding
periods of history; that, in a word, the history of political
theories as of history in general repeats itself, cannot be de
nied. But as was clearly seen by the eighteenth-century po
litical theorist, Vico, this pendulum movement is accompanied
by one of continuous progression. We advance by a sort of
spiral ascent. From time to time we return to the same rela
tive, but never to the same absolute, position. There is a real
evolution in the history of theoretical as well as of practical poli
tics. Individualism may be the dominant motif today; socialism
tomorrow; and individualism again day after tomorrow. But
the last expression of individualism is always a different one
from the first, incorporating as it does many of the principles
of the intervening socialism.
If the movement of thought has but swung full circle since
Plato and Aristotle, that certainly does not mean that real
progress has not been made in the intervening centuries. And
The Nation
438
with the vast accumulation of data, with an improved and
more truly scientific methodology, is it too much to hope that
[Vol. 112, No. 2907
his more heated countrymen who chafe under the slur of intel
lectual colonialism; he is tempted to cock his hat a little de
the progress of political science will be much more rapid in the
fiantly and develop an acrid sentiment in regard to the tail of
immediate future? May we not anticipate the time when this

science will serve the practical needs of statesman and ad
ministrator as the pure science of physics affords indispensable
assistance to the practical work of the engineer?
the British lion. For the plain truth is that if some scholarly
and moderately lively youngish professor of English in one of
our native universities had brought the manuscript of Life and
WALTER JAMES SHEPARD
New Schools for Old

New Schools for Old. By Evelyn Dewey.
E. P. Dutton and
foredoomed to the remnant counter and the second-hand stall.
Company.
IN
Letters with him to New York, he would have made some
agreeable acquaintances in publishing circles, but would have

carried his virgin manuscript back with him to the scene of his
pedagogical labors. Nor, things being as they are, would he
have had any particular reason to complain. Criticism that
opens new vistas or illustrates a fascinating personality is a
bleak enough bargain; mediocre critical writing is commonly
a period when all the deficiencies of our educational sys
tem are fortunately being brought to light and subjected to
discussion, none is more glaring than the weakness of the rural

school throughout the country. Apathy and isolation, the dis
trict system based on false conceptions of autonomy and neigh
borhood independence, inadequately trained teachers and still
worse conditions of service have all contributed their share
toward producing the singularly unprogressive and unattractive

rural school so well described by Miss Dewey in the first chap
ter of her book. Some progress has undoubtedly been made dur
ing the past ten years. The single-teacher school, ungraded

and poorly equipped, has in a few places been superseded by a
consolidated school and a system of transportation; more direct
training is being provided for rural school teachers, and a

movement has been launched to establish teachers homes.
But
these examples of progress do not go to the heart of the prob

lem. Too many theorists look for a solution of the problem in
an adaptation of the curriculum to the immediate agricultural

environment, that is, by giving an agricultural bias to all the
school work and cultivating exclusively rural interests. The
drift to the city, which is one direct result of the restricted
outlook of the rural school, is due not so much to lack of success
in agriculture as to the inadequate opportunities for a broader
cultural outlook and wider social contacts.
Only as the reform
of the rural school is envisaged as an essential part of the

country life movement will it hold out a promise of success.
Miss Dewey's New Schools for Old presents an account of
the changes wrought not merely in the school itself but in
the whole neighborhood served by the school of Porter, Missouri,
through the broad vision of its teacher, Mrs. Harvey. Her
success rests not so much on her skill as a teacher as on the
recognition of two principles: That the children take home

what they learn and thus the life of the whole family is influ
enced; and that It is not so much better buildings or modern
methods of teaching that are needed as a new spirit, a new
vision of the possibilities of country life and of the school in
that life. Largely because these two principles are applicable
not alone to the rural school, New Schools for Old, which
describes in detail the development of the school as the center
of a cooperative community life, should be read by all who are

interested in the future of education in this country.
Teachers
like Mrs. Harvey are not to be found in every school, but the
Porter experiment, which was not a hot-house or laboratory
venture but enlisted the efforts of pupils and taxpayers, has a
lesson for all intelligent teachers and for the public.
I. L. KANDEL
It is not until our professor might see such a volume as Mr. J.

C. Squire's that he could justly nourish a little flame of indig
nation.
The forty brief papers which the editor of the London Mer
cury has here reprinted from his weekly contributions to Land
and Water are trivial at their worst and competent at their
best. It took a good deal of self-trust to think such a paper
as One worthy of preservation; it required an incredible amount

of the same quality to perpetuate Initials. An essay like that
on Johnson is, indeed, a model of clear and workmanlike com
pression of the universally known; it is excellent literary jour
ney work. But it can be matched in an hundred school editions
of the English classics. Mr. Squire has, to be sure, livelier
and more personal moments. He has a firm and lucid one in
regard to the fundamental weakness of Anatole France; he is
sound on Pope and on Humane Education, agreeable on Marryat,
brave and true on George Meredith. Though he is merely
petulant on Walt Whitman and less than just to the free-verse
movement in this country, one forgives him for the sake of the
touch of charm and insight in Childhood in Retrospect. But at
his very best he never transcends a healthy, cultivated
mediocrity.
To seek the source of that mediocrity is to come at once upon

the cause and character of Mr. Squire's reputation. His is a
mediocrity not of manner but of mind. Mr. Squire is at one
with his audiencethe comfortable, not unlettered, right-think
ing middle class. He is suggestive without ever startling and
offers pleasant little vistas along roads that are safe and known.
He sticks to the familiar and the respectable and excludes from
his equipment and consideration all the men and books of the
modern world that have power to arouse the mind or trouble
the soul. And his act of exclusion is conscious of its own virtue.
A civilization in which men should spend their time promiscu

ously undermining traditional loves and loyalties by imperfect
syllogisms would rot to pieces. Unfairness of statement by
verbal insinuation could, of course, go no further. The truth
is, on the contrary, that a civilization in which men did not,
from time to time, reexamine and revalue traditional loves and
loyalties under the influence of perceptions and clarifications

so passionately lucid that they must be uttered, would soon be
as stagnant as a rotting pool. The greater part of vital litera
ture does precisely that. Hence Mr. Squire avoids it unless it
is so old that its values, once new and revolutionary, have long
since been merged with the quiet stock of conventional common
places. Among the moderns his warmest enthusiasm is given
to a stylist whose subject matter seems to him an incitement
to decent living.
Mr. Squire, in a word, being the very example of a safe and
The Safe Critic
sane critic is no critic at all. The true critic writes almost at

his peril and achieves handsome reprints with difficulty. For at
Life and Letters. Essays by J. C. Squire. George H. Doran
the center of his intellectual activity dwell the most unpopular
Company.
truths in the world.
Life tends to stagnancy and literature to
in sheets but manufactured in the United States at a time
formalism. To live with a fresh vision is to be creative through

reality; to record such living is to be creative through art.
when publishers are wary of anything without commercial pos

sibilities or commanding excellence, arouses even the good lover
of world literature to a mild protest. He begins to understand
is bent upon the same business, and a spinster novelist watching

her parish from the windows of a vicarage may be essentially
this handsome volume, which was not imported
The ironic spirit showing up the uncreative staleness of life
The Nation
March 23, 1921]
as full of the spirit of storm and stress as the young Goethe.

But Mr. Squire and his kind avoid the deep and steep places.
They have handsome libraries and good berths and a kindly
outlook. They savor a rich style and are addicted to rattling
good stories. They are uncomfortable with Euripides and
Lucian, Goethe and Shelley. They avoid Dostoevski and Haupt
mann and even George Moore. They love small talents and
pleasant memories; they write like gentlemen rather than like
men; they can turn out three articles a week and edit as many
papers, and handsome American reprints are the rewards of
439
to contract his interests to the preoccupations of love and re

duce his activities to the feeding of her ever-famished heart.
She has her case, which Porto-Riche permits her to state with
telling eloquence.
She has not had adventure and romance.
Her absorbing adventure and romance are here and now. But
she makes the grave error of thinking that adventure and
romance can be pervasive elements of lifenot white days and
their memories but years and continuous presences. Her ex
actions first rasp and then chill her husband. I suffocate
morally and physically, he cries out. I must be free. She
rummages in his brain as one rummages in drawers. She

diminishes the preciousness of love by her eagerness and the
their good taste and virtuous abstentions.
haste of her consents. She thus drives him into a mood of

supreme rebellion and disgust. Yet from that moment and its
Drama
The Tyranny of Love
I T was on April 25, 1891, that a play called Amoureuse had
its first performance at the Odon in Paris. The author,
Georges de Porto-Riche, who was even then forty-two years old,
had contributed a one-act play, La Chance de Franoise, to
the repertory of the Thtre Libre three years before, and had
also written a one-act play in verse. He had tried his hand at
lyrical poetry but without conspicuous success. Nor did he
cultivate or greatly extend the reputation which came to him
immediately upon the appearance of Amoureuse. Neither
Le Pass (1897) nor Le Vieil Homme (1911) shows any
development of his mind or art. He seems himself to have been
aware of the early exhaustion of his vein, for in 1898 he pub
lished his four plays under the very appropriate title Thtre
dAmour and made no further attempt at dramatic composi
tion for fourteen years. His fame, which presents every appear
irreparable consequences springs for him that revenge of life

itself which she predicts. Though all seems over between them,
he returns. Nervous disquietude and jealousy have drawn him
back. It is Germaine who utters a warning at last: But we
shall not be happy. The cry does not stir him. People are
not happy. They are united by the very wounds they have in
flicted on each other. Life is passion, conflict, resignation, and,
at best, peace.
No brief account can do justice to the dialogue of Porto-Riche,

which combines an elegiac beauty of rhythm with entire natural
ness and an inexhaustible wealth of psychological observation.
Not every artist has mastered all the intricacies of an emotional

or spiritual situation because he has known it well enough for
effective presentation.
Porto-Riche knows his situation to the
most fleeting of impulses, the faintest reaction of the mind, the

ultimate quiver of the nerves. He knows it so well that he
transcends the second stage of insight at which the consciousness
of complexity clogs the processes of art.
He sees not only
ance of solidity and permanence, rests essentially on the three
completely but with supreme clarity and order. To hear his

dialogue is a liberal education in the character of art and the
act drama of domestic life Amoureuse which was produced for
more difficult art of life.
the first time in English on February 28 at the Bijou Theater

under the title The Tyranny of Love.
We owe this production of The Tyranny of Love to the

good taste and admirable courage of Mr. Henry Baron. He
uses a translation of his own which is not always elegant and
idiomatic but which is faithful and complete. It is a pity that
The unrivaled excellence of Amoureuse in its own field is
due to two facts: it exhausts its subject; its progression and

outcome are conditioned neither by technical exigencies nor by
the use of moral fictions, but conform utterly to the native dic
tates of the human heart. It is as fresh and pertinent today
as it was on its first appearance thirty years ago; to witness
its performance is to reaffirm and reexperience in one's own

mind the conviction that depth and exactness of veracity consti
tutes the highest beauty in literature; it touches one's memory
he thought a superficial change of scene and nomenclature neces
sary.
But the very superficiality of the attempt keeps it from
being very annoying. The play is authentically before us. And

the acting is more than adequate. Mr. Flateau is a bit sullen
and heavy and Mr. Cyril Keightly not quite free from manner
ism.
But both have grasped their parts with great intelligence
and sincerity.
Miss Estelle Winwood reveals herself as an
even of Heartbreak House with a tinge of the over-eager
emotional actress of extraordinary genuineness, charm, and
and falsely pointed and sets into relief the over-consciousness

and calculated symmetry even of The Skin Game; it makes
all lesser plays seem like the trivial and childish fables they
are. Its scrupulous perfection shows up their easy vulgarity.
force. The success or failure of this production will give us

the measure of the theatrical taste about us. For it constitutes
nothing less than a first-rate interpretation of the best modern

play of the entire season.
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
speciosis condere rebus
carmina vulgatum est opus et componere simplex.

What distinguishes Porto-Riche is his insight into the curiosi
ties of love, into the difficulties of the heart.
The conflict be
tween Dr. tienne Friaud and his wife Germaine is the eternal
&%
one between the man of creative temper to whom love is ex

citement in youth and repose in later years, and the woman
Herald Square
2%
New York
to whom the satisfactions of love in the broadest sense are
coextensive with the content and meaning of life. It is they

whom you jeer at, Dr. Friaud exclaims, it is the scientists,
Maintains the
the artists, and the poets who have bettered this imperfect
largest and
most complete
Book Depart
world and made it more endurable.
Doubtless they have been
bad husbands, indifferent friends, rebellious sons.

ter?
Does it mat
Their labors and their dreams have strewn happiness,
justice, and beauty over the earth. They have not been kind
lovers, these egoists, but they have created love for those who
come after them. Germaine, however, cannot make the dis
ment in New
York City.
tinction between a service of self for its own sake and the ser
vice of a self that is identified with a great cause. She is

jealous of her husband's work, of his very thoughts; she desires
440
The Nation
[Vol 112, No. 2907
1
The World's
To All Readers of
Feast
DaySt.
Patrick's
The Nation:
This month every nation will celebrate the World's Feast DaySt. Patrick's.
Every man and woman in creation is forced to be vitally interested in Ireland
because the very salvation of civilization depends upon the solution of Ireland's
troubles.
In this country nine out of every ten men and women who are not of Irish blood are denouncing the
Irish. Indeed thousands of Americans of Irish ancestry are denouncing them, too. All are ignorant of
Irish conditionsIrish facts. We urge everyone to read, then lend to these critics all or any of the follow
ing books :
France May Be the World's Sweetheart, butIreland is the Beau of Humanity
Read WHY GOD LOVES THE IRISHthen you will love them, too. Lend or give it to othersthey will
surely agree with you that men and women who have done so much for every free nation on the Globe
should now themselves be free.
WHY
GOD
LOVES
THE
IRISH
By HUMPHREY J. DESMOND, DL.D.

With a strong Foreword by Joseph I. O. Clarke, President-General of the American-Irish Historical Society, and a really
delightful Appreciation by Dr. Maurice Francis Egan, our ex-Mlnister to Denmark.
No Politics!No Abuse!No Bitterness!Just God's own men and women at their lovable best. You will see
why, with half a chance, they go to the front in all walks of lifethe spirit, the force of manhood (inspired and
fostered by a womanhood of supernal purity) that sends thousands of the blood to all parts of the globe to work,
fight and die for the oppressed, the enslavedfor God and country. If Irish, it will make you a still better American.
If not Irish, you'll wish you had at least one Celtic corpuscle, that you, too, might flaunt it as a silkless emerald
the rarest of precious brilliants.
Note :Fourth Large Edition now ready. Price $1.35; Postpaid $1.45.
The
Irish
Rebellion
of
1916
AND ITS MARTYRSERIN'S TRAGIC EASTER

By Seumas O'Brien, James Reldy, Ker. T. Gavan Duffy, Sidney Gifford, Mary J. Ryan, Mary M Colum, Maurice Joy and
Padralc Colum.
The Best-Written, Fairest-Minded and Most Comprehensive Account of the Rebellion, Its History, Causes
and Leaders.
The Irish Rebellion of 11 and Its MartyrsErin's Tragic Easter is not a mere story bookthe glucose of literature.
It is History, real History, but so brilliantly pennedanecdotal, toothat it has all the compelling charm of a classic
novel. Written by men and women of Ireland, scholars all, who know how to write correct, graceful English, tills book
will ever appeal to all students of History as well as to the casual reader of the best in literature. Each author was
selected for what he or she could do best, given a free pen to write from heart and mindthe result, a concerted whole
as superior to one-man authorship as a symphony orchestra Is to a lone fiddler.
Note :Be sure that the book you get bears The Devin-Adair Imprintit is the only History that is illustrated and
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'
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SPECTAIj COMBINATION OFFERSend The Devin-Adair Company $7.5 for the above four books and they will
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at booksto-es THE DEVIN.ADAIR CO., Poblishers, 425 Fifth Avenue, N. Y.
The Nation
March 23, 1921]
The World's
Feast
DaySt.
441
Patrick's
Only a clear-headed woman can get at the bottom facts. Miss Russell, a
trained Chicago Journalist, went to Ireland determined to see and study con
ditions in the land of her parents. She saw Ireland, its people and its problems
as no one else has seen them. She states the case so clearly that Eamon De Valera,
after reading an advance copy, felt impelled to break his rule of silence and for
the first time write a Foreword of praise, of endorsement of a book "WHAT'S
THE MATTER WITH IRELAND?"
This new book is the only
WHAT'S
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MATTER with IRELAND?

By RUTH RUSSELL
DEAR HISS RUSSELL:
DEAR MISS RUSSELL:
I have read the advance copy of your book, "WHAT'S
I have read "WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH IRE
THE MATTER WITH IRELAND?" with much interest.
LAND?" with absorbing interest and keenest pleasure.
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will take the trouble to see things for themselves first
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International
Relations
Lenin's Letter to the Italian Socialists

THE letter from Lenin, part of which is printed below,
appeared in Pravda for December 10, and was
prompted by certain comments of Serrati published in the
same newspaper. Lenin took this occasion to express his
attitude toward the revolutionary movement in Italy and
toward the impending split in the Socialist Party.
Let us stop at this point to examine more particularly the
principal questions put by Serrati. Serrati fears the split
because, according to him, it would break up the party, and
particularly the unions, cooperatives, and municipalities. Serrati's chief concern is this: These institutions must not be
destroyed since they are indispensable for the building up of
socialism. "Where," asks Serrati in the Turin edition of
Avanti, October 2, 1920, "can we find enough Communists to
fill all the public positions from which we have ejected the
men designated by the Terracini resolution?" The same con
cern we find expressed in Communism, the review published
by Comrade Serrati (No. 24, page 1627), and in Serrati's
article on the Second Congress of the Third International:
"Just imagine the Commune of Milan (that is, the adminis
tration of the city of Milan) controlled by incompetent men,
by novices, by recent recruits of the Communist Party."
Serrati fears the destruction of the unions, cooperatives, and
municipalities through the ignorance and mistakes of new
men. The Communists, on the other hand, fear the sabotage
of the revolution by the reformists. This shows the error of
Serrati's position. He is always concerned with this same
fear, namely, the lack of adaptable tactics. This fear is in
contestable, but the point of the question is this: that Serrati
is moving to the Right, while, considering the actual conditions
in Italy, the need is for progress toward the Left. The Italian
party, in order to carry out the revolution successfully and
to defend it must still take a certain number of steps to the
Left without tying itself down and without forgetting that
circumstances may very well demand some steps to the Right.
If the proletarian revolution includes within its ranks re
formists and Mensheviki, it cannot conquer, and it cannot
defend itself. That principle is most evident, and has been
confirmed most certainly by the experiences of Russia and
Hungary. It is a conception of the question which has now
become decisive. To compare the danger of the defeat of the
revolution with the danger of loss, failures, errors, and mis
takes of the unions, cooperatives, and municipalities, is not
only ridiculous but is also a very serious mistake. To risk
the success of the revolution out of fear of risk to the com
munal administration of Milan, signifies absolute failure to
understand the fundamental task of the revolution, and sig
nifies utter inability to prepare for victory.
In Russia we have made thousands of mistakes, we have
had thousands of failures through the shortcomings of new
and incompetent men in the cooperatives, communes, and unions.
We do not doubt that . other more civilized peoples can make
fewer mistakes. But notwithstanding all these mistakes of
ours, we have attained the necessary aim: the conquest of
power by the proletariat; and we have held this power for
three years. . . .
Serrati does not understand the character of this period of
transition in which Italy now finds herself, when according to
general opinion the decisive battle of the proletariat against
the bourgeoisie for the conquest of political power is close at
hand. At such a time not only is it indispensable to expel
from the party the Mensheviki, reformists, and Turatis, but
it would even be advisable to expel some very good Commun
ists who are likely to hesitate, and who have a tendency to
defend unity with the reformists. It would be advisable, I
Section
repeat, to remove such Communists from positions of respon

sibility. I wish to give you an impressive example. Shortly
before the October Revolution, and shortly after, some excellent
Communists made a mistake, the memory of which is not pleas
ant now; the memory is not pleasant because it is not just
to recall the mistake of those who have made amends. But
the recollection may be useful to Italian workers. At the time
of the October Revolution some Bolsheviki like Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rikov, Noghin, Miliutin showed some hesitation, dwell
ing upon the risks that the Bolsheviki would run by standing
alone, by assuming the whole responsibility of the Revolution,
by maintaining too extreme an attitude toward the Menshevik
and Social Revolutionary Parties. The conflict reached such
a point that these comrades ostentatiously abandoned all posts
of responsibility in the party and in the soviet organization,
much to the joy of the enemies of the soviet revolution. Our
party papers were obliged to censure very severely the com
rades who resigned. But a few weeks later, or a few months
at the very most, all these comrades became convinced of their
error, and returned to take positions of greater responsibility
in the party and in the Soviet Government.
And it is not difficult to understand why this should have
happened. On the eve of the Revolution, and in the most acute
moment of the struggle for victory, the slightest agitation
within the party could have lost and ruined the Revolution
and dashed the power from the hands of the proletariat, since
the power was not yet consolidated and the direct blows against
those who held it were too potent. If the leaders of the Revo
lution had hesitated at such a time, if the wavering leaders
had not left the party, the party would not have been strength
ened, but weakened ; and with the party the workers' movement
and the Revolution would also have been weakened. And Italy
finds herself in just such a situation now, when all see and
recognize that the revolutionary crisis has taken on national
dimensions. In fact, the proletariat has shown its ability to
rise and to arouse the masses to a potent revolutionary move
ment.
Under such conditions the party must be a hundred times
more united, more decided, more fearless, more devoted to the
cause of the revolution, and more implacable than under ordi
nary circumstances and at less difficult times. At such times
and under such conditions the party will be strengthened a
hundred times, and will not be weakened at all, if Mensheviki
like those who gathered at Reggio Emilia on October 11, 1920,
leave its ranks and if good Communists like Baratono, Zannarini, Bacci, Giacomini, and Serrati give up its leadership. The
majority of such men, if they leave in a moment like this, will
undoubtedly return to their posts within a very short time,
for after the victory of the proletariat and after the consolida
tion of its conquests, they will recognize their mistake. Per
haps even a part of the Mensheviki and the Turatians will
return and will be accepted in the ranks of the party when the
most difficult period is over, just as today, after three years
of difficult life, some of the Mensheviki and Social Revolution
aries who in 1917-1918 were on the other side of the barricade
have now returned to us.
At the present time the Italian revolutionary proletariat is
facing one of its most difficult periods. The most difficult task
is still before it. It would seem to me superficial and criminal
to be blind to this difficulty, and I am astounded that Comrade
Serrati can publish without objection in his paper Communism
(No. 24, September 15-30, 1920) an article as superficial as
that entitled Shall We Be Blockaded signed P. K. Personally
I think, contrary to the opinion of the author of this article,
that a blockade of Italy by England, France, and America,
if the proletariat is victorious, is not only possible, but very
probable. In my opinion Comrade Graziadei put the question
of a blockade much more fairly in his speech at the meeting
of the Executive Committee of the Italian Socialist Party
March 23, 1921]
The Nation
(Avanti, Turin edition, October 1, 1920). He recognized that

the question of a possible blockade is very serious. He ob
served that "Russia has been able to live in spite of the blockade,
partly because of the sparsity of the population and her great
expanse of territory," and that "the revolution in Italy cannot
hold out long if it is not allied with the revolution of some other
country in Central Europe," that "such an alliance will be
difficult, but is not at all impossible," because all of continental
Europe is approaching a revolutionary period.
All this was said very cautiously, but very exactly. I shall
merely add that some sort of an alliance, however insufficient
so far, however incomplete, would be made with Italy; and to
obtain a complete alliance, Italy will have to fight vigorously.
The reformists insist on the possibility of a blockade in order
to sabotage the revolution, in order to delay the revolution by
dread of its consequences, in order to extend to the masses
their fright, their anxiety, their indecision, their hesitation,
and their waverings. The Communist revolutionists must not
give any evidence of the danger and difficulty of the struggle,
to give the masses much more firmness and courage, to rid the
party of the weak, the hesitating, and the unfaithful; to instil
into the whole movement a greater enthusiasm, a greater spirit
of internationalism, and a greater readiness to make sacrifices
for a great aim. Hasten the revolution, in England, in France,
and in America, if these countries decide to blockade the pro
letariat of the Italian Proletariat Republic!
Nicolai Lenin
Serrati Answers for His Party

SERRATI'S reply to the advice and comment contained
in Lenin's letter was printed in Avanti on December
11. Taken together, these two documents form an excellent
background for the struggle and final split in the Italian
Socialist Party which took place at the National Congress
at Leghorn in January.
Dear Comrade Lenin:
I already told you at the Congress of Moscowin a general
addresshow difficult and painful it is for a modest comrade
like myself and like a large number of the delegates at the
Congress, to enter into discussion with you. Difficult, because
you who willed and made the Revolution and defend it with
firmness and sagacity against a world of enemies, are sur
rounded by the most potent sources of information. Painful,
because discussion may appear to ingenuous minds to imply
antagonism, and may furnish a pretext to the enemies of the
proletariat for false and unjust interpretations injurious to
the international proletarian revolution, while I have never
felt so strongly revolutionary, so filled with the consciousness
of the necessity of the final step as now, when so much discus
sion is before me.
However, I shall fulfil a pressing duty which is on my con
science by trying to overcome the difficulty and painfulness.
"Can the reformists be kept in the party?"
Allow me to reply to this question of yours by another:
"Who are the reformists?"
Ifas it seems from your letterthe reformists are those
who desire the cooperation of classes, and the sharing of power
with the bourgeoisie, who carry on counter-revolutionary ac
tivities and might, when the time comes, change into Scheidemanns and Noskes of Italy, you are right, and I agree with
you on their expulsion.
But these "reformists" were expelled from our party at the
previous Congress of Reggio Emilia, and they are now quite
separated from us. The real reformistsTurati, Treves, Modigliani, and others whose policy I do not approve of and do not
defend, whose errors in tactics I have fought against tena
ciously from the startare the ones who have defended the
443
Russian Revolution in Parliament, and who were responsible

for its de facto recognition. They are the ones to whom one
of your Italian representatives, Engineer Vodovosov turned,
two months ago on behalf of your government, asking them
to intervene in the name of the Parliamentary group with
Giolitti to obtain certain concessions. And it was our group
that opposed such soliciting! They are the ones who only
yesterday were assailed by the reaction for their defense of
our party and who bore the burdens of the whole group, even
of the "pure" Communists, and spoke also in their name, and
won their applause. Nor do I know of a single case when the
voice of a Communist deputy was raised in the Italian Parlia
ment more ardently than theirs, or when any measures were
proposed that were more in keeping with the program of the
Third International than were theirs. This has never hap
pened. Not once.
But, I repeat, I am not for a moment attempting to defend
the men whom you call reformists. I am looking further ahead
than that. My mind is fixed on the party, on the proletariat,
on the revolution. .
You say that I fear a split because it would break up the
party, the unions, the cooperatives, the municipalities. No,
comrade, I fear a split because in compromising the develop
ment of these institutions it would compromise the success of
the revolution, both in the destructive phase and more espe
cially in the constructive phase.
The lack of men in our party, which I feel to be very serious,
does not concern me so much because of natural errors in ad
ministration and organization, errors which are deplorable but
nevertheless inevitable, and at such a time amendable; I am
concerned with revolutionary errors, which may be decisive in
a critical period. We have seen it in the recent events of
Bologna, where a man more conscious of his own responsibility
might have mastered the difficult and unhappy situation.
Nor is there contrast or opposition between my anxiety to
save the proletariat organisms and yours to save the revolution.
They belong together. They are one and the same thing.
There is no possibility of revolutionary action if the strength
of our institutions is not kept united and compact To feel
completely driven by this unitary passion, to make it the aim
of our own activitywhile our enemies are stirred up in the
flames of discorddoes not mean, Comrade Lenin, going to
the Right. It means staying at our posts, fulfilling our own
duty, however bitter it may be. An opportunist would not
stay firm, in my opinion, at all. And I add that if it should
become necessary, in order to save the proletarian revolution
and my party, to take some steps to the Rightand you your
self admit such a possibilityI should have the courage to do
that also. . . .
If I were in complete agreement with you, or rather with
those who keep you supplied with an interpretation of the
actual period through which Italy is passing, that is, if I were
persuaded like you that the problem of the revolution in Italy
is only a problem of leadership, that all the necessary elements
exist with the exception of the right men for immediate action,
I should not hesitate to declare myself in agreement with you
on the need for driving out of the party, not only the reformists,
but even the hesitating communists.
But, in this argument, the difference lies not only in the
ranks of the Right or in our ranks: the difference exists also
among the "pure" Communists, so much so that while some
of them actually believe that what is keeping the revolution
back from its destined road is the beard of Modigliani, there are
others who do not share in such narrow and childish concep
tions. Few of them, moreover, I believe, agree with you on
the aid that might come to the Italian revolution, aside from
a revolution in Central Europe, through revolutions in Eng
land, France, and the United States which, according to you,
ought to be hastened.
There are, then, hesitaters even in the ranks of the "pure"
Communists!
444
The Nation
I am also informed, dear Comrade, of what happened at the

time of the Bolshevik October Revolution, when yon were
fighting stubbornly against those who did not have faith in
the success of the revolution, and, at the critical moment, osten
tatiously resigned from all the public posts. And I know that
at that time you wrote against Zinoviev in such a way as this:
"I have known Gregory Zinoviev for many years; I always
believed he was not up to the mark, but I never thought he
was rotten." You sometimes make such biting remarks; but
your judgment did not prevent your friend from becoming,
later on, president of the Third International! Which sig
nifies that there are opinions which only hold good at the time
they are spoken, and do not offend because they are prompted
by a deep affection for the common cause. Who knows but
some day you may change your judgment of us! . . .
And now we come to a somewhat difficult argument. You
say that the Italian proletariat is facing one of the most diffi
cult periods, and that it would be superficial and criminal to
be blind to this difficulty, and you reprove me because I pub
lished in Communism an article which was not mine, but by
P. K., in which an attempt was made to give a less pessimistic
version of the actual Italian situation. All who know our
work know that while these difficulties cannot keep us from
fulfilling our duty we have constantly pointed out to our com
rades and to the proletariat the need for serenely and cour
ageously considering all the obstacles which the revolution will
meet on its path. But in Italy, to carry out this task of
courageous estimation of our strength, means to be sneered at.
And to point out the serious mistakes made by your revolution,
and admitted by you, in order to avoid them, means to be
shouted down as counter-revolutionists. And to expound the
difficulties you have passed through, without criticizing, but as
a help and example, means to be accused of slandering the revo
lutionso great is the superstitious infatuation of some com
rades, filled as they may be with the highest sentiments, but
lacking a true conception of the Socialist attitude.
And you now repeat to us what you wrote so opportunely
in October, 1919, that "a blockade of Italy by France, Eng
land, and the United States, if the proletariat is victorious, is
not only possible, but very probable." We feel the same way,
as we have written many times, and we also agree that in
spite of the possibility of a terrible blockade we must act in
the same way, even without waiting for possible aid from out
side. But doesn't it seem to youafter this calm survey of
the factsthat you contradict yourself when you speak of
hastening the revolution in England and France?
We know the international situation perhaps as well as you,
at least in so far as the western countries are concerned, and
we know only too well that the Communist parties there have
not influence enough to arouse the masses in aid of a foreign
revolution. The betrayal of July. 20-21 showed us that.
In England, notwithstanding the Moscow decisions, unity
among the Communists is far from complete, and the forces
of the nine different groups are anything but capable of in
spiring their adversaries with fear. They hardly have fifty
thousand members; they have not a single daily paper and
their weeklies are barely holding up even with your aid.
In France the partywith the "ifs," "buts," and "perhapses"
of Frossardmay adhere to the Third International, but it
would be vain to expect any decisive action from it in support
of us or of others, considering its lack of numerical and politi
cal strength, and the completely reactionary character of its
national politics.
In the United States things are no better. Unity between
the different groups has not yet been attained and they are
totally ineffective as compared with the power of our syndical
movement and the violent reaction which has been so pro
nounced for many years among our comrades here. I do not
believe that they are strong enough today to permit even the
most distant hope of a revolutionary movement. The news
from that side of the Atlantic is anything but encouraging.
[Vol. 112, No. 2907
The countries of the former Central Empireeven where

the conflict is raging, and the consequent crises give hope for
more rapid advances in revolutionary progressare passing
through a period of stagnation if not of actual retrogression.
I do not speak of Hungary, where the movement was de
feated not so much because of the attitude of the Social Demo
crats, as because of certain purely Marxian causes, as Trotzky
has pointed out, and where it has been superseded by a reac
tion which is tenaciously raging against our comrades there.
But in Austria, even in Germany, where you rightly succeeded
in blocking the Independents, the situation is no more revolu
tionary today than it was yesterday. Everywhere the bourgeoisie
is raising its head, organizing, taking advantage of our own
movement to obtain amnesty from the foreign enemy, and
opposing its organized force against the enemy at home. Bol
shevism has increased nationalism. In Bavaria restoration is
openly discussed, and to some extent in Germany.
Perhaps in the Balkan countriessuffering more than any
others from the post-war crisesthere existed until quite re
cently a considerable proletarian and revolutionary movement
sufficient to justify hopes for united action. But even there,
reaction has sprung up. In Rumania, in Bulgaria, in Jugo
slavia, things have changed considerably, and furthermore, it
is not from countries that are so poor in raw materials and
agriculture and industrial products that our country can expect
any kind of a restoration in case of a revolution.
As for the north countries, the economic, moral, and politi
cal conditions there are such that I do not believe that you
can be under any illusion regarding a relatively imminent
proletariat uprising there.
In this international situation, the only country, besides
Russia, which finds itself in socialistically advantageous con
ditions for struggling against the bourgeoisie is Italy. Here,
even though "victorious" the country is suffering the economic,
political, and moral torments of a conquered nation. Here
more than anywhere else is crisis, trouble, and irritation. Here
we have a political preparation of the masses, with a pro
portional economic organization, better than that in any other
country. Our party has 250,000 members, 150 deputies in the
Chamber, and 2,500 communes. The economic organizations
of resistance include two and a half million more supporters.
The cooperatives, which are under our control, number a thou
sand. We have the land and the materials for reconstruction.
The great majority of our comrades are free from any antag
onism arising from the two schools of thought; rather, they
are united by a single conscious idealof immediate conquest
and revolution.
How can any one think that by spreading ideas of separation
within this essentially creative and harmonious group, revolu
tionary work can be accomplished? How can any one believe
that the "pure" Communists, when once they are separated
from the majority of the party, can be the impetus to action?
But do you actually think that Turati and D'Aragona are
enough to stop the coming of the revolution? Such a con
ception is strangely superstitious and anti-Marxian.
Revolution is not a magic act performed by this or that
leader, even though the personal element has its own value.
Revolution is a combination of various circumstances and mul
tiple elements which accumulate and, at the historic moment,
develop into the solution of a crisis which is firmly rooted in
an economic background. To believe that the "pure" Com
munists will make a revolution as soon as they are freed from
Modigliani or Turati, and to state such a belief, is to under
estimate the significance of the revolution, spreading among
the masses those superstitious and loose prejudices which are so
destructive to our movement, and which you have so often
warned us to avoid and to combat.
These are things which our masses, who have a keen intelli
gence and a highly developed critical sense, understand to
perfection.
G. M. Serrati
March 23, 1921]
The Nation
The Line-up of the Factions in Italy

DURING the months preceding the National Congress
of the Socialist Party at Leghorn, the various divi
sions and groups within the party met and adopted declara
tions of principles and policy which were afterward made
the basis for the struggle for domination fought out at
Leghorn. The Socialist Concentration Group at its conven
tion last fall at Reggio Emilia adopted the following reso
lutions :
. The situation produced in these last days in the
Socialist Party makes it the duty of every member to give
full expression to his own opinion, so that the coming National
Congress of the party will be strengthened by a clarification of
ideas, aims, and program.
The Concentration Group declares itself to be resolutely for
unity and opposed to every split, so much the worse if provoked
by personal antagonisms and not by substantial differences on
the fundamental principles of socialism, and so much the more
dangerous and harmful at this moment for the coming of
the proletarian revolution. Differences in analyzing the his
toric period through which we are now passing are not a suffi
cient motive for separation ; the various opinions of the socialist
schools which have always existed in the partyas the ex
tensive development of the past has shownwill still permit
a fraternal collaboration, more fertile of results as a greater
degree of reciprocal respect is shown by each group, as well
as a common desire to insure liberty of judgment in every
situation and to maintain the strictest discipline through the
many stages in the development of the class struggle.
The Concentration Group confirms the adherence of the party
to the Third International, asserting that liberty in interpreting
and determining the application of the twenty-one points
equal to that permitted in other countries should be allowed,
and strongly upholding the exclusion of anarchist and syndical
ist groups and of the Massoni elements from the sections of
the International.
The Concentration Group has no preconceptions regarding the
historical advent of socialism and the means to be employed
for its definite triumph. The dictatorship of the proletariat,
understood in the Marxian sense, is a transitory necessity im
posed by special situations and not a rigid obligation, and this
is not denied by the Concentration Group, but such dictator
ship must not, cannot be modeled for all countries on that of
a single one; and it would be a grave error to try to proscribe
for democratically developed peoples who are not suffering
under an arbitrary rule, laws or systems considered useful and
necessary for other nations.
The Concentration Group does not condemn the use of vio
lence or of illegal methods in the class struggle and for the
conquest of political power. The historic transitions of such
power from one class to another are the final results of the
clashing of opposing forces. The use of violence in completing
such a transition is not to be questioned, although it cannot be
the ultimate force of the proletariat against the blind resis
tance and opposition of the bourgeois classes, but only an agent
in the destruction of a social organization which is incompati
ble with the new economy and with new methods of production.
The Concentration Group holds that the war, through its
very inability to accomplish the aim for which it was waged,
has accelerated the fall of the capitalist regime and rendered
more urgent for the proletariat the solution of the problems
on which the revolutionary attainment of socialist power
depends.
Such a revolutionary period has been even more accentuated
since the fall of the Czar's regime and since the Peace of Ver
sailles, which sanctions the domination of the strong states
over the weaker ones. But it would be childish to assert that
this revolutionary period has reached its most acute phase
445
throughout the world, and that a crisis in the richest capitalist

countries can be expected within a short time. And the Con
centration Group maintains that the revolution in Italy in the
violent and destructive form desired by the extremists, with
the immediate formation of a soviet order of the Russian type,
would be destined to fall within a brief time, lacking during
the inevitable disorder the harmonious economic and political
action of the proletariat of a richer country.
The Group of Socialist Concentrationists upholds all possible
attempts to attain the Socialist regime. When the time comes,
the party does not renounce the conquest of political power in
the form consistent with the internal situation, and making
use of the strength of all the syndical groups which act in
full accord with the party and are completely independent of
any other party or democratic organ of the bourgeoisie.
The group of Socialist Concentrationists pledges its own
members to support the provisions of this declaration in the
section assemblies and at the coming National Congress, con
fident that they will hasten the approach of the next revolu
tionary period, which will be more intense and more real in
the socialist sense, and which has been foreseen and desired
by all.
[Signed] Baldesi
D'Aragona
The Unitary Communists, who finally won a majority at
the Leghorn Congress, adopted at a meeting on November
20 the following preliminary resolutions:
The Unitary-Communist Socialists, convened at Florence
November 20-21, 1920; considering:
1. That the Italian Socialist Party through its political and
economic organizations not only is the strongest and the most
united political party in Italy, but has already conquered con
siderable political power held by its many and varied organs
of continuous activities, through which it alone can assure to
the proletariat the overthrow of the bourgeois regime and re
construction through the establishment of a communist order;
2. That the Italian Socialist Party, with all its units and
in all its tendencies unanimously opposed the bourgeois war,
to such an extent that not one of its fighters shared any re
sponsibility in it, so that even during the world conflict the
Italian Socialist Party, through the conferences at Lugano,
Zimmerwald, and Kienthal, initiated the work of the recon
struction of the International, in accord with ardent but small
groups from other countries;
3. That, after the Congress of Reggio, in 1912 (expulsion
of the Reformists) and the Congress of Ancona in 1914 (expul
sion of the "Massoni"), the revolutionary and absolutely irre
concilable tendency has completely dominated our party, ad
vancing beyond the groups of the Right and the federated
syndical organizations, subjecting the former to severe dis
cipline, and forming an alliance with the latter;
4. That the economic and political conquests of recent times,
though they may have been determined by contingent circum
stances and events, have clearly shown that the time has come
for the ultimate communist victory:
5. Declares the necessity of maintaining united the member
ship of the party in order to attain more rapidly and effectively
the revolutionary aim of our action.
*****
Regarding the relations with the Third Communist Interna
tional of Moscow; considering:
1. That the Italian Socialist Party has from the first ad
hered to the Third International, and entered it with its banner
unfurled ;
2. That it has strenuously supported and defended the Rus
sian Revolution against the bourgeois state, fixing upon it all
its hopes and dedicating to it its best energies;
3. That immediately after the war the Italian Socialist
Party felt spontaneously the need of changing its constitution
and passed at the Congress of Bologna a resolution accepting
446
The Nation
the guiding opinions of the new International, agreeing, among

other things, to the principles of the Communist Manifesto,
such as the dictatorship of the proletariat, the need for vio
lence, the opposition of communist institutions to democratic
institutions, etc., etc, in accordance with the methods and aims
of the Third International:
Declares that consequently it accepts in their entirety the
twenty-one points of Moscow, adding to them a twenty-second
on the exclusion of the "Massoni" from the Third International.
Finally, respecting the interpretation of the twenty-one points,
and the practices resulting therefrom; declares:
1. That the twenty-one points should be interpreted and ap
plied according to the actual conditions existing in our country,
as the Executive Committee of Moscow therein admits, and
practices with other countries according to the judgment of the
Executive Committee;
2. That the concept of the nation and all national aims have
now given way to the concept and aims of the International,
which cannot be disregarded without prejudicing the interests
of the class struggle and the proletariat;
3. That the relations between the units of the Third Inter
national must be open and frank, and be negotiated through
responsible agents and without secret diplomacy;
4. That every method of conquest may be adopted, within
the limits of the most complete irreconcilability of classes, and
always in keeping with the aim of the communist revolution,
for which the party needs to unite its political action with the
economic action of the syndical groups;
And therefore proposes:
1. That the Italian Socialist Party be strengthened by a
greater centralization, so that each single member or unit shall
subject its own actions to the general interest and to the inte
gral result, and this applies also to the control of activity in
the intellectual and propaganda fields;
2. That in face of organized and economic resistance, pref
erence shall be given in thought and action to political ques
tions over all other contingent and syndical questions, with
the complete subordination of the economic and syndical move
ments to the political party;
3. That legal and extra-legal methods of preparation shall
be adopted, whether for organizing means of education and
progress, and machinery for revolutionary conquest, or for
establishing substitutional organs;
4. That the Italian Socialist Party shall adopt the name of
"Italian Socialist Communist Party, Section of the Third Inter
nationale."
[Signed] Alessandki, Corsi, Baratono, Bacci, Frola,
MODIGLIANI, SMORTI, SERRATI, VELLA.
The group of Revolutionary Extremists stated their posi
tion and their attitude toward the Reformists in the fol
lowing terms:
We are divided from the Reformists as follows:
I. In the doctrinal field:
1. Our rigid conception of the class struggle is the Marx
ian and Unitarian conception of the political struggle in rela
tion to the economic conflict, through which we hold that as in
the economic field a revolutionary meaning attributed to the
conquest of better conditions is inconceivable, so in the politi
cal field, those reforms to which the bourgeoisie accedes under
the pressure of the proletarian movement, in an effort for trans
formation and progress, cannot be said to attack the exist
ing system; therefore, the conquest of such reforms has for us
no value in itself, except in so far as it is instrumental in
strengthening the class action which has determined it, and
so much the less do we admit that it has such great value as
to justify, in order to attain it, deviations and compromises by
the party or a letting down in the rigor of the class struggle.
2. We hold that the process of socialist change cannot by
gradual and progressive evolution make any rapid progress,
[Vol. 112, No. 2907
but that there are periods of revolutionary crisis in which not

only is revealed the sudden maturity of events which have been
developing slowly and imperceptibly during preceding periods,
but also in the particular revolutionary atmosphere new germs
are formed, new developments occur rapidly; in other words
we believe in the revolution not only as the final, exterior, and
almost superfluous conclusion of a cycle now entirely completed,
but as an intimate and dynamic contribution to social trans
formation.
II. Correlatively and as a necessary consequence in the tac
tical and practical field:
1. We give a different value to the historic function of the
party, which for us is quite logical, in the Marxian sense, and
is critical and destructive of the present society; we hold that
it is the duty of the Socialist Party constantly to call the atten
tion of the proletarian masses (who with a less defined politi
cal consciousness are acting on the basis of the class struggle)
to the consideration of the chief principles of the socialist move
ment; so that, by means of such an incessant propaganda of
revolutionary idealism (which necessarily repudiates the prag
matism of the Reformists as misleading and confusing) the
conception of the fundamental struggle for the integral con
quest of the economic and political control of society shall not
be lost in the multiplicity of single struggles.
2. We recognize the historic necessity, inevitable however
sad, of not holding back from the use of violence to overthrow
and conquer the certain resistance of the bourgeois class, which
will not be willing to adapt itself to meek acquiescence, and
consequently we claim that it is the duty of the party to pre
pare the proletarian mind for the violent conflict and to decide
upon the methods to be used.
Provisory Committee of the Extreme Revolutionary Group
of the Italian Socialist Party.
Hon. Giuseppe Bianchi
Nino Levi, Attorney
Dr. D. Angelo Filipetti
The resolutions framed by the Communist-Exclusionist
group for submission to the National Congress read as
follows :
The Seventeenth National Congress, after an adequate dis
cussion of the policy of the party based on an examination of
the Italian political situation, the international outlook, and
all the deliberations of the Communist International (with spe
cial attention to the principles formulated by the Second Con
gress regarding the conditions for the entrance of parties to
the International, and to the Seventeenth Point, which deals
with the principal duties of the International) ;
Recalling the Marxian principles, the experience of all the
past activity of the party, and the lessons to be learned from
our neighbors in the revolutionary struggle that has been car
ried on by the proletariat of the world since the Great War of
Imperialism, adopts the following deliberations:
1. Confirms its adherence to the Third Communist Interna
tional, pledging itself to all the provisions necessary to render
the structure and the activity of the party in harmony with
the conditions of admission, which the Second Congress of the
International has effectively provided for the protection of its
existence and for the development of the world organ of the
proletarian revolutionary conflict.
2. Confirms the general opinions expressed in the revision of
its program voted at the Congress of Bologna, making certain
changes in the form and in certain conceptions of the party
program which will be finally formulated according to the text
attached to the present motion; and declares that the program
itself must constitute the basis for the personal adherence to
the party of each member, who shall sign his complete accept
ance of its principles.
3. Decides to change the name of the party to the "Italian
Communist Party, Section of the Third Communist Interna
tional."
March 23, 1921]
The Nation
4. Asserts the incompatibility of retaining in the party those

who oppose the principles and the conditions of the Communist
International, declaring that the following must be included
among those who are incompatible:
(a) All those adhering to the so-called Concentrationist
Group and supporting its congresses;
(b) All party members who, in the present Congress, vote
against the communist program of the party and against the
pledge to abide strictly by the twenty-one conditions of admis
sion to the International.
5. Adopts as a fundamental part of the organization and
tactics of the party the resolutions of the Second Congress of
the Communist International, declaring it a duty of all mem
bers to maintain the strictest discipline in their action regard
ing these resolutions as interpreted and observed by interna
tional and national central executive bodies. The - application
of these tactics, in relation to the demands of the Italian politi
cal situation, demands of the party the following obligations:
(a) Preparation in the spiritual and material fields of the
means indispensable to the success of the revolutionary action
of the proletariat;
(b) Formation in the heart of all proletarian associations
of communist groups for propaganda, revolutionary prepara
tion, and the gathering of proletarian forces on the side of
the party;
(c) Immediate annulment of the present alliance agreement
with the General Federation of Labor as an inadequate expres
sion of the relations between the unions and the party; appeal
to the revolutionary proletarian organizations outside the fed
eration to join it in order to support the struggle of the Com
munists against its present policy and leaders. Pledge of all
party members as organized workers and organizers to fight
under any conditions to uphold within the federation the judg
ments and decisions of the party and to struggle by these
means to place agents of the party^ in executive positions of
the unions. Separation of the federation as soon as it is con
quered by the party from the yellow Secretaryship of Amster
dam, and its adherence to the syndical section of the Communist
International, as outlined in its statute;
(d) Participation in political and administrative elections
with a motive completely opposed to the old social-democrat
practice, and with the object of developing revolutionary prop
aganda and agitation, and of hastening the disintegration of
the organs of bourgeois democracy;
(e) Discipline, with the elaboration of a new statute for the
internal affairs of the party, the federation, and the sections
and a modification of its relations with organizations represent
ing the party press, the functioning of elected representatives
in the communes, in the provinces, and in parliament, the
young people's movement, the feminist movement, the institu
tion of the period of probation for new party members; and
the periodic revision of the names of all members, beginning
immediately after the Congress.
Committee of the Communist Group:
BOMBACCI, BORDIGA, FORTICHIARI, GRAMSCI,
MlSSIANO, POLANO, REPOSSI, TERRACINI
The Italian Socialists and the International

THE resolutions of the Unitary Communists, printed
below, were finally adopted at the Leghorn Congress
as the expression of opinion of the majority of the Italian
Socialists. As the result of this action the Communist Exclusionists, or "pure" Communists, broke away from the
party, carried with them a large number of the supporters
of the Left, and formed a new organization. The following
text is taken from Avanti for January 18.
The Italian Socialist Party in its Seventeenth National Con
gress, discussing its political policy, considers it necessary to
447
strengthen the unity of the party on the basis of a stricter uni

formity of its organs as well as of its members, and to bring
this about it desires a greater centralization so that all mem
bers and divisions will subordinate their own activity to the
general interest and to an integral result; and this applies also
to the control of activity explained in the intellectual and
propaganda fields;
With this same end in view, in the face of organized, economic
resistance, it is proposed to give preference in thought and
action to political questions over all other contingent and syndi
cal questions, and to keep the central organs of the economic
and syndical movement, subordinate to the political party;
It consequently recognizes the necessity of guarding the uni
tary character of the party membership in order to attain more
efficiently and more rapidly the conquest of all political power,
for whieh every method is acceptable within the limits of the
absolute irreconcilability of classes, and always with the aim
of the communist revolution, which demands the unity of
political action with the economic action of the syndical forces;
Adopting legal and extra-legal methods of preparation,
whether for organizing means of education and progress, and
machinery for revolutionary conquest, or for establishing sub
stitutional organs;
Discussing then the relations of the Italian Socialist Party
with the Third Communist International, confirms again its
complete and spontaneous adherence to the International itself
and to the deliberations of the Congress of the International;
Declares, however, that, following the Second Congress of
Moscow, it accepts substantially the twenty-one conditions that
were drawn up, together with the exclusion of the Massoni, and
as for their execution considers that the twenty-one points are
to be interpreted according to the particular historic conditions
of the country, in agreement with the Executive Committee of
the Third International, as is provided in points sixteen and
twenty and according to the usage in other countries;
Keeping intact the conception that whoever adheres to the
principles of the International, shall do so with the full under
standing and determination to put them into practice;
Finally, concerning the conditions demanded by the seven
teenth point, the Congress, in consideration of the fact that
the Italian Socialist Party did not stain its banner in the years
of the World War, and to avoid the adoption of the glorious
name of the Socialist Party, which is so familiar to the prole
tariat, by those who have abandoned it, proposes to the Execu
tive Committee of the Third International that it shall be pro
visionally kept and regarded as an exception to the conditions
for joining the Third International, from which the Italian
Socialist Party asks and hopes for a stronger, more constant,
and fraternal support in the future.
An Appeal to the Italian Workers

FOLLOWING the Leghorn Congress, the new Socialist
Party Executive issued a manifesto to the workers of
Italy, parts of which are printed below, appealing for a
unity of purpose in spite of the party split. The text is
taken from Avanti for January 27.
Italian Workers:
While the Italian Socialist Partyyour strong and glorious
partyhad already taken the decisive steps to prevent it, and
persisted in spite of many difficulties, the word spread among
the ranks like a new commandone of internal conflict, of dis
integration, of division.
Some comrades have found that it is no longer possible for
us to act together, and that there is a Right Wing in our party
which compromises its position and distorts its principles and
actions. And at the Leghorn Congress the unfortunate split in
the party was carried outnotwithstanding our firm resistance
not in order to save a few leaders, but to defend those eco
448
[Vol. 112, No. 2907
The Nation
nomic units without which the revolution is either impossible or

a thousand times more difficult. Today the bourgeoisie is re
joicing at seeing that a Communist minority has withdrawn
from the party to form a new one, even though it may know
that we are divided from these comrades only by a difference
of opinion on the methods of regulating the life of the party
which we want to maintain in its political and economic struc
ture as a preparation for the new order.
The bourgeoisie, however, will rejoice in vain over the division,
if the split, as we ardently wish and hope, can be converted
into a splendid contest for the most rapid and successful de
velopment possible of the revolutionary period. If the new
Communist Party which has been founded at our side does not
degenerate into a fruitless conflict between comrades who have
the same ultimate aim and the same revolutionary spirit; if it
is not perverted into a narrow, secret sect, the two groups of
Communists will come together again and join forces, when the
need for the struggle against reaction has drawn nearer, and
the masses and comrades have come to understand the value
of unity after having compromised and destroyed it.
In fact, the difference which actually brought about the split
at Leghorn was based on a point of a purely secondary nature,
which was made decisive only through the intervention of the
representative of the Moscow International. He demanded the
a priori and immediate expulsion of the entire group of those
who had supported the Reggio Emilia resolution, basing this
demand on a conception which we hold to be deeply erroneous,
and which no one at the Congress dared to support and prove,
namely, that those comrades had betrayed the party and that
some of them would have had strong enough positions in our
organization to sabotage a possible victorious revolution.
We hold rather, that only after the acceptance of the twentyone points of Moscow is Italy entitled to expel those members
who oppose their adoption, and we ask equality of treatment
with all other nations, which is even more just in our case,
since the Right Wing in our partyas everyone admitsis
already much further to the Left than Communists in other
countries.
All this has been denied to us by the representative of the
Third International; but we cherish the hope that, when arti
ficially ambiguous terms and needless misunderstandings have
been cleared up, Moscow will quickly recognize the integrity of
our aims and the harm that would be done to the party and to
the Third International itself by the wholesale expulsion of a
group, and realize that it would produce the split even in the
syndical organizations and the cooperatives.
We trust that the Third International will not want to keep
outside of it the strongest and most ardent of the parties which
defended the Russian Revolution from the start, which, having
taken part in the formation of the Third International, adheres
to it spontaneously and enthusiastically.
Thus the split has come in our party while the "democratic"
Entente is spreading its insidious nets to strangle the Russian
Soviet Republic in the coming spring, and even greater outrages
against the revolution are being prepared by the capitalists of
England and the United States. .
We who have a clear conscience regarding the justice of our
actions to prevent the occurrence of this misfortune, feel justi
fied in extending to you, workers of Italy, this fraternal appeal:
"Stay with us; press ever closer around our red banner,
which we have always held up to anger the furious enemy, in
this party which has bravely fought and conquered a thousand
battles!" In its platform, under its discipline, there is room for
all who believe in the proletarian revolution, and have faith in
it. There is room for all those who, today more than ever,
feel the profound significance of the words of Karl Marx:
"Workers of the world, unite!"
Executive Committee of the Italian Socialist Party: Bacci,
Baratono, Clerici, Mortara, Parpagnoli, Mantica, Pilati,
bonfiglio, floritte, serrati, stolfa, passigli, montanari,
Zannerini.
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Two Sections
Vol. CXII
The Nation
FOUNDED 1866
Section II
No. 2907
American Commission on Conditions in
Ireland
Fifth Report : Hearings in Washington, D. C, December 15 and 21, 1920

Testimony of Laurence Ginnell, Mrs. Annot Erskine Robinson,
and Miss Ellen C. Wilkinson
Q. Chairman Howe. Mr. Ginnell, you are an Irishman?
A. Yes.
Q. Where is your home? A. County West Meath.
Q. You have been identified with Irish public life? A.
Always.
Q. How long have you been in this country? A. Since
last July.
Q. Prior to that, what was your previous occupation in Ire
land? A. A prisoner was my occupation for several years,
except for short intervals.
Q. You were in the British Parliament? A. Yes.
Q. When were you elected? A. I have been for eleven
years actually a member of the British Parliament; but for
twenty years before that living in Westminster.
Q. What is your business or profession? A. I am a bar
rister of the English bar and of the Irish bar. But I have been
too active in political life to practice.
Q. And you have been in this country now for
A. Four
and a half months.
Chairman Howe. Thank you very much, Mr. Ginnell. Now
proceed.
The Witness. I always regarded the attendance of Irish
representatives at Westminster as worse than futile in prac
tice, and only awaited a general policy of withdrawal to with
draw myself. One member withdrawing could produce no
effect, nor could two or three. Ten or twenty would. The
time had not come. I had constant and conclusive reasons for
distrusting all English parties in the House of Commons in
all matters relating to Ireland. To give only a few instances.
On one occasionI think it was in 1907a motion was under
discussion calling upon the Government to allocate an adequate
sum of money out of the excessive taxes drawn from Ireland for
arterial drainage.
Q. Commissioner Addams. For what? For drainage. A.
For arterial drainage. That is, the deepening of some of the
larger rivers, to give free escape to their waters which, dammed
up by obstacles, were thrown back and flooded large tracts of
otherwise fertile land, destroying crops before they could be
gathered in, and in some instances driving people and their
cattle from their homesteads, delaying cropping for the next
season, and making the land less productive. The drainage of
these submerged lands was an urgent work of a character
which would pay directly for itself by the increased fertility
of the soil. But it could not be done by local effort because
of the great cost and because of the length of the rivers,
passing through or by several counties and local districts,
which only a national authority could bring into concurrence.
This obvious duty the British Government never exercised be
cause it did not want the work done, and because it did not
want to spend Irish money on an Irish improvement. If I am
asked, can you give any proof that such was England's motive?
I answer, yes. On the occasion just mentioned in 1907 when,
on a motion to allocate an adequate sum of money for this
purpose, all the Irish members in the House of Commons ex
cept two salaried place-holders supported the motionOrange

and Green united supporting the motion; but it was ignominiously defeated by the Liberal government then in office with the
help of Tory and Liberal representatives, showing that all
British parties are allied in getting all they can and holding
all they get. The money went for imperial purposes in various
parts of the world, and the Irish people, Unionists as well as
Nationalists, in Ulster as well as in Munster, Connaught, and
Leinster, were left and are still left to the flooding of their
farms and homes. To this day the Presbyterian farmers
along the River Bann in Ulster as well as the Catholic farmers
along the Rivers Suck and Shannon are victims of England's
greed.
Q. Chairman Howe. How many Irish members were in
the British Parliament? A. One hundred one were supposed
to be there, but the average attendance was about ninety.
Q. Out of six hundred? A. Yes. All the Irish members on
that day walked into the same lobby to have Irish money allo
cated for this purpose, and they were all beaten; showing that
under the best conditions Ireland could have no hope from
Westminster.
Another instance. In the autumn of 1915, knowing that fuel
would be scarce and expensive as the war continued, I formed
a powerful committee consisting mostly of political opponents
in my own constituency of West Meath to start a fuel industry
on a large scale on the peat bogs there. The machinery for
this purpose being manufactured only in Sweden, we were re
fused a permit to import it, and the project was effectively
killed. Clearly the answer given by John Burns, a Cabinet
minister, to Colonel Warburton on the same subject was still in
force: "Ireland must be kept to agriculture." Coal was sold
in West Meath for 23 shillings a ton. It is now and has been
for several years sold in West Meath at 3 a ton; showing
what a large profit could be made out of this one industry on
bog land which was unfit for any industry except this one,
and this one would not be allowed because it would compete
with English coal in Ireland.
It was not unknown that members of the House were ac
tually canvassed by their respective party whips to hear speci
fied speakers, and canvassed again to leave their seats to pre
vent other speakers being heard. Members of Congress and
of the Senate will realize how unfair that was. On one occa
sion an English member, Mr. Joseph King, had the honesty to
call the Speaker's attention to the fact that he himself, in com
mon with other members, had been canvassed to hear a state
ment from ministers and other leaders of parties, and also
canvassed not to hear me speak on the same subject. The
Speaker professed an inability to act in such a situation when
members of parties, acting as if with an electric button, rose
and cleared out and left me addressing the chair alone; whereas
a speaker must have forty members or he cannot proceed. I
was standing there with papers in my hand and ready to speak,
while a sand-glass was being turned and running empty, meas
uring the time for which I was allowed to stand. I had to leave
450
The Nation
the House with my speech in my hand and the documents to

support it in my pockets. The members of the House had been
canvassed not to hear the Irish case presented.
Again, on the 3d of May, 1916, all parties sprang to their
feet and cheered the announcement of the Prime Minister that
the leaders of the Easter Week rebellion had been executed. My
cry of "Huns!" "Huns!" on this occasion referred not so much
to the execution as to the cheering on hearing of the execution.
Q. Chairman Howe. Tell us something more about that,
Mr. Ginnell. Did these men who were executed take part in
the Easter rebellion? A. These men had taken part in the
Easter Week rebellion. They were patriots, and they were my
best friends, the best men I ever knew.
Q. Did they surrender? A. Yes, they surrendered, laid
down their arms, and were prisoners in England's hands. And
the fact that more than 600 members in the House of Commons,
in a legislative assembly in a civilized country, sprang to their
feet, waving their handkerchiefs and their parliamentary papers
like that [indicating waving with extended arms] and cheering,
brought up to my mind Dante's description of hell, and I con
sidered that they were demons and that they were Huns. I
shouted, "Huns! Huns! Huns!" These men were the criminals
and not the men who were shot at that time.
Q. Those men were leaders in the insurrection? A. Yes,
they were leaders in the insurrection.
Q. Just enumerate some of them. A. The chief. Padraic.
Pearse, leader of the Irish volunteers. His brother, buried in
quicklime, because he was Padraic's brother. James Connolly
had this distinction: he was shot through the legs and through
the body, wholly unable to stand. When the time came for
his execution, the military doctors told the English authorities
that the man would be dead in three hours. They would not
wait for the man to die in three hours. They wanted to have
the satisfaction of shooting him. He was wheeled into the
prison yard in a barrow, utterly unable to stand. Twenty
bullets were put through him at close range, and he went into
the quicklime like the rest.
Q. How many were executed? A. Sixteen.
Q. Altogether? A. No, two or three at a time.
Q. On different days? A. Yes, on different days. When
Mr. Asquith announced that "Padraic Pearse, Thomas Clarke,
Thomas MacDonagh were shot this morning," it was then the
cheering occurred. And these men: Thomas MacDonagh, a
poet; Thomas Clarke, a man, I believe, about sixty, the oldest
man among them; John MacDermott, and Eamonn Kent.
Q. Was there a trial? A. There was a court martial trial.
Q. Was it public or private? A. Private, of course, private.
Q. Was there any statement made by the Prime Minister in
Parliament other than that they were executed? A. No. He
read from a telegram. That was all.
Q. Those men were actively interested in the insurrection?
A. Oh, yes. Most of them had signed the proclamation of Irish
independence, except young Willie Pearse, brother of Padraic
Pearse. He was shot because he was his brother. And Plunkett, the son of Count Plunkett. He was a poet. They were
all artists.
My own first imprisonment was on Christmas eve, 1907, for
advocating what is known as cattle-driving. If you care to
hear anything about cattle-driving later on, it will be more in
place than it would here. In 1916, while still a member of
the British House of Commons, I was imprisoned in England
for having succeeded by writing my name in Gaelic in gaining
admission to Knutsford jail to visit some of the 400 Irishmen
detained there without trial. An order had been sent to all the
prisons in which Irish prisoners were detained that I was not
to be allowed to visit them, presumably because I was calling
attention to their treatment in the House. And I was impris
oned because I was compelled by this order to sign my name
in Gaelic, which the prison guard could not read, in order to
gain admission to see these men.
In March, 1918, I was again arrested and sentenced to six
[Vol. 112, No. 2907
months for trying to have the English law for compulsory tillage
applied to all the large holdings as well as the small farms.
This Compulsory Tillage Act was put in force by Orders in
Council for the war. These Orders in Council when once put in
force assume all the strength of an Act. The Order in Council
issued in Ireland was in practice applied only to small farmers
who had always been accustomed to till an adequate proportion
of their lot. They were now compelled to till more, while largegrazing tracts of land owned by men who did not reside on them
at all, men who gave no employment, men who had only a herder
and his dog for a tract perhaps of a thousand acresthose tracts
were not touched by the order. I went over the country advo
cating in counties especially where such tracts existed that the
young men in the neighborhood who lived on poor soil, bogs, and
barren hills, should go to these owners and offer to take the lands
over at their full value as found by an English Government
land valuer, in accordance with the Land Purchase system then
in operation. There was no injustice in taking the land from a
man who does not reside on it and paying him the full value for
it, in accordance with government inspection. I advised these
young men to take this land, and the money would be provided
by the Government, as per the existing Land Purchase law. And
if the owners refused, or if anything arose to prevent those men
from getting the land on these equitable terms, to go in on the
land and plow it up and make it useless for pasture. That
advice was acted upon in several instances. The owners gave
way, came to terms, and were very glad to take the money. In
other instances the owner, not residing in Ireland at all but in
England, refused; and then there was trouble. But whether
trouble or not, for this offense I was sent to jail for six months.
Q. What were you charged with? A. I was charged with
unlawful assembly, a very common charge in my case. On
account of my age and my health, I was sent to the hospital
part of the prison. But otherwise I was to be treated as a con
vict. That is, to get no visits, no books, no newspapers, or any
thing else from the outer world. And this was in direct viola
tion of the agreement come to a few months before, after
Thomas Ashe's tragic death, an agreement between the Lord
Mayor of Dublin, Laurence O'Neill, the Bishop of Belfast, and
the English Chief Secretary for Ireland, Mr. Shortt. An agree
ment was come to by these three men that political prisoners
should be allowed visits and allowed letters. An attempt was
made to break that agreement in my case. I at once went on
hunger strike, absolutely refusing to take food and drink from
the prison authorities, in order to obtain the treatment that
had been promised under the agreement. I was only four days
on hunger strike when through the influence of the prison
doctors I was given political treatment Then I came off my
strike.
Having spent six months in Mountjoy prison on that occa
sion, my sentence expired at the end of August, 1918. The
prison gate was opened only wide enough to allow my body to
pass through. Immediately outside was the door end of a
prison van, into which I was forced to walk. I could just
see my wife and other friends, who had come to greet me, but
I was not allowed near them. I was forced into the van and
taken to Arbor Hill barracks till the evening, when I was
taken to Reading jail in England without any charge or any
reason being given my why I was being treated as a criminal.
This did not surprise me, because while I was undergoing my
imprisonment in Mountjoy, many Irishmen had been arrested
and deported; and some who like myself were serving sentences
of imprisonment, were taken off to England immediately upon
the conclusion of their sentences without any warrant or charge
proffered against them.
At that time the English authorities, Lord French and Ian
MacPherson, were determined to crush the Irish people like
"poisonous insects." In my opinion the real motive for these
imprisonments was to deprive the Irish people of any leadership
or advisers for the forthcoming parliamentary elections, which
were held in December, 1918, in order that they, like sheep with
March 23, 1921]
The Nation
out a shepherd, might abandon the Republican cause. The result

was different. Forty of those prisoners in England without trial
were put up in Ireland as parliamentary candidates and all forty
were returned with sweeping majorities. In a country of 101
parliamentary seats, we won seventy-three notwithstanding our
imprisonmenta greater majority than this or any other coun
try just emerging from bondage has ever had at the start.
During that winter we all suffered severely from cold and
bad food. Imprisonment in an English prison, or im
prisonment in any prison ruled by England, is no joke. It
is hard for people to realize it. In my first imprisonment ten
years earlier, which I have mentioned, although I was allowed
food and all of the comforts from outside, and was supplied
with them, all that did not prevent the depressing effect of the
prison on my whole system. The monotony of the place; noth
ing but white walls to look at; nobody to speak to; nobody
to visit you; always alone: all this thing has a terribly de
pressing effect. I should have mentioned that in that im
prisonment of 1907 I was held for six months without a trial
in the ordinary sense. It is the usual course, and that is why
I thought it scarcely worth mentioning. I advocated at that
time cattle-driving, which was mainly with reference to driving
cattle off large unoccupied tracts of land so that they might
be used. For the offense of cattle-driving there is a civil
remedy. The owner of the land or cattle may prosecute you
or sue for trespass or damages. No owner ever sued me for
such a cause, although I gave plenty of them occasion for do
ing so. One particular estate I had dealt with, without my
knowing it, was under the jurisdiction of the Court of Chan
cery. The judge of that court, Judge Ross, still on the bench,
did not summon me to a trial. I was never tried nor asked
to attend for trial. He treated the matter as contempt of
court, with which in Ireland a judge can deal at his discre
tion. His discretion was to sentence me to six months'
imprisonmentin my absence and untried. My health broke
down, and at the end of four months the prison doctors became
alarmed that I was going to die. I was then released, and it
took me six to eight months more to recover my normal health.
At the end of March, 1919, I and all the untried prisoners
in England were released. On my release I went to a meeting
of njy constituents in Athlone to thank them for reelecting me
in my absence in prison. Without notice or warning of any
kind, the hall in which the meeting was to be held was occu
pied by the military. Not being able to enter the hall, we
attempted to hold the meeting on the public square in the town.
The military promptly came along with rifles and bayonets and
scattered the meeting, running over poor old women and chil
dren, who were unable to get out of their way with sufficient
speed. For having attempted to address this meeting I was
arrested at a railroad station in Dublin at the end of May,
1919. In the heat of the sun I was brought handcuffed from
Dublin to Mullingar, fifty miles, in a military lorry, surrounded
by soldiers with rifles, and followed and preceded by similar
lorries similarly filled. My face and hands were covered with
dust, and I was exhausted with thirst. I was brought back to
my own county, to the people who had elected me, handcuffed
as a criminal, for attempting to thank them for having elected
me. I was sentenced by an English-paid magistrate to four
months for unlawful assembly.
My health began to give way completely, although in com
parison to what other political prisoners had suffered I had
nothing to complain of. The doctor had ordered me to have
daily baths, and when I went into the bathroom one morning
I found a low criminal who occupied the cell next to mine pour
ing the contents of his potthe worst smelling thing I ever
knew ofinto my bath. I complained to the governor of the
prison, but without any effect.
A week before my time was up my health broke down most
seriously, and I was released on that account. I went to the
Isles of Aran to recover my health, and took no part whatever
in politics, being wholly unable to do so. In March, 1920, I
451
returned to my house in Dublin, intending to stay there just

a few days. One day I went to the National Library to get
Zimmer's German book on "The Irish Element in European
Culture," a harmless book, as anyone could imagine. That
night at ten o'clock the house was surrounded by military,
and after a thorough search lasting two hours I was taken
away to prison. By this time the curfew law was put into
force, and night raids were of quite common occurrence. With
all civilians barred off the streets by the curfew, the military
and the police carried on their work of terrorizing the people.
When a house was raided, all the males in the house were swept
off to prison, whether they were connected with the Republican
movement or not; so that it was not safe for the sons of the
family to sleep at home nights, or even to sleep in the same
house two nights in succession. I was released, however, after
a few days on account of my health, without prejudice to future
committal, as the prison governor was instructed to inform me.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. Of what date are you speaking
now? A. This year.
The streets were filled with fully armed soldiers marching
about with fixed bayonets and bombs hanging at their belts.
Often tanks, even in the daytime, rolled along. Airplanes hov
ered over the city of Dublin incessantly. There were soldiers
at the railroad stations and at most of the bridges leading
into the city. The people live in a state of military siege. All
literary societies, Gaelic clubs, and Cumann na m'Ban meet
ings were suppressed, but were being held in spite of the
law, largely and mainly through the complete unanimity of
the people. That is the foundation of the Republic of Ireland
the absolute unanimity of the people. A reward of 10,000,
or about $40,000, was offered by the English Government in
every part of the city of Dublin, especially in the poor slums,
for certain information and for certain men, dead or alive; and
the reward was never claimed, such is the fidelity of the people,
although hundreds among them knew where the men named could
be found. The expression that a man was to be found "dead or
alive" meant that he might he shot at sight, and that the reward
would be given to the person who shot him and produced the
body. It was an incitement to murder. It was a license to kill.
As a result of the general parliamentary elections of Decem
ber, 1918, the members elected met in Dublin instead of going
to London, formed their own national assembly called Dail
Eireann, repudiated England and all foreign rule, established
themselves as the ruling power in Ireland, appointed ministers
to take charge of the various essential departments for the
reconstruction of our country, and duly elected their President,
Mr. De Valera, as duly elected a president of a republic as ever
sat in the White House at Washington. That is our position.
At the local government elections in May, 1920, last May,
the duties of the police were discharged by soldiers of the Irish
Republic. In many places public houses were closed by order
of these soldiers to avoid any danger of disturbances. In one
case to my own knowledge schools both Protestant and Catholic
were closed on the same day by order of these soldiers. The
orders of these soldiers were cheerfully and implicitly obeyed
by all classes in that local government election. At this elec
tion to local councils, town councils, and city corporations, we
improved our position by having not merely 73 per cent but
84 per cent of the citizens of Ireland vote for candidates pledged
to the support of the Republic. It may interest the Commission
to hear that we completely broke the alleged barrier between
the northeast corner of Ulster and the rest of Ireland at that
election. You are told in this country that the northeast corner
of Ireland is Ulster, and that Ulster is a solid block against
independence for Ireland. Against that let me give you the
case of a friend of mine, Louis Walsh of the Ballycastle dis
trict in County Antrim, an Orange county, where a Catholic
candidate would have had no chance at all of election if depen
dent on Catholic votes. His election was accomplished by the
votes of Orangemen. He started out by declaring himself an
Irish Republican without any qualifications. In all his speeches
452
The Nation
he so described himself. The election was held under a new

system which England thought would be disastrous to the
Republicans, the system of proportional representation. We
welcomed this because our desire always is and has been
to heed the voice of all sections of the people. My friend Walsh
of Ballycastle division of County Antrim became a candidate.
All the people voted for five members. Ten candidates started.
Walsh was one of them. He was the only Republican candi
date. He was elected at the head of the poll. He got more
votes than any other of the nine candidates in an Orange dis
trict. In his speech returning thanks to the electorate for
having elected him he returned especial thanks to the Orange
men. Without their votes he could not have been elected.
I give that as an instance of the artificial barrier attempted
to be put up by England between Ulster and the rest of Ireland.
It is purely artificial and purely malicious. We want the
Orangemen. We know that they will be one of the strongest
elements in our new constitution. We hope for great things
from that particular section of the country, on account of the
advantages they have had in industry when we in the south
have not been allowed to practice industry, as I have just in
formed the Commission. If English power were out of Ireland,
the south and the west and the midlands would harmonize with
the people of the north within twenty-four hours. There is
no division between us but a factitious, artificial division kept
up as a pretext for such riots as occur occasionally in Derry
City and in Belfast under English influence.
That was the general condition of Ireland when I was leav
ing it last July. I left Ireland on the ninth of July. I have
been told since I came to Washington that the Commission de
sired something of an historical background for the present
situation in Ireland. What has it sprung out of? What is
its source and origin? I recognize that that is a very impor
tant thing, although I had no knowledge of the desire for its
presentation until I arrived yesterday. I have since then armed
myself with what will give the Commission as much information
as they may desire on that particular point.
On account of the poor, hungry, and ignorant Irish peasants
who have for generations come to this country, and the effect
on the minds of Americans as to what sort of a race they must
belong to to be so backward, I claim the privilege of saying,
and supporting the statement as briefly as possible, that our
nation of Ireland is one with a grand historical past. I say
with knowledge that no nation in Europe excepting Greece alone
has done as much as our little country of Ireland has done for
European civilization, and consequently for the civilization of
this country. Augustine Thierry, a Frenchman, in his book
"The Norman Conquest," volume II, pages 121, 122, says: "No
country has furnished a greater number of missionaries for
Christianity, from no other motive than pure zeal and an ardent
desire of communicating to foreign nations the opinions and
faith of their country. The Irish were great travelers, and
always gained the hearts of those whom they visited by the
extreme ease with which they conformed to their customs and
way of life. This facility of manners was allied in them with
an extreme love of national independence."
I shall give no authorities except non-Irish authorities as far
as I know. Heinrich Zimmer, in his work, "The Irish Element
in Mediaeval Culture," says: "Dungal, Johannes Scotus,
Clemens, Sedulius, and Moengal are representatives of a higher
culture than was to be found on the Continent of their day.
To a purely Christian training and a severely simple habit of
mind they joined the highest theoretical attainments, based upon
a thorough knowledge of the best standards of classical an
tiquity. These Irishmen had a high mission intrusted to them,
and they faithfully accomplished their task."
All of this refers to Ireland's relations with the Continent of
Europe from the fifth to the tenth centuries. Then dark days
came. King Henry VIII of England was the first English sov
ereign to plan and put into feasible operation a conquest of the
whole of Ireland, and the substitution of English tenure for
[Vol. 112, No. 2907
Irish tenure of land, and the substitution of English planters

for the Irish people he had dispossessed and exterminated.
This appears in English State Papers, 2, Volume III, page 329
is that too far back?
Chairman Howe. I was thinking that you might cite the
places, and save your time. Or you could just leave the book
with us.
The Witness. The point was that Henry VIII was the first
English king who initiated the extirpation of the Irish race
from Ireland. The previous policy of military conquest had
failed, and from Henry VIII's time on the continuous and con
sistent policy of England in Ireland has been nothing less
than the gradual extirpation of the whole nation. It was sug
gested to Henry to take first from the people their corn, so that
they and their cattle and beasts would have nothing on which
to live, and then they could be easily done away with. As the
State Papers say, "Thus to enterprise the whole extirpation
and total destruction of all the Irishmen of the land, it would
be a marvelous sumptuous charge and great difficulty." Henry
himself wrote, "Now at the beginning politic practice may do
more good than exploit of war, till such time as the strength
of the Irish enemies shall be enfeebled and diminished."
At a later period, in Elizabeth's time, Sir Henry Sydney, her
deputy, made a tour of inspection of Ireland in 1567, and he
reported to Queen Elizabeth: "Such horrible and lamentable
spectacles are there to behold as the burning of villages, the
ruin of churches, the wasting of such as have been good towns
and castles; yea, the view of the bones and the skulls of dead
subjects who, partly by murder, partly by famine, have died
in the fields, as in troth hardly any Christian with dry eyes
could behold." The policy of extermination had been put in
force there by the burning of corn in the fields, the slaughter
or removal of the people's cattle, the destruction of their homes,
and the slaying of the people themselves. This is the report of
Sir Henry Sydney, deputy of Queen Elizabeth.
In 1574 the Earl of Essex wrote home thus: "In the end it
may be put to herthe Queen'schoice whether she will suffer
this people to inhabit here for their rent, or extirpate them
and plant other people in it. The force which shall bring about
the one shall do the other; and it may be done without an;
show that such a thing is meant." Hollinshed, an English his
torian, tells how this policy of extirpation was carried out:
"As they went, they drove the whole country before them into
the Ventrie, and by that means they preyed and took all the
cattle in the country, to the number of eight thousand kine,
besides horses, garrons, sheep, and goats; and all such people
as they met they did without mercy put to the sword; by these
means the whole country, having no cattle or kine left, they
were driven to such extremities that for want of victuals they
were either to die and perish for famine or die under the sword.
By means of the continual persecuting of the rebels, who could
have no breath nor rest to relieve themselves, but were always
by one garrison or other hurt and pursued; and by reason that
their cattle were taken from them in great numbers and their
harvest preyed upon, and the whole country spoiled and preyed,
the poor people, who lived only upon their labors, and fed by
their milch cows, were so distressed that they would follow
after the goods which were taken from them and offer them
selves, their wives and children rather to be slain by the army
than to suffer the famine wherewith they were now pinched."
I would ask the Commission to reflect whether that is not in
entire harmony with what a member of the Commission read
today that he had received from Ireland, showing that Eng
land's policy of the Black and Tans is a continuity.
I must ask leave to say this. We, a small nation, are in
death grips with the most powerful and most unscrupulous
empire in the world. That empire if allowed to be repre
sented here would make an atrociously false case. I have
evidence here to prove that England's policy in Ireland is the
same today as it was a hundred years agoa policy of extirpa
tion. And I can prove that by the words of English states
March 23, 1921]
The Nation
men and historians themselves. I would ask you, Mr. Presi

dent, to admit that that is a strong position.
I want it on the record that I made an attempt to prove the
correctness of the statement of the English Chief Secretary
for Ireland that England's policy there is a continuity. That
is what I am here for. It is no freak at the present time.
It is a continuitya deliberate policy of extirpation.
Commissioner Addams. That will go in the record, and in
support of it you can submit this book, so that it is all there.
The Witness. I accept it, madam. Evidence of the artificial
famine and all will go in. All famines in Ireland are artificial.
Q. Chairman Howe. You might just elaborate that a little.
You say that all famines in Ireland are artificial. What do you
mean? A. The Commission has before it evidence, on the one
hand, that Ireland is a poor country, and on the other that
Ireland is a rich country. Which is to be believed? I am here
with very considerable knowledge to say that Ireland is po
tentially a rich country, but under foreign rule can never be
rich. That is the whole answer. There is no puzzle at all in
it Ireland can never be rich under English rule.
Q. We would like to hear you at length about that, Mr.
Ginnell. Just explain what you mean by that. A. What I
mean by it is this. Naturally, in speaking of the resources
of Ireland, I speak of the land first. The land is fertile, won
derfully fertile for such a latitude. The people, as soon as
they become owners of their holdings, are wonderfully, untir
ingly industrious. Without a future, as they have been in the
pastwithout a future and outlet for their abilities, they become
idle and descend to vices. With a future they gain courage, and
they are apt for any form of industry that they are allowed to
practice. They are not allowed to practice any form of industry
under English rule.
Q. You mean to say that after the Irish begin to take ad
vantage of the opportunities that are given to them under the
Land Purchase Act or otherwise, the British Government makes
it impossible to use it? A. No, it does not apply to land. It
applies to industry. An Irish child may grow up and develop
a distinct taste for mechanics. When he grows up in Ireland,
he has no field for exercising his peculiar talent. He must go
away to England, Scotland, or America, where such work is
appreciated. He is a loss to his own country.
Q. Explain why it cannot be done in Ireland. A. Because
industries will not be allowed in Ireland.
Q. That is true today, as it was in earlier days? A. True
today, not so much of the laws of the present time, but as a
continuation of the devices of past laws and continued adminis
tration of those laws.
Q. Give us some examples of today. Is that true of the
fishing industry? A. Yes, it is true of all industries in Ire
land. As early as 1545, an act of 33 Henry VIII, ch. 16, pro
hibited the importation of Irish wool into England, but the
first deliberate blow at the Irish woolen industry and trade in
goods manufactured from wool was the English Act of 1660,
12 Charles II, ch. 4. This bill hit the English branch of the
Irish trade in manufactured wool, but it did not interfere with
the foreign trade. Another Act of the same year, 12 Charles II,
ch. 32, and an Act of 1662, 14 Charles II, ch. 18, made it a
felony, that was punishable by death, to export wool from Ire
land anywhere but to England, and confiscated the ship and
cargo and goods and chattels of the master if wool were brought
into England except in the raw state under a heavy duty. That
is England's conception of reciprocity.
Q. Commissioner Addams. That was in 1662. And we sup
pose that since you have been in Parliament, you can give us
recent examples out of your experiences. A. Oh, no, that Act
exists still in force. According to Leckyand surely you will
accept Lecky, an English historian who is in no wise partial to
Irelandwe are not yet clear of the damage done to Ireland
by the destruction of the woolen industry. I have been asked
to give an instance. In 1697 a violent agitation was fomented in
the woolen centers of England, alleging decay of trade owing to
453
the growth of the Irish woolen industry. As a result of this

a bill was drafted and sent, in January, 1698, to the colonial
parliament in Dublin for enactment. That body for once
hesitated to pass, at England's dictation, a bill conceived and
drafted for the express purpose of destroying Ireland's prom
ising woolen industry. It had the negative courage to do noth
ing. Bearing in mind the circumstances of the time, one can
estimate the vigor of the woolen industry of Ireland from the
statement of a contemporary writer that it was giving employ
ment to 12,000 Protestant families in Dublin and to 30,000
Protestant families in the rest of Ireland. From the political
point of view, they were the only families worth considering.
But a much larger number of Catholic families had taken up
the industry as far as allowed, since it was a domestic and
congenial industry. The colonial parliament at Dublin, domi
nated by England, was finally compelled to act, and passed
late in 1698, by a small majority, the Act, 10 William III, ch. 5,
Irish. It was a measure dictated by England in England's
interest for the destruction of Ireland's industry and trade.
It was followed the next year by an act of the English Parlia
ment, 10 & 11 William III, ch. 10, which prohibited perpetually
the exportation from Ireland of all goods made of or mixed
with wool, except with special license and then only to Eng
land; and the English prohibitory duties existing since 1660
were retained in full force. Thus every door was barred and
bolted, and the people of Ireland were for commercial purposes
marooned and imprisoned on their island as though they were
lepers.
Chairman Howe. I think we will accept all these historical
data as valid. I was thinking about something contemporary.
The Witness. The cotton and the glass industries have been
suppressed in the same way. Ireland has peculiar ingredients
for the manufacture of fine glass, and factories have been
established at Birr and other places, where for some time a
great variety of glass was produced. The products of those
factories was a very high-grade glass which was much in de
mand for exportation. As soon as the industry began to flourish,
the English Parliament prohibited Ireland from exporting glass
to any country whatever.
Q. Chairman Howe. You mean to say that if a person
started a glass factory or a cotton factory today in Ireland,
the British Parliament or the British Board of Trade would
prevent it? A. Yes, they would by sheer force overwhelm us.
They would stifle us out.
Q. You mean that Ireland should be able to protect herself
against such competition by necessary tariffs? A. Yes, cer
tainly.
Q. Commissioner Addams. Mr. Ginnell, how many members
who were elected to the British Parliament and instead became
members of the Irish Parliament are still freestill at large?
A. I do not know. People in Ireland do not know because
there are so many of them on the run. They cannot appear
in public. A rough estimate would bewell, 73 seats were
filled by Republicans. In four or five cases one man was elected
for two seats. In our circumstances we cannot adjust that.
So that we really had 68 men for 73 seats. Of those 68, Pearse
McCann, member from East Tipperary, as fine a young man
as I have ever seen, died in an English prison in March, 1919.
Terrence MacSwiney died after a seventy-four-day fast in an
English prison. There are two gone. Roughly, perhaps twenty
others are in prison, twenty are on the run from the police, and
the remainder are trying to mind their business as well as
they possibly can, either their own or their country's business.
Q. Chairman Howe. What kind of legislation did that
Parliament pass? A. It was constructive legislation. We
could not take up anything like a code of laws. The only thing
we could do was to adopt a code of justice as much in harmony
as possible with the old Gaelic system, the old Brehon laws,
which have prevailed in Ireland from before the dawn of his
tory. We intend our Republic to be a cooperative commonwealth
as much as possible. That will be in strict harmony with the
The Nation
454
[Vol. 112, No. 2907
old Brehon system as it is expounded in five large volumes.

Q. CHAIRMAN Howe. What do you mean by a cooperative
Ireland in recent times. Mr. President, may I submit extracts

from duly accredited authorities, commissioners appointed by
commonwealth? A. I mean that we look to a future Ireland

where most of the branches of business will be carried on by a
the British Government to examine the financial relations be
cooperative system. By that we hope to escape from the
diffi
of this report in 1896, what those relations were?
culties of countries in modern times with labor problems.
Q. That is along the line of industrial democracy? A. Along

the line of industrial democracy.
In connection with that, I
think I ought to mention to the Commission that I wrote a

book in 1894, published by Fisher Unwin, on the Brehon laws.
The Brehon laws began in pre-historic times. In old manu
scripts which we have in vellum they have come down to us.
They begin in language which few living men are able to trans
Q. COMMISSIONER HOWE. Is this historical, Mr. Ginnell. A.

It is the report of the Financial Relations Commission ap
pointed by Parliament in 1894.
COMMISSIONER Howe. That is a little far back.
We should
like to have you begin not longer ago than 1916.

THE WITNESS. This Commission is considering the present
conditions in Ireland.
The conditions that exist in Ireland now
are rooted in what has been happening over there for several
late.
Q. Who conceived the idea of a cooperative commonwealth?
centuries.
CHAIRMAN Howe. We know, Mr. Ginnell. But we are mainly
A. We did.
Q. The Irish Parliament was dedicated to that form of

government? A. Not expressly, but all understood that that
was what it would probably become.
Q. CoMMISSIONER ADDAMs.
tween Great Britain and Ireland, showing in modern times,

that is, since the Union, since the year 1800 down to the issuance
You consider that the future
state in Ireland will be along the lines of the present coopera

tive movement in Ireland? A. It will. You may be told by
someone after me that the cooperative movement itself will be a
solution for all difficulties. We are told that these cooperative
societies formed in Ireland would solve all of our problems. But
we knew better than that. We knew that to increase the
farmer's income from the soil while the landlord was over
him would only increase the wealth in the landlord's pockets.

The only thing to do was to clear out the landlord and brush
him away. And to increase the wealth of the people by the
cooperative movement while England is over us will only increase
the amount of money that will flow into England's treasury. It
will do us no good. That is my answer to cooperation alone. We
look for great things from it in a free Ireland, but nothing for
an Ireland ruled by strangers. Now, on a subject on which you
have questioned me, Burke says: Every nation has formed

for itself some favorite point, which for it becomes the criterion
of its happiness. So have we. We do not interfere with the
interested in what is taking place over there now.
To accu
mulate our record with historical matters is not nearly so

valuable to us as what is happening over there today.
THE WITNESS. Then your secretary must have been in error
when he conveyed that impression to me.
I have here the
material he asked for.
CHAIRMAN HOWE. The current statistics in the Statesman's

Year Book will give us what is wanted about
THE WITNESS. Oh no, no, no. The Statesman's Year Book
deals with other matters. You cannot get it there.

CHAIRMAN HOWE. But we do not want to go back to 1800 or
1850.
THE WITNESS.
But this is reported in 1896.
Some of the
men on the commission are alive still. Really, I must begin

to question with very serious doubt whether you want the whole
truth and nothing but the truth, or not.
CHAIRMAN Howe. You must know, Mr. Ginnell, we could

spend years in going over the whole Irish question and going
back to the beginning.
THE WITNESS. Oh no. You have the opportunity to hear evi
dence that you have not got from anybody else. That is a very
strong position.
You may have other witnesses here who will
English nation or any other nation forming any point it pleases

as the criterion of its happiness while we are allowed to form
the criterion of our own happiness.
Q. CoMMISSIONER ADDAMs. Was the Home Rule Bill dis
cussed during your membership in Parliament, Mr. Ginnell?
A. Yes, I was there during the whole of it, madam. I have
stated a good number of instances to you to prove that English
policy in Ireland is a continuity, that its purpose is to destroy
the Irish people. International law regards such abuse of
power as tyranny, and France, England, Russia, and America
have already in several cases, with universal approval, re
garded such tyranny as a forfeiture by the offending state of
any right to rule such subject nation, released the nation from
represent the absolute contrary of this on their own authority,

and it will go into the record. This is not ancient history. It
continues still. These fifteen gentlemen, four of them Irish, the
others Britons, found that since the Act of Union England had
on her own statistics overtaxed Ireland as compared to England
to the extent of over two and three-quarter million pounds a
year. In 1915 Lord MacDonald, who is no friend of the Republic,
published a calculation based on the report made by these com
missioners, that to that date England had overtaxed Ireland to
an amount of over 400 million pounds. That has never been
remedied. It is conclusive evidence of Ireland's financial ability
to run her own government.
CHAIRMAN Howe. Go ahead, Mr. Ginnell, just as you have
such subjection, and established and maintained its indepen

dence. This book says: In none of those instances, in no case
of which there is record, has abuse of power been so bad or so
done now.
long continued as in the treatment of Ireland by England, com

prising as it does: (1) The policy of defamation of Irish char
acter, still being pursued; (2) the policy of destruction of
civilization in Ireland, still being pursued; (3) the policy of
exterminating the Irish nation, still being pursued; (4) the
inquire into the financial conditions between Great Britain and
policy of destruction and prevention of Irish industries and
trade, still being pursued; (5) the policy of prevention of

legitimate intercourse with other nations, still being pursued;
(6) the policy of financial exhaustion of Ireland for England's
purposes, still being pursued; (7) the policy of infidelity to
public engagements with Ireland, still being pursued; (8) the
policy of general victimization of Ireland, still being pursued;
(9) the policy of infringing the international Convention of
The Hague of 1907, still being pursued; and (10) the policy
of dominating international commerce, still being pursued.
was asked yesterday by the secretary of this Commission

whether I could say anything on the financial exhaustion of
THE WITNESS.
The report of this Financial Commission
states: The Financial Relations Commission was appointed to

Ireland and their relative taxable capacities and to report.
The very terms of this commission are an acknowledgment
that Great Britain and Ireland are not one country but two
distinct countries, in spite of the Act of Union and the amalga
mation of their treasuries. The commission was appointed by
royal warrant dated 26th of May, 1894, with the following
commissioners: Right Honorable Hugh C. E. Childers, chair
man; Lord Farrer, Lord Welby, Right Honorable O'Connor
Don, an Irishman; Sir Robert G. C. Hamilton, representative of
the English Treasury; Sir David Barbour, Honorable Edward
Blake, a Canadian, but a member of Parliament from an Irish
constituency; Bertram W. Currie, W. A. Hunter, M. P.; C. E.

Martin, J. E. Redmond, M. P., an Irishman; and Thomas Sexton,
M. P., an Irishman. To take the place of two deceased com
missioners, there were appointed by further royal warrant
dated 22d of June, 1894, Henry F. Slattery, an Irishman, G. W.
March 23, 1921]
The Nation
Wolff, M. P. On the death of Mr. Childers, the Right Hon

orable O'Connor Don was appointed chairman. The final re
port, page 2, states: "In carrying out the inquiry, we have
ascertained that there are certain questions upon which we are
practically unanimous, and we think it expedient to set them
out in this joint Teport. Our conclusions on these questions
are as follows: (1) That Great Britain and Ireland must, for
the purpose of this inquiry, be considered as separate entities;
(2) that the Act of Union imposed upon Ireland a burden
which, as events showed, she was unable to bear; (3) that the
increase of taxation laid upon Ireland between 1853 and 1860
was not justified by the then existing circumstances; (4) that
identity of rates of taxation does not necessarily involve equality
of burden; (5) that while the actual tax revenue of Ireland
is about one-eleventh that of Great Britain, the relative tax
able capacity of Ireland is very much smaller, and is not esti
mated by any of us as exceeding one-twentieth." All of these
things continue to the present day. We did not get rid of
them by this inquiry. It is going on, and continuing to go on.
Following the united joint report, from which the foregoing
extract is made, there are five other reports signed by differ
ent commissioners, and a draft report written by Mr. Childers
before his death, in some respects the best report made. The
report signed by O'Connor Don, chairman, J. E. Redmond,
C. E. Martin, W. A. Hunter, and Gustav W. Wolff, says, on
page 3: "Previously to the Union, it was not obligatory upon
Ireland to contribute anything to objects beyond her own
shores."
Chairman Howe. I think, Mr. Ginnell, you thoroughly mis
understand the purpose of this Commission. We do not have
it in mind to make any suggestions regarding the government
of Ireland. What this Commission has been hearing witnesses
on is conditions in Ireland todaythe murders, the killings,
the destruction of towns, the destruction of creameries, the
continuation of civil war; and we really did not come together
for hearing a lot of data on finance.
The Witness. Then you will not admit it into the evidence?
Chairman Howe. That will be all regarded if you can dic
tate it to the stenographer, and we will consider it in making the
report.
The Witness. Mr. President, the question will arise, Are
we able to support an independent state? I want to prove it by
the fact that England has extracted from us and will extract
from us more than would support several of the states of
Europe. Is not that important?
Chairman Howe. Yes, it is important. But what we want
to know are the things you have lived through.
The Witness. I have not witnessed an attack, because it
did not occur while I was at large. I was not free to witness
it. And then when I was released, my health was shattered.
I am a man who has always led an active life, and but for
this unjust treatment I would be an active, energetic man today.
I want to do the most I can for my country, knowing the
powers and the resources that are against us. I am here for
the purpose of presenting the truth about Ireland.
I want to say that it will be observed from all this that the
Financial Relations Commission, in agreement with its name,
deals only with money, and not with all the money relations, as
it might have done, but exclusively with taxation. And in taxes
alone England has robbed Ireland of 400 million pounds in ex
cessive taxation from the Act of Union down to 1914.
There are various other ways in which Ireland suffers
atrociously: the loss of manhood driven to other lands; the
revenue from her land, which has been estimated by competent
authority at thirteen million pounds a year; and various other
losses of that kind. This is not an academic matter for me.
It is a matter of life and death for those who are dearer to me
than life itself.
We lose enormously by the loss of our trade. We have been
wiped off the seas by England. Ireland was once a rival of
England on the seas. She has not a ship now. Pass along the
455
Blacksod Bay, a bay sheltered by a huge island from the waves

of the Atlantic, so deep and so capacious that it is able to hold
the whole British navy on its bosom. There is not even a fishing
boat on it. Go down to Galway, which was a great trading
center with Spain and other countries, even in Queen Elizabeth's
time. There is not a boat on it. Even in that sheltered place
of Galway Bay, there is not a single sail to be seen except Eng
land's men of war. That is an enormous loss to us. We of the
Republican Government have made efforts to get boats to put
the fishermen at work. And we are thwarted, and our boats are
confiscated.
Q. Commissioner Maurer. Is it the idea of your co
operation to develop along similar lines by which you
developed the creameries? A. Our idea is rather to
bring as much land as possible under tillage by resi
dent owners. There are in many of the counties of Ireland
large tracts of land which are untenanted and unresidential
no owners reside there at all. One of our first works will be
to break up those tracts and distribute them among working
people. The Congested Districts Board was established by Act
of Parliament in 1897, for dealing with what was called the
congested districts. Its area of operation was limited at first
to the western part of the Province of Connaught. Subsequent
Acts increased the scope of the board, so that at present the con
gested areas comprise all of Connaught and western portions of
Munster and of Ulster, the whole western seaboard. This board
was created for a temporary purpose, which was assumed and
described to be completed within ten yearsto solve the land
question in the western counties where there was congestion
in some districts, while there was good land untenanted in
other districts. Its purpose was to slice up the land and put
people upon it. That board has been in existence, not for ten
years, but for twenty-three years, and in the very most congested
county where its services were the most necessary, it has failed
to act. If this will be relevant and agreeable to the Commission,
I will just explain this. The County Mayo was like a running
sore on the face of Ireland. All the people were crowded on
gravelly, hilly, and barren land, while large tracts of good land
were without a resident on them.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. Unfertile land? A. Unfertile
land. I went down there in the autumn of 1917. I was invited
down there because I have spent almost my whole life on the
question of the land. I stopped at Westport town and drove out
to a mountainous district to the southern part of County Mayo.
I drove through plenty of good land without inhabitants. I
got onto a bog road covered with heather, which not even cattle
will eatit is used for bedding only. I drove on for miles,
and came to the unfortunate village concerned. It was a vil
lage of fifty-two families up on a mountainside where nothing
grew but heather and rushes. The people came down to meet
me. The landlord also came down with thema quite unusual
thing, for he was a poor man, too. There was not a
thing growing that a beast could eat. There were a few
sheep, a few asses, and a few goats. What was up in
the cabins I do not know. The landlord, John O'Dowd,
came up to me and asked me if I was going to attack him.
I said no, I was not going to attack any man. I wanted only
justice. He said, "I am willing to sell. There (pointing to the
right) is a tract of good land purchased by the Congested
Districts Board fifteen years ago for distribution, but it is held
by the board and let out to grazers and to pasture instead of
being distributed." On the right was Lord Lucan's estate
and on the left was Lord Sligo's estate, bought up by this
board. The board bought up this good land and would not
distribute it. He did not know why. I found out afterwards
why it was not distributed. He said, "I want to sell my land
and get rid of it, for it is a terrible worry. Otherwise I must
turn the people out and burn their houses." "Very well," I
said, "we will see what the board will do." I dictated on
the mountainside to the shorthand writer, a memorial to the
district board, a very respectful memorial but very strong in
456
The Nation
the facts. The landlord was the first to sign that memorial.
It was signed by all the fifty-two tenants, one by one. Was not
that a strong memorial? It called on the board for distribution
of the land bought up and held by the board for fifteen years,
and still held by the board. I went back to Dublin the next day
and met two officials of the board. One was a towering bully
named Henry Doran. He took up the attitude of a bully, of
abuse and insult. He used the language of the old landlord
class of the worst type. The other member of the board was
Mr. Meeks, who stayed with mea very pleasant man to speak
with. But he said, "We cannot do what you want. The Gov
ernment will not allow us. It will not give us cash for the
purpose, although it is bound by Act of Parliament to do it."
So he politely told me that nothing would be done. Mr. Doran
today is Sir Henry Doran, and Mr. Meeks is still Mr. Meeks.
That is the way a kindly attitude toward the people is rewarded.
The population on the mountainside is still without land.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. What was the motive for non
action? A. Mr. Meeks told me the Government refused to
advance the necessary money.
Q. Commissioner Maurer. What were they using the land
for thengrazing purposes? A. Yes, for grazing purposes.
Q. Whose cattle? A. The owners of the cattle in all proba
bility did not live in the same county.
Q. Chairman Howe. The land board bought the land for
grazing purposes and turned it over to some friends of theirs
for grazing. Is this the explanation? A. That is the ex
planation to some extent.
Q. Commissioner Maurer. Then the land was lying idle? A.
Yes, so far as tillage was concerned. Instead of benefiting the
poor people in the congested districts, it was turned over to the
friends of the board for grazing purposes. The excuse was
that they could not slice the land up in small holdings because
they had no more money. I should have said that in my
memorial I offered on behalf of the poor tenants to take the
land at its full value and not require houses to be built upon it,
if that was the difficulty, and to work the land from their pres
ent cabins until they were able to make some money and build
houses for themselves. I made it wholly unnecessary for the
Government to advance money to build houses.
It is only just to these poor people to say that in all my
travels through Ireland I never met a more sweet-mannered peo
ple than those people on this mountainside. They were beautiful
in appearance and sweet and kind in manner, and they never
asked me to put a thing in that memorial but what was strictly
in accord with justice and equity. They, of course, have never
been able to make a living from their mountain holdings at all.
They have been migratory laborers to England and Scotland.
That position becomes more difficult as the relations between the
two countries become more strained. As migratory laborers they
receive the least possible consideration. They are housed in a
terrible wayin a way often exposed in Parliament as a viola
tion of all sanitary laws. But they bear their treatment and make
a little money and go back. What could they do but go out of
that country, where they were denied an existence before their
eyes, to another country where there was opportunity?
In that same visit to County Mayo I visited a district where
I found a farm comprising the very best land in that part of
the county, 5,000 acres, owned and grazed by one man named
Carson. Not a solitary day's work given on that land to any
body. Five thousand acres in the possession of one man, after
the Congested Districts Board has been more than twenty years
in existence for the special purpose of solving that problem.
Q. Chairman Howe. Are most of the owners of the large
estates Englishmen? A. Oh, no, not necessarily.
Q. They are Irishmen as well as Englishmen? A. Yes,
Irishmen as well as Englishmen. These ranches are usually
rented.
Q. Who is the ultimate owner? A. Some corporation.
Q. Is it a case of alien landlordism? A. Oh, no. Alien
landlordism is a thing of the past.
[Vol. 112, No. 2907
Q. How many acres are held in these big estates? Does it

run into the thousands of acres? Or does it reach the hundred
thousands? A. Oh, no, the island is not big enough for that.
I should inform the Commission that there was no vacant spot
in Ireland that was not occupied in days gone by. It was
occupied, and then cleared off by each succeeding famine.
Q. You have spoken about these large estates in County
Mayo. What per cent of the land is held in this district in
these large estates? A. I am afraid, sir, that you have missed
the point. The point was that the Congested Districts Board
has existed to relieve congestion, and it has not done it If
you want to ask about the parts of Ireland that need such
relief other than this particular district, I am equally ready
to answer. In Meath, in my own county of West Meath, and
in Kildarethere are three counties lying side by side: land
that within the memory of living men used to be great wheat
land is now lying absolutely untilled.
Q. Chairman Howe. Grazing land now? A. All grazing.
Q. A great part of the county is grazed? A. A great part
of the county is grazed, and always the best landland that
you could cut like cheese; land without a stone in itbeautiful
land.
Q. Is a third of the land of Ireland held out of cultivation
that way? A. It would be hard to say. I do not suppose that
much. But so much of it is the best land.
Q. Commissioner Walsh. I suppose you are offering this
evidence to show the misgovernment of Ireland, and that the
administration of this law has been in the hands of people
who have not administered it A. Yes, sir, indeed. Along the
line of misgovernment, your remark reminds me of a very
curious thing. We maintain that apart from money and apart
even from property the people are a country's greatest wealth.
Commissioner Walsh. They ought to be more the concern
of government than the property.
The Witness. Yes. It is a policy that has been pursued, and
therefore must be the doctrine held by English rulers of Ireland,
because over and over again the policy has been a continuity, to
destroy the Irish race. Lord French stated two years ago in
public that "What is amiss with Ireland today is that there are
200,000 young men too many in it." What would be thought in
a properly self-governed country of the head of the government
giving expression to such a sentiment? There are 200,000 young
men too many in Ireland! Whereas England in the year 1913
was taking out of Ireland eleven million pounds in annual taxa
tion, she is taking out of Ireland now forty-three million pounds.
Most of that money is spent for imperial purposes in different
parts of the world. It is not being spent for Ireland. And all
men, Catholics, Protestants, Unionists, Republicans, and what
ever they may be, know that they and their families and their
posterity will be better off when all that money is spent within
the shores of Ireland.
Q. Chairman Howe. Now, Mr. Ginnell, have you some
thing that you want to dictate to the stenographer? A. I am
very sorry that I have not been able to develop all phases of this
question. With regard to religious friction, I have been handed
today an extract from the New York World to the effect that
a Jew has been ill-treated in Dublin. Now, I want to emphati
cally deny, not with any special knowledge, but with a knowl
edge of what England is doing, that any Irishman has perse
cuted any person whatever on account of creed or race. To
this day, no one can point out to me any single instance where
anyone has been ill-treated in Ireland on account of religion or
race in Gaelic Ireland, in Catholic Ireland. There have been
things developed in Belfast which I do not want to touch upon,
but the aggression there is not on our side. In the time of
Queen Mary, she drove Protestants out of England when she
wanted to drive England over to Catholicism, and they came
over to Ireland for safe refuge. The Quakers were driven out
of England, and they came over to Ireland and established a
school at Ballitore in County Kildare which became famous for
having given a portion of his education to Edmund Burke.
March 23, 1921]
Testimony of Mrs.
The Nation
Annot Erskine
Robinson
Mrs. Robinson, a resident of Manchester, England, went to
Ireland last October as a member of a commission of ten organ
ized by the English Section of the Women's International
League. The object of this League is to establish the principle
of cooperation in international affairs and discovering other
ways for settling disputes besides war. The commission, apart
from studying the general conditions in Ireland, paid particular
attention to the sufferings of women and children. On its re
turn it made a report of its findings and organized a large
number of demonstrations in the principal English cities, with
the object of bringing to the attention of the English people
the state of affairs in Ireland. In the course of Mrs. Robinson's
testimony before the Commission in Washington the fact was
brought out that vexatious obstacles had been placed in the way
of her and Miss Wilkinson's coming to America, the American
Consul at Manchester refusing to visa the passports which had
been promptly issued by the English Foreign Office except on
their definite promise that they would not address meetings,
engage in any propaganda, or grant any interviews while in
America. Much of Mrs. Robinson's early testimony before the
Commission was occupied with defining the position of the Eng
lish press and of prominent English liberals on the Irish ques
tion. The latter all agree in demanding a reconsideration of
the Government's Irish policy and in favoring some settlement
on the basis of granting self-determination to the Irish people.
Tracing the development of public opinion in England at the
present time, the witness said:
In 1914, before the war, when the Home Rule Bill was placed
on the statute books, although it was never made operative at
that time, you had Sir Edward Carson and F. I. Smith, now our
Lord Chancellor, who were the recognized leaders of the Ulsterites, protesting in the name of the people in the six counties (it
was six at that time; now it is four), that they would
not accept separation from Great Britain. And you had
at that time the Ulster Volunteers very effectively armed and
drilled. You had up in northeast Ulster a very well drilled and
disciplined and armed body of troops. The arms, as you know,
were obtained partly from big firms in Britain and partly from
Germany when you had the gun-running at Lame; and at that
time the lawlessness in Ireland was all in the northeast of
Ulster. And lawlessness in Ulster at that time had the support
of a certain proportion of the aristocracy and the Conservative
Party, which represented the aristocracy in Great Britain.
When you talk of the northeast Ulster situation, you must
realize that a large section of Conservative and aristocratic opin
ion in England upheld them in their open rebellion against the
Home Rule Bill. They imported arms and got ready to fight
against its enforcement. And then came the war.
Redmond, in the name of Ireland, called upon Ireland in the
British Parliament to fight for the right of small democracies.
And then after that very little about Ireland appeared in our
newspapers. Naturally, the war occupied the attention of the
great mass of people in Great Britain, because, of course, the
war came into our work and family life, perhaps more than it
did in this country. And after that came the 1916 Rebellion.
Before the 1916 Rebellion the Sinn Fein movement was not a
movement whose existence was recognized by many people in
Great Britain. It was a literary movement, an educational
movement. It was not, to the knowledge of most people, a po
litical movement. And then after the Rebellion you had the
execution of the leaders, which was protracted over a good many
days.
Q. Commissioner Wood. It aroused a great deal of feeling
in Ireland, but not in England? A. It aroused a great feeling
in England, especially in Labor circles, and outside of Labor
circles, too.
457
Q. Senator Walsh. It almost immediately made Ireland

Sinn Fein? A. Yes, it gave support to the growth of the Sinn
Fein demand for absolute independence in Ireland. Before 1914
there was very little talk of absolute independence in Ireland.
After the 1916 Rebellion and the executions in Ireland, the de
mand for independence assumed very much greater importance,
and the Sinn Fein movement spread. Then in 1917 and 1918
there were many arrests of people suspected of disloyal opinion.
Q. Senator Walsh. How were these people treated? What
method of trial did they get? A. Well, that is answered by this
summary which I have prepared: In the year 1917 no police
man was killed, but the police and military raided private houses
and arrested 394 persons for political opinions, deported 24 per
sons without charge or trial, suppressed meetings and news
papers, and killed several civilians.
In the year 1918 no police were killed. One hundred and ten
political arrests took place. Seventy-seven were deported with
out trial. Fairs and markets were suppressed, and five civilians
were killed.
Q. Commissioner Wood. When you say five civilians were
killed do you mean that they were killed by the Government
forces? A. Yes, or by the police in skirmishes. In Ireland
the police go about heavily armed. They are always a halfmilitarized force.
Q. Commissioner Thomas. May I go back to the question
from which we started? About the development of British
opinion: what was happening in Great Britain? A. After the
armistice in 1918 we had a general election in December, 1918,
and the Commission ought to bear in mind that this election
resulted in the adoption of the Irish policy of Sir Edward Car
son, which since then has been very considerably modified. In
1919 you had very definitely the Irish Parliament elected and the
Irish members of Parliament refusing to come to the British
House of Commons, setting up an independent Parliament of its
own committed very definitely to Irish independence; while you
had the Coalition Government committed to Sir Edward Car
son's policy. And the suppressions went on in Ireland.
Q. Mr. Manly. Would it be accurate to say that the result
of that 1918 election was that the Ulster policy secured control
of the British Government and that the Sinn Fein policy secured
control of the situation in Ireland? A. Yes, the Sinn Fein
policy secured the support of 82 per cent of the electorate
of Ireland, further confirmed by the elections of January, 1920.
The shooting of police did not begin until January, 1919; and
the claim is made that the policemen attacked were policemen
who had been especially active in hunting down Sinn Feiners.
Q. Commissioner Thomas. Would it be true to say that war
psychology determined that election; that the cry was to make
Germany pay the cost of the war and hang the Kaiser, but the
result was reaction in England? A. Yes, that is what hap
pened. But for myself I should not put it so crudely. I don't
think that the average English elector in that election gave a
thought to Ireland. I don't think that one elector out of a hun
dred was concerned with Ireland at all. But the master
minds behind the election were. And that, therefore, when those
atrocities began in Ireland, the average Britisher had no clew
whatever as to why those atrocities should begin. And to the
average British mind there is a very great repugnance to secret
murderthat is, murder in lonely places. The average Britisher,
however brutal he might be, would not resort to secret murder.
And then when in 1919 those secret murders began, it created
a state of feeling against Ireland which still continues.
Our newspapers had been very reticent about what was hap
pening in Ireland. We did not see why the situation in Ireland
should be so desperate, why policemen were being shot, why these
outrages occurred. Of course, the ordinary people thought we
were treating Ireland quite well, and could not understand.
Beginning with January, 1919, you had a number of great
movements of troops over to Ireland heavily armed. Those
troops began the raids and the hunting up of Sinn Feiners.
Then you had the complete breakdown of the British Govern
The Nation
458
ment over the greater part of Ireland, and the growth of the
Sinn Fein Government, until you really have today two govern
ments in Ireland, the Sinn Fein Government and the British

Government. And you have this policy of atrocities and re
prisals. That is the situation now.
Q. CoMMIssionER ADDAMs. Will you just give your own ex

periences in Ireland now? A. Yes, I think that will be best.
While our commission was there we interviewed a good many
people, a considerable number of Belfast city councilors, leaders

of the Unionist Party.
The cooperative movement being very
[Vol. 112, No. 2907
that when that Ulster Parliament is set up, you will have a
majority of the Labor Party in the Ulster Parliament. Fer
managh and Tyrone have been included to be sure you will have
an Ulster Parliament which labor cannot control.
Q. CoMMISSIONER ADDAMS. Those two counties are not Union

ist? A. No. Politically they are Nationalist, but economically
they are capitalist and not labor, because of their agricultural
holdings. And when the division comes between capital and
labor, Tyrone and Fermanagh can be depended upon for some
time to support the capital side rather than the labor side. When
strong in that part of Ireland, we devoted a fair amount of time
this Home Rule Bill was being discussed in the House of Com
and attention to its leaders. Then we interviewed a considerable
mons Sir Edward Carson insisted that this Parliament should
number of the Expelled Workers' Committee, and also a number

of representative citizens, so as to get an all-around view of the
situation. In Belfast we saw a great number of soldiers, heav
ily armed, and many heavily armed constables. Every town you
come to is an exhibition of military force. From all of those
sources we got a pretty consecutive narrative as to what had
been happening recently in Belfast. There was agreement as to
facts, but there was not agreement as to the deductions from the
facts. In the local elections last spring in Belfast, which were
held under the proportional representation act, for the first time
a breach was made in the domination of the Unionist Party in
the city council. Out of sixty councilors elected, twenty-five

represented Nationalists and Labor and Sinn Fein and Socialist
opiniontwenty-five out of sixty.
Up to this time there had been an unquestioned domination
of the Unionists.
This was a great section of different opinion
which appeared to act more or less together as a group.
The
reasons which were given for this very extraordinary change in

public opinion in Belfast were rather conflicting.
During the war there was a period of very great industrial
activity in Belfast. You had then linen mills and shipyards

working as hard as they could work. You had many new peo
ple coming into Belfast during the war period. You had an
infiltration of people with new ideas.
And I think this infiltra
tion of people with new ideas had very much to do with the
change in the Belfast situation at the last election of the city
council. Aside from that has been the great activity among
labor unions in Belfast. In Belfast the workers are well organ
izedunions like the engineers, or the carpenters and joiners, or
the big unskilled workers' union, or the electrical workers
have no power to make a levy on capital. The point I wish to

make is that Carsonism and Unionism are becoming the strong
hold of capitalism and aristocratic feeling; but their hold is

being threatened by the growth of trade unionism.
As a result of these twenty-five people being returned

to the Belfast city council who were not Orangemen open
threats of retaliation were made by the Orange leaders.

That was in June. And then July 12 came, which is the anni
versary of William III's crossing of the Boyne, and very often
you have riots at that time. Citizens of Belfast told me that
they looked forward with sickening apprehension of what might

happen at that time, because of the great tension of this local
election. But when July 12 came there was no trouble, no riots
at all. But on July 21st riots occurred in the great shipyards
of Belfast. The shipyards stand on an island and are separated
from the mainland by a channel 200 feet wide. On July 21
inflammatory speeches were made by speakers at the gates of

the shipyards, and immediately after that the Orange workers
turned upon their Nationalist fellow-workers and expelled some
thing like 4,000 of them from the yards. Some of the men tried
to swim the channel, but were met by stones on the other side
so that they could not land and had to come back. Some of them
spent hours in the water. Some of them, of course, were killed.
This strike spread to the linen mills, where the Orange workers
also expelled their Nationalist fellow-workers. This went on
until, when I was in Belfast in October, more than 20,000 ex
pelled workers and their families were living on relief. That is,
for more than four months they had been refused the elemental
right to earn a living because of their political views.
unionbodies having their headquarters in England. And in

the spring of 1919 there was a strike carried through in Bel
fast for a forty-four hour week; and in that strike the Roman
We have been asked in Great Britain to regard those riots in

Belfast as an expression of religious and sectarian bitterness.
Our people have read reports in their newspapers that the
Protestants have expelled the Roman Catholics. The point I
Catholic and the Protestant Unionists and the Nationalists stood
wish to make is that, although those riots are no new thing in
side by side. The unions for the first time were able to get
united action between the workers of Belfast. That in my mind
is an important factorthe very great growth of trade unions
and labor feeling, as evidenced in the elections.
And then, as well as that, there was a great growth of national
feeling. The Unionist began to feel himself an Irishman before
he was a Unionist; and he was very nearly as critical of the
English Government as the Nationalistsfor different reasons
he was extremely critical of the English Government. I mean
Unionists in politics. Perhaps Orangemen would be better. The
Orangeman was as critical of the English Government as was
Belfast, they were this time much more political than ever be
fore. People were not expelled because they were Roman Cath
olics. They were expelled because they were Nationalists or
Labor or Socialists in their point of view. The point should not
be overlooked that more and more the Orange employee is be
the Nationalist; and the Orangeman was beginning to realize

that he was an Irishman as well as the Nationalist. The growth
of a feeling of nationalism in Ireland is perhaps best indicated
by the local elections of 1920, which left only four counties in
northeast Ulster with a Unionist majority.
Q. SENATOR WALSH. Out of how many? A. Nine. And you

know that in the Home Rule Bill before Parliament at the pres
ent time a separate parliament is to function for four counties
of Ulster instead of six counties comprising the Unionist strong

hold. To these Unionist counties Fermanagh and Tyrone have
been added by the bargaining of Sir Edward Carson, although
they are not Unionist counties.
They are Nationalist counties
with farmer constituencies. These six counties are coming un

der the Ulster Parliament because there is a very real danger
coming a supporter of capitalism as against the classes of labor.

And then that night, on July 21, there were more riots. In
Belfast you have had the custom of Protestants living in cer
tain parts of the town and Catholics living in other parts.
During the six years of the war that custom had been broken
down, because of the incoming of so many new workers, and the
people were much more mixed up. That night the women in one
of these quarters heard about the riots that had occurred in the
shipyards, and the rumor reached them that 200 men had been
drowned in the channel.
The women armed themselves with
stones and waited for the men coming back from work. They
stoned the tram cars continuously, and many of the men were
injured. And riots of this kind between Orangemen and Na

tionalists, between Catholics and Protestants, have sporadically
occurred ever since July 21 in Belfast.
Q. COMMISSIONER MAURER. You

labor was well organized in Belfast?
Q. Are they still well organized?
the most extraordinary condition you
extraordinary situation I know of.
said that during the war

A. Yes.
A. Well, you see, this is
have in Belfastthe most
You had carpenters and
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March 23, 1921]
joiners working side by side, some Nationalist and some Union

ist, who were members of the same labor union. And then you
had members of the same union expelling other fellow-workmen
and denying them the right of earning a livelihood, which of
course is an elemental right.
Q. CoMMISSIONER THOMAS. Was not the feeling that some

of them were going to lose their jobs at the back of it? A.
Probably, but it was not a dominant factor.
Q. If employment had continued as it was during the war,
would there have been any riots? A. I asked that, and I was
assured that the shipyards were still very busy making up for
the ravages of the submarines. I asked that, and I was told that
there was no great unemployment in Belfast.
Q.
But you would think that the employers would not want
such a situation.
A.
Yes, but the excess profits tax entered in.
Their profits were being taken from them.

Q. COMMISSIONER WOOD. Did you get any information from
employers that there is a danger that they were raising some
thing they would not be able to handle later on? A. No. But
there is this: that in some of the shipyards there have been es
tablished by the Orange workers what are known as Vigilance
Committees. Those Vigilance Committees meet on the firms
time. They meet in rooms provided by the firm. And they dis
cuss on what grounds a workman may be allowed to earn a liv
ing.
They ask a workman to produce his baptismal certificate,
or the baptismal certificate of his children or wife, for that mat

ter, so that he must be beyond suspicion. If the employers are
willing to provide the time and accommodations for these work

men to make these investigations, it shows a great deal of sym
pathy behind them from the employers.
Q. Do you know whether the labor unions still exist in these
places? A. The labor unions are in a very, very difficult posi
tion. They still exist, and the national headquarters are very
much concerned with the situation. The Carpenters and Join
ers Union, which is one of our very old and very well organized
trade unions, has been particularly active in this matter. When
the expulsions took place, the national executive came over and
had a sitting in Belfast. They called a meeting of the whole
trade in Belfast.
The carpenters and joiners, of course, are a
very important part of shipbuilding, and have a large number of

well-paid workers. They called a meeting and engaged a hall
to consider the situation. And the meeting was prohibited by
the competent military authorities. The meeting was prohibited
and could not be held. They again tried to hold a meeting and
failed. And now they have taken a ballot. They said that if
some of the members were to be called out, all must be expelled.
Those who remained at work are now regarded as scabs and
blacklegs, and are not entitled to further union work. That is
how they have dealt with the situation. I dont think there is
anyone more unhappy in Belfast than the average trade union
official. He is in a very difficult situation.
I think I ought to say that also in Belfast we interviewed
several Orange leaders and tried to ascertain their point of

view, why this sectarian bitterness had been continued so long,
and why we could not achieve peace between the different sec
tions, and we were told that Belfast was the largest city in Ire
land; that it had the largest shipyards, the largest distilleries
and factories, and various things of that kind. And the next
thing they always said was that it had the lowest rates, ten
shillings to the pound, compared with sixteen shillings in Dub
lin, and that that, of course, was because Belfast was a city of
successful business men. They felt that the people of Dublin had
no business capacity; and if the country was to be governed
from Dublin, the country would be ruined within five years. I
tried to point out that I have been very much interested in the
tuberculosis problem; I was interested in education and in the
wages of women, and so forth; and that I have always heard
that you have a very high rate of death from tuberculosis in
BelfastI think it is the highest in the British Isles; and a very

high rate of infant mortality, and very low wages to women.
And that I thought it would be better to raise the rates and get
459
rid of these things. Yet the fact remains that the average
Orangeman thinks that Belfast is a very prosperous city, and
that its rates are low, and for this reason they will not be joined
with the rest of Ireland. And then one later proceeded to say
that they would wade knee-deep in blood before they would be
associated with the rest of Ireland. Orangeism in Belfast is
becoming more and more associated with capitalism, with the
money interests, with the big employing class.
Q. CoMMISSIONER NEWMAN. Did these Orange leaders also
bring out that they were afraid of religious domination by the

rest of Ireland? A. Yes, of course. But I was surprised to
find that it was much more an economic question than the ques
tion of religious domination when you talked to them in private.
In Belfast, again, there has been a very great deal of destruc
tion of homes in raids. A very great part of the city has been
destroyed, or else burned out.
You have public houses looted
and burned, and shops looted and burned. You have had a very
great deal more destruction of property in Belfastmostly these
workingmen's homesthan I had thought of. The result was
that you had two or three families crowd into one house. Hous
ing conditions were very bad in Belfast before. The overcrowd

ing that has been caused by this destruction of property has
caused a very serious situation indeed.
And then into Belfast
have gone the refugees from Lisburn.

Q. CoMMISSIONER WooD. Would this overcrowding in Bel
fast be confined to one quarter, or would it be general? A. No,
to a great extent it would be in the Nationalist quarters, since
the houses were destroyed there.
Q. COMMISSIONER WALSH. Are you convinced that soldiers
and police armed by the authority of the Government have com
mitted brutalities against innocent women and children?
A. Oh
yes, quite. These houses were burned and women very sick and
very ill and children were turned out on a moment's notice;
women in bed connected with childbirth, and things of that kind.
Some horrible things have occurredperfectly dreadful.
Q.
CHAIRMAN Howe.
Who administers the relief in Belfast?
A. The relief is administered by what is called the Expelled

Workers Committee. They have collected money all over
Britain. An enormous amount of money has been contributed
all over Britain. The representatives of those committees have
visited a good many of our trades councils in Britain and laid
the position of these workmen who are not allowed to work be
fore their fellow trades unionists. And very large contribu

tions have come in this way.
Q. CoMMISSIONER WALSH. Has not this situation that you
have described in Belfast had a tendency to extend the Sinn
Fein influence even further than it was? A. Undoubtedly, but

public opinion in England is only beginning to wake up.
In addition to Belfast I also visited Lisburn, a very prosper
ous linen town just outside of Belfast. In September of this
year District Inspector Swanzy was in Lisburn. When Mayor
MacCurtain was murdered in Cork, the Sinn Fein organization
and the local authorities, I believe, through such evidence as
they could get of the murder and the attempt on Professor

Stockley, found out who some of the parties responsible were.
The police who took part in the murder of the Lord Mayor have
been tracked down by Sinn Fein. I was told that District In
spector Swanzy was one of these persons.
After Mayor Mac
Curtain's death Swanzy was removed from Cork and sent to

Lisburn. He was coming out of one of the chief Protestant
churches in Lisburn one Sunday when three motor cars came
up filled by men who were veiled, by men who were strangers to

the district. They held up the congregation and District In
spector Swanzy was shot dead as he was coming out of church.
In that district you had a mixed population, an Orange popula
tion and a Catholic population. The Orange population rose
against the Catholic inhabitants of the town and the Sinn Fein
and Nationalist leaders and burned their houses, although the
murder was admittedly committed by men who were strangers
in the town. The town burned Sunday night and a large part
of Monday, and no attempt was made to extinguish the flames,
The Nation
460
although Lisburn is quite near Belfast, and the skies were lit up
for miles around. As we walked into the town our attention was
directed to a poster on which the ink was absolutely fresh
and
new. It was on the morning of October 13. That notice said:

The Scriptures said, An eye for an eye. But we say, three
lives for every life of a member of the forces of the Crown who
may be killed or injured on the streets of Lisburn.
As we walked through Lisburn we saw remnants of the same
notice. It had been posted that morning, and had been pulled
down by the police. Standing at the top of its main street, We
[Vol. 112, No. 2907
war Ireland has of course not been very important in that

respect.
First of all regarding agriculture. When I was in West Clare

and Limerick there was a wholesale burning of hay ricks.
That
looked around and down on the town. And I should say that
one house out of three had been destroyed. Some of them were
was extremely important, because on the hay ricks depended the

cattle, and hence the creameries. In burning the hay ricks, you
destroyed the very foundations of Irish agricultural prosperity.
It was said by the British military authorities that these were
reprisals against Sinn Feiners; but that was not so. There was
a great deal of difficulty, too, in importing cattle fodder. I
have with me a clipping from the Irish Independent of October
8, 1920, in which it is stated from a Belgian paper that the Brit
simply heaps of stone, and from other homes the walls and win
ish Controller General had issued a proclamation against the
dows were gone. The picture was one of absolute devastation.
importation of cattle fodder into the United Kingdom, and that

that prohibition of importation was absolute against Ireland.
I wanted to find out what had happened to all the women and
children expelled from this town. I went back to the Expelled
The Irish farmers, after their own hay had been burned, had
Workers Relief Committee in Belfast and asked to see them. I
been importing cattle fodder from England. That meant that
was taken to a long hall in Falls Road operated by Catholic sis

ters. There were three long rows of beds, and sitting on the
edges of them were some of the women who had been driven
they could not get feed for their cattle at any price. Another
very serious blow to the agricultural prosperity of Ireland was
the prohibition of fairs and markets which were felt by the
British Government to be breeding-grounds for sedition. How
ever that might be, they were also the ordinary mediums of ex
change, where the British buyers got into touch with the sellers
of Irish cattle. And that, of course, made the situation of the
out of those houses in Lisburn.
I spoke to one old woman of
seventy, very infirm, who never had any bad words with her
neighbors, and who was driven out of her house and could not
get permission to take a thing with her. All her possessions,
the accumulations of a lifetime, were lost in her house. I spoke
to another woman, a widow with four children; and to another
one who had lost all. Those people were absolutely the most
hopeless looking lot of people I have ever seen. I wish I could
convey to this Commission the saddening depression that the
sight of those women gave to me. And then the children.
Testimony of Miss Ellen C. Wilkinson

Miss Wilkinson, a resident of Manchester, England, is national
organizer for the Amalgamated Union of Cooperative Employees,
but before the American Commission she represented only the
Women's International League. Like Mrs. Robinson, she was a
member of the commission which the English Section of the
League had sent to Ireland in October of last year.
Q. COMMISSIONER ADDAMS. Miss Wilkinson, will you begin
and make the statement that you had outlined of your experi
ences in Ireland? A. Well, I thought it might be better if I
divided my evidence into sections, one section on the economic
blockade of Ireland, one on the raids, lootings, and sackings,

and one on the southern Unionists, with whom I took a great
deal of care to get in touch. I might say that with two members
of the Society of Friends, I covered Dublin, Limerick, Galway,
and Tuam; and then on up the west coast of County Clare to
Ennistymon, and to Cork and Mallow. When we went to Lime
rick we found that the proposition of traveling on the Irish rail
ways was very difficult indeed, and we motored over a good deal
of western Ireland.
Q. What date was that? A. The first two weeks of October,

1920. We returned October 17. First of all, as to the policy of
the British Government in Ireland. It seemed to us that there
was a policy behind the Government's economic blockade of Ire
land. Lord French, the Viceroy of Ireland, made a speech in

which he said that the trouble was that there were 200,000 too
many young men in Ireland. He assumed that these young men
and women, many of whom had gone to fight in the war, with
which they were not very sympathetic, were the cause of all the
trouble. And I learned that it was the policy of the British Gov
ernment to get the young men out of the way.
farmer a great deal more difficult. The next thing was the im
portation of cattle. I interviewed a number of the most promi
nent employers of Limerick in this industry. One was Mr.
OMara, a prominent member of the Irish Party in the British
Parliament. He has one of the largest bacon-curing factories
in Limerick, and he told me that the average killing of pigs

there had been two thousand a week, and that since the blockade
they were able to get only six hundred. And he said that the
reason for that was that when his buyers went around the
country they could not go to the markets because these had been
suppressed, and they had to go to the individual farmers. They
had been shown telegrams by the Irish station masters on the

Irish railways that no cattle or pigs could be received. This
resulted in much unemployment.
Then Limerick was a large milling center.
The ships which
were bringing flour to Limerick were diverted north. Mr. OMara
said that he was under the impression that the big business in
terests in Belfast had a big trade hold on the Dublin Govern
ment, and that they were able to cut off supplies from southern
firms. He knew that the pigs he wanted to buy were being
diverted north, and that the flour his mills needed was being
diverted north. And he felt that the big business interests of
the north had the aid of the Government in diverting the flour
and the bacon they needed in Limerick. That, of course, again
caused unemploymentthe flour being diverted north.
Then comes the railway situation, which is one of the most
serious unemployment situations Ireland has to face. As you
know, the British Council of Action, as the result of the British
railwaymen's action, has decided that it would not ship muni
tions of war to Poland to aid in the war against Russia. The
Irishmen applied that to their own country, and said they would
not engage in the shipment of arms or armed troops in order
that the Irish war could go on. That for a time was effective.
But a sort of modus vivendi was arrived at, and the policy of the
Government was changed. The munitions were sent by road.
The Ministry of Transportation, under Sir Eric Geddes, carried
this policy through, and determined that this could not go on,
There is another thing. At the beginning of the war agricul
and that the Irish railwaymen must carry whatever they were
given to carry. And therefore an arrangement was made be
tween the British Ministry of Transportation and the Irish
railway companies, which of course are dependent on Govern
ture in Ireland was more prosperous than it ever was before.
ment subsidies, because the Government took over all the rail
They had developed dairy farming and cattle-raising for the
roads during the war and gave them a subsidy to make up their
profits from. This arrangement was that any railwayman or
English market.
And of course, during the war we were
rather more polite to Ireland than we have been since; for Ire
land could have blockaded us and could have made a very serious
difference to our food supply if she had wanted to.
Since the
guard who refused to carry munitions on an Irish train should
be dismissed when he reached the end of his journey.
It has
been only a question of time as to how soon the railways in
The Nation
March 23, 1921]
Ireland should be completely stopped. I know once or twice

when we were traveling on the main line from Dublin to Gal
way, soldiers got on the train; and if they got on bearing arms,
the Irish railwaymen would not carry them. But if they had
no arms, the railwaymen would carry them. For instance, Lim
erick, which is the most important commercial center on the
west of Ireland, had only one train a day into and one train a
day out of it, and you could not tell when that would run. And
sometimes it wouldnt run at all. The only train you could de
pend on was the one o'clock train on Sunday, on which soldiers
did not ride.
And of course business men know what such a
461
There were a few capitalist ones, but most of them were built
by the farmers themselves. They would raise money on their

land and put it together and buy the machinery. And these
creameries gave a great deal of employment, especially to the
women in the countryside. Also there were such mills as the
hosiery mills at Balbriggan and various other mills. Then just

at the beginning of the war there was a very important com
mission known as the Industrial Development Commission
started, which was later made an official commission by Dail

Eireann. And their idea was to map out Ireland and consider
situation means to trade.
just where they could start industries. Darrel Figgis was head
of this commission; and he was arrested, of course, and the
The stopping of the trains meant a serious lack of food sup

ply for the larger towns. The Irish, of course, tried to meet
this by organizing a motor transport, as the English Govern
crushed.
ment had done at the time of the railway strike.
And this was
feel that this crushing of the new industrial movement and the
immediately replied to by a government order refusing to allow

the free use of motor transport. No person was allowed to
burning of creameries and factories is part of England's policy
drive or have a motor without a motor license.
And it is im
their view. Edward Lysgant started a cooperative industry near
possiblenot theoretically but practically it is impossiblefor

a Sinn Feiner to get a license. And the OMara people again,
who are wealthy people in Dublin, got a new car; and as soon
as they had it delivered, a British officer appeared and took away
the important parts of it. He apologized, but said he had to
demobilize the car. It was only with the greatest difficulty that
we could get a motor to do our work. That means that the rail
way transport is shut down and the motor transport is shut
down. And that means an economic blight upon the country. Is
Limericka very interesting man who was on the run and man
aged all this business during the day. He was trying to raise
up a feeling for peasant crafts, and to get a market for them.
And all his works were burned down. That was pretty rotten.
Q. CoMMISSIONER THOMAs. Is there any chance of getting
compensation for the loss of these creameries? A. Yes, that
comes under the Malicious Injuries Act, and according to that
the people who suffer the loss appeal to the courts, and the
that clear?
in Limerick, with 44,000 people, over 50,000 of damage has

been done. And it meant that any person who appealed to the
courts would get his damages very liberally assessed, but they
had to be paid by the people.
Q. COMMISSIONER THOMAS. What explanation did Sir Hamar
Q. CoMMISSIONER NEWMAN. You spoke about the burning

of hay ricks. Have you any idea of how extensive that is? A.
While we were there, all the hay ricks from Limerick up the
coast to Ennistymon were burned. And since we got back, in
Galway and Tipperary, too. It is not true that all the hay ricks
in Ireland have been burned, as some have said.
mous quantity has been lost.
But an enor
Q. SENATOR NORRIS. What organization did the burning? A.

The Black and Tans.
Q. CoMMISSIONER WooD. How much of this did you see your

self?
A.
Well, of course I saw a fair amount of hay burning.
Q. Actually burning? A. Yes, actually burning. When we

went to Limerick, for instance, we were taken to Brennan's
farm, five miles out of Limerick. It was owned by a widow.
Her two sons were heroes in the countryside.
One of them,
Michael Brennan, is chairman of the Clare county council.

course they are both on the run.
Of
And the English officers,
rightly or wrongly, put down many of the occurrences in this

community to them. So the English officers went to the house,
told Mrs. Brennan to get out immediately, and burned the house
and the hay.
Q. COMMISSIONER WOOD. Was it only a rumor that the Black

and Tans did that, or did you actually see them? A. No, of
documents of the commission confiscated, and the movement
The terrible thing is that a great many of the Irish people
toward Ireland.
And the Irish people have much to support
damages are assessed upon the inhabitants.
The result is that
Greenwood give of these burnings of creameries in the House

of Commons? A. First of all, he said it did not occur. And
when we showed him pictures, he said it was done by the Irish

men. And when we produced evidence by eye-witnesses that
they were burned by the armed forces of the Crown, he said the
managers were Sinn Feiners. He also tried to prove that they
were used as Sinn Fein ambushes. Well, of course, we all
laughed at him, for Sir Hamar Greenwood is a kind of a joke.
You see, Sir Hamar Greenwood is put in the position of either
having to say that he doesnt know, or to try to explain. He
has usually had to take refuge in diplomatic silence and say he
doesnt know. But, of course, these creameries were not used
as Sinn Fein ambushes, and many of the managers are Eng
lishmen and have nothing to do with Sinn Fein.
With regard to Irish trade as apart from Irish industry, the

two great difficulties have been the stoppage of supplies from
England and the burning of business premises. With regard to
the stoppage of supplies from England, the evidence is this: we
were shown certain letters from English firms in reply to orders
course, I didnt see them. Only in Cork was I actually in a scrap
from Irish firms, stating that they could not supply Irish firms;
myself. All these things went on at night, and you saw the evi
they were sorry. And of course in September and October there

were notices in English post offices saying that no one could send
a parcel to Ireland, not even personal parcels to Ireland. And
dence the next morning.
But everybody in the country declares
it was the work of the Black and Tans.
Then another question is Irish industry as apart from Irish

agriculture. The question of Irish industries is important in this
sense. I dare say a good many people here have read the books
on the Irish renaissance and the new life that was just spring
ing up before the war. The great idea of the Irish patriarchs
was to start industries in the villages in order that young men
and women might be kept in the villages and keep Irish life
alive. That led to the encouragement of manufactures and the
cooperative creameries movement. The creameries, of course,
were started by the Irish Agricultural Organization Society

under Sir Horace Plunkett. And the idea was, instead of having
the difficulties and waste under the individual farmer trading
system, to collect the milk and produce of the farmers, and make
it into butter or condensed milk or any of the various dairy
products. Now, these creameries were very largely cooperative.
of course that is ruinous to trade.
And in addition the English Government is preventing free

trade relations between Ireland and other countries.
Then with regard to the burning of business premises, there

is a large bakery owned by a man named Daly and a large tan
nery owned by a man named White which we visited. These had
been burned by the Black and Tansthe lower floor soaked with
petrol and set fire to, and about 700 damage done. Then about
the looting of shops. In Galway the Black and Tans used to

hold up the public houses and get what drink they wanted merely
by threatening to burn the place down. We went to a public
house there called The Bow, which is just out of Galway on the
north road. There there is just a girl and her mother in charge.
And the police came one night after dark and locked up the girl
and her mother in a room and took what drink they wanted. And
462
The Nation
then, of course, they took pot shots at the glasses and windows.
Then there was, in addition to this looting, the smashing of
windows in business houses. And that made it difficult for busi
ness to be carried on. And then, of course, if there was a row
a pitched battle between the Crown forces and the Sinn Feiners
business houses would get the worst of that, too.
That pretty well covers what I have to say with regard to the
economic blockade and its effects on industry, business, and
trade. But I don't want to misuse the word blockade; to make
it sound as if there had been a formally declared blockade. It
is much more the cumulative effect of a policy of preventing the
young men from working and preventing Dail Eireann from
building up the industrial prosperity of Ireland. And the mili
tary authorities have struck everywhere at the business houses
and the mills as a part of clearing Sinn Feiners, as they say,
out of the country. That is all of that.
With regard to the organization of the military, it is, of
course, difficult to get exact information. The military question
is one of the most difficult of all. And this is the difficulty with
regard to English public opinion. After all, the armed forces
of the Crown in Ireland are our own men. And in any English
audience to which you talk some woman will say, "Well, my hus
band is there." And as far as that is concerned, my own
brother, a boy of eighteen, was stationed at Ennis during the
latter part of the war. Therefore, I want to be fair in dealing
with this question. It is difficult to make English people under
stand it. And it is also important for people who are looking
at matters not from the standpoint of any country or any gov
ernment, but from the human point of view, to realize that the
military authorities in Ireland are concentrating on propaganda
among these men, which is producing a mentality that makes
them believe that every Irishman is a murderer. If you are
going to consider the Irish problem, it seems to me that you can
not get away from the mentality of the English soldiers who are
over there.
First of all, the British Government, in answer to a question
that was asked in Parliament, said it was spending on the mili
tary organization in Ireland (that is, of course, apart from the
Black and Tans and the police), 1,500,000 a month, which at
the par rate of exchange would come to, I believe, about $90,000,000 a year. That means that there is an enormous number
of soldiers in Ireland.
Q. Commissioner Addams. They are not Black and Tans
entirely, either? A. No, I am not considering the Black and
Tans; they are not considered soldiers. Apart from that, there
is the Royal Irish Constabulary, which was always there. The
R. I. C. has always been to an Irishman an armed garrison
force. The British Government always sent the southern Irish
men to the north, and the northern Irishmen to the south. There
have been a large number of resignations from that organiza
tion. Then the British Government has organized the Black
and Tans. There were two divisions of these. One was a flying
column division. When we were motoring in West Galway, we
would come across lorry loads of these men drawn up along the
roadside asleep. They were not confined to barracks. They were
sent out in flying columns and sent on from place to place, and
got their rest along the roadside. That was to prevent them
from getting in touch with the population, as the troops who are
quartered in one place often do. Then there were also those
which were confined to operations around barracks. They are
the army auxiliary force, who get very good pay, one pound
seven a day, I believe. They enlist as sergeants. They do the
intelligence work and do the raids on the better-class people,
like the raid on Professor Carroll in Dublin.
Q. Commissioner Newman. They are under the military
rather than the police, are they? A. Well, of course, they are
under the military now. Even the police are now.
These men are living under very bad conditions. We were told
that a barracks in Dublin that would ordinarily hold 160 men
was now crowded with several times that many. It is impossi
ble for them to live very regular lives. And besides this, they
[Vol. 112, No. 2907
are kept in a very excited state of mind. There is a publication

called The Weekly Summary given by the British Government to
the Black and Tans in Ireland, and it purports to give a list of
all of the crimes of Sinn Feiners against the Government. It
is, of course, a deliberate incitement to violence. Copies of this
have been produced in the House of Commons, and the Gov
ernment has been very severely criticized about it, but without
much result.
Q. Commissioner Newman. You say it is a direct incite
ment to violence. What is published in it? A. Well, you see,
Sinn Fein is not supposed to have any arms in its possession at
all. You are liable to arrest if you are found with them. Fot
this there is a continuous search for arms. And on the other
hand, there is a continuous carrying of arms from one place to
anotherthere is an "arms hunger" on the part of the Sinn
Fein population. For that reason you get ambushes to get arms.
The individual murders of policemen and the finding of arms
are all printed in this Weekly Summary withfrom the British
point of viewappropriate comments.
The position of the British soldiers in Ireland is very difficult.
They are not fighting an enemy that they can see. They are in
a hostile atmosphere. They are fighting everything around
them.
That is the situation. Of course, the Irish cannot fight openly
because there is three million population against an Empire. And
then, of course, the soldiers are in a disadvantageous position.
I remember that my brother said, when he was stationed at
Ennis before things were so bad, that if a soldier were set upon
in any way, they were ordered to go around the streets knocking
people off the pavement, and that sort of thing. The removal
of the soldiers is the condition precedent to any kind of peace.
For of course, while British soldiers are being shot, you cannot
do anything with British public opinion. Of course the Sinn
Feiners say, "Well, of course, if British soldiers were not get
ting shot, you would say we are all happy, and would pay no
attention to us." The whole thing is a very vicious circle, as
always happens when you resort to violence.
I tried to get in touch with some of the parents of the vic
tims. You cannot always do it, because many of the Royal
Irish Constabulary are single men stationed in the barracks.
But in our hotel in Limerick we got in touch with a mother
whose boy of eighteen had been shot in one of these raids. The
English authorities said that the leaders were known and would
be punished. I think her reply deserves to be quoted. She
said : "I don't want Irish boys to be punished for what happened
to my boy. I want the fathers to settle and put an end to this
horrible work."
Commissioner Addams. Miss Wilkinson, you were going on
to the raids and other acts of violence which you yourself saw.
The Witness. Well, first of all in Limerick.
Q. You are not Irish? A. Oh no, I am from Lincolnshire.
I believe I have some Irish blood from somewhere, but it hap
pens to be Orange. With regard to Limerick. Of course, one
has to realize that for each case that we investigated, a reason
was given by the English press for it. That is to say, it was
in the nature of a reprisal for some damage done. Brennan's
near Limerick I have already described.
We saw a number of similar cases in Limerick. A man named
Cain, a man with eight children, was taken out of his home,
and they were going to shoot him, but his wife begged for his
life, and they did not. Then when we went on to Ennistymon
and Lahinch, we found a number of houses burned there. At
Miltown Malbay a Captain Lendrum had been kidnapped, and
the soldiers threatened reprisals if he was not returned; and his
dead body was laid in a coffin and returned to them. Of course
that made the soldiers very, very excited. The Catholic priest
tried to intercede, but the soldiers were out of control. At
Lahinch the houses were only left as a shell. The soldiers went
along the street and burned every house. Then the draper's
shop, which had no connection with Sinn Fein, because it was
owned by a widow who was keeping her son in college, was
March 23, 1921]
The Nation
burned. Then the concert hall was also burned. Then we went
to Ennistymon, where the town hall was burned and a large
amount of property demolished. That, of course, was a reprisal.
We saw a great many farms that had been burned in the area
all around.
At Galway what had happened was that a soldier was shot
at the station. The Sinn Fein version of the story was that the
man had been shot while shooting at civilians. I don't know.
But anyway, this soldier named Krumm was shot. And then
the police and soldiers went out that night and took three men
out of their homesone was named Quirk, and two others were
taken out and shot. Then the town was afraid of reprisals.
And they decided to hold a public inquiry and to invite the
police to give evidence. Mr. Louis O'Day was the solicitor for
the town, and led the case for the town.
Q. Commissioner Newman. Who decided to hold an inquiry?
A. The municipal authorities of Galway, who were all Sinn
Fein, of course. The town authorities wanted to hold this in
quiry. Of course, any kind of assembly in Ireland now is illegal
unless it is held with a permit. So the town tried to hold this
inquiry, and soldiers came and dispersed the assembly, and Mr.
Louis O'Day would not go home. But that night his home was
entered and demolished; and the office of the Galway Express
was demolished because it had printed the speech which Mr.
Louis O'Day had intended to deliver at this investigation. The
curfew was put on for three weeks. It was not on when this
happened, for Galway had been very quiet. Following this there
were a number of reprisals in Galway; houses were burned,
and Mr. Walsh, who owned the Old Malt House, was taken out
and killed and his body thrown into the river. I mention Gal
way because the excuse of the military authorities is that they
cannot get a jury because, of course, no Irishman will serve on
an English jury. But here was a case where there would have
been an investigation by the municipal authorities of the town,
but the military authorities broke it up.
Then, of course, there was the breaking up of that shop
called the Bal in Galway.
Then we motored to Tuam. Tuam was in a horrible shape.
The houses and shops were destroyed. I had an interview with
the archbishop of Tuam. He does not want his name mentioned
in any way, but he gave me certain signed statements of atroci
ties on civilian people, some of them by the military and Black
and Tans and some by R. I. C. men. Some of these statements
are in the handwriting of the parties making them. The only
connection that the archbishop has with them is that of guaran
teeing their authenticity; but he does not want his name men
tioned with them in any way.
My friend and I went to Cork the night after the burning of
the city hall. We had always come just after things had oc
curred, but we got to Cork at a very tense moment. We asked
the driver to drive us to a hotel right near the city hall. He
protested violently, but he finally took us to the Imperial Hotel
right near the city hall. Curfew was at ten o'clock. We went
to our room. According to law, no one is supposed to have a
light or look out of the window. But we turned out our lights
and wrapped ourselves up and went to the window. First of
all there came the soldiers in extended formation, wearing tin
helmetsthe shrapnel helmetsand carrying guns with fixed
bayonets. And then came three armored cars packed with
soldiers. And then after them came a lorry which had petrol
in it, I suppose. Those who were marching were all soldiers.
They went by, and when they came back they fired into the
houses at a certain level. We saw the bullet marks the next
morning. That, of course, is a terrible thing. Many people
have been killed on account of this indiscriminate shooting from
motor lorries. And then they withdrew to the city hall. It was
not blown up that night. It was blown up later. But it was
an extraordinarily eerie experience, this absolutely quiet street,
and then these soldiers coming along, and these bullets whizzing
past your head.
Q. Commissioner Wood. How long did this lastyour per
463
sonal experience? A. It lasted from ten until three. There

was the roaring and the shooting and the calling of "Who goes
there?"
Q. Commissioner Newman. Was there any retaliation from
the Irish people? A. Not that we could see. But there has
been, of course. But that is not usually done in the towns but
in the country, because it leads to such terrible reprisals.
Q. Commissioner Thomas. Did there appear to be officers
in command? A. Yes, of course there were officers in command.
This was a disciplined motion of troops through Cork, and the
officers were very clearly with the men. As far as I know, there
were no burning of houses that night. The city hall has been
blown up since, but it was not done that night.
Q. Commissioner Addams. Those were your own personal
investigations, of course. A. Yes, my own personal investiga
tions. What is happening, of course, is that whenever ambushes
occur or soldiers are killed, the reprisals take place on the com
munity immediately. What happens is that the women and
children are thrown out of the house, petrol is sprayed on
the house, and it is burned. One could just go on multiplying
instances. They all conform to the same type.
Q. Commissioner Addams. Are there any questions to ask
Miss Wilkinson?
The Witness. I will then go on to the question of the South
ern Unionists. We considered that very important, because
they are three hundred thousand of the population in the south.
And, of course, at one stage of the Ulster agitation great play
was made of the fact that an Ulster Parliament alone would
not settle the matter, because you would then leave these south
ern Unionists to the mercy of the Irish. That was a great point
prior to 1914.
My brother happens to be a Wesleyan minister, and he gave
me introductions to Wesleyan ministers in Ireland, and I had
conversations with them. And I found that they entirely ridi
culed the idea that the southern Unionists were in any danger
from the southern population. And if you take Limerick alone,
many of the most prosperous business places in Limerick are
owned by Unionists. And this minister said that, generally
speaking, the Irish people trusted them completely, and they
had no trouble at all. They were much more fearful of what
the Crown forces than what the Sinn Fein forces would do. I
pressed him to know what he meant, and his wife gave this
example: when they were firing one place, there was a Prot
estant store just opposite which had two young men, assistants,
living in it (which, of course, is the custom in Ireland). And
these young men came and tried to help extinguish the flames.
And the British soldiers tried to set a light to their place to
give them something to do in their own premises, although it
was owned by a Unionist and a Protestant. And he spoke of
the gun-running at Larne. And he said that gun-running was
the worst mistake that the Government had made; and they
could never get any peace in Ireland at all until the troops were
taken out. He said that the agitation for home rule was mere
sentiment on the part of the Irish, because there was no reason
why they could not live as comfortably within the Empire and
united to England as the Scotch. But since they would not, the
only reasonable thing was to give them what they wanted.
He gave me another case that shows how the policy of the
Government is turning many of the Unionists against it. There
were two Protestant business men whose property was de
stroyed. And one of them wrote a letter to the military au
thorities complaining of the destruction of his property. And
the response was that the officer in charge on that occasion
was not quite responsible for his action since he got back from
the war, that he was a little bit queer. And that was the only
answer he got!
Then, with regard to the courts and the doing of justice. The
Sinn Fein courts work in secret. It is not possible to get justice
in the southern part of Ireland at all except through the Sinn
Fein courts. At the time of the death of Lord Mayor MacSwiney the Prudential Insurance Company was actually plead
464
The Nation
ing through a Sinn Fein court. I asked these men if they had
ever been in a Sinn Fein court, and they said they had. One of
them had a case of petty theft of some rugs that had been left
outside his place, and he appealed to the Sinn Fein court to get
the goods restored. They were restored, and he was told that
the culprits had been punished.
All of the Unionists whom I saw in southern Ireland said
that it was impossible that home rule should not come to Ireland
now. They were very bitter over what they called the selfishness
of Ulster; that when they saw home rule was coming, they sim
ply wanted Ulster cut off, and left the rest of them to their
fate. That, of course, has been strongly put in the House of
Lords by Lord Middleton. They feel that the only thing, under
the present situation, is to give Ireland dominion home rule as
soon as possible.
Q. Commissioner Wood. Did you find any cases of religious
intolerance on the part of the Catholic majority against the
Protestant minority? A. No. That is surprising. There is
no complaint of it whatever. The Methodist ministers told me
to emphasize that whenever I could, that the Protestant people
had always had the most courteous treatment from the Catholic
population. I think that is important, because in the south
there is no reason to fan the flame of religious intolerance. I
interviewed the Lord Mayor of Limerick, and he said that on the
relief committee formed for the unemployed workers there were
both Catholics and Protestants, and that nobody in southern
Ireland would ask you your religion any more than they would
in England.
Q. Commissioner Thomas. May I ask about the English
Government? When British labor made resolutions about selfdetermination, did they mean absolute self-determination or
self-determination within the British Empire? A. I should
say that British labor is divided on that point; the So
cialists and the left wing would give Ireland absolute right
to say what she wanted. But there is a very consider
able, well-informed body which say that to have a lot of little
nations as we have in Central Europe and Czecho-Slovakia,
none of which is strong enough to maintain its independence,
is simply an invitation for a stronger Power to be their master.
And this section claims that Ireland would be far safer, and
that we would be far safer, with her in the Empire. We do
not hold Canada by force, and we do not hold Australia by force.
And we could not do so. They remain in the Empire not be
cause they have to, but because they want to remain in. And,
of course, the unfortunate thing is that the policy of the mili
tarists in Ireland and the policy of the Ulsterites is driving the
Irish people to want to go out of the British Empire altogether.
But whether British labor would agree to Ireland's going out
of the British Empire I could not say. The general trend of the
resolutions is largely to shelve that issue and get the two sides
together and get something done.
Q. Commissioner Wood. In the districts in which you were,
you saw a very considerable need for relief in those sections?
A. Well, of course, the need for relief is simply something ter
rible. I was in touch with some people who were giving out
the relief. These people's homes are destroyed. Everything
they had was destroyed. The only thing they have is what they
stand up in. They have no hope of compensation, because if
they apply for compensation, it only means that their neighbors
have to pay it. The situation is terrible.
Q. Commissioner Thomas. Are there any English or Scotch
societies administering relief? A. No. Of course they are con
tributing to it very largely. There is only one exception, I
believe. The Society of Friends is giving relief, and certain
members of it are thinking of arousing English opinion by
persuading individual English towns to adopt Irish towns. And
we were opposed to that because we said that relief of that kind
was simply a salve to the British conscience; and if people
wanted to give relief, it should be given in justice and not in
charity.
Q. Commissioner Wood. May I ask if you found in the
south of Ireland any fear of Ulster domination? A. No, quite
[Vol. 112, No. 2907
the contrary. As far as I could gather from the Sinn Fein

judges and politicians, they were prepared to go to very great
lengths to overcome what they called "Ulster prejudices" so
long as Ulster would remain in Ireland and thus keep Ireland
united. They were prepared to give Ulster any kind of gov
ernment she wanted, any kind of taxation she wanted. But
they wanted Ulster in Ireland because they believe, once the
English influence was removed from Ulster, that in time the
two sections would get together. And they feel that if Ulster
has a Parliament of her own she will be controlled by England,
and that will only cause further trouble in the country. But,
of course, there is no fear of Ulster domination at all. The
fear is on the other side. The Ulster politicians fear a Catholic
domination.
Q. Commissioner Thomas. It is often said in this country
in the name of England that the whole question would be sim
ply solved were it not for Ulster; that England stands ready
to give Ireland anything if only Ulster were out of the way.
I don't mean to ask you whether the people who say that are
sincere, but whether it really does bulk large in the minds of
the English people. A. To say that is to say, Suppose that
English history had been entirely different. You see, this policy
has gone on for several hundred years. The policy of the Brit
ish Government for all these generations has been to keep the
Protestant minority in Ireland dependent entirely on England.
So you have got the Pale around Ulster.
Q. May I interrupt? The Pale was Catholic until the Refor
mation, was it not? A. Yes, the Pale was. And there were
plantations under the most Catholic Queen we ever had
Mary II. And the Pale was included then. But the O'Neals
of that time came from Ulsterand Ulster is the place of the
great Irish heroes. But when it came to plant Ulster, the Irish
were driven off the land more completely than in any other part
of the country. And so Ulster has been kept dependent on the
English ascendancy, and Ireland has been kept divided most
wonderfully. Of course, this is not a British policy. The policy
of Divide and Govern is an old one.
Q. Senator Walsh. The regular imperialistic policy. A.
Yes, the regular imperialistic policy.
So that you see it is quite impossible for a British statesman
to get up and say, "If only the Irish could agree among them
selves, we would be prepared to give whatever they wanted."
The answer to that is the attitude of the Coalition Government
toward the Convention.
Q. You mean the Horace Plunkett convention, for the sake
of the record? A. Yes, quite. There was the Horace Plunkett
Convention called by Sir Horace during the war. From what
he said to us, they got far beyond their expectations in getting
the Ulster leaders to admit that the Irishmen haven't horns and
tails. And just as they were giving their reportthe very same
week Mr. Lloyd George came forward with his plan of con
scription for Ireland. That was tearing up his promises to
the Convention. And, of course, the whole thing fell through
on that. Now, then, if the British Government were sincere
that they would give Ireland what it wants if it can agree,
they should not do things that make it impossible for that
agreement to be reached. I think it is sincere when a good many
people say it, because they do not understand the history of
Ireland. I don't think it is sincere when the Coalition Govern
ment says it.
Q. Commissioner Wood. Is there a feeling that Ireland, if
it were allowed to go on its own, would adopt some new ex
periment in government? A. I think there is that feeling very
largely in England. But the much more real fear in England
is that Ireland would be used by an enemy for a submarine
base. It was said by the British Government that Irish creeks
were used by the Germans as submarine bases during the war.
I don't know how true that was. Of course, the Government
says it was a German submarine that landed Sir Roger Case
ment. That is a real danger, I suppose. But we are doing
so much harm by keeping the issue alive. Ireland can be won.
We can win Ireland to friendship if we set about doing it.
The Nation
FOUNDED 1865
Vol. CXII

Contents
465
EDITORIALS :
England Ready for a Navy Talk
467
Recognize Russia 1
463
The Railroad Wreck
469
The Outcome in Upper Silesia
470
Oh, Boston!
470
MEXICO1921. I INTRODUCTORYTHE HOUSE SET IN ORDER.
By Paul Hanna
471
MR. LANSING LIFTS THE VEIL. By Oswald Garrison Villard
472
EXIT GEORGIA. By Paxton Hibben
475
ACQUAINTANCE. By David Morton
477
UNEMPLOYMENT AND CLOSED SHOP IN COHOES. By Cedric Long 478
IN THE DRIFTWAY. By The Drifter
480
CORRESPONDENCE
480
VICTORY. By Leonora Speyer
482
BOOKS:
Mr. Choate. By Thomas Reed Powell
482
Delphi. By Gisela M. A. Richter
488
The French Revolution in Germany. By David S. Muzzey
484
The Uses of Perversity. By Preserved Smith
484
Village Verse. By Mark Van Doren
486
Growth of the Soil
486
Books in Brief
486
DRAMA:
Bricks and Mortar. By Ludwig Lewisohn
488
President Obregon's Message
489
The Case of General Crozier
490
The British Mandate in Mesopotamia
491
Workers' Control in Italy
492
OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editoe
Associate Editors
LEWIS S. GANNETT
FREDA KIRCHWEY
ARTHUR WARNER
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
ERNEST H. GRUENING
CARL VAN DOREN
Managing Editor
Literary Editor
VIVIANI will get a hearty welcome, the headlines tell
us, and then add as if it were news : "Administration
Will Have Open Mind on any Proposal He May Make." This
is the day of the open mind and its inevitable companion,
procrastination. We were to have had an immediate peace
with Germany, but the recent events in Germany make it
clear that we must not move now lest we upset our Allies
in their latest action against our former enemy. At Omaha
Mr. Harding promised that one of his first official acts would
be to take the American troops out of Germanybut here,
too, we plainly must not act now. Then those front-porch
conferences were to have yielded an immediate program for
our foreign relationsbut the open mind is still open, and
the program still lingers. The fact is that this Administra
tion is not going to grapple with any foreign issue until it
is compelled to. Domestic affairs have the right of way.
The farmer is to be succored at the expense of Australian,
Canadian, Danish, and South American producers; more
temporary tariff barriers!a curse wherever they may be
are to be established by reenacting the Fordney bill Mr.
Wilson vetoed. Then business is to be rescued from the
excess profits and super-income taxes and by December we
are to have a permanent tariff law based on the PayneAldrich law the American people once abolished. What if
Sir Philip Gibbs declares that "the whole destiny of the
world depends absolutely on President Harding's leader
ship"? Before America even, comes Big Business; Europe
may go hang.
No. 2908
PREMIER LLOYD GEORGE is finding it no easy task

to carry his country with him in the absurd German
reparations policy to which he committed it at the behest
of France. The retirement from the Cabinet of Mr. Bonar
Law, like that of Sir Robert Cecil, is thought to be due to
the Irish rather than to the German policy, but it weakens
Mr. Lloyd George at a most unfortunate time. The band
which is opposing the Prime Minister's German policy in
cludes Mr. Asquith and Sir George Paish and such queer
bedfellows as Horatio Bottomley, editor of John Bull, and
J. L. Garvin, editor of the Observer. "Germany could only
work up the enormous export surplus required to pay the
Allies by driving British exports from every competitive
market," argues Mr. Garvin. From the Rhineland there
are still reports of the slowing down of industry, and British
officials there are quoted as estimating the total amount
collectible under the customs penalties as not more than
$4,000,000 annually. In the French Chamber the other day
Deputy Auriol, Socialist, declared that France's part of the
duties would be less than the expenses of occupation. Here
in America, too, there is less disposition than at first to
identify the voice of the Allies as the voice of God.
MORE and more the news from Ireland takes on the
character of real warfare. "Heavy casualties were
inflicted on the First Royal Fusiliers in an attack upon a
train today near Headford Junction, County Kerry. An
official report states that one officer and six men of the ranks
were killed and twelve wounded"thus runs a Dublin war
dispatch of March 21. The week of St. Patrick's Day was
the bloodiest the rebellion has known not even excepting the
historic Easter week of 1916. Yet bankrupt British states
manship insists that it is getting on well in Ireland and ac
complishing its purpose. Despite all sorts of false dis
patches there is no real move toward peace in sight, and the
Irish are so encouraged by the success of their anti-Belfast
boycott that they are beginning one upon certain English
goods. The folly and the needlessness of it all are over
whelming when one realizes how easily a man with the spirit
of a John Bright, or a Cobden, could bring about peace.
ALMOST a year ago in the main street of the mining
town of Matewan in Mingo County, West Virginia, ten
men were killed in a gun fight. Among those slain was
Albert C. Felts of the Baldwin-Felts detective agency, and
among those involved in the killing was "Sid" Hatfield, Chief
of Police of Matewan. Felts was in charge of a party of
detectives who had been engaged by the mine operators to
drive from their homes the families of the striking miners
without the bother of a legal warrant. Hatfield tried to
prevent the forcible eviction of the families, and a fight
started. Sixteen men were finally tried for the murder of
Albert C. Feltsamong them Hatfield. After a legal battle
almost as bitter as the original affray, the sixteen defend
ants have finally been acquitted on the chief charge. The
verdict establishes nothing but the innocence of the defend
ants; all strike questions were excluded from the trial.
But the outcome may have important results.
466
The Nation
BERLIN has had its first pogrom. A preconcerted raid

was made on a Jewish quarter, several hundred of its
residents attacked and beaten, and a number seriously
hurt. While it has not appeared that any of the injuries
have resulted fatally, the mere fact of this organized as
sault is ominous. It marks a tragic step backward toward
barbarism. It adds another European country to those
which have allowed the smoldering embers of ignorance
and race antagonism to blaze into violence. Yet this out
burst is not surprising. Since the war, which intensified
every passion, which aggravated every dislike, which
aroused new hates, anti-Semitism has been studiously nur
tured in Germany. From a latent and localized prejudice
deriving its inspiration from Junkertum, it has developed
through reactionary propaganda and careful organization in
a sadly disorganized community until it is today a rampant,
widespread mental disease. The Viennese manifestations,
while complicated by great numbers of Galician Jewish
refugees whose presence adds to the economic distress, are
essentially of the same origin. Could such a thing happen in
the United States? Five years ago we should have laughed
the idea to scorn. But it is not unthinkable today in a
country as credulous as ours, by nature more prone to
mob violence than its neighbors, which tolerates the
lynching of another weak and helpless race within our
borders.
BUT even this sinister possibility does not justify the
suppression of the Dearborn Independent. The threat
ened arrest in St. Louis of persons engaged in selling it
is wholly misguided. While under an interpretation of a
Missouri law such people are held to be disturbers of the
peace, the police power in almost any State is probably
sufficient, if invoked by the authorities, to check the sale of
any publication. It is the more necessary, in dealing with
so utterly detestable a campaign of slander, that the issues
be clearly distinguished. More important than antisemitism is the fundamental question of freedom of expres
sion so gravely imperiled' today. The right of the indi
vidual to say what he pleases is the cornerstone of our
American liberties.
THE natural response to the "Rhine horror" meeting
in New York was the patriotic rally in Madison
Square Garden on March 18, at which, according to the
New York World, there was greater hatred of and bitter
ness toward Germany expressed than during the war. The
fateful old German inability to understand other people's
psychology, to be tactful, considerate, and wise, still per
sists over here. The Von Machs learn nothing. As for
the patriotic rally, it was great fun for those who took
part in it; they rejoiced in their opportunities to hiss
Mayor Hylan and the originators of the "Rhine horror"
affair, and they demanded that no one should break up the
old friendships with the Allies. As to the latter The Nation
is heartily with them. It only wishes that they could see
that the real menace to our friendship with France is not
the professional German-American, but the French impe
rialists, who, all unwitting, are pulling down the whole
economic structure of Europe; and that the real menace to
our peace with England is not the Sinn Feiner but those
directly and indirectly responsible for the proposal to build
a large navy to rival the British, who fail to realize that this
will lead straight to war.
[Vol. 112, No. 2908
IT is no new thing to find the representatives of the

Allies bad business men, but the recent note of the
Reparations Commission asking Austria to deliver all live
stock specified in the treaty of St. Germain seems both
unintelligent and heartless. This means the immediate sup
plying of 6,000 milch cows1,000 to Jugoslavia, 1,000 to
Rumania (both cattle-exporting countries), and 4,000 to
Italy at the very time when the American Relief is finding
it necessary to ship milk regularly into Austria, the Vienna
Children's Milk Relief asserts that there are thousands of
children who have never tasted fresh cow's milk, and the
Red Cross reports in Vienna alone 115,000 tubercular chil
dren whose chief need is milk. What makes this particular
demand particularly immoral and idiotic is the fact that
the Allied Governments, sitting in conference in London,
after consulting their experts, have just announced that
they are prepared to postpone their financial claims on
Austria in order to avert her starvation.
IN the passion for discrediting the Soviet Government, its
enemies have manufactured not merely propaganda in
wholesale quantities for export, but they have produced the
raw material out of which history is largely made. The
Nation called attention last summer to an Associated Press
dispatch from Warsaw, purporting to quote the Isvestia of
June 11 in regard to Russian policy, and noted that the
copy of the newspaper of that date in the New York Public
Library contained no such article. Possibly the Isvestia
in question came into existence in the same way by which
the London Daily Herald says bogus copies of the Russian
Pravda have been circulated in the Baltic states and even
smuggled into Soviet Russia itself. These spurious issues,
containing anti-Soviet propaganda, have been printed in
London and circulated, the Daily Herald declares, with the
aid of Scotland Yard. They may naturally be assumed to
have been the basis for some of those ingenuous dispatches
from the Baltic region, beginning, "Copies of the Russian
Pravda received here say
." And yet the same Govern
ment that did not scruple to assist in circulating a fictitious
newspaper was most solicitous in its recently concluded
trade agreement with Russia to obtain the promise of the
Soviet Government not to spread anti-British propaganda
abroad. It is permissible to pull the Bear's ear but not
to twist the Lion's tail
A RECENT announcement that employees of the Post
Office were to be allowed to treat with the Govern
ment through their organizationscollective bargaining
is a welcome sign that the new Postmaster General, Will
Hays, intends to follow a more enlightened policy than that
which prevailed during the Burleson regime. No other
Cabinet officer has so great an opportunity to raise the
morale and increase the efficiency of his Department by
the installation of even a modicum of justice in the treat
ment of employees as has Mr. Hays. . The demoralization
of the service worked by the Burleson era of autocracy and
incompetence cannot be counteracted in a day, but the com
ments of Mr. Hays indicate an appreciation of how to go
at it. "My purposes are to take the postal service out of
politics," he said at Chicago lately, "to make such rectifica
tions as in all decency and fairness must be made to assure
a square deal, and to strengthen and broaden the civil ser
vice." We hope Mr. Hays acts as he talks, and we wish
him success in cleaning the Augean stable of his predecessor.
March 30, 1921]
The Nation
467
HE report of the committee of the American Associa

tion of University Professors on the dismissal of
Professor J. E. Kirkpatrick from Washburn College reveals
flagrant and insolent autocracy on the part of President
Womer and the trustees. It is established, says the com
mittee in its summary, that Professor Kirkpatrick was dis
missed without prior notice, hearing, or stated charges,
and without his knowledge of certain allegations against him
made to the trustees. The specific acts cited as grounds
of his dismissal turn out to consist: (a) in his having,

Some years earlier, angered certain potential contributors
by calling the attention of the State's Attorney to a viola

tion of law; (b) in his having talked with a neighbor and
personal friend, who was also a trustee, about the movement
for increasing the salaries of college teachers; (c) in his

having, as a delegate to the Congregational Conference,
expressed to one other delegate views about the nomination
of a member of the Board of Trustees which did not coin
cide with the wishes of President Womer. These are the
acts cited; one of the principal actual causes, the com
mittee finds, consisted in his having, during the preceding

college year, urged changes in the constitution of the col
lege which would limit the president's powers and give the
faculty a greater part in the determination of the educa
tional policies of the institution. These facts require no
comment.
Nor is it surprising, under the circumstances,
to learn that the committee reports of President Womer

that, though highly successful in collecting money for the
institution and in carrying out a program of material im
provements, he has been at once autocratic and vacillat
England Ready for a Navy Talk

ROM England has again come so plain an offer to dis
cuss the limitation of armaments that it is hard to see
how the President can delay for a moment. In the course
of the debate on the new British estimates it appeared

that England has deliberately abandoned her historic two
Power standard for her navy; has reduced the number of
capital ships in full commission from twenty to sixteen as
compared with thirty-eight in 1914; has given up one de
stroyer-flotilla and the entire South American squadron

and decreased the personnel by 6,000 men. True, four new
battleships are to be begun while eight are transferred to
the list to be disposed of; but Baron Lee, First Lord of the
Admiralty, has specifically declared that in making this
long delayed beginning with the replacement of obsolete
ships, the Government neither commits itself to, nor con
templates, any building program in answer to those of any
other Power. Indeed, he went out of his way to say that
his Government trusts it may be possible as a result of
frank and friendly discussion with the principal naval
Powers to avoid anything approaching competitive building,
either now or in the future. More than that, Lord Lee
has stated that if America invites Great Britain to a con
ference to come to an agreement on the naval question he

is prepared to put aside all other business to help that
matter forward. What more can anyone ask?
Well, we ask that on this side of the ocean there be im
to have been guilty of bad faith, to have been lacking in

candor and trustworthiness in his administrative methods,
and to have made, in connection with this committees in
vestigations, statements which are not in accord with the
facts. The trustees, of course, back up the president, and
share his responsibility. It is all a disgraceful affair.
mediate response not only in official Washington but by

all those who bespeak a hands across the seas, blood is
thicker than water policy. Instead, we have the Presi
dent, according to Washington dispatches, accepting one of
Mr. Wilson's foolish beliefs that the possession of the
world's most modern navy will insure the country a re
spectful hearing when it is ready to propose new inter
national relationships. It is understood, one correspon
dent telegraphs, that he [Mr. Harding] regards the pos
HE comparative literary sterility of the Southern

States has been vigorously described by Mr. H. L.
session of the most powerful navy in the world as a guar

anty not only to the world but to American citizens of
Mencken. A really searching explanation of it is yet to

come. Every now and then, during very many years, a
consciousness of the fact itself has suddenly obtruded itself
in the minds of cultivated and thoughtful Southerners. At
such moments they would found a periodicalthe Southern
Review in 1828, the Southern Quarterly Review in 1842,
the sincerity of the Administration, when it proposes
ing in his official relations with the faculty.
He is found
Simm's Magazine in 1845, Russell's Magazine in 1857, and

the Nineteenth Century in 1869, to name a few only. All
these magazines were more or less identified with small
literary groups in Charleston. Today another such moment
has come and Richmond announces the foundation of The
Reviewer, a bi-monthly. A commendatory testimonial ac

companies the first issue in which the undersigned, realiz
ing the need of a literary review in Richmond, and the
growing demand for such a publication throughout the
changed international relations and reduction of arma

ments.
All of which is the same nonsense which Mr.
Daniels used to talk. It is as if a drunkard would not sign

a pledge to do away with drink until he had convinced
everybody by one last grand debauch that he was not afraid
of good hard liquor.
How can any American be so credulous as to believe that
it is necessary for the United States to arm further in
order to obtain a respectful hearing? Why, there is not
a country on earth that speaks with such authority as the
United States today, and no foreign chancellery stops to
ask the chance number of our battleships when we do. So
childish a bluff as that will fool nobody, nor any attempt to
quaint and innocent! Yet among the undersigned are

James Branch Cabell and Mary Johnston and Ellen Glasgow
and others who know the ways of literature in this busy
world. We wish The Reviewer the best luck provided it
so juggle a proportional disarmament as to give us a domi

nating position because we have the greatest number of
post-Jutland battleships afloat or under way. England will
not accept any such arrangement, and as for the world, it
seeks not proportionate disarmament, but disarmament
complete and absolute. Mr. Harding ought to bestir him
self; he may be compelled to by the tremendous decrease
in this year's income tax returns. But he ought not to
avoids the old Southern fault of over-anxious refinement
wait for them.
and intellectual timidity.
to encompass naval disarmament will pass unused.
State, wish to express their cordial approval and indorse

ment. How familiar that sounds to anyone who has
gone through the files of the old Southern magazines, how
He must move or this golden opportunity
468
The Nation
Recognize
ONCE more communist Russia arises to confound her
enemies. The Kronstadt rebellion, the unrest in Mos
cow and Petrograd, the anarchist disturbances in the
Ukraine, all led optimistic imperialists to assert for the
hundredth time that the Soviet Government was tottering to
its fall. Then gradually out of the mist of press misrepre
sentations and mistakes and half-truths the facts again be
gan to emerge; and the Russian Government was suddenly
revealed as a power still firmly intrenched and more neces
sary to placate and to deal with than ever. Within three
days events took place that entirely changed Russia's posi
tion and assured the continued control of the Soviet Gov
ernment. * On March 16 a trade agreement was signed at
London between the "Government of the Russian Socialist
Federal Soviet Republic" and the British Government, to
gether with a declaration of recognition of claims signed by
M. Krassin and Sir Robert Home, President of the British
Board of Trade. By these instruments the world's most
powerful trading nation has welcomed the Russian Govern
mentwhich it had referred to in earlier days as a govern
ment of "murderers," "cutthroats," and "tyrants"back
into the commercial family of nations. On the same day a
Russian-Turkish treaty was signed at Moscow "establish
ing fraternal relations between the two countries." On
March 17 the Kronstadt garrison surrendered to the Red
Army and the Government forces took the town. On March
18 the terms of a trade agreement between Russia and
Germany were settled, and the final peace treaty with Poland
and the Ukraine was signed. On March 19 the Italian
Foreign Minister announced that Italy would soon sign a
trade treaty with Russia. So, after years of trial and perse
cution, Russia again becomes the friend of the great.
One great nation still holds aloofand even she is begin
ning to show signs of anxiety. While England and Ger
many sign up pacts of commercial friendship with Russia
and begin to turn the pages of her catalogue of conces
sions; while Canadian concessionnaires pick up vast tracts
of lumber, and fifty of the largest firms in Holland com
bine for trade with the Baltic states and Russia; while
British factories begin to turn out goods for Russian peo
ple to buythe Government of the United States decides
to find out "through diplomatic and other channels" what
is going on in that part of the world. Russia is again on
the mapnot only on the geographic map where she has
sprawled all along in mocking immensitybut on the diplo
matic map made up of "good" governments which respect
the rights of private property and do not say their prayers
to the prophet Marx. And the United States wants to see
what Russia is doing there with the other fellows. Does
Russia really mean it when she says she will be good?
The new Administration has decided, so the newspapers tell
us, that the time has almost come when we must begin to
think about finding out what has been occurring and when
we must determine what position, if any, we wish even
tually to stand upon. This, as anyone who has followed our
Russian policy must realize, is going a long way.
It is evident, however, without waiting for the State
Department to announce details, that the return of the Rus
sian prodigal to the family of nations has not meant a com
plete victory for communism. Lenin has secured for his
country peace, commerce, and a chance to rebuild. He has
[Vol. 112, No. 2908
Russia!
forfeited, however, some important items of his program;

laid down some powerful weapons. When, as the corre
spondent of the New York Herald reported, he "screwed
up his eyes in a comical manner and said: 'I fear I have
become respectable,' " he summed up the extent of his con
cessions. He has forfeited his belief in an imminent world
revolution as well as his power of helping to bring it about
by propaganda or force. He has yielded up the riches of
Russia to foreign concessionnairesan act which he admits
carries with it the danger of foreign interference in de
fense of such holdings. He has, if he is quoted correctly,
modified, for the time being, his plan of communistic enter
prise in agriculture and industry, by acknowledging the
rights of private agricultural holdings, of free commerce
in agricultural products, and of private production by
"artisans." He has given the bitter non-communist press
an opportunity, which they have avidly seized upon, of pro
claiming the downfall of communism at the very moment
when they are forced to admit the virtually universal suc
cess of the Soviet Government. But their joy may be partly
unwarranted. For years Lenin has been living according to
two philosophiesthe philosophy of communism and that
of reaipolitik. He is doubtless dominated by the hope that
he can make the second serve the first. By clearing Russia
of invaders, by opening trade, by getting industries going,
and by placating the peasants, he hopes to save Russia for
communism. And he is unique among statesmen in his
readiness to admit a deviation from principle. "The BrestLitovsk peace is bad, but what would you have me do? We
cannot defeat the Germans. We must have a breathing
spell." So he said in 1918. "Concessions are dangerous,"
he has said lately, "but are they more dangerous than
hunger and cold and underproduction and industrial chaos?"
"Private enterprise is not communism," he is doubtless say
ing now, "but there can be no communism till things are
running againin five or ten years perhaps." Lenin has
compromised beyond question for the sake of expediency.
He has surrendered a position here and one there, but by
admitting his necessity he has softened the pain of defeat
and may in the end stave it off entirely.
Meanwhile he says to the nations of the worldthough
he addressed his words to Great Britain : "Agreement use
less unless the British Government ceases the mistrust
shown us for three years. Our best and only propaganda
will be the example given the world by our economic recon
struction of Russia." The United States should listen to
those words. Will we continue to stand with one foot
in the past and one in a wholly imaginary future, while
the other nations of the world recognize the power and
promise of the existing Russian Government? During Mr.
Wilson's regime we insulted the Soviet Government by
every means in our power; we refused its overtures and
drove out its representative. We learned nothing from
Britain's willingness to face and accept the facts. We
threw away a chance to be Russia's best friend among the
nations. Small signs now begin to indicate an unwilling,
gradual change of heart. Relief can now be sent into Soviet
Russia. Will trade follow? The dogmatic statement of
Secretary Hoover gives us little hope, but if the new Ad
ministration is wise it will ask Russia to send an envoy
back to us and follow after England as fast as we may.
The Nation
March 30, 1921]
469
The Railroad Wreck

HIS is a sad world.
Only one short year ago a com
cent operation of this law, have managed to transform a
plaisant Congress passed the Esch-Cummins law. It

gave our railroad financiers everything they asked. Rail
and their passenger trains are running half empty where
road credit was permanently insured by a provision that
they are not being consolidated.
rates were to yield 6 per cent on the aggregate value of

railroad property. The monstrous Plumb Plan for service
certain passenger spent nine nights in a Pullman.
at cost was buried hell-deep under a mountain of anathemas

with a stake through its heart. With a sigh of relief a
harassed country saw the roads slip back into the compe
tent hands of the Christian men to whom God in his wis
dom had intrusted them.to apply in a different connec

tion the well-remembered words of a late railroad president.
A year has passed. Today the Esch-Cummins law is a

complete and admitted failure. Even Senator Cummins
asserts that something is wrong; he demands an inquiry
shortage of freight cars into a surplus of 300,000 idle cars,

On a recent journey a
In no
case did he make a reservation in advance, and in no case

was the berth above him occupied. Despite the hullabaloo
over wages and the propaganda for cutting them, the
fundamental trouble with the railroads today is bad man
agement and excessive rates. The executives are busy
trying to produce profits instead of transportation. In
this effort they have overreached themselves, and have
killed the traffic goose that lays the golden egg.
The transportation committee of the Boston Chamber of
Commerce, after discussing the financial plight of the New
by the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce to find
England roads and the proposals for their relief by yet
out what it is.
further rate increases, points out that poor service and

high rates have driven shippers to the extensive use of
motor trucks. It demands an investigation by the Inter
The self-same financiers of a year agone
mournfully announce that they cant make their roads pay,

and so must be allowed to smash the unions and slash wages.
They declare with apparent truth that many of the roads
are on the verge of bankruptcy.
Freight won't move, and
passengers wont travel. The roads dont come within gun

shot of 6 per cent, and the loathsome Plumb Plan is once
more raising its hideous head. It is all very discouraging
to men whose business it is to pick financial plums off the
railroad tree. Already they talk of selling the good-for
nothing plum tree to an ungrateful Governmentalways
provided, of course, that the price can be made right. In
state Commerce Commission to determine whether the
New England roads are now being operated efficiently and

economically.
Yet more pointed is the report of the New England

Traffic League, representing the important shippers of that
section. It says: Instead of proceeding in an orderly
way to bring this [the wage] question before the Labor
Board, they [the carriers] have attempted a short cut

through a campaign of publicity, and have utterly failed to
fact, one uncommonly intelligent banker warns his col
accomplish any results commensurate with the efforts ex
leagues that they are going altogether wrong in their

present fight on the unions. He urges them instead to kiss
and make up with the men's organizations, and then go
hand in hand to Uncle Sam, pointing out to the old gen
tleman that after all it is a lovely plum tree and that he
couldnt do better than add it to his charming fruit garden.
What is the matter? Why do all the rosy promises of
private-ownership-propaganda days fade as a leaf 7 Let
pended. In view of this inexcusable failure the League

feels that it is time the directors of these [the New Eng
land] roads take action that will not only make unnecessary
further increase but which may give some assurance that
charges that are now so high as to divert business from
the roads may be so adjusted as to increase the amount of
traffic handled by these lines. The sacrifices made by ship

pers during the war, says the League, are misconstrued
Senator La Follette answer:
into meaning that the Executives can tax them to the limit
The financiers of Wall Street are running the railroads today.

Beginning about 1900 a change came, and the railroad man
agement of the country passed out of the hands of men who
had come up from the ranks, who were capable of running the
without fear of opposition.
railroads, and believed in balancing service against transporta
tion charges. The management of the railroads passed into

the hands of the representatives of Wall Street, and from that
The following passage even
suggests a degree of impatience:

If the time has arrived when no confidence can be placed in
the word of a railroad executive, the sooner the shipper under
stands this the better it will be; for if those in charge of these
properties cannot command the respect of their patrons, the
directors can do no better service to their stockholders than to
hour on the railroads of the United States have not been run
replace those in control by men who will have some respect for
by men capable of managing the transportation of the country.

They have been run, sir, by the representatives of the great
financial houses, by the promoters, by the banks.
Of the twelve men responsible for the new union-smashing
an agreement. In none of these proposals have the carriers

indicated any intention of cleaning house, but apparently pro
pose to continue the present inefficient methods of operation
policy of the railroad executives, nine, we are reliably in

formed, are opposed to that policy. They are the active
operating officials; but the other three, representing the
dominant banking interests, dictate the action of the group.
Ex uno disce omnes.
More specifically, dealing with the Esch-Cummins law,

the Wisconsin Senator goes on: This infamous law has
destroyed the very purpose which its authors professed to

believe it would achieve, for by passing that law you imposed
transportation charges upon traffic that the traffic of the
country cannot bear. The financiers, under the benefi
which shippers generally believe to exist, particularly on the

New Haven road, and possibly on other lines.
It is clear to the business interests of New England that if
the increasing of rates is carried much further the carriers will,

like Samson, ruin themselves by pulling down the industrial
structure upon which they are solely dependent and upon which
the prosperity of New England depends.
Other than New England roads may well take these

stinging words to heart. If the gentlemen who at present
own and mismanage these rich properties wish to keep
them in their own hands, it is high time for them to bestir
themselves to give cheap transportation and cut rates to a

point that will let traffic move.
470
The Nation
[VoL 112, No. 2908
The Outcome in Upper Silesia
Oh, Boston !
IN his book on the Peace Conference, Mr. E. J. Dillon

records how in an interview with an American journalist
Mr. Lloyd George interrupted his visitor to ask of his en
tourage, "Is it Upper or Lower Silesia that we are giving
away?" Well, the Upper Silesian plebiscite is over and no
part of Silesia is given away by the fiat of Paris; it re
mains German by a very heavy majority vote. The re
sult is satisfactory in that it will increase the Allied pros
pects of German indemnities; it keeps within Germany a
territory that should be inside her boundaries, and will
put heart and courage into the German people for the tasks
before them. As for Poland, there the blow is a severe one.
A correspondent of the New York Tribune cabled the other
day that if the Germans won, Poland would collapse. As
to that we shall see what we shall see. It is but just to
both sides to record that the voting passed off without dis
turbances, and this is the more remarkable as we have no
doubt from reliable documents that lie before us that the
Poles were guilty of coercion and violent oppression during
the months before the plebiscite. Doubtless there was
wrongdoing on both sides. All the more gratifying is it
to record the faultless behavior of the British troops on
duty in Silesia. In a most trying position they won the
respect of both Germans and Poles.
This Silesian plebiscite must not become of the things of
the past without dwelling upon the clear illustration it
affords of the mischief done to the world by protective
tariffs. Strictly speaking, aside from sentiment, it would
make no difference to German industry or to the world at
large which flag flew over Silesia if only there were free
trade. If German industrialists could have purchased
Silesian coal and iron without let or hindrance if these
materials were under Polish control, then they would have
stood the loss of Silesiawith much outward alligator grief
for the German Kultur to be subordinated to Polish "bar
barism"but with great inward resignation. But, of
course, what the Poles planned to do was to slap on tariffs
right off, and perhaps export bounties as well. The tariffs
were to be for revenue and the bounties and other tricks to
keep Germany from obtaining the Silesian coal and iron
which have been so necessary to her development. That
the Poles, had they thus hampered or cut off the German
market, would not have been in a position to absorb the
greater part of the Upper Silesian output themselves, did
not weigh with them. They wanted to grab for themselves
raw materials the control of which they counted upon to
save their new State from bankruptcy while weakening
Germany correspondinglya New York Times correspond
ent admitted on the day after the voting that if Upper
Silesia were lost to Germany the latter would probably be
quite unable to pay the indemnities demanded by the Allies.
All of which merely goes to prove how nationalist and
tariff lines cripple trade, barter, and exchange, and make
for hate, bloodshed, and war. The German Empire grew
great when its states combined and abolished their tariffs
against each other. Europe will and must yet abolish all its
tariffs and customs houses and supplant its narrow nation
alism with an internationalism under which the iron and
coal of Briey, of Lorraine, the Ruhr, Upper Silesia, and
Poland will be held in trust for the peoples of the Contiit, with special regard for those who are without them.
TIME was when we loved to visit Boston. We regarded

it as one of half a dozen of our large cities with a pro
nounced individuality. We used to love to treadwhen not
trying to catch a trainthe parabolas and hyperbolas of
its streets ; we liked to sniff the fishy smells of the T-Wharf
and the skinny odors of the leather district; we reveled in
baked beans, saturated with molasses and fragrant with
the bouquet of roast pork, which we stowed in our bunkers
between layers of steaming brown bread; we sat down two
or three times a day with reverence before a section of
squash pie, moist and rich with milk, and graced with a
cuticle baked nut-brown but tender as moonrise in spring.
So superior, that squash pie of New England, to the coarse
grained insipid pumpkin that is foisted upon one by the
vulgarian restaurateurs of New York! In those days Bostonians prided themselvesand rightlyupon their Bunker
Hill Monument and their accent; upon their literary clubs
and their creamed codfish; upon their Public Library and
their Museum of Fine Arts; upon their Puritanism and
their pie. In that geological agewe were there last in
the autumn of 1920the city by the Charles was not merely
big; it was Boston. It was worth all it cost to get there
from any place, even under the Esch-Cummins law.
Ah, Boston!
But recent news is depressing. Boston is elated because
while in 1880 there was one bathtub to every 40.2 persons,
there is now one to every 4.4 persons. If the ratio of in
crease is maintained, it is said, there will be a tub per per
son inside of five years. Well, what of it? What sort of a
thing is that for Bostonour Bostonto brag of? Boston
and Bunker Hill, or Boston and beanssuch associations
are historic and ennobling! But Boston and bathtubs!
Bah! The bathtub is the great symbol of our materialism
and hypocrisy. It is the proof of our belief in inward
grace through outward cleansing; of absolution by ablu
tion; of sanctification by soap. Bathing has become our
modern religion and the bathtub the family altar. It will
soon be the fashion to advertise not "four rooms and a
bath" but "four baths and a room." We shall carry our
tubs with us, like Diogenes, and excuse ourselves between
courses at dinner to withdraw and take a bath.
But we had not imagined that Bostonour Boston
would succumb to this craze, would abandon her fine indi
vidual virtues for so conventional and superficial a cult.
We might have believed it of Salt Lake City, where we noted
recently that they had forbidden smoking on the public
streets, or of some thriving towns of the Middle West
where the visitor in search of the soul of the community
hears only of the number of automobiles and the miles of
asphalt pavement laid since 1910. We shudder to think
that when next we go to Boston we may be stopped at the
city line by an inspector of the Bureau of Bathtub Boost
ing, who will inquire when last we were wet-cleaned and
if we have brought an individual swimming pool with us.
A speck of dirt will be worse in the new era than a slip of
grammar in the old. Browning will give way to blueing,
and the Boston Latin School to a soap factory.
What the Hub of the Universe needs is not more soap
bubbles but more axle grease. Her future, like her past,
should be built on Bunker, not on Buncombe HilL
Oh, Boston!
The Nation
March 30, 1921]
471
Mexico1921
I.
IntroductoryThe House Set in Order

By PAUL HANNA
EXICO has put her house in order. Fifteen million

people in that country have achieved a Government
Satisfactory to most of them. Now they are waiting to see
As you read the different daily newspapers in Mexico City

you will learn that the ministry contains here a Bolshevik
if it will prove satisfactory to the people and Government
and there a Diaz Cientifico. Workmen parade the prin

cipal streets with red flags whenever the spirit moves them
of the United States.
and are not disturbed by the authorities.
That is the truth and the issue re
specting Mexico. Mexicos present leaders are realists.

They know that a government fully approved by its own
people may be attacked and destroyed from without because
it does not suit the taste of foreign Powers. They recall
that under Porfirio Diaz Mexico had a government wholly
pleasing to the foreign world and wholly disastrous to the
Mexican masses. They dare not and will not pawn the
wealth and happiness of their country, as Diaz did, to pur
chase the praise and recognition of foreigners.
Eleven years of civil war is the price these Mexicans have
paid to escape their old bondage to native and foreign mas
ters. Those years were marked by the terror, violence, dis
appointment, and betrayals which are common to organized
bloodshed, for whatever cause. The agony of rebirth looked
at times like the throes of national death. But if the symp
toms were confusing, the outcome is clear enough. Mexico
is reborn, entirely at peace, and busy from end to end with
the development of her new domestic freedom. To make
sure this freedom exists, to understand how it applies itself
and how much its undisturbed development may contribute
to human progress, is surely the duty of every American.
For there is no menace to Mexican liberty except the mis
understanding or indifference of the American people. For
every worthy class of Americans there is a strong appeal in
what Mexico has done and is planning to do.
The revolution which began in 1910 and culminated in
May of last year had four fundamental objects in view: (1)
To give the peons land; (2) to restore political democracy;
(3) to establish the wage earners right to organize; (4) to
promote education. Today the land is being distributed among
the peons, and to all other citizens of the Republic who
wish to make agriculture their calling. Peasants who fol
lowed their fathers into slavery for the payment of their
grandfathers' debts have, in thousands of instances, re
ceived acres of their own. Regiment after regiment of the
revolutionary army is dissolving from a parasitic garrison
existence to the status of individual productive owners and
tillers of their own ground. They do not wish to soldier
because they have something else to do. They do not need
to fight because their fight has been won.
Political democracy? I saw more of it in Mexico than
exists, I believe, anywhere else in the world today. The
The Catholic
Church and the Federation of Labor conduct a series of
joint debates in a crowded theater to determine whether

proletarian rule would be just or desirable.
Perhaps the wit and good humor of this intellectual fer
ment is best illustrated by what befell a Socialist Deputy

who acted as chairman at one of these debates.
He had
taken the floor to quell some immoderate hecklers. Re

member, he said to the crowd, this audience is composed
entirely of workers and intellectuals. Bad manners would
dishonor such a gathering. Instantly a garage hand
leaped to his feet. Seor Fulano [the chairman] is

neither a workman nor an intellectual. He isa Deputy!
The house roared, but the heckling ceased.
Labor's freedom to organize, agitate, and strike is unre
stricted. Many of its activities are housed in buildings
donated by the Government.
Its independent educational
efforts enjoy semi-official subsidies. Its veteran leaders

occupy such posts as director of government factories and
director of public printing.
Books on economic subjects
which are desired and indicated by the workers are being

translated into Spanish and printed at government ex
pense, just as other works of general cultural or scientific
interest are being produced for other classes of the popu

lation.
Public education is largely in charge of the National Uni

versity, whose distinguished director, Dr. Jos Vasconcelos,
will shortly enter the cabinet as chief of the new Department

of Public Education, with an initial appropriation of some
25,000,000 pesos. The program calls for a free school and
library within reach of every child in the Republic. Hun
dreds of these schools have been opened during the past
six months.
These things Mexico has done and is planning to do for

herself.
Within her own borders no serious obstacles are
apparent. There remains only the great peril of her vast

natural wealth and the lust of alien exploiters to possess it.
Within the limits of a Constitution which gives the state
title to all subsoil treasures, but which provides for leasing
to private exploiters, I am convinced the administration of
President Obregon intends to deal generously with foreign
capitalists. Several projects are under way in the Ministry
of Finance for the repayment of interest and principal on
Minister of Finance is the ex-Provisional President whom
the external debt which has been defaulted since 1914.
Obregon succeeded after a free election by the people. The

Governor of the Federal District is an ex-cobbler who in
Under this regime the foreign world is invited to share the

bounty of Mexico's wealth, but alien capitalists will not be
permitted to set all four feet in the trough and trample
the weaklings to economic death.
If that limitation is intolerable to foreign capital there
sists upon talking personally with the hundreds of poor

persons who visit his office daily.
We must destroy the
Servile illusion about public officials, he explains. Public

buildings are placed at the disposal of any sect or faction,
however small in number, whose orators wish to denounce
or praise the administration, demand new methods of taxa
tion, or impugn the personal honor of cabinet members.
will be war against Mexico, preceded, I imagine, by a vio

lent effort of plotters in Mexico City to seize the Govern
ment and mold it nearer to the desire of business hearts.
There are plenty of eminent Mexicans willing and anxious
The Nation
472
to function in the "Cubanization" of their native land. And

they are active in persuading others that such an evolution
from independence to a place within the "Empire of North
America" represents Mexico's very desirable destiny. But
the Mexico of President Obregon and the liberated masses
is not afraid of its domestic foes. On the battlefield and
in the voting booth it has taken their measure and van
quished them successively. In the matter of both materials
and morale it is today better able than ever to crush its
Mr.
Lansing
[Vol. 112, No. 2908
internal enemies. But what about its foreign foes?

What about invasion? Mexicans know they would be
crushed. Most Mexicans, however, are in what may be
termed the Patrick Henry stage of patriotic development.
They do not believe that life is so dear nor peace so sweet
that they should be bought at the price of liberty. They
will run to their mountain shelters and fight for years
against any invasion. Let this suggest what the conquest
of Mexico must mean in terms of blood and treasure.
Lifts
the
Veil
By OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD

FROM Robert Lansing has come the most interesting
contribution to the history of the Versailles Treaty,
of the League of Nations, and of Woodrow Wilson which
has yet appeared.1 Only the intimate memoirs of Mr.
Wilson himself, Lloyd George, or Clemenceau could sur
pass it in world-wide interest, and it is doubtful if any
thing that they may write will be sufficiently detached to
surpass Mr. Lansing's statement as purely historical ma
terial. We cannot recall a similar case where an actor
in a great dramatic event has in so short a time there
after not only lifted the veil as to what happened behind
closed doors, but has so elaborately dissected the chief per
sonality of the drama. Naturally Mr. Lansing is not with
out deep personal feeling. Out of consideration for the
President he put off for thirteen months a statement of the
facts which led to his resignation's being accepted by Presi
dent Wilson in such a shabby manner. He has now set
forth, with obvious effort to be just and to confine himself
to a lawyer's presentation of the facts, the exact story of
what took place in Paris and why his mind could not "run
along" with the President's. He makes no studied personal
plea for himself; he does not stress various aspects of the
mortifying position in which Mr. Wilson placed him in
Paris; and he frequently goes out of his way to give his
former superior the benefit of any doubt, to suggest explan
atory reasons for the attitude Mr. Wilson assumed, and
to analyze situations as much as possible from the Presi
dent's point of view. Moreover, he frequently pays tribute
to the altruism and idealism of the ex-President. But he
would be more than human if in so doing he could eradicate
all trace of the sense of injury and wrong which any honor
able man must feel who has been through such an experience
and been publicly charged by his superior with something
akin to disloyalty.
For generations to come historians and moralists will, we
presume, wrangle as to the exact responsibility of Mr. Wil
son for the Paris catastrophe. Already the lines are clearly
drawn. His admirers, those, for instance, who are now rais
ing a fund of $500,000 to commemorate the ex-President's
services to the cause of peace, believe that, if only for his
enunciation of the Fourteen Points and his insistence on the
League of Nations, he deserves the highest pedestal in his
tory. They portray the President as having fallen among
thieves in Paris and as meriting the greatest credit for hav
ing achieved as much as he did in his single-handed battling
against the subtle trickeries of cynical, Old-World diplo
mats. They ask what would have happened to the beaten
enemy and to Russia if Mr. Wilson had not been there, and,
1 The Peace Negotiations. Heuffhton Mifflin Company.
sincerely believing that the League of Nations has come to

stay and is in fact the beginning of a new world-order, they
feel, as General Smuts has just put it, that Mr. Wilson
accomplished more than enough to entitle him to the thanks
of mankind.
For such as these Mr. Lansing's story affords no comfort
at all. The picture that he paints is one that no historian
can afford to overlook who proposes to draw a truthful por
trait of Mr. Wilson, and it is anything but a flattering one.
To this those of Mr. Wilson's defenders whose minds are
closed will reply that Mr. Lansing, being a dismissed official,
writes as one with a grudge. Fortunately for the former
Secretary of State, not only is he able to document his case
in considerable degree, but time has been on his side and
also the outcome of the Conference. His judgments and
opinions and prophecies have been upheld by the march of
events, just as those critics like The Nation who attacked
the treaty as soon as it appeared, as both dishonorable and
unworkable and one the American people could not accept,
have had their contentions upheld not only by the "solemn
referendum" of the American electorate last fall, but by the
daily events abroad. Mr. Lansing was perfectly clear at
the time as to what an abortion the Paris Conference had
given birth to, for on May 8, 1919, he wrote of it in his
diary:
The impression made by it [the treaty] is one of disappoint
ment and of depression. The terms of peace appear immeasur
ably harsh and humiliating, while many of them seem to me
impossible of performance. ... It must be admitted in hon
esty that the League is an instrument of the mighty to check
the normal growth of national power and national aspirations
among those who have been rendered impotent by defeat. . . .
This war was fought by the United States to destroy forever
the conditions which produced it. These conditions have not
been destroyed. They have been supplanted by other conditions
equally productive of hatred, jealousy, and suspicion.
To this he added his belief that the League was simply
an alliance of the five great military Powers, that justice
was secondary and might primary in the settlement, and
that the treaty could not bring peace "because it is founded
on the shifting sands of self-interest." "Mr. Wilson," Mr.
Lansing now declares, "won a great personal triumph, but
he did so by surrendering the fundamental principle of the
equality of nations. In his eagerness to 'make the world
safe for democracy' he abandoned international democracy
and became the advocate of international autocracy."
Nothing could be added today, after two fateful years,
during which the world has not progressed further toward
peace, to this characterization in 1919 of a treaty which was
madness from the beginning, nor to this analysis of the
March 30, 1921]
The Nation
League, for it was precisely because the League, as now con

stituted, gives to the five dominant Powers control of the
world that its defeat in the Senate was made possible. Mr.
Lansing quickly saw, too, that instead of the League's being
created as an agency to prevent war it was chiefly to be an
agency to carry out the terms of peace. He was utterly
opposed to the interweaving of the Covenant of the League,
as Colonel House seems also to have been, since to this fact,
according to common report, is to be attributed the break
between Colonel House and Mr. Wilson. Indeed, Mr. Lan
sing directly charges the ex-President with misrepresenting
facts to the American people on March 28, 1919, when he
assured the public that it was not true that the drafting
and interweaving of the Covenant was responsible for delay
ing the peace. "Why attempt," wrote Mr. Lansing in his
diary (which in Paris had a lock upon it besides being
always locked in a drawer), "to refute what is manifestly
true?" He admits, however, that the ex-President's action
may have been due to his having failed to appreciate the
exact situation existing at Parisan alternative not compli
mentary to the President's acumen.
Mr. Lansing was opposed to the League of Nations as now
constituted from the beginning. As far back as May 25,
1916, a year before we went into the war, in a letter to Mr.
Wilson he opposed the doctrines of the League to Enforce
Peace, declaring with rarely prophetic vision that "popular
opinion as well as the Senate would reject" any treaty which
limited our independence of action to the will of other
nations across the seas. He did not believe that America
should bind itself to fight wars abroad at the behest of an
international body and leaned to the opinion that the use
of force in compelling acceptance of a decision could be
avoided by a resort to economic compulsion. He wanted to
obviate the necessity of forcing nations to abstain from
invading other countries by asking the nations to give a
mutual understanding not to impair the territory or the sov
ereignty of any state. Just as Senator Knox has argued
that we should build on the Hague Tribunal, so Mr. Lansing
wanted the basic principle for the new organization to be
judicial settlement. From the beginning he had valuable
constructive criticisms to make. He found, to his grief, on
the way to France that political expediency and diplomatic
adjustment "tinctured with morality" were to be the Presi
dent's basis for the settlement of international controversy.
In Paris he laid before the President a memorandum on the
"Constitutional power to provide coercion in a treaty," in
which he declared that any attempt to contract by treaty to
create a state of war upon certain contingencies would be
unconstitutional, "null and inoperative." But as was fre
quently the President's habit in dealing with Mr. Lansing,
Mr. Wilson neither acknowledged receipt of the covering
letter nor of the memorandum, and he did not consult with
his Secretary about the matter.
Mr. Lansing thinks that Mr. Wilson's distrust of him
came originally from the fact that he is a lawyer. At the
conference of the American Peace Commissioners on Janu
ary 10, 1919, Mr. Wilson bluntly told Mr. Lansing that he
"did not intend to have lawyers drafting the treaty of
peace." Thereafter, Mr. Lansing, and with him Mr. White
and General Bliss, were left much in outer darkness. Mr.
Lansing's book contains a picture of these three gentlemen
sarcastically entitled "The Daily Conference of the Amer
ican Peace Commission." This abbreviated Commission
often knew very little of what was going on and sometimes
473
ascertained that from members of foreign peace commis

sions or the press representatives. Yet when Mr. Wilson
sailed for Paris Mr. Lansing was left in charge, or in a coregency with Colonel House, and, of course, when the League
of Nations Covenant was finished it was largely the work
of a lawyer, Mr. David Hunter Miller of New York. It
would have been easy for Mr. Wilson to relieve Mr. Lan
sing if he had lost faith in him on the ground that he was
needed in the State Department, but he kept him in Paris,
and for patriotic reasons Mr. Lansing hung on although sub
jected to great humiliation. In his book he discusses the
question whether Mr. Wilson can brook criticism or not. He
hopes that the President's attitude toward him was due to
a misunderstanding of his [Lansing's] motives, but he is
compelled to record his belief that Mr. Wilson "was irri
tated by opposition to his views, however moderately urged,
and that he did not like to have his judgment questioned
even in a friendly way." Alas, there are dozens upon dozens
of others who have come to this same conclusion after per
sonal experience; it is, to date, the sole known reason for
Mr. Wilson's throwing over Colonel House, than whom no
man ever served his country or his chief more unselfishly
or more devotedly. Again, says Mr. Lansing in the course
of his portraiture, "He [Mr. Wilson] seemed to lack the
ability to forgive one who had in any way offended him or
opposed him." And it is also enlightening that "there is in
the President's mentality a strange mixture of positiveness
and indecision which is almost paradoxical"; "suddenness
rather than promptness has always marked his decisions";
"to put off a decision to the last moment is a trait of Mr.
Wilson's character." Mr. Lansing's revelations do anything
but enhance the credit of Mr. Wilson's personality.
How wide the breach between the two men was appears
from each successive chapter. The Secretary of State
wanted a carefully thought-out American program to take
to Paris; Mr. Wilson took nonehe admitted he had not
even read the secret treaties which were the key to the
whole political side of the struggle. Then they disagreed
on self-determination, Mr. Lansing believing that if applied
to every case it would become a source of political instability
and rebellion. Mr. Lansing was also absolutely opposed to
the system of mandates, originated by General Smuts, and
he charges that the Allies set afoot a deliberate propaganda
to induce the United States to accept mandates over Con
stantinople and Armenia, both of which would be a heavy
burden to the mandatory Power, while reserving for them
selves rich and prosperous territories. Those who were en
gaged in this propaganda did so, Mr. Lansing says, for the
purpose of taking "advantage of the unselfishness of the
American people and of the altruism and idealism of Presi
dent Wilson." Then Mr. Lansing, in this case rightly, op
posed the President by favoring the speedy negotiation of
a preliminary treaty which should contain a set of declara
tions as to the League of Nations and an agreement for a
future international conference to draft the details. Had
this policy been adopted and vexed territorial questions left
to later negotiation the whole situation of the world would
be vastly better today, a financial catastrophe would not be
so imminent, and hundreds of thousands of people would
have been saved from death by slow starvation.
To the proposed "triple alliance" treaty with France and
England Mr. Lansing, General Bliss, and Mr. White were
entirely opposed, and the fact that this treaty, which would
have bound us to spring to France's rescue in perpetuo, has
The Nation
never had a moment's serious consideration in Washington
bears out the correctness of their position. Mr. Lansing
declares that this proposed treaty was agreed to by Mr.

Wilson solely in order to do away with the French demand
for an international military staff and for the creation of
an independent Rhenish Republic (with which we are still
threatened in March, 1921).
But the classic example of the way Mr. Wilson was be

trayed by his expediency and sacrificed everything for the
Covenant still remainsShantung.
Mr. Ray Stannard
Baker, it appears, went before the Chinese delegation after
the President's surrender and said to its members that:
the President was very sorry that he had not been able to do
more for China but that he had been compelled to accede to
Japan's demand in order to save the League of Nations.

Not unnaturally Mr. Lansing describes this in his diary as
an iniquitous bargain and a flagrant denial of undoubted
right. Mr. Lansing points out that it was the result of
secret diplomacy, because the arguments which prevailed
with the President were those to which he listened when in
secret council with M. Clemenceau and Mr. Lloyd George.

So murder will out. Mr. Lansing declares that the Japanese
threats were nothing but bluff, but the President yielded
before them as he threw overboard, one after another, all
of the Fourteen Points. Even members of the British peace

staff bewailed the fact: they had counted on him to stand
firmly by his guns and face down the intriguers.
It is the Presidents secret diplomacy in Paris that Mr.
Lansing most severely criticizes. When the writer of these
lines left the Crillon after the indignation meeting of the
American correspondents when it became known that Mr.
Wilson had surrendered on the open covenants of peace, a
distinguished Kansas editor prophetically remarked to him:
Its all up with Mr. Wilson. Lloyd George, Clemenceau,
and Orlando will now take Mr. Wilson into a private cham
ber and rob him to their hearts content, and the outside
world will not even hear his cries for mercy. Mr. Lansing
on January 29, 1919, remonstrated with the President, de
claring that his private conferences were making a bad im

pression everywhere.
The President heard him in silence.
On March 29, Mr. Lansing told his faithful diary that

Secret diplomacy is reaping a new harvest of execrations
and condemnations. Will the practice ever cease? The
record of the Paris proceedings he later declared to be one
of the abandonment of principle, of the failure to follow
precepts unconditionally proclaimed, of the repudiation by
act, if not by word, of a new and better type of interna
tional intercourse.
It is no exaggeration to say that if Mr. Lansing, when

he appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
on his return from Paris, had blurted out the whole truth
he has recorded here, the treaty fight would have ended
[Vol. 112, No. 2908
admits that his position was paradoxical.
I was opposed
to the Treaty but signed it and favored its ratification. . . .
Even if the Treaty was bad in certain provisions; so long

as the President remained inflexible and insistent, its rati
fication without change seemed a duty to humanity. He

still thinks he was right in this position, but in so doing
he is guilty of that very expediency of which he accuses the
President. We were to swallow monstrous wrongs, to break
our own plighted faith so as to get the miserable old treaty
done and over with ! For the sake of peace we were to
become particeps criminis. Fortunately, it was not to be,
and now we have Briands word that the treaty is dead.
But this paradoxical position of Mr. Lansing's raises
anew the whole question of his own position in Paris.
Ought he not to have resigned, particularly after the Shan
tung outrage?
There can be no question that had he done
so it would have been to his profit.
He himself says that
he withheld his resignation because it would have un
doubtedly caused an unfortunate, if not a critical, situation.

He bore unbearable slights in order to have the American
delegation present an unbroken front in the face of the
enemy. But after all he compromised with his conscience.

Like so many others he subordinated that conscience to
loyalty, and to the outside world sponsored what he knew

to be monstrous wrongs; he was betrayed by the hide
bound regularity of the place-holder. He is indignant at
Mr. Bullitt for what he terms the betrayal of a confidence
in telling the Senate Committee what Mr. Lansing's real
views were. But at least Mr. Bullitt refused to be a party

to the confidence game which was then being worked on the
American peoplewhen they were being told that the

spurious coin offered them was the pure gold with which
the reconstitution of the world was to be achieved. Loyalty

to one's superior and to one's crowd can go much too far.
There are times when a man should place his insistence
upon serving the right and his soul above all else, and as
his decision goes so is his final place in history often fixed.

It seems to us that the place for Mr. Lansing to have spoken
out was Paris, and the time, March, 1919; not March, 1921.
Now he is compelled to write a defense of his paradoxical
position. Had he, like Wolsey, served his God as he served
his country in Paris, had he refused to compromise, he

would today be beyond the need of any defense, and, in
his shining righteousness, would have been one of the
patriotic figures of the country.
great
Moreover, it is quite possible now to speculate as to

what would have happened if Mr. Lansing, instead of per
Suading General Bliss to destroy the letter of resignation
which that officer wrote, had joined with him and Mr.
Henry White in throwing down the gauntlet to Mr. Wilson.
If instead of Mr. Lansing's reasoning with the President
those three gentlemen had demanded that they be treated

as something else than dummies, under penalty of imme
at least six months earlier. If after its publication now

there is any prospect left for an American acceptance of
the Covenant we shall be very much surprised. For we
believe the reasoning of Mr. Lansing as to the Covenant,
diate resignation and a public statement, something would

have happened. Similarly, a united front of these three
gentlemen on the Shantung issue with the threat of truth
the crimes of the treaty, and its fundamental errors to be
telling would have probably stopped that outrage.
so sound as to be unanswerable. Expediency may have
We need open diplomacy for a new and better type of
ruled in Paris; there is no need for it now. Undoubtedly
international intercourse, as Mr. Lansing affirms in this
as the financial situation in Europe gets worse we shall be

told again that it is all our fault for not accepting Mr.
book, but even more we need statesmen who will speak out
at any cost when statesmanship becomes a magnificent con
Wilson's handicraft and entering the Leaguewhich pre
spiracy against right and justice; we need statesmen and
supposes our ability to have dominated it had we entered
diplomatists who will serve the truth first and last.
it.
who begin to do so will be among the great men of histery.
Mr. Lansing favored our accepting the treaty.
He
Those
The Nation
March 30, 1921]
475
Exit Georgia
By PAXTON HIBBEN
HE most significant event in connection with the Rus

sion situation that has occurred since the collapse of
the Wrangel adventure took place on February 19. Georgia,

the last hold of the anti-Bolshevists between India and the
Mediterranean and between the White Sea and the Persian
Gulf, turned soviet.
At the crossroads of the world be
tween East and West, Georgia is the last of the Trans
caucasia states that separate Bolshevist Russia from Bol

shevist Turkey to succumb to the soviet influence. The
event is the culmination of a long campaign of quiet but
effective propaganda emanating from the Kremlin, whose

strength has been not so much in what Soviet Russia can
or will do for the Transcaucasia states as in what the
Western European Powers have failed to do for them. For

precisely three years the Transcaucasia states have waited
upon some action by Peace Conference, Supreme Council,
Assembly of the League of Nations, or the individual Euro
pean governments vitally concerned in maintaining the
road to India and the Middle East open for the non-soviet
world, to enable them to stand alone.
They have waited
in vain.
When it is recalled that from Batum, Georgia, on the

Black Sea, the route runs which forms the most direct way
to Tabriz, Teheran, and all Persia, and that from Batum,
through Baku and across the Caspian to Krasnavodsk, is
the shortest way from Western Europe to Bokhara, Khiva,
Afghanistan, and all northern India, the importance of the

conversion of Georgia to the soviet idea is apparent. The
all rail route to India via the Syrian desert and southern
Persia, for which Great Britain arranged with France on
December 23, is a mere makeshift intended to discount the
loss of the one natural route that has served mankind for
countless centuriesthat across the Transcaucasian isth
mus. From a political standpoint it is not that Russia has

gained so muchthe road to Persia, Bokhara, Afghanistan,
and India has been open to the Soviets since the annihila
tion of the Denikin army a year ago. What is significant
is that the political influences which are opposing bolshe

vism have lost their last base of operations in the Middle
East, anywhere.
There is notor at least there should not beanything
surprising in the sovietization of the Georgian Republic. It
has been coming for a long time, and those in Europe who
have given the matter even superficial consideration must
have been aware of it. On November 11, 1919, I filed a
press dispatch to the Chicago Tribune describing the
abortive attempt to effect a bolshevist revolution in Georgia
which even then only failed by the narrowest margin. My
message was stopped at Constantinople by Admiral Bristol,
who sent Commander Haynes to Tiflis to ask me what I
meant by trying to send such a dispatch. I tried to con
vince Commander Haynes that the message was true in
every detail, that Georgia was even then ripe for revolution,
and that if any serious attempt were made to bring about
a change of government in Georgia it would probably suc
ceed. I told him that the Georgian army was shot through
with bolshevism and could not be counted upon to resist the
Soviet influence, and quite a number of other things which
are plain to anyone, now. Commander Haynes got most
of his information from Russian Czarist refugees, and

would believe nothing else; so my message was never passed.
Nevertheless, a serious attempt at a soviet revolution has
been made in Georgia at last, and has succeeded. On March
10, even Batum, under the very guns of the Allied Black
Sea fleet, went Soviet with little struggle. So much for
censorship.
Since November 11, 1919, a great many things have hap
pened in Transcaucasia; but none of them has strengthened
the position of the Bolshevists opponents. Denikin was de
feated. Wrangel made his attempt and failed miserably.
Mr. Colby wrote his celebrated note of August 11, 1920, in
which he refused to recognize the independence of the so
called republics of Georgia and Azerbaijan. The Armenian
and Georgian Republics were refused admission to the
League of Nations. Mustapha Kemal swept into Armenia
and conquered the country in contempt of President Wilson's
arbitration of the Armenian boundary with Turkey. Most
significant of all, the Moslem Republic of Azerbaijan on
April 28, 1920, by a comparatively bloodless revolution
within the country, and not through any invasion by the
Red army of Russia, turned bolshevistand liked it.
The defection of Azerbaijan was the most serious blow to
the anti-bolshevists not only in Transcaucasia and the Near
East generally, but also in Western Europe. Not only did

it furnish the partisans of communism a base of operations
from which India, Persia, and Turkey could readily be
reached, but it provided a local Red army, recruited among
the Tartars of Azerbaijan, with which whatever military
operations might seem advisable could be carried out with

no drain on the armed forces of Soviet Russia, proper.
There has been a concerted effort in press dispatches to
show that a large Russian Red army has been maintained in

Transcaucasia. On January 12, for example, the New York
Times published a Constantinople dispatch stating that the
Eleventh Soviet Russian Army had been withdrawn from
Armenia and that the bolshevist troops in Georgia had like
wise been ordered out. Of course there were no bolshevist
troops in Georgia and eye-witnesses who have just arrived

from Tiflis inform me that the bolshevist troops in Armenia
were not from Russia at all, but from Baku.
It was the
radical Russian and Armenian workmen in the oil fields of
Azerbaijan who effected the revolution in that country and

who were at once formed into a soviet army for Trans
caucasian use.
The most serious blow to the anti-Bolshevists in the de
fection of Azerbaijan was, however, the fact that compara

tive prosperity followed the sovietization of Azerbaijan.
Where the British during their occupation of Transcaucasia,
between November, 1918, and July 15, 1920, had kept the
oil wells of Baku closed in an effort to break the oil-land
owners and thus force them to sell their holdings to British
capitalists for a song, Soviet Russia opened up the oil fields

again and 60,000 idle and discontented workmen were once
more able to earn enough to live on. Of course, Soviet
Russia profited by the oil; but the concrete example of mate
rial prosperity following the adoption of a Soviet system

was worth far more to the communists than fuel oil.
It
was the oil of successful propaganda, and the Russian
476
The Nation
agents scattered throughout Transcaucasia lost nothing of

the talking advantage that this fact gave them. In an
Armenia without other food than that furnished through
American charity; without adequate means of defense
against their secular enemies, the Turks; with no agricul
tural implements, beasts of burden, or other means of mate
rial rehabilitation; overrun with almost half a million
pathetic and helpless refugees from Turkish Armenia, whose
presence further impoverished an already destitute land,
propaganda of this nature was bound to be irresistible.
Independent since 1918, recognized by the United States
de facto on April 23, 1920, the Armenians, with amazing
patience and faith in the promises of America and Western
Europe, had resisted every communist influence. Mr.
Colby's categorical pronouncement, on August 11, 1920, in
respect of "Finland proper, ethnic Poland, and such terri
tory as may by agreement form a part of the Armenian
state," that "the aspirations of these nations for inde
pendence are legitimate," seemed to hold forth a definite
prospect of urgently needed material aid.
At that very hour, however, the Turkish Nationalists
were preparing an offensive against the Armenian Republic.
Pleas and appeals for assistance launched broadcast by the
Armenian Government brought only fine phrases. Late in
October the attack began. On November 4 Kars fell and
the victorious Turkish army swept through Armenia virtu
ally unresisted. The lesson was unmistakable: Azerbaijan
had prospered by adopting communism. By fighting com
munism, Armenia had been destroyed. On December 6,
therefore, the proletariat of Armenia rose in revolt against
a government whose best men spent most of their time in
Paris or Geneva or San Remo or London, following the
Supreme Council about begging for help which never came.
The Socialist Soviet Republic of Armenia was proclaimed.
Only Georgia remained. With Georgia, the pressure of
poverty and economic anarchy had never been so great as
with Azerbaijan and Armenia. There were, it is true,
several hundred thousand refugees in Georgia alsomostly
anti-bolshevist Russians who had fled to Tiflis with what
wealth they could carry, non-producers, useless alike for
work or war. But Georgia has two outlets on the sea, at
Batum and Poti, and a certain amount of foodstuffs and
necessary supplies could be obtained from the Western
world. The Georgians were pinched, certainly, and their
paper money being valueless outside Transcaucasia they
had difficulty in paying for what they required from
abroad.
But Georgia produces the best manganese in the world
and manganese is greatly in demand ; manganese was there
fore bartered for food and materials of first necessity. Georgia
had not formed the very frontier and fighting ground of
war from 1914 to 1920, as had Armenia and Azerbaijan.
The returning troops of the disintegrated Russian Caucasus
army, who swept northward after the bolshevist revolution
of 1918, destroying as they went, passed Georgia by while
they laid waste what war had left standing in Armenia and
Azerbaijan. Georgia, too, had a railroad which connected
the interior with the Black Sea and, through Azerbaijan
(when there happened to be peace between the two coun
tries) , with the Caspian. What industries the Russians had
established in Transcaucasia were in Georgia. Tiflis, a city
of a quarter of a million before the war, grown almost to
a million from the influx of refugees, boasts electric lights,
electric street cars, factories, mills, a grand opera, a Rus
[Vol. 112, No. 2908
sian ballet, and excellently paved, well-laid-out streets. What

prosperity had escaped the blight of war in Transcaucasia
was centered in Georgia.
The Government, albeit a socialist republic, was far from
bolshevist. Some of the best educated and cleverest politi
cal figures of Imperial Russia were in the Georgian Govern
ment, and they were intelligent enough to see that socialism
was the order of the day and to accept the socialistic trend.
Large estates were confiscated. The manganese mines and
the silk cocoon crop, constituting together the principal
sources of revenue from exports, were nationalized and the
proceeds of their sale applied to the purchase of supplies by
the Georgian Government. The great private clubs with
their ornate gardens were thrown open to all comers for a
few cents' admission. A seat at the opera cost eight cents,
and everybody went. On the whole, a distinct effort was
made in Georgia to meet the demands of the more radical
element while at the same time retaining a form of govern
ment with which the Western European nations would be
willing to deal.
President Jordania, with his long record of service to the
doctrines of Karl Marx, inspired confidence in the radicals,
while Eugene Gueguechekori, a young man of marked cul
ture and cosmopolitanism, who acted as President during
the almost permanent illness of Jordania, treated with the
various European missions according to the best traditions
of Western diplomacy. David Ghambashidze, plenipotenti
ary of Georgia in London and Paris, was a man of the
world who inspired the fullest confidence in the stability
of his Government and the good sense of his compatriots.
Even the reactionary French could scarcely shy at a govern
ment in which Prince Napoleon Murat, a great-great grand
son of Napoleon's marshal and first cousin of Prince Joachim
Murat, Senator of France, held a high place in the ministry
for foreign affairs.
There was therefore every reason why the European
Powers should, from their point of view, do all in their
power to aid the menshevist government of Georgia to main
tain itself, and none why Georgia should have been left to
be overwhelmed by the rising tide of communism. Yet
they did not. Every policy, every act of Britain, France,
and Italy in Georgia from the beginning of the British
occupation, immediately after the armistice in 1918, and
following the departure of the German mission to Trans
caucasia on October 12, 1918, until the final reluctant with
drawal of the British troops last July, was calculated to
exploit the country to the maximum, to reduce both Gov
ernment and people to a degree of poverty and want so
desperate that this wholesale exploitation might be the
more cheaply and more readily compassed.
The crudity with which the Georgian Republic and the
Georgian people were held up and looted is scarcely believ
able. There were three Allied "missions" in Tiflis when we
arrived in the late summer of 1919, going full swing
British, French, and Italian. They were there in a blaze
of war-like uniformsbankers, promoters, engineers, who
had never seen a gun or heard a shot fired, and whose gen
eral's stars were shiny newto impress the natives with
their importance and authority. Their business was con
cession huntingmining rights, water rights, railway con
cessions, municipal contracts, loan flotationsanything not
nailed down. For its independence Georgia must mortgage
itself, body, boots, and breeches, for generations to come, by
much the same method of protected foreign capital invest
March 30, 1921]
The Nation
477
ment as Venizelos had pledged in Greece as the price of his

continued premiership.
The great copper mines of Alaverdi, in the Borchalo
district, immediately south of Tiflis, were the capital prize.
No sooner had the Allied missions arrived in Georgia than
their intrigues to secure possession of this valuable property
brought on a ten days' war between Armenia and Georgia,
which Gen. Sir W. Rycroft ended by erecting Borchalo into
a neutral zone. The French thereupon secured the mines
from the Armenians, but the British countered by award
ing the disputed district, mines and all, to Georgia, without
the knowledge of the French. It was this anomalous situa
tion, in which nationalistic passions had been artificially
stimulated from without, which finally led to the hostilities
between Soviet Armenia and Georgia, just ended with the
sovietization of Georgia.
Similar procedure was followed by the Allied missions
over the manganese mines of Mingrelia, the tobacco fields
of Sukhum, the silk orchards of Kutais, and everything else
of value or prospective value in the Georgian Republic. It
was a scramble, with each mission undercutting the others,
intriguing, cajoling, offering bribes of influence with the
Peace Conference to obtain commercial prizes, or threaten
ing the partition of Georgia among the other Transcaucasian states to prevent a concession going to rival interests.
The British specialized in loans. A brigadier general rep
resented a well-known financial house in London, with the
aim of tying Georgia up by some such permanent mortgage
as the Anglo-Persian agreement of August, 1919. The
French specialized in mines, while the Italians, with an eye
to immediate turnover, sold rifles, ammunition, and shoes
captured from the Austrians to Georgians, Azerbaijanians,
and Armenians without favoritism, to equip armies in each
country to fight the others.
And in this process of exploitation the Transcaucasian
ruble (based, after all, on quite as sound a foundation as
pound, franc, or lira) was hammered down by the concerted
action of three great Powers until its market value was little
more than that of Confederate money. Then with their
paper pounds, francs, and lire, they bought labor at a dollar
a month and despoiled a poverty-stricken and desperate
people of their last personal valuablesjewelry, rugs, furs,
silverwhich the Georgians were forced to sell for bread.
In Batum I counted sixty bales of ten priceless Persian
rugs, each, which one Allied army officer had bought and
was shipping home. He had passed them through the
Georgian customs duty free by declaring them as army
blankets !
With a get-rich-quick opportunity like this within reach,
none of the European nations wanted to see Georgia made
economically stable by the advance of adequate credits to
enable the little republic to begin its own regeneration. And
resist as they would the efforts of these advance agents of
civilization to strip their country of the last resources upon
which it must depend for admission on a practicable basis
to the markets of the world, the Georgians were forced to
yield little by littlea concession here, a mining right
there, a municipal contract or an order for railway rolling
stock. And with each grant yielded, the avidity of the
exploiters grew. The cash to enable the Georgian Govern
ment to pay its army, to employ its idle and grumbling
workmen, to reduce its ruinous taxes, was withheld always
a little longer to permit some belated profiteer to get in on
the ground floor. It is the same policy which the Entente
Powers have followed with every little nation, from Poland

and Greece to Azerbaijan and Siam, since the armistice.
In the case of Georgia, which is merely typical, the goose
was laying the golden eggs. But the representatives of
Western Europe were blind to the increasing thousands in
Georgia who did not know where their next meal was to
come from. I saw families who had known every luxury
and who had never known anything elsethrown into the
streets because they could no longer pay a rent of $5 per
month. And when I went to the landlord to protest against
such cruelty, I found him living in a great house from which
he was slowly stripping the furniture, the table linen, the
silver, room by room, to keep from starving.
It was horrible, grotesque, topsy-turvy. The country was
rich, the people eager to work. They had their outlet on
the sea (when the British finally evacuated it) to ship their
products abroad, and their products were in demand in the
world's markets. Yet by a combination of spoliationa
stupid combination, that killed the goose of the golden eggs
the country was robbed instead of being helped to its
feet. The same is true of Greece, of Poland, of Austria, of
Serbia, of Syria, of Persiaand will be true of Turkey, if
Mustapha Kemal permits it.
Of course, in Georgia it could not last. Soviet Russia
was too near at hand. Communism may not be desirable,
but to many it is preferable to economic slavery. The ex
ample of Azerbaijan was there at hand, where an escape
from Western European exploitation to communism had
meant prosperity. The patience of the Georgians ended.
After three years of waiting, the Supreme Allied Council
finally, a month ago, recognized Georgia as de jure an in
dependent nation.
It was too late. The operation was successfulbut the
patient died.
Acquaintance
By DAVID MORTON
All that we know of April is her way
Of coming on the world through gentle springs,
Turning the hedge a whitening line of spray,
Staining the grass with shivered, golden things.
She has a way of rain against the sun,
Of moonlit orchards, ghostly white and still,
And the slow, silver coming, one by one,
Of burning stars above a purple hill.
And this is all we know of such as she,
These shining names she leaves for us to call:
The whitening hedge, the showery apple tree,
And golden jonquils gathering by a wall. . . .
All that we know of April is her way,
And these bright legends we have learned to say.
The second article in the series on Mexico1921 by

Paul Hanna, entitled A Labor Republic, will appear in
the forthcoming issue of The Nation.
The Nation
478
Unemployment
and
Closed
[Vol. 112, No. 2908
Shop
in
Cohoes
By CEDRIC LONG
COHOES, New York, has an unsavory reputation in both
labor and social welfare circles. It is a textile city. It
is a city owned by absentee landlords. Like so many com
munities that produce great wealth, it is indescribably dirty,
ramshackle, unkempt. The rest of the State is quite in
order if it asks how and why all this happens.
There is no finer water power anywhere than that of the
Mohawk River just before it empties into the Hudson. Out
siders went there years ago and bought the rights to that
power. They also bought up a great deal of land. Today
these outsiders own one of the largest hydro-electric plants
in the country, millions of dollars' worth of land, buildings
and machinery, and hundreds of the tenements in which the
workers live. The people of Cohoes own almost nothing.
The local newspaper is supported by outside advertisers.
There is no real public library in town, no reading room, no
decent hotel or restaurant, no Y. M. C. A. A Salvation Army
station leads a precarious existence; and this winter an out
side evangelist has been giving the Protestant population
twenty-eight consecutive days of hellfire-and-brimstone reli
gion. The worker of Cohoes, in order to make a living,
mortgages very much of his body and soul to non-residents,
and now unemployment takes from this worker even his
right to make a livingall of which requires an explanation.
During the war the textile industry prospered. Cohoes
ran its thirty cotton, shoddy, batting, and woolen underwear
mills to capacity, manufacturing surgical gauze, cotton bat
ting, and woolen underwear. Between 4,500 and 5,000 men
and women were employed at this work. Profits were high,
wages good, and the city prospered. Workers paid their
bills and laid up savings and it was not until the late spring
of 1920 that real depression began.
But within the industry itself labor history was being
made. Previous to the war, the manufacturers had, of
course, taught their help the good American lesson which
demonstrates that competition leads to success. The work
ers competed valiantly for jobs and for favor in the eyes of
the boss. They competed, but wages went steadily down
ward and the speed of the machinery increased. A few of
the wisest among them began to realize that the truly suc
cessful competitor in all this was the owner of the industry ;
and a union was started. But war came along and brought
good fortune to the workers. Formerly they had competed
for jobs; now the jobs grew in number and competed for
workers. The bosses vied with one another for the favor
of the men and bid against each other for labor. Wages
went up and organizing activity was not discouraged. By
1919, the United Textile Workers had almost 100 per cent
of the industry unionized. The workers, for the first time
in their history, had economic power.
And yet, economic power is not economic understanding.
There are 3,000 workers in the twenty woolen mills of the
city alone. By late spring of 1920 orders came to the manu
facturers in smaller volume than formerly. A few orders
were canceled. Some of the manufacturers began to wonder
if all was right with the market. Labor, however, was
blindly optimistic. When the little independent union of
mule spinners found a grievance with the powerful United
Textile Workers over a matter of death benefit to the family
of a deceased worker, warfare started between the two labor

groups and the U. T. W. struck for a closed shop. The bosses
tried some conciliatory methods at first, hoping that good
times might continue if serious labor trouble could be
averted.
Finally, the manufacturers saw the inevitability of a dead
market. They decided to put the blame for unemployment
upon labor. Therefore, when the union leaders came around
next time and talked closed shop, they complied. On July 6
the woolen mills of the city were closed to all union members ;
and workers were told that they must apply to the office
individually for jobs. A handful drifted back, worked spas
modically for a few days or a few weeks, and, with one ex
ception, the mills closed down entirely. The industry was
headed at full speed for an abyss; the union got the entire
credit throughout the city for pushing it over the edge, for
throwing thousands of God-fearing men and women out of
work, for taking bread from the mouths of women and chil
dren, for creating eight months of unemployment. Priest,
newspaper editor and preacher, storekeeper and mill fore
man will tell you that the workers are floundering in a hole
of their own digging, and many of the workers half believe
it. In the early autumn the Harmony Cotton Mills gradually
closed down and threw 1,500 more out of work. Since most
of these also belong to the union, they likewise were held
responsible for their own unemployment. The bosses got the
credit for good times, the workers for bad.
Recently the manufacturers, textile and others, in the
cities of Troy, Cohoes, and Waterford have united in a TriCity Manufacturers' Association for the more effective wag
ing of their open-shop campaign. Their secretary is a man
who revels in unemployment and union-baiting. When he
left the Poughkeepsie Manufacturers' Association office to
take up work in Cohoes, the labor body of that city gave him
a send-off in the form of a little pamphlet especially devoted
to the exposure of his union-breaking methods and to warn
Cohoes unionists against him.
To date this open-shop campaign is highly successful The
textile workers have no fighting power whatever. Troy col
lar workers have never been successfully organized, anyway.
At present this Manufacturers' Association is conducting a
fight against two or three smaller miscellaneous industries
which are on strikethe millions of dollars of the Manufac
turers' Association pitted against the staying power of a
few score workers. Newspapers report that one factory is
patrolled by State guards, each guard accompanied by a
police dog. And meanwhile there are thousands of unem
ployed walking the streets of these cities, anyone of whom
may have a job in these factories by applying to the TriCity Manufacturers' employment bureau.
This secretary informed me that his office was a "clearing
house for information" about workers (the union leaders al
ready know it for a black-list office) . I asked about discrim
ination. "We don't object to unions, but of course none of
our members would hire a man who has been agitating and
getting his name in the papers and that sort of thing." I
thought of the Association of Textile Manufacturers in
Passaic and their "employment office," which is today the
center for a vast network of espionage covering the entire
March 30, 1921]
The Nation
city and environs and costing thousands of dollars a month.

The Tri-City Manufacturers' Association is still young. In
time it will doubtless develop the effectiveness of similar
organizations in Passaic, Duquesne, Pennsylvania, and the
Virginia coal fields. It has not yet begun wholesale espion
age simply because it has not met the resistance which war
rants such extensive methods. Upstate labor is extremely
conservative; unemployment is prevalent. The opening of
this office under such circumstances is a compliment.
A 22 Y2 per cent cut in wages is scheduled for all textile
mills upon resumption of work. Open shop is also on the
schedule, of course. Huge bills to the grocer, the coal dealer,
the landlord haunt many of the workers night and day.
While they look ahead to all this, they are wandering about
in a city of mean, small tenements, no recreation except the
cheap movies, dirty streets, bleak winds, and a pervasive
atmosphere of pessimism and gloom. Of the 7,500 wage
earners in the city one-third have been idle since last sum
mer, approximately two-thirds since autumn, yet the Polish,
Russian, and Italian populations have devised methods of
saving money. The sufferers are American and French
Canadian, and even these run deeply into debt and endure
extreme hardships before they withdraw their savings from
the banks. It seems incredible that a city of 23,000 people,
after many months without income, should have between
eleven and twelve thousand savings accounts in its banks,
and that not a store should have been forced to close its
doors.
The working man of Cohoes, as an individual, is not, gen
erally, experiencing any real physical hardship. He could
continue his present manner of life for several weeks more.
His worst suffering is mental and spiritual. He has con
tinual cause for worry about the future of his family and
himself. But the working man, as union member, is suffer
ing severely. His organization is down in the mud and
being trampled upon and everyone knows it and says so. In
place of the spirit of independence which belongs to a man
who carries a union card and fights beside his fellow-worker
for decent living conditions there is now humiliation and
anger. Doubtless the textile union of Cohoes was a very
feeble affair, lacking in real leadership, a remnant of the
worst traditions of antiquated unionism; but it was the
instrument he had used to raise himself from a position of
abject poverty and servility. He never philosophized much
about capital and labor; he was willing to be patronized a
good deal by his boss, and he thought of a "class war" only
as a mental concoction of anarchists. But he now has a de
veloping hatred of certain vague forces which conspire to
push him back to where he was ten years ago. The press,
some of his friends, the churches, all tell him that he, with
his union, caused this trouble. The movies and the school
teacher repeat the charge to his children. Are they right?
He joins a few of his fellow-unionists for long talks in the
union hall and together they try to untangle the great
puzzle.
Meanwhile, the manufacturers, some and perhaps all of
the ministers and priests, the bankers, many of the mer
chants, are happy and comfortable. Optimism prevails
throughout the center of the city. Wages are back to nor
mal, the open shop is an accomplished fact, the old "rights"
are restored, labor domination is ended. What looked to
the manufacturers like a tremendous financial crisis turns
out to be an unemployment godsend. One druggist says
the people are quite comfortable and affirms that he is losing
479
no business. "I am cutting prices on goods, doing five times

normal business, and making at least 30 per cent profit on
everything." Furthermore, the machinery for maintaining
normal labor conditions is now established and running
smoothly. If labor becomes fractious, a little lubrication
and careful manipulation of this machinery will render it
as effective as that in Passaic or Lawrence or Bethlehem.
For the black list leads to under-cover work, provocation,
and possible violence as inevitably as armament on the part
of competitor nations leads to war. The manufacturers, to
be sure, are blind to the future; sufficient unto today is the
knowledge that unemployment has brought them the Open
Shop.
During the past few weeks the Harmony Mills have slowly
begun operations again and 1,500 workers will gradually fit
back into the places before their machines. These men and
women have work at reduced wages ; they lose the organiza
tion which lifted them from utter misery to a height where
they could see some hope in life. There is workand bit
terness. And the stage set for future trouble if the spirit of
independence breaks out again.
Other textile centers are resuming work gradually. They
have had long periods of unemployment. Other industries
the nation over are in much the same position. Is unem
ployment throughout the United States merely an introduc
tory chapter to a fiercer warfare between Capital and Labor
than we have yet witnessed? Certain political forces in
New York State are strongly urging the abolition of the
State Employment Service. Is this for the purpose of plac
ing employment facilities in the hands of other manufac
turers' associations and black-listing agencies? Are hun
dreds of thousands of workers who were good union mem
bers a few months back and who have been turned into the
streets by the industrial crisis to be sifted carefully through
the sieve of the open shop, union-baiting Garys, and William
Woods, and Atterburys of industry? Cohoes is an indication
that this is to become a general policy.
And what future has this little mill city just north of
Albany? The United Textile Workers is notorious for -its
indifferent or reactionary leadership of the hard-pressed
textile workers of the country. Yet the future of Cohoes,
like the future of Pittsburgh or Paterson, depends upon the
virility and intelligence of its workers and their leaders.
Absentee landlords care nothing for Cohoes. The workers
live in the midst of this squalor, small-town politics, unhy
gienic moral conditions, hell-fire evangelistic campaigns,
sordid business life. Until they can formulate their aspira
tions in terms as unmistakable as those of the Tri-City
Manufacturers' Association, and put them into practice, the
textile workers of the Spindle City have a sorry future be
fore them.

Paul Hanna is the Washington correspondent of the
Federated Press. He has just returned from a sojourn
in Mexico undertaken at the behest of The Nation for a
careful study of the political and economic situation
there.
Paxton Hibben is a student of Eastern affairs. He ac
companied the Harbord Mission to Armenia and was
Associated Press correspondent in Greece, 1915-1917.
Cedric Long is field secretary of the New York State
Consumers' League.
The Nation
HE Drifter, being a person of modest income, had en

thusiastically joined the people's buying strike, and
rejoiced in its apparent success. Recently, having become
threadbare, he decided to desist. A Fifth Avenue depart
ment store which in recent months had opened a Men's
Shop, first attracted him. A gorgeous affair, the Drifter

found it, but on discovering suits from $65 up decided it
He next ventured to his place of yester
year's purchase, having noted with pleasure its alluring

full-page advertisements, which described suits at $50 and
more. Slightly pained at finding next to nothing at less
than $75, he called to the clerk's attention that prices were
as high as last year.
Weve come down, the salesman
assured him placidly.
But how so? replied the Drifter;
last spring I paid $70 for a suit here and these prices are
now just the same or a trifle higher. Oh well, they really
are lower, responded the clerk, the quality is better.
*
undoubtedly had a religious case against the political English

churchman. Incidentally, Cardinal Gasquet sits in Curia, and
together with French, Italian, and German cardinals resident
at Rome endeavored to interpret war-time America for the
Supreme Pontiff. For notwithstanding the fundamental de
mocracy of Catholicity and the spiritual prosperity of the

church in the United States, American Catholics have no car
dinal representative in the church's government at Rome.
After the Pope's chastisement of Bourne the English For

eign Office made several diplomatic gestures, which did not
escape the watchful eyes of the Papacy. In fact, these were
regarded as something like psychological fists, openly pointed
at Benedict. Again and again, Bourne was singled out by
the British Government for conspicuous notice.
He made
noisily trumpeted trips to the British base in Southern Italy,

to the British sectors in France, and, last but by no means
least, to the Holy Land.
The same Bourne is now at Rome once more, significantly

minus certain baggage, which he lost near the Italian border.
It is probable that His Eminence was robbed, and possibly the

thief got something more than ecclesiastical robes of office.
OW the Drifter, resolving that his long abstinence and

resultant shabbiness should not be in vain, passed on
to a great emporium on Madison Avenue, synonymous with
the latest and best in men's clothing. Here, too, he found
the late sixties and the seventies as the price level. Again
he interrogated. Yes, prices are lower, the clerk told him
easily. This line, for instance, was $75 last year; now it
is $68. The Drifter inquired whether the clothes were all
wool, and upon prompt assurance that they were, wondered
aloud that the reduction was so slight. The bottom has
dropped out of the price of raw wool, labor is coming down,
he urged. The clerk was ready for him. Well, wool does
not represent more than 10 to 15 per cent of the price any
how. Labor is the big item, and that has not come down
as yet.
[Vol. 112, No. 2908
was no match for the keen-witted Kennedy-O'Riordan duumvi

rate. Besides, Monsignor O'Riordan and Monsignor Kennedy
In the Driftway
was not for him.
But the Drifter, disillusioned and cynical, turned
on his heel and walked out, firmly resolved to continue his
part, at least, of the consumers' strike, jusqu'au bout.

THE DRIFTER
Nevertheless, Catholic liberalism is far from believing the

unsubstantiated rumor that Bourne in England and Bishop
Cohalan, the would-be ecclesiastical climber of Cork, are acting
and have been acting as diplomatic agents of the Vatican.
Indeed, in addition to the Casement business, there is much
indirect, if not direct, evidence to the contrary.
Considered as an abstract proposition, Bourne's statement
that Sinn Fein is a secret conspiracy and its republican move
ment anti-Catholic strikes at the roots of Catholicity. In the
last analysis his reasoning denies that sovereignty is in the
people and affirms the divine right of kings. Have politics
made him more than a modern bedfellow of the timid Peter,
whose funeral dirge only in a temporary sense was the crow
of a cock? Cardinal Bellarmine in the sixteenth century and
Francisco Suarez in the seventeenth century recognized the
fact that political authority in general comes directly from
God to the whole community.
Up to his death a year or two ago Rev. Charles Macksey,

an American Jesuit, taught the same doctrine in the Gregorian
University at Rome. He gave fresh and emphatic and a very
human utterance to a theory of government which had not
been expounded in Gregorian University classrooms for one
hundred and fifty years. In the beginning the ecclesiastical
Bournes of Italy tried to influence His Holiness against such
revolutionary teaching. The Pope, however, did not heed
then, and we are convinced that he will not heed now. The
world is too full of Irelands, and their voices like the voices
Correspondence
The Vatican and Ireland
tional first-hand excerpts from the same chapter of the unpub
of Joan of Arc will not cry forever in a wilderness. Ireland

is a phase of world-wide social and industrial injusticea single
letter in the universal alphabet of anti-Christian practice.
Fundamentally, Ireland is less a country than a Christian prin
lished history of that sometime baffling period:
ciple; less a protest against imperialism than a declaration
Roger Casement's relatives went as far as to charge that

Cardinal Bourne tried to prevent the Irishman's preexecution
return to the Catholic church. After Casement's death they
sent Monsignor Kennedy to Rome to institute a suit against
the English prelate in the ecclesiastical courts. Kennedy,
who was an old, retired British army chaplain, cooperated with
Monsignor O'Riordan of the Irish College in the matter of
of faith.
SIR: P. D. Murphy's Cardinal Bourne and Ireland, recently

published in The Nation, carries a page from the war-time
volume of Anglo-Irish activities at the Vatican. Here are addi
Bourne's alleged unpriestly and un-Catholic conduct.
Italy is
a whispering gallery, and the Vatican, try though it did, could

not keep the affair quiet.
It was long a tidbit on the loose
tongue of Roman gossip, and the American colony was con

siderably interested and intrigued.
In the end Bourne was privately reprimanded by the Pope.

The Cardinal, even with the backing of his Tory colleague,
Gasquet, and the reactionary British Mission to the Holy See,
Father Macksey ran foul of Cardinal Bourne, when the Irish
Red Book was published at Rome. The little pamphlet fell

like a great stick of dynamite into the complacency of the
British Mission at the Vatican. Father Macksey was priest
enough to love and seek justice for all men, English as well as
Irish, but he was falsely accused of being responsible for the

part-authorship of the Irish Red Book. Besides, the book was
not a composition but a compilation of clippings from the
English press, explaining and extenuating or defending the
Sinn Fein position. The Irish College at Rome collected and
printed the data, sending a copy of the publication to every
high church and state authority in Italy and to various foreign
ambassadors and officials attached to the Quirinal. The first
copy was placed in the hands of His Holiness by Monsignor
O'Riordan himself. This carefully planned action did much
The Nation
March 30, 1921]
toward neutralizing the acid in the maneuvers of the Bourne

Gasquet anti-Irish group in Catholic Italy, at least.
O'Riordan was the most philosophical intelligence which I
have ever encountered. I had a chance to weigh and judge
him, when we for weeks were fellow-patients in the Blue

Nuns' hospital on the fringe of the Roman Campagna. He at
481
Mr. Colcord closes his article well with the words: We

cannot understand the system unless we know what it is in
tended to do. May I suggest that we do not yet understand
how beautiful a free social order may be. There are object
lessons already to show how the dreams of both individualists
and socialists may be combined in some kind of free cooperation.
the time was in his final sickness, and was philosophically
But surely nothing that we know of history promises that we
traveling a tortuous road to death. His place as rector of the

Irish College was subsequently taken by his more fiery assist
ant, that brilliant historian, Father O'Hagan. For years
O'Hagan has been digging historical references to Ireland
from the deep and little explored soil of the Vatican archives.
Long buried documents have yielded up to him diplomatic
secrets, whose public telling would not always rub the tiger
fur of Catholic Ireland's natignal sensitiveness the right way.
Once I asked an American friend of Father O'Hagan whether
shall ever arrive at a higher plane of welfare by any method
or not the fearless Irish priest intended to publish his findings.
With his reply I close this already too lengthy letter.

Dont you know, the American answered, that diplomacy
is the hand that publishes or fails to publish history!
Will
Father O'Hagan give the world his revealing notes on past

Anglo-Vatican diplomacy? That depends upon circumstance.
I would say that publication is not in the lap of the godsor
Godbut in the lap of the diplomats.
New York, March 11
JOHN HEARLEY
of violence or compulsion or constraint, whether at the hands
of arrogant capitalists, who hold the reins over legislatures

and congresses, or of other equally arrogant communists, who
despise common people and claim dictatorial power over a
whole nation.
Jamaica Plain, Mass., March 16
CHARLES F. DOLE
Why the Socialist Vote Shrank

SIR: Outsiders, they say, see most of the game, so perhaps

an interested observer from this side of the border who gained
his first insight of industrial problems during a residence for
some years in the United States can offer some explanation of
the falling off in the Socialist vote. In the first place an in
creasing number of class-conscious workers, who otherwise
would be disposed to support a Socialist candidate, have lost all
faith in the political movement and advocate direct action for
The Prime Object of Industry

SIR: In Mr. Colcord's interesting article in your issue of

March 16 he makes a sharp distinction between Capitalist and
Communist industry.
His distinction holds between a com
munist theory at its best and a capitalist system as adminis

tered by thoroughly selfish men. Why not compare each with
the other at its best?
At present, of course, most men under any system are think

ing first of getting their living and do not ask what their object
in life is. They are animals before they come to act and think
as men. Our real question, therefore, is what the mature and
thinking men who are working any industrial scheme think of
it and use it for? May I say then, as one brought up in the
capitalist system (the truer name for it is the Free system),
that I cannot recollect the time when I understood that its
the overthrow of capitalism. But probably a greater factor is

the falling away of the large class calling themselves Socialists
without any clear-cut conception of genuine Socialist ideals, who
in times of storm and pressure cannot stand the acid tests of
social ostracism, the blacklist, or the boycott. Socialism in fair
weather times has always attracted a number of soreheads,
cherishing a vague dissatisfaction on purely personal grounds
with existing conditions, and also many sentimentalists, who

fancy themselves Socialists because they entertain a pious hope
that the lot of the working class may be somewhat alleviated
without interfering with the comfort of the propertied class or
entailing any considerable inconvenience on themselves. The
Socialist vote in the past has always been largely a protest vote,
and this fact accounts in a great measure for the disappointing
action of the German workingmen in supporting the war. The
number of Socialists in Germany at that time was supposed to
be 4,000,000. Had half that number been genuine class-con
prime object is to make money for its shareholders. I was

brought up to believe that the object of every decent industry
is the common welfare, that success in any industry is tested
scious Socialists there would have been no war. We can see

now that the returns of elections in normal times are deceptive
primarily by the abundance and the excellence of its product,
of the German Socialists so-called forsook their principles to
that whether a man gets much or little money, his getting it

is a shame unless he contributes something useful for human
howl with the wolves under pressure of government intimida

tion or the influence of mob psychology, so the weak-kneed, the
half-instructed, and the sentimentalists of American and Cana
dian socialism have been scared back into political orthodoxy
welfare.
We were told that we must earn our living; this
and illusory as a test of the strength of socialism. Just as most
meant to do our part in the work of the world; moreover, we

must be generous in our work and give good measure, pressed
by the bogy of bolshevism, skilfully exploited by the intellectual
down and running over.
parasites of capitalism.
Thousands of people were brought up with this idea of in

dustry. I cannot see why the possession of capital is incon
sistent with it, provided the individual does not claim as his
own, to do as he pleases with, the common gifts of nature,

such as lands, mines, water, etc. Do we need any other dis
tinction than this, which lies between private capital, such as

individuals produce, and communal or public capital, in which
all men should share?
He must be very unfortunate (even as things are now) who

does not know men and women who are engaged in all kinds
of industry, with a fairly clear understanding of the real
object of their work. Can there be any satisfaction to a
man, as soon as he crosses the line from the animal to man
hood, in finding that he is only a parasite on human society?

That this is not yet generally understood is only another demon
stration, just like the Great War, how far the world is still
from genuine civilization.
The shrinkage in the Socialist vote need neither surprise nor

discourage anyone. It ought to have been discounted in ad
vance. There is a valuable lesson in it which Socialists should
take to heart. Instead of running election campaigns to make
votes, they should be run to make Socialiststhat is, purely

as means of propaganda. It gets us nowhere to poll a large
vote of mere malcontents, political indifferentists, and senti
mental friends of labor uninstructed in the philosophy of
socialism, who are sure to fall away when a crisis arises. In

the present state of public opinion the only use we should have
for elections lies in the opportunity they present for the incul
cation of Socialist principles. To emulate the course of the
old-party politicians by minimizing or keeping them in the back
ground and putting the soft pedal on class-consciousness may
win temporary and local victories, but can never permanently
advance the cause.
Oakville, Ont., Canada, March 9
PHILLIPS THOMPSON
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2908
tive material than as the principal part of the record.
This
conviction which one has from the beginning is riveted by the
Victory
concluding chapter which quotes largely from the tributes paid
By LEONORA SPEYER
was seen and appreciated by the audience rather than from
to Mr. Choate after his death.
His was a life to be written as it
behind the curtain.
Day is the heart's red field,

And many an anguish there
This is not to say that the letters lack interest. The picture
of village life in New York City in the fifties and sixties has
the charm of an old print. The fights against Tammany are
Is lost or won,
And many a hope lies hopeless in the Sun;

But night the conqueror kind,
Spreads its blessed treaty of the stars,
Where the heart's peace is signed.
reminders that history repeats itself.
The accounts of the way
law was practiced before lawyers became mostly business men

show why the bar as a profession was once a public career.
The letters from England give a sympathetic picture of English

homes and English functions. Mr. Choate's love of Harvard
and all its associations, his interest in international under
Under the moons white flag

I meet my ambushed dreams,
standing, his devotion to the many civic and charitable causes

to which he gave so much of his time, bring home to us the
delight and the value of such a spirit as his. From first to
I see the foe
Whom I have faced and put to flight, I knowl

Yielding his hosts to me;
And in strong, vanquished hands I lay
My weeping victory.
He did his part as he saw it, without philosophizing about it.

Success in his profession he took seriously, without taking him
self seriously. For all his playfulness and lightness of touch,
the sense of duty that came from Salem continued to cling
close to him in New York. Doubtless it gave him pleasure to
give pleasure to others, but his consent to attend dinners and
make speeches was often given with reluctance and only be
cause he found it hard to withhold a service. Those who envy
Books
Mr. Choate
The Life of Joseph Hodges Choate: As Gathered Chiefly from
His Letters. By Edward Sandford Martin. Charles Scrib
ner's Sons.
R. CHOATE is one of the cherished possessions of the

American people. Partly this is due to the joy of cre
ation, for we have helped to make the humorist whom we love
to quote. Yet it matters little that Mr. Choate said but a
part of all that is attributed to him. Tradition with customary
art has confined its overlay to anecdote that is characteristic
qui fut dans son coeur sinon sur ses lvres.
last one is impressed with the refreshing absence of any cant

or vanity in Mr. Choate. He was little conscious of himself.
The man we remem
ber best is not so much the lawyer and the public official as the
charming entertainer. This places Mr. Choate less with Mr.
Root and Mr. Hughes than with Mark Twain, Joe Jefferson,
and Mr. Crothersa blend of all three, though in unequal pro
portions. Much of his public service was rendered in his con
his success will be interested to note his ante-prandial misgiv

ings, his care in preparing himself, and his regret when, as he
puts it, I had to travel largely on my muscle. It may be
not all in jest that he remarks that during a long life time he
has cultivated the habit of speaking without saying anything.
He was not given to being too profound for those who had dined
heavily. Yet it would be wrong to think of him as solely or
chiefly a fun-maker. By and large his speeches were directed

toward smoothing the way for enterprises which he had at
heart.
When Mr. Choate was in England as ambassador, both Presi

dent Roosevelt and Secretary Hay desired him to act as counsel
for the United States in the Alaska Boundary Dispute. With
his fine instinct for the amenities, the ambassador felt acutely
the impropriety of being guest, negotiator, and hostile advocate
genial role of entrepreneur of enthusiasm for many good causes.
at one and the same time.
Yet, lavishly as he spent himself in this way, he gave to an
Secretary deferred to his reluctance, Mr. Hay wrote that neither

of them sympathized with it. Perhaps the Secretary was merely
loyal to his chief. Perhaps the point, which seems so obvious,
is more readily appreciated by a lawyer than by a layman, par
ticularly when the layman is a client. Mr. Choate could love
Mr. Roosevelt without emulating the less lovely strains in his
make-up. In 1896 he wrote: Tonight I am to dine again at the
Wolcott's to meet those jingling jingoes, Cabot Lodge and Theo
dore Roosevelt, both of whom I think would like very much the
fun of a war with England. In his attitude toward war with
arduous professional career an unflagging industry that few
can rival. This is the major impression made by these two

volumes. They begin with an unfinished autobiography which
gives Mr. Choate's reminiscences of his boyhood and early man
hood. The rest consists chiefly of Mr. Choate's letters to his
family, with here and there a newspaper account or an excerpt

from a speech or address and a bit of binder by Mr. Martin.
Most of the letters are to Mrs. Choate. Necessarily they give
an incomplete and one-sided picture of Mr. Choate and his work.
A man writes to his wife when he is separated from her. For

Mr. Choate these separations usually came in the summer when
he stayed in the hot city, engrossed in the infinite details of
complicated lawsuits.
So what we hear most about is a hard
working lawyer who greatly misses his wife. All of the letters
tell much more of what Mr. Choate is doing than of what he is
thinking. They give little evidence of that interest in litera
ture or philosophy so essential to the highest intrinsic value in
personal correspondence. They owe their interest mainly to
our interest in Mr. Choate when he was not writing letters.
Though the President and the
Germany, Mr. Choate was with the President rather than with
his vehement critic. After the sinking of the Lusitania he

writes that the Germans, so far as we can guess, seem to be
taking the President's last note in a kindly way, and I have
no fear of any war between us and them.
As events moved,
he moved with them, and became eager for our participation

in the conflict.
But even then he did not antedate his hindsight.
Martin, with his rare gifts, should have remained so largely the
In a letter to Lord Grey in April, 1917, he says that we must

give President Wilson credit for one signal result of his watch
ful waiting, and that is, that he was waiting to see when the
whole nation would be wrought up to the point which has now
been reached, so that he could safely announce to the world
our alliance with France and Great Britain without any prac
tical dissent. The un-Rooseveltian temper in which he took the
editor and chronicler instead of becoming more the biographer.
war is evident from his address to the Allied Mission three
Wherever he ventures to relax his restraint, he makes us regret

the more that he subjected himself to any self-denying ordi
days before his death. I feared at one time, he says, that

we might enter it for some selfish purpose, for the punishment
of aggression against our individual, national, personal rights,
Mr. Choate, as he impressed himself upon his friends and upon

the public, is more unique, more vital, and more enduring than
Mr. Choate writing of his daily routine.
It is a pity that Mr.
nance. The letters would have been more effective as illustra
The Nation
March 30, 1921]
for the destruction of American ships or for a few American

lives, ample ground for war; but we waited, and it turns out
now that we waited wisely, because we were able at last to
enter into this great contest, this great contest of the whole
world, for noble and lofty purposes such as never attracted
nations before.
All in all Mr. Choate stands as the perfect exponent of a
genteel tradition. The greater part of his life was lived in those
quieter days when the fortunate took for granted the necessity
483
mensurate with the highest hopes entertained. For those who

thought that we might quietly rediscover the innumerable works
which were dedicated during the centuries of Delphi's greatness,
the actual finds were disillusioning. There was no trace of the
famous work by Pheidias in honor of the victory of Marathon,
which we know to have been erected there. Not a fragment of
the gilded statue of Phryne by Praxiteles has survived.
But a
and the permanence of what contributes to make them so. One

will not go to Mr. Choate for searching insight into what we
now regard as the deeper issues of social and economic life.
knowledge of the history of Delphi was sufficient to prepare

the explorers for the wreckage which came to light. When we
hear that Nero alone carried away from Delphi 500 bronze
statues, and when we remember that such plundering went on
throughout Roman and Byzantine times, nature and the course
Mr. Martin tells us that he thought the Income Tax Case of
of centuries duly aiding in the work of destruction, we under
1895 was of great importance to civilizationa case that

would build a proper rampart around the rights of property,
which he seemed always to feel were the real underpinning of
civilization. That this feeling was more than an advocate's
stand why more was not left.
In our work of resurrecting
Greek art we have learned to be thankful for what has sur
vived rather than continually regret what has disappeared.

And we certainly have enough to make us rejoice in what the
devotion to the cause of his client is evident from an address
spade has brought to light in Delphi.
made by Mr. Choate after his cause was won.
The tribute here
which can produce such works as the bronze charioteer, the
paid to Mr. Southmayd and the acknowledgment of indebted

ness to his brief in winning the income tax case is but one of the
Agias, the Naxian Sphinx, and the dancing women from the
akanthos column, has made a worthy contribution to mankind.
many illustrations of the generous spirit which made Mr. Choate
And Delphi has done even more than restore to us a number of

masterpieces. It has given us a wealth of architectural and
lovable. Later events have brought forward the income tax as

the ally of civilization rather than its enemy. There is more
to be said for Mr. Choate's argument on constitutional law than
for his views of public policy. Yet it would be a pity to judge
such a life by standards that are quite alien to it. So few lives
are perfect even of their kind that we must be grateful for one
that approaches such perfection so closely. Mr. Choate was
first and foremost a lawyer. Until his sixty-seventh year he
gave to the promotion and protection of his clients interests
an amount of time and energy that would appall the ordinary
practitioner. His hours of relaxation were not hours of ease.
They were the hours of the many activities that will make Mr.
Choate fondly remembered long after the lawyer and the advo- .
cate have been forgotten.
Any single excavation
sculptural remains, ranging from early Greek times to the

period of Roman occupation, so that our stock of knowledge has
been greatly increased in all directions.
That Dr. Poulsen, the well-known director of the Ny Carls
berg Glyptothek in Copenhagen, has undertaken the task of

making these results generally known in a book with copious
illustrations and a very readable and suggestive text, is a
matter for hearty congratulation. Hitherto we have had to go
for information about Delphi to the expensive and therefore
rather inaccessible Fouilles de Delphes, the official French
publication of the excavations; or to M. Bourguets Ruines de

Delphes, a topographical guide, also in French. In Dr. Poul
THOMAS REED POWELL

sens volume we have for the first time a book which will make
Delphi
Delphi.
By Frederick Poulsen. Translated by G. C. Richards,
with a preface by Percy Gardiner.
London:
this important chapter of Greek art generally and adequately

known among the English-speaking public.
Dr. Poulsen has approached his task with great discrimina
tion. Instead of following (as Bourguet did) the perhaps obvi
ous path of describing the monuments in the order in which
Gyldendal.
Pausanias saw them, he has chosen the much more interesting
D#. the
famous seat of the oracle of Apollo, has cap
tured the popular imagination as few other spots on this
earth.
Surrounded by precipitous mountains, with a beautiful .
method of describing the monuments chronologically, and so

presenting a coherent account of what would otherwise almost
certainly have been a rather confused and unconnected story.
view over the plain of Itea and the sea in the distance, the site
And since the sculptural remains in Delphi are by far the most
is one of the fairest and certainly the most dramatic in Greek

lands. Moreover, it played a unique part in Greek history. In
important, Dr. Poulsen has made them his chief theme, with
a country made up of small city states, each with a strongly
developed local patriotism, it was practically the only interna

tional center. For it was not a political but a religious city.
Emissaries from all parts of Greece and from foreign lands
excursions into other fields where necessary. Consequently, he

has written what amounts to a history of Greek sculpture, illus
French. Excavations were begun by the French School at

Athens in 1892, and carried on for a number of years with great
trated not by the rubber stamp material found in other his

tories, but by the comparatively unfamiliar monuments from
Delphithus infusing new interest and life into a familiar
story, and linking up the new material with the known stock.
The text gives not only accurate descriptions of what was found
at Delphi, but discusses the many problems involved from a
large fund of historical, literary, and archaeological knowledge,
and with genuine artistic appreciation. To non-archaeologists
the book not only presents a delightful account of Delphi and
its remains but gives them a realization of the manifold ave
nues by which archaeological problems have to be approached,
energy and ability under the direction of M. Homolle.
It was
and a realization of how wide a range of knowledgeand imagi
an arduous task. The site was occupied by the modern village

of Castri, and the peasant proprietors had first to be expro
priated and transferred to another place. Since Delphi was
nation tempered by knowledgeis necessary for their solution.

Archaeologists will find in the book the chief Delphian monu
came to Delphi to consult the Greek oracle and to learn wisdom
from Apollo and his Pythian priestess. And in thankfulness for

help rendered they dedicated statues and other offerings, housed
in little buildings called treasuries; so that Delphi soon became
a great gallery of international art.
The good fortune to excavate so promising a site fell to the
built on the slope of a hill, parts of monuments belonging to

buildings of an upper level had continually rolled down to a
lower, and much care in the interpretation of finds had to be
exercised.
Fortunately the detailed account of the precinct by
Pausanias who visited the site in the second century helped

greatly in the identification of the various buildings.
It is true that the results of the excavations were not com
ments assembled in excellent illustrations, and also a temperate
scholar's conclusions on many still debatable points. For while

a survey is given of the different theories of the prominent
archaeologists who have made it their task to unravel the many
mysteries presentedsuch as Pomtow, Courby, Homolle, and
DinsmoorDr. Poulsen generally presents also his own ideas,
especially in the sculptural field.
GISELA M. A. RICHTER
The Nation
484
The French Revolution in Germany

Germany and the French Revolution. By G. P. Gooch. Long
mans, Green and Company.
THE title of Mr. Gooch's book is not indicative of the con
tents. One might expect an analysis of the political changes
brought about in the German states as a result of the French
Revolutionary wars or the Napoleonic invasion; or the story
of the diplomatic sequel to the treaties of Luneville, Basle, or
Tilsit; or of the effect of the Continental Policy on Germany's
economic life; or of the far-reaching consequences of the dis
possession of German princes on the left bank of the Rhine; or,
in fact, of any one of a number of political, constitutional,
industrial, and social changes wrought in the limits of the old
Holy Roman Empire by the world-shaking upheaval across
the Rhine. But Mr. Gooch has no intention of telling over
again the facts that have been so amply treated in the pages
of Von Sybel, Sorel, and Hausser. His purpose is "to show
the repercussion of the French Revolution on the mind of
Germany." It is a study in national psychology, illustrated
by a detailed analysis of the writings of leading German
philosophers, poets, dramatists, and publicists which deal with
the theories and behavior of the actors of the great Parisian
drama, or are directly influenced thereby. The book would
have been more fitly entitled "The Influence of the French
Revolution on German Thought."
It is a novel and useful service that Mr. Gooch has under
taken for an English reading public, and he has performed
the service with diligence and fidelity. Whether we can add,
with discrimination also, is doubtful. Readers of Mr. Gooch's
"History and Historians of the Nineteenth Century" know that
he is "an austere man" with the pen, reaping wherever a seed
has been sown. He has not the supreme gift of pretention.
The closely printed pages succeed each other with an inexo
rable accumulation of names, titles, quotations, until long before
one is half-way through the half-a-thousand pages one feels
that one is reading a catalogue. It is safe to say that ninetenths of our historico-literary students are intensely inter
ested in the views of a Goethe, a Schiller, a Kant, a Fichte on
the significance of the French Revolution, and moderately
curious about the views of a Wieland, a Forster, or a Kotzebue.
and not at all concerned with the views of a score of minor
writers in the various duchies of the Empire whose names they
are scarcely familiar vith. Yet Mr. Gooch will not spare us.
We must make the grand tour of the Empire with him, through
Saxony, Brunswick, and Hanover, through Weimar, Gotha, and
Baden. We must hear the testimony of Dietrich, Cramer, von
Trenk, Kerner, Oelsner, and a dozen other men of comparative
obscurity whose writings are but the echoes of the stronger
voices. If Mr. Gooch had only left out half of his twenty-two
chapters his readers would not lay down the book with a sense
of relief and release. The truly valuable material would be
greatly enhanced by not having to be salvaged from a pitiless
mass of information.
The general trend of German thought in the Revolutionary
era, as shown again and again in the treatises analyzed by
Mr. Gooch, was a hearty welcome to the liberal reforming prin
ciples of the men of 1789, turning to coldness when faction
frustrated the work of the Legislative Assembly and the Conven
tion, and ending in disgust when the frenzy of Jacobinism swept
away the throne, the altar, the constitution, and the customs
of a great civilized nation. Of course there were a few Germans
like Gentz who were hostile to the Revolution from the be
ginning, a few like Goethe who were indifferent to it, except
as a spectacle, all the way through, and a very few like Adam
Lux and Schneider whose zeal for the new ideas could not be
chilled by the regicides or the terrorists; but the great majority
of thinkers, from the Hanoverian Whigs (Schlozer, Rehberg,
Brandes) who were imbued with the doctrines of British par
liamentarism and Burke's reverence for tradition, to "insurg
[Vol. 112, No. 2908
ents" like Fichte and Schiller, went through the process of a

more or less rapid disillusionment. From cherishing the hope
that the enlightenment preached by Montesquieu and Voltaire
and realized by Mounier and Mirabeau would shed its beams also
in the dark places of the Holy Roman Empire, these men came
to emphasize the assurance that Germany would never fall a
prey to the murderous dogmatism of Robespierre and Couthon.
Mr. Gooch seeks to correct some current judgments on the
attitude of influential Germans toward the Revolution. He
thinks, for example, that Goethe was not as indifferent to the
events of the Revolution as he was to the Napoleonic domina
tion. It is true that Goethe predicted the Revolution in 1785
and that he accompanied the army of Duke Karl August to
Champagne. It is true that he talked and wrote much about
the new ideas in France and that he announced that Valmy
opened "a new epoch of world history." But for all that,
Goethe remained an onlooker only. He had no interest in
democracy, which seemed to him but "the enthronement of
mediocrity," and he complacently wrote from Weimar that
aesthetics kept him "going" while "almost everyone else" was
"suffering from the political disease." He was left equally un
concerned by "the death of democratic or aristocratic sinners"
in France. The author is more successful in rescuing Anacharsis
Clootz from the unenviable position of the buffoon of the Revo
lution which he is made to fill in Carlyle's impressionistic pages.
The chapter on Kant is stimulating and convincing. The
author shows clearly how far the aged philosopher of Konigsberg bore the disappointment of deceived hopes in the French
Revolution in a manner unlike that of his younger contempo
raries Schiller and Fichte. For Schiller 1793 meant refuge in
the "Weimar gospel" of aesthetic self-realization; for Fichte
the disaster of Jena meant the passionate advocacy of German
nationalists; but Kant, fortified in his citadel of idealism, kept
faith in man when men disappointed him. He never ceased to
believe that, in spite of all its excesses and mistakes, the French
Revolution meant a step forward toward the goal of reason
and humanitarianism. Only we question Mr. Gooch's state
ment that Kant's treatise on "Perpetual Peace," based so largely
on the belief that increased commerce in goods and ideas among
the nations must inevitably bring in the age of brotherhood,
sounded the "highest notes ever struck by a German publicist."
The last four or five chapters of his book Mr. Gooch devotes
to a rapid survey of some of the actual political changes
wrought in the moribund Holy Roman Empire by the Revolu
tion and the work of Napoleon. One cannot help feeling that
by omitting this material, which is only a resume' of other
treatments already familiar to historical students, the author
might have reduced the bulk of a book already too large with
out sacrificing anything of the value of his contribution.
David S. Muzzey
The Uses of Perversity

The Uses of Diversity. By G. K. Chesterton. Dodd, Mead
and Company.
AS Dickens personifies the spirit of Christmas, Stevenson
that of a child's birthday, Kipling of Guy Fawkes's Day,
and D. H. Lawrence of May Day, so Gilbert Keith Chesterton
would seem to be the fitting patron saint of April the First
He is the royal jester in the new court of King Demos; if he
is a "poisson d'avril," he is a very whale of mirth. He dislikes
seriousness because he thinks it irreligious, and, having come
to the conclusion that it takes more brains to make a joke than
to excogitate a philosophy, he has devoted the brain of a sec
ond Newton to working out the law, not of gravity, but of fun.
Those who, like Max Eastman, fiercely protest against the
result as "a puerile piddle of inanities," are irked by the more
abstruse and recondite laws in this new Calculus of Risibilities.
Most of us can follow the four fundamental processes of humor,
but when it comes to extracting the square root of a joke, to a
March 30, 1921]
The Nation
geometrical progression of puns, to sines and tangents of epi

grams, to negative, irrational, transfinite, and imaginary jests,
we begin to feel that after all wit may be no laughing matter.
But just as the modern theory of groups has brought order
into the tangles of higher mathematics, so a classification of
Mr. Chesterton's quips renders them more easy for the average
mind to master. They rush through his brain with the bewil
dering frequency and velocity of radio-active particles passed
through a vacuum, but long observation will make them obey
the law of atomic weights as readily as do natural gases. Dis
regarding small and negligible quantities of jokes, the great
bulk of his humor falls into three divisions, polarized by his
three great antipathies, to Germany, to Protestantism, and to
what he calls "Modern Thought." And this trinity is one sub
stance under a triple form.
When Mr. Chesterton writes on the subject of history, he
avows that he thinks the only useful parts of it are the good
anecdotes and nursery tales told to children. He would not be
so dogmatic, he says, as to exclude from history a story merely
because it was true in the ordinary sense of the word, but
he would regard the literal truth as entirely secondary. Now
we know how he got his idea of Prussia and of German his
tory. He proves that England has always loved France be
cause her coast towns are called "The Cinq Ports." He proves
that England has always hated Germany because Chaucer sent
his perfect knight to crusade against the heathen Prussians.
As the Prussians of that day were not Germans Mr. Chesterton
might have as well said that England and Italy had a war
when Caesar invaded Britain. Such a distortion of history is
absurd and mischievous. If Mr. Chesterton took the trouble to
read English literature of just a hundred years ago he would
find in Wordsworth and De Quincey and Coleridge and Scott
the same uncritical admiration for the Germans that he feels
for the French and the same ugly hatred of the French that
he feels for the German*.
Much the same witty but overworked joke against Protestant
ism as the corrupter of the modern world adorns his pages in
season and out of season. An essay on the Mormons is made
the occasion for giving a good hard slap to Oliver Cromwell,
though the average mind does not see the connection between
the Latter Day Elders and Brigham Youngsters on the one
side and the Protector and the Puritan Commonwealth on the
other. Jane Austen is criticized for being a typical Protestant,
and that she was so is proved by the fact that the title of one
of her tales, Northanger Abbey, recalls "the crucial crime of
the sixteenth century," Henry VIII's confiscation of the monas
teries. Moreover, Jane Austen had "to do with the human
heart, and it is that which cometh out of the heart that defileth a nation, philanthropy, efficiency, organization, social re
form." Surely as a bit of literary criticism this overtrumps
Mark Twain's saying that he considered any library good which
did not include Jane Austen and that he wanted to hit the old
girl's skull with one of her own shinbones.
And what does not Modern Thought (as Chesterton personi
fies various things he does not like) suffer at the hands of
this scoffer? It goes through something like the "Bump the
Bumps" slide at Coney Island, in which one is jolted and
jerked this way and that, one's hat blown off, one's clothes
disheveled and one's brain made giddy, all for the trifling sum
of ten cents. All the woes of the world, from Tennyson's
poetry to prohibition and woman's suffrage, are attributed to
this specter. Tennyson failed as a poet, it is said, because he
believed in evolution, a theory as fabulous "as the centaur, the
mermaid, and all other images under which man has imagined
a bridge between himself and brutality." In Mr. Chesterton's
category of criticism the maintainers of the simple, correct
view often talk rather elaborately, like Meredith and Browning,
but the believers in difficult pessimism talk in words of one
syllablemostly "damns"like Swinburne and Hardy. Japan
failed to become great because ske refused to imitate Dante
and medieval architecture and imitated instead only the com
485
mercialism of Birmingham and the militarism of Berlin, and

so she is still "the same strange, heathen, sinister, and heroic
thing" that she always has been. And so it goes through "that
depth of mindlessness which calls itself the modern mind."
Preserved Smith
Village Verse
A Few Figs from Thistles. Poems and Four Sonnets by Edna
St. Vincent Millay. Salvo. Frank Shay.
Iron Men and Wooden Ships. Sailor Chanties collected by F. S.
Salvo Two. Frank Shay.
This Morning. Poems by Hildegarde Flanner. Salvo Three.
Frank Shay.
WASHINGTON SQUARE and the motley streets near by,
with their mushroom cellars sprouting unusual litera
ture, art, and food, have had in the long run, and will have in
yet a longer one, small effect on poetry. Greenwich Village is
a number of agreeable things, but it is not originalat least
it has not been importantly so in poetry. More types of verse
have ended there than begun. It is a refuge and a refuse place
for the hunted and the tired; it is a limbo of tag ends. Its
inhabitants make much of the fact that literature is a creation
of conversation in groups, while they forget that there is a
difference between conversation and gossip, between groups and
litters. Too many persons, meeting too casually, admire one
another too much and think too little, with the result that what
might be composite masterpieces become only collections of
foreign rubbish scraped together. How many of the first poets
in England and America today are clubby? Hardy, Masefield,
Davies, Bottomley, Robinson, and Frost are not. These might
love Greenwich Village, as all do in a way, but they would not
be of it.
Series after series of published village verse, born to be
"different," has died an indifferent death. There is something
more hopeful, perhaps, about Mr. Frank Shay's new series
known as Salvos. It would be hazardous to predict long life for
such an enterprise as a whole; but it is possible to say of the
items already put forth that they are breaths of very fresh
air, or, to adopt their editor's metaphor, good round shots and
palpable clean hits. It was an excellent idea, for instance, for
Mr. Shay in his second Salvo (since this is the village, a re
viewer can begin anywhere and end nowhere) to print folkpoetry, to be unconventional by importing a convention, to
depart from the artificial community of Washington Square
into the real community of seamen. The chanties he has col
lected are all too few and fragmentary, but they are honestly,
comically blunt, and the whiff of salt they bring is something
that village expression rarely can be called, strong.
Strong is exactly what Hildegarde's Flanner's truly pretty
poems are not. They come, as it happens, from California,
but their faint free verse, conceived in the purest village man
ner, resigns itself rather wearily to the business of beauty and
truth. Spoken in a sort of mild trance, with listless gestures,
most of these pieces break prematurely off in delicate sighs,
showing shortness of breath if not of inspiration. Their inno
cence and their wistfulness are managed quietly but with a de
liberate art that would impress roomfuls of poetasters; their
metaphors, usually good to begin with, are overdone. The only
exception to all this, a poem called Discovery, is indeed a re
markable exception. A monologue spoken by a girl who looks
for her soul in a mirror and finds her body, it gains by being
dramatic, and it does not lose by being a little smart.
It has been the rule of Edna St. Vincent Millay to be dra
matic, and it seems to be her necessity to be bright. Every
page of "Figs from Thistles" has a gleam or a shout or a
slap. In the matter of love, and particularly in the matter of
inconstancy, Miss Millay can claim direct descent from Sir
John Suckling, but she is an exceedingly competent poet on
her own account. Three pieces here in ballad-quatrains, She
The Nation
486
[Vol. 112, No. 2908
over the drab and busy civilization of the North; today he flees
is Overheard Singing, Portrait by a Neighbor, and The Phi

losopher, ring with the joy of genuine creation, and shine with
to an Arcadia of his own imagining and writes Growth of
details that are permanently good for poetry:
the Soil.
Before she has her floor swept,

Or her dishes done,
Any day you'll find her

A-sunning in the sun.
It's long after midnight
Her keys in the lock,
And you never see her chimney smoke
Till past ten o'clock.
She digs in her garden
With a shovel and a spoon,
She weeds her lazy lettuce
By the light of the moon.
He found his ideal human qualities in the Caucasus.
(Im
Mrchenland, 1904.) As one goes farther into the Orient, one

finds men talking less. The ancient races have passed beyond
the stage of chatter and laughter; they are silent and they smile.
. . . We read novels and newspapers. The old peoples do not
read. In these romantic contrasts and escapes we find the
origin of the Biblical and primitive and massively idyllic char

acter of Growth of the Soil.
It is a transference of the broad
simplicity of a patriarchal age and society to the wild and waste

places of the North. Hamsun heals his own restless, modern,
neurotic imagination with the elemental strength and silence of
Isak, the large fertility and sturdiness of Inger; he steeps it in
a contemplation of primitive toil and in the idealized processes
of the beginnings of civilization. For in the tirelessness and
profound inner serenity of Isak there is an idealization that
She walks up the walk

Like a woman in a dream,
She forgets she borrowed butter
refreshed Hamsun's weary and sophisticated soul. Pioneer

farming in a harsh climate has, in fact, little in common with
the broad calm of a patriarchal age in the Orient. Here the two
And pays you back cream.

Her lawn looks like a meadow,
And if she mows the place,

She leaves the clover standing
And the Queen Anne's lace.
almost attain a sort of spiritual identity. Yet the Northern and

romantic note steals back into the book in the shape of two in
fanticides and of Inger's later love life, and the enormously
acute psychological naturalist of the earlier works reappears in
the brilliantly subtle and exact delineations of the characters of
Miss Millay justifies Salvo; perhaps Salvo will justify village

Verse.
MARK WAN DOREN
Oline and Geissler, Brede and Barbro.

It is not the purpose of this analysis to belittle Growth of
the Soil, but to disengage its true character. It represents the
Growth of the Soil
culmination of the long career of a writer who, like so many

Continental artists of his generation, described the realities that
Growth of the Soil. Translated from the Norwegian of Knut

Hamsun by W. W. Worster. Alfred A. Knopf. 2 vols.
H. G. WELLS'S simple-hearted remark concerning Knut
the pain they suffered. Born in a militantly scientific period,

they curbed their dreams and longings and analyzed the impact
of an intolerable world upon themselves. But always, as the
hurt their sensitive souls and nerves with all the acuteness of
M".
Hamsun, Indeed, I did not know of his existence until
years went on and as the pressure of a positivistic view of
now, illustrates once more the almost complete isolation of Eng

lish and American literary culture from that of Central and
Northern Europe. Ordinary people are not likely to know more
things lifted, they built themselves a symbolic or neo-romantic

refuge for their hearts. Strindberg did that, and Hauptmann,
and now Hamsun has followed their example. He has stripped
than Mr. Wells, and thus we shall probably witness, in the course
his prose of pointedness and sophistication and used a broad and
of the years, other sudden discoveries of writers whose names
naive folk-speech; he feigns to tell his story with a simplicity
have been for a quarter of a century household words among a

great portion of civilized mankind. Some day, after whispers
and rumors, there will emerge into our literary consciousness a
Dane named Hermann Bang, a Swede named Gustaf af Geijer
stam, and two authentic masters, born respectively in Lbeck
and Braunschweig, called Thomas Mann and Ricarda Huch.
One result of this whole situation is complete ignorance of a
given writer's development and therefore of his true character.
It is quaint and amusing to see Growth of the Soil character
ized as possessing the timeless appeal of Homer's Iliad and
as leaving a sensitive Chicago reviewer dumb at the sheer
of structure that recalls the Sagas and the Old Testament narra
power of its stark beauty. For the inference is, obviously, that
we have here a great, naive artist, sane, bronzed, virile, who
turns aside from the neuroticism of a decrepit age and brings
us a wind that blows from some morning of the world. Alas,
Knut Hamsun is the author of Hunger, of Mysteries, of
Pan, of Editor Lynge, of Slaves of Love, of Victoria";
he is the cruelest and most self-tormenting of the psychological
impressionists, abnormal, bitter, bitterly ironic and nervously
erotic, fleeing from the banality of life in his native country to
the ends of the earth and enduring starvation and loneliness
rather than face fishy boots, vermin, stale cheese, Luther's
catechism, and the Philistines in their three-story huts. They
eat and drink at need, have a good time over their toddy and
electioneering twaddle, and trade in green soap, brass combs, and
fish. But at night when it thunders they lie on their backs and
read the hymn book in sheer terror. The tormented naturalist,
who is a romantic at heart, fled in his youth to America; later
he fled to the Caucasus and the Orient, pouring out his scorn
tives. He builds a large idyl; he dreams a golden age; he admits

finally the symbolical character of his protagonist. A ghost
risen out of the past to point the future, a man from the earliest
days of cultivation, a settler in the wilds, nine-hundred years old,

and withal a man of the day. Growth of the Soil is a book
full of nobility and beauty. It has skill and insight and a large
clarity of final effect. But it is not primitive, it is not Homeric,
and it may be questioned whether its most permanent aspect
is not its close, modern power of characterization rather than
its deliberate and not quite ingenuous poetizing of the simple life.
Books in Brief
HE Catalogue of The Fogg Art Museum of Harvard Uni
versity (Harvard University Press) is not only a fine
tribute to those generous lovers of art who have made the
museum what it is, but it is, besides, a valuable contribution to
art criticism and a stimulant to the study of the early masters.
The pictures in the museum are described as well as reproduced,
and a detailed account of their past history is given with care

ful discussion of their attributions.
The Introduction contains
a history of the bequests and acquisitions of the museum and

explanatory notes upon technical processes in early Italian
paintings. The colors used in the pictures are so described
that students in foreign lands may lack no necessary accurate
information. The general bibliographies are adequate, and
bibliographies of individual pictures are made as complete as
possible. The catalogue is arranged by schools and chrono
March 30, 1921]
The Nation
logically under the schools. In order that the book may serve
as a manual for students of the fine arts at Harvard and Radcliffe, a brief history of the various schools of art has been
prepared by the staff of the museum. These histories are all
well done as brief surveys, especially those written by Miss
Margaret Gilman, secretary of The Fogg Art Museum. An
interesting feature of the catalogue is the lists of paintings
in this country attributed to the artists discussed in connection
with the museum treasures. The catalogue in one respect is a
fascinating surprise, for scattered lavishly throughout the dis
cussions of the individual pictures are bits of recondite infor
mation upon medieval and Renaissance forms of representa
tion. There is a discussion of the traditional representation of
St. Jerome, of the devil, of the Adoration of the Magi, of the
Annunciation, and of representations of God the Father before
and after the twelfth century. Some interesting and curious
material is introduced here and there explaining the symbolism
of colors and flowers. We learn the significance of St. Jerome's
lion, the skull and pelican in the Crucifixion, the pomegranate,
the gourd, the sprig of cherries, the apple in the hand of the
infant Christ. No theme in art is more curious than that which
dealt with psychostasis or the weighing of the soul. The cata
logue has an interesting account of this. The book fairly teems
with such out-of-the-way matters as the enlisting of the Flor
entine painters in the Guild of Doctors and Apothecaries in the
latter part of the thirteenth century, and the question of why
the painters of Siena disliked the use of the traditional lily in
their pictures of the Annunciation. It is rather unfortunate
that the title "Catalogue of the Fogg Art Museum" cannot hold
forth to the general reader a suggestion of the book's alluring
contentsthe beautiful reproductions and the learned and dis
criminating comment upon individual paintings.
'T'HE Jew has always been one of the most instructive object
* lessons of history, and never more so than at present.
It is interesting, therefore, to observe the effect upon him of
the modern insistence upon nationalism. He has become a
"divided self." Romantic sentiment, pseudo-historical obses
sions, reason, and enlightenment are all struggling in him for
supremacy. The nationalism of Europe takes the form of
Zionism in the case of the Jew. By far the larger part of what
has been written upon this subject in the past five years has
looked upon Zionism as a manifestation of robust health in
Jewry. Professor Morris Jastrow in "Zionism and the Future
of Palestine" (Macmillan) diagnoses the phenomenon as a
disease, and a very serious one. Zionism has three forms:
religious, or the Zionism of the orthodox Jews; economic, or
the Zionism of the Jewish agricultural colonies in Palestine;
and political, or the Zionism which seeks to establish a Jewish
state in the ancient homeland. For the first of these Mr. Jas
trow has respect, with the second the deepest sympathy, for the
third nothing but reprobation. His reprobation is based on
historical reasoning. He argues that political Zionism is both
religiously and politically an anachronism, that it will add to
the antagonisms already existing in Palestine, and will com
plicate in a most unfortunate way the problem of Jewish
political emancipation outside of that country. The Zionist
seeks to ally religion once more with nationalism, whereas the
essence of the Jewish religion as preached by the prophets is
individualistic. The Zionist would turn back the stream of
history, and reestablish a nation in Palestine, not unjustly
called by Professor Jastrow "a glorified ghetto," whereas the
tendency of Judaism is to diffuse itself as a religion over the
earth's surface in a way most helpful to general culture. It
is further pointed out how such a state in Palestine is calcu
lated to awaken the suspicions of its present inhabitants. The
present reviewer has received, for example, recent information
direct from Jerusalem to the effect that elements of the Mo
hammedan population are already beginning to wish for a
return of Turkish rule because they fear lest the Jews under
the British mandatory might oust them from the country.
487
Finally, the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine would

tend to emphasize the nationality of the Jews outside of Pal
estine. This emphasis has been one of the main causes of antiSemitism and of the continued political disabilities of the Jews.
TpXCEPT for references to Max Nordau, Thorstein Veblen,
*-* and Sigmund Freud, there is little or nothing in William
Bayard Hale's "Story of a Style" (Huebsch) that would be
wilder Martin Marprelate were he alive today. No sixteenthcentury goad of Anglican clergy, no seventeenth-century ber
serker-pamphleteer, no Hall, no Milton, no Claudius Salmasius,
would feel anything but at home in a book which tears the
various texts of Woodrow Wilson line from line and withers
each with scornful critical fire. Those old warriors would have
only one qualifying suggestion to make, perhapsthat Mr. Wil
son, being in a sense already extinguished, needed to be no
further so. Mr. Hale's reply would be and is that he finished
his terrible book before its victim fell ill. The fact is that he
has published it, and the impression will remain, whether he
likes it or not, that the glee which he felt in his critic's task
was somewhat ghoulish. With unmistakable relish he has gone
to work to prove in detail what a few knew always and what
most have known recentlythat Mr. Wilson's utterances have
been hollow. He improves his close personal acquaintance with
the man to become psychoanalytical, proceeding from a premise
that Mr. Wilson is intellectually inferior, and knows it, to nu
merous evidences that his sole effort first and last has been
to cover this inferiority with language sounding great not only
to others but to himself. Being fearful of matching his mind
with any other than the undergraduate's, he early resorted to
the hope, and eventually arrived at the conviction, that he had
been born imperially aloof, like Geo. Washington (whose name,
thus signed, Mr. Wilson has frequently pointed out, contains,
like his own, thirteen letters). Being subject from the start to
mental incapacity, indolence, or fatigue (Mr. Hale favors fa
tigue), he developed a system of address which by intensifica
tion, super-asseveration, alliteration, personification, and mis
cellaneous mystification hypnotized "his people" and stimulated
himself. All this is intensely interesting, whether or not it is
strictly true, and there will be denials that it is true. One
thing is certain. If Mr. Hale has not written the last word
on Woodrow Wilson, he has written a valuable book on style.
' ' O ARLY Persian Poetry, from the Beginning down to the
*-* Time of Firdausi" (Macmillan), by A. V. Williams Jack
son, is an enthusiastic essay which, if taken with the more
extended English work by Edward G. Browne treating Persian
literature as a whole during the same period, furnishes an ade
quate and agreeable introduction to a field of poetry that seems
to possess permanent fascination for Western readers. Sadi
and Hafiz and Omar, of course, the favorites of Emerson and
Fitzgerald, do not come in here, but the story includes at least
one great preacher, Zoroaster, and one great epic poet, Fir
dausi. Mr. Jackson, not always sufficiently restrained in his
recommendations to be exactly effective among the unconverted,
is both at his most affectionate and at his most credible in the
account of Firdausi, whose episode of Suhrab and Rustam he
ably translates, and the traditions about whose career he com
poses into a brilliant picture.
THE second and last volume of Mr. Robert Withington's
sumptuously printed "English Pageantry" (Harvard Uni
versity Press), takes up the history of tho pageant at the be
ginning of the seventeenth century and continues it to the
present time. It is a somewhat bifurcated volume, two-thirds
being taken up with an antiquarian study of the Lord Mayor's
Show and the rest with a discussion of modern, or, as the author
calls it, Parkerian pageant, which he treats in a somewhat
soft, Drama-Leaguish fashion. We prefer the earlier part.
Mr. Withington is of course not the first to study the subject,
but he has gone over the field again and presents a wealth of
[Vol. 112, No. 2908
The Nation
488
details from contemporary printed and manuscript sources and

has added a comprehensive bibliography. The Lord Mayor's
Show was formed upon that dignitary's annual procession, in
stituted with the office in 1209, to take his oath at Westminster.
Apparently, it first began to take on pageant features in the
sixteenth century and was at its height between 1585 and 1708,
during which time the text was written by such men as Peele,
Middleton, Dekker, Heywood, Tatham, and Settle. Early in
the eighteenth century dialogue disappeared, and the show
went steadily downhill until it was revived somewhat in the
mid-nineteenth century. Today it survives to the delight,
chiefly, of children, Americans, and country cousins. Mr.
Withington finds the chief distinction between ancient and
modern pageantry to lie in the fact that the former stressed
allegory and entertainment, whereas the latter stresses history
and instruction. Perhaps a deeper distinction lies in the fact
that pageantry came into being spontaneously as the expression
of an exuberant and childish imagination, while its modern
form is a conscious revival.
Drama
Bricks and Mortar
T was last season that Mr. John D. Williams, desiring to
* produce Eugene G. O'Neill's "Beyond the Horizon" and
finding no available theater, hit upon the notion of using a
playhouse during the four afternoons left free by the customary
eight performances of the week. During the present season
this method has been used by one group of artists after an
other, and no one who has not busily visited these so-called
"special matinees" has had any correct sense of the quality or
variety of the year's theatrical activities. O'Neill's "Diff'rent"
and "The Emperor Jones" first saw the light in this manner;
"The Tyranny of Love," the most distinguished Continental
play, and Emery Pottle's "The Hero," surely the second-best
American play of the winter, had both to be content with this
imperfect manner of public appearance. For it is no cause for
surprise that the greater number of these afternoon produc
tions has failed. In a busy and nervous world it needs both
the peace and the exhilaration of night to bring on the free
and intense mood which the art of the theater demands.
It is clear, then, that the question of the mere physical exist
ence of an American theater grows more urgent year by year.
To the coming of that theater all signs point. Only it is
coming homeless and as a beggar. Hegel justly observed that
in order to have vital dramatic activity, "the free self-con
sciousness of human aims, of human difficulties, and of human
fate must have been as thoroughly awakened and have become
cultivated in such a degree as is possible only during the mid
dle or later periods of a nation's development." Our literature
bears witness to the fact that we are beginning to win that
consciousness and that cultivation. An American art theater
is struggling to be born. Cooperative groups of craftsmen and
actors and playwrights are ready at any moment to bring the
theater a little nearer to the level of our native fiction or our
native poetry. But writers have publishers. The artists of
the theater have neither land nor bricks nor mortar for a
playhouse. They are helpless.
We have emphasized the fact before and shall not hesitate
to do so again, that such groups or individuals are, as a rule,
quite aware of the normal economic necessities of their situa
tion and quite ready to reckon with them. But a regard for
normal economic necessities counts for little when brought into
competition with the spirit of the "promoters of theatrical
enterprises." Thus it is no secret that one of the best and
most artistic productions of the season is being withdrawn not
because it is not self-supporting, not because the producer has
failed to meet any obligations, but because the advance sales
- - em to guarantee the owners or lessees of the house
huge enough profits extending far enough into the summer. If

any expert of the theater desired to produce a play in New
York today he might, after much persuasion and much tread
ing of stranger's stairs, be able to secure a theater on what is
known as the sixty-forty per cent basis. This means that the
owner of the building is entitled to forty per cent of the gross
box-ofBce receipts. Unjust as such an arrangement is, it is
not intolerable in itself. It becomes so because the owner de
mands that the forty per cent do not fall below a stipulated
average sum and fixes this sum according to a scale of profits
derived from the receipts of the frothiest musical comedies and
the rawest melodramas. Thus it comes about that Shakespeare
and Sheridan, Shaw and Schnitzler, Ibsen and Porto-Riche,
and the new talents that are to create our dramatic literature
are forced into open competition with Messrs. Otto Harbach
and Sigmond Rorberg, Owen Davis and Willard Mack
Whenever, as in the case of the Neighborhood Playhouse or
of the Theater Guild, the evil necessity of such competition has
been eliminated, it has been because the directors have either
owned the playhouse or have been able to secure its lease on
terms that are not crushing. And both of these admirable or
ganizations, especially the latter, have been able to work on a
perfectly sound and normal business basis in regard to both
salaries and profits. The American art theater or repertory
theater can now, in brief, hold its own on reasonable terms.
But usually it is in the situation of, let us say, a Joseph Hergesheimer or a Theodore Dreiser, whose manuscripts are re
jected by every publisher, not because they could not be pub
lished at a profit but because the profit of the venture would
fall below the standard of earnings set by the books of Zane
Grey, E. Phillips Oppenheim, and Harold Bell Wright.
The remedy for this situation does not lie, as we have also
said before and hope to say again, in subsidies, endowments,
or charity. In communities outside of New York there is no
reason why private munificence should not build a theater as
readily as it builds a museum of art or endows a symphony
orchestra. In New York it is only necessary that a few theaters
be built by men who are content with such profits as are ex
pected from any other normally sound investment and that
these theaters be turned over exclusively to artistic and con
scientious directors. The best dramatic literature, both native
and foreign, would then get a hearing; the competition offered
by these houses would reduce the immoderately swollen profits
of the purely commercial managers and minimize, even in their
case, the temptation of always preferring a bad play to a
good one. Thus the present hot-house production of false and
shoddy theatrical goods would cease to command a premium
and the average playwright would no longer strive to write
this is no jest, but a hard factas badly as his temperament
and intelligence will let him. What a vista of usefulness is
thus opened to kindly but sensible millionaires!
Ludwig Lewisohn
Square
Herald Square
Jtnct "
New York
Maintains the
largest
and
most complete
Book Depart
ment in New
York
City.
CorvTigHt, Ml, R. B. Harry A Co.. /*.
International
Relations
President Obregon's Message

THE address of President Obregon at the opening of the
extraordinary session of the Mexican Congress on
February 7, was published in the Heraldo de Mexico on the
following day.
In compliance with a constitutional duty, I have the honor to
address the members of the honorable Congress of the Union,
to inform them of the purpose of the Federal Executive in
calling into extraordinary session the representatives of the
nation, in exercise of the right granted by Article 88, Part XI,
of the Mexican Constitution. . . .
It would be discreditable for a Government conscious of its
duties and its powers not to take advantage of this opportunity,
unique in the history of Mexico from 1910 to the present, for
responding to the demands of public opinion and to the desire
of all honorable men, and for carrying into effect reforms in
accordance with its constitutional powers, the most urgent of
which is to raise the level of culture of the people to a much
higher point. . . .
The Problem of the Banks
The great confusion which the Republic has suffered because
of the lack of a well-established banking system which would
distribute throughout the whole country the benefits of mer
cantile credit can be readily seen and has provoked a crisis so
acute that it is needless to call attention to it, and even more
needless to dwell upon the supreme necessity of providing a
radical remedy for the chaotic condition existing under our
present system throughout the Republic. Therefore the first
matter to which the Congress should turn is the pushing of a
law to solve the problem of banks issuing notes. The Executive
is fully confident that the project which he will present to the
careful consideration of the Congress will be discussed in an
impartial and calm spirit according to the principles which rule
the economic life of the people.
Workmen's Insurance
Workmen's insurance is a means of protection for the work
ing class the timeliness and utility of which no one can deny;
the demands of modern thought and culture in this matter
are so urgent that any government desiring to oppose a human
itarian movement of such importance would not only crumble
but would fail to accomplish its duty. Therefore the Executive
wishes to bring about one of the highest ideals of the Revolution
and to give immediate effect to Article 123 of the Constitution.
This is the second matter to be taken up in the Assembly.
Education
The nationalization of education, the creation of the offices of
Secretaries of Public Education and of Labor, and the corre
sponding reform of the law relating to secretarial offices, are
questions which afford such a ready response to the needs of
a good administration and to the vital problem of increasing
the culture of the people by all means at the disposal of the
state, that merely the proposal of the respective laws is sufficient
to make the Congress of the Union understand the importance of
the affairs in question and the necessity for a prompt decision.
The Agrarian Law
The Agrarian Law has for its object the solution, so far as
possible, of the old but important problem of the land. The
first aim of the revolutionary program is the equitable dis
tribution of land among the proletarian class, and the
Executive must see to it that this promise does not remain in
the realm of political dreams, also that it does not threaten
to overthrow the whole existing agrarian regime, 1101
Section
attack at their roots the foundations of the agricultural life of

the country. The project of the Agrarian Law which I submit
to the consideration of the legislature, even though it is inspired
by more advanced revolutionary principles, is, however, founded
on a concrete understanding of the needs of the country and of
the practical difficulties which a law of this nature must
encounter in its operation.
The Petroleum Problem
In turning to the question of petroleum, there are found grave
problems of an internal and international character which
will have no little effect on the future progress of the country.
On one side is the principle of national autonomy which
the Revolution proclaimed as indispensable for uniting all the
active forces and all the elements of wealth in the Republic for
economic progress; and on the other hand, the interests of
owners of petroleum wells, who are opposed to the application
of Article 27 of the Constitution, either before the courts of
Mexico, or through diplomatic channels. Everything has con
tributed to make the petroleum problem of the greatest im
portance abroad, and to present grave difficulties which alone
can be solved by patiently studying how best to preserve the
interests of the nation, without unjust injury to the property
rights of our own nationals and of foreigners, which have been
established in accordance with law and justice.
Official Privilege
The Executive feels that political and administrative moral
ity must begin with the high officials and extend throughout the
entire body of public servants. For this reason, the law which
fixes the responsibilities of the President of the Republic and of
the Secretaries should be given preference in this Congress.
From this it should follow that the high executive officials must
be made subject to law and justice in all of their actions and not
enjoy the immunity from taxes, which is so repugnant to honor
able men and for the protection of which so many wrongs have
been committed. In a true democracy the public official should
be accountable for his actions, whatever may be his rank or
legal power; the higher it is, the greater are his duties and
responsibilities. The executive should, for the same reason,
give proof of his democratic spirit and respect for the prin
ciples of the law, initiating the enactment of the law which
fixes the responsibilities of the President of the Republic and
his Secretaries.
Power to Call Extraordinary Sessions
With regard to Paragraph 10 of the Convention, it is highly
satisfactory for the Executive to turn over to the permanent
commission of Congress the power to call extraordinary ses
sions which according to our Political Code of 1857 the com
mission possessed, and which in a spirit of absolutism poorly
disguised in the Constitution of 1917 was taken away without
a just motive. For this reason it will follow that the legislature
is able to enjoy the autonomy which most modern constitutions
concede, and its action may not be made subject to the will or
caprice of the Executive.
Administration of Justice
Public clamor has pointed out grave evils in the administra
tion of justice, which is at present merely written in our laws
and which absolutely lacks effectiveness notwithstanding that,
according to our penal code, courts should be obliged to give
justice to whoever seeks it. The principal reason for such a
state of affairs is to be found in the Organic Law of Tribunals,
promulgated under the past administration, the defects of
which have been shown with rare unanimity. The Executive
desires something practical and effective, and this does not
signify, as has been the case until now, a vain hope and dream
impossible of realization.
IVol.112, No. 2908
The Nation
490
being brought to trial, as he considered there was clear evidence

against them. The services of the remainder of the party were
GAMBLING
Gambling should be, in the opinion of the Executive, vigor

ously attacked in order to diminish as far as possible the
troubles which it causes not only in the way of speculations
and immoral waste but also because it involves the administra
dispensed with.
Dismissal can only be carried out by direction of the Chief

of Police.
The Chief of Police sent instructions to suspend
dens. As the Federal authorities have not jurisdiction through
action against the twenty-six cadets until he returned to Dub

lin. This letter took twenty-four hours to reach the Command
ant of the Auxiliary Division, with the result that the men were
out all the Republic in this matter, it is necessary to institute a
Chief of Police at the Irish Office that they had been dismissed
tive corruption of those officials who shut their eyes to it, or

who have actual agreements with the managers of gambling
sent to England.
On arrival in England they protested to the
constitutional reform in order legally to prosecute and punish
gamblers, not only in the Federal District and territories but
without trial.
On his return to Dublin he directed that the dismissed cadets
also in the various local units.
should be recalled without prejudice to any future disciplinary
action if found guilty. He at once instituted a court of inquiry
PENSIONS
into the whole of the circumstances, which is now proceeding.
In regard to military pensions, the Government has considered

it just and equitable to reform vigorously the present system,
The cadets have not been allowed to return to their own unit,
and there is no question under any circumstances of allowing
which establishes odious differences in relation to the military
rank which the beneficiary holds at the time of his death or

when he is disabled by accident. Nothing is more contrary to
the need for a just and humanitarian compensation than these
differences, and therefore the Executive wishes that all servants
of the fatherland who die upon the field of battle or who suffer
wounds which diminish their efficiency should be assured that
the state will come to their aid and will compensate their
them to do so. They are now awaiting the finding of the court.
The commanding officer and the adjutant have resigned. There
is no condonation of looting of any sort. In all cases of this
nature the accused are, if the evidence warrants it, sent for
trial. The county inspector of police could not support the sum
mary dismissal of these cadets without full investigation.
On the following day the letters which had passed between

General Tudor, Police Adviser to the Lord Lieutenant of
efforts and sacrifices.
All the other laws which are to be taken up in the Congress

are of importance, particularly those which relate to social,
political, or administrative problems, the solution of which will
result in marking out for the nation the path of progress and
Ireland, and General Crozier were published in the press.
resolute purpose of working for the reconstruction of the
The first, from General Tudor to General Crozier, dated at

Dublin, February 14, follows:
DEAR CROZIER: I think it will be best for you to keep these
thirty T. C.s suspended till I come back. I want to discuss it
with the Chief Secretary. He gets all the bother. My main
point is that it is an unfortunate time to do anything that looks
panicky. I think also these T. C.s will have a distinct griev
country, the restoration of national credit, and the removal of

those traditional evils which have paralyzed all the active forces
of the Republic. The future of millions of human beings is linked
quitted. Tell these thirty they are suspended pending my

return or, if you prefer it, keep them on by not completing
organization.
Deputies, Senators: At this moment the nation requires from

its representatives a broad and lofty spirit of reform and the
with the action of the legislature, and it is not strange, there

fore, that public opinion demands a strong determination,
tenacious and coordinated, to solve all those questions upon
ance if the platoon commanders and section leaders are ac
their accounts till I come back.
Yours sincerely,
H. H. TUDOR
which depends the future of the fatherland. See to it that the
Congress of the Union secures the approval and satisfies the

hopes of the Mexican people.
On February 19, General Crozier dispatched the follow

ing reply to the Police Adviser:
DEAR GENERAL: The more I think over the matter the more
I am of opinion that your attitude in the Trim Incident has

made my position quite impossible in the Division, as I am all
The Case of General Crozier
out to have the discipline unquestionable. I therefore propose
HE resignation of General Crozier, commandant of the
to resign at the expiration of my leave.
I still consider that
Auxiliary Division of the British forces in Ireland,

was announced on February 22. The circumstances leading
theft on the part of policemen in the course of their duties is

unpardonable, and I cannot honestly associate myself with a
up to it were reported in the press of England in the follow

ing general terms: Thirty cadets of the Auxiliary Division
force in which such acts are condoned.

Yours sincerely,
F. P. CROZIER
were caught in the act of looting a house which they had

been ordered to search for arms. The case was investigated
by General Crozier, who remanded five of the men for court
martial and dismissed the remainder from the division.
According to General Crozier his action was approved by

General Tudor, police adviser to the Viceroy, but the dis
missed cadets on their return to England appealed to this
The whole incident was dealt with by the Manchester

Guardian in a vigorous editorial appearing in the issue of
February 24:
Fuller evidence gives a still blacker look to the virtual dis
missal of General Crozier from the command of the Auxiliary
Cadets for insisting on discipline in that force. There are pub
There
lished today the final letters between him and General Tudor,
upon the commandant, General Crozier, resigned, together

with the adjutant of the division. In answer to questions
in the House of Commons on February 22, regarding the
facts of the case, Sir Hamar Greenwood, Chief Secretary
for Ireland, read the following report of the Chief of Police:
On receipt of a complaint that a party of the Auxiliary
the superior who drove him out of his command. That General
Tudor did this in order to make things easier for Sir Hamar
official and the order of dismissal was overruled.
Greenwood in Parliament is indicated in the letter in which his
more dutiful subordinate was thrown over.
General Tudor,
then apparently in London and in touch with the politicians,

seems to have lost part of that regard for discipline which had
led him in the first instance to approve everything that General
Crozier had done.
General Tudor now felt he must consider the
Division had been guilty of looting, the Chief of Police directed

the Commandant of the Auxiliary Division to make immediate
comfort of the Chief Secretary. The bother, he says, would
inquiry. The Commandant thereupon arrested five platoon com

manders and section leaders and one cadet, with a view to their
come upon Sir Hamar Greenwood if General Crozier's policy of

having discipline unquestionable continued to be loyally
March 30, 1921]
The Nation
backed. General Crozier's answer to this letter will be remem

bered as a model for every upright officer who may hereafter
be the object of such an attack. . . . Now that the attempts
to save Sir Hamar Greenwood "bother" at the cost of discipline,
life, and property have failed, a grotesque medley of conflicting
excuses are offered to Parliament. First there were flourishes
about not punishing men without trial. Of course the incrimi
nated men were tried before dismissal. It is to shirk the con
sequences of their trial that a different trial has since been
resorted to. Perhaps conscious of this absurdity, Sir Hamar
Greenwood next suggests that he only wants more punishment
for them. Dismissal, he now suggests, is not enough of a pen
altyas if dismissal from a police force ever precluded subse
quent prosecution for such crimes as organized theft. Sir
Hamar Greenwood had better own up. The facts are growing
plain. In the present Government of Ireland there are clearly
some elements, civil and military, which, like General Crozier,
"consider that theft on the part of policemen in the course of
their duties is unpardonable," and which "cannot honestly asso
ciate themselves with a force in which such acts are condoned."
And there are other elements differently minded. All that we
do not know is how far the expulsion of the former elements by
the latter has yet proceeded.
The British Mandate in Mesopotamia

THE British draft of the Mesopotamia mandate, which
was made public early in February, has been submit
ted to the Council of the League of Nations.
Article 1. The mandatory will frame within the shortest
possible time, not exceeding three years from the date of the
coming into force of this mandate, an organic law for Meso
potamia. This organic law shall be framed in consultation with
the native authorities and shall take account of the rights, in
terests, and wishes of all the populations inhabiting the man
dated territory. It shall contain a provision designed to facili
tate the progressive development of Mesopotamia as an inde
pendent state. Pending the coming into effect of the organic
law, the administration of Mesopotamia shall be conducted in
accordance with the spirit of the mandate.
Akt. 2. The mandatory may maintain troops in the terri
tories under his mandate for the defense of the territories.
Until the entry into force of the organic law and the reestablishment of public security he may organize and employ local
forces necessary for the maintenance of order and for the
defense of these territories. Such forces may only be recruited
from the inhabitants of the territories under the mandate.
The said local forces shall thereafter be responsible to the
local authorities, subject always to the control to be exercised
over these forces by the mandatory, who shall not employ them
for other than the above-mentioned purposes except with the
consent of the Mesopotamian Government.
Nothing in this article shall preclude the Mesopotamian Gov
ernment from contributing to the cost of the maintenance of
any forces maintained by the mandatory in Mesopotamia.
The mandatory shall be entitled at all times to use the roads,
railways, and ports of Mesopotamia for the movement of troops
and the carriage of fuel and supplies.
Art. 3. The mandatory shall be intrusted with the control
of the foreign relations of Mesopotamia and the right to issue
exequaturs to the consuls appointed by foreign Powers. He
shall also be entitled to afford diplomatic and consular protec
tion to the citizens of Mesopotamia when outside its territorial
limits.
Art. 4. The mandatory shall be responsible for seeing that
no Mesopotamian territory shall be ceded or leased or in any
way placed under the control of the government of any foreign
Power.
Art. 5. The immunities and privileges of foreigners, includ
491
ing the benefits of consular jurisdiction and protection as for

merly enjoyed by capitulation or usage in the Ottoman Empire,
are definitely abrogated in Mesopotamia.
Art. 6. The mandatory shall be responsible for seeing that
the judicial system established in Mesopotamia shall safeguard,
firstly, the interests of foreigners; secondly, the law and (to the
extent deemed expedient) jurisdiction now existing in Mesopo
tamia with regard to questions arising out of the religious
beliefs of certain communities (such as the laws of wakf and
personal status) ; in particular, the mandatory agrees that the
control and administration of wakf shall be exercised in accord
ance with the religious law and dispositions of the founders.
Art. 7. Pending the making of special extradition agree
ments with foreign Powers relating to Mesopotamian extradi
tion, the treaties in force between foreign Powers and the man
datory shall apply to Mesopotamia.
Art. 8. The mandatory will insure to all complete freedom
of conscience and free exercise of all forms of worship, subject
only to the maintenance of public order and morals. No dis
crimination of any kind shall be made between the inhabitants
of Mesopotamia on the grounds of race, religion, or language.
Instructions in and through the medium of the native language
of Mesopotamia shall be promoted by the mandatory.
The right of each community to maintain its own schools for *
the education of its own members in its own language (while
conforming to such educational requirements of a general na
ture as the Administration may impose) shall not be denied
or impaired.
Art. 9. Nothing in this mandate shall be construed as con
ferring upon the mandatory authority to interfere with the
fabric or management of sacred shrines, the immunities of
which are guaranteed.
Art. 10. The mandatory shall be responsible for exercising
such supervision over missionary enterprise in Mesopotamia as
may be required for the maintenance of public order and good
government; subject to such supervision no measures shall be
taken in Mesopotamia to obstruct or interfere with such enter
prise or to discriminate against any missionary on the ground
of his religion or nationality.
Art. 11. The mandatory must see that there is no discrimi
nation in Mesopotamia against the nationals of any state which
is a member of the League of Nations (including the com
panies incorporated under the laws of such state) as compared
with the nationals of the mandatory or any foreign state in
matters concerning taxation, commerce, or navigation, the ex
ercise of industries or professions, or in the treatment of ships
or aircraft. Similarly, there shall be no discrimination in
Mesopotamia against goods originating in or destined for any
of the said states, and there shall be freedom of transport
under equitable conditions across the mandated area.
Subject to the aforesaid, the Mesopotamian Government may,
on the advice of the mandatory, impose such taxes and customs
duties as it may consider necessary, and to take such steps
as it may think necessary to promote the development of the
natural resources of the country and to safeguard the interests
of the population.
Nothing in this article shall prevent the Mesopotamian Gov
ernment, on the advice of the mandatory, from concluding spe
cial customs arrangements with any state the territory of which
in 1914 was wholly included in Asiatic territory or Arabia.
Art. 12. The mandatory shall adhere, on behalf of Meso
potamia, to any general international convention already exist
ing or that may be concluded hereafter with the approval of
the League of Nations respecting slave traffic, traffic in arms
and ammunition, traffic in drugs, or relating to commercial
equality, freedom of transit and navigation, railway and postal,
telegraphic, and wireless communications, or artistic, literary,
or industrial property.
Art. 13. The mandatory will secure the cooperation of the
Mesopotamian Government, so far as social, religious, and other
conditions may permit, in the execution of any common policy
492
The Nation
adopted by the League of Nations for preventing and combating

diseases of plants and animals.
Art. 14. The mandatory will secure the enactment, within
twelve months from the coming into force of this mandate and
will insure the execution of a law of antiquities based on the
contents of Article 421, part 13, of the Treaty of Peace with
Turkey; this law shall replace, the former Ottoman law of
antiquities, and shall insure equality of treatment in the matter
of archaeological research to the nationals of all states mem
bers of the League of Nations.
Art. 15. Upon coming into force of the organic law, ar
rangements shall be made between the mandatory and the
Mesopotamian Government for settling the terms upon which
the latter will take over the public works and other services of
a permanent character, the benefit of which will pass to the
Mesopotamian Government; such arrangements will be commu
nicated to the Council of the League of Nations.
Art. 16. The mandatory shall make to the Council of the
League of Nations an annual report as to the measures taken
during the year to carry out the provisions of the mandate;
copies of all laws and regulations promulgated or issued during
the year shall be communicated with the report.
Art. 17. The consent of the Council of the League of Nations
* is required for any modification of the terms of the present
mandate provided that in the case of any modification proposed
by the mandatory such consent may be given by a majority of
the Council. If any dispute whatever should arise between
the members of the League of Nations relating to the inter
pretation or application of these provisions, which cannot be
settled by negotiation, this dispute shall be submitted to the
Permanent Court of International Justice provided for by
Article 14 of the Covenant of the League of Nations.
The present copy shall be deposited in the archives of the
League of Nations, and certified copies shall be forwarded by
the Secretary-General of the League of Nations to all the
Powers signatory to the Treaty of Peace with Turkey.
Workers' Control in Italy

THE Italian Government's project for "workers' control"
of industry appeared in Avanti (Milan) for January
26. It is still under discussion and its extreme caution has
evoked much protest among the workers; while the em
ployers are divided between a clear-cut opposition to any
measure of democratic control and a belief that some such
modification of the present system is inevitable.
Aims of Control
Article 1. Control of industry by capable workers is estab
lished with the following aims in view: (a) To instruct the
workers concerning the conditions under which the industries
themselves are run; (b) to promote improvement in technical
education and in the moral and economic conditions of the
workers within the limits determined by the conditions under
which the employers carry on their work; (c) to insure the
execution of all the laws established for the protection of the
working classes; (d) to recommend improvements in methods
which will increase production and render it more economical;
(e) to bring about more and more normal and peaceful rela
tions between the workers and employers.
Industries Controlled
Art. 2. Control is established separately for each class of
industries as follows: iron and metal, textile, chemical, and
electrical industries, land transportation, navigation, construc
tion, extractive industries, mines, quarries, hotels, and allied
industries.
Exempt from such control are industries run by the state,
industries established within the last four years, and industries
employing less than sixty workers.
[Vol. 112, No. 2908
Formation of Committees
Art. 3. Adult workers in each class of industry shall elect
proportionally a committee of control composed of nine mem
bers, six of which shall be chosen by the operatives and three
by the engineers, office workers, and technicians of the indus
try. The unions having members among the workers of each
industry shall present to them the lists of candidates.
A rule which shall be drawn up after hearing the opinion of
the Superior Committee of Labor will establish the regulations
and methods under which each class of industry is run. The
committee shall be renewed every three years. Committee
members may be reelected.
Control in Small Industries
Art. 4. The committee shall appoint for each industrial
establishment, whether a joint stock company or a limited lia
bility owned by private employers, two or more workers, accord
ing to the importance of the establishment, chosen to exercise
control and report to the committee.
The delegates shall be selected among the adult workers
belonging to the establishment in question, and possibly among
those who have served at least three years. The rules which
will be carried into effect by Article 9 of this law will deter
mine the way in which the delegates are to exercise their au
thority, taking into account the particular conditions in each
class of industry.
With the renewal of the committee every three years, the
renewal of delegates will take place; such delegates shall be
eligible for reelection.
Powers of the Committees of Control
Art. 6. By means of its delegates, the committee of
control is entitled to the information necessary for a knowl
edge of: (a) Methods of obtaining and cost of raw materials;
(b) cost of production; (c) methods of administration; (d)
methods of operation, with the exception of anything depend
ing on factory secrets; (e) wage of workers; (f) employment
of capital; (g) profits of the business; (h) method of carrying
out the laws which protect the workers and provisions relating
to employment and dismissal of workers.
Employers' Representation
Art. 6. Employers or their representatives (no more
than two) may be present at the meetings of the committees of
control; a representative of the Superior Committee of Labor
may also be present. The representatives of the employers and
of the Committee of Labor may make remarks and may ask to
have them taken down word for word, but they have not the
right to vote. They are entitled to prevent the publication, or
the entrance into the minutes, or even the writing down, of
any information which might prejudice the interests of the
employers.
Art. 7. The employers in each class of industry shall,
by the methods established by law, name their own representa
tive body for any negotiations with the committee of control,
to make certain that the separate employers fulfil the obliga
tions arising from the present law and its various regulations,
and to choose their representatives for the meetings of the
committee of control. These representative bodies of the em
ployers, like the committees of control, shall be composed of
nine members and they also shall be renewed every three years.
Two delegates of the committee of control may be present at
the meetings of the representative bodies of the employers, and
can make remarks, but have not the right to vote.
Art. 8. When special circumstances demand it, or in any
case at least once a year, the representatives of the employers
and the committees of control must hold a meeting under the
presidency of a representative of the Superior Committee of
Labor, to examine together the improvements which experience
shows advisable to introduce into the management of the in
dustry, to increase and improve production in the interests of
March 30, 1921]
The Nation
493
public economy and of the workers, and to settle any contro

versies which may have arisen in the exercise of control.
Employment and Dismissal of Workers
Art. 9. Special rules to be drawn up for each class of
industry, after hearing the opinions of the representatives of
the employers, the committee of control, and the Superior Com
mittee of Labor, shall govern the employment and dismissal
of operatives, taking into account the special conditions under
which each industry is run.
Such rules must, however, comply with the principles estab
lished in the two following articles.
Placement Bureaus
Art. 10. In places which shall be determined by rule, as pro
vided for in the preceding article, placement bureaus shall be es
tablished composed of representatives of the employers and of
the committees of control. These bureaus shall keep a record of
those asking for employment, and when it is not a question of
providing work in which they are specially skilled they shall
be given employment in order of their application, preference
being given to workers living in the commune where the estab
lishment is situated, and to those who return from military
service and were formerly employed in the same establishment.
In the placement of workers no attention must be given to
considerations of a political or trade union nature. When
workers skilled in the line required cannot be found among the
applicants at the placement bureaus, the companies may employ
casual laborers from other sources. Every firm must refuse
employment to those who have undergone heavy sentences for
criminal offenses and to those who have been dismissed for
disciplinary reasons.
Differences between employers and committees of control rela
tive to the employment of workers shall be settled without
appeal by two judges, one chosen by each side, and under the
presidency of a person selected by the two judges from the
workers, and in case of disagreement, nominated by the presi
dent of the court.
Dismissal of Workers
Art. 11. No dismissals shall be made for political or
trade union reasons.
When industrial conditions call for a reduction of labor, and
if the nature of the work permits, the normal working time
shall be reduced to a limit of thirty-six hours a week. If that
is not sufficient, work must be divided among the operatives
as much as possible before workers can be dismissed.
When dismissals must be made, workers who have given long
service must be kept in preference, as well as those having large
families.
Controversies arising with regard to dismissals shall be de
cided by judges named as in the preceding article.
Art. 12. When particular industrial conditions demand
it and especially when there is a great difference between the
method in which a given industry is run in different parts of
Italy, the rule established in Article 3 can provide for more
than one committee of control in a single industry, in which
case the number of employers' representatives must be propor
tionally increased.
The expenses for the committees of control shall be shared
equally by the workers and the employers. The methods of
contribution and assessment shall be determined by special men
drawn up as provided in Article 9.
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The Nation
FOUNDED 1866
Vol. CXII
NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 6, 1921
Contents
496
EDITORIALS :
The Commission on Ireland Reports
498
Europe DriftsNowhere
499
The Poor Professor
499
The American Cardinal
600
KEEPING THE COST OF LIVING HIGH. By Louis F. Budenz
601
MEXICO1921. II. A LABOR REPUBLIC. By Paul Hanna
503
THE KANSAS COURT OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS. By Clyde M.
Reed
606
OUR IMPERIALIST PROPAGANDAI. THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHICS ANTI-HAITIAN CAMPAIGN
608
THE PROGRESS OF CIVIL LIBERTY IN THE UNITED STATES
609
610
CORRESPONDENCE
610
BOOKS:
Sarah Cleghorn. By Martha Gruening
612
China's Foreign Trade. By Frederick Wells Williams
612
Through RusBian Eyes. By Jacob Zeitlin
618
Notable New Books
614
DRAMA :
"Inheritors." By Ludwig Lewisohn
616
Is Egypt a Nation? 1
616
Associate Editors
LEWIS S. GANNETT
FREDA KIRCHWEY
ARTHUR WARNER
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
ERNEST H. GRUENING
CARL VAN DOREN
Managing Editor
Literary Editor
SuRScnirnoN RathsFive dollars per annum postpaid in the United States and
LLOYD GEORGE losing his grip? So the London cor
respondents are reporting. Then it is for the thou
sandth time. True, he shows increasing nervousness. He
has tipped off the country to prepare for a general election,
and, within a week, he twice bitterly assailed the British
Labor Party, which he now denounces as dangerously revo
lutionary and possessing a damnable new party discipline
which makes the corporals of its army the leaders. The
Labor Party, it appears, is a deadly menace, "worse than
the war-peril," and bent on destroying the whole social sys
tem. Again, as to Ireland the Premier cannot hide his un
easiness. The policy of ruthlessness, reprisals, and revenge
is not getting ahead somehow. We have almost a confession
of failure on the part of the infallible one, but he sees
clearly that the blame for the continuing bloodshed rests
not upon him, but upon the Irish leaders. Not one of these,
he tells us, has the moral courage "to face his people and
tell them that, for the sake of Ireland, he was going to
abandon certain demands which it was impossible for the
British Government to concede." Well, Lord North's min
istry would likewise not concede; it had no patience what
ever with the miserable American leaders who asked the
impossible. The difficulty with the Opposition remains that
there is no single big leader available to confront Lloyd
George, still the most dexterous opportunist and the most
skilful political acrobat of modern times.
SECRETARY HUGHES did not finally close the door on
trade with Russia but he left open such a narrow crack
that it will be difficult for a self-respecting government
to squeeze through. Trade will depend upon the establish
ment of the economic bases of production; and these will
No. 2909
depend, according to the economics of Mr. Hughes, upon

several things, among which is prominently numbered "firm
guaranties of private property." Mr. Hughes's economic
theory may be right or wrong, but when he goes up to a
socialist government and says in effect "You are all right
except that you seem to be a little bit socialistic in your
behavior," the chances are that the socialist government will
laugh in a rude way and reply, "You don't say." Private
property may be receiving a little unwilling consideration in
Russia these days, but it will be a long time before it is
again made the basis of Russia's economic life, and if it
ever does become the dominant factor that it was under the
old regime it will not, we are ready to swear, be due to the
exhortations of Mr. Hughes. Meanwhile this Government's
protestations of "deep sympathy and grave concern" are
likely to be regarded in much the same light as those of the
well-famed walrus.
MOST cheerful and optimistic reports on our business
situation are, we hear, being given to President
Harding by some of our leading captains of industry. Mr.
Ford, too, thinks we are over the worst. But business itself
belies these encouraging tales. In the East, at least, Mr.
Harding's accession to power resulted in none of the mir
acles Republicans have the reputation of performing merely
by entering the White House. So great is the prostration
of business, so grave the situation of our railroads, we
heartily wish the good news given to the President could be
trusted. But unemployment steadily increases and one prob
lem after anothernot the least that of the Shipping Board,
which is facing a deficit of no less than half a billion dollars
thrusts itself upon the unfortunate President. To his own
satisfaction Mr. Harding has, however, mapped out his
legislative policy. The anti-dumping bill and the emergency
protection for farmers are to be enacted with a rush, while
changes in taxation are to await the outcome of the efforts
of the Treasury to induce our Allies to pay the $500,000,000
a year interest on their loans which they owe us. Only one
thing, and that rather amusing, darkens the legislative sky
for the protectionists. More than a score of legislators
have informed Mr. Harding that they are going to get their
feet into the trough and are going to introduce their own
bills placing embargoes on any number of agricultural prod
ucts and manufactures. Mr. Harding, firm advocate of
protection, is spending all his time trying to prevent these
interferers from feathering each their several nests. And
yet there are those who envy Mr. Harding his job !
NOTHING can surpass the cleverness of Paris these
days. Here is fresh proof of it:
[By the Associated Press]
Paris, March 25.Official circles here regard the Communist
uprising in Germany as "spurious," basing their judgment on
dispatches.
But, surely, the Germans are entitled to some credit for
their ability as moving-picture producers. It takes some
nerve to blow up historic municipal buildings and kill forty
or fifty fellow-citizens and further to disrupt business life
in certain sections. But then there are no limits to the
496
The Nation
Machiavellian intrigues of Berlin. They arein Parisian

eyesquite capable of killing Ebert and all his Government
to avoid paying the indemnities. Yet if they should pay
under duress should we not have further proof of their
cringing contemptibility?
WE had almost written that nothing more horrifying
has come out of the South of late than the whole
sale murders of Negro peons on the farm of John Williams,
the Jasper County, Georgia, farmer, but then we remem
bered some of the recent lynching horrors with all their
fiendishness. It now appears that some eleven or more
Negro slaves were killed by Williams and one Negro assist
ant, out of fear because charges of peonage had been made
against Williams and Federal agents were investigating
his plantation. What did it matter if there were eleven
"niggers" less if Williams succeeded in hiding the traces
of his wrong-doing? Well, against such a wholesale mas
sacre we shall doubtless have some Southern protests. But
no pulpit and no newspaper will, we fear, ring with denun
ciation of the semi-slavery throughout the South in which
the rural Negro usually lives. If it were not for Federal
interference the practice would go on undisturbed. No
Southern newspaper has yet begun a crusade against a
slavery the like of which is not to be found in any other
civilized state. When in Arkansas in 1919 there was an
effort of some law-abiding Negroes to free themselves eco
nomically under guidance of a white attorney, they were
immediately attacked by whites and the report that a
Negro rebellion was on was sent all over the country. There
was an economic rebellion under way and the powers that
were in Arkansas decided to stop it there. But it cannot
be stopped.
OUR American Negroes are among the most law-abiding
people in the world but they are fast being driven
to desperation. The news from Jasper County will steel
many a heart. It is unfortunately true that the doctrine
of opposing force with force and violence with violence is
making rapid headway among them North and South.
Against this The Nation will use all the influence it may
have among the colored people, whose battles it began to
fight with its first issue. But they know that in the
South they are literally enslaved in State after State as
on John Williams's plantation. Not until the war exodus
frightened them did the Louisiana and Mississippi plant
ers' associations agree to give their black tenants a
yearly written accounting, and even now that cannot be
had by hundreds of thousands who labor and labor and
never get out of debt to their white masters. The case of
John Williams should be a warning to the South. If it
does not begin to put its house in order and to give eco
nomic justice and freedom to its colored citizens it will
some day pay a terrible price. The white Czars once
thought the Russian serfs would never rise. Twice now
have the serfs set themselves free. Were the Negro not the
patient long-suffering person he is the South would be a
shambles today. What other people would peacefully endure
their exclusion from all courts save as criminals, their
taxation without representation, and their being barred
from every participation in government, and then stay quiet
in the face of such horrors as the burning of Henry Lowry,
so graphically described by William Pickens in a recent
issue of The Nation, and the wholesale murders in Jasper
County?
[Vol. 112, No. 2909
THERE is just one point of consequence involved in the

action of the New York County Chapter of the Amer
ican Legion in its expulsion of Lieut.-CoL Alexander E.
Anderson because of his participation in a meeting to pro
test against the use of African troops by the French in the
occupied regions of Germany. That point does not concern
the propriety of the meeting, which we have already criti
cized as a mistake, or what Colonel Anderson said, which
in detail we do not know. The issue is the right of a man
to do or say what he pleases, so long as he acts in his indi
vidual capacity, without control or interference by any
organization to which he happens to belong. That right
is not without qualification. If, for instance, a member of
a church makes declarations, in or out of it, which deny
all that the body stands for, its membership would be justi
fied in asking him to show why he should not be dropped
from its rolls. The line is often hard to draw, but in
general no organization should concern itself with the ex
pressed opinions of a member except where they come so
definitely and directly into conflict with its objects as to
indicate that the person in question can no longer function
as a member.
NOW the American Legion has specifically declared itself
to be a non-political organization. It has a proper
purpose in seeking to maintain social ties among ex-service
men and in working for their legitimate material interests.
It has no concern with America's present relations with
either Germany or the Allies. It ought to keep its hands
off international controversies. It ought to have ignored
the Anderson incident. If there are still men of liberal
minds in the Legion, and there are, they will have to work
hard to hold it to its original and legitimate objects in the
face of a too-frequent manipulation by the bigoted. Nobody
with opinions will any longer be willing to belong. Inci
dentally Colonel Anderson's reply to the Legion is so scorch
ing and so true in its Americanism it ought to be read and
taken to heart by every member.
FROM the point of view of continued production the
settlement arrived at through Federal mediation of
the difficulties in the packing industry is gratifying. It
came after a long and earnest discussion by representatives
of the workers and packers with Secretaries Hoover, Wal
lace, and Davis acting as mediators, and the outcome was
the result of concessions on both sides. The eight-hour
day and overtime rates are restored to the men, and the
war-time agreements which the packers wished to abro
gate remain in effect until September, while a wage cut
of eight cents an hour for hourly workers and of 12% per
cent for piece workers was allowed by the decision. But
the settlement is in the nature of an armistice rather than
a treaty of peace. The men still speak bitterly of the
"hostility" of the employers and threaten trouble in Sep
tember when the agreements expire; while the packers,
through Morris and Company, have announced that they
want it understood that they "have signed no agreement
with the workers but have renewed with Secretary Davis
the agreement entered into with the former Secretary of
Labor concerning arbitration of disputes." This is inter
preted to mean, according to the words of the statement,
that "the packers are holding firm in their policy not to
recognize the unions, and that the agreement was not
made with their employees but with Secretary Davis."
April 6, 1921]
The Nation
THE treatment of the Mexican laborers brought into the

Salt River basin by the Arizona Cotton Growers' Asso
ciation has aroused much indignation in Mexico and some in
Arizona. During the past four years the Association, hav
ing leased lands in the Salt River Valley at absurdly high
rentals and having borrowed from the banks to finance its
gamble, by a special suspension of the immigration laws has
imported 35,000 Mexicans as cotton pickers. By the terms
of the contract made with the Mexican Government the
Association agreed to pay all the cost of transporting the
Mexicans and of returning them to Mexico when they were
no longer needed. Last year, when the market for longstaple cotton collapsed months before the crop had ma
tured, the Association suspended work in the fields, and the
laborers found themselves without work and in many cases
unable to collect the money that was due them. After the
Mexican Government had protested against this violation
of contract, the Association again promised to "repatriate
and to assume the debts due the Mexican cotton pickers."
But there are still thousands of imported Mexicans desti
tute in Salt River Valley, fed by the Phoenix Trades Council,
and the Cotton Growers' Association has taken no steps
toward the fulfilment of its contract. On the contrary,
bills (inspired by the Association) have been introduced in
the Arizona Senate and House providing for the feeding
of the hungry and the relief of distress by the supervisors
of counties at the expense of the State, and a House joint
memorial has been adopted under a suspension of rules,
urging the Federal Bureau of Immigration "to deport to
their own country aliens who have been brought into this
country under special arrangement or contract and who for
two weeks have been without work." And while the Asso
ciation tries to make the taxpayers assume its obligations,
the Mexicans starve.
THERE is a shortage of a million houses in the United
States, according to the published report of the United
States Senate Committee on Reconstruction of which Sen
ator Calder of New York is chairman. To build these will
cost five billion dollars, while railway and other necessary
construction in the country is demanding fifteen billion
dollars more. Senator Calder's committee opposes sub
sidies or building at Government expense, and offers ten
bills to meet the existing emergency. Of these the most
hopeful, perhaps, are a bill to permit the Federal Reserve
Board to direct the use of savings and time deposits of
national banks for long-time loans for home building, and
a plan for a home loan bank functioning after the fashion
of the Farm Loan System. Both these measures have
merit, but it is doubtful if they can really cure conditions
which so gravely menace the health and welfare of the
country.
IT is hardly a generation ago that Europe began to reach
out after fresh fruit as far as the West Indies. Within
that time an enormous trade in bananas has developed,
while apple exports from the Atlantic seaboard of the
United States and Canada have also become a great in
dustry. Now it appears that the Pacific coast is to become
a direct fruit mart for Europe. The Panama Canal and
the development of refrigerator-steamships make this a
natural step, and it is not surprising to learn that the Royal
Mail Steam Packet Company is planning to put a fleet of
nine 15,000-ton steamships in operation between Seattle
and European ports, in conjunction with a small service
497
already begun by the Holland-America Line. This new

outlet for the fruit industry of our Pacific seaboard comes,
fortunately, at a moment when high railroad rates are
making it more difficult than formerly to sell Pacific-grown
fruit on the Atlantic seaboard. Within the last year or so,
for instance, Florida oranges have largely displaced the
California crop in Eastern markets. Logically, this is as it
should be; we ought to take our food from the nearest
gardens available; but the steamship is not so limited. A
few hundred miles are nothing to it and its capacity to
range the whole world over in search of cargoes for its
home ports.
"rf^HE trustees are well able to run this institution.
A Conducting such an institution is like running a
shop or a factory, and when it is found that a man does not
fill the bill he should be fired." Thus the president of the
board of trustees of Lawrenceville in an obviously irritated
reply to the criticism which the trustees and the headmaster
of that center of light have encountered as the result of
the dismissal of one of the teachers. Ah those strong,
efficient men who "run" our institutions of learning! They
always travel true to form. Less than two years ago
these same trustees were looking about for a new head
master, not sure whether they wanted an educator or some
eminent man of another calling, say an engineer, who
might continue his profession and yet find time to look
out for the destinies of the youth under his strong care.
It now becomes clearer than ever what they are about.
They have a factory in mind; this means that they want
quantity production of standard materials; and doubtless
that is what they will increasingly get. But what if human
youth should somehow turn out to be insusceptible to this
mechanical handling? What if some one should find out
that the boys of Lawrenceville, as of all other schools, are
of material too fine and precious to be run through iron
hoppers and steel looms, and require consideration and gui
dance more personal and subtle than is dreamed of in the
philosophy of our strong, efficient men?
THE choice of General Leonard Wood as "head" of the
University of Pennsylvania and of Professor Josiah
H. Penniman as provost has the appearance of being a
step in the right direction; The Nation has repeatedly
urged the wider separation of the functions of business
administration and of educational leadership in American
universities. We seriously question, however, whether
this particular step amounts to more than a mere appear
ance of progress in a liberal direction. Bearing in mind
the personal prestige which General Wood will have in his
new position, and remembering his record as a reactionary
and a militarist, we foresee that he will exert an altogether
disproportionate influence in the conduct of the University
and that the faculty is not at all likely to have that in
creased part in its own government which it ought to have.
Accomplished scholar and agreeable person as Professor
Penniman is, we feel reasonably sure that he will have to
play second fiddle to his business manager. Now this is
precisely what should not take place in any university. The
faculty should be first, and the business management should
carry out its policies. We cannot quite see General Wood
in the role of executive secretary of the University of Penn
sylvania; and we suspect.that the honors and perquisites
particularly the perquisitesof the president will be hand
somely in excess of those the provost may look forward to.
The Nation
498
The
Commission
on
THE American Commission on Ireland, constituted at

the call of The Nation, has published its Interim Re
port of 136 printed pages, unanimously signed by its eight
members, Messrs. L. Hollingsworth Wood, Frederic C.
Howe, James H. Maurer, and Norman Thomas, Major
Oliver P. Newman, Miss Jane Addams, and Senators David
I. Walsh and George W. Norris. Frankly admitting that
its inability to obtain pro-English witnesses and, because
of the refusal of the British Government to visa its pass
ports, to seek pro-English testimony in Ireland or England
has gravely handicapped it, the Commission has none the
less sought to render as judicial a report as possible. It
by no means confined itself to the American or Irish or
English witnesses who appeared before it, but collected
a mass of testimony from other sources such as the British
Labor Commission's report and other similar documents,
including many British official reports and statistics, Par
liamentary debates, etc. We believe that a perusal of the
Commission's findings will convince every unbiased reader
of the earnest determination of the Commission to get at
the facts and the truth. Its conclusions are as follows :
We find that the Irish people are deprived of the protection of
British law, to which they would be entitled as subjects of the
British King. They are likewise deprived of the moral protec
tion granted by international law, to which they would be en
titled as belligerents. They are at the mercy of Imperial Brit
ish forces which, acting contrary both to all law and to all
standards of human conduct, have instituted in Ireland a "ter
ror" the evidence regarding which seems to prove that:
1. The Imperial British Government has created and intro
duced into Ireland a force of at least 78,000 men, many of them
youthful and inexperienced, and some of them convicts; and has
incited that force to unbridled violence.
2. The Imperial British forces in Ireland have indiscrimi
nately killed innocent men, women, and children; have discriminately assassinated persons suspected of being Republicans;
have tortured and shot prisoners while in custody, adopting the
subterfuges of "refusal to halt" and "attempting to escape";
and have attributed to alleged "Sinn Fein Extremists" the
British assassination of prominent Irish Republicans.
3. House-burning and wanton destruction of villages and cities
by Imperial British forces under Imperial British officers have
been countenanced and ordered by officials of the British Gov
ernment; and elaborate provision by gasoline sprays and bombs
has been made in a number of instances for systematic incen
diarism as part of a plan of terrorism.
4. A campaign for the destruction of the means of existence of
the Irish people has been conducted by the burning of factories,
creameries, crops and farm implements, and the shooting of
farm animals. This campaign is carried on regardless of the
political views of their owners, and results in widespread and
acute suffering among women and children.
5. Acting under a series of proclamations issued by the com
petent military authorities of the Imperial British forces,
hostages are carried by forces exposed to the fire of the Re
publican army; fines are levied upon towns and villages as pun
ishment for alleged offenses of individuals; private property is
destroyed in reprisals for acts with which the owners have no
connection; and the civilian population is subjected to an in
quisition upon the theory that individuals are in possession of
information valuable to the military forces of Great Britain.
These acts of the Imperial British forces are contrary to the
laws of peace or war among modern civilized nations.
6. This "terror" has failed to reestablish Imperial British
civil government in Ireland. Throughout the greater part of
Ireland
[Vol. 112, No. 2909
Reports
Ireland British courts have ceased to function; local, county,

and city governments refuse to recognize British authority;
and British civil officials fulfil no function of service to the
Irish people.
7. In spite of the British "terror" the majority of the Irish
people, having sanctioned by ballot the Irish Republic, give
their allegiance to it; pay taxes to it; and respect the decisions
of its courts and of its civil officials.
As for the question of Irish violence, it will be observed
that the Commission is convinced that there is full-fledged
revolution on in Ireland. Yet it does not approve the Sinn
Fein policy of assassination but "earnestly deprecates it."
The Commission might, it seems to us, have spoken out
even more emphatically against it, for that policy leads
only to reprisals. But that does not excuse the British Gov
ernment for the crimes that are daily being committed in
its name contrary to the laws of war and of civilization.
The Commission's report records many such atrocities
which, had they been committed by Germans in Belgium or
Rumania or France, would have aroused America to the
uttermost indignation. The Commission is quite correct
in its position that these outrages on both sides will cease
only when the British troops are withdrawn. There would
be peace in Ireland today if Lloyd George could but have
the courage, generosity, and magnanimity to abandon the
policy of trying to crush Ireland by force. The Irish people
are not to be conquered that way.
A supplemental report of the Commission deals admira
bly with the religious issues in Ireland. The Commission
was profoundly impressed by the absence of any religious
strife outside of Ulster and the fact that the non-Catholics
in the rest of Ireland are not subject to religious persecu
tion. To this there was unanimity of testimony, as there
is increasing proof that the Ulster bigotry is "artificially
stirred up by those whose economic and political interests
are served by dividing the people." The Commission might
have added, we believe, that wherever in southern Ireland
the Catholic clergy has failed to keep abreast with the Re
publican movement the church has steadily lost power.
While The Nation's disappointment over the enforced onesidedness of the Commission's hearings is as great as that
of the Commission itself, it has no regrets whatever for
having had a share in the undertaking. On the contrary, its
editors believe that it has been a public service to bring
out the facts and to concentrate the responsibility. It
cannot allow to go unchallenged any criticism of the Com
mission's work as likely to injure Anglo-Saxon relations.
The Commission was organized not to hurt but to help those
relations, which must remain gravely in danger as long as
Ireland is bathed in blood by bankrupt British statesman
ship. The Nation believes with Mr. A. G. Gardiner, former
editor of the London Daily News, that there are three
parties to the Irish problem, the Irish, the English, and the
Americans, and its criticisms are no more to be regarded
as anti-British than those of the London Nation, or of a
host of other British newspapers whose denunciation of
their own Government is far, far worse and far less bridled
than anything written by the non-Irish press of America.
Finally we repeat that we should welcome a similar British
study of our conduct in Haiti and Santo Domingo, for we
believe that a foreign report upon it would arouse Ameri
cans to the crimes committed there under our flag.
April 6, 1921]
The Nation
Europe Drifts Nowhere

OUR return to peace on earth, toward the "normalcy"
with which the new American leadership is to bless
mankind, has scarcely been speeded by the events of the
last week. The refusal of the United States to open trade
negotiations with Russia, the manifest purpose of the
French to nullify, at least in part, the result of the Silesian
plebiscite, the deepening of the Franco-German reparations
impasse, the communist uprisings in Germany, and the new
Greco-Turkish war form an ominous composite picture of
a world sinking deeper into chaos. Mr. Lansing chose well
the moment for publishing his criticism of Allied statesman
ship at Paris two years ago. Yet, except for Lloyd George's
change of front toward Russia, the most heartening event
of last month, no gleam of understanding appears in the
actions or attitude of the men in Washington, London, and
Paris who so largely influence the march of events.
More graphically than any other single episode, the finally
completed Silesian plebiscite reveals the unwisdom not to
say bad faith of the French imperialists, who, despite the
polite fiction of an inter-allied commission, and the presence
of some British troops, are and have been in full control of
this area. Hardly had the territory voted overwhelmingly
to remain German, despite electoral regulations highly fav
orable to the Poles, when various alternatives to the just
and obvious one of abiding by the result were announced
from Paris. In the name of self-determination it is now
proposed to award to Poland the entire southwestern section
of Upper Silesia, which contains the coveted coal mines, be
cause certain of its districts returned Polish majorities.
Apart from the manifest absurdity of extending the prin
ciple of self-determination to such minor unitsa practice
which of course has been followed in no other plebiscite
areathe vote even in the coal region which lies close to
Poland's frontier furnishes no basis for such a disposition.
For while the Germans carried the entire plebiscite area
by over two to one, none of the pro-Polish districts shows
aught but a bare majority, and intertwined with the latter
are others strongly pro-Teuton. Konigshutte, in the very
heart of the mines, went for Germany by three to one, and
the coal area as a whole indicated a decided German prefer
ence. The injustice and dishonesty of setting aside such a
verdict would be exceeded only by its stupidity, for it would
still further diminish the chance of securing adequate Ger
man reparations. Alternative plans of maintaining Allied
control over Silesia, of perhaps holding another plebiscite in
five years, are equally foolish. They mean nothing less than
a deliberate perpetuation of a state of passive war for an
indefinite periodan inevitable era of propagated hate and
bitterness during which a settling down to the labors of
peace would be manifestly impossible.
If the French imperialists persist in the policies which
will bring down the European house of cards, they at least
have not been unwarned. The communist revolt in Ham
burg where thirty persons were killed, the pitched battles
in Saxon towns, the demonstrations in Leipzig, Dresden,
and Munich, have been sufficiently widespread and violent
to indicate what may easily happen if a people is driven to
desperation. The present disorders will undoubtedly be
repressed. But the outburst, at the moment that the French
are purposing to deprive Germany of more German territory
which is indispensable to her economic needs, and even talk
499
of occupying Berlin, is more than coincidental. The deeper

the French penetrate into Germany the deeper they will get
into trouble. The brusque breaking-off of negotiations has
served only to suspend payments of any sort. The billion
marks which the French insisted must be paid by March 23
remain undelivered as will the twelve billion which they
claim to be due on May 1. Meanwhile the German morale
is enormously stiffened. It is safe to say that the chances
of recovering the reparations which Germany should pay
were never slighter than today. Every step farther into
German territory correspondingly diminishes them. The
only ray of light in the Franco-German situation is the
vote of the Confederation Generate du Travail in favor of
the importation of German labor for reconstruction work
in the devastated areas. Its indorsement of the repeated
German offer of labor, which was refused three weeks ago
by Briand in London, is another piece of evidence of the
divergence of governments and peoples. The actual suf
ferers of northern France have of course long favored this
plan.
Meantime the Balkan tinderbox, after smoldering through
two and a half years of quasi-peace, is again ablaze.
The Greeks, taking affairs into their own hands, have again
declared war on their ancient enemies, the Turks, and have
advanced many parasangs into that remnant of territory
which even the so quickly abrogated Treaty of Sevres con
ceded to be wholly Turkish. "Greece's future depends upon
crushing the Turks," say the Greeks. Poor little bankrupt
state, dupe and victim of rival imperialisms, it has picked
up readily the current diplomatic jargon! Only by crushing
something or somebody can peace in its little corner of earth
be assured. Why not? Isn't that the formula of world
"leadership" today?
The Poor Professor

"IF ever one were disposed to say that a community deX serves no better government than it has, it would be
in the case of our universities," we remarked in a recent
editorial, with the result of a surprising response from
many parts of the country, from professors so heartily in
accord with the statement that we venture to return to the
discussion. Wherever, our correspondents assure us, any
attempt has been made to agitate for a more decent and
self-respecting stand by teachers against the unwarrantable
aggression of trustees and presidents, the greatest obstacle
in the way has been the inertia, if not the timidity, if not
the positive acquiescence of the victims themselves. Not only,
of course, has this attitude on the part of the professors
made it easy for their bosses to manipulate them, but it
has been cited in vindication of all that has been done to
them. If there are no more and no worse rebels than this,
the administrators say in effect, surely there is no great
need for a revolution. The grievances have been exag
gerated or have been the inventions of the over-sensitive
and the over-imaginative.
We are obliged to say that we sympathize with the pro
fessor at one of the universities who when asked how he
felt about academic freedom replied that all the academic
freedom he wanted was freedom from committee meetings
and a chance to go on with his work. Instead of blaming
him or others like him we should say that the great diffi
culty with our university faculties is that there are not more
500
The Nation
of the same sort of scholars there. Something like his dis

position is the true instinct of the scholar. Any one who
knows the American university from the inside knows how
many men with genuine capacity for productive scholar
ship or creative teaching are regularly wasted on the rou
tine work of committees and eventually diverted by the
little futilities of university politics from the tasks to which
their natures and their private longings urge them. Opin
ion constantly presses upon them to sacrifice themselves
for the good of the community; they are rewarded with
positions of authority and with larger salaries; in the end
not a few of them come to imagine that they have chosen
the better path. Meantime they have given up to party
what was meant for mankind.
Is it a contradiction to say that our professors have paid
too little attention to their administrations and at the same
time have given too much of themselves to administration?
We do not think so. To the extent that they have allowed
themselves to be pulled away from their essential duties,
which are learning and teaching, they have weakened their
own position. They have seemed to admit that the admin
istrator's task is higher than that of the scholar or the
teacher. Certain of them who are scholars have put them
selves in contact with the mere politicians who abound in
universities as elsewhere and have suffered the natural con
tagion. Certain others who have been faithful to learning
have consequently fallen into places less conspicuous and
have ceased to have their natural influence. The outcome
has been a vastand largely superfluouselaboration of
university machinery, in which the various functions of
the members of the community are hopelessly confused.
From this comes the penalty of the professor: not having
been sufficiently faithful to his calling, he has assisted in
the creation of a machine which now crushes him. He is
inert because the machine has come to seem a living part
of his life, timid because it has become overshadowingly
large, acquiescent because, having had some share in it, he
accepts some responsibility.
In an earlier discussion we drew a parallel between the
plight of the professor and those citizens of large cities
the governments of which have been too much neglected
by the good men and too much attended to by the bad.
The parallel, of course, like all moral parallels is not exact
at all points, but the immediate way of escape for the pro
fessor is the same as for the citizen. He simply must do
more to help himself. He has let pass the time in which
he might have best served the community by attending to
his own particular field of learning. If he had kept his
fences up properlyto use a bucolic similethere would be
no marauding cattle in his garden. As it is, there are, and
he must now lay down his book and chase them out. We
see no help for him except in a clear class-consciousness,
a stubborn collective resistance to administrative aggres
sion, a willingness to employ the threat of general strike
in egregious cases, and a determination to resign when
matters become unbearable. He has the example of other
unions of workmen who have been forced to similar methods
of self-defense and have thereby, though at enormous tem
porary sacrifice and discomfort, eventually improved their
status. If the professor is unwilling to do anything dras
tic, if he continues to complain without any real action, we
cannot see that he has any one to blame so much as himself.
How long will it be before he rouses himself to vigorous and
to concerted action?
[Vol. 112, No. 2909
The American Cardinal

THE death of James Gibbons, Cardinal Archbishop of
Baltimore, is an event of more than local importance,
for it marks the close of a significant era in the history
of the Roman Catholic Church in this country. During
the late Cardinal's lifetime the cause of his communion
was beset by dangers and stresses which could be weathered
only by the most skilful and sagacious statesmanship. There
were and there still are influences at work in the Roman
curia far from friendly to the ideas and principles for
which America is supposed to stand. And on the other
hand, the free spirit of Protestantism which is not so much
a creed as an attitude of mind, had to be reckoned with and
to some extent placated. It is not too much to say that
James Gibbons did more than any other to guide the
Church amid the difficulties that threatened its well-being.
A winning and genial personality, revealing itself in a
studied simplicity and considerateness, was to no mall
extent the secret of his success and of his remarkable in
fluence, not only among those who shared his faith, but
among many who regarded it with indifference or hostility.
He never forgot that he was an American Cardinal, and
his loyalty to the American spirit, as he conceived it, was
sincere and whole-hearted. This greatly assisted in build
ing up his popularity. He cultivated friendly relations
with ministers and members of other churches, and within
the limitations drawn by ecclesiastical law or usage he
cooperated with them in many enterprises for social and
civic betterment. His policy was to emphasize the things
on which all Christians are more or less agreed, and to
throw into the background the things that make for dis
union and mutual suspicion. He differed from some of his
fellow-princes in the Church by his firm refusal to assume
the external show and impressive paraphernalia attached
to his rank. These baubles he held to be out of harmony
with the spirit of a democratic state. He was the more able
to take this stand in that he had not been subjected to the
influence of Italian training and tradition. The result was
that common men were attracted to him and believed in
him. He has done more to commend his type of Christianity
to the American people than any other Catholic ecclesiastic
of our time.
When, however, we turn to consider his work and influ
ence from a non-ecclesiastical point of view, it must be said
that on the whole they were reactionary. He was no pio
neer opening up fresh paths of truth, no champion of
unpopular causes. His voice was always lifted on the side
of the established order. Anti-modernist, anti-suffragist,
anti-progressive in matters sociological, his thinking was
cast in a traditional and conservative mold. Of the deeper
forces of his age he does not appear to have caught even a
glimpse. He gave no guidance to the minds of the rising
generation. He made no contribution to the solution of
any of the spiritual and ethical problems that vex the souls
of his contemporaries. His books, which have had a wide
spread circulation among his co-religionists, are without lit
erary distinction, and we fear we must add, without any
standing at the bar of modern Biblical scholarship. For
minds rooted in the past, and satisfied with what they find
there, the Cardinal will continue to be a help and an in
spiration, but he had nothing to say to those who believe
in the revelations of a Spirit that are creating a new world.
April 6, 1921]
The Nation
501
Keeping the Cost of Living High

By LOUIS F. BUDENZ
THE long-harassed ultimate consumer in New York City
who for a few months has hopefully fixed his vision on
the mirage of deflation and its promise of economic relief
rubs his eyes these days in a stupor of dismay. The bottom,
he knows, has dropped out of the cost of raw materials.
Wages, he is aware, have been reduced, and unemployment
widespread. The cost of many commodities has started
down the toboggan slide. Food prices have tumbled. Clothes
are beginning to be a trifle cheaper. But public utility ser
vices which he must have and which he can only get from
certain sourcestelephones, gas, electric light, street car
ridesare not decreasing in price. On the contrary, the
cost of these essentials is going up, and by no modest per
centage.
During the last few weeks four of the chief corporations
serving the people of the Greater City have secured ad
vances in rates, or have taken measures which will make
such advances certain. On March 1 the Consolidated Gas
Company, by grace of the United States District Court, was
granted a new rate of $1.50 per thousand cubic feet. Only
a short time before, also under Federal Court order, it
had been allowed to charge $1.20 per thousand cubic feet.
On March 1 the price of gas oil was declining. On that
date coal had also decreased. In fact on that very day
President John J. Stanley of the Cleveland Street Kailway
Company, in his annual report for 1920, was pointing to
this new condition. "All authorities seem to agree that
prices are coming down," he said. "Many prices have
already come down. Copper and tin, exclusive of freight,
are below the average prices of those metals in the ten
years from 1905 to 1914. According to the Bankers' Com
modity Price List the average price of all commodities on
December 1 was $501.75 compared with $564.01 a month
before, $662.66 a year before, and $358.77 on August 1,
1914. Coal is down. Wage reductions throughout the
country range from 5 per cent to 60 per cent, a great ma
jority being from 20 per cent to 25 per cent in December,
and they may go lower." The Federal Court, however, took
a different view of the situation. It had previously held
that the New York law which fixed 80 cents as the maximum
price for gas was confiscatory and null as against the Con
solidated Gas Company. The $1.50 rate was now decreed
as the price which the consumer must pay in order to allow
the company "an adequate return."
On March 17 the consumer was hit hard from another
angle. The State Public Service Commission, by a 3 to 2
vote, granted the New York Telephone Company a 30 per
cent increase in rates. This increase gave the company,
according to the Commission's figures, all of the $11,000,000
which the company had requestedto make up, it contended,
the increased labor costs since 1919. The award was made
with astonishing speed. The city had not yet had its day in
court. The company alone had been heard. All of the data
which the city had collected on reduced costs and further
reductions in the future were brushed aside. The com
pany has a reserve for depreciation for the State amount
ing to $73,000,000 and a surplus of $36,000,000 over its
8 per cent dividends per year. Indeed, the telephone com
panieson their own say-soare in excellent financial con
dition. The report of the American Telephone and Tele
graph Company issued on March 5 for the year 1920, shows

that in that year the company earned a profit equal to 11.7
per cent on its outstanding stock, against 10.04 per cent in
1919. It was the best year in the company's historya sit
uation which the report holds out as tempting bait to pro
spective investors.
The New York Telephone Company is one and the same
as the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. The
latter owns 100 per cent of the former. But the American
Telephone and Telegraph Company, for its own financial
purposes, is not the same as the New York Telephone Com
pany. It charges its New York self a license fee of 4y2 per
cent of gross revenues for use of the instruments. This
is clearly a cost-plus arrangement. It makes inevitable
the unsatisfactory financial results for the public which
have characterized arrangements on this basis in the war
industries and the building trades. When wages go up, for
example, in the New York Telephone Company or the Cen
tral Union Telephone Company or the Southwestern Bell
Telephone Company, or any of the other selves of the Amer
ican Telephone and Telegraph Company in different parts
of the country, it is a source of profit to the "parent" cor
poration. Any increase in operating costs actually makes
money for it.
In its 1920 report the A. T. & T. goes to great pains to
defend this license contract, which it calls the "backbone
of its system." But to the consumer, who must pay for
this arrangement, such a contract is indefensible. Why,
he innocently asks, should not the charge be based on rental
price per instrument used which would encourage the
"parent" body (or the other self) of the New York Tele
phone Company to increase facilities for the public? At
the present time, in New York City, the company admits,
there are 80,000 applicants for telephone installations on
the waiting list. Why should the contract be based on a
percentage of gross earnings, which invites higher costs
and higher rates in the operation of the system? Prac
tically every Public Service Commission throughout the
country has expressed itself as dissatisfied with this con
tract. Practically all have condemned it. Those that have
approved it, such as the Alabama, Virginia, Arkansas,
Georgia, Maryland, and Louisiana bodies, have made apolo
gies for doing so. The New York Telephone Company, it
must be remembered, is not only an operating company. It
is also a holding company. It owns practically all the capital
stocks of the Bell Telephone companies operating in New
Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and
the District of Columbia, This is true of other A. T. & T.
subsidiaries all over the country. They stretch in a huge
net of interweaving interests, even up into Canada. Cer
tainly, the Commission should have looked into this 4%
per cent contract before so flippantly deciding to take
$11,000,000 out of the pockets of New York telephone users.
The public was sandbagged, it now appears, without even
being asked to hold hands up.
A poll of the Commission throws an interesting sidelight
on this decision. On page 121 of the record in the Syracuse
Telephone case, a letter appears which gives pertinent in
formation concerning Commissioner Barhite who cast the
deciding vote in favor of the increase, two of the five com
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2909
502
missioners being opposed. The letter is from Seymour Van
Santvoord, chairman of the Public Utilities Commission, to
Franklin B. Lord, counsel to the Governor, in regard to
Assembly Bill Int. 1680 (1917 session), and says: "I think
I properly should add that Commissioner Barhite did not
participate in either the discussion or the determination
of the Commission in respect of this matter, because he has
heretofore acted as counsel for the New York Telephone
Company." Commissioner Barhite had been disqualified on
previous occasionswhen his vote was not needed !
The electric light rates in New York City have similarly
been increased 10 per cent by the three companiesthe
New York, Brooklyn Edison, and the United Electric Light
and Power Companywhich monopolize this public utility
in the metropolis. Here again there were no public meet
ings nor public hearings in connection with the increase.
The new schedule was quietly filed with the Public Service
Commission which, as far as any protection it gave the
consumer, might well have been non-existent. The compan
ies' say-so that they needed the increase was sufficient.
The spirit of reaction, abroad in the land, has given the
interests a feeling of irresistible power. Crudeness and
force increasingly characterize their relations with the
public. This is revealed no more clearly than in Governor
Miller's Transit act, which has just been made law. It
combines all the bad features of the numerous efforts of the
street railway companies in the past to assault the carriders of New York City and steal their pocket-books.
None of the epithets which have been applied to it can de
scribe its audacity and ruthlessness. In 1907 New York
City had secured through the so-called Elsberg Bill the
power to own municipally and operate its rapid transit
facilities. The construction of the first subway was ac
cordingly begun. At least thirty millions of dollars was
put into it, when the interests became alarmed. The
contracts resulted, under which the city gave its subway
to the companies and entered into partnership with them.
On these termsthat the city should sink $300,000,000
further into the subways and should get no return on
this investment until the costs of operation and the
company's dividends had been earned. The considera
tion for this arrangement was the 5-cent farewhich
Governor Miller's act will summarily destroy. Under the
police power his commission can grant increased rates.
It is given authority to do this regardless of the contract
between the city and the railway company. It is specifically
encouraged, and given power, to grant a temporary increase
of fares while investigating the need for fare increases.
This means nothing more nor less than that the car-riders
will be obliged to pay tribute to the company, even though
the act is taken into the courts and declared invalid. The
ownership of the separate extra three cents or five cents paid
under a temporary 8-cent or 10-cent fare can never be
traced after it has been paid in. For this plunder of them
selves, the car-riders are compelled by the act to pay all the
costs of the commission without investigation.
This wave of gouging is not confined to New York City.
It is going on all over the country. State commissions seem
powerless before it. The Indiana commission and one or two
others, may be possible exceptions. When commissions can
not or will not deliver, other agencies are created or found.
Across the river from the Greater City, in the State of New
Jersey, a bitter conflict has been going on over the alleged
favoritism of the State commission to the powerful New
Jersey Public Service Corporation. This corporation ex

tends over the entire State. It furnishes gas, electric light,
and street railway transportation to 141 municipalities.
Literally speaking, it has the State of New Jersey in its
pocket. Governor Edwards did not like the situation. He
put the members of the State commission on trial and re
moved them from office. But the Public Service Corpora
tion went into the legislature for the increased fares which
it was after. There it secured the passage of an act by
which the valuation of its street railway properties was
farmed out to such firm of engineers as the "State House
Board" might decide upon. The Governor refused to act
on this Board, and the other members gave the job to the
firm of Ford, Bacon and Davis, engineers well known for
their loyalty to the corporation viewpoint. The State of
New Jersey thereby abdicated a governmental function and
turned it over to a company of prejudiced private engineers.
The result will be 10-cent street-car fares in Jerseywhich
is the objective of the corporation.
Other striking examples of this charge on the public are
the Louisiana telephone rate case and the Philadelphia
street railway situation. Within one-half hour after taking
the former case under "advisement," two members of the
Louisiana Bailroad Commission, constituting a majority,
published an extensive order allowing the increase which
the company desired. The public was astounded, for testi
mony offered by the city of New Orleans on reduced costs
seemed to point to a striking victory. Philadelphia had
stood out during the war as the city of the 5-cent fare.
Thomas Mitten, the president of the company, conducted a
nation-wide propaganda for low charges, which was a thorn
in the side of the other companies. After the war, the
company went before the State commission asking for "re
lief" other than the destruction of the 5-cent fare. But
the Stotesbury interests within the company could not see
it that way at all. What was the result? The State com
mission, over the protest of Mr. Mitten, granted his com
pany a 7-cent fare! There was an audible sigh of relief
from utility companies all over the country when Philadel
phia ceased to be a low-fare talking point.
Ordinary competitive businesses must arrange their
finances so that the surpluses of fat years will take care
of the lean. The utility companies do not have to do this.
They have a monopoly on things which the public must have.
The people thought they could deal with them by establish
ing agencies of control. But the utilities soon learned to
control the control in one way or another. Distinguished
criminologists agree that the way to stop a crime wave is
to remedy its cause. The causes of utility crimes upon the
public must be removed by making these public services
public property. As long as private interest exists in them,
there is a constant conflict between private profits and the
public interests. With the four great public-utility essen
tialslight, heat, transportation, and communication, which
no one, be he ever so humble, can do withoutsharply
mounting in price, the public is being ground between two
millstones. The alleged lowering of the cost of living is
being made the universal basis for reduction in wages. But
the cost of living is not and cannot be materially reduced a?
long as the main essentials remain at the old price levels or
are pushed to higher ones. If the public utilities are now
permitted to run counter to the much-desired current of
cost-of-living reduction, they will play havoc with the pos
sibility of returning prosperity.
April 6, 1921]
The Nation
503
Mexico 1921
II. A Labor Republic
By PAUL HANNA
FIFTEEN years ago Mexico had its first labor strike.
Today it has a labor President. The strike of 1906 was
in the copper mines of Sonora. When Carranza fell ten
months ago he was succeeded by Adolfo de la Huerta, a
native of Sonora, who was active in the copper strike re
ferred to. His selection to fill the Provisional Presidency
marked the political triumph of a revolution whose main
spring, since it began against Diaz a decade ago, has always
been the determination of town and country workers to
escape from intolerable oppression. De la Huerta knew his
term in office would last only until the coming general elec
tion, six months ahead. Cynical observers reared in the old
school of intrigue and violence said he would not leave office
until shot out of it, like all but one other President in
Mexico's history. Isn't he pure Yaqui Indian, they said, ex
cepting the white strain contributed by a Polish Jewess
grandmother? Yes, he had been abroad and had studied
music in company with Maria Gay who is still his friend,
but such accidents do not change the Yaquis' spots, they
argued. The Provisional President gave no heed to the
gossips. He gave land to the peons, however, as fast as they
applied for it and the government surveyors could parcel it
out. And to the wage earners in city, town, and mining
camp, to whom he is sure the future chiefly belongs, he gave
that freedom to organize, agitate, educate, and strike in
which their only protection lies in the present stage of
industry.
Carranza had begun almost as well. But the old First
Chief was not of the people. He loved progress as a fine
principle, as Woodrow Wilson did; as an astronomer loves
the stars. He did not know that progress cannot wait upon
presidents nor conform to their personal ambitions. The
masses sensed this. Within a year various state regimes,
acting under pressure of their constituents, were proceed
ing independently of Mexico City to apply the blessings of
the revolution to town and country workers. Yucatan went
farthest to the left, making virtually every male inhabitant
a landowner and a partner in its eighty cooperative stores
and in the hemp sales corporation. In a word, Yucatan in
the extreme south, Sonora in the far north, and certain agri
cultural states like Chiapas, Morelos, and Tabasco became
or remained centers of positive anti-Carranza sentiment.
Presidents Carranza and Wilson quarreled because they were
so much alike. Neither could endure being crossed. For
some states to seek salvation by other than his personal
methods made Carranza furious. He sent troops against
Yucatan. They destroyed the cooperative stores, suppressed
the exporting corporation, and drove into hiding such lead
ers as were not killed or imprisoned. The labor unions in
Mexico City and elsewhere rose in protest. Carranza's sol
diers suppressed them. Sonora remained, with its strong
labor unions and its independent Yaquis. Carranza ordered
mobilization against Sonora. Backed by De la Huerta, the
trade unions, and the Yaquis, Governor P. Elias Calles ac
cepted the challenge. The whole nation joined with Sonora
and Carranza was snuffed out.
De la Huerta aimed to give the wage earners such a hold
upon their new rights during his six months as President

that succeeding administrations, however reactionary, would
be unable to destroy them. His time was short, but he did
one thing and attempted another that revealed his
temper. By his inspiration the railway workers of the whole
Republic met in convention at Mexico City, with a program
to form a single union through which to voice grievances
and negotiate with the Government. Transportation and
twenty pesos a day for general expenses were allowed each
delegate by the Government. We shall see presently what
came of that remarkable gathering, which was still in ses
sion when Obregon came into the Presidency.^ In the last
days of his term De la Huerta proposed that a labor con
gress composed of delegates elected by all groups of organ
ized wage earners be formed, to sit concurrently with the
national Chamber of Deputies and have joint authority with
the latter body in all legislation affecting the welfare of the
workers. The plan has not been realized, but the gesture
is fresh in the minds of the people.
President Obregon is not a "Bolshevik." He is not a
Communist nor even a Socialist. He is a Jeffersonian demo
crat with only one cloud to his title as a labor President.
In his campaign last fall he had the indorsement of the
Mexican Labor Party (which includes some Socialist par
ties, in the British style) and the Mexican Federation of
Labor. And when I reached Mexico all these groups were
unanimous in saying Obregon had fulfilled their highest
hopes. When they indorsed his candidacy last summer the
labor groups laid down very specific conditions which Obre
gon accepted. In formulating their demands the Mexican
workers went back to principles which were familiar and
agreed to by all citizens of the United States prior to the
World War. To their candidate for President they said,
We require that you protect us in these rights :
Complete freedom of speech, press, and assemblage;
Complete freedom to organize, educate, and strike;
Full protection under the law in all other efforts at col
lective betterment.
General Obregon broke no precedent when he subscribed
to those principles. Innumerable leaders before him had
first indorsed and then betrayed them. I wanted some one
to tell me why special confidence was placed in Obregon.
And Luis Morones, the father of the Mexican labor move
ment which Carranza almost destroyed, gave me a reason
I had not expected. He said :
When our position was most terrible I and two other labor
men went one night to Obregon's home. We told him that
Carranza could not be endured any longer; that there would
be no freedom left from the revolution if he were not over
thrown. Obregon listened and confessed that our charges
were true. "But I will not betray Carranza nor any other man
with whom I am associated," he told us. "I will not lead a
revolt against his Government." So Obregon remained passive
and stayed in his home until, after Carranza's troops had sur
rounded it, he and I disguised ourselves as peons and escaped
from the city in a freight car. He would not betray Carranza;
he will not betray labor. He is honest.
But the faith that labor men have in Obregon is not a
504
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blind faith. Throughout his electoral campaign one or an

other of the labor leaders traveled and spoke from the same
platform with Obregon. The presidential candidate had to
talk of many things. His labor lieutenants summed up their
attitude, in very plain words, about as follows:
Do not vote for any man, not even for General Obregon,
simply because he is a military hero with a magnetic person
ality. We must separate men from principles, and support
only principles, or we shall be lost At crucial times in the
past General Obregon has defended the interests of the workers.
He pledges himself to do so in future. We believe he is honest
and sincere. If he proves false to us some day we must be
prepared to abandon and oppose him.
So, after ten years of nearly incessant civil war, Obregon
was made President at a peaceful election. And chief
among those in his Cabinet are : Alberto Pani, conservative,
Minister of Foreign Affairs ; General Estrada, conservative,
Minister of War; Plutarco Elias Calles, radical, Premier
and Minister of the Interior; Adolfo de la Huerta, radical,
Minister of Finance ; Antonio Villareal, radical, Minister of
Agriculture. That is to say, the general affairs of land,
labor, and taxation are managed by the friends of the
workers and peons. And the Governor General of the Fed
eral District is Celestino Gasca, the former shoemaker, who
contributes one-tenth of his salary to the Federation of
Labor. Morones, now Director of Government Factories,
and Salsedo, Director of Public Printing, also give a tenth
of their salaries to the Labor Federation, which they did so
much to create.
An important gathering of foreign business men as
sembled in Mexico City a few weeks ago. They were en
tertained by the Government. President Obregon appeared
before them and told them how happy his administration
was to greet the representatives of foreign capital, without
which, he said, the vast dormant resources of the Republic
could not be exploited. He wanted them to understand
without hesitation that in their expanding operations within
the limits of the country alien investors would receive the
fullest encouragement and protection of Mexican law. From
that gathering of foreign and native capitalists Obregon
went directly to a convention of the Mexican Federation of
Labor which that same day was assembled in a building
placed at its disposal by the Government. The hall was
filled with the leaders of a working-class movement hardly
more than a decade old. Penniless Indians from distant
deserts and sea-coast towns who never before had seen their
ancient capital were in attendance. To these men President
Obregon said, almost textually:
Your Government, acting through my person, has just ex
tended the hand of welcome to the representatives of capital,
so much needed to develop the natural wealth of our country.
That welcome was gladly and sincerely given. From that
assembly I have come now to welcome and encourage, in the
name of your Government, the representatives of a class which
is far more vital than any other to the welfare of Mexico and
the advancement of civilization. In this gathering there are
no masters of international finance. There are no bankers and
brokers, no owners of vast landed estates. I see before me,
instead, a convention of the class to which Mexico really belongs,
because without this class there could be no Mexico. Unless
it represents this class, and be dedicated principally to the
steady advancement of its welfare, no government of Mexico
can claim to be a popular government. In the name of such a
government I have the honor of greeting this convention and
renewing the pledge of your elected officials to make the wel
fare of the many their principal concern.
[Vol. 112, No. 2909
There are many reasons why the convention gave Obregon

a storm of applause, instead of the perfunctory response
which his pleasant words would evoke in any democratic
gathering. They would have given him a "triumph" if he
had said nothing on this occasion. For his acts respecting
labor had already reduced the importance of his oratory.
During his visit to Mexico in January Samuel Gompers was
received at the National Palace. He apologized for intrud
ing upon the time of a busy Executive. "If governments
would give more time to labor problems there would be no
labor problem," answered Obregon. I was almost as modest
as Mr. Gompers when at five o'clock of a busy afternoon I
sat down in the old room adorned by Maximillian wherein
President Obregon usually receives callers. I said I had
come to ask indiscreet questions. General Obregon smiled.
"There is an answer for every question, you know," he re
plied. With the edge that was left on my adventure I in
quired: "Why does the Government not grant the demand
of the railwaymen for recognition of their union?" "We
have no authority to recognize one union to the exclusion
of others, and will not do so," he answered. He then re
ferred to the convention of rail workers to form one union
which Provisional President de la Huerta had called. "They
remained in session more than two months, spending their
expense money and accomplishing nothing," the President
went on. "At the end of that time I was obliged to an
nounce that the Government had no authority to continue
spending public funds for such a purpose. So the conven
tion ended. Since that time rival unions have been formed.
One of them demands that we recognize its exclusive juris
diction. It is impossible."
Of course I asked the labor men about this. They ad
mitted sadly that President Obregon was right about the
railwaymen's convention. It had squandered time and
public money, they said, and split into factions instead of
forming one compact union. They added that while Obre
gon had ended the rail convention by cutting off its subsidy,
and was now refusing to recognize any union of railwaymen, he had in other respects so fully carried out his pledges
that these achievements could be recorded :
With its new freedom to agitate and organize the Mexi
can Federation of Labor has grown in membership to nearly
500,000;
Hundreds of new schools have been opened to the illiter
ate masses, and thousands more are honestly planned by the
Government;
Speech and thought have been completely liberated. The
smallest minority is admitted to audience with the President
or encouraged, not to "hire a hall" but to take a public
building and appeal for adherents to its program;
Labor has a daily newspaper, La Lucha, which enjoys
semi-official subsidies in both money and materials from
men in the administrationwhich it attacks for some short
coming every day;
Labor has its Institute of Social Science which enjoys
similar support and is free to teach its twelve hundred
pupils any kind of economics and sociology, as well as the
much needed ability to read and write.
Luis Morones, pioneer labor "agitator" and now Director
of Government Factories, began with a grim knowledge of
how industry was conducted and a bright vision of how it
might be conducted. Under President Obregon he is slowly
but hopefully realizing his vision. I paid a visit to one of the
Federal factories in Tacuba where all styles of clothing for
April 6, 1921]
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service men are made. The building is an old convent, all its
architectural beauties, inside and out, having been carefully
preserved or enhanced by the Government's touch. Sunlight
floods its long galleries and wide patios, and fresh air sweeps
through its astonished cloisters. Banks of blooming flowers
riot about the wide entrance drive. All machinery in the
plant is driven by electricity. And if all Americans could see
the speed and accuracy with which the native Indian girls,
hundreds of them in a gallery, guide their fabrics under
cutting blades, needles, and punches they would be free from
the fiction that Mexicans do not know how to work. At
piece work these girls earn an average of six pesos a day,
and the Government gets its uniforms at an average cost of
sixteen pesos each. Moreover, a night school and a well-
The
505
equipped film theater are being installed in the plant for

the employees.
But my last impression of the place is of its day nursery.
Three months before her child is born a woman worker in
this factory goes home. Her average earnings are sent her
every week. A factory doctor attends her. When the baby
is three months old she returns to work. At the nursery she
leaves her baby with nurses who bathe it, change its cloth
ing, weigh it, and put it to sleep in a spotless cradle. Three
times a day the mother may leave her machine and come to
the nursery to feed her infant. Some were doing it when I
was there. "The design, execution, and management of this
plant is all Mexican," one is told at the end of the tour. And
I did not wonder that my hosts were proud of their work.
Kansas Court of Industrial
Relations
By CLYDE M. REED
KARL MISHMASH is a coal miner of Austrian par
entage who started to work in the Kansas coal mines
as a boy, "spragging" cars down on the level under the
ground where the coal came from. It is the custom in the
Kansas coal fields for boys to receive men's pay when they
reach the age of nineteen. The coal operator usually pre
vents an increase in his operating expenses by transferring
the boy to the class of work for which a man's wage is
paid. Mishmash went to his foreman in the Mackie H
mine in March, 1918, and informed him that he was nine
teen years of age and demanded a man's pay. The fore
man put him on a job drawing man's pay April 1, follow
ing. According to Mishmash he had become nineteen Au
gust 31, 1917, and had delayed advising the foreman
through ignorance of the custom mentioned above. If his
claim were correct there became at issue the question of
back pay on the basis of a man's wages from August 31,
1917, until April 1, 1918, the difference being $1.31 per
working day.
Mishmash took his case to the local union and in accord
ance with the usual custom it was referred to the pit com
mittee, the arbiters of local grievances on behalf of the
men. The pit committee and the foreman of the mine
were unable to agree as to when Mishmash became nine
teen years of age and therefore entitled to the higher rate
of pay, so the question went up to the mine superintendent
and the member of the executive board of the Miners'
union representing that particular sub-district. The mine
superintendent went to the Mishmash home and examined
the family Bible. On first examination the birth of Karl
Mishmash was dated as August 31, 1899, and the mother
signed a statement for the mine superintendent to that
effect. A few days later the mine superintendent was
asked to come to the Mishmash home again and on that oc
casion another entry in a different part of the Bible was
shown him giving the date of the birth of the boy as Au
gust 31, 1898. If this were correct Mishmash would be
entitled to back pay from August 31, 1917. If he were
born in 1899 he would not be nineteen years old until
August 31, 1918, and consequently would have no back pay
coming. The mine superintendent then went to the school
records of the county in which the mine was located and
they were more confused still. In three different years
the school census showed Karl Mishmash to have been born
in 1898, 1899, and 1900 respectively. The mine superin

tendent refused settlement of the back pay question.
The case then went up to the district board of the Mine
Workers' Union and to the commissioner employed by the
operators' association to adjust such questions. Being
unable to agree the case was then referred to the court of
last resort in this system of negotiation, a body known as
the joint board, being composed of the commissioner and
deputy commissioner representing the operators and the
president of the Mine Workers' Union and another repre
sentative of the miners. The president of the Mine Work
ers' Union in District 14 is Alexander Howat. The joint
board agreed that in accordance with the custom, Mishmash
would be entitled to the adult rate of pay from the time
he became nineteen, but it did not make any finding on
the important point involved in this controversy, namely,
what that date was. The case dragged along, being the
subject of infrequent correspondence. The boy's mother
furnished the mine workers' board with an affidavit to the
effect that he was born in 1898 and as against this the
operators held her signed statement to the effect that he
was born in 1899.
Finally the executive board of the United Mine Work
ers, District 14, on the recommendation of its president,
Alexander Howat, and, according to the operators, without
notification or demand for a settlement, ordered a strike in
the Mackie mines until Karl Mishmash received his back
pay, the sum in dispute amounting to $187.40. The two
mines operated by the Mackie Fuel Company, employing
something like two hundred men, received this order and
ceased work on February 4.
News of the strike in the Mackie mines came to Governor

Allen and to the Court of Industrial Relations through the
newspapers. A cessation of work in an essential industry
for the purpose of limiting production is forbidden by the
law creating the Industrial Court. A member of the court,
accompanied by the Attorney General and the attorney for
the court, went immediately to the coal district to investi
gate the situation. In September, 1920, on application of
the Attorney General and the Court of Industrial Relations,
Judge Andrew J. Curran of the District Court of Crawford
County, in which is located the larger part of the Kansas
coal mines, had granted a permanent injunction against
506
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the president of District 14, the district board, the officers

of the local union and others, forbidding them to call
strikes or do other acts which would tend to limit normal
production of coal. (It must be remembered that the
Kansas Constitution forbids the combining of legislative
and judicial powers in one tribunal. The Kansas Court of
Industrial Relations having large legislative powers cannot
be clothed with judicial powers and therefore cannot en
force its own orders. It must go into the courts of general
jurisdiction for such enforcement.)
Casual investigation showed the facts as related above.
In open court evidence was laid before Judge Curran show
ing a violation of his order. Officers of the local unions
involved came into court bearing with them the original
strike orders received by them, in one case from the hands
of President Howat direct, in other case the channel of
delivery was through a member of the district board. Judge
Curran immediately issued attachments for all of the dis
trict officers of the Mine Workers' Union. When they came
into court an unusual thing happened. Thomas Harvey,
secretary and treasurer, on being arraigned stated that he
had opposed the order, that he had informed the district
board that it was contrary to the law of Kansas, and had
declined to vote for it. This was the first time division of
opinion on the board had been shown. Harvey, in fact,
had gone to jail with Howat and others in 1920 for refusal
to appear in the Court of Industrial Relations and testify
in an inquiry then under way. The other defendants, in
cluding Howat and five members of the board, appeared in
court. Judge Curran found the defendants guilty and sen
tenced them to one year in the Crawford County jail. Im
mediately notice of appeal to the Kansas Supreme Court
was given and bond filed.
*
*
#
*
The authority of the State of Kansas having been duly
upheld in its courts, the Court of Industrial Relations pro
ceeded to investigate the controversy. After three years
of contention the only remedy found had been to call a
strike. The court called witnesses and took information
where it could get it. The first witnesses to testify gave
the facts as outlined above. By inquiry the court's officers
had located the midwife who was present at the birth of
Karl Mishmash. She appeared and told of the event but
could not identify the year. Her testimony was therefore
as inconclusive as the rest had been. In the course of it,
however, she referred to the fact that the godfather of the
boy was then in a mining camp in that vicinity. He was
immediately telephoned to come into court and complied.
But the witness, Spohn, could not remember the year in
which the boy was born. He was earnest and unquestion
ably telling the truth. Finally under a careful line of
questioning by the court's attorney and a member of the
court, he remembered that at the christening, which was
on a summer day, a group of Austrians present had ad
journed to the shade of a tree and sitting there had dis
cussed the startling event of the assassination of the wife
of Francis Joseph, Emperor of Austria, which had just
occurred. Spohn did not undertake to say in what year
this had occurred but he clearly remembered the linking
of the two circumstances.
It was rather a dramatic scene. The courtroom was crowded,
mostly with coal miners. The news of the investigation
of the Industrial Court into the controversy had spread
through the town and district. The examination of the
[Vol. 112, No. 2909
several witnesses had been followed with a lot of interest.

The Industrial Court at once directed its clerk to proceed
to a library and obtain a standard reference work by which
the year of the assassination of the Austrian empress could
be fixed. This was done and in a silence that was intense,
the clerk read: "Elizabeth, wife of Francis Joseph, Em
peror of Austria, was assassinated by an Italian anarchist
in Geneva, September 10, 1898." Finally in a most unusual
way something conclusive had been found. On the testi
mony introduced and the record made the Court found that
Karl Mishmash was born August 31, 1898, and became nine
teen years of age August 31, 1917, and under the custom
prevailing in the coal district was entitled to man's wages
from that time, and the court directed the coal operator
to pay him accordingly. The next day the amount due was
deposited with the clerk of the district court and has since
been paid to Karl Mishmash. The mines have resumed
operations.
I have gone into this matter in some detail because it
is an interesting story; because it is the last case tried by
the Court of Industrial Relations before this is written, and
because it illustrates more perfectly than any other single
incident the sort of thing which brings on industrial con
flict in the coal district and the advantage that a fairminded and impartial tribunal clothed with the power of
the State has in the ascertainment of facts and the deter
mination of controverted issues. Three years of the old
method had brought only a strike. In thirty-six hours from
the time of the Industrial Court's investigation of the facts
began, a finding had been made and the money found to
be due the miner paid into court.
The law creating the Kansas Court of Industrial Rela
tions came out of a special session of the legislature fol
lowing the great coal strike of 1919. Aside from railway
employees the coal miners constitute the largest and most
numerous class of workmen in Kansas in any essential in
dustry. The coal miners are also the best organized, the
most powerful financially and with the most radical and
defiant leadership of any industrial class in Kansas. About
80 per cent of the members of the United Mine Workers'
Union of District 14 are foreign born or of the first genera
tion in this country. Huddled into small mining camps,
detached from the larger towns in the coal district, they
have been peculiarly susceptible to the radicalism rampant
in the coal regions. Alexander Howat, the district presi
dent, is a radical of radicals, alleged to be a member of
the I. W. W., the Coal Mine Workers' Industrial Union, and
charged with contributing to the financial support of the
Communist Party and in touch with the extremists of the
country.
The coal district in Kansas is the most turbulent in the
matter of the number of strikes in the whole United States.
Howat not only fights the operators, but he fights the
national organization of his own union as vigorously and
viciously as he fights Governor Allen and the Industrial
Court. Between him and the relatively conservative na
tional leadership of the United Mine Workers' Union of
America there is no sympathy or concord. When the
Kansas Industrial Court began its work in the coal district
in April, 1920, it was received with openly sullen hostility.
Howat and his officers refused to appear before the court
and give any testimony as to conditions in the mining dis
trict. For this defiance he and the officers were sent to jail.
They were released on bond pending an appeal to the Kansas
April 6, 1921]
The Nation
Supreme Court which found against them. They then

appealed the case to the United States Supreme Court,
where it is pending.
In 1920 the Industrial Court obtained no voluntary in
formation of particular value from any of the coal miners
with two or three exceptions. The processes of the court
were resisted and when the witnesses appeared their mem
ories failed them on all important points. While no strike
was called there was a partial cessation of work lasting
several weeks. The court was trying to get the facts in
volved in the numerous controversies that had arisen and
that had seriously curtailed the production of coal in Kansas.
It pursued its difficult task patiently and calmly. From
time to time it sat at Pittsburg, the capital of the coal
fields, and made its findings and orders. The coal mines
of Kansas have operated from the middle of August, 1920,
until the strike in the Mackie mines without interruption,
the longest period of uninterrupted operation in many years.
When the Industrial Court went to Pittsburg this time
there was a difference in the atmosphere. It was no longer
surcharged with sullen hostility. Courtrooms were crowded
at hearings as of old, but the crowds were not unfriendly.
Witnesses, with the exception of Howat and the district
board, responded promptly and gave testimony freely. The
principal officer of the district, next to Howat, disclaimed
responsibility for the last strike order. The officers of the
local union affected came into court bearing the original
strike orders signed by Howat himself. A year ago it
would have been impossible to have obtained them. With
the exception of one day when the miners took a holiday
to hear Howat arraigned in district court they were gen
erally at work. There was no serious threat of a general
strike even when their leaders were sentenced to jail.
Sources of information for the court and its officers here
tofore closed were freely opened.
If, as both its friends and its enemies predict, the value
of the Kansas Industrial Court law will ultimately be deter
mined in the Kansas coal fields, its journey to victory is
well on its way.
In the twelve months of its existence the Kansas Court of
Industrial Relations has touched upon activities in all of
the essential industries of the State. It has listened to the
presentation of issues involved in controversies between
street railroad owners and their employees; between em
ployees of railroads and the railroad management; between
electricians and electric power companies; between flour
mill operators and their men; it has heard in all twentyeight cases; it has made a definite finding in all of these
but four; it has made many orders, touching upon condi
tions found to exist in these industries, and aside from
the Howat case it has had only one appeal from its deci
sions and that was dismissed before being heard. Its find
ing of a fair wage in the Joplin & Pittsburg Street Railway
Company case was used as a basis by the Metropolitan
Street Railway Company operating in Kansas City, Mis
souri, and Kansas City, Kansas, for paying their employees.
All of organized labor is not unfriendly to the Industrial
Court. Of the cases brought before it twenty-seven have
been filed by representatives of labor organizations. Only
two or three cases have been brought by employers.
A great deal of press attention was given recently to the
decision of the court in the matter of the operation of flour
mills at Topeka. The mills in this city, the capital of
Kansas and the seat of the court, had curtailed production
507
in the fall of 1920. The employees filed a petition in court

to have the conditions investigated. That was promptly
done. The owners of the mills were subpoenaed to come
into court and give testimony as to the conditions in their
business, which they did. Out of this case rules were laid
down by the court, as authorized by the law creating it,
requiring that flour mills operation be 75 per cent continu
ous and that when a mill found it necessary or desirable to
reduce production below that figure, application must be
made and permission obtained. Some of the press reports
indicated that the court had gone far afield in requiring an
industry to be operated without regard to trade conditions.
The court did recommend that when because of business
conditions flour mills were shut down, its skilled employees
should be retained on the pay roll either on a monthly basis
or by providing them with satisfactory employment. The
language of the court on this point is as follows:
The evidence before us shows that in the Topeka mills
skilled men in the milling business are being paid a monthly
wage, and are therefore drawing pay whether the mill is run
ning or not. So far as is possible to do so, this rule should
be recognized in all the mills of the State, for it is necessary
in the promotion of the general welfare that skilled and
faithful workers should always be available for these essential
industries which so vitally affect the living conditions of the
people.
The owners of a sorghum syrup mill at Fort Scott ob
jected to the interpretation of a contract made with the
local labor union and asked the court to interpret and
modify it. In the hearing the national officers of that or
ganization agreed to abide by the court's finding, and ex
pressed the feeling that the local organization was not justi
fied in the position it had taken. All parties cheerfully
accepted the court's finding and are abiding by it. When
the time to make a new contract between the largest street
railway and interurban company in Kansas and its em
ployees came last August, there were several points upon
which they were unable to agree. Both sides agreed to
submit the matter to the Court of Industrial Relations and
to abide by its decision. The court gave the matter its
earnest attention and wrote the disputed sections, which
have been accepted. Recently some questions have been
raised as to the proper interpretation of the contract in
some of its details, and again both sides are asking the
court as a whole or one of its judges as the court may
determine to resolve the differences. Both sides again
agree to accept its finding.
During the first year of its existence the Industrial Court
acted as a public utilities commission and was charged with
the responsibility of supervising the service and fixing the
rates of the public utilities of the State. The present ses
sion of the legislature has recreated the public utilities
commission, thus relieving the court of that burden. On
the other hand the Labor Bureau and the Industrial Wel
fare Commission have been abolished, their functions being
merged into the Industrial Court. The court will also be
charged with the duty of administering the mine inspec
tion laws, factory inspection, and other industrial activities
of the Stated It will be an industrial tribunal free from
the necessity of giving a large portion of its time and
attention to public utility matters. This will give it more
time to investigate conditions and adjudicate controversies
which may arise and correct evils before they become se
rious enough to menace production of the commodities es
sential to the health and welfare of the people of Kansas,
508
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[Vol. 112, No. 2909
Our Imperialist PropagandaI. The ' 'National Geographic Y ' Anti-Haitian Campaign
Sir: The inclosed letter speaks for itself. In the December num
ber of the National Geographic Magazine appeared an article entitled
Haiti and Its Regeneration by the United States. The article was
not signed, but judging from the photographs the articles must
have originated in the office of some officer of the U. S. Marine
Corps, or the National City Bank of New Tork. I took the liberty
to inclose with my letter a copy of "The Conquest of Haiti."
Rosholt, Wisconsin, February It
Hugo Mueller
National Geographic Magazine
Washington, D. C.
Dr. Huoo Mueller,
February 8
Rosholt, Wisconsin.
Dear Sir: Your recent letter in reference to the articles on Haiti
was referred to me, for we are always interested in constructive
criticism.
I am sure, however, that if you had followed the investigations
and clearing up of these entirely unfounded and fundamentally
Inspired attacks on the Marine Corps' administration in Haiti, you
would not hold the thought that the National Geographic Magazine
could be subsidized for propaganda of any kind or description, for
its honorable record of thirty-two years certainly precludes any
such possibility.
It was only after the most careful examination of the facts and
consultation with such men as Harry A. Franck, whose new book
on the West Indies is considered an authorityfor he had just
returned from therebesides conferring with a half-dozen other
members of the National Geographic Society who have had an
opportunity to study conditions in that country, that the material
was published.
The most searching investigation by Congress has resulted in an
entire setting aside of the charges made, which were, to be per
fectly frank with you, in our Judgment born of political inspiration.
If you care to investigate the matter as closely as we have, you
will find that conditions in Haiti were brought about by the actions
of not only scores but hundreds of petty bands who, gathering
around a small group of malcontents, would war against each
other, and against the Marines, many of the latter having been
murdered in cold blood from ambush and by the worst kind of
guerrilla warfare.
The same condition that occurred in the Philippines when we were
forced to take them over and which has been rampant in Mexico
for years occurs in a smaller way in Haiti, and requires drastic
action, and this only has brought about a house-cleaning.
We always welcome constructive criticism, however, and therefore
thank you for your letter.
Very truly yours,
John O. La Gorce, Associate Editor
[Let us take up the allegations in this letter one by one.
"It was only after the most careful examination of the facts
and consultation with such men as Harry A. Franck, whose book
on the West Indies is considered an authorityfor he has just
returned from there." Is Harry Franck an authority? Does
the fact that a person has just returned from somewhere make
him that? Harry Franck is a magazine writer who was shown
every possible courtesy by the American authorities in Haiti
and Santo Domingo. He was shown about by the Marine Corps
and certainly might reasonably be expected to write favorably of
its every act. But does he consider himself an authority? In
the introduction to his book just published by the Century Com
pany, he writes: "The following pagesHo not pretend to 'cover'
the West Indies. They are made up of the random pickings of
an eight-months' tour of the Antilles, during which every island
of importance was visited." The eight months' tour included
Cuba, Porto Rico, Haiti, Santo Domingo, Jamaica, St. Thomas,
St. John, St. Croix, Dominica, St. Kitts, St. Vincent, St. Lucia,
Granada, Barbados, Trinidad, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and
Curasao. Such is the sole "authority" whom the associate editor
of the National Geographic Magazine cites.
But even Mr. Franck has something to say which does not
entirely justify the words "entirely unfounded and fundamen
tally inspired attacks on the Marine Corps." On page 235 of his
book he writes of Santo Domingo: "The great majority of the

forces of occupation were well-meaning young fellows who often
lacked experience in distinguishing outlaws from honest citizens,
with the result that painful injustices were sometimes committed.
These ignorant, or movie-trained, young fellows were sent out
into the hills to hunt bandits. They came upon a hut, found it
unoccupied, and touched a match to the nipe thatch. They prob
ably thought such a hovel was of no importance anyway, even
if it were not a bandit haunt, whereas it contained all the earthly
possessions of a harmless family. In their ignorance of local
customs they could not know that the entire household was out
working in their jungle yuca-garden. Or they found only the
women and children at home, and burned the house because these
could not explain where their man was. Or again, they met a
man on a trail and asked him his business, and because he could
not understand their atrocious imitation of Spanish, or they his
reply, they shot him to be on the safe side. In still other places
they burned the houses of innocent accomplices, because bandits
had commandeered food and lodging there. If one can believe
half the stories that are current in all circles throughout Santo
Domingo, the Germans in Belgium had nothing on some of our
own 'leather-necks.' "
On page 129, he writes the following about Haiti: "Some two
years after American occupation cacoism took on a new life.
In perfect frankness it must be admitted that this was partly
the fault of the Americans. ... In their eagerness . . .
the forces of occupation resurrected an old French law called
the corvee . . . but they [the Haitians] probably would have
endured the resurrected corvee had it been applied in strict
legality, a few days' labor in their own locality, instead of being
carried out with too energetic a hand. When they were driven
from their huts at the point of a gendarme rifle, transported, on
their own bare feet, to distant parts of the country, and forced
to labor for weeks under armed guards, it is natural that they
should have concluded that these new-coming foreigners with
white skins were planning to reduce them again to the slavery
they had thrown oft' more than a century before. The result
was that a certain percentage of the forced laborers caught up
any weapon at hand and took to the hills as cacos."
We pass on. Paragraph four of the associate editor's letter
is absolutely and unqualifiedly false. There has been no Con
gressional investigation, "searching" or superficial, of the Amer
ican occupation of Haiti. There was only a very biased "investi
gation" by officers of the very force responsible for the atroci
ties.
In answer to paragraph five, ". . . conditions in Haiti
were brought about by . . . petty bandits who . . .
would war against each other and against the Marines, many
of the latter having been murdered in cold blood in ambush and
by the worst kind of guerrilla warfare," we again cite the
National Geographic Magazine's "authority." Mr. Franck says
on page 133 of his book: "Up to date at least three thousand
bandits have been killed as against four Americansa major
and a sergeant were shot from ambush and two privates who
lost their lives from over-confidence."
The associate editor must, to put it charitably, be very unin
formed to write as he does of the "condition" which "forced" us
to take over the Philippines. He seems to be unaware of the
war with Spain. His mention of Mexico is almost as revealing.
If the National Geographic Magazine really claims and values
the generally acknowledged "honorable record of thirty-two
years" of which its associate editor boasts, its public is clearly
entitled to a full explanation without evasion or mendacity.
Editor The Nation.]
[P. S.The above material was submitted to the editor and
associate editor of the National Geographic Magazine, who
were invited to make any comment or explanation they desired.
Two letters and a telegram were ignored.Ed.]
April 6, 1921]
The Nation
509
The Progress of Civil Liberty in the United States

[Items from recent bulletins of the American Civil Liberties Union.]
Nonpartisan Demons and Legion Saints
Overruling the Courts
Kansas. A mob of more than 200 persons, led by American
Washington. Elmer Smith, Centralia attorney acquitted in
Legion members, seized J. C. Stevic and A. A. Parsons, State
the Centralia murder trial, was prevented by the chief of police
organizer and secretary of the Nonpartisan League, at Great
from speaking at a public meeting at Raymond on February 13.
Bend on March 13 and forced them to tar themselves. The
He was escorted to the station and ordered out of town with the
warning that if he returned he would be lynched.
authorities made no effort to stop the attack. Former Senator
J. Ralph Burton, one of a committee which recently reported
Religious Liberty
favorably on the League's administration in North Dakota, was
Massachusetts.
Carmelo
Niciti, a religious conscientious ob
"escorted" out of Great Bend on the same day.
jector, was denied citizenship by Judge Frederick Lawton in the
A Negro Is Always Guilty
Naturalization Court at Springfield on February 24.
Kentucky. An armed and masked mob of men at Versailles
100 Per Cent
on March 13 took Woodford James, a Negro accused of murder,
Iowa.
Volney
Diltz,
commander
of the Des Moines American
from the county jail and hanged him.
Legion Post, has announced that more than 100 legionnaires
Rebellion Against England Contrary to American
have signified their willingness to be sworn in as special officers
Traditions
to assist the police in suppressing meetings for William Hay
wood if he attempts to speak there. "Bill Haywood won't speak
Pennsylvania. The Pittsburgh Board of Public Works on
here if we know he is coming" is the commander's statement.
March 11 canceled a permit for a meeting with Donal O'Callaghan, Lord Mayor of Cork, as speaker. The Board stated
Extending the Blessings
that the hall is "purely an American hall" and cannot be used
Manila. Gregorio Perfecto, editor of La Nacion, organ of the
for meetings "designed to spread propaganda against countries
Democratic Party, was sentenced on January 5 to two months'
allied with the United States."
imprisonment following conviction on a charge of having criti
The Irish Co a Little Oppressing on Their Own Account
cized members of the legislature.
Oregon. A meeting under the auspices of the Portland Civil
Guilty Till Proved Innocent
Liberties Union, with Irwin St. John Tucker as speaker, was
Idaho.
R.
Quackenbush,
I. W. W. organizer, was arrested by
prohibited by the police on February 22 at the request of the
the police at Boise on January 20 and held on $2,000 bail pend
directors of the Ancient Order of Hibernians.
ing investigation.
Be Careful About Your Audience
Why Try Them? All Rooshians Are Anarchists
Oregon. Permit for the Portland public auditorium on Feb
Ohio. Department of Justice agents, assisted by the Loyal
ruary 7 for a meeting, with Lincoln Steffens as the speaker, was
American League, arrested eight Russians at Cleveland on
canceled by Mayor Baker after being advised that his meet
March
1, charged with being anarchists. They are held for de
ings elsewhere "were un-American and the audience composed
portation.
The Unprivileged
of radicals."
Majestaetsbeleidigung
Washington, D. C. The United States Supreme Court on
March 7, Justices Brandeis and Holmes dissenting, affirmed the
Oregon. Thomas R. Speakman, arrested for distributing cir
decision of the Circuit Court of Appeals in upholding the ruling
culars condemning Mayor Baker for prohibiting radical meet
of Postmaster General Burleson in refusing the Milwaukee
ings, was sentenced at Portland on February 5 to 360 days in
Leader second-class mailing privileges.
jail.
More Patriotic than the G. A. R.
Un-Americanism on the Bench
Indiana. Rev. William H. Lewellen, a Russellite preacher,
Washington. In an order restraining the police of Seattle
who attempted to speak at a meeting in a private residence at
from destroying the issues of the Industrial Worker, an I. W. W.
Greensburg on January 23, was kidnaped by members of the
publication, Judge Everett Smith declares that the police have
local American Legion Post, taken to the county line, and threat
no right to censor newspapers or periodicals.
ened with tarring if he returned. Mr. Lewellen was to speak
Freedom of Board and Lodging
at the G. A. R. Hall, the use of which was denied after threats
South Dakota. After having been held in the county jail at
of the Legion.
Aberdeen for six months, charged under the State criminal
The Right to Work
syndicalism act, John Gartland, an I. W. W., was given his pre
Tennessee. An injunction issued by Chancellor Garvin at
liminary hearing, and the case was dismissed. The prosecution,
Chattanooga on January 28 prohibited the striking employees
responsible for delaying the trial, admitted that it had been
of the Lucey Manufacturing Co. from picketing and from an
unable to get the witnesses it needed.
nouncing the strike in the vicinity of the factory by word or
No Advocate of Violence Wanted
printed notice.
Iowa.
Mayor
O. L. Barewald, of Davenport, who recently
Desecration
resigned from the Socialist party, issued an order to the police
California. Charged with defacing a picture of President
on January 8 to rid the town of radicals. "Load up the riot
Wilson which was displayed in the office of their realty firm,
guns for immediate use and give them a reception with hot lead.
Samuel and John Lochenmaier, wealthy residents of Lodi, have
We don't want any 'Reds' here."
been ordered by Major Garrison, commander of the local Amer
Liberty and Union
ican Legion Post, to leave the town within thirty days. The
Alabama.
Under
the
order issued by General R. E. Steiner,
action of the Legion was taken after the matter had been
commanding the troops in the coal strike district, no meetings
brought to its attention by a committee of the Business Men's
of union miners, for business or other purposes, are permitted.
Association.
Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Freedom of the Press
California. The executive officer of Alcatraz military prison
Washington. The seven I. W. W.'s arrested at Spokane on
has ruled that no inmate may read The Nation and New Re
February 11 for selling the Industrial Worker on the streets
public until peace with Germany has been formally declared.
were sentenced on March 5 to 60 days in the county jail.
The Nation
510
[Vol. 112, No. 2909
Correspondence
In
the
Driftway
EVER since Professor Michelson of the University of

Chicago told the world that, according to his new
method of measurement, he estimated the size of Betelgeuse to be 27,000,000 times that of our sun, many people
have searched out that star who had never taken the trouble
to know it before. Betelgeuse is, in fact, the popular star
of the dayor, more correctly, night. This is excellent,
in a way, as is anything that encourages us of this age and
country to take our eyes and our thoughts off the petty
trifles near at hand and raise them to the infinite spaces
above. But the attention bestowed upon Betelgeuse and its
inconceivable mass makes the Drifter jealous for one of his
own pet stars, the giant Canopus of the Southern Hem
isphere. The Drifter hopes there is nothing in Professor
Michelson's discovery that will upset the relative size of
stars as hitherto determined. For, according to such cal
culations, preeminence has been conceded to Canopus. In
"Astronomy with an Opera-glass," Garrett P. Serviss says :
There can be little doubt that Canopus, in the Southern
Hemisphere, is a grander sun than Sirius. To our eyes Canopus
is only about half as bright as Siriuj, and it ranks as the second
star in the heavens in the order of brightness. But while
Sirius's distance is measurable, that of Canopus is so unthinkably immense that astronomers can get no grip upon it. If it
were only twice as remote as Sirius, it would be equal to two
of the latter, but in all probability its distance is much greater
than that.
*
*
*
TO the Drifter it has often seemed that our greatest
thinkers have been men who communed with the stars;
that our profounder philosophies have been developed in
regions like the Orient, where men lived much in the open
of desert and plain, ever obsessed by the tremendous sig
nificance of the burning firmament above them. In this age
and country we look seldom at the stars, and then drop our
eyes quickly earthward, comprehending neither the science
nor the poetry of infinite space. That is one reason, per
haps, why we dare not and cannot handle in our literature,
our art, or our daily conversation the great things of exis
tence. We play around the edges, and if we touch the great
themes at all it is only in humorous vein. Thus Bert
Leston Taylor, the newspaper minstrel who died the other
day, wrote:
When temporary chairmen utter speeches,
And frenzied henchmen howl their battle hymns,
My thoughts float out across the cosmic reaches
To where Canopus swims.
*****
CANOPUS, of course, belongs to the southern heavens
and is not visible in most of the United States. The
Drifter lately helped to identify this star, however, for a
friend who was sojourning in Florida. There it was glori
ously visible during the winter, close to the horizon south
west of Sirius, to all who chose to regard it. How many,
the Drifter wonders, among the throngs at Palm Beach
last winter saw, or even knew of the existence of, this
greatest of all suns? A few, he hopes,
For after one has had about a week of
The arguments of friends as well as foes,
A star that has no parallax to speak of
Conduces to repose.
THE DRIFTER
Peasant Rule and Cooperation

Sir: In the fall of 1919 a movement was started in Jugo
slavia whose novel social and political principles might be of
sufficient interest to Nation readers to justify a brief exposi
tion of them. The movement originated among the peasant
cooperators, was organized under the name of the Peasants'
League, and at the elections of last November secured forty
seats in the National Assembly.
The Jugoslav Peasants' League claims that peasants consti
tute 85 per cent of Jugoslavia's population; that their laboT
in products contributes an equal percentage toward the ex
istence of the state, that is toward the upkeep of all cul
tural institutions; that the peasant class thus constituting
numerically and economically the principal support of the
state, ought consequently to exercise a corresponding in
fluence in the government of the country and enjoy all the
benefits of a culture created by it. The present capitalist sys
tem not only deprives the peasant of all power but hoards in
towns and cities all the fruits of culture, leaving the villages
in ignorance, poverty, and filth. Other good reasons why the
peasant majority should rule Jugoslavia are that it is the
most altruistic and conciliatory element in society; that it is
patriotic without a tinge of imperialism and that it is invari
ably opposed to war.
As the land should belong to those who till it, all big estates
should be divided among the peasants, with a sufficient allot
ment to each for a decent living. The peasants should form
cooperative societies and through them build homes, secure in
formation for increasing the productivity of the soil, gather and
sell their products, and thus protect themselves against ex
ploitation by greedy profiteers. Through the cooperative system
and peasant rule capital will be deprived of its present omnip
otence and turned into what it ought to be, a good and useful
servant. Experience gained in all European countries during
the last fifty years shows that almost all branches of human
work can be successfully operated on a cooperative basis.
The cooperative system applied to every possible branch of
human work logically leads to the idea of collaboration among
the classes: peasants, workingmen, private and public mental
workers, and capitalists. Each of these classes is essential to
human progress, each has its special interests to be considered.
But no real progress can be attained if one class seeks its wel
fare in the exploitation or the destruction of the other. Only
through their collaboration can the general welfare be assured;
not through forcing all men to be "equal," as the communists
pretend, or through making all men subservient to the moneyed
class, as the capitalists practice at present.
But how obtain this desirable collaboration of the classes?
By destroying the present political parties and creating class
parties or organizations. Instead of professional politicians,
class representatives should meet in parliament and legislate.
But these great changes can be accomplished only under the
auspices of a peasant rule, that is, under a class which is equally
opposed to capitalist and communist dictatorship.
Such are, in general terms, the aims of the Jugoslav Peasants'
League, led by Mr. Mika Avramovich, general manager of the
Jugoslav Cooperative Federation of Belgrade, whose solid
culture coupled with twenty-five years of practical work among
the Serbian peasants fits him better, perhaps, than any other
man in Europe to be the leader and the interpreter of peasant
thought. The creed of the Peasants' League is spreading so
rapidly in Jugoslavia that its ascendancy to power is only a
question of the next election, when the Western world may have
occasion to study a new economic and political system steering
between the extremes of capitalism and communism.
New York, March IS
J. F. Lupis-Vukich.
April 6, 1921]
The Nation
From Another Alumnus of G. P. College

Sik: I have read with interest the letter concerning Gopher
Prairie College which appeared in your March 16 issue. That
interest is due primarily to the fact that a friend of mine, the
graduate of another Alma Mater who has gone "on the town,"
is a member of the faculty of the college referred to. I have
seen a copy of the same "Center HallPure American" bulletin
referred to by Mr. C. G. J. An experience which my friend
had last fall, during the torrid days of the bitter (ahem!)
Presidential election, may be illuminating to Mr. C. G. J., and
to others.
My friend is a man of strong convictions, and is sometimes
guilty of rather unguarded utterance. He forgot that he was
in the Palmerized U. S. A. (You see, he had served in the
A. E. F. during the greater part of the war, and was, accord
ingly, out of touch with American patriotic sentiment) He
suggested one day in a casual conversation that he did not con
sider Eugene V. Debs a horned devil, the return of whose soul
to Hades Beelzebub himself is eagerly looking forward to. He
further suggested that he did not approve of having Presidents
of the United States selected by Penrose, Lodge, Watson, Smoot,
and their ilk. Result: a day or two later he was called upon
by the president of the Board of Trustees of Gopher Prairie
College, was accused of being a Socialist, and was informed
that he would be ousted at the next meeting of the board. I
understand that he questioned the worthy board as to what is
meant by being a Socialist, and found these leaders of American
thought woefully lacking in knowledge on this and kindred
subjects. He demonstrated, on his part, that he had only been
so radical as to support the Pink Progressives in 1912. Result:
he was permitted to remain among the corps of independent
teachers of Pure Americanism at Gopher Prairie College. But
I have no doubt that he is still regarded with bilious eye by
those who hold in trust the mental and moral welfare of the
youth who inhabit that part of the State which is "almost ex
clusively" peopled by folk of old American ancestry.
Mr. C. G. J., you are right: at your Alma Mater, as at many
another, "no restraint has ever been or will ever be placed upon
freedom of thought"if unexpressed.
Chicago, March 10
N. C.
The Benefits of Military Training

Sir: Among the advantages claimed for military service are
the formation of character and the presence in the community
of disciplined young men who will resist all forms of lawless
ness. Tacoma, Washington, has been experiencing these bless
ings. It paid well for them in advance by presenting the War
Department with a two-million-dollar site upon which to estab
lish the permanent army cantonment of Camp Lewis. The
Tacoma Ledger of March 11, 1921, sheds the following light
upon the development of military virtues in its vicinity:
In Imposing sentence on Private Root, Judge Askren called
attention to the fact that most of the crime cases brought before
the present grand Jury have arisen from the action of Camp
Lewis soldiers, or from men Just released from service. "The
very fact that a man is In uniform takes him from the suspicion
of the average citizen," Judge Askren said. "The uniform of the
United States soldier never has stood for robbery or any sort of
crime. To a person walking along the dark street the appear
ance of a soldier in uniform usually gives a sense of security
equaling the appearance of a city police officer. Yet the history
of crime in this country during the last few months has centered
about men wearing the olive drab of the army. Instead of the
army cantonment being a blessing to the community, as it should
be and has been in the past, Camp Lewis is rapidly assuming the
position of a curse to us. . . ."
Seattle, Washington, March 15
Stuart A. Rice
511
Hawthorne's Main Street

Sir: When William Allen White said Sinclair Lewis's "Main
Street" ranks with the "Scarlet Letter" he probably did not
have in mind that Hawthorne has written a tale entitled Main
Street, nor has Lewis perhaps been aware of it. It is inter
esting to turn to this tale first published in 1849. Though it
is only episodic, "somewhat in the nature of a puppet show," one
may find in it a vitality that Lewis's soulless account lacks:
These wanderers have received from Heaven a gift that, in all
epochs of the world, has brought with it the penalties of mortal
suffering and persecution, scorn, enmity, and death itselfa gift
that, thus terrible to its possessors, has ever been most hateful to
all other men, since its very existence seems to threaten the over
throw of whatever else the toilsome ages have built upthe gift
of a new idea. You can discern it in them, .illuminating their faces
their whole persons, indeed, however earthly and cloddishwith
a light that inevitably shines through, and makes the startled com
munity aware that these men are not as they themselves arenot
brethren nor neighbors of their thought.
Urbana, Illinois, March 22
Ernest Erwin Leisy
Should All Laws Be Obeyed ?

Sir: There are too many Homer Reeds in this country who
seem to have gathered nothing from history or experience.
Mr. Reed's whole argument is that law, regardless of its idiocy
or despotism, must be obeyed. If this had been the thought
of our fathers there would be no United States of America.
The Kansas law to which he refers tends to, and was ap
parently intended to, suppress labor unions. Howat believes
the law to be both wrong and unconstitutional. By what
other method than disobeying it can he test that law?
Peoria, Illinois, March lk
Nathan A. Cole
The New York Peace Society

Sir: On page 30 of The Nation of January 12, you severely
criticize the policies of the New York Peace Society "from 1914
on." You imply a charge of inconsistency because it "elected
as vice-president the head of the Navy League." The truth is
that Gen. Horace Porter, president of the Navy League, re
signed his membership and office in the Society in 1913, because
it opposed the increased naval and military expenditures which
he favored. You say that this Society in the same manifesto de
clared for universal peace and more battleships. The truth is
that it did not advocate any increase in battleship construction.
Because this Society, "from 1914 on," did not oppose the pro
duction of all instruments of war, you say that its members
were "pretended lovers of peace." I respectfully submit that
the word "pretended" is singularly inapplicable in this con
nection to such men as Andrew Carnegie, Samuel T. Dutton,
Wm. H. Short, George W. Kirchwey, Frederick Lynch, Hamil
ton Holt, Charles E. Jefferson, and others like them, the leaders
of this Society.
It is true that their road to international peace and justice
differs from yours, but I hope that you will consent to acquit
them of the charge of pretense or hypocrisy.
Charles H. Levermore
[The Peace Society in 1915 publicly "stood behind" the Presi
dent in his advocacy of three battleships. From our benighted
point of view, a Peace Society which stands for battleships is
on a par with an Anti-Drug Society urging the moderate use
of the hypodermic syringe. Dr. Levermore does not deny that
General Porter was chosen as Vice-President of the Society when
head of the Navy League.Editor The Nation.]
The Nation
512
Books
Sarah Cleghorn
Turnpike Lady.The Spinster.Fellow Captains (with Dor
othy Canfield).Portraits and Protests. By Sarah Cleghorn.
Henry Holt and Company.
IN our high school and early college days many of us who
wanted to write encountered the doctrine that literature
must never, could never in fact, be "propaganda." In practice
this musty superstition, still held by a disconcertingly large num
ber of intelligent people, worked out to mean that any passion
ate expression of unpopular conviction, however fiery, lucid, or
beautiful in itself, failed of justification as a piece of writing.
Defense of the existing order, however, or of any order which
had safely ceased to exist, was not for some reason subject to
this disqualification. It could be moving and beautiful without
arousing suspicion, and if as was most frequently the case it
was merely lightly and brightly scornful of anything new,
young, or generous, it became a triumphant example of "the
way to write." The way to write, it seemed, was to have noth
ing of any particular moment to say, and to say it with a kind
of portentous playfulness.
The persistence of this obscuring and undeveloped attitude
probably accounts in part for the neglect of a native talent so
rare and distinctive, so fresh and individual, as that of Sarah
Cleghorn, the Vermont poet and novelist. She is the author of
two too little known novels, "The Turnpike Lady" and "The
Spinster," of occasional magazine verse, and of a slim volume of
poetry, "Portraits and Protests." Much of her best work is
undoubtedly propaganda in the sense that all great work is
propaganda which is neither deliberate moralizing nor a pro
jected intellectual attitude but the expression of an irresistible
passionate conviction, a personal affirmation, and an act of
faith, and its importance is due in part at least to this very
quality which makes it the reverse of the literary models held
up to our adolescence.
"The Spinster," which appeared in 1916, was until the recent
appearance of "Moon-Calf" hardly equaled in our literature as
an autobiographical novel. Ellen Graham, Miss Cleghorn's
heroine, is a feminine edition of the Moon-Calf. The record
of her life, like that of the life of Felix Fay, is largely one of
mental adventure, and Miss Cleghorn has the gift, as Floyd Dell
has, of making these adventures vivid and important. Ellen
Graham's experiences are the discoveries of ideas. Her excite
ments are experiments with writing and conversion to social
ism and anti-vivisection. These excitements we are enabled
to share through Miss Cleghorn's close and clear-eyed identi
fication with her heroine. While the latter half of the book,
dealing with Ellen's early maturity and relating among other
things a slight and tepid love-episode, falls somewhat below the
high standard the author set herself in writing of her child
hood and adolescence, the book as a whole is singularly candid
and significant. It is memorable not only as a charming, sym
pathetic, and humorous picture of the "viewy" little girl and
her Vermont background but as an unusually sure and search
ing record of the elusive and complicated processes of mental
growth, a record in Miss Cleghorn's case of the making of a
radical. To readers of her poems it has a particular interest
for the light it throws on the origin of the two distinctive
strains in her: the native Vermonter with her strong love of
Vermont country and history, her cherishing reconstruction of
its old-time scenes and characters; and the modern passionate
poet of pity and rebellion, the mystical Christian Socialist and
pacifist. In both veins she is one of the most deeply individ
ual of our poets.
It is her early Vermont poems that figure in "The Spinster"
as Ellen Graham's "sunbonnet" verses. Varying from purely
descriptive pictures of people and places to intensely imagi
native little dramas and phantasies, they are alike in their
[Vol. 112, No. 2909
limpid clearness, their simplicity, their whimsical, appealing,

and occasionally slightly sentimental .tenderness. Unlike most
old-fashioned or rustic poems, they are distinct and full flavored,
as evocative of the atmosphere of early New England as an
old-fashioned color print. Too often such attempts at re
creation are merely a setting forth of stage propertiesan
elaborate restoring of surface quaintnesses. It is otherwise
in these poems of Sarah Cleghorn's, not only because she has
a real imaginative gift but because they are the result of a long,
happy, almost unconscious absorption of this atmosphere. She
is deeply rooted in Vermont soil, impregnated with its sights,
sounds, and distinctive quality. This is the case even when
she draws for her material on the Vermont of a long dead past,
as in Old Portraits Revisited, Morrice Waters, or In a Far
Township, because it is a past whose echoes so evidently
haunted and charmed her childhood, a past which was fused
by so many associations and traditions with her own environ
ment that she could feel and express for it an authentic and
personal emotion.
These early poems, too, were the logical precursors of the
"protests"the militant full-blown and less-known poems of
social rebellion. As conceived by Ellen Graham these country
poems were to be not merely fanciful portraits but "to embody
some shy and covert gospel of gentleness and brotherly love."
It is a gospel which still finds expression in Sarah Cleghorn's
poems, but it is an expression neither covert nor shy but full
throated and ringing, as intensely living as the personality
behind them. Her poems of the past, which have met with
a slight recognition, were full of a gentle and reflective ac
ceptance. The Protests are passionate and searching rejections.
Rejected themselves by an attitude inherited from the past,
they are perhaps destined to be among the revolutionary songs
of tomorrow. It seems not too much to hope for such poems
as Richard Ford and Hermann Suhr, The Poltroon, The Survival
of the Fittest, or for this brief and forceful quatrain:
The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.
Martha Gruening
China's Foreign Trade

The Foreign Trade of China. By Chong Su See. Columbia
University. Longmans, Green and Company.
DESIDES its intrinsic interest Dr. See's volume is worth
noting as completing the second hundred in the series of
monographs edited by the Political Science Faculty of Colum
bia University that deserves to be reckoned among the most
creditable issues of the sort coming from any institution in
this country. Twelve of these are doctors' theses by Chinese
students which have added measurably to our first-hand knowl
edge of such economic problems as come within range of the
series and are an indication of the positive contribution to
American scholarship already derived from our share in the
education of Orientals. No country is so well served today as
the United States in authoritative information about Eastern
Asia, and it is the fault of the inquirer if opinions are still
founded upon travelers' tales and newspaper clippings.
The main value of Dr. See's work lies in his presentation
from the Chinese standpoint of a subject that has been fairly
covered by fuller histories in English. "Most of the books
given to us by foreign writers," he complains, "have not done
the Chinese justice. They generally describe the activities of
the foreigner in China in his own terms and solely from his
own standpoint, and are designed primarily to justify the
policy of some power in that country. As to the impression
produced by those activities upon the Chinese themselves, we
are left perfectly in the dark." The charge is rather over
April 6, 1921]
The Nation
drawn, for writers like General Foster, Captain Brinkley, Pro

fessors Parker, Hornbeck, and Morsenot to mention mission
aries who always defend the Chineseare notable for their
fairness toward Orientals. We are not, however, disposed to
blame a Chinese for pleading with some warmth the cause of
a country that has been the victim of many misconceptions as
well as much mishandling. Yet, though she is censured through
ignorance, the fact remains that China is now bound by iniqui
tous restrictions because her rulers until lately remained stub
bornly ignorant of the outer world, refusing to equip herself,
as Japan did, with the means of national defense. No con
demnation is too strong for the conduct of the early European
adventurers who came to China, but they acted as adventurers
have done from time immemorial, as the Danes did in Britain
and the Japanese in Siam. The "closed door" was a futile
policy.
This is said with no desire to depreciate the temper with
which China's side of the case is presented here. Dr. See has
written an account of her relations with Western peoples that
will serve the general reader as perhaps the best account to
be found within the same compass. Its main value lies in its
very illuminating analysis of the devious ways which foreigners
keep and pass and turn again to deprive China of her own
birthright. The shameful increment of these trammels, begin
ning with the Opium War of 1840, has developed during eighty
years into a situation of extraordinary complexity, blocking the
industrial progress of the country so completely as to threaten
the continuance of profitable intercourse with outsiders. The
author is justified in his contention that these impediments to
the normal progress of a nation, combined with the conflict
proceeding between the old and the new ideas of the people,
are the true causes of the disturbances everywhere going on in
China. They are in the midst of a great transformation "in
which a new scheme of life that is foreign in origin is being
gradually absorbed," but its throes do not prove that the Chi
nese are not fit for self-government or that they must be placed
under international tutelage. Much is said, of course, about the
role of Japan and her schemes for aggrandizement, and with
this much appears about our efforts to check her that will
carry comfort to American readers. But it is not necessary to
touch upon these controversial topics to accept the general con
clusion that the destiny of China involves the future peace of
the world so long as her autonomy is violated through the
clash of antagonistic intrigues among the great powers.
Frederick Wells Williams
Through Russian Eyes

The Passing of the Old Order in Europe. By Gregory Zilboorg.
Thomas Seltzer.
THE great war and its aftermath have supplied the pacifist
critic with abundant matter to his purpose. The delusion
of a better world to be generated from fire and blood is rapidly
evaporating, and men and nations are reverting, some com
placently, some cynically, some despairingly, to the formulas
and slogans of the old political and industrial order. The
evils of imperialism have been increased by the destruction of
the delicate balance of power which prevailed before the war
and Europe is agonizing in the throes of its readjustment.
Acute physical distress has sharpened the elemental cravings
and hatreds; never since Europe received the blessing of mod
ern civilization has the rule of power been so shamelessly as
serted. War has wrought its customary benefits. To counteract
these results Mr. Zilboorg proclaims the creed of a "militant
pacifism which will refuse altogether to compromise upon the
essential issue of war and peace," since violence has never
availed to destroy violence but has inevitably strengthened the
principle which it endeavored to oppose. He frankly avows
the Russian theory of defeatism as the most healthy and noble
idea with which war can be met.
513
Mr. Zilboorg is aware that such an attitude will never be

encouraged by society as it is now organized. Force is the
essential constituent of the modern state, war its irreplaceable
instrument. All our political progress has been in the direc
tion of strengthening the power of the state, and if we are to
free ourselves from the morass in which we are plunged, we
must, in his view, get rid of the oppressive claims which the
state makes upon us. We can travel a considerable distance
in sympathetic mood with the critic till he falls into the phi
losopher's temptation of referring all phenomena to his single
formula. If our standards of humanity are debased, if we are
suffering from a selfish, degraded morality, if our aesthetic
life is perverted and dispirited, it is all owing to the absorp
tion of our energies in the service of this monster. And setting
aside the cause, his presentment of modern civilization is too
hopelessly blank to square with his own prophecies. If Euro
pean thought is as debauched, if its spirit is as mechanistic
and mediocre as the writer declares, how is it to find those
energies from which the new life is to be created? To make
his interpretation of the prevailing spiritual decay effectively
lugubrious, he chooses examples which are not certain to com
mand the assent of other students. To show that the age is
one of thoroughgoing pessimism and despair he elevates into
supreme significance the writings of Oscar Wilde, Dostoevski,
and W. J. Locke (!), attaching to them values which they do
not commonly have for their readers. We do not believe that
the importance of Wilde lies in his idealized philosophy of
suffering nor that Dostoevski is "beloved" because of his
"anarchistic, atrocious, and unhealthy pessimism." As for
Locke, perhaps he is "the most popular writer in Europe," but
we object to being called upon to bow before his "amazing
erudition" or to construe his popularity as a sign of our moral
decadence.
This somewhat distorted literary perspective is not, however,
as injurious to Mr. Zilboorg's interpretation of Europe's malady
as is the sectarian view which he takes of the class struggle.
While in some particulars adopting a very critical attitude to
ward Marxian dogmas and preserving in the main an admirably
temperate tone in his discussion, in speaking of the middle class
he displays a fanatical zeal which results in confusion to his
ideas. He makes the middle class his target because it is the
chief prop of the existing order, but he talks about it as if it
were a consciously solidified body possessing a definitely formu
lated set of principles and distinguished from the rest of hu
manity, as clearly and as simply as black from white, by pecu
liar mental and moral traits. The middle class in his view is
wholly and unalterably materialistic:
"The ideals of the middle class all grow out of the belief
that the good life consists simply in following pleasure and
avoiding pain and that the chief means of achieving thi3 happy
state is by satisfying the possessive instincts to the utmost.
. To rise above the level of this fixed, sessile, comfort
able, and thoroughly degraded order of existence is no part of
the mission of the middle class. Social stability, with its
insurance of an unchallenged position and a regular income,
is all that the middle class seeks to maintain, and it sets its
back firmly against every movement which challenges its exist
ence or which threatens to remove the conventional founda
tions upon which it rests. . . . Spiritual violencethe
ruthless suppression of every benevolent instinctis the very
soul of bourgeois culture."
This is the tone of irrational invective. It is a mere distor
tion of psychological and social realities, dictated by a deep
political bias. The exercise of power has always carried with
it the material good things of the earth, and the rule of the
middle class has only signified a more widespread enjoyment
of material prosperity, resulting in a strengthening of the
"bourgeois ideal" in those countries in which economic oppor
tunities were most accessible. Is there any warrant for assum
ing that there exists in any country, even in proletarian Soviet
Russia, a large class whose struggle for power is unrelated to
514
The Nation
the possessive instinct? Is not the mujik's passion for his

land inflexibly determining the course of the revolution in
Russia? Mr. Zilboorg, far more than he admits, is writing
under the sway of Marxian doctrines. The abasement of the
middle class is for him a necessary condition of the elevation of
the workingman, in whom, he believes, are centered the finest
hopes of the future society. His reasoning is up to a certain
point syllogistic but ends with a blind leap into darkness. Our
present social order, he argues, is wicked, our present social
order is controlled by the middle class; therefore the middle
class is wicked and should be rooted out, and therefore the
working class should be put in control of the world's affairs.
Even if we were to recognize the sharp division of classes, we
might ask to be convinced of the superior moral qualifications
of the laboring man, because a nobler moral order is what Mr.
Zilboorg is concerned about. We might allege that a fear
often expressed by thoughtful and fair-minded persons is that
a working class rule would intensify those very materialistic
and mechanistic tendencies which he regards as the worst sin
of the middle class. Mr. Zilboorg offers no proof to quiet this
kind of misgiving. By the same logic which places Harding
in the White House because Wilson failed in his great task,
though heaven knows there is little to be looked for from the
new choice, we are here called upon to replace one class by
another because no alternative is available. "There seems no
recourse," says Mr. Zilboorg, "but to throw the lines to labor."
The rest is faith and hope.
What, now, are the methods by which the transfer of power
is to be brought about? Mr. Zilboorg is not a Bolshevik; he
calls himself a philosophic opponent of its doctrines. His op
position is fundamentally to its employment of force. In his
detestation of violence he is consistent from beginning to end.
A revolution which makes use of the same weapons as the sys
tem which it is opposing is planting the seeds of its own
destruction. A government which is erected by force can be
maintained only by force, and the use of brute force is what
has brought the world to its present hopeless pass. If he is
lenient toward the bolshevist leaders it is because he views
their actions as the inescapable consequence of the diseased
condition of Russia and of Europe in general. Indeed, he holds
the rest of Europe more to blame for the course of events in
Russia than that country itself. Having been a member of the
idealistic Kerensky government, he remains loyal to the humane
principles which that regime vainly tried to incorporate into
politics, and in the refusal of the world to respond to Kerensky's
appeals he sees the direct cause for the triumph of bolshevism.
The revolution which Mr. Zilboorg forecasts will therefore be
peaceful. It may entail great suffering and misery, but it will
admit of no recourse to arms. Its weapon will be the strike,
which is to be employed in both political and economic issues,
directed in one sphere to the decentralization of the state, in
the other toward the control of industry by labor. But these
are not the ultimate objects of the writer's quest. What he
is looking toward is a readjustment of social groupings to
bring about a greater solidarity among men, a more widespread
efflorescence of cultural forces that have long been suppressed,
a moral and spiritual regeneration of the world. It is an at
tractive, a generous, and a high-minded ideal; we need only
faith in the efficacy of the methods he proposes to become con
verts to his creed.
Jacob Zeitlin
Notable New Books

Across Mongolian Plains. By Roy Chapman Andrews. Appleton.
A popular account of observations and adventures in Mongolia and North
China in connection with the Second Asiatic Expedition of the American
Museum of Natural History.
The War of the Future. By General von Bernhardi. Appleton.
Advice based on the experiences of the past war.
[Vol. 112, No. 2909
The New Jerusalem. By G. K. Chesterton. Doran.

A book of travels with a rub-a-dub-dub of argument about Jews and
Jewry.
Devil Stories: An Anthology. Edited by Maximilian J. Rudwin. Knopf.
Twenty stories from several literatures, chosen to illustrate the attitude
toward the devil of various nations and of various story-writers.
Essays and SUidies by Members of the English Association.
Collected by A. C. Bradley. Oxford.
Six solid studies by H. Bradley, W. P. Ker, George Saintsbury (Trollop*
Revisited), John Sampson (On Playing the Sedulous Ape), F. Melian Stawell (Conrad), and H. C. Wyld.
Training for Librarianship. By J. H. Friedel. Lippincott.
Useful advice upon how to become a member of a lamentably neglected
profession.
What Happened at Jutland. By C. C. Gill. Doran.
An impartial study, by a Commander in the United States Navy, of a
combat which he calls one of "the greatest battles in history," but of which
he says it "had no decisive influence upon the naval situation or the gen
eral course of the war."
Africa: Slave or Free? By John H. Harris. Dutton.
A high-minded and enlightened plea for a more democratic treatment of
Africa by European and American Powers.
The Crisis of the Naval War. By Viscount Jellicoe. Doran.
An account of the work of the British and American navies in com
bating the submarine.
The Northern D'Entrecasteaux. By D. Jenness and the late
Rev. A. Ballantyne. Oxford.
An interesting anthropological description of the almost entirely unknown
islands of Goodenough and FergusBon in the D'Entrecasteaux archipelago,
off the New Guinea Coast.
The Poems of John Keats. Edited with an Introduction and
Notes by E. De Selincourt. Dodd, Mead.
The fourth edition, revised, of a book which, first issued in 1904, still
remains the best one-volume edition of the poet, though it lacks the Letters
included in Cambridge edition. This new edition, specially intended to
mark the Keats centenary, takes account of the Woodhouse transcripts,
with other recent findings, and includes the two sonnets discovered in 1914.
Camping and Woodcraft. By Horace Kephart. Macmillan. 2
vols, in 1.
A reissue of an invaluable book now for the first time bound in one
compact volume.
The General Staff and Its Problems. By General Ludendorff.
Dutton. 2 vols.
"The history of the relations between the High Command and the Ger
man Imperial Government as revealed by official documents."
The Garden of Bright Waters. By Edward Powys Mathers.
Houghton Mifflin.
120 Asiatic love poems translated by the translator of "Coloured Stars."
Many are of recent or contemporary origin, but all are strongly in the
"Oriental" tradition of ardor and longing, and ail are rendered, for the
most part in free verse, with exquisite taste. As in the case of the earlier
volume, this collection brings together poems from all the corners of Asia,
the largest number being from the Arabicin which are written the seven
poems of John Duncan here included. There are also further poems by the
American-born Chinese valet whose work attracted attention in "Coloured
Stars," and whose name Mr. Mathers now gives as J. Wing.
A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists. Compiled
by Joseph McCabe. London: Watts.
A substantial quarto of nearly a thousand columns devoted to informa
tion concerning nearly 3,000 persons who since 1600 have dissented in some
respect or another from orthodox Christianity. The list, of course, includrs
a large proportion of the most eminent men and women who have thought
at all during the period. Without pretending to great research, Mr. Mc
Cabe has done a workmanlike job, not innocent here and there of notes of
exultation at the number of his examples ; his own intellectual position is
that of Bvowed and thoroughgoing rationalism.
A Short History of Russian Literature. Translated from the
Russian of Shakhnovski. Dutton.
A convenient primer, not very well adapted to the non-Russian reader.
The Early Life and Education of John Evelyn1620-161,1.
With a Commentary by H. Maynard Smith. Oxford.
The first instalment of a proposed new edition of Evelyn's "Diary," of
which this volume gives about twenty pages with a commentary which
for luxuriance of annotation can hardly be matched in English literature.
It contains much pertinent matter agreeably presented.
The Nation
April 6, 1921]
Drama
"Inheritors"
WHILE managers are returning from early spring trips
to London and Paris with the manuscripts of plays
ranging from Shaw to Bataille, our native drama is gathering
an ever more vigorous life. The process has few observers.
But all great things have had their origin in obscurity and
have often become stained and stunted by contact with the
world and its success. It need matter very little to Susan
Glaspell whether her play "Inheritors," which the Provincetown Players are producing, ever reaches Broadway. Nor
need it affect her greatly whether the criticism of the hour
approves it or not. If the history of literature, dramatic or
non-dramatic, teaches us anything, it is that Broadway and
its reviewers will some day be judged by their attitude to this
work.
"Inheritors" is not, in all likelihood, a great play, as it is
certainly not a perfect one. Neither was Hauptmann's "Before
Dawn." Like the latter it has too pointed an intention; unlike
the latter its first act drifts rather than culminates and needs
both tightening and abbreviation. But it is the first play of
the American theater in which a strong intellect and a ripe
artistic nature have grasped and set forth in human terms the
central tradition and most burning problem of our national
life quite justly and scrupulously, equally without acrimony or
compromise.
In 1879 two men occupied adjoining farms in Iowa: Silas
Morton, son of the earliest pioneers from Ohio who fought
Black Hawk and his red men for the land, and Felix Fejevary,
a Hungarian gentleman, who had left his country and sought
freedom in America after the abortive revolution of 1848.
The two men were lifelong friends, and Morton, who had- had
but two months of schooling, absorbed from his Hungarian
friend a profound sense of the liberation of culture and left
the hill which the white man had wrung by force from the
red to be the seat of a college that was to perpetuate the united
spirits of liberty and learning. In the second act we are taken
to the library of this college. The time is October, 1920.
Felix Fejevary, 2nd, now chairman of the board of trustees, is
in consultation with Senator Lewis of the finance committee of
the State legislature. Fejevary wants an appropriation and
recalls to the senator that the college has been one hundred
per cent American during the war and that the students, led
by his son, have even acted as strike-breakers in a recent labor
dispute. The son, Horace Fejevary, is introduced, a youth who
thinks Morton College is getting socially shabbytoo many for
eigners!and who is just now enraged at certain Hindu stu
dents who have pled the cause of the Indian revolutionists
and quoted Lincoln in defense of their position. Senator Lewis
thinks the lad a fine specimen. But, talking of appropriations,
there is a certain Professor Holden who does not think that
the Hindus ought to be deported, who has said that America
is the traditional asylum of revolutionaries, and who seems
to be a Bolshevik in other ways. Fejevary promises to take
care of Holden, and the ensuing scene between these two with
its searching revelation of spiritual processes, its bitter sup
pressions, its implication of an evil barter in values not made
with hands touches a point of both dramatic truth and force
which no other American playwright has yet rivaled. The
ironic and tragic catastrophe is brought about by another mem
ber of the third generation, Madeline Fejevary Morton. To
her mind, natural and girlish though it is, the monstrous inner
contradictions of the situation are not wholly dark. It is two
years after the armistice. Yet a boy chum of hers, a con
scientious objector, is still in a narrow and noisome cell; the
Hindu students who are to be sent to certain destruction are
but following the precepts of Lincoln's second inaugural. She
interferes in their behalf and proclaims in public, crudely but
515
with the passionate emphasis of youth, the principles for which

her two grandfathers founded Morton College. Her offense,
under the Espionage Act, is no laughing matter. People with
foreign names have got twenty years for less. Her uncle and
her aunt plead with her; Holden asks her to let herself ripen
for greater uses; her father's state pleads for itself. Miss
Glaspell has been careful to make her neither priggish nor
tempestuous. Some inner purity of soul alone prompts her to
resist. Suddenly an outcast, she goes forth to face her judges
and suffer her martyrdom.
No competent critic, whatever his attitude to the play's ten
dency, will be able to deny the power and brilliancy of Miss
Glaspell's characterization. The delineation of the three Fejevarysfather, son, and grandsonis masterly. Through the
figures of these men she has recorded the tragic disintegration
of American idealism. The second Felix remembers his father
and his inheritance. But he has faced the seeming facts so
long and compromised so much that he is drained dry of all
conviction and sincerity. His son is an empty young snob and
ruffian. With equal delicacy and penetration we are shown
the three Morton generationsthe slow, magnificent old pio
neer, his broken son, his granddaughter Madeline whose sane
yet fiery heart symbolizes the hope and the reliance of the
future. Alone and pathetic among them all stands Holden, the
academic wage slave who knows the truth but who has an
ailing wife; who yearns to speak but who has no money laid
by; a quiet man and a terrible judgment on the civilization
that has shaped him.
In the second and third acts Miss Glaspell's dialogue ex
presses with unfailing fitness her sensitive knowledge of her
characters. It has entire verisimilitude. But it has constant
ironic and symbolic suppressions and correspondences and over
tones. This power of creating human speech which shall be
at once concrete and significant, convincing in detail and spirit
ually cumulative in progression, is, of course, the essential gift
of the authentic dramatist. That gift Miss Glaspell always
possessed in a measure; she has now brought it to a rich and
effective maturity.
The acting of the Provincetown Players in "Inheritors" is
by far the best their little stage has ever seen. Miss Anne
Harding's impersonation of Madeline has freshness and sin
cerity, a cool charm and a beautiful lift of aspiration. Jasper
Deeter gives a hauntingly real picture of a difficult character
in the last act, and George Cram Cook, Andrew Fraser, and
James Light (as Holden) exhibit a new plasticity, earnestness,
and insight. Broadway blazes and buzzes. The memorable
dramatic occasion of the year is on MacDougal Street where
Susan Glaspell has added to the wealth of both her country
and her art
Ludwig Lewisohn
The Spring Book Supplement vill be published with the issue of The
Nation for April IS.
Herald Square
Jtnct
New York
Maintains the
largest
and
most complete
Book Depart
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York
City.
Copyright, ltl, R. B. Macy A Ce.. Int.
International
Is Egypt a Nation?
Relations
I.
THE documents to be printed in this and the two sub

sequent issues of the International Relations Section
will tell the whole story of Egypt's relations with Great
Britain. The report of the British Mission appointed to
"inquire into the causes of the late disorders in Egypt,
and to report on the existing situation in the country and
the form of the Constitution which, under the Protectorate,
will be best calculated to promote its peace and pros
perity, the progressive development of self-governing in
stitutions, and the protection of foreign interests," was
published as a Parliamentary White Paper on February
19. The Mission was headed by Viscount Milner, and
the report represents the most enlightened point of view
of British imperialism. It has not yet been accepted as
the policy of the Government. The formal answer of the
Egyptian Delegation has not been made, but Zaghlul Pasha
gave an interview on March 7, at Paris, in which he asserted
that the Egyptian nation could never accept a settlement
such as that suggested in the report. As a statement of
Egypt's demands he referred to a draft treaty submitted
by the Egyptian Delegation to Lord Milner, on July 19,
1920. The text of that treaty, never before published, will
appear in the International Relations Section following the
report of the Milner Mission.
The British Report on Egypt
I. Work of the Mission in Egypt
The dispatch of a Special Mission to Egypt had been under
the consideration of His Majesty's Government since April,
1919, when the prevailing unrest in that country had culminated
in manifestations of violence and disorder; and in May the
announcement was made that such a Mission, under the chair
manship of Lord Milner, would proceed thither in the autumn.
The openly avowed intention of the Egyptian Nationalists to
organize a boycott of the Mission received great encouragement
from the protest of Mohammed Said Pasha, the Prime Minister,
against its arrival before the peace with Turkey had been signed,
and was intensified after his resignation, which followed the
overruling of his protest. Mohammed Said Pasha was suc
ceeded as Prime Minister by Wahba Pasha, and the new Min
istry was in office during the whole of our stay in Egypt.
Wahba Pasha himself has since resigned, owing to ill-health,
and his place has been taken by Tewfik Nessim Pasha, one of
his colleagues, who, during our stay in Egypt, was Minister of
the Interior. The courage and patriotism of these two Prime
Ministers and of their colleagues in taking office at a time when
their country was passing through so grave a crisis, and when
their own lives were daily in danger, cannot be too highly com
mended. Tewfik Nessim Pasha's Ministry, which is still in
office, consists, with one exception, of the same men as Wahba
Pasha's and is of the same character. It is a Ministry of
affairs, composed of capable administrators, loyal to the Sultan
and working harmoniously with the British High Commissioner,
but of no distinct political color and indisposed to take any
decided line with regard to the burning question of the future
of Egypt.
The change of Ministry in Egypt, and other circumstances,
caused the departure of the Mission to be delayed until the end
of November. We arrived at Port Said on the morning of Sun
day, December 7, and in Cairo on the afternoon of the same
day. In view of the general attitude of hostility to the Mission,
which had been sedulously fostered, every precaution was taken
for our security, and we reached the hotel where quarters had
Section
been prepared for our reception without incident. The day

after our arrival we were all presented by Lord Allenby to His
Highness, the Sultan, a formal visit, which had been preceded
by a short audience of a more intimate kind which he had
accorded to Lord Milner. This was the first of a number of
conversations which, during our stay in Egypt, our chairman
and other members of the Mission had with His Highness, who
always treated us with great friendliness. In these conversa
tions he expressed himself freely about the political situation in
Egypt, the events of the last few years, and the difficulties of
his own position. But he carefully abstained from giving: any
advice with regard to the subject of our reference, viz., the
future constitution of Egypt. Beyond warning us to be slow in
forming conclusions and on our guard against busybodies, and
indicating certain men of position whom it would be well for
us to consultsuch as Rushdi Pasha, Adli Pasha, Mohammed
Said Pasha, and Mazlum Pasha, all of them ex-Ministershe
never attempted in any way to guide or influence our delibera
tions. His attitude, as far as the main object of the Mission
was concerned, was one of studied reserve.
This reserve was even more marked in the case of the Minis
ters, Wahba Pasha and his colleagues, to whom we were intro
duced at a party given by Lord Allenby at the Residency on
December 11, and with whom throughout our stay in Egypt
we maintained very cordial relations. They were at all times
ready to assist us in our inquiries, to put every sort of informa
tion at our disposal, and to bring us into touch with any officials
whom we desired to see. There was never any doubt of their
willingness to give us every opportunity of becoming acquainted
with the mechanism of government or the state of the country.
But they were particularly careful to leave us to form our own
conclusions. Though freely invited to do so, they were not dis
posed to make any suggestions of their own on constitutional, as
distinct from purely administrative questions, and never evinced
any desire to know in what direction the thoughts of the Mis
sion were tending with regard to the future government of
Egypt.
In strong contrast with the caution and reserve exhibited by
the native official world was the storm of protest and disappro
bation with which the arrival of the Mission was greeted by
the native public and the native press. We had not been many
days, or even hours, in Cairo before we had ample evidence of
active and organized antagonism. Telegrams poured in an
nouncing the intention of the senders to go on strike as a pro
test against our presence. Many of these were dispatched by
schoolboys and students, but others came from public bodies,
such as provincial councils, a few from government officials, and
a considerable number from corporations or communities of
greater or less importance. We received in all 1,131 such mes
sages during our stay, while only twenty-nine telegrams of wel
come were received, mostly from private persons acquainted
with individual members of the Mission. The Egyptian ver
nacular press, with rare exceptions, exhausted the repertory of
vituperation and innuendo, proclaiming that any recognition of
the Mission would be interpreted as an acceptance of the exist
ing situation and that any Egyptian who had dealings with its
members would be guilty of treason to his country. The major
ity of writers consistently maintained that Zaghlul Pasha at
Paris was the accredited representative of the Egyptian people,
and the Mission was recommended to address itself to him. A
series of short strikes were declared by students, lawyers, tramwaymen, cab drivers, and shopkeepers, and processions of strik
ers, reinforced by numbers of schoolboys and the rougher ele
ments of the city, paraded the streets with banners, denouncing
the Mission and Lord Milner in particular, and acclaiming
Zaghlul Pasha and the "Complete Independence of Egypt."
Nor were such demonstrations confined to the male population.
The Cairene ladies availed themselves of this occasion to aban
don their seclusion and to drive through the streets with similar
April 6, 1921]
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war cries. This procession, however unwonted, was orderly

enough, but the schoolboys and hooligans were frankly riotous,
and but for the admirable order maintained by the police with
occasional military support there would have been considerable
destruction of property and even bloodshed. As it was, beyond
the wrecking of a few tramcars little damage to property
actually resulted. And after the first week or two disorder in
Cairo gradually subsided, though throughout our stay occasional
attacks upon British soldiers and three successive attempts to
assassinate members of the Ministry showed that the criminal
element was still active, especially among a section of the
student class.
It seems needless to dwell at greater length upon the many
manifestations of hostility to the Mission and its object. Men
tion should, however, be made of two of them, which as indicative
of the strength of the popular current appeared to be of special
importance. In the second week after our arrival the heads of
the El Azhar University, the center of Mohammedan religious
teaching, addressed a manifesto to the High Commissioner,
which set forth the claims of Egypt to complete independence
and demanded the withdrawal of the British. There was some
reason to believe that the religious leaders who actually signed
this document were not particularly enamoured of the political
course on which they thus found themselves embarked, but
yielded to the pressure of the teachers and students, among
whom anti-British propaganda had for some time been increas
ingly active. This manifesto was followed a little later by a
similar declaration, signed by six Princes of the family of
Mohammed Ali, near relatives of the Sultan, which was con
tained in a letter to Lord Milner and simultaneously published
in the press. The action of the Princes may have been prompted
by various motives, but the dominant one was undoubtedly their
desire to gain popularity by identifying themselves with a move
ment which at the moment was sweeping like a tidal wave over
the country.
The immediate object of the promoters of this movement was
to prevent the members of the Mission from coming into friendly
touch with representative Egyptians and thus ascertaining for
themselves how much substance there was in the demand for
"complete independence" and in the ceaseless denunciations of
"the Protectorate." With this end in view the headquarters of
the Mission were constantly watched by unostentatious pickets.
The visit of any Egyptian of note was at once communicated to
the press and became the subject of minatory comment. More
over, the offender was liable to be subjected to a domiciliary
visit in his own house from a group of students, demanding an
explanation of his conduct, which generally ended in his making
a profuse profession of his Nationalist faith and affirming that
in his conversation with the Mission he had been careful in no
wise to depart from it. Only in one or two cases did the person
thus visited have the courage to tell the intruders to mind their
own business. Meantime, the movements of members of the
Mission were carefully followed, especially when any of us
went into the provinces. Emissaries would be immediately
dispatched from Cairo to dog our footsteps, to try to prevent
our getting into touch with the looal people, especially the
fellahin, and to arrange demonstrations calculated to impress
us with the solidarity of Egyptian opinion. The visit to Tanta
of one member of the Mission led to serious riots, which con
tinued for many days and were only quelled by the interven
tion of the military. These demonstrations naturally to some
extent hampered our work. But they certainly failed in their
main object, for it was impossible not to come to the conclusion
that, if the Egyptians were really so unanimous as we were
intended to think, we should have been left to find that out for
ourselves by going about the country without let or hindrance.
It must not be supposed that the boycott of the Mission, car
ried out as it mainly was by students and schoolboys, was
approved by educated Egyptians generally, or even by all those
who held advanced Nationalist views. Rudeness to strangers
appeared to them inconsistent with the courtesy and hospitality
517
upon which all Egyptians pride themselves. Moreover, there

were a large number of men who were really anxious to bring
their views before the Mission, but were deterred from doing
so by fear of the personal annoyance to which they might in
consequence be exposed. It was, therefore, suggested to us in
many quarters that, if only we would make it clear, that by
appearing before the Mission a man did not necessarily com
promise his position as a Nationalist, the barrier to free con
verse would be removed. We accordingly drew up the follow
ing declaration, which was published on December 29 in the
Official Journal and the press:
"The British Mission has been struck by the existence of a
widespread belief that the object of its coming is to deprive
Egypt of rights which it has hitherto possessed. There is no
foundation whatever for this belief. The Mission has been sent
out by the British Government, with the approval of Parlia
ment, to reconcile the aspirations of the Egyptian people with
the special interests which Great Britain has in Egypt and with
the maintenance of the legitimate rights of all foreign residents
in the country.
"We are convinced that with goodwill on both sides this object
is attainable, and it is the sincere desire of the Mission to see
the relations of Great Britain and Egypt established on a basis
of friendly accord which will put an end to friction and will
enable the Egyptian people to devote the whole of their energies
to the development of their country under self-governing insti
tutions.
"In pursuance of this task the Mission desires to hear all
views, whether of representative bodies or individuals who have
the welfare of their country at heart. All opinions may be
freely expressed. There is no wish on the part of the Mission
to restrict the area of discussion nor need any man fear to
compromise his convictions by appearing before it. He will be
no more compromised by expressing his opinions than the Mis
sion will be compromised by hearing them. Without a perfectly
frank discussion it is difficult to put an end to misunderstanding
and arrive at agreement."
This declaration certainly had some effect in mitigating hos
tility, but it did not get over the reluctance of Egyptians gen
erally to enter into formal relations with the Mission. We there
fore made up our minds that, as far as Egyptian opinion was
concerned, we must rely upon our individual opportunities of
social intercourse with men of various classes to elicit it. As
such opportunities constantly presented themselves, and as the
people whom we thus met and who certainly included most of
the leaders of Egyptian opinion expressed their views in private
with the greatest frankness and unreserve, we succeeded during
the three months of our stay in very thoroughly gauging the
main currents of thought and feeling in the Egyptian world.
While a good deal of time was spent in these conversations, we
were also busily engaged in studying the situation from an
entirely different angle. In addition to the carefully prepared
volumes of official documents drawn up for the instruction of
the Mission by the Foreign Office, a very considerable amount
of valuable evidence had been collected before our arrival by an
information committee instituted by the High Commission,
which had obtained the considered views, on many issues, of
prominent officials, of unofficial residents, and representative
bodies. The study and collation of these views, which had been
ably edited by the secretary of the committee, Captain B. A.
Hooper, occupied some time.
While the perusal of this mass of documents was of the great
est assistance to us, we sought to supplement the information
contained in them by getting into personal touch with as many
members of the British community, official and unofficial, as we
had time to see, as well as with the principal foreign residents,
who, of course, had no hesitation about coming into open and
constant contact with the Mission. The evidence and advice of
the chief British officials were freely available to us from the
first, and we are greatly indebted to them for the ready help
they gave us. With their aid we were enabled not only to gain
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a fairly comprehensive view of recent events, but to make an

exhaustive examination of the organization and personnel of
every department of the Egyptian Government. This work was
divided up between sub-committees, who reported to the Mis
sion, which also assembled in full strength to hear the views of
the highest British officials, as well as those of Sir William Brunyate, the late Acting Financial Adviser to the Egyptian Gov
ernment, who was present in Cairo during the latter part of our
stay. Meantime, the legal member of the Mission, Mr. (now Sir
Cecil) Hurst, while cooperating as far as possible in these activi
ties, devoted the greater part of his time to inquiring into the
judicial system and the modifications best adapted to bring it
into harmony with present requirements. Similarly Sir Owen
Thomas, besides serving on one of the sub-committees just
referred to, paid special attention to the study of agricultural
conditions, and visited a number of estates, public and private,
to make himself familiar with the methods of cultivation and
the life of the people. The whole Mission, with the exception
of one member who was otherwise engaged, passed the inside
of a week at Alexandria, where opportunity was afforded us of
coming into contact with the important foreign communities of
the great commercial center of Egypt. We were there able to
hear the views of the French, Italian, and Greek, as well as of
the British Chamber of Commerce. Many centers of activity in
Upper and Lower Egypt were also visited by individual mem
bers of the Mission, who communicated their impressions to
their colleagues, and in spite of the endeavors already described
to prevent our getting into direct contact with the local popula
tion, valuable experience was thus gained and placed on record.
Two of our number, General Sir John Maxwell and Sir Owen
Thomas, also paid a visit of several weeks to the Sudan, and
the impressions they brought back were a valuable supplement
to the information we had already obtained from the evidence
of British and native residents in that country, whom we had
been able to see in Cairo.
The manifold activities which we have briefly summarized
kept us all very busy during the months of January and Febru
ary. Towards the end of the latter month, as the time available
for our inquiries in Egypt was drawing to a close, since several
of our members were obliged to be back in England before the
end of March, we began to hold a number of meetings for the
purpose of collating the information obtained and comparing
the views which we had severally formed. It at once became
apparent that in view of the immense mass of material and the
number of points requiring thorough discussion it would be im
possible for us to draw up a report during the remainder of our
time in Egypt especially as interviews still occupied a good deal
of it. The preparation of our report had, therefore, necessarily
to be deferred until after our return to England. At the same
time these preliminary discussions revealed a remarkable una
nimity between us on certain cardinal points, and we even draw
up, before leaving Cairo, though only in outline and subject to
such modifications as further discussion might suggest, a series
of propositions in which we were all able provisionally to
agree.
These propositions ranged over the whole field of our inquiry
and have formed the groundwork of the present report. It may,
therefore, be convenient at this stage to review the results of
our investigations in Egypt and the conclusions to which they
had led us.
II. Provisional Conclusions Arrived at in Egypt
Causes of the Recent Disorders and Existing Unrest
1. Prior to the War
The disorders which broke out in March, 1919, were brought
to a climax by specific events connected with the war, but they
can by no means be attributed solely to recent or contemporary
conditions and the ground had been prepared through a long
antecedent period.
It appears to be frequently assumed in current talk and writ
[Vol. 112, No. 2909
ing in this country that Egypt is a part of the British Empire.

This is not and never has been the case.
The "special position" which Great Britain occupies in Egypt
dates from her intervention in 1882 to restore order during the
Arabi rebellionan intervention in which the other Powers,
though invited, declined to participate. This threw upon her
responsibilities which she could not decline, and which could only
be discharged by the occupation of the country until at least
there was a reasonable certainty that order would be main
tained and the lives and property of foreign residents rendered
secure. But at that time it was the declared intention of the
British Government to evacuate the country so soon as these
objects were accomplished, and in 1887 Sir Henry Drummond
Wolff was dispatched to Constantinople to prepare the way for
evacuation. He drew up a convention with the Sultan whereby
Great Britain agreed to withdraw her troops from Egypt at the
end of three years provided that there was then no new danger,
external or internal, to require their retention, and provided
further that she should have the right of reoccupying the coun
try if any such danger arose. It was only at the last moment
that the Sultan under foreign pressure withheld his signature
and the negotiations fell through.
But though Great Britain remained in Egypt, she did nothing
during the next twenty-seven years either to legalize her own
position or to disturb the theory that Egypt was an autonomous
nationality under the suzerainty of the Sultan of Turkey.
Egypt was in theory governed by the Khedive, the Council of
Egyptian Ministers, the Egyptian Legislative Council and As
sembly; and the British representative was in name merely
"Agent and Consul-General," the exponent, like the represen
tatives of other Powers, of the views and wishes of his Govern
ment to the Government of Egypt. Though, in virtue of the
Army of Occupation and of the numerous duties and responsi
bilities which circumstances gradually imposed on him, he came
to be the real arbiter of the country, he was always studiously
careful to observe this theory, and the observance of it was
regarded by Egyptians as an implied pledge that the occupying
Power did not intend to impair the national status of their
country.
It was also so regarded by foreign Powers, and when the
Anglo-French Agreement of 1904 was concluded a declaration
was signed in London to the following effect:
"His Britannic Majesty's Government declare that they have
no intention of altering the political status of Egypt. The
Government of the French Republic, for their part, declare that
they will not obstruct the action of Great Britain in that coun
try, by asking that a limit of time be fixed for the British
occupation or in any other manner."
This understanding would no doubt have served for all prac
tical purposes, if European peace had been maintained. But
with the outbreak of war and the entry of Turkey into the war
on the side of the enemy, questions of extreme difficulty arose.
Egyptians were nominally subjects of the Sultan of Turkey,
owing allegiance to him and not to the British Crown. This
was obviously an intolerable situation. But the mere abolition
of Turkish suzerainty by an act of war would have deprived
Egypt of any definite status and left her in the position of a
former Turkish dependency in the hands of Great Britain. This
difficulty might, of course, have been summarily disposed of by
the annexation of Egypt to the British Empire, but the British
Government deliberately chose a less drastic course which would
afford security to Egypt, while leaving the principle of an Egyp
tian national entity unimpaired. This was to place Egypt under
the protection of Great Britain. A proclamation was accord
ingly issued in the Official Journal on December 18, 1914:
"His Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State for Foreign Af
fairs gives notice that in view of the state of war arising out of
the action of Turkey, Egypt is placed under the protection of His
Majesty, and will henceforth constitute a British Protectorate.
"The suzerainty of Turkey over Egypt is thus terminated,
and His Majesty's Government will adopt all measures neces
April 6, 1921]
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sary for the defense of Egypt and protect its inhabitants and
interests."
On the following day a further proclamation was issued de
posing Abbas Hilmi, the then Khedive, on the ground that he
had adhered to the King's enemies, and announcing that the suc
cession had been offered to and accepted by His Highness Prince
Hussein Kamel, with the title of Sultan of Egypt.
It has been constantly asserted by Egyptian Nationalists that
they understood the Protectorate to be merely a war measure,
and the defense of Egypt promised under it in the second clause
of the proclamation to be limited to defense in the war. The
wording of the proclamation seems to us to offer no ground for
this interpretation, but the Egyptians were certainly given to
understand that efforts would be made at the end of the war
to satisfy their national aspirations, and great pains were taken
to assure them that their national status was not changed for
the worse by the Protectorate. For example, in the telegram
which he addressed to Sultan Hussein on his accession to the
Sultanate, His Majesty the King used these words:
"On the occasion when your Highness enters upon your high
office, I desire to convey to your Highness the expression of my
most sincere friendship and the assurance of my unfailing
support in safeguarding the integrity of Egypt, and in secur
ing her future well-being and prosperity.
"Your Highness has been called upon to undertake the re
sponsibilities of your high office at a grave crisis in the national
life of Egypt, and I feel convinced that you will be able, with
the cooperation of your Ministers and the Protectorate of Great
Britain, successfully to overcome all the influences which are
seeking to destroy the independence of Egypt, and the wealth,
liberty, and happiness of its people."
It should be added that Egyptian Nationalists are able to
point to a long series of declarations by British statesmen dis
owning the idea of annexing or even permanently occupying the
country, and affirming, in the words of Sir Eldon Gorst, that
"the fundamental idea" of the British Government "has been to
prepare the Egyptians for self-government, while helping them
in the meantime to enjoy the benefit of good government."
Englishmen are aware of the circumstances which have till now
prevented the fulfilment of these pledges, but they are naturally
treasured by Egyptians and too easily made the ground of accu
sations of bad faith. It is necessary to bear them in mind if
we would understand the resentment of Egyptians at the com
mon assumption that Egypt is a British possession or that the
Protectorate has naturally made it so.
The situation in Egypt has therefore always remained an
abnormal one since the British occupation in 1882. In the
initial stages, problems which appeared almost insuperable had
been surmounted with remarkable success under an exception
ally able administrator, and as time went on, and the machine
appeared superficially to be running smoothly, public opinion in
Great Britain ceased to concern itself with the indefinite char
acter of the situation. But in reality a settlement was becom
ing progressively more urgent the more widely the influence of
our presence in Egypt and the introduction of western methods
made themselves felt. With the removal of that fear of oppres
sion which in old days had made Egyptians acquiescent and sub
missive, new impulses and ambitions were inevitably aroused.
The Egyptians of 1920, whether townsmen or peasants, are dif
ferent people from those of 1910, and very different indeed from
the Egyptians of 1890. We have never honestly faced the Egyp
tian problem, and our neglect to do so is in a measure respon
sible for the present situation.
The regime inaugurated by the late Lord Cromer to redeem a
bankrupt administration was never more than a provisional one,
because for many years there was no reason to believe that the
occupation, which we had in 1887 actually agreed to terminate,
would be other than of brief duration. But provisional and ex
temporized expedients gradually hardened into established insti
tutions and the stronger element in a combination of administra
tive forces tended to become the dominant one, to acquire powers
519
and responsibilities not originally contemplated, and to restrict

the Egyptian element in the public service to a secondary posi
tion. The policy pursued in the early days of the occupation
had been to engage a restricted number of carefully selected
British officials to advise and assist, especially in the finance and
irrigation services. A judicial and educational adviser were, in
due course, added, and later again an adviser to the interior,
with a body of inspectors for the provinces. So long as their
numbers were strictly limited and only men of high capacity and
experience were appointed, not only was the cooperation of Brit
ish officials tolerated, but they were themselves regarded with
esteem and affection.
As the resources at the disposal of Egypt increased the public
services were greatly expanded, and with this expansion the
obligation arose concurrently to add to the number of foreign
assistants and experts. Thus, with the prolongation of the occu
pation, the number of British officials in Egypt steadily in
creased, and the principle that the aim of the administration
should be to train and equip Egyptians to manage their own
affairs fell into the background. In spite of the fact that Egyp
tian Ministers have of recent years taken a greater part and
a more direct interest in their departments than in the early
days of the occupation, when many of them were content with
little more than an honorary position, the work of under-secretaries and heads of departments, for the most part non-Egyp
tian, has become increasingly independent of the Council of
Ministers. A growing resentment at the number of posts mo
nopolized by the British was noticed for a long period antecedent
to the war. Egyptian officials of long experience and consid
erable competence felt that they were definitely excluded from
rising to the highest positions in view of the system conse
crated by prescription that a post once held by a non-Egyptian
was, on its becoming vacant, automatically filled by a nonEgyptian. Particular resentment was occasioned in Egypt at the
time of the arrival of the Mission by a recent increase in the
numbers of the British engaged for the public service. This in
crease, if it was greatly exaggerated by ill-informed rumor, was
nevertheless appreciable, and affected also a few very subordi
nate offices hitherto filled by natives of the country. It may here
be mentioned that the number of British officials has risen from
a few hundred in the earlier years of the occupation to upwards
of sixteen hundred at the present day, with scales of pay dif
ferent from those enjoyed by the Egyptians. These higher
scales, if amply justified by special circumstances, were readily
represented as constituting a grievance.
Another feature of Egyptian life has undoubtedly contributed
to the unrest. As British officials have increased in number
they have more and more lived apart from the Egyptian com
munity, and their chief residential quarter on the Island of
Ghezireh has come to be a self-contained community, furnished,
like an Indian cantonment, with a complete equipment for social
intercourse, sport, and physical exercise. This has added to
the amenities of life for the official class, but it has withdrawn
them from society with Egyptians and tended to create a British
enclave from which Egyptians are excluded. We are aware of
the difficulties on both sides which stand in the way of free and
unembarrassed relations between men and women of different
races and customs, but when the necessary allowance has been
made it must, we think, be said that the increasing segregation
of the British community, which has been a feature of recent
years, has been a cause of estrangement between British and
Egyptians and made the fact of an alien occupation more ob
trusive than it need have been.
We have noticed with pleasure the cordial and intimate rela
tions which many old residents in Egypt and not a few senior
officials and their wives have established with their Egyptian
neighbors, and we have seen much evidence of the value and
influence of these friendships in the recent times of stress and
difficulty. We are convinced that it would greatly help if more
efforts were made to cultivate these neighborly relations. The
forms and conventions of conduct should be studied and care
520
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fully respected by British residents in Egypt and visitors to

Egypt. It should be realized, especially by the latter, that alto
gether disproportionate harm may be done by offenses against
good taste which, though trivial in themselves, cause comment
and scandal. It should, in general, be the aim of the British
residents and visitors to break down the barriers that exist
rather than to create new ones, to enter as far as possible into
the life of the Egyptian people, to learn enough of their lan
guage to make social contact possible and agreeable, and to
avoid the minor causes of offense which in the aggregate become
mischievous.
On the other hand, a criticism not infrequently heard that the
quality of the British officials has deteriorated does not seem
to us to be justified. There are many officials of high capacity
in Egypt today, as there were in former times men of excep
tional and others of only moderate caliber. But the critical
sense of the Egyptians has been greatly developed by progress
and contact with other countries, and they have become more
exacting than the older generation with regard to standards of
efficiency.
Again, since the retirement in 1907 of Lord Cromer, there
have been no less than five British Agents or High Commis
sioners, and Egypt has felt herself to some extent a field for
successive experiments. The result of these repeated changes,
due to the accident of circumstances, tended to increase the in
dependence of the permanent British officials, who were more
concerned with departmental efficiency than with questions of
policy, while to Egyptian observers they conveyed an impression
of uncertainty and instability.
Another contributory cause of the general discontent was the
manifest insuccess of educational policy resulting in the produc
tion of an unnecessarily large and ever-increasing number of
candidates for official posts, provided with examination certifi
cates but destitute of any real educational culture. It was
necessary in the initial stage to train a number of young men
to such a standard of efficiency as would enable them to under
take clerical duties in state departments which had hitherto
been largely performed by non-Egyptians, and to prepare pupils
for the higher colleges of medicine, law, and engineering. But
here again there seems, until quite recently, to have been little
attempt to revise a system adopted under exceptional circum
stances or to realize that changing conditions required new
methods. Education, for which there is a real and crying de
mand among the people, remains atrophied. The mass of the
population is not only still illiterate, but without social or moral
training. The only real education in the higher sense available
in the country itself is provided by religious or benevolent insti
tutions, controlled for the most part by the French or Ameri
cans, or by the admirable Victoria College, which owes its insti
tution to the British residents at Alexandria. In spite of these
criticisms, however, it must be admitted that the general level of
instruction has greatly advanced since the early years of the
occupation, and that the number of those capable of taking an
intelligent interest in public affairs is very much larger today.
Nationalist propaganda has been at work for many years in
Egypt. The evolution of a sane and moderate Nationalist spirit
might have been regarded with sympathy and interest, and in
deed the late Lord Cromer had hopes that it might be turned to
good account. But unfortunate political rivalries among the
Western Powers led it from the first to assume an anti-British
color. The Nationalists were alternately encouraged and op
posed by the ex-Khedive for his own personal aims. Their
ranks were swelled by the members of a thoroughly dissatisfied
civil service, who regarded the presence of the British as a bar
to promotion, and who were further discouraged by a system
of selection which made it possible for the influential to secure
the preferment of relations and dependents. The increasing
number of the students who look only to state employment as a
reward for the often real sacrifices made in order to qualify
for it, and who regard their prospects of obtaining any appoint
ment as diminished by the competition of the foreigner, made
[Vol.112, No. 2909
them a ready instrument for such propaganda in the provinces.

Finally, there is the latent but ever-present impatience of the
Moslem with Christian rule. That a Mohammedan should oc
cupy a position of political subordination to a Christian is
opposed to the essential spirit of Islam, and the sentiment which
this spirit has engendered survives long after strong religious
feeling has been greatly attenuated, or even become altogether
extinct. Its existence no doubt exercised an influence in creating
a prejudice which the religious element would make the most
of against the name of Protectorate, interpreted as implying
the permanent subjection of a Mohammedan ruler and state to a
Christian sovereign. There is in the East a patriotism of re
ligion which is an even more fundamental sentiment than the
patriotism of home and tradition.
2. During the War
Such were the influences which had long been active when in
1914 Turkey, the seat of the Caliphate, entered the war as the
enemy of the occupying Power, and German agents freely prom
ised the liberation of Egypt from British control after the final
victory which they confidently predicted. In these circum
stances, and in view of the spirit of hostility toward the occupy
ing Power which had been gathering volume over a number of
years, the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief in Egypt was no
doubt well advised in the Proclamation announcing the state of
war with Turkey to make it clear that Great Britain took upon
herself "the sole burden of the present war without calling on
the Egyptian people for aid therein." It is, however, only just
to record that, whatever may have been the hopes or anticipa
tions raised by the war in a certain section of the Egyptians,
the obligations and disabilities which it entailed upon the people
were borne with patience and good-will; that the services ren
dered by the Egyptian Labor Corps were of inestimable value
and indispensable to the campaign in Palestine; and that the
Sultan's Government supported the British authorities in a
spirit of the most cordial cooperation, evidenced among other
things by their writing off the suspense account under which
Egypt would have been entitled to reclaim advances of three
millions sterling.
So far we have only dealt with the causes of unrest in Cairo
and the larger centers during the period preceding the riots
which broke out in March, 1919. It remains to consider the
reasons which affected the fellahin and made them susceptible
to nationalist agitation and propaganda.
Unrest among the educated classes in Egypt was, as has al
ready been pointed out, manifest long before the crisis of 1919.
But that it should have spread to the fellahin, and should have
led to outbreaks of savage violence among a class which has
derived such immense 'benefits from the British occupation
needs explaining.
In the first place, it may be laid down that the agitation
among the fellahin was of a far more partial character than
has been generally supposed, and that disorders were confined
to the neighborhood of large centers and to districts along the
main lines of communication. In remoter villages, less readily
accessible to propagandists and agitators, little disposition was
shown by the small farmers to take part in any such movement.
Where disorders occurred, it was generally the railways which
became the object of aggression, and there is reason to believe
that the attacks upon them were carried out in pursuance of
a preexisting plan for a German-Turkish attack on the Canal,
supported by a simultaneous rising in Egypt. This would ac
count for certain indications of concerted action revealed in the
disturbances of March, 1919.
There is some evidence to show that discontent was stimu
lated by the controlled price of cotton, which denied the culti
vator the advantage of competing in foreign markets, while the
rent of his land continued to advance. But the more obvious
factors arising out of the war to alienate his goodwill were:
(a) The recruiting for the Egyptian Labor and Camel Trans
port Corps; (6) the requisition of domestic animals; (c) the
April 6, 1921]
The Nation
requisition of cereals; (d) the collections for the Red Cross

Fund. In each case it was not so much the measures themselves
that were resented as the manner in which they were carried
out.
As regards (a), the recruiting for the Egyptian Labor and
Camel Transport Corps, it seems evident that once enrolled the
men were, as a rule, satisfied with the conditions, and that the
wages paid were of great benefit to the poorer classes of the
population. The hospital accommodation provided for them does
not seem to have been altogether satisfactory, and there were
evidently among their officers many ignorant of their language
and without experience in handling them. But their readiness
to reenlist again and again, and the fact that those actually
serving gave no trouble during the events of March, 1919, shows
that grievances against the service were not serious. So long
as the Labor Corps was locally raised from volunteers arrange
ments worked satisfactorily. There was some discontent at the
prolongation of service beyond the contractual period after re
cruiting was taken over by a military organization. But it was
after the voluntary system had ceased to supply a sufficient num
ber of recruits, and when administrative pressure was applied
to obtain them, that abuses began. In view of the announce
ment made at the outbreak of war with Turkey that Egyptians
would not be required to take part in it, the voluntary system
was maintained in name, but measures of compulsion were
applied by the Omdehs, the unpaid administrative officers in the
country districts, to whom recruiting was intrusted without su
pervision by British officials, most of whom had been recalled
for duties elsewhere. There is no doubt that unscrupulous
Omdehs took advantage of the position, sending their enemies
to serve, while letting off their friends, and accepting bribes for
exemptions and substitutions. In some cases measures resem
bling those of the press gang were adopted, and British pres
sure was asserted as the excuse for them. As to the extent of
the abuses there seems to be some conflict of opinion. But they
were frequent enough to cause much discontent in certain re
gions, and gave the political agitator his opportunity.
As regards (6), the requisition of domestic animals, though
the fellah was often hardly hit by the removal of his means of
transport, prices which were good at the time seem to have been
paid when the animals were taken. On the other hand the
prices at which they could be bought back at the end of the war
were often considerably higher. While the fellahin were nat
urally most unwilling to part with their animals, there does not
appear to have been much real ground for grievance on account
of these requisitions, inevitable in a state of war. But they
naturally would not tend to increase good-will toward those
held responsible for them.
A more fertile source of discontent was (c), the requisition
of cereals. Owing to the demand for the army prices advanced,
and market rates were considerably higher than requisition
rates. Districts were assessed to furnish a given quantity, and
the collection was left to local officials, who derived large profits
from the transaction. Not only did Omdehs collect larger
amounts than they were required to furnish at requisition rates
and sell the balance at the higher market rate, but individuals
who possessed no wheat had to buy their quota at market rates
and hand it over at the lower requisition rate. The process of
verification and repayment was slow, and it appears to be sub
stantiated from the evidence submitted that the provincial offi
cials retained the sums received to make payments in their own
hands for long periods, and that Omdehs and Sheikhs who were
intrusted with sums in bulk for distribution in many cases held
back a portion of these moneys. The local officials were mainly
responsible for the abuses which occurred, but they were attrib
uted to the British who, under the exceptional conditions pre
vailing, were unable to control them.
As regards (d) , the collections for the Red Cross Fund, these
were organized locally by Egyptian Mamurs and Omdehs, and
while intended to be voluntary, were, in practice, frequently
made compulsory by officials seeking to acquire merit by the
621
amounts which their districts contributed. There was a current

belief in the country that only a portion of the total amount
collected reached its real destination. It is open to question
whether it was prudent or opportune, under the special con
ditions prevailing in Egypt, where the opposition of Cross and
Crescent was inevitably emphasized, to do more than notify the
opening of a fund for the aid of the wounded, to which many
wealthy Egyptians and resident foreigners would no doubt have
responded. To intrust the collection to local Egyptian officials
was inevitably to open the door to abuses, entailing additional
pressure on the poorer classes, with whom many other circum
stances made the war unpopular. It should be added that the
Joint Committee of the British Red Cross and the Order of
St. John, after the close of the war, assigned upwards of a
100,000 for the relief of victims of the war in the Egyptian
Labor Corps and their families.
In addition to the specific grievances, to which attention has
been drawn, there was in Egypt also an unprecedented and pro
gressive rise in prices, especially the necessaries of life, such
as corn, clothing, and fuel, which weighed heavily on the poorer
classes, whose wages were quite inadequate to meet the en
hanced cost of living, while they saw a limited number of their
countrymen and the unpopular foreigner making large fortunes.
A family of foura man, his wife, and two small children
could not at the beginning of 1919 obtain a sufficiency of food
except at a cost which considerably exceeded the ordinary rate
of wages.
These various factors had contributed by the end of 1918 to
create a condition of discontent and unrest among the fellahin
and some loss of confidence in the benefits of British administra
tion. There was thus a favorable field in which the agitator
could work. The fellah had seen no British officials for a long
period, and none had intervened to protect him from inequitable
demands. Even before the war the once familiar figure of the
British inspector riding through the fields and stopping to listen
to the small farmer's claims and grievances had almost disap
peared, and motor-cars conveyed the hurried official from one
administrative center to another. His disappearance made it
easier to believe reports which were spread of the imminent
departure of the British, when the land would be divided among
the fellahin, with an unrestricted water supply and no taxation.
There is also reason to believe, though there are no grounds for
suspecting the leaders of the Nationalist Party of their inspira
tion, that highly-colored and wholly imaginary accounts of out
rages committed on native women by British soldiers and mur
derous assaults on the villages were circulated by unprincipled
agitators, and that a spirit of vindictive resentment was thus
aroused, which culminated in the brutal murders of British sol
diers at Deirut.
The death of Sultan Hussein in 1917 had removed from the
scene a ruler of character and ability, who thoroughly under
stood his own countrymen. He had accepted the onerous posi
tion of the first Sultan of Egypt as a not too welcome duty, and
had loyally and courageously cooperated in the difficult task of
administering a Moslem state in occupation by a Christian
Power at war with the sovereign who represented the Caliphate
of Islam. He had to a great extent lived down the unpopularity
which his substitution for his nephew had at first aroused, and
enjoyed the general regard of all classes. His successor, who
had been educated in Italy, found himself from the first in a
much weaker position as regards his own countrymen, on whom
he had as yet little hold. With the best will in the world, there
fore, he could have little influence in stemming the rising tide of
anti-British sentiment which was gathering strength.
3. After the War
In the preceding pages we have endeavored to describe the
internal situation in Egypt up to the concluding phases of the
war. It will now be more readily understood why the principles
enunciated by President Wilson and approved by the Allies pro
duced an immediate and decisive effect on Egyptian opinion.
522
The Nation
The acceptance of the idea of self-determination appeared to

give international' sanction to sentiments which had long been
maturing among the educated classes.
Those in Egypt who had anticipated, and would at one time
even have welcomed, a German and Turkish victory, now found
a favorable opportunity for shifting their ground. This section
now claimed that by contributing morally and materially to the
victory of the Allies Egypt had herself been instrumental in
throwing off all that was left of the Turkish yoke.
At the same time the voice of moderate opinion in Egypt also
began to urge that the time had come to assert a claim to selfgovernment consistent with the repeated declarations of British
statesmen regarding the provisional character of our interven
tion. It was genuinely felt that the attitude of the country as
a whole during the war, the cooperation of the Sultan and his
Ministers, and the conspicuous sacrifices which the Egyptian
people had been called upon to make, entitled them to the par
ticular consideration of Great Britain. The idea of definitely
regulating the relations between Great Britain and Egypt had,
indeed, already been mooted by Rushdi Pasha, the Prime Minis
ter, at the end of 1917.
This movement received great encouragement from the publi
cation, in the beginning of November, 1918, of the Anglo-French
declaration regarding Syria and Mesopotamia, which announced
that Great Britain and France contemplated the complete and
definite enfranchisement of the peoples liberated from Turkish
oppression and the institution among them of national govern
ments deriving their authority from the initiative and free
choice of the people themselves. The High Commissioner (Sir
R. Wingate) did not fail to point out that the policy indicated
in this declaration would have its repercussion in Egypt. More
over, the Egyptians had recently witnessed the establishment of
an independent kingdom in Arabia, which they had always re
garded as far behind their own half-occidentalized country in
civilization and development.
At the very moment when these ideas were being widely
discussed, public opinion was greatly stirred by the revelation
of a confidential memorandum which was interpreted as denying
to Egypt the privileges of self-government advocated for other
less advanced communities. A special commission to consider
constitutional reform had been nominated at the beginning of
1918, and Sir Wm. Brunyate, the Acting Financial Adviser, was
requested by this commission to draw up a note to serve as a
basis for their discussions. He was invited, in particular, to
examine the principle of giving the foreign colonies some share
in the legislation of the country, which might render more ac
ceptable to the Powers the surrender of the practical veto exer
cized by them under the Capitulations over a considerable field
of legislation. Sir Wm. Brunyate's note gave great offense to
the Prime Minister, to whom it was presented in the middle of
November, 1918, and though intended only as a basis for confi
dential discussion, its contents became generally known. A
storm of protest was aroused by a project which was inter
preted as assigning only consultative functions to an Egyptian
Legislative Assembly, while bestowing all legislative power on a
Senate in which the officially nominated members and a group
of elected foreigners would constitute the majority.
Simultaneously with the commission above referred to, an
other commission had been sitting for many months to consider
the judicial reforms which would become necessary in the event
of the abolition of the Capitulations. Although this commission
had issued no report, a general impression prevailed that it con
templated the supersession of the Mixed Tribunals by new
courts in which the English language and British legal pro
cedure would predominatea measure which would entail dis
abilities on the native Bar and paralyze the foreign advocates
who had hitherto used the French language. This assumption
tended to confirm the hostility of the legal profession to any
extended affirmation of British control.
On November 13, 1918, Zaghlul Pasha, with two other lead
ers of the advanced Nationalist group, paid a visit to the High
[Vol. 112, No. 2909
Commissioner and expressed their desire to go to London in

order to put forward a program of "complete autonomy" for
Egypt. Simultaneously, the Prime Minister, Rushdi Pasha,
proposed that he should himself, together with Adli Pasha
Yeghen, the Minister of Education, proceed to London to dis
cuss the affairs of Egypt, a plan which he stated had the full
approval of the Sultan. The contention of these Ministers was
that the Peace Congress would give official consecration to the
Protectorate, and that therefore its nature could not be left
undefined. Under the Turkish suzerainty Egypt had had cer
tain rights, and they desired to know what their rights would
be as against Great Britain under the Protectorate.
Sir R. Wingate reported these proposals to the Foreign Office,
and was informed in reply that "no useful purpose would be
served by allowing Nationalist leaders to come to London," and
that the visit of the two Ministers would not be "opportune" at
that moment. The Foreign Secretary explained that, owing to
the fact that he and other Ministers would be absent from Lon
don in connection with the peace negotiations, they would "not
be able to devote sufficient time and attention to problems of
Egyptian internal reform." In these circumstances the Minis
ters were invited to "defer their visit." Rushdi Pasha gave the
High Commissioner to understand that he regarded the refusal
of His Majesty's Government to give him an immediate hearing
as involving an interpretation of the meaning of the Protec
torate to which he could not agree and tendered his resignation.
There were no doubt obvious difficulties in the way of discussing
such questions with the Egyptian Ministers at a moment of
high political pressure, when the Peace Conference was about to
open, but it would appear that in spite of the insistence with
which the High Commissioner appealed for their reception, the
real urgency of dealing with the Egyptian problem at that criti
cal moment had not been realized.
Every effort was made to induce Rushdi Pasha to withdraw
his resignation, and a prospective date for the eventual visit of
the Ministers was indicated. But the position of the National
ists had now become so strong in Egypt that the Ministers were
only willing to go if Zaghlul Pasha and his friends were allowed
to do the same. As it was not considered expedient to permit
this, they adhered to their resignation, and the High Commis
sioner was instructed to come to England himself to report on
the situation.
The result of these events was that a number of the Mod
erate Party joined the advanced Nationalists, who now advo
cated a more far-reaching policy, while their agents initiated
a violent anti-British campaign throughout the country, where,
owing to the calls of the flag, only a relatively small number
of British officials remained.
While t"ne proposed visit of Egyptian Ministers to London
was still under consideration in the beginning of 1919, a docu
ment was addressed to the foreign representatives and residents
in Egypt announcing the constitution of a "Delegation" of twelve
members, under the chairmanship of Zaghlul Pasha, which pro
posed to lay the legitimate aspirations of Egypt before other
countries. The majority of the Delegation were identical with
those included in a Nationalist committee of fourteen formed
at the end of the preceding year.
On March 3 the Delegation above referred to presented to the
Sultan a petition which was generally interpreted as an attempt
to intimidate His Highness and deter him from appointing a
new Government. This proceeding was felt to be a challenge
which could not be declined, and Sir Milne Cheetham, acting for
the High Commissioner, decided with the approval of the Brit
ish Government to deport Zaghlul Pasha and three of his most
active adherents to Malta. This gave rise to renewed agita
tion and protest, beginning with anti-British demonstrations
on the part of students in Cairo which quickly necessitated mili
tary intervention. Similar outbreaks were soon reported from
the provinces. On March 12 disturbances broke out at Tanta
and were quelled by the military, not, however, without blood
shed. By March 14 and 15 the trouble had spread to most of the
April 6, 1921]
The Nation
Delta provinces, where attempts to interrupt communications

had become general. Looting, pillaging, attacks on British troops,
and murders of British soldiers and civilians were reported from
many quarters. On the 16th the railway and telegraphic com
munication between Cairo and the Delta, as well as with Upper
Egypt, was broken. By the 18th the provinces of Behera,
Gharbia, Menufia, and Dakhalia were in a state of open revolt
Upper Egypt and the foreigners living there were completely
cut off, while the fanaticism of the insurgents culminated the
same day in the murder at Deirut of two British officers and
five other ranks and of an English Inspector of Government
Prisons in the Assiut-Minia train. By March 26, however, the
situation, from a purely military point of view, had become sta
bilized. The main railway and telegraphic communications had
been reestablished and the necessary dispositions of troops had
been made for their adequate protection. Mobile columns had
been moved in various directions to control the more violent
areas, to arrest and bring to justice those responsible for the
excesses, and to reestablish civil control. The outlying centers
of disturbance in the south had been relieved and the first and
most dangerous phase of the disorders was over.
Thus, within a week from the deportation of Zaghlul Pasha
and his associates, a movement anti-British and even antiEuropean had assumed grave proportions. It was a national
movement backed by the sympathy of all classes and creeds
among the Egyptian population, including the Copts, and on the
part of its more fanatical adherents it took the form of the sys
tematic destruction of property and communications, with an
increasing disregard for human life. Responsible though the
Delegation undoubtedly was for the organization of the original
demonstrations out of which the movement grew, its more re
sponsible members soon became alarmed at the development
of a situation which rapidly passed out of their control and fell
into the hands of irresponsible extremists, supported by a cer
tain number of undesirable foreign elements.
The Commander-in-Chief in Egypt, Field-Marshal Lord
Allenby, had left to join the Peace Conference at Paris on
March 12. He was, however, back again in Cairo by the 25th,
having been in the meantime appointed Special High Commis
sioner during the absence of Sir R. Wingate, the High Com
missioner, in England. His instructions were to "restore law
and order" and "to administer in all matters as may be required
by the necessity of maintaining the King's Protectorate on a
secure and equitable basis." The military measures which had
been taken had rendered the situation outwardly calm. But
there was little diminution of anti-British sentiment, which was
now chiefly manifested against the military element, whose
behavior during the repression of disorder was speciously mis
represented. Lawyers and students continued to strike, and
many officials absented themselves from their duties.
The conciliatory disposition adopted by the Special High Com
missioner in addressing a group of notables who visited him by
invitation did not prevent the outbreak on April 2 of a gen
eral strike, which had, however, practically subsided by the
6th. Meanwhile, in pursuance of his policy of conciliation, Lord
Allenby, with the approval of His Majesty's Government, com
pletely removed the embargo on the departure of Egyptians
desiring to travel, a measure which carried with it the release
from Malta of Zaghlul Pasha and his three associates. Thus,
within a month of their deportation, the policy then adopted
was reversed, and the leaders of the movement became free
either to return to Egypt or to proceed elsewhere to renew their
campaign of agitation.
Such, in brief, was the course of events in the first four
months of the year 1919. It is obvious, after the event, that
Egyptian Ministers should have been encouraged to come to
London when they proposed to do so, and Sir Reginald Wingate,
whose advice on this subject was fully justified by the sequel,
would have done well, in our opinion, to urge his views with
even greater insistency. After this initial mistake events moved
more rapidly in Egypt than the Administration appear to have
523
realized. The consequences of deporting the Nationalist lead

ers were not rightly estimated, and the revoking of that meas
ure, after serious disturbances had taken place, necessarily gave
the impression that British policy was wavering and liable to
quick changes under the pressure of agitation. In the next
stage, punitive measures for the murder of British officers and
other outrages committed during the rebellion became a neces
sity, and though carried out on the whole with moderation, they
inevitably prolonged the period of exasperation. The Adminis
tration endeavored to conciliate Egyptian sentiment by trans
ferring a large number of the trials, after the most urgent
cases had been dealt with by martial law, to the ordinary tri
bunals, but by this time Nationalist opinion had hardened, and
the almost invariable result was that evidence ceased to be forth
coming and that the accused were acquitted. In the meantime,
Zaghlul Pasha and his colleagues had, on their release from
Malta, proceeded to Paris, in the hope of obtaining a hearing
for Egypt's claim to independence from the Peace Con
ference.
On failing to achieve this object, they devoted all their energies
to obtaining foreign support for their cause, and an emissary
was dispatched to America to canvass opinion in the United
States. At the same time, their adherents in Egypt worked with
the greatest industry to complete their organization, collecting
large sums of money and extending their propaganda to all
parts of the country. Their activities in this latter sphere were
largely concentrated upon the exploitation of the existing con
ditions of industrial unrest, resulting in a succession of more or
less serious strikes. By this time it had been announced that
the British Government intended to send the Special Mission to
Egypt, but, having made up their minds that its object would
be the extinction of Egyptian nationality, the agitators concen
trated their attention on limiting the sphere of its activities
by an organized boycott.
The Nationalist Movement and Egyptian Aspirations
Enough has been said to explain the rapid growth of the
Nationalist movement. It is more difficult to give, within a reas
onable compass, a correct and at the same time intelligible
analysis of its real nature and objects.
It has been said that "every Egyptian worth his salt is at
heart a Nationalist." This is only true of the educated and
semi-educated classes, who constitute less than 10 per cent of
the fourteen million inhabitants of Egypt. It would be mean
ingless as applied to the 92 per cent of illiterates and especially
to the fellahin, who are two-thirds of the whole people. The
turbulent crowds of the great towns may indeed be easily worked
up to excitement by political catchwords, which they vociferate
without understanding. But the fellahin, as a body, are nor
mally very indifferent to politics. They are a primitive peas
antry, living on the land and by the land, to which they are
passionately devoted, and from which, though working with rude
instruments and with little aid from agricultural science, they
raise by their matchless industry and perfect knowledge of the
soil those wonderful crops which are the bed-rock of Egyptian
prosperity. Their whole interest in life centers in these crops
and in the regular supply of Nile water, without which their
fields would be barren. But while their outlook remains limited
their independence has developed, and they are far more tena
cious of their rights than in the old days of despotism.
The fellahin, when left alone, are not unfriendly to the Brit
ish. No doubt they do not love any foreigner, and as fervent
Moslems they start with a certain antipathy to any Christian.
But in the case of the British these initial prejudices have to
a large extent been overcome by experience of the integrity and
kindliness of the general run of British officials and by the mani
fest improvement which their presence has wrought in the con
dition of rural Egypt. It is true that a new generation, which
has never known the evils of the old regime, is less grateful to
us than were their fathers, by whom these evils were vividly
remembered. But the fellahin, though much less helpless and
The Nation
524
[Vol. 112, No.2909
submissive than in former times, have still cause to dread the

rapacity of landowners and the bullying and extortion of a good
number of native officials, and against these dangers they feel
that British influence affords them a certain protection. Those
unfortunate incidents of the war period, to which we have al
ready alluded, shook for a time their confidence in our justice

and good will, and were predisposing causes of the savage out
break of anti-British feeling in the spring of 1919. But these
Practically immediate
relief of pain follows
a dose of
excesses were abnormal and short-lived. Except where they are
directly stirred up by agitation from the towns, the fellahin

appear to be more reasonably well disposed to those British
people whom they know and who know how to handle them.
We were greatly struck by the evidence of a number of our
countrymen, official and unofficial, living in close contact with
the Egyptian peasantry, who affirmed that the bitter feeling of
the last year or two has now subsided, and that Englishmen who
conducted themselves properly were as welcome as ever in the
It is equally efficacious for

HEADACHE
TooTHACHE
NEURALGIA
countryside.
But it is idle to hope that the comparatively satisfactory atti

tude of the peasantry will long be maintained if our relations
with the middle and upper classes of their countrymen continue
as strained as at present. Nationalism has, for the time being
at any rate, established complete dominance over all that is vocal
and articulate in Egypt. From the Princes of the Sultan's fam
ily down to the children of the primary schools, the men of
property, the professional men, the religious teachers, the
literati, the journalists, the students and school-boys have all,
more or less willingly, been swept into the Nationalist movement.
Most serious of all perhaps, it now permeates the official class
and the upper ranks of the army. Discipline and official de
*and in addition to being

absolutely safe to take
-it
has
no
undesirable
after effects.
In aluminum boxes
2 sizes. Atall druggists
General Drug Co.

94 N. Moore Street, New York
corum may prevent their sympathies finding open expression

the attitude of Egyptian officials towards the Mission was always
courteous and correctbut in their hearts they are mostly
strong Nationalists, and the influence radiating from them is

all in the same direction.
It is inconceivable that the sentiment
of their social superiors of every class, of all the men who make
opinion, should not in the long run profoundly affect the mass
of the people.
No doubt nationalism as a political creed has little attrac
tion for these unlettered millions, though they can easily be
taught to repeat its catchwords. But then it is not so much
by abstract political arguments that the extremist agitator
seeks to win their support, as by the constant vilification
of everything British and by subtly attributing every local
disaster and every personal grievance to the malignity or in

competence of British officials.
This campaign of mendacious
denigration is carried on by many agencies, by preachers in the

mosques, by country-bred students returning for the holidays,
by all but a few organs of the Arabic press.
Fifth Avgnuc-Fiftyfifth Street
-Ngw-york
It is true that the
fellah cannot as a rule read himself, but he can always be read

to, and if everything that is spoken or written to influence him
Concentration
points the same way, the falsehoods so sedulously instilled can
not fail ultimately to poison his mind.
We make allowance for the fact that at the time of our visit
anti-British clamor was exceptionally intense. It was no doubt
artificially stimulated by the more extreme section in order to
of the most
distinguished
of America
impress us. And no man of any experience in such matters

would mistake the extravagances of a political agitation at
fever pitch for the deliberate expression of the mind of a people.

But it is a significant fact that, while many Egyptians undoubt
edly disapproved of the excesses of this agitation, very few who

were not compelled to do so by their official position made any
effort to stem them. Men of standing, whatever their personal
views, were much too nervous of appearing to be out of sym
pathy with national aspirations to exercise any moderating or
restraining influence. No one would have dared to say that he
was in favor of the Protectorate, or that he was not in favor
of complete independence. To all outward appearance, inde
pendent opinion was solidly Nationalist. And in our judgment

it is likely to remain so.
WEDDINGS, RECEPTIONS,
DANCES, PRIVATE DINNERS
Are Now Being Booked for the
The Nation
FOUNDED 1865
Vol. CXI I

Contents
525
EDITORIALS:
The First Real Move for Peace
628
How Open is the "Open Shop"?
629
The Orchestra to the Front
530
North Dakota Goes to the People
530
John Burroughs
681
MEXICO1921. III. RESTORING THE LAND TO THE PEOPLE.
By Paul Hanna
6S2
"LET'S HAVE DONE WITH WIGGLE AND WOBBLE." By Donald
Bryant
634
CORRESPONDENCE
538
Is Egypt a Nation? II
540
The British Coal Crisis
548
SPRING BOOK SUPPLEMENT
THE PAUPER WITCH OF GRAFTON. By Robert Frost
649
THE PROGRESS OF POETRY: GERMANY. By Ludwig Lewisohn... 550
MIRAGE. By George Sterling
562
BOOKS :
The Cambridge History of American Literature. By Samuel C. Chew 662
In Russia. By Dorothy Brewster
554
Disraeli: Last Phase. By B
656
Job Today. By Kemper Fullerton
656
An Honest German. By W. K. Stewart
557
America Once Over. By Irita Van Doren
658
What Every Kreshman Should Know. By Vernon Louis Parrington 558
Popular Science. By Preserved Smith
560
Japan and the World. By J. Ingram Bryan
560
Poetic Space and Time. By Mark Van Doren
562
Bergson and Balfour. By S
564
DRAMA:
John Drinkwater. By Ludwig Lewisohn
564
ART:
Archipenko. By Pierre Loving
666
MUSIC :
The "Third" Italy. By Henrietta Straus
668
NOTABLE SPRING BOOKS
571
Associate Editors
LEWIS S. GANNETT
FREDA KIRCHWEY
ARTHUR WARNER
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
ERNEST H. GRUENING
CARL VAN DOREN
Managing Editor
Literary Editor
Mexico : to Canada, $5.50. and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00.
THE NATION. 20 Vesey Street. New York City. Cable Address : NATION, New
BOTH the Allies and the "Little Entente" took the right
attitude toward the attempted coup d'etat of the exKaiser Karl of Austria. The world is through with Kaisers;
it should have no more of them. The least capable of suc
cessfully returning from Elba was obviously Karl. He is
fortunate that his retreat to Switzerland was left open and
that he is not behind bars. So weak, so futile a man has
none of the stuff of which Napoleons are made, and we
cannot believe that the people of Hungary or Austria, for
all they may have been tempted, could forget that this man
was too weak and feeble to end their torture in 1917 when
he might so easily have done so. As for the Allies, their
stand marks a great advance over the days of 1919 when
they established another Hapsburg in Budapest until the
honest scorn and fierce denunciation of a brave American,
Herbert Hoover, drove him out. Soon after Hoover had
spoken out about the Archduke Josef regency, so the
story runs, what seemed to be a mangled dispatch in code
from Budapest reached an American official in Paris. For
a while no one could decipher it. Then a bright American
spelled it out. It read : "Archie is on the skid!" Thanks to
Hoover, the Archduke was. But for Karl it is not even
necessary to do more than threaten the skid.
No. 2910
AT the close of the Near East Conference at London in

February Greece uttered a loud note of defiance to
both Turkey and the Allies. The treaty of Sevres had
been modified in the interests of peace in the Near East;
but Greece would have none of compromise. Premier
Kalogeropoulos said to the Allied ministers: "Greece
stands or falls by the Treaty of Sevres. She has absolute
confidence in her ability to make it respected by Turkey."
And now, a month and a half later, it begins to look as if
Greece were determined to fall. Her offensive against the
Turks, unsupported by Allied arms or gold, appears to have
failedas all offensives should failand her armies are
in retreat from the city of Eski-Shehr. The Turks are
nationalistic, militaristic, aggressively determined to con
trol Asia Minor. But the Greeks add to these character
istics imperialistic designs against the other states of the
Near East which can only be carried through by means of
endless war. It is to be hoped that their present setback
will be enough to discourage any more militaristic adventurings in Asia Minor and the Balkans. The Greek people
have long enough allowed themselves to be bled white for
the sake of the ambitions now of the Allies and now of
their own rulers. It is time they called a halt.
IN the last analysis the responsibility for the latest British
coal strike rests with Lloyd George's Government. It
harks back to its broken promise to be guided by and to act
promptly upon the report of the Sankey Commission ap
pointed to investigate and to outline a policy. But that
report is now well in the background. The fact today is
that the Government decided to end its control of the in
dustry on March 31 instead of August 31 and to this the
workers objected. They demand the retention of national
wage agreements and of the existing scales which the own
ers seek to decrease. The operators say that they will not
treat nationally with the miners and that they cannot afford
to pay present wages, to which labor responds that in that
case the Government must pay the difference, precisely as
the Italian Government has been paying the Italian bakers
the difference between the price they have received, and the
actual cost of making bread. Unquestionably the British
coal industry has suffered some severe setbacks because of
decreased demand and increased costs ; the Versailles Treaty
has injured it because, owing to the German coal Belgium
and France are receiving, they no longer have to buy English
coalthe former is even reselling German coal in Holland.
AT bottom the struggle is one between private and public
ownership. The settlements heretofore have been
temporary and political, while the Lloyd George Govern
ment has drifted with no national policy to urge. The
present struggle may be the final one for Government own
ership; the mood of the men is plainly more serious than
heretofore, as is shown by the flooding of some mines, an
act which forfeits them much public confidence and sym
pathy at the very outset of the struggle, just as the demand
that the Government meet any deficit due to the retention
of the existing wage will be opposed by many who favor the
[Vol. 112, No. 2910
labor cause. The situation is profoundly grave from every

point of viewthe difficulties of the owners, as Mr. Harold
J. Laski points out in the Survey, are not to be minimized.
At the same time they are determined to return to the con
ditions of 1914 while the men will not stop at anything short
of nationalization of the mines. The owners are, however,
in the better position, with excellent coal reserves, while the
miners used up their strike funds last year. The Govern
ment will, of course, side with the capitalists.
THE British Embassy is sure that the report of the
American Commission on Ireland is biased and mis
leading, and the charge is echoed by some of our wiseacres
of the daily press. The New York Evening Post feels, for
instance, that the language of the report is not judicial and
is too bitter. Very well. But what have they to say to this
passage on Ireland from a loyal British weekly, the London
Nation?
There may have been a time when Ministers believed honestly
that they were trying to put down a murder gang. At this
moment they know perfectly well that the obstacle to their
power is not the wickedness of Irishmen, but the virtues of the
Irish people. By blunders, by blindness, by crimes, they have
brought the two peoples into this grim and terrible tragedy
the conflict, not between order and crime, but between power
and justice. The offense alleged against Ireland is that of en
couraging and inciting the armed servants of the Crown to take
the law into their own hands. The Prime Minister cannot deny
this amazing charge: he has to sit silent when it is pressed in
the House of Commons. Today, Ireland is full of stories of the
personal behavior of these men, of murders and tortures of
which they have been guilty. We have an illustration of their
code of morality in the conduct of thirteen cadets who watched
their comrades bully and insult and finally kill an old priest of
seventy-three. These brutalities lasted a quarter of an hour,
during which time these thirteen honorable and courageous men
chosen, as Sir Hamar Greenwood tells us, for their bravery
in battlewatched the consummation of this cowardly murder.
Such is their code and such is the code of their masters.
If it be objected that the London Nation is a chronic
"kicker," let us turn to the Tory London Times. It allows
Mr. Arthur Vincent to say in its columns that "under the
mask of enforcing law and order every canon of civilization
has been broken." That is precisely the finding of the Amer
ican Commission to which Sir Auckland objects and which
the Evening Post criticizes. Meanwhile it is gratifying to
note that the Tribune's correspondent cables that the result
of the printing of the American report in Ireland and
of President Harding's indorsement of Irish relief has been
"to force the issue and drive the Government to a more
satisfactory position." This alone justifies the American
report.
THE announcement of the increase to 9 per cent of the
American Telephone and Telegraph Company's divi
dend the day after the courts had defeated New York
City's final effort to stay the 30 per cent increase in the
New York Telephone Company's rates on April 1, is atro
cious insolence. Are corresponding announcements to
be expected from the other electric light, gas, and traction
companies, as soon as the increases which they are levying
or about to levy are legally copper-fastened? As was
pointed out in an article in last week's Nation, entitled
Keeping the Cost of Living High, the American Tele
phone and Telegraph Company owns the New York Com
pany and charges the latter a fee of 4V per cent of its gross
revenue for the use of instruments. The American Tele
phone Company has just experienced, according to its
1920 report, the most prosperous year in its history. Only
indisputably demonstrated need could possibly justify any
increase in rates in the metropolis, and a rise of 30 per
cent in the cost of telephone service at a time when reduc
tion in the cost of living is the universal need and demand
seems nothing short of extortion. That the deciding vote in
this award was cast by a former counsel for the New York
Telephone Company, who by his position was disqualified
on previous occasions from participating in the activities of
the Public Utilities Commission, makes the matter only more
atrocious. These utility rate increases now bid fair to be
the controlling issue in the next municipal and gubernatorial
elections in New York City and State.
WHILE believing that any family that wants to shoo
away the stork has a right to do so, we do not feel
that birth control should be imposed upon tenants by land
lords, nor that children should be regarded in the real
estate world as an opportunity for profiteering. If children
are to be abolished, let us proceed to it legally, by Consti
tutional amendment, or humanely, by the lethal chamber.
In the meanwhile, we approve of the bill in the Legislature
of New York, which would make it a misdemeanor punish
able by fine for the owner of a dwelling to refuse tenancy
to any person because of children. We hope also that Boston
will stop the practice that has developed there of boosting
the rent upon arrival of a baby. Leases have been drawn
with a clause reading: "This apartment is leased for a
family of .... persons, and for each additional person in
the family the rent shall automatically increase $10 per
month." A man to whom twins were recently vouchsafed
was at once billed $20 more rent a month. Give the stork
a chance; give the children a chance; give the parents who
have had the wisdom or folly to welcome them into a world
of harsh butcher bills, inflated shoe prices, and miscel
laneous costs plusyes, give them a chance too.
THE Nevada law providing for a lethal gas chamber for
the execution of persons condemned to death is a curi
ous illustration of the development of public conscience in
regard to capital punishment. To hang a man by the neck
until he is dead or to shoot him (the methods now in vogue
in Nevada) has apparently become distasteful to the public
sense; so they attempt to humanize the institution by
asphyxiating the victim. His suffering, mental as well as
physical, may indeed be lessened by the new method; but
with all that may be said for it, a human life will none the
less have been taken. So it is with methods of warfare.
Nations cry out against (though they use them) barbarous
ways of waging war. But when all is said and done, with
or without torture, poison gas, or dum-dum bullets, the pur
pose of all methods of warfare is the killing of human be
ings; and their slaughter is an anachronism in this sup
posed era of civilization. The substitution of lethal gas for
other methods of execution is encouraging because it indi
cates a tendency, in spite of the brutalizing influence of the
years of war, toward the mitigation of undue suffering. But
let us hope that the consciences of the people of Nevada will
not be made too comfortable by their new law, and that
there as elsewhere enlightenment will proceed until the kill
ing that the law calls execution is abolished.
April 13, 1921]
The Nation
COLONEL HARVEY'S appointment as Ambassador to

the Court of St. James's is the fruition of more than
eight years' quest of the post. It was an open secret that
this was his ambition during his ardent support of Woodrow Wilson. It now takes on the nature of a personal
reward from Mr. Harding for campaign services rendered.
Colonel Harvey was one of the small group that picked Mr.
Harding for the Presidential nomination in a room at the
Blackstone Hotel after the Chicago Convention was dead
locked, and, behind the scenes, he was of much comfort to
the candidate during the canvassone of Mr. Harding's
most important speeches on international affairs is attrib
uted to Colonel Harvey in toto. It is a far cry from Lowell,
Motley, Bayard, Hay, and Choate to this appointment, but it
is chiefly interesting as another revelation of the Harding
mindand taste. Great Britain will hardly thank the Pres
ident. Colonel Harvey is often indiscreet, has been a sharp
and bitter critic of England, and his absolutely anti-League
stand will give no encouragement to the British advocates
of saving what is left of League and treaty. But in this
day of complete mediocrity and often unfitness in high office
the choice of Colonel Harvey is far less shocking than it
would have been eight years ago. Just when the relations
between the two countries show growing strain, it is a genu
ine misfortune that our representative in London should
not be of the type of a Lawrence Lowell or a Jacob Gould
Schurman.
ONE of the chief points at issue between the Allies and
Germany is whether the latter is taxing its people to
the same extent as the victors in the war are assessing
themselves. Experts disagree here; those of the Allies at
Brussels expressly declared that the German direct taxes
were so high as to constitute a danger to the further de
velopment of German industry and trade. In America we
feel ourselves put upon because an income of $5,000 is taxed
four per cent. The same income in Germany pays 46Vfe .per
cent and 56% per cent if it is unearned income; it even pays
63 per cent if it is the unearned income of a corporation.
A British official White Paper declares Germany is now
taxed 43 per cent of her total income. Beyond question,
however, Germany's indirect taxes are far lower than those
of the Alliesa point the French constantly and effectively
dwell upon. To this the Germans reply that they are in
process of being increased but that it is doubtful, in view
of existing economic conditions, whether raising them will
not decrease consumption so as to make the net gain small.
This is plainly not a convincing reply. That the Germans
are willing to increase them shows that the limit of in
direct taxes has not yet been reached ; particularly because
they have been freed from crushing army and navy bur
dens must they make every effort to go deeper into their
pockets. They are on stronger ground when they point out
to the Allies that Germany's power to pay cannot be
reckoned, as Lloyd George seeks to, by her wealth and ability
before the war; she has lost her merchant fleet, her colonies,
her foreign property, and 12 per cent of her before-the-war
population, besides having enormous domestic debts to
carry.
THE State of New York is steadily plunging backward
into the dark ages of war-time hysteria. The Assem
bly has just passed a billa small tribute, it appears, to the
527
late activities of Senator Clayton R. Luskrequiring public

school teachers to take an oath of allegiance to the flag and
to the Federal and State Constitutions. It was passed over
Democratic opposition, and the presumption is that it will
succeed in the Senate and be signed by the Governor. Ap
parently the Republicans, who seek to preserve our liber
ties by keeping them in mothballs, have an idea that the
New York City schools are particularly affected by sedition.
But ever since the Superintendent of Schools, Mr. Ettinger,
preferred charges against Miss Sarah Hyams, accusing her
of holding political views which unfit her for performing
her duties as a teacher of cooking, the city has been per
fectly safe. Neither the food nor the morals of our chil
dren shall be tainted with the virus of anti-Americanism
or bolshevism, and liberty shall be kept strictly in its place.
CHARLES MCCARTHY of Wisconsin, who died in Ari
zona almost unnoticed by the Eastern press the other
day, was the father of the Legislative Reference Depart
ment at Madison. This comprises a library of facts relat
ing to legislative procedure, a gold mine of information on
every topic of pending interest, and the machinery for the
drafting of bills by experts in law-making. To it the Wis
consin legislator, whether new or old, takes his way as soon
as he has a bill to introduce, with the result that as nearly
scientific measures as may be are drawn up for him on any
topic he may select. From Wisconsin the idea spread from
State into State; California and Indiana early summoned
assistants of Dr. McCarthy to instal similar organizations;
here in New York Columbia University instituted a legisla
tive reference bureau of its own ; and everywhere the results
have been notable. Dr. McCarthy was a most unusual
public servant; able, aggressive, devoted, he kept the work
of his bureau at -a high pitch with all the life and vigor of a
keen private enterprise. He was one of those quiet work
ers, unable to advertise themselves, who perform public
service of a value of which few have any idea, least of all
the general public.
SINCE the middle of the last century the problem of
adult education has interested fewer persons in the
United States than it did before, but here and there signs
now appear of a return of interest. One of the latest comes
from Bryn Mawr, where the authorities of the college have
announced a summer session for manual workers in charge
of a joint committee of directors, alumnae, teachers, and
various representatives of women in industry. The session
will last eight weeks, the attendance will be limited to
seventy students, and the necessary fees will be met by
subscriptions and scholarships. The curriculum as tenta
tively planned includes required work in labor movements
and problems, spoken English, composition, and parliamen
tary law, with elective courses in more advanced subjects
of considerable variety. It seems to us an admirable scheme
that workingwomen should thus have the opportunity to use
the Bryn Mawr facilities during the long vacation, and that
Bryn Mawr should have the opportunity to come in more
intimate contact with labor than it has in the past. One
feature which calls for particular commendation is the
resolution of the joint administrative committee worded as
follows: "Moved that the school shall not be committed to
any dogma or theory, but shall conduct its teaching in a
broad spirit of impartial inquiry, with absolute freedom
of discussion and academic freedom of teaching."
[Vol. 112, No. 2910
The Nation
528
The First
Move for
NOTHING could be in better taste and spirit than Sec

retary Hughes's note to the Germans in reply to that
of the Foreign Minister, Dr. Simons. It generously recog
nizes the sincerity of the German desire to make repara
tions and to reopen negotiations with the Allies and it is
even capable of the interpretation that our Government
may itself open the way for a resumption of the negotia
tions so needlessly broken off in London. Naturally Mr.
Hughes reaffirms the Allied belief in Germany's respon
sibility for the war, but the important thing is that the
Secretary is dealing with our former foes in frank friend
liness and with apparent faith in their word. That is both
generous and manly and almost as if in response to the
recent moving appeal of the head of the Reichstag, Dr.
Fehrenbach, in the New York Times, for fair and sympa
thetic treatment of the new German democracy.
Even more important is the fact that the Harding Ad
ministration is at last beginning to move in foreign affairs.
At this writing there is unanimity in the press reports as
to what the attitude of this Government is to be when Con
gress assembles. We are to conclude promptly a separate
peace with Germany; we are not to enter the existing
League of Nations, or ratify in any way the monstrous
peace of Versailles, but we are to insist upon our rights
in the settlement. Most striking of all, it is said we are
to move in the direction of the Knox proposals for a new
and better world ordernot at once, of course, but, perhaps,
in due time. If this proves to be Mr. Harding's course
he and the country are to be congratulated upon it. It
means that there will be no split in the Republican Party on
foreign issues; that the Knox-Borah wing has won. It
means also that M. Viviani's mission to the United States
has failed to affect the President and his advisers. The
sole concession to that brilliant orator seems to be the pro
posalwhich we trust will be promptly droppedto make
it the "declared policy" of this Government that it will
regard any situation threatening the freedom and peace of
Europe "as a menace to its own peace and freedom." While
such a declaration cannot be binding upon future Admin
istrations unless they wish it to be, it is emphatically a
position which this Government should not take. If it were
to be submitted to the American people today it would be
overwhelmingly voted down.
If this proposed declaration stands, it will, moreover, be
made the excuse of navalists and militarists for genera
tions to come to keep in being the nucleus of an expedition
ary force and the necessary transports. We sincerely hope
that there will be a sober second thought upon this doc
trine so entirely contrary to the whole spirit of our Ameri
can foreign policy. On its face the proposed declaration
is as vague as it is illogical. How great is to be the men
ace upon which we shall interfere in the wars of Europe?
And how are we to judge just when any future struggle,
if one arises, is so clearly a menace to our peace and free
dom as to cause us to consult with "our chief co-belligerents
for the defense of civilization"? This is plainly fustian,
but dangerous fustian. We do not believe that it will
satisfy the Foch school of French militarists. If it is to
be adopted at all it should equally apply to any situation
in which France or Great Britain might be the aggressors.
It is within the memory of living men that Great Britain
Real
Peace
with France as her ally warred against Russiaalso a war

widely heralded as the war to end warand, incredible as
it now seems, one of the avowed purposes was to safeguard
Germany's integrity from Russian attack. Seventy-five
years are as nothing in the history of Europe. Who shall
say what new and strange alignments may not take place
over there within ten years?
But, waiving that, it is profoundly encouraging to have it
stated with apparent authority that we are to get away
from the hideous lie we are livingthe pretended state of
war with Germanyand that we are to end the debate as to
whether we shall or shall not enter the League of Nations
and ratify the Versailles iniquity in any degree. Against
both of these proposals The Nation has fought from the day
the Treaty was published. It naturally rejoices that the
long fight actually seems won and that Mr. Harding is con
vinced that the American people voted against treaty and
League last fall. But it trusts that the President and Mr.
Hughes will not stop there. The proposed steps will vitally
clear the political and international atmosphere; beyond
that we shall still need, however, a sailing chart. These are
not destructive measures now announced; wreckage must
be cleared away before new construction can arise on the
foundations. But once this is done the new structure must
be built. For that Senator Knox has pointed the way. If
he is allowed to frame the future policy we believe it will be
substantially in accord with the program laid down by The
Nation last fall for building a new world order upon the
Hague Court, upon the idea of the outlawing of war, and the
deciding of all questions between nations by judicial pro
cesses with no distinction as to justiciable and non-justiciable.
This, as we have said, is for the immediate future. For
today it is reason for gratitude that some steps forward are
to be taken and taken promptly. We sincerely trust that the
opportunity will be given to Mr. Harding to mediate be
tween France and England and Germany. The friendly
offices of the United States should always be at the disposal
of the Allies. Mr. Hughes is plainly convinced that the
Germans mean to do the right thing. Dr. Simons has re
peatedly stated that every decent-minded German wants to
repair the destruction in France. He rightly complains that
apparently for political reasons the French have not even
discussed the repeated German offers of "labor, technical
advice, and material assistance," although for two years past
the cleaning up of the devastated districts and their recon
struction have languished. Here is a chance for Mr. Hughes
to inquire as to the attitude of the French Government.
He stated, too, in his memorandum that the American Gov
ernment stands with the Allies in insisting upon Germany's
making reparation "to the limit of her ability to pay." That
is correct and just. But what is the limit of her ability?
That is the whole issue today, and here again Mr. Hughes
has his opportunity. Liberal opponents of the League and
the treaty have never wished the United States to withdraw
from all cooperation with Europe. They have protested
against any acceptance of the League because, as Mr. Lan
sing put it, that meant merely an "alliance of the five great
military powers" in a league "to be the prey of greed and
intrigue." We must help Europe in every possible way
financially, morally, and economicallybut with our hands
and our policies unfettered by League or treaty.
April 13, 1921]
The Nation
How Open Is the "Open Shop"?

FOR about a year there has been an insistent campaign
in this country for the "open" as opposed to what is
called the "closed" shop. Theoretically, the open shop is
one which employs both union and non-union men without
prejudice to either, while the closed shop is one which ac
cepts only union workers. Conceived in this way, there is
some argument, and a strong superficial appeal, in favor of
the open shop. By the very terms "open" and "closed,"
one's sympathies are enlisted on the side of the former. As
a matter of experience, it is doubtful if many open shops of
this kind are in existence. In trades which are divided
between union and non-union workers, the usual method
is not to mix them in the same shop, but to establish the
various shops as union or non-union and apportion the
workers accordingly. In any event, it would only confuse
the issue to discuss here the merits of the theoretical open
shop, because even if it be possible, it is not what the pres
ent campaign is aiming at. Behind fine phrases and clever
propaganda, behind a patriotic appeal and such catchwords
as "American plan," "no discrimination," "square deal for
all," and "freedom of contract," the moving spirits of the
present campaign have only thinly veiled their hostility to
organized labor and their intention to break it so far as its
capacity to accomplish anything useful for the wage worker
is concerned. The great majority of the advocates of the
"American plan" do not intend to establish an open shop,
but one definitely closed to union workers. The minority
which is still proposing to tolerate union workers is never
theless planning to treat with them only as individuals, not
collectively ; which means, of course, that the value of union
ization ceases to exist.
Indicative of the purpose of the "open shop" campaign is
a pamphlet just published by the Bureau of Industrial Re
search of New York, in which Savel Zimand examines what
has been written and said by the proponents of the policy
and convicts them out of their own mouths. At the Amer
ican Idea Convention in Chicago last Januarythe first
national gathering in support of the "open shop"one of
the delegates said:
It is unpopular to say you don't believe in the open shop, but
I confess I do not quite know what the open shop means. To my
mind it is a good deal of a question of non-union shop or union
ized shop, and I hate to be a hypocrite under a resolution or
anything else, or to vote or declare in favor of open shop when
my own policy is not to carry that out, but to hit the head of
the radical in my shop whenever he puts it up.
To this A. M. Glossbrenner of the Indiana Manufacturers'
Association replied:
I happen to be running a shop which I think is similar to
yours, Mr. Gillette, in the manufacturing business, in that we
will not employ an individual in any part of the plant that does
not sign an individual contract in which it is expressed that he
is not and will not become a member of a labor organization
while in our employ. I am in favor of this resolution because
the interpretation I give to it is that the open shop means to me
that I can employ whomever I may please, as an individual em
ployer.
One of the pieces of literature put out by the Associated
Employers of Indianapolis is a "Notice to Our Employees,"
intended for posting in shops, which concludes as follows:
"We will at all times, in the future as in the past, be glad
to confer with any or all employees individually, on all
529
matters not affecting shop policy or management; but we

will not entertain shop committees."
The Minnesota Banker unmasks the whole movement
with ingratiating frankness:
The closed shop is zealously fought for by the radical wing of
labor organization. The open shop can be the most readily
brought about by the elimination of this element as a power in
organized labor. . . . The open shop argument must be
addressed, therefore, to the better sense and judgment of the
conservative in organized labor. . . . Where the radical ele
ment is too strongly intrenched, there is, of course, but one
final thing to do, and that is to beat them by force. They must
be locked out and licked until the conservatives see the light.
. . . This harsher method, however, should not be employed
until all other plans have failed.
The intention of the "open shoppers," as they are dubbed
in the labor world, to treat with employees only as individuals
and thus destroy the value of unionization, is plain wher
ever their purposes have been defined beyond vague gener
alizations. This is recognized by impartial religious bodies
like the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in Amer
ica and the National Catholic Welfare Council. The Social
Action Department of the latter recently said that the real
purpose of the open shop drive "is to destroy all effective
labor unions, and then subject the working people to the
complete domination of the employers." Objections to this
statement were answered as follows:
Several representatives of employer groups have protested
to the Social Action Department against its declaration that the
"open shop" is intended to destroy the unions. Upon examina
tion every one of them admitted that the "open shop" which
they are advocating would not permit dealing with the unions.
The spokesman for the National Association of Manufacturers
was informed that if that body would make a public statement
to the effect that the "open shop" is consistent with proportional
representation by the union employees in a system of collective
bargaining, even confined to the individual shop, the Social
Action Department would withdraw its statement against the
"open shop." This gentleman declared that the National Asso
ciation of Manufacturers would make no such statement, and
admitted that this organization really desired to cripple the
unions. Up to the present no authorized representative of an
"open shop" organization has denied that collective bargaining
with the union is inconsistent with the "open shop."
The Catholic Welfare Council further reminded its critics :
Testifying before the Lockwood housing committee in New
York, December 16, 1920, Mr. Eugene G. Grace, president of
the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, declared that he maintained
an "open shop," but that he would not deal with unions, even
though they embraced 95 per cent of his employees. Not only
did he maintain that kind of "open shop" in his own corpora
tion, but in conjunction with other makers of steel he refused
to sell his product to builders who would not adopt the same
policy. A few days later, before the same committee, Mr.
Cheney, the secretary of the Erectors' Association, admitted
that this organization, together with the National Fabricators'
Association, had formally adopted the "open shop" policy, and
that with these organizations this policy meant not only no
dealings with the union, but no employment of union members.
He confessed that "an open shop is a shop in which the foremen
are expected to see to it that there are no union men."
In brief, the "open shop" drive is for the destruction of
unionism through elimination of its most vital weapon, col
lective bargaining. Of this the War Labor Board said in
the principles that it laid down for the government of in
dustry : "The right of workers to organize in unions and to
bargain collectively through chosen representatives is recog
530
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nized and affirmed. This right shall not be denied, abridged,

or interfered with by the employers in any manner."
We have come, therefore, to a turning-point in industrial
policy. If the people of America want to deprive the wage
earner of the small share in the control of industryand
thus of his own lifethat he has obtained through organi
zation, they have that right; but they ought to know that
they are doing it. If they want to strengthen the grip on
our national destinies of the Steel Corporation and the big
banks, of the exploiters and the profiteers, they have that
right; but they ought not to be misled by pretty phrases
into imagining that they are furthering freedom and jus
tice in industry. If they want the term "American plan" to
become synonymous with economic czarism, they have that
right; but they ought to stop talking about the closed or
the open shop, and, facing realities, speak instead of the
union or the anti-union shop. They ought to call a spade
a spade, a club a club, and a knave a knave. They ought
to know that they are getting not an open shop openly
arrived at, but an anti-union shop secretly attained.
The Orchestra to the Front

TWENTY-TWO orchestra concerts in one weekthis is
one of the facts which has made this winter in New
York a notable one in the sphere of music. Our metropolis
is now the musical capital of the world, the Mecca of
soloists, the possessor of the best opera. It has not only
rejoiced in three large orchestras of its own, it has been
visited by those of Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and
Minneapolis, and the Chicago Opera, while Toscanini and
La Scala's orchestra were cheered to the echo by the Italian
colony and by those who like to hear a virtuoso play upon
an instrument greatly in need of a drill-master to smooth
out many rough places. To see a great American audience
wildly applauding Toscanini's Italians for their rendering
of music by such Huns as Wagner and Beethoven was en
couraging proof that in some respects we are beginning to
get away from war hatredseven if Beethoven would not
have recognized his own creations as interpreted by Tos
canini. Besides Toscanini, Mengelberg, the Hollander, has
stirred his listeners to enthusiasm.
If all the band concerts were not well patronized there is
still encouraging proof that the taste for good orchestral
music steadily improves, that there is less and less need
of using soloists as a lure, and that the public knows better
and better how to discriminate between orchestras. Severely
classical programs have drawn well. Every seat was sold
for the Philadelphia series, as it should have been, for that
organization has greatly improved, while the many empty
seats at the Boston Symphony concerts testify that the
public knows that that once preeminent orchestra has still
far to go to regain the place lost to it by the war and by its
German conductor. M. Monteux, the present French con
ductor, has started it on the right road, but it is doubtful
if he possesses the leadership that is needed to restore it
to its old place. Formerly lovers of music waited for years
to succeed to subscribers' tickets for the Boston Symphony ;
now they receive letters begging for their support. As for
the National Symphony Orchestra, led this winter by both
Mengelberg and Bodanzky, this ambitious effort has already
come to an end and its amalgamation with the Philharmonic
has been announced. This is as it should be. Populous
[Vol. 112, No. 2910
and rich as New York is, it does not need three large con
cert orchestras in addition to all the minor ones. What it
should have is one great, adequately endowed and supported
organization, equipped to do the best possible work.
The stumbling-block of late has been that the fashionable
world and many of the critics have persistently belittled
the Philharmonic's conductor, Josef Stransky. They de
clared him to be an excellent drill-master but no musician ;
a good man to select musicians, and an excellent program
maker, but as a conductor lacking inspiration and passion.
This the public has refused to believe and so the Philhar
monic has sold out 90 per cent of its concerts. There
are no audiences more discriminating than the Philhar
monic's and the subscription sale is now four times what
it was when Mr. Stransky took hold. The deficit of the
National Symphony ran into the hundreds of thousands
despite the craze for Bodanzky, and so a venture that should
never have been begun had to end. Mr. Damrosch and his
generous Maecenas still struggle on with the New York
Symphony and are asking an English conductor, Albert
Coates, to share the directing next winter. But it, too,
should amalgamate with the Philharmonic. When all is
said and done Mr. Stransky is the only conductor to fill
houses even when he has no soloist to star. Some of the
money that has gone into deficits should have given New
York the new concert hall it needsif Carnegie Hall should
burn the music season would almost stop. If then, the new
movement for an orchestra training-school should be linked
up with the Philharmonic, we should be certain of one na
tional orchestra supreme in its skill and its art.
North Dakota Goes to the People

AFFAIRS in North Dakota have taken a turn which
must profoundly interest all friends of true democracy.
The banking interests having refused to handle the bond
issue needed to carry out the State's program, North Dakota
is now writing a new page in our financial history by
offering its $6,000,000 of bonds directly to the people. The
State's announcement appears elsewhere in this issue.
The North Dakota program has constantly been attacked
as "radical" and "un-American." It happens to be neither.
Its collapse has been frequently prophesied and recorded.
It hasn't collapsed and isn't likely to, although nearly every
means, fair and foul, at the command of the forces of ex
ploitation have been employed in the attempt to wreck it
In North Dakota, an agricultural community, the owner
ship of the mills and elevators through which the State's
products pass was almost monopolized. Taxation, distribu
tion, marketing were all organized against the farmer
the producer who gave his unremitting toil and his small
capitaland also against the ultimate consumer. Between
the two, the exploiters neatly extracted most of the wheat
and the gold, leaving little but chaff and dross. For years
the farmers attempted organization in vain. Their efforts
were carefully hamstrung, until they came to realize that
their only hope lay in gaining political control of the State.
So they organized the Nonpartisan League, and with Stateowned grain elevators and flour mills and rural credits at
cost as chief planks, elected in 1918 a complete State ticket.
The anti-League forces mobilized swiftly their full na
tional war strength. The varied assortment of assaults
which the ingenuity of high-priced corporation lawyers
could devise is too long to recount here fully. A series of
April 13, 1921]
The Nation
injunctions necessitating the lengthy process of appeal

through the courts to the Supreme Court of the United
States, which inevitably postponed the execution of the
Nonpartisan program; a press propaganda of unparalleled
misrepresentation; a carefully planned political campaign
which falsely pretended sympathy with League policies with
merely slight divergence in methodall these, combined
with successive crop failures, and the country-wide business
disintegration due to deflation, enabled the opposition to
obtain a slight majority in the lower house of the North
Dakota Legislature. The League retained control of the
Senate, together with a majority of the executive officers
and the all-important Industrial Commission. The nature
of the assaults on the Nonpartisans is now wholly clear
and the next election should mean a victory for the League.
Meanwhile the control of the House has enabled the opposi
tion to continue for the time being its efforts at sabotage
and the recall of State officials has been set in motion.
The State needs the proceeds of its bonds sale to carry
out its program, which has made a most promising begin
ning despite great handicaps. And here it is important to
emphasize that this program is not selfish, not, as has been
charged, a class program designed to benefit only the farm
ers. True, it aims to insure a square deal for the farmer,
but equally does it benefit the ultimate consumer. The
small State flour mill which was purchased in 1919, pending
the erection of a larger one, while making a fair profit
above expenses, succeeded in paying the farmer an average
of 12 cents per bushel more for his wheat than he had been
receiving and in selling the flour at 50 cents less per barrel
and feed at $7.50 less per ton than the price charged by
other dealers and mills. This small mill alone will save the
farmers and consumers tens of thousands of dollars an
nually. Then there is the Home Building Association which
under State auspices erects modest city and farm homes
on easy payment terms. How bolshevistic, in these days of
housing shortage and rent profiteering, to make it possible
for families of small means to own their own homes ! And,
finally, among other enterprises whose specific purpose is
to serve the people is the State bank which aims to assist
the small farmer and business man in financial distress.
So a great opportunity confronts the liberty-loving peo
ple of the United States. Every one of them may do his
bit to make the North Dakota program a success ; and this
opportunity is afforded without risk. The State bonds, net
ting 5% to 6 per cent, are even in these days of high in
terest rates an attractive investment, especially in view of
their tax exemption and safety. Most State and municipal
issues floated in the last year have borne a lower interest
rate, and no State can show so small an indebtedness
there is only $340,000 ahead of this issue. It is important
to note here, too, that this bond issue, which has been legal
ized by the United States Supreme Court, will be just as valid
as to interest and principal even if the Nonpartisan League
should be swept out of office. The obligation on the State
and its entire taxing power would continue unchanged. In
these times of reaction one often hears the plaint that there
is so little that the ordinary citizen can do. Here is his
chance. He should subscribe freely to the North Dakota
State bonds, and get his friends to do so. He will not only
be making his contribution toward establishing a most
hopeful economic development; he will be striking a direct
blow at the financial control which would dictate to and
coerce the will of a sovereign people of an American State.
531
John Burroughs
JOHN BURROUGHS seemed old to many of his readers,
but measured by anything but mere linear years he was
older than he seemed to most of them. Measured, for in
stance, by reference to the fame of Whitman, Burroughs
went back to the days when he was a clerk in the Treasury,
and Whitman, then likewise a Government clerk, was dis
missed from his post by a Secretary of the Interior who now
survives in the memory of his nation chiefly by reason of
this episode. Burroughs wrote the earliest book ever writ
ten about hi3 greatest friend, and for more than half a
century he neither forgot nor long neglected to praise Whit
man's large sanity and seerlike wisdom. Measured by the
reputation of Thoreau, of whom it was easy for the most
casual to perceive that Burroughs was in some fashion a
disciple, he went back so far that he had been seventeen
when "Walden" came into the world, and he began himself
to write about birds and green fields before Thoreau died.
And measured by a line even longer than the fame of either
Whitman or Thoreau, Burroughs went back so nearly to the
origins of American literature that he saw the Catskills, of
which he was to remain the particular singer and annalist,
within three or four years after Irving, heretofore ac
quainted with them only from the deck of a Hudson River
boat, had first visited the neighborhood already sacred to
the quite mythical but also immortal spook of Rip Van
Winkle.
To mention Irving is to suggest a comparison actually
more fruitful than that which some thousands of pens have
recently made between Burroughs and Thoreau. The bland
old man whose beard was latterly as well known in these
States as was that of Bryant in its proper day, had hardly
anything in common, except an affectionate concern for ex
ternal nature, with the dry, hard, vivid Yankee who acted
out his anarchistic principles on the shores of Walden Pond
and fiercely proclaimed the duty of civil disobedience to all
men who might find the world traveling along false paths.
Burroughs had in him too much of the milk of American
kindness to thrive in a comparison with an authentic genius
like Thoreau, who might not be half the naturalist that
Burroughs was but was twice the poet and a dozen times
the pungent critic of human life. Nor, in another direction,
does Burroughs appear to much advantage by comparison
with Whitman, who had a cosmic reach and a prophetic
lift and thrust that never visited Slabsides. Rather, for all
Burroughs employed a modern idiom and took to the coun
try instead of staying snugly in town, he points back to the
earlier tradition of smoothness and urbane kindness and
level optimism which Irving practiced. Did Burroughs not
but a few weeks ago take a mild exception to the "naked
realism" of Howells? In that phrase a very old school
speaks. Perhaps we shall in the long run remember best
that Burroughs annually made one of an odd triumvirate
of campers which included besides him Thomas A. Edison
and Henry Ford. Let us, for the sake of seeing the group
in its true perspective, call Mr. Ford the village blacksmith
who happens to have the fortunate touch of Midas; let us
call Mr. Edison the village inventor who happens to have
the touch of a mechanical Merlin; let us call Burroughs the
village naturalist who to his native instincts adds the win
ning gift of language and makes himself heard, as his
friends do by their machines, outside the village.
532
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2910
Mexico 1921
III. Restoring the Land to the People
By PAUL HANNA
ACROSS the white sheet, in a darkened reception room,
the hills and valleys of Morelos sweep in smooth pano
rama. Fields of swaying cane, little groups of surveyors,
cattle at pasture, and crowds of peons claiming their land
dance past to the purr of the cinema crank. The proces
sion ends. Lights flare up and a servant appears with re
freshments on a polished tray. Rafael Cal y Mayor, "bandit"
chief, general and boy, is still gazing at the empty screen
as he sips from his glass. "I have fought for eight years;
I fight no more," he says softly. But we all hear, and feel
that another act in Mexico's drama has come to an end.
The story of Cal y Mayor and Chiapas state is the story of
Zapata and Morelos state. And in their joint stories one
finds the first cause of Mexican unrest and the history of
ten years of revolution. Today these states and the rest
of Mexico are as peaceful as Kansas, and for the same rea
son. The natives have got pretty much what they want.
For "Land and Liberty" they fought for ten years, and
won. Today their claim to both is undisputed.
Morelos state is small in area, rich of soil, and lies close
to Mexico City. In the days of Porfirio Diaz it had a popu
lation of 172,000, of whom thirty-two families owned threefourths of the land and lived sumptuously in foreign parts
on the income from rich harvests of sugar, rice, coffee, and
orchard crops. Then came the Zapata brothers, calling
the peons to revolt. Since then so many have been killed
in or have fled from the struggle that Morelos has only
60,000 inhabitants. South of Morelos lies Chiapas. There
the young medical student Cal y Mayor painted his banner
with the Zapata slogan of "Land and Liberty," and with
most of the peons at his back fortified the heights along a
river which is the main highway to and from Chiapas.
Under his direction the peons found time to till the soil
for themselves as well as whip off Carranza's troops from
time to time, while the "bandit" movement spread through
several adjoining states under local chieftains. Sometimes
these agrarian outlaw leaders became corrupt. Often they
were cruel. In many ways they mirrored back the tyranny
they strove to overthrow. But always they voiced the
aspirations and enjoyed the loyalty of peons battling to
be free.
"While Emiliano Zapata lived I acknowledged him as
chief of the agrarian revolt," Cal y Mayor told me the
night I was entertained at his home in Mexico City. "When
he and his brother were killed by Carranza we in Chiapas,
Tabasco, Campeche, and elsewhere kept up the fight with
out any commander-in-chief. When Carranza fell our cause
triumphed. The war is over." General Gilbardo Magana
grasped the standard that was shot out of the hands of
Zapata in Morelos. Today Magana is director general of
fifty land colonies established by and for so-called bandits
in various parts of the Republic. His chief is General An
tonio I. Villareal, Secretary of Agriculture. American lib
erals will recall Villareal as the youthful intellectual who
was imprisoned in the United States during the Taft ad
ministration, charged with plotting on American soil
against the "friendly" government of Porfirio Diaz.
In the strategic cabinet post he now occupies I found
him weary with overwork, but zealous and happy in his

great opportunity to solve Mexico's agrarian problem. Re
ception room, staircase, and patio leading to his office were
crowded with Indians from the distant country on the day
I called upon Secretary Villareal. Scores of them, I was
told, had crossed mountain and desert on foot to look for the
first time upon a great city and test at its source the
strange, glad rumor that a peon could have land for the
asking. This huge, silent, yet eager band of petitioners in
person might have filled any official with apprehension or
dismay. They filled Villareal's heart with delight. He wel
comed them as couriers who in their remote homes would
soon spread among crushed and doubting peasants the truth
that Mexico is reborn and serfdom ended.
"Since Carranza fell we have restored to five hundred
towns the communal lands stolen from them during the past
century. Within another year thirty-five hundred more
pueblos will recover their lands," Villareal explained. "Then
there will be no more danger of revolution in Mexico, for the
agrarian problem will be solved. I have never been so
hopeful as now," he continued. "We have fifteen million
people and far more than enough land for all of them.
With all our people hard at work they could not till the
land we have. We must attract a flow of farmer immigrants
to Mexico. Merchants, business men, and capitalists will
be welcomed also, but the great need of our country is more
men to cultivate her rich soil. Here," said the agrarian
idealist, "is a letter that will be signed by President Obregon and myself and sent off tomorrow. It is addressed to
the representatives of 50,000 Mennonites now living in
Canada who have asked for land in Mexico." I read the
paper he handed me. It began with a cordial greeting to
the churchmen and followed up with a specific offer of land,
plus the following concessions about which the Mennonites
had asked especially: Complete freedom from military ser
vice. Total exemption from an oath of allegiance. Free
dom to worship as the colonists wished. Freedom to estab
lish and maintain schools separate from the national edu
cational system. Freedom to organize communal means to
raise and market their products. "And tomorrow," said
Villareal as I returned the letter, "the leaders of 25,000
more Mennonites will arrive at the northern border to ar
range for the migration of their brethren from the United
States to Mexico. They will be offered land virtually on
their own terms." To one reared in the Quaker surround
ings and traditions of Pennsylvania it was not altogether
pleasant to hear this zealous Mexican official describe, how
ever simply, the flight of religious bodies from the United
States to another country where they will escape military
service and be free to worship as conscience dictates.
In many parts of Mexico the peon lost his land because
he loved it too much. That is, the peon would rather toil
for a pittance on his own or the common village land than
go to work for a larger reward in wages on the great pri
vate estates which came to adjoin the native pueblos. When
wages failed to lure the peons onto the big estates the proud
haciendados who adorned the reign of Porfirio Diaz hit
upon the simple plan of taking the village lands away so
April 13, 1921]
The Nation
that the inhabitants would be forced to till the private

estates to earn a living. Mexico's "first families" secured
title to public domains because they wanted land. They
took what was left of the village communal lands in order
to get labor. When they got both these essentials to their
happiness the peons rose up in a rebellion which continued
for a solid decade and brought the lands back to the people.
If anyone in Mexico, or from abroad, tries to restore the
old order there will be more revolutions here. It should
be understood that redistribution of lands does not proceed
with the same speed in all localities. In states like Morelos,
where the peons were most determined and successful dur
ing the revolution and are still armed to hold their own,
there are thirty-five state engineers at work making allot
ments, and the job will soon be finished there. In states
where the crushed peasantry remained dormant during the
upheaval the local authorities reflect this lethargy and the
program lags. The Obregon administration believes in
"state's rights" and concerns itself only with Federal lands
or estates obtained through Federal grants. The lands
now being distributed in Mexico are obtained from four
chief sources:
L Old pueblo communal lands which originally, by
Spanish decree, embraced a radius of three miles surround
ing the village church. Present "private owners" of such
lands are deemed to have no title and are not compensated.
To these original communal areas large additions are being
made to fit the enlarged necessities of growing pueblos.
2. Large areas are being recovered from individuals and
corporations that have held choice concessions for specu
lation and failed to fulfil original stipulations.
3. Under Diaz a so-called agrarian bank was established
with public funds to help needy small farmers. Its capital,
I am told, was borrowed chiefly by rich haciendados who
managed for years to avoid paying even the nominal in
terest agreed to. These perfectly legal government mort
gages are now being enforced by the Obregon administra
tion, which carves land for the peons from the estates of
those who defrauded the Government of its interest.
4. Article 27 of the new Constitution says in part:
"The nation shall have at all times the right to put private
property to the uses which the public interest demands.
. With this object in view necessary measures shall
be dictated for the division of the large estates; for the
development of the small properties ; for the creation of new
agricultural communities, etc."
Excepting those tracts which must be taken to accommo
date adjoining populous villages, I do not think that large
private estates will be generally broken up in this process
of distribution. There is no such scarcity of land. Vast
speculative tracts that have lain fallow for years are being
taken. For example the title to all Federal lands obtained
since the Diaz reign began in 1876 are being rigorously
examined. The friends of Jose Ives Limantour, for many
years Minister of Finance, and of other persons who enjoyed
the bounty of Don Porfirio, will be interested in current
executive decrees, of which the following is a good example :
Pursuing our duty to review all contracts and concessions
made by previous governments, since the year 1876, which in
volve the ownership of land, water, and other natural resources,
and being empowered by the last paragraph of Article 27 of the
Constitution to declare null such contracts when they involve
grave injury to the national welfare, the Secretary of Agri
culture will forthwith proceed to study the concession granted
to Jose and Julio Limantour, with a view to canceling said con
533
cession if such cancelation shall be found justifiable. The in

dividuals named, or their representatives, shall be notified of
this procedure and be given thirty days in which to appear
before the Secretary of Agriculture to present their views and
defense of the concession.
[Signed] Alvaro Obregon, President of the Republic.
On the train from Saltillo to San Luis Potosi I talked
with a young man whose family owns 47,000 acres of tillable
land. Only 12,000 acres of it are under cultivation this
year. He and his brothers and sisters were educated partly
in the United States and have spent long periods in Europe.
They and their friends regard the distribution of small
tracts of land as a species of intolerable "bolshevism."
During his first months in office President Carranza did
well by the peons in the matter of land grants. Secretary
VillareaFs assistants showed me the record of 195,713
hectares "donated" and 30,811 hectares "restored" to vil
lages during the five years of Carranza's regime. Against
Carranza's total of 226,524 hectares in five years, the De la
Huerta-Obregon administrations place a total of 136,957
hectares donated and restored during six months following
the fall of Carranza. To Federal and State governments
alike it has seemed important first to give the peons their
land and leave the problem of compensation for later dis
cussion and legislation. One rule under which the Federal
authorities have operated provides for payment to private
owners of "the assessed value plus ten per cent." The Diaz
regime was so good to its favorites that many rich areas
were assessed at 1 cent an acre! Despite its undeniable
poverty, the Obregon administration can still afford to buy
farms for peons at a cent and one-tenth an acre.
During the present month Secretary Villareal presented
to Congress a new bill to regulate the distribution of land.
It is designed to supersede all present regulations and is
regarded as sure to be adopted. This measure abrogates
the law of December 28, 1920, declares the Carranza decree
of September 19, 1916, without force since the present Con
stitution was adopted in 1917, and gives the President full
authority to create future agrarian commissions and pre
scribe their rules of procedure. Formal distributions of
land took place in Morelos state every Sunday during Feb
ruary of this year. I have talked with Mexican officials
and American civilians who witnessed these simple but
effective ceremonies and have seen motion pictures taken
on the spot. Tenextepango and Zacatepec are two towns
where the Morelos peons received their farms on Feb
ruary 20. With each donation of land in this region goes
one new American plow. Fifteen hundred such plows have
been given away, and my friends who witnessed the event
at Tenextepango tell me they saw many hundreds more
stored in public buildings there awaiting their peon claim
ants. It is the ambition of Morelos officials to add a team
of mules to the gift of land and plow. Ten years of war
depleted the state's former abundant supply of work ani
mals. To avoid confusion, accelerate the program, and
shield the peon against future lawsuits, the state authori
ties have prepared printed application blanks to which the
simple Indian need only affix his name, after a clerk has
set down the tract of ground desired by the applicant.
Estates of sixty acres or less are immune from seizure in
Morelos. And the new farms being created there are limited
at present to twelve acres each. In the body of the procla
mation it is explained that the lack of modern agricul
tural machinery makes it impossible for a peon to till more
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2910
534
than twelve acres, especially in a region where crops ripen
all the year around. It is further stipulated that as soon as
modern machinery is obtained, either by individual farmers
or through Government donation, the grants shall be in
creased. The present Governor of Morelos is Dr. Jos6 G.
Parres, and the Secretary of State is General Carlos Peralta,
a graduate of the engineering school of Lehigh University.
The state's intellectual leader is A. Diaz Sota y Gama, who
now champions her agrarian program as a member of the
national Chamber of Deputies. All these men are veteran
partisans of the Zapatista movement.
All farm machinery is admitted to Mexico free of duty,
and the freight rate on it reduced 50 per cent. Under
Villareal the Department of Agriculture has become the
country's heaviest purchaser of farm machinery, which it
resells on easy terms to all who have need of it.
In the course of a luncheon at which Secretary Villareal
was my host, he said :
Our ambition is to have every state in the Republic establish
at least one agricultural school. Of Federal schools there will
certainly be three : one for soil and crop experts, one for veterinaries, and one for agricultural mechanics. And to combat the
peon's prejudice against steel plows we are opening fifteen
special schools at which the sons of farmers will be invited to
stay at government expense to familiarize themselves with the
use of machinery. It is agreed that all revenue in excess of
previous appropriations shall be devoted to agricultural promo
tion work, through our department, and I anticipate that pro
vision will give us at least 15,000,000 pesos during the coming
year. Much of this money will be spent on irrigation projects.
"Let's
Have
On the Rio Lerma, in Guanajuato state, a reservoir is now being

constructed which will supply 100,000 acres in a rich tract where
425,000 acres are awaiting irrigation. A similar enterprise is
already under way on the Rio Naza, in Chihuahua.
It was not until February of this year that the Church
consented "in principle" to the land distribution policy.
And the Archbishop of Mexico City announced through the
press that the program should be suspended until the Gov
ernment should have funds in hand with which to compen
sate private owners. In reply Secretary Villareal called
the prelate's attention to the large properties held by the
Mexican clergy, which he said was "one of the richest in
the world," and said a test of the Archbishop's good faith
would be his willingness to pledge those properties to assist
in solving the agrarian problem.
Of the judiciary's part in the land issue I was told this
story. Some private owners in Morelos brought suit in
the Supreme Court last fall to stay the land distribution
in their state, and they got a favorable decision. In re
sponse, the Zapatistas sent word that they did not under
stand how a group of men sitting in Mexico City could
understand the agrarian problems of Morelos; would the
honorable court be so kind as to visit Morelos, take testi
mony there, and render its decision on the spot? Were that
not done, said the memorandum, the people of Morelos would
not feel bound by the verdict. Soon afterward the Supreme
Court ascertained that it was really the Senate that pos
sessed final jurisdiction in the case. To that finding the
Senate demurred. The case is now somewhere in transit
between those two august bodies.
Done With Wiggle and Wobble"
By DONALD BRYANT
A Washington newspaper [the Herald] publishes an editorial
THE twins, Wiggle and Wobble, those two enfants terricongratulating the newspaper fraternity on the dawn of "a
bles, for all the invectives and maledictions leveled
newsy Administration" and the wealth of news it already
at their heads by the Republicans last year, were to be ob
has begun to produce. The correspondents at the capital feel
served scurrying about the departmental buildings and the
there is cause for commiseration, not congratulation. The old
White House on March 5 much as if they had never been
est journalistic inhabitant cannot remember a fortnight follow
disturbed. Master Wobble is reported to have made the
ing the inauguration of a new President that has been so un
productive of "big news" as the two weeks ending tomorrow.
White House and the executive offices his peculiar domain.
Both at the White House and the important government depart
It is reliably reported that on any morning or afternoon
ments little but platitudes and generalities is available. De
he may be seen about the White House grounds. Whether
cisions and developments are few and far between.
this is true or not, it is certain that Wiggle, his brother,
Aside from the controversy into which the State De
has found safe retreat in the State Department, ad
partment
has entered with Panama and Costa Rica there has
jacent to the White House, a fact to which virtually
been no information of consequence imparted to the press
every Washington newspaper correspondent recently at
by the State Department. In the week of March 12-19 Sec
tendant upon the press conferences conducted by the Secre
retary of State Hughes took occasion but twice to meet rep
tary and the Under-Secretary of State may bear abundant
resentatives of the press at the stated conferences held
testimony. To every question of foreign policy raised by
twice daily at the State Department and which all former
the correspondents in their daily conferences with the
secretaries of state have been accustomed to attend once
Under-Secretary of State, Master Wiggle is there, clutch
daily. But once, since he has been Secretary of State, has
ing the coattails of Mr. Fletcher and returning a saucy
he entered into any informal discussion respecting foreign
face. And with the daily responses of "I don't know" of
affairs of the United States, and that briefly to declare that
Mr. Fletcher, Wiggle makes a movement as if to thumb his
the rights acquired by American participation in the World
nose and to say: "You won't know as long as I'm around,
War would be maintained by the new Administration.
and I intend to stay." These are gloomy, unproductive days
Under-Secretary of State Fletcher, while he has met
for Washington newspapermen and days of uncertainty
newspapermen
more regularly, has had even less to say
and unrest for the public desirous of making itself ac
than
Secretary
Hughes. Asked as to the motive behind
quainted with the foreign policy of the new Administration.
the
retention
in
Paris of Roland W. Boyden, former Ameri
On March 18, Mr. F. W. Wile of the Philadelphia Public
can representative on the Reparations Commission, who
Ledger Service commented in the columns of his Republi
was withdrawn by the Wilson Administration, he has con
can newspaper as follows:
April 13, 1921]
The Nation
tented himself with the enigmatic reply that it was done

"pending a decision." What that decision means, whether
it has to do with the definition of the American attitude to
ward the Treaty of Versailles as such action would imply
despite the shrill scream from the Capitol that the treaty
and all its works are deadwould seem to be left- to the
inference of the most imaginative and speculative of the
Washington correspondents.
The injustice of this not alone to newspapermen but as
well to the public whom they represent is manifestly ap
parent. Secretary Hughes and Under-Secretary of State
Fletcher both presume to represent the people of the United
States, but so are the newspapermen representing the people
or at least the medium through which the public is kept
informed of the doings of its public servants.
While the foreign offices of most foreign governments
are subject to interpellations in open Parliament by the
representatives of the people as to their acts in the conduct
of the people's affairs, in the United States the officials of
the State Department are immune from any other interro
gations than those propounded by representatives of the
press. Once the newspaper conferences conducted by the
Secretary and Under-Secretary of State have been stripped
of all but their most perfunctory character, there can be
no other knowledge obtained by the public of what is tran
spiring in foreign relations than that which the State De
partment sees fit to make public at its own proper time
or what leaks out from foreign sources.
On March 7 a hint of the presence of Master Wiggle in
the environs of the State Department was contained in a
Washington dispatch to the New York Times.
Developments today [it was stated] gave an intimation of
what the policy of the Harding Administration will be in deal
ing with the press, and the impression created was not reassur
ing to those who believe that the American people are entitled
to be kept informed of what their Government is doing. . . .
The first development came through Charles E. Hughes, the
new Secretary of State, who expressed to newspapermen his
displeasure over the publication of the fact that identical notes
had been sent by him to the Governments of Panama and Costa
Rica, calling on them to cease hostilities. The subject was also
taken up by Mr. Hughes with officers of the State Department,
and altogether his course indicated that he had taken the matter
very seriously and would endeavor to prevent the press from
making statements concerning the policies and moves of the
Department unless publication was officially authorized. . . .
The doctrine enunciated by Secretary Hughes today has long
been a theory, in a somewhat modified form, of State Depart
ment procedure. Mr. Hughes has gone a step further than most
of his predecessors in recent years in holding apparently that
the newspapers are bound to withhold any statement regard
ing State Department affairs unless he gives permission for
them to print it. This would mean that if the State Depart
ment embarked upon an important policy that would have a very
decisive bearing upon the welfare of the country the American
people would not be entitled to know anything about it until
the Government chose to inform them. As the formula for the
conduct of the press was outlined today, expression of public
opinion would be withheld until it suited the convenience or
purpose of the powers that be in Washington to take them into
its confidence in a formal, official way. Current discussion would
be limited to the information that the Government chose to make
known, if it was made known at all.
With the adoption of such a policy by Mr. Hughes and
the practical abandonment of the press conferences, Wash
ington correspondents are muzzled almost as effectually as
was the German press in the heyday of Prussianism.
535
It is no secret among Washington newspapermen that

for the publication of certain "unauthorized" news stories,
secret service agents of the State Department have sub
jected correspondents to an inquisition to obtain the source
of their information in order to prevent any further leak
age to the public of news whose publication was considered
by officials inadvisable. Within only the last ten days it
is known that Secretary Hughes has directed officials of the
Department of State to communicate with the Washington
bureaus of newspapers in order to ask that they request
their papers to desist from commenting editorially upon
a note which, it was reported, the United States had sent
to Panama and whose publication he had not authorized.
Since the beginning of the war there has been a stand
ing rule of the State Department forbidding the communi
cation of any newspaper man with any other officials than
the Secretary or the Under-Secretary of State. There was
a time when press correspondents might interview with
perfect freedom the chiefs of the Mexican Division, the
Near East Division, or the Division of Far Eastern Affairs.
But since the war a censorship department has been main
tained known as the Division of Foreign Intelligence, whose
ostensible business it has been to act as the point of con
tact between the State Department and the press. Since
the armistice, however, its function has been chiefly the sup
pression of news rather than its dissemination, and with
the new policy inaugurated by Secretary Hughes it has
been the abiding place of Master Wiggle and the echo of
the "I don't know" of Under-Secretary of State Fletcher.
The general public has little realization of the public ser
vice rendered by the Washington correspondent in laying
bare the doings of the State Department or of the difficulties
which one finds barring his way to a knowledge of the con
duct of foreign relations by the State Department of which
it is deemed fitting the public should be apprised. Before
the war it was the custom of the State Department to make
public at the end of each year a Red Book, containing the
diplomatic correspondence engaged in during the preceding
year by the United States with foreign governments. Pub
lication of a Red Book has long since ceased, however, and
it is only by the perseverance and ingenuity of the news
papermen who give attention to the affairs of the State De
partment that the present correspondence of the United
States ever sees the light of day.
It might be recalled that one of the most important diplo
matic exchanges into which the Wilson Administration en
tered in its last days, that with the Japanese Government
over the occupation by the latter country of the Russian
half of the Island of Saghalin, has never been made public,
and it is doubtful if its existence would ever have been made
known to the American people but for the faithful obser
vance on the part of the newspapermen of that which was
passing behind the scenes of the censorship imposed by the
Division of Foreign Intelligence.
Perhaps some day, however, there will be an enforced
housecleaning of the State Department which will spread
to the White House so that we will truly have done with
those pernicious infants Wiggle and Wobble. At present
they do not appear changed appreciably from the pair that
has been in evidence for eight years, unless indeed they
have grown a little bolder, a little bigger, a little more
thoroughly at home in the last four weeks.
Is this a democracy, and are the officials at Washington
the masters or the servants of the American people?
The Nation
536
[Vol. 112, No. 2910
$6,000,000
THE
STATE
OF
EXEMPT FROM ALL TAXES

To Yield 5fc,
534 and 6%
These Bonds are secured by the faith and credit of the State of North Dakota
backed by taxable property assessed at $1,600,000,000.00
The banking interests have refused to handle or to sell the bonds of the sovereign State
of North Dakota.
They base their refusal on no question of security or validity.
They have admitted that in point of safety and interest yield, North Dakota bonds are
second to no other State bonds that have been floated.
(The total outstanding debt of the
State of North Dakota$340,000is unique as the lowest indebtedness of any State in the
Union.)
The reason the banking interests have refused to sell the North Dakota bond issue is that
they are hostile to the public ownership policies of the people of North Dakota.
These poli
cies, which include State ownership of a flour mill, a bank, and a grain elevator, together with
a program of home building and State insurance, do not, as a matter of fact, constitute an
extremely radical program.
Other States have State-owned enterprises.
The North Dakota program of serving the people has merely been somewhat more com
prehensiveand more successfulthan that of any of her sister States.
Knowing this, the
great banking and public utility interests who feel their domain invaded or threatened by the
success of what they like to term the North Dakota "experiment," have determined to make
a final effort to ruin it if possible.
Hence, their boycott of the North Dakota bond issue.
The State of North Dakota therefore appeals directly to that higher authoritythe
American people.
The North Dakota bond issue affords them an opportunity to subscribe to a gilt-edged,
iron-clad, totally tax-exempt security, at least the equal of any other State bond issue in the
United States, easily excelling most of them and far ahead of the countless municipal, county,
public utility, and private corporation issues floated every day by the banking interests.
This issue is backed by the entire faith and resources of a sovereign State of our Union.
April 13, 1921]
The Nation
537
BOND ISSUE
NORTH
DAKOTA
INCLUDING FEDERAL INCOME TAX
Issued in Denominations of $1000, $500, $100

STATEMENT OF ASSETS AND RESOURCES
Total area of State. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..............
Total tillable land. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..................
Total land under cultivation............................................
70,837
29,159,300
17,033,885
Tons of coal in ground (estimate)...................................... 600,000,000,000
Assessed valuation (1920) of all private property. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $1,600,000,000
In addition the State owns

Securities valued at. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Buildings valued at. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Unsold land-1,547,117 acresvalued at. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
$25,000,000
7,034,353
22,242,617
Total property owned by State exceeds. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
$50,000,000
square miles
acres
acres
tons
LIST OF BONDS ISSUED BY THE STATE OF NORTH DAKOTA AND NOW OFFERED
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Series
Amount
Bank ... . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Bank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Real Estate . . . . . . . .
Real Estate . . . . . . . .
Real Estate . . . . . . . .
Real Estate . . . . . . . .
Real Estate . . . . . . . .
Mill & Elevator. . . . . .
Mill & Elevator. . . . . .
$958,000
992,000
300,000
300,000
450,000
600,000
1,350,000
500,000
500,000
Date Issued
71-1919
7-1-1919
7-1-1921
7-1-1921
7-1-1921
7-1-1921
7-1-1921
7-11921
7-1-1921
Interest
Rate
Denominations
5%
5%
534%
534%
534%
534%
534%
$100; 500
1,000
100
100
500
1,000
6%
1,000
100; 500
6%
1,000
Maturities
July
July
July
July
July
July
July
July
July
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1929
1934
1931
1936
1941
1946
1948
1941
1946
At
96.64
95.28
100.00
100.00
100.00
100.00
100.00
100.00
100.00
To Yield
5%%
5%%
534%
534%
534%
534%
534%
6%
6%
Interest payable semi-annually, January 1st and July 1st.

At price indicated in Column 7 and interest.
(There is no material difference in the security behind these issues. The shorter term bonds yield a slightly lower interest
rate, but all are equally secured by the entire faith and assets of the State of North Dakota.)
Fill out the coupon below (or a similar one) and mail with cheque, draft or money order to Spurgeon Odell, Special Rep
resentative, Bank of North Dakota, 20 Vesey Street, New York City.
-
BANK OF NORTH DAKOTA
SPURGEoN ODELL, Special Representative, 20 Vesey Street, New York City.

Cheque
Enclosed find $... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
{#
Order
Cross out ones

used
for which please send me Bonds of the State of North Dakota as follows:
$100 Denominations
$500 Denominations
$1,000 Denominations
(Cross out ones not wanted)
The right is reserved to reject any applications for the above bonds and also to award a smaller amount than applied for.
NoTE-All payments must be made by cheque, draft or money order to The Bank of North Dakota. No repre
sentative of the Bank or other person is authorized to accept payment for bonds in any other form than cheques,
drafts or money orders payable to The Bank of North Dakota, at Bismarck, North Dakota.
(Write Legibly.)
The Nation
538
Correspondence
Irish and American Independence
Sir: Mr. Colcord's article [Irish and American Indepen
dence] is interesting and well-written, and is excellent journal
ism, but it is not, and I hardly expected it would be, particu
larly good history. His likenesses, dressed up for the occasion,
are all familiar and constitute the usual stock in trade for the
purpose. I could add some others, even more apt, such as the
fact that a conservative Englishman and a radical colonist
were never able to find common ground of agreement or to
use in argument a language that the other could understand
any more than can an Englishman and an Irishman of the
present day. But these likenesses are no more than surface
similarities, such as are characteristic of all violent movements
in history, where coercion is threatened on one side and de
fiance is breathed on the other. They are in no way sufficient
to create that "extraordinary parallel" which you mentioned
and which I supposed Mr. Colcord was to make clear in detail.
More disappointing still is the latter's failure to answer my
question, to ask which was my sole justification for writing
at all.
Omitting all discussion of particular grievances, which are
capable of being presented in a thousand different forms of
subjective interpretation, according to one's predilections and
cleverness in disputation, I would ask consideration of one point
only. Ireland continues her revolt despite concessions which
had they been offered to the American colonies would have
brought to a speedy end the efforts of the colonial radicals to
force a revolution. As it was, the latter accomplished their
purpose with difficulty and only with the aid of British blun
dering. If a parallel with the colonial situation is to be found
then it should not be in Ireland, where race, religion, historical
antecedents, and mental habits are all fundamentally different,
but in Canada or Australia, colonies of Britain's own people,
with no tribal background or Celtic emotionalism, where a
parallel does exist and where in the middle of the last century
the concession of representative government, the repeal of the
corn laws and the navigation acts, and the eventual granting
of responsible government brought to an end all desire for
independence. Had these things been done for the American
colonies before 1776 there would have been no war of the
American Revolution, but unhappily in the colonies as in Ire
landand here is another likeness for Mr. ColcordEngland's
peace offers were not very opportune and generally came too
late.
At the time of their controversy with Great Britain, the
colonies were in a stage of development out of Crown colonies
into something very like self-governing dominions, although
they had never shown, as Canada, Australia, and South Africa
were to show later, any inclination to combine in a closer union.
That would have come eventually. It was Great Britain's
failure to recognize this de-facto status of essential indepen
dence and her determination to maintain the legal sovereignty
of the British Crown and the legal view of colonial subjection
and dependence as Crown colonies (and no Britisher conceived
of any other relationship as possible at the time) that brought
on the revolt. What our colonists wanted was something sim
ilar to that which the self-governing dominions have since ob
tained, though it is probable that at first they were not very
sure of what they did want, except perhaps greater freedom
from outside interference; they did not seek legal separation
from Great Britain until all possible remedies had been denied
them.
The fact that concessions which would certainly have stopped
revolt in America and since that time have prevented further
disintegration of the Empire are not sufficient to satisfy Ire
land, who in the face of them still demands entire separation,
[Vol. 112, No. 2910
shows that there is something in the Irish situation that was

not present in America before 1776 and has not been present in
Canada, Australia, or South Africa. I think it is more than a
lack of confidence, upon which the Irish lay so much stress,
for something very like a lack of confidence in the British
Government (another point for Mr. Colcord) prevailed among
the colonial radicals. There was no Ulster or anything like
Ulster in the American situation, which is a pretty fundamental
point of difference, and the colonies were not at England's
back door, which is in itself almost enough to break the back
of the parallel. But even these two differences do not explain
all. I have spoken of the differences of race, religion, historical
antecedents, and Celtic emotionalism, all of which are of tre
mendous significance and not one of which finds a parallel in
America. Mr. Padraic Colum has recently in your pages called
attention to an Irish tactic of aggressive defense, differing
from the English tactic of acceptance and compromisea "hold
ing on" tactic revived in the recent movement. There was
nothing like this racial tactic in America, for the colonists were
Englishmen and employed methods characteristic of their Eng
lish ancestry. Were Ireland inhabited, as were the British
Colonies in America, in the main by colonists of Protestant,
English stock, would not a settlement have been reached long
ago? Will Mr. Colcord kindly answer this question?
Yale University, March 12
Charles M. Andrews
Sir: Professor Andrews evidently is under the impression
that I wrote my article in reply to his first letter to The Nation.
This is a misapprehension. I had not seen his letter until it
appeared in company with my article, and had in fact written
the article a couple of months before. This will explain why
I failed to answer his question, and seemed to depart from
the tenor of his thought.
Whether the article is good history or not, must forever re
main a matter of opinion. I tried not to violate the record of
what might be termed static history; I did, however, enter the
field of dynamic history, where things largely are as one sees
them. Professor Andrews takes his stand on the firm ground
of static history; although he indulges freely in speculation as
a side line. It is not so much a question of parallelism between
the Irish and American Revolutions as between Professor
Andrews's point of view and mine.
To attempt in static terms to draw an historical parallel be
tween Ireland today and America in 1776 would be a palpable
absurdity. The specific facts and events which led up to the
American Revolution unquestionably were not the same as
those which led up to the present situation in Ireland. What I
tried to show in my article was that in spite of such inevitable
differences, both sets of facts and events strangely enough had
produced the same reaction in the public temper on either side
of the contest, that the psychological condition of the peoples
involved was extraordinarily alike in both periods, and that in
this sense there was a close historical parallel. The peoples
were generalizing in the same spirit and about the same prin
ciples. This field of popular psychology which I have termed
the field of dynamic history, is the one which chiefly interests
me, because it seems to be the key itself to history; and the
more history I read, the more I realize that it is the field which
the main body of historians either neglect or avoid. Perhaps
this is why we have so little permanent history and so much
prejudiced and inaccurate history which nevertheless appears
to be based on fact; so little true history and so much false
history. Certainly that body of history which is permanent
derives its enduring qualities from a true report of the popular
psychology of the period it covers.
Professor Andrews seems to claim that in all periods of
revolution the popular psychology is much the same. Is the
position tenable? Was the popular psychology of the French
Revolution, for instance, at all comparable with that of the
American Revolution? It does not appear so to me; and this
April 13, 1921]
The Nation
in spite of the fact that both movements, in a sense, sprang

from the same intellectual parentage. The reason for this is
that economic circumstance is the most important single factor
in establishing the trend and temper of a revolutionary mani
festation. The French Revolution fundamentally was an in
ternal economic movement. The American Revolution was a
political and colonial movement largely induced by economic
exploitation on the part of the mother country. In its essential
features, the Irish Revolution partakes of the latter rather than
of the former.
Coming to the argument, I must protest that Professor An
drews in his first question commits an unpardonable solecism.
He says : "Ireland continues her revolt despite concessions which
had they been offered to the American colonies would have
brought to a speedy end the efforts of the colonial radicals to
force a revolution." [The italics are mine.] Putting aside the
inaccuracy of offering as a statement of fact what inherently
must be a matter of opinion, is it not obvious that Professor
Andrews is comparing two entirely different phases of revo
lutionary development? He is applying to an acute revolu
tionary situation in Ireland a factor derived from the prerevolutionary period of the American case. His very language
confesses this solecism. "Ireland continues her revolt"then
he admits that the Irish Revolution is under way. "Would have
brought to a speedy end the efforts ... to force a revolution"
then he is thinking of a time, in the American case, before
the revolution had arrived.
Had the British Government in 1777, let us say, after a year
of revolutionary development, offered the American colonies con
cessions similar to those which today are being offered to Ireland,
I doubt very strongly if the American Revolution could have
been held up. My respect for the courage and integrity of my fore
fathers, as well as my general sense of the reactions of human
nature, leads me to believe that, with the die cast for revolution
and a year of war already over, they would not have stopped
short of independence. On the other hand, had the British Gov
ernment in 1915, let us say, or at some time before the
revolutionary temper in Ireland had come to a head, sincerely
offered and carried out the concessions which it is willing to
make today, I think it extremely likely that the revolt could
have been averted. But to speak of conditions in prerevolutionary America as applying to revolutionary Ireland is his
torically improper and wholly unfair.
In fact, does not the point raised here serve only to strengthen
the parallel which Professor Andrews is attempting to deny?
In both the Irish and American cases, prerevolutionary conces
sions might have checked the development of the actual revolt.
In both cases these concessions were withheld, through misjudgment by government of the popular psychology. In both
cases, the revolution followed as the direct result of this policy.
Professor Andrews should not forget that the Home Rule Bill
which the British Government is now attempting to extend to
Ireland when she will not have it was passed in 1914, and has
been held in abeyance ever since, for reasons best known to the
Ministry. It would be interesting to hear Professor Andrews's
explanation of this singular failure on the part of Government
to put in practice those concessions which he makes the basis
of his argument.
Professor Andrews's final question springs from another com
mon error of the static historian ; namely, exaggeration of ethnic
and cultural factors in their application to human nature in the
mass. The fact is, not that peoples here and there are sharply
dissimilar, but that peoples everywhere are remarkably alike.
Their differences are largely superficial; their hearts and gen
eralizations meet on common ground. In the study there is a
constant temptation to pay too close attention to these super
ficial differences and to forget the universal agreement in the
strong undercurrent of life. Thus it appears that to ambush
a body of British soldiers at Concord Bridge and shoot them
down from behind the neighboring rocks is an act of Anglo-
539
Saxon calmness and deliberation; these men "employed methods

characteristic of their English ancestry." To ambush a body of
British soldiers in an Irish lane, however, and serve them the
same trick, clearly is an act of "Celtic emotionalism." The effort
to explain universal human manifestations on separate ethnic or
cultural grounds leads directly to that utter misapprehension of
life forces which obsesses the mind of the world today with
respect to the great war and its results. The answer, of course,
to Professor Andrews's question is that, had Ireland always
been inhabited by people of English stock, she would not have
been subjected to alien rule, and there would have been no Irish
problem. The capital of the British Empire might have been
Dublin instead of London.
I would not be so academic as to contend that a strict his
torical parallel exists between the Irish and American Revolu
tions ; there is no such thing as a strict historical parallel. Con
trary to the popular axiom, history never repeats herself. In
my article I called it an analogy rather than a parallel. An
analogy I still believe it to be; and one sufficiently close to com
mand sympathy for Irish Independence of all those who would
have joined the movement for American independence had they
been alive in the revolutionary period. Those, of course, who
would have been Tories in 1776 will be Tories still.
Searsport, Maine, March SI
Lincoln Colcord.
For Suppression
Sir: Allow me to take issue with your editorial in The Nation
of March 30. Admitting the "sinister policy" of the Dearborn
Independent, the editorial regards the suppression of that paper
as a blow at the freedom of the press. Whenever a paper re
sorts to malicious slander, circulates deliberate falsehoods, at
tempts insidious propaganda instilling in the minds of its read
ers hatred toward thousands of law-abiding, loyal Americans it
approaches dangerously near that border line which tends to
separate freedom of the press from libel. A periodical such as
that should be throttled before it does further damage. The
action of St. Louis and other cities upholds the basic American
principle guaranteeing freedom of religion, a principle with
which Ford seems to be totally unacquainted. So that while
The Nation admits that as a result of anti-semitic propaganda
pogroms in this country are "not unthinkable," energetic steps
are being taken by municipal authorities to stem the source of
this propaganda. Which is more American, the supression of
the Dearborn Independent, or its support based on an elastic
interpretation of freedom of the press?
Chicago, March 28
Anita Libman
[Non-suppression does not mean support. But nothing could
be more dangerous to American liberties than an "elastic inter
pretation" of freedom of the press. The greater part of our
press contains views that are objectionable to some group or
other. The moment the line is drawn even against opinions that
are utterly detestable the entire structure of our freedom is
imperiled. It has already been gravely compromised by the
suppression of the dissenting voices during the war.Editor
The Nation.]
Correction of an Advertisement
Sir: In his recent advertisement in The Nation Mr. Upton
Sinclair conveys the impression that Prof. James Melvin Lee
of New York University was "selected" by the New York
Times to attack Mr. Sinclair, and that he furnished "clippings
and quotations" in advance to that newspaper. You will, I
am sure, wish to know that neither statement is correct.
New York, April U
H. C Hobart
[From information before us we believe that Mr. Sinclair
erred as to Professor Lee.Editor The Nation.]
International
Is Egypt a Nation?
Relations
II.
THE first part of the report of the Milner Mission to

Egypt, printed in last week's issue of the Interna
tional Relations Section, covered the work of the Mission in
Egypt and its provisional conclusions as to the causes of
disorder and unrest, before, during, and after the war, and
as to the extent of the Nationalist movement. The follow
ing sections continue the discussion of the state of affairs
in Egypt and set forth the terms of the Memorandum drawn
up by the Mission after its return to England. The con
cluding sections of the report and the proposals of the Egyp
tian Delegation will appear in the next issue of the Inter
national Relations Section.
The Milner Report Continued
The Nationalist Movement and British Policy
The position is undoubtedly a serious one, and in face of this
solid phalanx of opposition it might seem at first sight as if we
had no choice but either to abandon our position in Egypt alto
gether, or to maintain it by sheeT force, in the teeth of the
general and ever-increasing hostility of the Egyptian people.
But a closer study of the problem led us to take a more hopeful
view. From many and intimate conversations with representa
tive Egyptians, including some who were commonly regarded
as extreme Nationalists, the conviction was borne in upon us,
that they were not so intransigent, and certainly not so antiBritish, as the frantic diatribes of the press might have led us
to suppose. The broad banner of nationalism was seen to cover
many shades of opinion, and, above all, most notable differences
of temper and of aim. Undoubtedly there are a number of
Nationalists whose fundamental hatred of all foreign, and espe
cially all British, control leads them to commit, or at any rate
sympathize with, acts of lawlessness and crime. Not only are
their aims wholly incompatible with any sort of understanding
between British and Egyptians, but they are prepared to pursue
them by methods which nothing could justify and which no
Government could do otherwise than strive to repress. They
are deliberately encouraging a system of terrorism, which is
intended to render any cooperation between British and Egyp
tians impossible in the future.
The untoward events of the last few years in Egypt itself and
the restless and revolutionary spirit throughout the whole world,
which has had a strong repercussion in that country, have un
doubtedly been grist to the mill of this extreme section and have
given a more sinister character to the Nationalist movement.
No wonder that, under these circumstances, nationalism has
appeared to many British people on the spot, and perhaps to
even more at home, to be synonymous with violent Anglophobia
and to be aiming at the complete subversion of the existing sys
tem of government in Egypt.
But we were satisfied, even before leaving Cairo, that it would
be a profound mistake to take this sweeping view. It would be
wrong to allow the impressions of a period of turbulence, like
the preceding twelve months, to blind us to what is reasonable
and legitimate in the aspirations of Egyptian nationalism. Such
an indiscriminating attitude could only tend to drive moderate
men more and more into the camp of the extremists and to con
vert the present deplorable friction between British and Egyp
tians, which is not incapable of being remedied, into bitter and
enduring hostility. Violence and disorder must, of course, be
suppressed, and here let us say that the measures taken to that
end during our stay in Egypt were as temperate as they were
effective. The necessity of continuing to maintain martial law
Section
in Egypt is regrettable, but under Lord Allenby martial law was

being administered with the minimum of severity or of disturb
ance to the normal course of justice and the everyday life of
the people. The duty of promptly suppressing violence and dis
order must not, however, lead us to confound all those who are
in a greater or less degree opposed to the existing system of
government with the pronounced revolutionaries, or simple crim
inals, who were responsible for the outbreak of the spring of
1919 and the sporadic acts of violence which have been per
petrated since. In talking to many men who professed Nation
alist opinionsand indeed it was difficult to find anyone who
repudiated all sympathy with themwe encountered a very dif
ferent spirit from that which found expression in such detest
able outrages. These men denounced the resort to violence, or
open rebellion, as not only criminal, but useless. Great Britain
such was the general viewwas more than strong enough to
keep Egypt in permanent subjection if she preferred unwilling
subjects to friendly and grateful allies. For they all recognized,
with more or less warmth and spontaneity, the great benefits
which Great Britain had conferred upon Egypt, while most of
them also recognized that Egypt still stood in need of British
assistance, not only in the work of internal reconstruction, but
for her defense against foreign interference and the danger of
once more becoming the arena of international rivalry and in
trigue. They all, without exception, admitted that Great Britain
had a very special interest in Egypt, as the central link in her
communications with her Eastern Empire and the Australasian
Dominions, and a perfect right to safeguard these communica
tions from any danger of interruption. But was it necessary
for the fulfilment of these objects to deprive Egypt of her inde
pendence, to try to convert her into an integral part of the
British Empire, and to run counter to the ineradicable desire
of the Egyptians to take their place as a distinct people among
the nations of the world? Would not an orderly and friendly
Egypt, in intimate association with Great Britain, serve British
purposes as well, or even better, while removing all sense of
grievance and all spirit of revolt on the Egyptian side? More
over, was not such a consummation the only one consistent with
the avowed policy of Great Britain, with her reiterated declara
tion that it was not her intention to appropriate Egypt or to
incorporate her in the British Empire, but to make her capable
of standing on her own feet? In the sincerity of these declara
tions they had long believed, but were now ceasing to believe.
After nearly forty years of British occupation, they seemed to
be not nearer to, but distinctly further from, the goal at which
Great Britain had professed to be aiming. With our continued
insistence on the Protectorate, which they all regarded as im
plying the permanent subjection of their country, Great Britain
had definitely departed from her original policy and, in fact,
broken her word. They had accepted the Protectorate, when it
was first declared, as a necessity of the moment. Great Britain,
being at war with Turkey, had not unreasonably severed the
remaining links between Turkey and Egypt, and something had
immediately to be substituted for the former Turkish suzerainty.
The Protectorate was thus justified as a temporary expedient,
but at the end of the war they had always expected that Great
Britain would proceed to regulate her relations with Egypt in
a manner more consistent with her declarations, with her real
interests, and with her honor. Instead of that they now saw
nothing before them but the permanent loss of their nationality,
of their existence as a people. They were to become a "British
Colony," to be British subjects. Against that they appealed,
and would continue to appeal, to the British sense of justice and
in the last resort to the sympathy of the whole civilized world.
Future Policy
Such, we believe, is a fair statement of the average opinion
of Egyptian Nationalists. The violence, unfairness, and un
reason of the more extreme and noisy section have given to the
April 13, 1921]
The Nation
whole movement an appearance of intransigence which, in our

opinion, is not essential or necessarily enduring. The remark
able organization known as the Wafd ("Delegation") which,
under the leadership of Zaghlul Pasha, has established, for the
time being at least, so complete an ascendancy over the Egyptian
public, and claims, not without many credentials, to speak in the
name of "the nation," does not consist mainly of extreme men.
Its members were drawn largely from the ranks of the old Hub
el Umma, which, in contrast to the Hisb el Watani, the real
revolutionary and anti-British party, stood for gradual and
constitutional progress. It is true that in face of an attitude
on our part which seemed to them to present a blank negative to
all their hopes, Zaghlul and his associates have until quite re
cently been drifting steadily to the Left. But in our experience,
it only needed some effort to understand their point of view and
to remove their suspicions of the intentions of Great Britain in
order to get many of the Zaghlulists to discuss the situation
in a perfectly reasonable spirit. And the same is naturally true
of men of even more moderate views, like the ex-Ministers
Rushdi, Adli, and Sarwat Pashas, who, while sympathizing with
the ideals of nationalism, had never actually joined the Wafd.
In such discussions, when once we had got away from phrases
and formulae and come to grips with the practical difficulties of
the problem, it soon became apparent that there were many
shades and varieties of opinion among Egyptians. The one
thing common to them all was the desire to preserve their
nationality, their distinctive character as a people.
It is evident from what has been said that any effort at
reconciliation between British and Egyptians, any policy which
seriously attempts to bring the more moderate and friendly
elements of Egyptian nationalism once more on to our side,
must take account of this deeply rooted feeling. No grant to
Egypt of a greater or less measure of "self-government," even
if it went the length of what is known as "Dominion Home
Rule," would meet the case, because Egyptians do not regard
their country as a British Dominion or themselves as British
subjects. This wholly differentiates the problem of constitu
tional development in Egypt from the same problem in countries
which have for years indubitably formed part of the British
Empire, as, for instance, British India. We talk of such coun
tries gradually attaining the status of nationhood. The Egyp
tians claim that they already have this status. No settle
ment of the future of Egypt which does not recognize this claim
is ever likely to be accepted byit can only be imposed onthe
Egyptian people.
As against these considerations, we have the patent fact that
Egypt, though not actually a part of the British Empire, is of
vital importance to our whole imperial system, and that that
country under British guidance has attained a new level of
civilization, from which it would be disastrous to allow it to
relapse. To reconcile the defense of these interestsEgyptian
as well as Britishwith the recognition of the national status
of Egypt is no easy matter. And the problem seems, at first
sight, to be further complicated, though on a closer study it may
turn out to be really simplified, by the exceptionally strong
position which the foreign colonies, other than the British,
occupy in Egypt. In no other Eastern country are there so
many resident Europeans, enjoying such special privileges or
filling so many important posts in commerce, in education, in the
professions, in society, and even in the government departments.
The great towns, especially Alexandria, are to a large extent
Europeanized, and in a certain sense Egypt will always remain
an international country. No solution of the Egyptian problem
can be enduring unless it provides for the security of the great
European interests, which are so strongly intrenched in the Nile
valley. Thus that problem may well appear as insoluble as it
is certainly unique. But then everything in and about Egypt
always has been unique. There are no precedents for us to
follow in dealing with conditions so abnormal. Any system
which really fits these conditions is bound to be novel, and it
541
should not be condemned as unsound merely because it looks

paradoxical.
In view of all these difficulties, we gradually came to the con
clusion that no settlement could be satisfactory which was
simply imposed by Great Britain upon Egypt, but that it would
be wiser to seek a solution by means of a bilateral agreement
a treatybetween the two countries. In no other way did it
appear possible to release Egypt from the tutelage to which
Egyptians so vehemently object, without endangering any of the
vital interests which we are bound to safeguard. All necessary
safeguards, as it seemed to us, could be provided in the terms
of a treaty of Alliance by which Egypt, in return for Great
Britain's undertaking to defend her integrity and independence,
would agree to be guided by Great Britain in her foreign rela
tions and would at the same time confer upon Great Britain
certain definite rights in Egyptian territory. The rights we
contemplated were of a twofold character. Firstly, in order to
protect her special interest in Egyptthe safety of her imperial
communicationsGreat Britain was to have the right to main
tain a military force on Egyptian soil; and secondly, for the
protection of all legitimate foreign interests, she was to have
a certain measure of control over Egyptian legislation and ad
ministration, as far as they affected foreigners. The former
privilege was no more than what Egypt could honorably concede
to an ally who undertook to defend her against all external
dangers, and whose strength and security were therefore of vital
importance to Egypt herself. And the latter privilege would
involve no greater infringement of Egyptian independence than
that to which, by virtue of the Capitulations,* Egypt has always
been exposed. Indeed, by substituting a single Power, Great
Britain, for the thirteen foreign Powers which have hitherto
enjoyed capitulatory rights in Egypt, it would tend to enlarge
rather than to curtail that independence. Moreover, it was part
of our scheme, as it has always been a feature of British policy
in Egypt, to confine the special privileges enjoyed by foreigners
under the Capitulations within more reasonable limits, and by
so doing to make Egypt much more the mistress in her own
house than she is today. But this could only be done if Egypt
was prepared to recognize Great Britain as the protector of
these foreign privileges when reduced to reasonable proportions.
This latter point requires a word of explanation. The re
strictions which the Capitulations impose upon the sovereign
rights of Egypt have a good as well as a bad side. In so far
as they protect the liberties and property of foreigners by
insuring them justice in the courts and immunity from arbitrary
action on the part of the local authorities, their operation is
beneficent. But, on the other hand, by exempting foreigners
* "Capitulations" is the name Riven by Europeans to those concessions which
secured from the early Sultans of Turkey extra-territorial rights to foreigners
residing there, in continuation of similar privileges granted to foreign residents
by the Byzantine Empire. They are unilateral and non-terminable, but liable
to modification by subsequent Treaties. If, however, these latter Treaties are
terminable, the Capitulations revive on the expiration of such Treaties. Pri
marily, they were intended to make it possible for Christians to trade and
reside in the territories of the Ottoman Empire by safeguarding them against
any forms of injustice or ill-usage, to which, as foreigners of a different re
ligion, they might otherwise have been subjected. The Capitulations granted
to Great Britain by the Porte date back to a very early period, but after
various alterations now bear the date of 1675, and were confirmed in the
Treaty of Peace concluded at the Dardanelles in 1809. Capitulations were
granted to France in 1581, 1604, and 1673, and were renewed in 1740. The
Dutch were granted Capitulations in 1612 ; these were renewed in 1680 and
still continue in force. Nearly all the other great Powers obtained similar
concessions from the Porte at one time or another in the course of the last
400 years.
It is in virtue of these unilateral Treaties with the Porte that Capitulations
exist in Egypt. The Powers enjoying them were, before the war, fifteen in
number, viz.. Great Britain, United States of America, France, Italy, Spain,
Holland, Belgium, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Greece, Portugal, Russia, Ger
many, and Austria-Hungary. The privileges of the two latter were terminated
in the recent Treaties of Versailles and St. Germain. In Egypt the rights con
ferred on foreigners by the Capitulations, apart from certain commercial con
cessions, included :immunity from personal taxation without the assent of
their Governments ; inviolability of domicile and protection from arbitrary
arrest ; and exemption from the jurisdiction of the local Courts. Since the
creation of the Mixed Tribunals in 1876. the practical effects of the lastmentioned privilege are that no legislation applicable to foreigners can be
enforced without the consent of the capitulatory Powers, and that civil juris
diction in cases between Europeans and natives or between Europeans of
different nationality is exercised by the Mixed Courts, while criminal juris
diction over Europeans and jurisdiction in civil cases between Europeans of
the same nationality is exercised by the Consular Courts applying the laws
of their own countries. The only internal taxes to which foreigners are at
present liable are the house and land tax.
542
The Nation
from taxation and from the necessity of conforming to local

laws and regulations of an equitable kind, they constitute a
great and unjustifiable hindrance to the progress of the country.
For this reason it is, and always has been, the policy of Great
Britain to get rid of the Capitulations and to substitute for
them a system which, while protecting all legitimate foreign
interests, would put an end to the indefensible privileges which
foreigners now enjoy. Negotiations to secure that object have
for some time been going on between Great Britain and the
other Powers who have capitulatory rights in Egypt. But the
Powers in question cannot be expected to give up these rights
unless they are assured that their nationals can rely on obtain
ing justice and fair treatment in the future. In order to be
able to give them that assurance, Great Britain must be put
into a position enabling her to implement it. Thus it is in
Egypt's own interest to empower Great Britain to act as the
protector of such of the privileges now enjoyed by foreigners in
Egypt as it is just and reasonable to maintain. It is in this
sense that the recognition in the recent peace treaties of Great
Britain's special position in Egypt should be interpreted.
These, in broad outline and reserving details for later ex
planation, are the main features of the settlement by which we
had come to think that relations between Great Britain and
Egypt might in future be regulated. And when we began to
discuss them with those Egyptians, all of more or less advanced
Nationalist opinions, with whom we were in friendly contact,
it was encouraging to find that our suggestions met with a large
measure of sympathy. No doubt the idea of a treaty, of a
settlement arrived at by agreement as between equals, not by
dictation from above, appealed strongly to their sense of being
a distinct people, to their national self-respect. For evidently
that idea involved the recognition, in principle, of the independ
ence of Egypt and was inconsistent with the theory of her being
a British possession. And when they came to consider the con
ditions which in our proposal were attached to this recognition,
they were ready to admit that, however unacceptable to extreme
Nationalists, these conditions were nevertheless such as they
could themselves justify to their countrymen, as being com
patible with their status as a nation. For that status could only
be maintained in fact by the support of Great Britain and Great
Britain was entitled to a reasonable quid pro quo for this in
dispensable support. That she should claim to control the for
eign policy of Egypt and should have the right to maintain, for
her own imperial purposes, a force on Egyptian soil, was no
more than such a quid pro quo. As regards her domestic affairs,
Egypt would be completely self-governing except in respect of
the privileges of foreigners. And the restrictions upon the full
exercise of Egyptian sovereignty which the maintenance of some
of these privileges involved were no greater but less, and far
less irksome, than the restrictions which had always existed.
In view of these practical considerations, it could not be denied
that the proposed arrangement was conceived in the interests,
not only of Great Britain, but of Egypt, and could be defended
as a fair and reasonable basis for future cooperation.
The point of view of the Egyptians of whom we are speaking
can, of course, only be stated in general terms. There was much
discussion between us, and much difference of opinion among
the Egyptians themselves, about details. Interminable and
wearisome argumentation about the meaning of words"pro
tectorate," "sovereignty," "independence," and "complete inde
pendence"occupied much time. But it did not prevent a great
deal of practical consideration of the actual provisions of the
contemplated treaty or indicate that agreement about them was
in any way impossible. On the whole the conversations which
we had while in Egypt left on our minds the impression that
we had made great progress towards a good understanding, and
especially that we had got into a much better atmosphere. The
bitterness and suspicion, with which all Egyptian Nationalists
had recently come to regard Great Britain were beginning to
disappear, and there was a good prospect of gaining the support
[Vol. 112, No. 2910
of the more moderate section for a policy of reconciliation.

But there was a distinct limit to anything which we could
achieve, while still in Egypt, in the shape of definite results.
It was not within our competence to arrange a settlement of
the Egyptian problem. We could only advise as to the best
course to be followed to that end. And the Egyptians with
whom we conversed, one and all, were emphatic in stating that
they were only expressing their individual opinions, and that
they could not claim to speak for the great body of their coun
trymen. Indeed, almost all of them went further, and referred
us to Zaghlul Pasha and his Delegation as being the only men
authorized by general acclamation to represent the Egyptian
people. We ourselves, of course, could not admit that Zaghlul
Pasha and his associates possessed the full measure of authority
thus claimed for them, but neither could we blind ourselves to
the fact that they were for the time being the most powerful
leaders of Egyptian opinion, and that no scheme to which they
were definitely hostile stood any chance of favorable considera
tion, much less of general acceptance. But it was essential,
from our point of view, as we had explained to the Egyptians
from the first, that the treaty which we contemplated, if it was
to have any real value, must be concluded in such a manner as
to make it not only technically but morally binding upon Egypt.
As a matter of form, it would be a treaty between the British
and Egyptian Governments. But an agreement merely between
Governments would not be sufficient. It might always be said
afterwards that the Egyptian Government was not a free agent,
but was bound to accept any terms that Great Britain chose to
impose, and that in any case it was an autocratic Government,
not really representing the Egyptian people. For these reasons
it had always been a fundamental point in our plan that the
treaty should not be allowed to come into force unless it had
been approved by a genuinely representative Egyptian assembly.
This might be the existing legislative assembly, the sittings of
which have been suspended since the outbreak of war, or pref
erably it might be a new body elected ad hoc. It was rather
for the Egyptians than for us to say what kind of assembly
would be in the truest sense representative. But it must in any
case be a popularly elected body, deliberating with perfect free
dom and taking its decision without official or other pressure
of any kind.
In any such assembly, we were assured on all hands, Zaghlul
Pasha and his associates would command a substantial, if not
an overwhelming, majority. In these circumstances it appeared
to us absurd to let any question of etiquette stand in the way
of our engaging in discussion with him, if he was willing to
confer with us. Had we not from the outset invited representa
tive Egyptians to lay their views before us, without prejudice
on either side? And as a matter of fact it seemed likely at one
time that Zaghlul Pasha, who was still in Paris, would return
to Egypt in order to meet the Mission. Great efforts to induce
him to do so were made by the Egyptians who had been con
ferring with us, and some of whom were among his strongest
adherents. Adli Pasha also, who, though himself occupying an
independent position was in friendly relations with Zaghlul and
was most anxious to effect a meeting between him and us, lent
his powerful influence to second these efforts. But Zaghlul
Pasha did not as yet see his way to respond to these appeals and
though numerous communications passed between him and his
friends in Egypt during the latter portion of our stay he re
mained for the time being in Paris.
The position, therefore, at the time when we left Egypt was
as follows : We had obtained, from British and Egyptian sources,
a vast amount of information about existing conditions; we had
had ample opportunities of making ourselves acquainted with
the state of public feeling; and we had formed our own opinion
as to the policy best calculated to reconcile British and Egyptian
interests. But we were not yet in a position to say whether the
scheme which we had in our minds, even if it commended itself
to British opinion, was likely to command sufficient support in
The Nation
April 13, 1921]
543
Egypt to make it worth while to attempt a settlement on our

lines. All we could do, therefore, was to report on the situation
again they declared that it was impossible for them to accept

some proposal or other made by us, the fairness of which they
as we had found it, to indicate the conclusions to which our
did not directly dispute, because it was inconsistent with the
inquiries had led us, and to express the hope that the better
mandate which they had received from the Egyptian people.

It was useless to point out to them that the alleged mandate
was really their own program which the Egyptian public had
simply accepted from them, and that there was nothing to pre
vent their modifying a policy of their own creation. The reply
always was, that they had no authority to depart from claims
which, even if originally put forward by themselves, had been
enthusiastically indorsed by a great majority of their country
men. The war cries of the past eighteen months were, indeed,
understanding between British and Egyptians, of which we saw
some promising signs, would ultimately make it possible to

determine the future status of Egypt by mutual agreement.
III.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE MISSION AFTER LEAVING EGYPT

Discussions with Egyptian Delegates in London
We left Egypt at the end of the first week of March,

traveling by different routes, and met again in London
about the middle of April, with the view of drawing up
a perpetual stumbling-block, and while in the course of our dis
our report. But soon after we had begun to do so, a new and
not wholly unexpected development of the situation caused us
to interrupt our work in the hope of being able to obtain fuller
information with regard to the capital point on which, when
leaving Egypt, we had still remained in doubt. That point,
as already explained, was the attitude likely to be adopted by
the chief exponents of nationalist opinion toward the policy
which we were ourselves disposed to advise the British Govern
ment to adopt. A prospect, however, now presented itself of
clearing up this point of doubt by the Mission coming into direct
contact with Zaghlul Pasha.
At the end of April Adli Pasha, who commands the universal
respect of his countrymen and whose advice had been of the
greatest value to us in Egypt, paid a visit to Paris, and at once
put himself into communication with Zaghlul Pasha with the
object of bringing about a meeting between him and the Mis
sion. Early in May we became aware that, largely owing to
Adli Pasha's good offices, Zaghlul Pasha and the Delegation were
now disposed to abandon their former attitude and enter into
direct relations with the Mission. Accordingly, during the third
week in May, Mr. (now Sir Cecil) Hurst, who happened to be
in Paris, conveyed to them an invitation to meet the Mission in
London. Zaghlul Pasha, having satisfied himself that by so do
ing he would not compromise his position as the advocate of
Egyptian independence, arrived in London on June 7. He was
accompanied by seven members of the Delegation, who were sub
sequently joined by one or two of their colleagues.
cussions we were often very near agreement on points of sub
Then followed a series of conversations which, with frequent
stance, it was always difficult to clothe such agreement in words
which did not conflict with formulae to which the Egyptians

felt themselves committed.
The idea of a treaty between Great Britain and Egypt was

readily accepted. That was our starting-point, and without it
we should have made little progress. But when it came to dis
cussing those terms of the treaty which embodied the few but
essential safeguards for British and foreign interests, the Egyp

tians were always extremely apprehensive of agreeing to some
thing which might conflict with their ideal of independence. As
a matter of fact, our proposals did not conflict with that ideal
reasonably interpretedas the Egyptians themselves, or at any

rate some of them, were ready to admit. But there was always
the fear in their minds that their countrymen would not take
the same view, and that they would be regarded in Egypt as
having betrayed the national cause.
In spite of these difficulties one obstacle after another was
gradually surmounted, and we finally succeeded in drafting the

outlines of a settlement with which both parties were more or
less satisfied. This result was only achieved by considerable
concessions on the part of the Mission. On one point in par
ticular, to which we shall presently refer at greater length, we
acquiesced in a claim on the part of the Egyptians which we
were at first disposed to resist, because we were assured that
the admission of that claim would do more than anything else to

gratify popular sentiment in Egypt. This concession seemed to
us not too high a price to pay if it secured the cordial acceptance

of the scheme as a whole by the Egyptian people.
interruptions due to the fact that several of the members of the

Mission were now busily engaged in other work, lasted till the
middle of August. These prolonged discussions took a variety
of forms. There were a number of meetings at which the Mis
sion, as a body, met Zaghlul Pasha and his companions, Adli
Moreover,
we were bound to recognize that the delegates also were ready

to give up a good deal of what they had originally demanded,
in their anxiety to come to a good understanding with the
Mission.
The compromise thus reached was one which commended it

Pasha being also present. From time to time, points which it
was found difficult to discuss in so large a body were referred
to committees consisting of a few members of either party, and
these to some extent cleared the ground. Moreover, there was,
in the interval between formal meetings, a great deal of useful

private discussion between individual members of the Mission
and one or more of the Egyptians. It would serve no useful
purpose to try and give an account of the many changing phases
of this lengthy debate, but it is necessary to indicate its gen

eral character.
In the first place, we record with pleasure that very friendly

relations were maintained from first to last, and that even when
differences of opinion were sharpest the controversy was always

conducted in an amicable spirit. There was never any doubt in
our minds that our visitors were as sincerely anxious as we
were ourselves to find a way out of the difficulties of the situa
tion. But they were to some extent hamperedand this is
especially true of Zaghlul Pasha himselfby the uncompromis

ing line which they had taken in the recent past, when they be
lieved that there was an unbridgeable gulf between Egyptian
aspirations and the policy of Great Britain. They had no doubt
come to recognize by this time that they had misunderstood that
policy, but it was not easy for them to readjust their position to
suit their altered view of British intentions.
Over and over
self to us on its merits subject to one essential condition. That

condition was that Zaghlul and his associates would undertake
to use all their influence to obtain its acceptance by the people

of Egypt, and ultimately to get a treaty giving effect to it ap
proved by an Egyptian popular assembly. This, as it seemed to
us, was no more than we had a right to ask of them. We could
not, indeed, expect them to promise that their efforts would be
successful, any more than we could ourselves promise that our
advice would be approved by the British Government and the
British people. What we did demand was that they should
commit themselves to supporting wholeheartedly the result of
our joint efforts. For unless they did this, it was too much to
hope that the settlement would be rightly understood, much less
cordially welcomed, in Egypt. Yet it would be idle for us, if
we could not cherish that hope, to recommend it ourselves as a
solution of the Egyptian problem. The British people, we be
lieved, would be quite willing to accord very generous terms to
Egypt, but only if they were convinced that those terms would
be gratefully accepted and would lead to permanently improved
relations and hearty cooperation between them and the Egyp
tians in the future.
Zaghlul Pasha and his friends were, however, not yet pre
pared to commit themselves to this extent. They were evidently
still nervous of being repudiated by a considerable number of
The Nation
544
their followers in Egypt. They accordingly kept on suggesting

further modifications of the terms so far agreed to, mainly on
points of form, with the view of making them more acceptable

to Egyptian opinion. But we had now gone as far as we deemed
wise in the way of concession. For we, too, as we did not fail
to point out, had to reckon with public opinion, and it was no
use to agree to anything, with a view of pleasing the Egyptians,
which would lead to the rejection of the whole scheme in Great
Britain. We seemed, therefore, after all, to have reached an
impasse.
The Memorandum of August 18, 1920
[Vol. 112, No. 2910
Great Britain and Egypt should be precisely defined, and the

privileges and immunities now enjoyed in Egypt by the capitu
latory Powers should be modified and rendered less injurious
to the interests of the country.
2. These ends cannot be achieved without further negotia
tions between accredited representatives of the British and

Egyptian Governments respectively in the one case, and between
the British Government and the governments of the capitula
tory Powers in the other case. Such negotiations will be di
rected to arriving at definite agreements on the following lines:
3. (a) As between Egypt and Great Britain a treaty will be
entered into, under which Great Britain will recognize the in
At this stage, however, it was suggested on the Egyptian side
the great advantages which Egypt would derive from it. If,
as they hoped, they met with a favorable reception, this would
dependence of Egypt as a constitutional monarchy with repre

sentative institutions, and Egypt will confer upon Great Britain
such rights as are necessary to safeguard her special interests
and to enable her to furnish the guaranties which must be
given to foreign Powers to secure the relinquishment of their
capitulatory rights.
(b) By the same treaty, an alliance will be concluded be
constitute a mandate from the people which would justify the
tween Great Britain and Egypt, by which Great Britain will
Delegation, on the return of the emissaries, in pledging itself

to give our proposals an unconditional support. Zaghlul Pasha
undertake to support Egypt in defending the integrity of her

territory, and Egypt will undertake, in case of war, even when
the integrity of Egypt is not affected, to render to Great Britain
all the assistance in her power, within her own borders, includ
ing the use of her harbors, aerodromes, and means of communi
that the discussion should be temporarily suspended in order

that some members of the Delegation might have time to visit
Egypt, to explain to the public of that country the nature
of the
settlement which the Mission was disposed to recommend and
himself was not disposed to undertake the journey, but he ap
proved of the idea, and three or four of his companions were

willing to go.
This proposal had obvious advantages from the Egyptian

point of view. For it would enable the emissaries to advocate
the acceptance of certain terms without being absolutely com
mitted to them, and thus running the risk of finding themselves
isolated from the bulk of their party in case those terms met
with an unfavorable reception. But it had advantages for us
also, inasmuch as the general public discussion, which was bound
to ensue, would enable us to gauge Egyptian opinion more com
pletely than had yet been possible, and to judge of the com
parative strength of moderate and extreme Nationalists. A
memorandum was accordingly drawn upthe last of a series
of efforts to reduce the result of our discussions to a definite
shapewhich laid down in general terms the main features of

the settlement, which, on the condition already specified, the
Mission would be disposed to recommend. The object of the
memorandum was to enable the emissaries to elicit an expres
sion of Egyptian public opinion.
This document, which pres
ently came to be known as the Milner-Zaghlul Agreement, but

which, on the face of it, was not an agreement but merely an
outline of the bases on which an agreement might subsequently

be framed, was handed by Lord Milner to Adli Pasha, who, as
an intermediary between the two parties, had had a large share

in all our negotiations, to be communicated by him to Zaghlul
Pasha and his friends. It was understood that they might make
free use of it in public discussion in Egypt. It was dated Au
-gust 18 and was in the following terms:
The accompanying memorandum is the result of conversa
tions held in London in June to August, 1920, between Lord

Milner and the members of the Special Mission to Egypt, and
Zaghlul Pasha and the members of the Egyptian Delegation,
in which conversations Adli Pasha also took part. It outlines
a policy for the settlement of the Egyptian question in the best
interests both of Great Britain and Egypt.
The members of the Mission are prepared to recommend the
British Government to adopt the policy indicated in the memo
randum, if they are satisfied that Zaghlul Pasha and the Dele
gation are likewise prepared to advocate it, and will use all
their influence to obtain the assent of an Egyptian National

Assembly to the conclusion of such a treaty as is contemplated
in Articles 3 and 4.
It is clear that unless both parties are cordially united in

supporting it, the policy here suggested cannot be pursued with
success.
(Signed)
cation for military purposes.
4. This treaty will embody stipulations to the following

effect:
(a) Egypt will enjoy the right to representation in foreign

countries.
In the absence of any duly accredited Egyptian
representative, the Egyptian Government will confide its inter

ests to the care of the British representative. Egypt will un
dertake not to adopt in foreign countries an attitude which is
inconsistent with the alliance or will create difficulties for Great
Britain, and will also undertake not to enter into any agreement
with a foreign Power which is prejudicial to British interests.
(b) Egypt will confer on Great Britain the right to main
tain a military force on Egyptian soil for the protection of her
Imperial communications. The treaty will fix the place where

the force shall be quartered and will regulate any subsidiary
matters which require to be arranged. The presence of this
force shall not constitute in any manner a military occupation
of the country, or prejudice the rights of the Government of
Egypt.
(c) Egypt will appoint, in concurrence with His Majesty's

Government, a financial adviser, to whom shall be intrusted in
due course the powers at present exercised by the Commis
sioners of the Debt, and who will be at the disposal of the
Egyptian Government for all other matters on which they may
desire to consult him.
(d) Egypt will appoint, in concurrence with His Majesty's

Government, an official in the Ministry of Justice, who shall
enjoy the right of access to the Minister. He shall be kept fully
informed on all matters connected with the administration of
the law as affecting foreigners, and will also be at the disposal

of the Egyptian Government for consultation on any matter
connected with the efficient maintenance of law and order.
(e) In view of the contemplated transfer to His Majesty's
Government of the rights hitherto exercised under the regime

of the Capitulations by the various foreign governments, Egypt
recognizes the right of Great Britain to intervene, through her
representative in Egypt, to prevent the application to for
eigners of any Egyptian law now requiring foreign consent, and
Great Britain on her side undertakes not to exercise this right
except in the case of laws operating inequitably against
foreigners.
Alternative:
MILNER
Memorandum
1. In order to establish the independence of Egypt on a se

-cure and lasting basis, it is necessary that the relations between
In view of the contemplated transfer to His Majesty's Gov

ernment of the rights hitherto exercised under the regime of the
Capitulations by the various foreign governments, Egypt recog

nizes the right of Great Britain to intervene, through her repre
April 13, 1921]
The Nation
sentative in Egypt, to prevent the application to foreigners of

any Egyptian law now requiring foreign consent, and Great
Britain on her side undertakes not to exercise this right except
in the case of laws inequitably discriminating against foreigners
in the matter of taxation, or inconsistent with the principles
of legislation common to all the capitulatory Powers.
"(f) On account of the special relations between Great Brit
ain and Egypt created by the alliance, the British representa
tive will be accorded an exceptional position in Egypt and will
be entitled to precedence over all other representatives.
" (g) The engagements of British and other foreign officers
and administrative officials who entered into the service of the
Egyptian Government before the coming into force of the treaty
may be terminated, at the instance of either the officials them
selves or the Egyptian Government, at any time within two
years after the coming into force of the treaty. The pension
or compensation to be accorded to officials retiring under this
provision, in addition to that provided by the existing law, shall
be determined by the treaty. In cases where no advantage is
taken of this arrangement existing terms of service will remain
unaffected.
"5. This treaty will be submitted to the approval of a con
stituent assembly, but it will not come into force until after the
agreements with foreign Powers for the closing of their Con
sular Courts and the decrees for the reorganization of the Mixed
Tribunals have come into operation.
"6. This constituent assembly will also be charged with the
duty of framing a new organic statute, in accordance with the
provisions of which the Government of Egypt will in future be
conducted. This statute will embody provisions for the Minis
ters being responsible to the Legislature. It will also provide
for religious toleration for all persons and for the due protec
tion of the rights of foreigners.
"7. The necessary modifications in the regime of the Capitu
lations will be secured by agreements to be concluded by Great
Britain with the various capitulatory Powers. These agree
ments will provide for the closing of the foreign Consular
Courts, so as to render possible the reorganization and extension
of the jurisdiction of the Mixed Tribunals and the application
to all foreigners in Egypt of the legislation (including legisla
tion imposing taxation) enacted by the Egyptian Legislature.
"8. These agreements will provide for the transfer to His
Majesty's Government of the rights previously exercised under
the regime of the Capitulations by the various foreign govern
ments. They will also contain stipulations to the following
effect:
"(a) No attempt will be made to discriminate against the
nationals of a Power which agrees to close its Consular Courts,
and such nationals shall enjoy in Egypt the same treatment as
British subjects.
"(b) The Egyptian Nationality Law will be founded on the
jus sanguinis, so that the children born in Egypt of a foreigner
will enjoy the nationality of their father, and will not be claimed
as Egyptian subjects.
" (c) Consular officers of the foreign Powers shall be accorded
by Egypt the same status as foreign consuls enjoy in England.
"(d) Existing treaties and conventions to which Egypt is a
party on matters of commerce and navigation, including postal
and telegraphic conventions, will remain in force. Pending the
conclusion of special agreements to which she is a party, Egypt
will apply the treaties in force between Great Britain and the
foreign Power concerned on questions affected by the closing of
the Consular Courts, such as extradition treaties, treaties for
the surrender of seamen deserters, etc., as also treaties of a
political nature, whether multilateral or bilateral, e.g., arbitra
tion conventions and the various conventions relating to the
conduct of hostilities.
"(e) The liberty to maintain schools and to teach the lan
guage of the foreign country concerned will be guaranteed, pro
vided that such schools are subject in all respects to the laws
applicable generally to European schools in Egypt.
545
"(f) The liberty to maintain or organize religious and chari

table foundations, such as hospitals, etc., will also be guaranteed.
"The treaties will also provide for the necessary changes in
the Commission of the Debt and the elimination of the inter
national element in the Alexandria Board of Health.
"9. The legislation rendered necessary by the aforesaid agree
ments between Great Britain and the foreign Powers will be
effected by decrees to be issued by the Egyptian Government.
"A decree shall be enacted at the same time validating all
measures, legislative, administrative or judicial, taken under
Martial Law.
"10. The decrees for the reorganization of the Mixed Tri
bunals will provide for conferring upon these tribunals all juris
diction hitherto exercised by the foreign Consular Courts, while
leaving the jurisdiction of the Native Courts untouched.
"11. After the coming into force of the treaty referred to in
Article 3, Great Britain will communicate its terms to foreign
Powers and will support an application by Egypt for admission
as a member of the League of Nations.
"August 18, 1920."
The Policy of the Memorandum
1. Representation of Egypt in Foreign Countries
The policy of the above document in its general character is in
accordance with the conclusions at which, for the reasons al
ready given, we had arrived before leaving Egypt. But, as a
result of our discussions with Zaghlul Pasha and his associates,
we were now prepared to go somewhat further. The most im
portant point on which we were led by their arguments to
modify our earlier view is one to which the memorandum gives
especial prominence, viz., the right of Egypt to appoint her own
representatives in foreign countries. It has always been, and is,
from our point of view, a fundamental principle that the for
eign relations of Egypt should be under the general direction
of Great Britain. All reasonable Egyptians, however strongly
Nationalist, recognize the immense value of the security which
an alliance with Great Britain would afford them. But it is
obviously impossible to expect that Great Britain should shoul
der the responsibility of defending the integrity and indepen
dence of Egypt against all possible dangers, if that country were
free to pursue a policy of her own in foreign affairs inconsis
tent with or prejudicial to the policy of Great Britain. This
axiom none of the Egyptians with whom we were dealing ever
attempted to dispute. They were quite preparedin a treaty
of allianceto give whatever pledges might be necessary to
exclude the possibility of any action on the part of Egypt which
could cause embarrassment to her great ally. There was, in
deed, no difference of opinion on this point in the course of our
discussions, and the words of the memorandum dealing with it
appear to us to make the complete understanding which existed
with regard to the subject sufficiently clear. For in this, as in
other respects, it must always be borne in mind that in draw
ing up the memorandum we were not attempting to draft a
treaty but simply to express in ordinary language the ideas
which a treaty, to be subsequently negotiated, would express
with much more detail and in terms of greater precision.
The real issue here was not whether Egypt should be free to
follow a foreign policy independent of Great Britainthe im
possibility of our assenting to this was not disputedbut
whether this principle necessarily involved the conduct of all
her foreign relations remaining in British hands.
This was a question upon which we had already, before dis
cussing it with the Egyptians at all, come to a very definite
conclusion. In our opinion British control should be limited
to Egypt's political relations. Egyptian commercial or other
interests of a non-political character in foreign countries had
better be left in Egyptian hands. These interests are numer
ous and growing. The development of commerce and communi
cations, the rapidly increasing number of Egyptians who now
travel or reside abroad, especially in Western Europe, and the
multifarious connections which they form there constitute a
546
The Nation
need for a certain amount of official protection. If the duty of

looking after all Egyptian private interests abroad is to con
tinue to fall upon British diplomatic and consular agents, it will
become an excessive burden. And the inevitable failure to dis
charge that duty to the satisfaction of the Egyptians will be a
constant source of grievance. For these reasons it seemed to us
from the first to be eminently desirable that Egypt should ap
point representatives of her own in foreign countries.
But what we originally contemplated was that these Egyptian
representatives should have only consular and not diplomatic
status. It was on this point that during our discussions in
London we came, not without hesitation, to adopt a different
view. The Egyptians were all absolutely unanimous in main
taining that the denial of diplomatic status to the representa
tives of Egypt vitiated the idea of an alliance and would make
the settlement we were contemplating entirely unacceptable to
their countrymen. And in this assertion we believed them to be
justified. For, even while in Egypt, we had realized that all
Egyptians, including the Sultan and his Ministers, however
much they were divided on other questions, were united in their
desire for the diplomatic representation of their country abroad.
It was a sore point with all of them that, when declaring the
Protectorate, we had dispensed with an Egyptian Minister for
Foreign Affairs and placed the Egyptian Foreign Office, with
which it was found impossible to dispense, under the High Com
missioner. The hope was universal that, when the time came
to put the relations of Great Britain and Egypt on a permanent
footing, we should allow the Ministry for Foreign Affairs once
more to have an Egyptian chief and foreign representatives, as
of old, to be directly accredited to the ruler of Egypt. And
on the same principle it was hoped that, now that Turkish
suzerainty had disappeared, Egyptian representatives in those
foreign countries to which it might be necessary to send them
would enjoy a similar status to that of foreign representatives in
Egypt. In this matter, therefore, we could have no doubt that the
Egyptian delegates were speaking for all their countrymen. And
indeed they were most emphatic in declaring that, unless we
could meet them on this point, there was no prospect of settling
the future relations between Great Britain and Egypt by the
method of agreement. On the other hand this recognition of
the status of Egypt would, as they affirmed, be so great a satis
faction to national pride that it would make the acceptance of
all our other conditions easy. And what, they asked, were we
afraid of? We recognized that Egypt had many interests of
her own in foreign countries, which could best be looked after by
Egyptians. There was no advantage to Great Britain in with
holding from the men intrusted with the care of those interests
the dignity of diplomatic status. For they could not take any
action injurious to British interests or conflicting with British
policy, without breaking the treaty, which, as had already been
agreed between us, was to be so drafted as to preclude the
possibility of such action. Moreover, the number of Egypt's
diplomatic representatives abroad would be very limited. Egypt
did not desire, and could not afford, to have such representatives
in more than a few countries. The fact that everywhere else
Egyptian interests would be intrusted to the care of Great Brit
ain marked the specially intimate character of the relations be
tween the two countries.
We could not but feel that these were weighty considerations.
At the same time it was evident, as we strongly insisted, that
the presence of Egyptian diplomatists, even in a few European
capitals, and of foreign diplomatists in Cairo, would afford op
portunities for intrigue, which might lead to much trouble. The
very fact that these diplomatists would, in the political sphere,
have really nothing to do might tempt them to justify their
existence by transgressing their proper functions. But the dele
gates would not admit that there was any real danger of this
happening. Their view was that, satisfied with the position
acquired by Egypt under the treaty, the Egyptians would be
the last to favor intrigues which might give other foreign na
tions an opportunity of interfering in their country by first
[Vol. 112, No. 2910
making mischief between them and Great Britain. The greatest

safeguard which we could have against such machinations was
the fact that the Egyptians themselves would be whole-heart
edly in favor of an alliance which fully recognized their national
status and dignity.
Such were the arguments which led us to reconsider our po
sition on the question of diplomatic status. In so doing we
were well aware, and we frankly told the delegates, that this
was a concession which might alarm public opinion in this
country and imperil the acceptance of the agreement as a whole
by the British people. And, judging from the unfavorable com
ments which this proposal has already excited in many quarters,
it is evident that we were not mistaken in anticipating that it
would meet with serious opposition. Nevertheless, we remain
of opinion that the balance of argument is decisively in its
favor. So long as bitterness and friction continue to exist be
tween Great Britain and Egypt, we shall always be exposed to"
the hostility of Egyptians in foreign countries. Associations
for the purpose of anti-British propaganda have been actively
at work for a number of years in Switzerland, France, Ger
many, and Italy. There is no remedy for this, except in re
storing friendly relations and we rely on the whole policy heTe
proposed to have this effect. If that result is achieved there
will, in our opinion, be positive advantages in giving diplomatic
status to Egyptian representatives abroad. For if, as is only
to be expected, a certain number of irreconcilables are still left
to carry on the campaign against Great Britain, the official
representatives of Egypt will be bound to try to restrain them.
No Egyptian Minister could do otherwise than discountenance
activities on the part of his own countrymen, directed against
Egypt's ally, without failing in his duty and rendering him
self liable to be recalled.
2. The Defense op Imperial Communications
The supreme importance which the delegates attached to the
question of national status was once more strongly in evidence
when we came to deal with Great Britain's strategic interest in
Egyptthe protection of her Imperial communications. To
Great Britainas an allythey thought that Egypt could, with
out indignity, accord a base in Egyptian territory, "a strong
place of arms," a point cTappui in the chain of her Imperial de
fenses, linking East and West. They were not averse from the
idea that Great Britain, in case of war, should have the com
mand of Egyptian resources, and especially of all means of com
munication, railways, aerodromes, etc., for the conduct of mili
tary operations. Such a stipulation was even welcome as em
phasizing the "bilateral" character of the agreement between
the two countries, inasmuch as Egypt would be giving some
thing in exchange for what she got. As by a treaty of alliance
Great Britain would be undertaking to defend Egypt, it was
only fair that Egypt should do something to assist the British
Empire if Great Britain was engaged in a war, even a war in
which Egypt was not directly interested.
A more difficult point was the maintenance of a British mili
tary force in Egypt in time of peace. But here again it was
not so much the numbers of the force in question which inter
ested the Egyptians as its character. As long as it was not
there as an "Army of Occupation," as a force intended to "keep
order" in Egypt, which was merely another way of saying to
keep Egypt in subjection, but was maintained for an external
object, the defense of the British Empire, the presence of a Brit
ish force in Egypt was justifiable from their point of view.
The question of the strength of that force was never raised in
the course of the discussion. It was recognized that this de
pended on external conditions and, apart from what would be
necessary if Egypt was herself in danger, might vary with the
varying exigencies of Imperial defense. The great point was
that it should not be regarded in any sense as a garrison of
Egypt. The maintenance of internal order was a matter for the
Egyptians themselves.
In order to emphasize this aspect of the case the delegates
urged very strongly that the force in question should be sta-
April 13, 1921]
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Let America Speak
The American Commission On Conditions In Ireland has

rendered its report, based on the testimony of 38 English,
Scotch, Irish and American witnesses, supported by sworn
affidavits and depositions.
The British Ambassador to America, after rejecting the
Commission's invitation to present oral or written statements
of fact, and after refusing to vise passports for members of
the Commission delegated to gather facts first-hand from
English as well as Irish sources, now brands as "biased and
wholly misleading" the conclusions of the Commission as
embodied in its Report.
This Is the Most Crucial Moral Issue
of the Generation
If the verdict of the Commission be true, then the mighty
Empire by whose side we fought in the Great War to vindi
cate the rights of self-determination and free government for
small nations stands convicted of the shameless use of mili
tary force to suppress these rights when asserted by a subject
nation at her own door.
If the allegations of the British Ambassador be true, then
the American Commission On Conditions In Ireland is guilty
of violating the high confidence reposed in it, and of wilfully
deceiving the American people.
The American Commission On Conditions In Ireland has
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Then let America speak.
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HISTORY OF THE GREAT WAR

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548
tioned on the bank of the Suez Canal and preferably on its east
ern side. But to this it was quite impossible for us to agree.
For, in the first place, the presence of British troops in the neu
tral "canal zone" would be calculated to raise trouble with other
Powers interested in that international waterway. The neu
trality of the canal is guaranteed by international agreements
and the permanent occupation of the canal zone by troops of any
single Power might be challenged as a breach of that neutrality.
Moreover, Great Britain's strategic interest in Egypt is not
limited to securing a free passage through the Suez Canal.
"The defense of her Imperial communications" involves much
more than that. For Egypt is becoming more and more a
"nodal point" in the complex of those communications by land
and air as well as by sea. In face of these considerations the
idea of fixing Kantara, or some other spot in the canal zone,
as the site of a cantonment had to be abandoned and, the prin
ciple of the maintenance of a British military force in Egypt
having been admitted, the question where that force should be
stationed was left opento be settled, with other details, in the
official negotiations for the conclusion of the contemplated treaty.
The British Coal Crisis

THE British bill providing that government control of
the coal industry should cease on March 31, 1921, was
the immediate cause of the disputes leading up to the
present strike. The coal industry has suffered severely
owing to a decrease in exports during the past months and
the Government consequently decided to terminate its con
trol in order to avoid the burden of subsidizing the indus
try. Shortly after the publication of the "decontrol" bill,
the mine owners announced new wage schedules which
after much discussion and many counter proposals were re
jected by the men. The summary of the "decontrol" bill,
as published in the London Morning Post for March 5, read
as follows, with the full text of the operative clause:
The bill provides that there shall be two pooling periods for
that Act [the Coal Mines (Emergency) Act of 1920] which
received the Royal Assent on March 31 lastthe first from
then up to the end of last year and the second from January 1
of this year onwards, that is, to the 31st inst Under the
original Act, after the standard profit had been paid onetenth of the excess was paid to the undertakings. That pro
vision is to be abrogated. The original Act also provided that
if the aggregated profits were less than nine-tenths of the
standard, the sum should be made up to the standard. For
the second pooling period, coal levy and coal award are to be
calculated with reference to "nine-tenths of the standard" in
stead of with reference to "the standard," which means that if
there is any loss it will only be made good up to nine-tenths
of the standard.
The Operative Clause
I.
1. The Coal Mines (Emergency) Act, 1920, as amended by
any subsequent enactment, shall, so far as it is limited in dura
tion, continue in force until the thirty-first day of March, nine
teen hundred and twenty-one, and no longer, and the expres
sion "the period of the operation of this Act" wherever it oc
curs in the said Act shall be construed accordingly.
2. For the purpose of the provisions of the said Act relating
to the pooling of profits, the period of the operation of the Act
shall be divided into two periods, the one ending on the thirtyfirst day of December, nineteen hundred and twenty, and the
other commencing on the first day of January, nineteen hundred
and twenty-one, and the said provisions shall, in relation to each
pooling period, have effect as if for references therein to the
period of the operation of the Act there were substituted ref
erences to the pooling period in question.
[Vol. 112, No. 2910
3. If, in either of the said pooling periods, the amount of the

aggregate profits of all the undertakings, after such deduction
or addition as is mentioned in subsection 2, of section I of the
said Act exceeds the aggregate of the total standards of all
the undertakings, no part of the profits in excess of such aggre
gate shall be distributable amongst the several undertakings;
and, accordingly, proviso (1) of subsection 1 of section I of the
said Act shall have effect as if the words "plus one-tenth part
of such excess" were omitted therefrom.
4. In relation to the second pooling period, coal levy and
coal award shall be calculated with reference to nine-tenths of
the standard instead of with reference to the standard, as if in
paragraph (a) of subsection 1 of section II of the said Act
for the words "the standard" wherever they occur in that para
graph there were substituted the words "nine-tenths of the
standard."
5. Paragraphs 2, 3, and 5 of the First Schedule to the Coal
Mines (Emergency) Act, 1920, and as from the first day of
April, nineteen hundred and twenty-one, section three of the
Mining Industry Act, 1920, shall be repealed.
The mine owners' offer, finally rejected by the workers,
who demand a standardization of wages throughout the
country, was published in the London Times on March 19.
It being agreed that wages in the industry must depend upon
the financial ability to pay, the owners propose that the fol
lowing principles be adopted by the Mining Association of
Great Britain and the Miners' Federation of Great Britain for
application to the determination of the wages payable in each
district upon the financial position of such district:
1. That the base rates now existing at each colliery with the
percentages, or the equivalents in any district where there has
been a subsequent merging into new standards, which were
paid in July, 1914, shall be regarded as the point below
which wages shall not be automatically reduced. [Note. All
additions which have since been made to the base rates pre
vailing in July, 1914, shall be maintained and the percentages
which have been added to pieceworkers' rates consequent upon
the reduction in hours from eight to seven shall continue.]
2. That the owners' aggregate standard profits in each dis
trict in correspondence with the above shall be taken as 17 per
cent of the aggregate amount of wages payable as above.
3. That any surplus remaining of the proceeds of the sale of
coal at the pit head after such wages and profits and all other
costs have been taken into account shall be divisible as to 75
per cent to the workmen and 25 per cent to the owners, the
workmen's share being expressed as a percentage upon the
standard rate of the district. [Note. To meet the present ab
normal situation the owners are prepared to accept a tempo
rary departure from the strict application of the above prin
ciples to the extent of waiving their share of the surplus in
favor of the workmen on condition that ascertainments are
made at monthly periods to determine the wages payable dur
ing such time as the above concession on the part of the own
ers continues to operate.]
4. That if during any period of ascertainment the owners'
standard profit is not realized the amount of the deficiency
shall be carried forward as a prior charge against any surplus
available for the payment of wages in excess of the basis of
wages provided in No. 1 aboveContributors to This Issue
Donald Bryant is the pseudonym of a Washington cor
respondent who, for several years, has devoted himself
to a study of State Department affairs.
Robert Frost, one of the most distinguished of American
poets, is the author of three volumes of verse which
distil into a few short poems all the substance which for
forty years has gone into the local color short stories
of New England.
Spring
The
Book
Pauper
Supplement
Witch
of Grafton
By ROBERT FROST
Now that they've got it settled whose I be,
I'm going to tell them something they won't like :
They've got it settled wrong, and I can prove it.
Flattered I must be to have two towns fighting
To make a present of me to each other.
They don't dispose me, either one of them,
To spare them any trouble. Double trouble's
Always the witch's motto anyway.
I'll double theirs for both of themyou watch me.
They'll find they've got the whole thing to do over,
That is, if facts is what they want to go by.
They set a lot (now don't they?) by a record
Of Arthur Amy's having once been up
For hog reeve in March Meeting here in Warren.
I could have told them any time this twelve month
The Arthur Amy I was married to
Couldn't have been the one they say was up
In Warren at March Meeting for the reason
He wa'n't but fifteen at the time they say.
The Arthur Amy I was married to
Voted the only times he ever voted,
Which wasn't many, in the town of Wentworth.
One of the times was when 'twas in the warrant
To see if the town wanted to take over
The tote road to our clearing where we lived.
I'll tell you who'd rememberHeman Lapish.
Their Arthur Amy was the father of mine.
So now they've dragged it through the law courts once
I guess they'd better drag it through again.
Wentworth and Warren's both good towns to live in,
Only I happen to prefer to live
In Wentworth from now on; and when all's said
Right's right, and the temptation to do right
When I can hurt someone by doing it
Has always been too much for me, it has.
I know of some folks that'd be set up
At having in their town a noted witch:
But most would have to think of the expense
That even I would be. They ought to know
That, as a witch, I'd often milk a bat
And that'd be enough to last for days.
It'd make my position stronger, think,
If I was to consent to give some sign
To make it surer that I was a witch?
It wa'n't no sign, I s'pose, when Mallice Huse
Said that I took him out in his old age
And rode all over everything on him
Until I'd had him worn to skin and bones,
And if I'd left him hitched unblanketed
In front of one town hall, I'd left him hitched
In front of every one in Grafton County.
Some cried shame on me not to blanket him,
The poor old man. It would have been all right
If someone hadn't said to gnaw the posts
He stood beside and leave his trade mark on them,

So they could recognize them. Not a post
That they could hear tell of was scarified.
They made him keep on gnawing till he whined.
Then that same smarty someone said to look
He'd bet Huse was a cribber and had gnawed
The crib he slept inand as sure's you're born
They found he'd gnawed the four posts of his bed,
All four of them to splinters. What did that prove?
Not that he hadn't gnawed the hitching posts
He said he had besides. Because a horse
Gnaws in the stable ain't no proof to me
He don't gnaw trees and posts and fences, too.
But everybody took it for a proof.
I was a strapping girl of twenty then.
The smarty someone who spoiled everything
Was Arthur Amy. You know who he was.
That was the way he started courting me.
He never said much after we were married,
But I mistrusted he was none too proud
Of having interfered in the Huse business.
I guess he found he got more out of me
By having me a witch. Or something happened
To turn him round. He got to saying things
To undo what he'd done and make it right,
Like "No she ain't come back from kiting yet.
Last night was one of her nights out. She's kiting.
She thinks when the wind makes a night of it
She might as well herself." But he liked best
To let on he was plagued to death with me:
If anyone had seen me coming home
Over the ridge-pole stride of a broomstick
As often as he had in the tail of the night
He guessed they'd know what he had to put up with.
Well, I showed Arthur Amy signs enough
Off from the house as far as we could keep
And from barn smells you can't wash out of ploughed ground
With all the rain and snow of seven years;
And I don't mean just skulls of Rogers Rangers
On Mooselauke, but woman signs to man,
Only bewitched so I would last him longer.
Up where the trees grow short, the mosses tall,
I made him gather me wet snow berries
On slippery rocks beside a waterfall.
I made him do it for me in the dark.
And he liked everything I made him do.
I hope if he is where he sees me now
He's so far off he can't see what I've come to.
You can come down from everything to nothing.
All is, if I'd aknown when I was young
And full of it, that this would be the end,
It doesn't seem as if I'd had the courage
To make so free and kick up in folks' faces.
I might have, but it doesn't seem as if.
550
The Nation
The
Progress
of
Poetry:
[Vol. 112, No. 2910
Germany
By LUDWIG LEWISOHN
ROMANTIC poetry, allied both to the living influence of
the folk-song and to the strong inwardness of the
national psychology, persisted later in German than in any
other literature. It is only in the last of the major ro
mantic poets, Eduard Morike, that we find the pure mood
of romanticism occasionally crinkled by conceits or hardened
by self-consciousness. Within his lifetime, moreover, the
main stream of romantic verse grew broad and shallow;
the minor writers turned from the difficult lyric to the
easy tale, and during the third quarter of the nineteenth
century drawing-room tables were littered with heavy vol
umes in red and gold containing either translations of
"Evangeline" and "Hiawatha" or the- nerveless narratives
of Julius Wolf and Gottfried Kinkel. Cultivated readers
turned during the post-romantic or silver age to the poetry
of the Munich school: to the fine ivory, alternating with
celluloid, of Emanuel Geibel, to the sunny but superficial
Italianate glow of Paul Heyse, or even to the tricky dex
terity of Friedrich Bodenstedt. But the public taste of the
period was below its actual achievement. For, though the
lyrical work of each was overshadowed by the non-lyrical,
it produced four poets of all but the highest order in Theodor Storm, Friedrich Hebbel, Gottfried Keller, and Konrad
Ferdinand Meyer. Hebbel's verse is gnarled and knotted
by the intricacy of his thought; the moods and notes of
Keller are delicate and subtle; the carved marble and beaten
bronze, the union of antique clarity and modern warmth
will always restrict the audience of Meyer to the fit and
few; but whoever cares to grasp the essential character of
Germanic lyricism must always return to the inviolate sim
plicity, the fathomless depth and purity of mood, the con
summate marriage of speech and experience that mark the
handful of verses left by Theodor Storm.
These poets worked in comparative isolation. Their
verse was reintroduced to the nation by the modern renais
sance of German poetry which set in when Detlev von
Liliencron published his first volume in 1884. "The power
and originality of the lyric impulse" which, according to
so staid a critic as Professor J. G. Robertson of London,
marked that rebirth, led to the production of a body of
poetry that must be ranked with the work of the very
great periods of creative literature. It is early and profit
less to discuss the stature of the chief poets: Detlev von
Liliencron, Richard Dehmel, Stefan George, Rainer Maria
Rilke. Other critics would add or substitute names. What
strikes every sensitive reader is the extraordinary diffusion
of lyrical energy, so that the anthologies, like those of the
Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, are thronged with iso
lated lyrics of permanent loveliness by writers whose other
works and names an earlier age would scarcely have re
corded.
The movements within this poetic renaissance are, ac
cording to a rough but useful division, four. The natural
ists, grouped about Liliencron, sought to tighten form, to
give speech body and savor, to write with their eye on the
object and render it in its authentic character. Such was
also the aim of Richard Dehmel. But to it he added a
richer ideology and an unrivaled insight into the psychol
ogy of modern life. The music of his verse is at once freer
and more intricate; it stands midway between the vague

rhythms of Peter Hille and the wavering, half-mystical
melodies of the true symbolists: Max Dauthendey, Alfred
Mombert, Leo Greiner. But Dehmel, like every major Ger
man poet, absorbed the vision and the cadence of the folk
song and hence his art is akin to that of the third group
Otto Julius Bierbaum, Carl Busse, Hermann Hessewhich
added to the romantic folk-tradition subtle perceptions and
unheard-of overtones. The influence of Nietzsche's Shake
spearean speech-craft, finally, links him to that fourth group
of poetsStefan George, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, Karl Vollmoeller, Stefan Zweigwho sought
to wring both life ana speecn free of all dross, to recreate
the world in the image of their highest moments, and to
render their verses timeless by commemorating always the
depth and not the tumult of the soul. Thus George creates
in Der Herr der Insel a myth to illustrate the necessary
aloofness of the noble mind, and in his Invocation and
Prelude indicates the history of his purged, considerate
heart:
In my life, too, were angry days and evil
And music that rang dissonant and shrill;
Now a kind spirit holds the balance level,
And all my deeds are at an Angel's will.
Such, described with excessive brevity, were the domi
nant strains in German poetry at the outbreak of the
World War. Of the more eminent poets, Liliencron was
dead; Dehmel, like Regnier and D'Annunzio, flung himself
into the fray but was visited by shattering doubts as early
as 1916; the symbolists stood aloof, as did George and
Rilke. Hermann Hesse and Stefan Zweig retired to Swit
zerland and protested against the great crime and all its
participants. The ephemeral verse expression of tribal fear
and passion flooded both the press and the bookshops. But
side by side with it arose many lyrics in which, in the old
spirit of folk-poetry, war is accepted as part of the inevi
table and tragic fate of humble men and its experiences are
expressed without debate or rancor. Not a few common
recruitsa boiler-maker, Heinrich Lersch, two factory
hands, Karl Broger and Max Barthelwere wrought upon
by the war to the point of developing genuine poetic voices.
With whatever impulse they entered the conflict, they found
in it the spirit of Lersch, who rescued and buried under
fire the wind-shaken body of a fallen Frenchman:
Begraben:Ein fremder Kamerad.
Es irrten meine Augen. Mein Herz, du irrst dich nicht :
Es hat ein jeder Toter des Binders Angesicht.
Today the older poets are still heard, but their voices
sound a little faint and muffled. A new generation has
arisen, men born in the late eighties or early nineties of the
last century, and these, though very varied in their gifts
and methods, have been grouped under the name of expres
sionists. The meaning of that much debated word is iden
tical with the single conviction that unites them. And it is
a very simple one. They have despaired of the world and
have returned to the creative spirit of man. The conquest
of nature produced a civilization that bore the hideous and
poisonous fruit of the war. We must, then, not yield our
selves to the world nor draw our inspiration from any ob
April 13, 1921]
The Nation
jective thing, but spiritualize and save that chaos which

is the universe through human light and love. Again,
though in a sense so different from the theological one, we
must let the world be anthropocentric. Each of these poets
reiterates the cry of Walter Hasenclever: "Return to me,
my soul!" And out of the blending of a myriad creative
souls that absorb into themselves and purify and make
beautiful all things, even to the humblest, even to the most
loathsome, there is to arise a new heaven and a new earth.
Many of the expressionists published their first collec
tions before the war. A harsh and sundering cry comes
from these volumes, a cry of isolation and bitterness. Acrid
sketches of industrial scenes alternate with a lyrical ex
pression of withdrawal and desperate quietism. Thus Albert
Ehrenstein wrote:
Ich rege mich nicht,
Denn alle Gedanken und Taten
Truben die Reinheit der Welt.
It was inevitable that these poets should rebel at being
swept into war. The world and its forces, which they were
even then beginning to reject, crushed them into the com
mon, bloody mold. Those who survived came back with
all their powers of speech liberated; they came back revo
lutionists, deniers of all force, impassioned lovers of the
humanity which they had watched in its unspeakable pain.
They all, in other words, attained on the fields of France
or Poland the temper and the vision of Siegfried Sassoon.
But they passed almost at once beyond that vision of
irony and woe to a spiritual rebuilding of the world. "Ac
cursed be any who would rule!" is the last conclusion of
Rene Schickele; and Rudolf Leonhard sums up with im
mense concision the innermost cognition of the revolu
tionary expressionists: "Jedes Du, wie ich, sagt: Ich!"
In their modes of artistic expression these poets are
sharply divided from each other. There is a good deal of
free verse of a highly rhythmic character, and there is in
the vibrating revolutionary chants of Karl Otten, Ludwig
Rubiner, and Rudolf Leonhard something of the breadth
of Whitman and something of the echo technique of Paul
Fort. But the strongest and most memorable work uses
forms derived from the traditional ones, even though the
inner music is both more aching and more stormy. The
influence one marks is that of Rilke, as in the brimming
harmonies of Theodor Daubler. But poets as different as
Walter Hasenclever, whose quatorzains have a rich exact
ness and a Goethean radiance, and Gottfried Benn, whose
verse is pitilessly intellectual and stripped, have drawn from
the old forms a note and an accent indisputably their own.
Of all these poets it may be said that to them beauty, which
many often attain, and Daubler and Hasenclever and Georg
Trakl always, is a by-product. The mark of all their work
is its supreme intensity, the deep inner necessity that com
manded its utterance. And that applies not only to their
occasional moments of dithyrambic violence. It applies to
the gravely beautiful verses of Hasenclever when he writes :
Gib, grosse Erde, starkre Sensationen,
Dass wir, die nur im Unerfiillten wohnen
Nicht einsam werden vor Verganglichkeit;
it applies to Gottfried Benn when the vision of human pain
drives him to wish that we might return to the estate of
our remotest ancestors in a primeval marsh:
Schon ein Libellenkopf, ein Movenfliigel
Ware zu weit und litte schon zu sehr.
Among these poets there is one who, whatever posterity
551
may determine, impresses one today as having the range

and wealth and power of creative energy that belong to
genius. Franz Werfel was born in Prague in 1890. In
his earliest verses there is a great desolateness of mood.
All lands dissolve, all places melt under the feet of man.
The war drove him at once into the abiding city of the
soul. As early as August 4, 1914, he repudiated the "storm
of false words," the "empty thunder" that "smote against
the pitiless walls of all the world." He uttered at the
same moment his faith in the simple goodness that alone
can save civilization. To that faith he has clung, and to its
expression he has devoted his most memorable poems. But
a warning must be sounded. By goodness Werfel does not
mean one fixed and specific variety of human conduct. He
means that resistless and creative spirit of love to which
all human experience is sanctified by its necessity and its
pain, the spirit that knows nothing of exclusions or repu
diations but lifts men into the gardens of God to heights
proportionate to the intensity of their aliveness here.
Wie sehr wir hier sind, sind wir dort vorhanden
Die hier unruheten aus deinen Tiefen
Sie werden ruhen dort in deinen Tiefen.
With that spirit of love Werfel has utterly identified him
self. He strives to be the good man, "der gute Mensch"
(so different from Wordsworth's "happy warrior"), of his
own close-knit and sonorous paean:
Sein ist die Kraft, das Regiment der Sterne.
As such he draws into himself human souls and their diverse
agonies. He includes within himself a "fat man peering
into a mirror," an "old woman creeping about her house,"
Hecuba the eternal mother, a father and a son. His aware
ness of the sufferings of his fellows is so vigilant and tire
less that he feels the highest ecstasy of his personal life
but as an added weight of guilt:
Ihr Keuchenden auf Strassen und auf Flussen!
Gibt es ein Gleichgewicht in Welt und Leben
Wie werd ich diese Schuld bezahlen miissen.
His verses are not often merely beautiful; they are
always in the highest degree expressive of an overwhelm
ingly felt reality. They are full of the names of concrete
and ugly things. But these things are never named to be
coldly dissected or to be hated or cast off. They are named
because all men and all things must be redeemed before
any can find salvation. Thus strange and hideous things
are burned into beauty by the fires of the soul, even as God,
in this poet's vision, becomes God by identifying himself
with all the pain and horror of that world which he must
wholly save in order to have created it at all.
Du aber, Herr, stiegst nieder, auch zu mir,
Und hast die tausendfache Qual empfunden,
Du hast in jedem Weib entbunden,
Und starbst im Kot, in jedem Stuck Papier,
In jedem Zirkusseehund wurdest Du geschunden,
Und Hure warst Du manchem Kavalier.
Out of that creative spirit of love must be born the revolu
tion that is to shatter the walls that hem in all the true
sources of life, the resistless, universal revolution that is to
restore man to his own soul. Such is the burden of Werfel's
Revolutions-Aufrur, Veni Creator Spiritus, Ein Geistliches
Lied, and Die Leidenschaftlichen, poems of an incompa
rable rhythmic force and of a diction so full of fire and sting
that they seem written in a speech cleansed of all literary
use and staleness and remembrance.
The spirit of Werfel and the expressionist? is that of all
[Vol. 112, No. 2910
The Nation
552
vigorous imaginative literature in Germany today. The

reactionaries are dumb and barren. One after another the
older writers join the new voices, and so rancorous a par
ticipant in the war as Ernst Lissauer celebrates in the
large and lustrous measures of his latest volume ("Die
Ewigen Pfingsten") the tongues of flame which, on ever
recurring Pentecosts, descended on Luther and Michel
angelo, on Bach and Goethe and Beethoven, and on all
those creative prophets and confessors whose deeds alone
give meaning to history and to life.
I pray unto a great God, a God I know,
I pray to the God of Beethoven and Michelangelo,
Who with a quiver of might the suns and moons illumed,
I pray to a God who in the service of his own works is consumed.
An architect I would be and pray to my God with spires,
I pray to the God of organs in the dusk of echoing choirs ;
I pray to the God at whose feet eternity lies like a realm out
spread,
I pray to the God who marches through history with his millen
nial tread;
I pray to a God who breathing builds up and also destroys,
I pray unto my own God and I know he hears my voice.
Mirage
By GEORGE STERLING
I well remember that the year was old
A time of fallen leaves and wings departing.
Beside our western sea the grass was starting,
And willow buds were eager to unfold.
But all that day the shadowed paths were wet,
As though in cloud had come the waiting vision,
And on the sunset altars of transition
Awhile that mournfulness and beauty met.
Long gone the night that held my deathless dream
Its vanished rain long given to the roses,
But though I sleep, no other night discloses
The Three who shone by that delaying Stream.
One was called Evening for her slow caress,
And one called Peace because her eyes were tender,
(Softly she came, most innocent and slender),
And one called Heartache for her loveliness.
They were of slumber and mirage's sky
Frailties of vision, an august illusion,
Living a little by the soul's inclusion,
Living in memory as long as I.
Yet did they make the burning stars seem clods
Those shadows of illusion, passing slowly;
For on each face a Light fell sad and holy
From tracts I dreamt forbidden save to gods.
A little while, a little while they gleamed,
Who were not, are not, yet shall haunt me ever,
Mingling the sorrow of the Once and Never,
To glorify the dream of him that dreamed.
I shall not know them other than they are,
Who find on paths that memory retraces
The immortal, mournful beauty of those faces
That, haunting, hold me exile of their star.
Books
The Cambridge History of American
Literature
The Cambridge History of American Literature. Edited by W.
P. Trent, John Erskine, Stuart P. Sherman, and Carl Van
Doren. Volumes III and IV. G. P. Putnam's Sons.
rT,HIS great undertaking, now at length accomplished, is some* thing more than a history of American literature; some
thing less than a history of American thought and culture. It
inevitably suggests the question: What, then, is "literature"?
For in accordance with any rigid and narrow definition of the
word, if literature be regarded as a "fine" art as distinct from
an "applied" art, many of the subjects here discussed would be
excluded"Science and Health," for example, or the Ladies'
Home Journal. In many chapters we are concerned with what
may be called pre-literary and sub-literary products of the pen:
with poor-white ballads and dime novels and defunct journals
and economic treatises. Such books are, of course, rightly in
cluded in a work like this, which aims to provide a foundation
for literary study and research. But the amount of space de
voted to forgotten or half-forgotten essayists and historians and
travelers and divines suggests the thought that a large propor
tion of "American literature" is of a relative importance to us
quite out of scale with its absolute importance. The strict limi
tations imposed in the Cambridge "English Literature" upon
the consideration of even such a writer as Walter Pater (for
example) is a measure of the comparative value of the English
and the American achievement in literature; how many pages
would have been allotted to an American Pater in a work that
devotes four pages to Ik Marvel?
In this final instalment three figures of major importance
stand out above the rest: Mark Twain, William Dean Howells,
and Henry James. The chapter on Mark Twain has been as
signed to Professor Sherman, from whom his insolence and his
vitality and his laughter ("broad as ten thousand beeves at
pasture") receive a treatment so sympathetic as to have raised
the eyebrows of the critic's spiritual forbears. Mr. Sherman
wisely dismisses with a few words the much-discussed but cer
tainly over-estimated posthumous works which are in such
marked contrast with the great books of Mark Twain's prime.
Of some biographical and psychological importance, these writ
ings are not part of the characteristic "output" of the man.
Perchance Clemens inclined naturally toward an attitude of
pessimism and satiric disillusion; but the view of life that he
chose to express was essentially humorous and it is as a humor
ist that Mr. Sherman has depicted him. The foremost name in
the chapter on The Later Novel by Mr. Van Doren, overshadow
ing that of Mrs. Stowe on the one hand and of Weir Mitchell
and Marion Crawford on the other, is of course William Dean
Howells. Mr. Van Doren emphasizes his achievement as the
most extensive transcriber of modern American life, as the
apostle of "the religion of reality." He dwells upon the grace
and charm of this transcript, upon its kind wisdom and
thoughtful mirth; and without attempting to pass any final
judgment upon the work of a man so lately dead, he wonders
whether such qualities, in the absence of both malice and in
tensity, may serve to keep that work alive. He glances across
the water at the fame of Jane Austen, thus suggesting by im
plication Howells's claim to a rank which probably he will never
attain in any general estimation of his excellences. Professor
Beach deals less convincingly with the art of Henry James.
Despite various acute remarks upon its characteristicsits
"dramatic limitation," its "intimate psychological notation," the
suggestion that it carries of "initiation" into some spiritual or
social value hidden from the vulgarthe critic does not seem
to penetrate behind the mask of the great, benign face to the
man who is revealed so attractively in the "Letters."
April 13, 1921]
The Nation
The chapters dealing with various groups of writers differ,

despite evident editorial care in adjusting individual methods
to a total plan, in manner and in excellence. At the outset of
this "History" it was announced that certain living writers
would be included in the surveya wise departure from the
plan of the companion "History of English Literature," and a
necessary one in recording the history of a literature that stands
in some need of bolstering up by the presence of eminent names.
But the chapter on the novelists tacitly, and that on the his
torians explicitly, omit any such names. One finds a brief list
of living poets in the appropriate place, but with no discussion
of the novel theories and practices which have aroused so much
comment during the last decade. On the other hand, when one
comes to the economists and the philosophers, one finds that
ample space has been devoted to the work of men still living
and, in some cases, in mid-career. The accounts of Later The
ology and of Later Philosophy are both carefully articulated
and well-reasoned pieces of criticism; but both the chapter on
Later Historians and the bibliography that accompanies it pro
ceed according to no very logical sequence, and Professor Seligman's review of economic writings is a bare, hard, unilluminating, and excessively dry catalogue of names and titles, set down
in chronological order and with hardly an indication of the
general tendencies of economic speculation in this country.
Though in the discussion of the philosophers and of the theo
logians there is some mention of the effect of evolutionary doc
trines on American thought, no separate chapter is devoted to
the literature of science, a department of writing as much en
titled as many others to inclusion within the broad domain of
this history of literature. How masses of material lying on the
outskirts of that domain may be so ordered as to serve an in
structive purpose is well seen in Mr. Dellenbaugh's account of
the literature of travel and exploration. Attention should be
called to the enormous and especially useful bibliography to this
chapter. No less excellent, and equally removed from the great
central highroad of letters, and equally typical of America, are
the accounts of later periodical literature: the Magazines and
the Newspapers. Professor Stephenson's discussion of the
qualities of Lincoln's thought and style approaches perilously
near to the merely "appreciative," though it is by no means so
amorphous as Senator Lodge's somewhat similar essay on Web
ster in an earlier volume. The study comes to an abrupt close
at the beginning of Lincoln's "final manner," with no direct
mention of those addresses by which Lincoln is best remembered
and with no allusion to the astonishingly vital and individual
quality of his war dispatches. One is reminded, per contra, that
in the crowded pages of the Cambridge "Modern History" space
is found for the citation in full of the address at Gettysburg.
To Professor Wolff fell the difficult task of surveying American
scholarship. He has performed it far more satisfactorily than
did Dr. Sandys the parallel task in the Cambridge "English
Literature." One notes with special satisfaction the quite ad
mirable estimate of the achievement and temperament of Gildersleeve, whose influence upon American letters has not always
received just recognition. One regrets that Dr. Wolff limited
his discussion of writers upon art to a brief treatment of Charles
Eliot Norton. Professor Boynton has written of hymns without
acquiring beforehand any very thorough mastery of the purely
musical side of his subject; else he would not have said (for
example) that the melodies of Dykes were "attuned to the
emotional appeals of the nonconformist pulpit rather than to
the stately traditions of Rome or England." If there is any
modern composer of hymn-music in whom the English tradition
lives on, it is Dr. Dykes, who passed almost all his life as organ
ist of Durham cathedral.
Three chapters may, for different reasons, be provocative of
controversy. One is Professor Ayres's sane, good humored,
mildly ironical, and solidly grounded study of The English Lan
guage in America, in which the central point made is that recog
nized by all scholars but ignored by those who rush in where
scholars hesitate to tread: namely, that a language so widely
553
diffused as is English, a language employed in such contrasting

conditions of environment and tradition, must necessarily un
dergo local and even national variations; but that these varia
tions in no way constitute a distinct and separate "language";
and that the proper attitude to take is that of loyalty, barring
the more extreme peculiarities that are not historically justi
fiable, to the forms taken by the language in the country of one's
birth. Such propositions are indisputablea fact that may not
stop disputation. Discussion of another sort may be aroused
by Professor Riley's study of Popular Bibles: "The Book of
Mormon" and "Science and Health." Some critics might have
chosen to deal with such "delicate" subjects by means of in
nuendo and evasion. Mr. Riley is to be congratulated upon the
plainspokenness, authoritative yet touched with humor, of this
contribution. Professor Pound's chapter on Oral Literature
suggests the possibility of controversy of another sort, for the
subject impinges closely upon the ground of the "popular bal
lad," that immensely debatable land.
A word only can be spared to the remaining chapters. That
on the Drama presses to the extreme limits any possible defini
tion of "literature." The study of Political Writers is in wel
come contrast to the chapter on Economists mentioned above.
The chapter on Education reaches back to the colonial period
and presents an illuminating survey of educational theories,
practices, and problems. The final chapters in the work treat
of non-English writing in the United States: German, French,
Yiddish, and Aboriginal. Miss Austin offers a not altogether
convincing plea for the Amerind myths as a proper subject for
modern imaginative treatment. Professor Faust's account of
German writings is timely in view of the fact that the need of
detailed study of this body of literature, especially of the
German-American lyric, has been lately urged by a committee
of the Modern Language Association.
It is a pity that the publishers decided to issue as two vol
umes the material that was evidently arranged by the editors
to appear in one, as originally announced. The continuous pagi
nation throughout both volumes is awkward; unlike all other
volumes in the Cambridge Histories, Volume III of this instal
ment is unprovided with bibliographies and separate index; and
in consequence of this nearly half of Volume IV is taken up
with the bibliographical apparatus and index. There are some
omissions and errors in the work. It is not obvious, in view of
the non-literary quality (in any rigorous sense of the word)
of much of the writing included, why no mention is made, espe
cially in the chapter on Travel and Exploration, of the work of
Theodore Roosevelt. Among writers on Spain, and possibly
among the minor poets, space should have been found for the
name of Severn Teakle Wallis. It is strange that from the roll
of American scholars the name of Bloomfield, which should be
found side by side with that of Lanman, is missing. In the
same chapter should have been mentioned Henry Reed, whose
influence was widespread during the years before the "univer
sity" phase of American scholarship. The remarkably gifted
Albert T. Bledsoe is referred to in more than one place but
without any allusion to what is perhaps his most characteristic
book: "Is Davis a Traitor?" of which a Chief Justice of the
United States is reported to have said that had Davis been
tried before his court, with Bledsoe as the lawyer for the de
fense, he would never have been convicted.
The last word, however, must be of grateful acknowledgment
of the admirable way in which the editors, and, in general, the
contributors, have accomplished the task set them. Other his
tories of American literature will still be read for the light that
comes when filtered through a single mind. In all other re
spects, in breadth of scope, in variety of interest, in the happy
union of the individual topic and the specialist best qualified
to deal with that topic, and especially in the generous and gen
erally exhaustive bibliographical apparatus supplied, the Cam
bridge "History" supersedes all earlier attempts to tell the story
and to appraise the achievement of our national literature.
Samuel C. Chew
The Nation
554
[Vol. 112, No. 291
studying exceptional people at close range.
In Russia
Mayfair to Moscow. Clare Sheridan's Diary. Boni and Live
secured
right.
Russia in the Shadows.
By H. G. Wells.
George H. Doran
Company.
M Y
philosophy of life, notes Clare Sheridan in her diary
on the eve of adventuring into Russia to bring back the

heads of Lenin and Trotzky, is to travel light and not accumu
late, but to throw off. If some other observers of bolshevist

Russia had thrown off their theories at the border and retained
only their soap and their sanity, few people would still be
sharing Winston Churchill's conception of bolshevism as a
crocodile that must be destroyed. It is theories that make one
see crocodiles instead of communists. Mrs. Sheridan, whose
concern in Moscow was portrait work, not politics, had no
theories. She was better off in that respect than H. G. Wells.
He, it is true, has thrown off successive theories so rapidly as

to occasion Mr. Chesterton's famous remark that one can lie
awake nights and hear him grow. But a few crossed the border
with him and got in his way a bit in Russia. Mrs. Sheridan
could not be irritated, as Wells is, by Karl Marx's beard because
she has never been irritated by Karl Marx's theories. Travel
ing light suggests abandonment of middle-aged habits as well as

of theories. And again Mrs. Sheridan has the advantage over
Wells. In that interesting guest-house in Moscow where the
sugar-king once entertained Caruso, Wells and Mrs. Sheridan
condoled with each other over the discomforts and the lack of
privacy in Russian lifewhere the rooms were like a railway

station. But Wells (like Mrs. Gummidge) felt it more. He
needed his morning bath and his newspapers and a quiet break
fast and leisure and peace, or he could not work. If one can
not work without a hot bath to start the day with, it is, Mrs.
Sheridan admits, lamentable to be in Russia. It was perhaps
because he was uncomfortable that Wells saw more danger sig
nals than Mrs. Sheridan, who felt safe as a mountain in

Moscow, and who foresaw a winter of hardship for the city, but
no disorders.
Cold baths in cold weather and bad food are
unpleasant, but not necessarily indicative of a disruption.

They need not blight one's outlook. - She thought Wells sadly
needed shaking out of his habits.
Discomforts did not blight Mrs. Sheridan's outlook. Not since
John Reed tore through the Petrograd streets in a wild Revo
Mrs. Sheridan
missed Chicherin, the recluse of the Foreign Office, who sug

gested four in the morning as his quietest time for a sitting
unfortunately my quietest time, as she observed. But she
Lenin himself, Trotzky, with whom
she discussed
whether Byron or Shelley were the greater revolutionary, and

Dzirjinsky, the head of the Extraordinary Commission. Dzir
jinsky, who spent a quarter of his life in prison, was her most
quiet sitter; one learns patience and calm in prison, he re
marked. The lone capitalist in the guesthouse, Mr. W. B.
Vanderlip, was as interesting a study as any communist, espe
cially when he discovered one shop which had not been requisi
tioned by the Government, and bought birds of paradise, yellow
ones, black ones, and white ones, to take home to the decorative
American ladies who in his opinion should not work, but be
worked for.
Mrs. Sheridan made one mistake: she was not imprisoned in

Moscow, and this increased her passport difficulties when she
sought permission to enter our land of past revolutions. Is
there in all these lively impressions of an adventurous artist
material on which to base a Russian policy? Obviously not;
but material to bring sanity and humor and humanity into the
Russian question and destroy a few crocodile nightmares.
Mrs. Sheridan was in Moscow only.
H. G. Wells spent most
of his brief fortnight in Petrograd.

He is concerned with
broad interpretations and a policy. It is easier to estimate his
actual contribution to our knowledge now that his impressions

are not hedged around by the John Spargo and H. A. Jones
comments, which the anticipatory energy of the New York
Times attached to them. These comments, to be sure, deserved
no more attention than was accorded to them by Mr. Wells,
who declared that he would as soon argue with a remote, tire

some, and inattentive foghorn as with Henry Arthur Jones.
But however appropriate a foghorn accompaniment is to a
perusal of the Times, it is a distraction. Mr. Wells's conclu
sions have little of the supporting evidence now being abun
dantly furnished by writers like Mr. Brailsford and Mr. Ransome;
but they are in harmony with this evidence. No reasonably in
formed person needs to be told at this late date that the inherent
rottenness of the old Russian system accounts for one of the
greatest crashes in history; or that the peasant, the base of the

old pyramid, is still there on the land, more firmly and widely
intrenched, and that the problem of peasant cooperation is the
mission and nothing to do but darn stockings and listen to
great problem of today; or that the emergency bolshevik gov

ernment after a period of chaos brought a certain order and
security to Russia, in spite of stupid attacks from without; or
that it was the only force intelligent and coherent and pur
poseful enough to do this; or that the Bolsheviki have had to
modify their theories as they have come to realize that they
Mr. W. B. Vanderlip read Rupert Brooke.
have not so much captured a state as got on board a derelict.
lutionary armored car during those ten days that shook the
world in November, 1917, has anyone seemed to have a better
time in Russia than Mrs. Sheridan.
There were moments of
depression when there was little prospect of accomplishing her

But everything she
desired came in time, from Trotzky's head to the much-needed
It was worth while, however, to have Mr. Wells say it all,
fur coat that made her a sharer in the government distribu

tion of bourgeois property to the people. There was little
outward excitement. Counter-revolutions broke out, Trotzky
because of the wide audience he commands.
was wounded, barricades were erected in the streetsin the
London newspapers. In Moscow nothing fell but the early

October snow, to make the city beautiful. But there was spirit
ual excitement in plenty. Not precisely of the sort to make one
exclaim Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but the less
exalted thrills of novelty and contrast: watching Sergey

Trotzky, son of the Russian Jewish exile, playing football in the
palace grounds; sharing with Kamenev the Crown Prince of
Sweden's biscuits (which Mrs. Sheridan did not discard at the
border); listening to a theater full of Russians rock with
laughter at the mention of Churchill and Lloyd George; at

tending Litvinov's banquet to the Chinese general in the sugar
king's palace, and sympathizing with the happiness of the
sugar-king's old man-servant, who for this occasion got out the
Svres salt-cellars and the cut-glass decanters and felt that he
was once more back in the respectable pre-Revolutionary days,
serving his master's friends.
And there was excitement in
tact with the peasants.
He had no con
He has never had much patience with
those static elements of society that generation after generation

carry on their life in a general atmosphere of cows, hens, and
domestic intimacy. The fear he expresses of the advance of
peasant barbarism is at least partly due to ignorance.
He calls
the great mass of the peasants illiterate; and fifty per cent
of them were illiterate in 1914, according to so well-informed a
student of peasant problems as Mr. Maurice Hindus. That is

a great mass, but not the great massnot the great majority.
And among these illiterate peasants, Mr. Hindus tells us, were
some extremely capable and intelligent workers in the great
cooperative enterprises, which Mr. Wells entirely ignores when
he denies to the peasantry any constructive quality.
With his gift for vivid realization Mr. Wells has made us
see the dying city of Petrograd, with all the shabbiness and
the shuttered shops, the starved hospitals, the general disrepair,
the dwindling population. He has also cheered us a little with

the spectacle of Chaliapin, the Artist Triumphant, strong
enough to demand payment in flour and eggs; and with the
April 13, 1921]
The Nation
more inspiring picture of Gorki, semi-official salvage man with

the consent of Lenin, striving desperately to preserve the in
tellectual continuity of Russian life, harboring artists and
scientists and literary men in the Houses of Science and Litera
ture and Art. That glimpseof "what the intellectual blockade
of Russia has meant to those who value knowledge more than
breadwas worth the trip to Russia. And there is hope in the
little glimpses Mr. Wells secured of the creative and educa
tional efforts that are under way, "varying between the admira
ble and ridiculous, islands at least of cleanly work and of hope
amidst the vast spectacle of grisly want and wide decay. Who
can weigh the power and possibility of their thrust against the
huge gravitation of this sinking system?"
Dorothy Brewster
Disraeli: Last Phase

The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconafield. By G. E.
Buckle in succession to W. F. Monypenny. Vols V and VI.
FORTY years have passed since Disraeli died, and it is only
now that this biography, the first volume of which ap
peared more than ten years ago, is completed, almost all those
who knew him personally in the British Parliament having by
this time disappeared. The work is alarmingly large, six
octavo volumes; whereas Gladstone's life by Lord Morley con
sisted of but three, and those of other prominent statesmen in
England and America, such as the Duke of Devonshire in the
former and Theodore Roosevelt in the latter country, have
been compressed into two. Nicolay and Hay's life of Lincoln
with its ten volumes is a biography of vaster dimensions, but
it is really a history of the Civil War as much as a biography
of the President. Nevertheless Mr. G. E. Buckle is not to be
censured for prolixity. There is, at least in these two con
cluding volumes, very little that was not worth inserting, for
Disraeli's life is singularly interesting in its threefold aspect.
Born a Jew, at a time when Jews had not reached the im
portance and influence they now enjoy, he made his way by his
own talents, in a country which had not yet become a democ
racy, to be the leader of a proud and ancient aristocracy, and
he rose to be not only twice Prime Minister but both the spe
cial favorite of the sovereign and an extremely popular figure
with the rank and file of the Tory party. Secondly, his career
was connected with three important political events: the ejec
tion, in 1846, from office of Sir Robert Peel and the consequent
schism in the Conservative Party, the extension of the elec
toral suffrage in 1867-8, and the events in the Turkish East
between 1875 and 1880 which set in motion the force that
ended by bringing about the World War of 1914. And thirdly,
Disraeli's personal character was so singular as to have roused
in his own time, and to rouse still, an eager curiosity to form
a true conception of the being who was at once wary and daring,
sometimes frank, sometimes wrapping himself in a cloud of
mystery, externally cold and cynical, yet capable in inspiring
warm attachments. Mr. Buckle had to display the man in all
these aspects, and he did well to supply the world with abun
dant materials for a judgment. The book consists mainly of
Disraeli's own letters, but when the biographer steps in to give
a connecting or connected narrative, he does it clearly and
concisely. One criticism on his handling of the subject must,
however, be added. He carries that admiration for his hero
which is pardonable in a biographer to a point at which it de
generates into partizanship and becomes so undiscriminating
as to defeat its own purpose. When Disraeli is praised for acts
which the sequel shows to have been blunders, when his illu
sions and ignorances are defended or explained away, the
American reader who, being free from the party passions or
prejudices of England, can judge political policies by their
results, sets little store by the biographer's opinion, for he
perceives that the results of the foreign policy Disraeli followed
555
in his later years were deplorable, and are admitted on all

hands to have been injurious both to England and to peoples
of the Near East as a whole.
Volume V shows us Disraeli in 1868 after twenty-five years
of political experience just reaching the goal of his ambition
by becoming Prime Minister on the resignation (owing to
failing health) of Lord Derby. Nothing could have seemed
more unlikely twenty years earlier than that a Jewish adven
turer should ever lead the Tory party, but his succession to
Lord Derby was accepted as a matter of course, for there was
no competition. He was, however, without a majority in the
House of Commons, and during the months which had to elapse
till a general election could be held on the extended suffrage
conferred by the Reform Act of 1867, his Government held
power on sufferance. As that Act had been passed by Derby
and Disraeli, the Tory party expected that the newly enfran
chised workingmen would show their gratitude by voting for
the Tory ministry. This, however, they failed to do. The
Liberals obtained a large majority: Gladstone, who led them,
came into power as Prime Minister, and used his opportunity
to pass a series of large and drastic measures. For six years
Disraeli had to lead the opposition, but it was a united oppo
sition, loyal to him; and he led it with unwearied vigilance
and skill. He was a very adroit Parliamentary tactician, not
speaking often, but reserving himself for important occasions,
quick at seizing an opportunity, studying carefully the temper
and proclivities of his audience, taking pains to select and bring
forward and encourage capable young men and to send them out
as skirmishers to harass the hostile ranks. Gladstone's min
istry began before long to alienate various sections of the
community by its reformsit had to break many eggs in mak
ing its omelettes; and the Tory chief could see that the tide
was turning in his own favor. By 1873 this had become clear.
The authority of Gladstone's cabinet declined in Parliament
and in the country. Before long, having been defeated in the
House of Commons on an Irish University bill, it resigned
office. The Queen sent for Disraeli to form a ministry, but he
prudently preferred to wait for the next general election.
Gladstone was obliged to resume office, but things continued to
go ill for his administration, and when he suddenly dissolved
Parliament in January, 1874, his party was vanquished at
the polls. Disraeli came in as Prime Minister for the second
time and had now for the first time what he had always longed
for, a strong and compact majority behind him in both Houses
of Parliament.
The time had come for him to show his powers in construc
tive legislation and to carry out various plans which during
previous years he had adumbrated, especially schemes for
pacifying Ireland and for improving the condition of the
masses in Great Britain. But alas he was now getting old, the
loss of his wife, in 1872, told heavily upon him, and his health
began to fail. Attendance in the House of Commons was be
coming too great a burden, so he transferred himself to the
House of Lords, in 1876 taking the title of Earl of Beaconsfield.
That year opened a new chapter in English history, for it saw
the renewal of bitter party strife after two years of unusual
quiet, a time of calm like that which was once called in America
the "Era of Good Feeling." Attempts at an insurrection on
the part of the Bulgarian Christians had been suppressed by
the Turks with savage cruelty, and public opinion in Russia
was stirred and called upon the Czar to take action; his Gov
ernment threatened the Sultan; Austria and Germany joined
in milder remonstrances; but Disraeli, refusing for some time
to believe that the Turks had committed massacres, did his
best to protect them against Russia and might have committed
England to a defense of them by arms had not Gladstone
stirred the whole country by his passionate denunciation of
Turkish cruelty and oppression. When after more than a
year's fighting the Turks had been overthrown and the Russian
army was at the gates of Constantinople compelling the Sultan
to sign at San Stefano a peace by which Bulgaria and other
The Nation
556
territories obtained their independence, Disraeli again came to

the rescue and menaced Russia with war unless the Treaty of
San Stefano were modified. The dispute was adjusted by the
famous Congress of Berlin at which Disraeli headed the British

delegation. It was the most triumphant moment of his career,
[Vol. 112, No. 2910
compassion asserts itself, and we are glad of something that

redeems his cynicism. This weakness, this craving for affection,
made no difference to his public action. In politics he remained
hard, tenacious, unscrupulous, sometimes even vindictive. Yet,
if his life does not clear him from the charge of these faults, it
for he and Bismarck were the central figures on whom the eyes
does present him as having a likable side, capable of attracting
of the world were fixed, and Bismarck was believed, in com
paring Disraeli with the other prominent figures, to have re
those who worked with him, always courageous, and always

faithful to his friends. A more interesting study in human
marked: The old Jew, that is the man.
The triumph was
nature has seldom presented itself in the life of a politician.
repeated on Disraeli's return to London, where he was wel
B.
comed by enthusiastic crowds.
But their acclamation did not
represent the sentiment of the nation, which had not shared

his anti-Russian feelings nor approved his imperialistic poli
cies. It was these policies, continued in the Afghan War of
1879, which brought about the complete rout of his party and
the return of the Liberals to office in 1880.
By this time he
had grown old and feeble, and in April, 1881, he passed away
Job Today
The Book of Job.
By Morris Jastrow, Jr.
J. B. Lippincott
Company.
AN a westerner ever hope to do justice to an oriental book?
after a career than which is none more remarkableindeed, one
More especially, do the modern methods of Biblical criti
may say more memorablein the annals of the British Par
cism sufficiently take account of the peculiar workings of the
liament.
oriental mind?
So much of his public life, which can now be fully followed

and judged by adding to a study of his speeches and writings
there often seems to be a lack of any logical arrangement, of

any coherence or consistency in the Biblical compositions. But
the abundant revelations of his character and ideas contained
does that mean that the easterner felt such a lack?
in these six volumes.
mind supply subtle connecting thoughts which quite escape our

more matter-of-fact modes of apprehension? Have we the right
to attempt to rearrange this eastern literature in accordance with
our own standards of what is decency and order in good litera
His letters make good reading; they are
never prolix or tedious, always clear and to the point, usually

shrewd and pungent, often amusing though not so brilliant or
witty as his speeches and novels might lead one to expect. Wit
he certainly had, perhaps beyond any of his contemporaries
among statesmen of the front rank; but its flow was not abun
dant or spontaneous. Many of his good things seem to have

been the fruit of careful preparation; sometimes they were
borrowed. Shrewd as he was in his judgment of individual
men and of the House of Commons as an assembly, he was by
no means the far-seeing and wide-seeing oracle whom his fol

lowers fancied him to be. One is surprised to find in his
letters strange mistakes not only as to the great movements
which were agitating Europe but as to the temper and feeling
of the English people themselves.
To the western reader of the Old Testament
Or did his
ture? And yet there is another side to the question. When

one really works into the literary remains of the poets and
prophets of Israel, the conviction grows that one is dealing
with men of extraordinary literary ability. Can such men be
capable at one moment of the most lucid and convincing argu
ment and in the next of views that flatly contradict it? Can
such inconsistencies be chargeable simply to longitude?
In the series of commentaries on the Wisdom literature of
Israel which Professor Jastrow is so generously giving to the

public these questions are faced and answered. The various
Old Testament books are most decidedly products of the orien
In these volumes, however, there is much more than politics

indeed, the politics are less entertaining than the relations
of Disraeli with three women. Two of them were sisters,
charming persons, the Countess of Chesterfield and the Countess
of Bradford, to both of whom, after the death of his wife, he
went for consolation and sympathy. The third was Queen
understand them.
But their orientalism must be sought for in
the right place.
The difference between ancient oriental
Victoria, whose confidence he succeeded in winning to an extent

hardly ever, if ever, equaled by a British Minister since the days
of the Stuarts. How far this was due to the flattering arts
of which Disraeli was a master, how far to the tactful con
sideration which he undoubtedly always showed to her, need
arouse sufficient interest to warrant further additions being

made to it. In other words, the orientalism which makes it so
not be here discussed.
Of the fact there was no doubt: it
appears from the letters printed in this biography. They show

the Queen expressing her opinion upon all sorts of political
topics in a way which would have surprised the English public
of that day had they known of it, but it is only fair to add that
there is no evidence that the Queen's views and exhortations
really affected the policy of her Minister. They coincided with
his own in nearly all of the leading questions of the day, and
when Disraeli had a strong opinion of his own, he did not give
way, except as regards ecclesiastical appointments. In these,
it is worth remarking, the Queen's judgment was usually better
than the Minister's, for the Queen seems to have had the
benefit of judicious confidential advisers outside politics.
The incessant correspondence which Disraeli kept up with the
two Countesses, from which profuse extracts are given, makes
curious reading for those who had been led to think of Disraeli
as a hardened old cynic, cold and self-reliant, for his letters are
those of a sensitive and emotional being, hungering for sympathy
and consolation, unable to live without love. Thus they raise as
well as lower the judgment we have of this singular personage.
He seems weaker than we believed, weak almost to the verge
of silliness. Yet when we think of him as a lonely old man,
tal spirit, and unless this is allowed for it is impossible to
and
modern
western
literature,
we
are
told,
may
be
summed up in the statement that with us the finished book

begins its life, whereas in the ancient orient the final form of
composition represents a dead book, one that had ceased to
difficult for the ordinary western reader to understand the Old

Testament is found in the fact that it has been subjected to a
long continued and drastic process of revision. The westerner

inclines to see in this fact of revision a qualification of the
value of the book; the easterner sees in it the proof of its un
dying importance.
Until our western readers can adjust them
selves to this fact of a thoroughgoing revision in the Old Tes

tament, its various books will remain unsolved enigmas.
Mr. Jastrow showed his sound instinct in choosing Ecclesi

astes as the first illustration of his thesis.
In The Gentle
Cynic we have a book that in its original form was thoroughly

skeptical, but has now been soundly converted by various addi
tions into a book of edification for the pious and the orthodox.
This thesis was not likely to provoke much opposition in the
case of Ecclesiastes. The book has always been a puzzle, even
to those who are inclined to discover sense in nonsense when
the nonsense happens to be within the covers of the Authorized

Version; and no such sacred associations have attached to this
book as have gathered about other books of the Bible. It was
good policy, therefore, to establish the thesis of revision in the
case of this book first. Mr. Jastrow's interpretation would
come as a relief rather than as a shock to religious sentiment.
But the book of Job is a different matter. It discusses one of
the most important themes which have ever occupied the human
April 13, 1921]
The Nation
mind, the problem of suffering. It discusses it with an emo

tional intensity and imaginative power that have gripped the
human mind in all subsequent ages and have secured for Job
an undisputed place in the world's greatest literature. Further
more, there still lurks, probably, in the minds of most of us the
influence of the old dogmatic premise that an inspired book
which formulates the problem of suffering in such an acute
form must offer an adequate solution of it. An attack upon
the integrity of Job which at the same time denies that a thor
oughly satisfactory theodicy is to be found in it, will proba
bly provoke vigorous dissent when an attack upon the integ
rity of Ecclesiastes remains unchallenged. But having pre
sented his thesis in such a winning and attractive way in The
Gentle Cynic as practically to disarm criticism, Mr. Jastrow
has cleverly prepared the way for the application of the same
557
going rationalist. But if this is so, are we not to look for evi
dences of struggle in him and will these not be seen in logical
inconsistencies which are nevertheless psychologically just what
we would expect? When, for example, in the sixteenth chapter
Job ends that amazing and altogether overpowering review of
his condition by the cry that shivered to the tingling stars,
Oh, Earth, cover not my blood,
is the appeal to the heavenly witness that follows out of place,
as Mr. Jastrow supposes? Is not this sudden fierce appeal to
God himself against God, this momentary turning from the
phantom God conjured up by the superficial theology of his
friends to the God of reality revealed in a crisis of intense
moral agony, just one of those touches that isolate the master
pieces of the world on heights that lesser genius cannot scale?

KEMPER FULLERTON
thesis to the book of Job.
His theory of the book, which is an expansion of the work of

many predecessors, is, in a word, as follows: The Prologue and
Epilogue are an earlier folk-tale, a kind of ancient Sunday
school story, depicting how patiently the good Job endured the
sufferings which he could not understand and how completely
he was rewarded for so doing. This story was later made the
subject of criticism by a group of bold and brilliant thinkers
who said that Job would not have acted in that way at all.
These critics were not irreligious men. On the contrary, they

were profoundly religious and morally in earnest. For that
very reason they revolted at the conventional theology and the
a priori interpretations of life implied in the Sunday school
story according to which every sinner must be punished and
every good man rewarded or God would be unjust. It is the
correctness of this current theology which forms the main sub
ject of the Symposium, or the three great series of speeches in
chapters 3-27. When reduced to their original form these
speeches are found to be simply a protest against current views.
They provide no solution of the problem of suffering. They
begin and end with the question, Why? They are danger
ously skeptical because they dared to raise the question of the
justice of God in so acute a form as to permit of no evasion,
and yet did not undertake to provide an answer. This was
quite shocking to subsequent generations, and various means
were taken, as in the case of Ecclesiastes, to counteract the
dangerous tendencies of the Symposium. In the first place its
text was subjected to criticism and the three famous passages,
13:15 (contrast the Authorized Version with the Revised Ver
sion), 16:19, and 19:26, were so manipulated as to teach Jobs
pious faith in God and the hereafter. In the next place the
third series of speeches, chapters 2227, to which chapters 28,
29-31 were still later attached, and which has always created
the greatest difficulties for the interpreter of Job, is considered
to have been shuffled about and the good sound doctrines of the
three friends to have been quietly incorporated into the speeches
of Job himself. By these means the skeptical Job was trans
formed into the submissive saint of the tradition.
An Honest German
Mein Kampf gegen das militaristische und nationalistische
Deutschland. By Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster. Stuttgart:
Verlag Friede durch Recht.
I' is
a thousand pities that this most candid and penetrating
examination of the psychology of German chauvinism and
imperialism cannot be brought properly to the attention of those

who assert that German liberalism, if it exists at all, is some
thing incoherent and hamstrung. Professor Foerster has writ
ten a book which can hardly be matched in any of the other
countries which participated in the war so far as unbiased self

analysis is concerned. It ought to be translated into English
if for no other reason than to help shame us into a similar
mood. The author announces that his object is to reveal the
Germans to themselves and thus to aid in the reconstruction
of a better land.
But, incidentally, his book, if read abroad,
will contribute its bit to the healing of wounded national pride
and the allaying of partisan prejudices.
Surely nothing could
be more irenic in intention and tone than his constant assump
tion that the chief guilt of the war is Germany's.

Professor Foerster had a most honorable record all through
the war for his courage in telling unwelcome truths. Yet he

suggests neither the moral prig nor the habitual off-sider. One
does not need to be a positive Christian believer, as he calls
himself, in order to appreciate his moral idealism. There is
something so compelling in his peculiar combination of ethical
loftiness and sturdy sense of reality that one can easily under
stand the large number of his followers, especially among the
academic youth of Germany. His volume entitled German
Youth and the World War, published in the very middle of the
conflict, afforded ample evidence that his teaching had not been
lost.
The German Government was at great pains to suppress
this influence, but the methods employed of direct and indirect
pressure can hardly have conduced to that end.
When, for
But these
changes were not enough. The crowning attempts to counteract

the skepticism of the original book are found in the speeches
of Elihu, chapters 32-37, and in the speeches of the Almighty,
chapters 38-41. Magnificent as these last chapters are as poetry,
they have nothing to do with the problems formulated by the

Symposium except to blunt the unfortunate impression made
by their discussion.
Mr. Jastrow elaborates his theory with all the unobtrusive
learning, lucidity, and attractiveness which characterized his
former commentary. Here we have popularization of the best
sort, in which undue technicality is avoided without the com
promise of thorough scholarship. Yet I cannot suppress the

feeling that in the present instance the problem of Job has
been too much simplified by the analysis. This is particularly
true in the treatment of the Symposium and of the great crisis
in it described in chapters 16, 17, and 19. Mr. Jastrow admits
that Job is a profoundly religious spirit. He has not the coldly
objective attitude toward religious problems of the thorough
example, Professor Foerster's colleagues in the philosophic fac

ulty of the University of Munich issued a manifesto repudiat
ing his views on Bismarck and the fatal legacy of Realpolitik,

they probably furthered the spread of those opinions.
In a way, the present book is the answer of Professor Foer
ster to his critics at home. It would be going too far to say
that he wants to make the Germans see themselves as others
see them; but it is preeminently true that he wishes to pre

serve his sense of proportion in adjudging the guilt of the war.
He is never weary of asserting that no fair verdict can be
reached if only the outward events of the last few years are
considered, while the psychology of peoples and their cultural

traditions are left out of account.
So although it may be
truthfully said that the entire European system was to blame

for the war, yet it is possible, granted the system, to single
out one element to which the major part of the culpability

attaches.
And Professor Foerster has not the slightest doubt
that the disturbing element was Germany.
It was that coun
558
The Nation
try which aroused universal distrust, forced excessive arma

ments, and made out of Europe an armed camp in which inse
curity and fear prevailed. It is not so much the overt acts of
aggression which the author would stress as the spirit behind
the deeds: the arrogance and truculence of Prussianism, the
inflated utterances of statesmen and newspapers, the pervertedly patriotic education of the youth of the land. It is in this
sense that he finds the books of Jagow, Bethmann-Hollweg, and
the English publicist E. D. Morel so unsatisfactory. They
dwell almost exclusively on the coalitions, intrigues, and mili
tary preparations of the last fifteen years, whereas Herr Foerster finds that the German guilt lies .much deeper than in dip
lomatic blunders and imperial fanfaronades. He deplores any
tendency to explain the cataclysm of 1914 as the outcome of
"world-sin." All such arguments are just so much flattering
unction which the German nationalists lay to their breasts.
He devotes a particularly interesting chapter to an analysis of
the writings of Mr. Morel which appeared in German transla
tion last year. The total effect of such publications is to keep
alive the spirit of aggressive Prussianism which is for Herr
Foerster the brand of infamy on modern Germany and for
which he would fain substitute the once honored cultivation of
the soul. Can such drastic self-searching be found in any other
country? If so, the reviewer has as yet not discovered it.
W. K. Stewart
America Once Over

Across America with the King of the Belgians. By Pierre Goemaere. E. P. Dutton and Company.
M PIERRE GOEMAERE shows himself a logical descen dant of those European travelers who during the early
days of this republic came to the New World and found it, by an
admirable coincidence, to be exactly what they had been told
it would be. His observations of the "rather naive and even
primitive" Americans have, therefore, a quaintly archaic flavor.
The George Washington, appropriately outfitted even to the
extent of possessing a "coquettish" apartment for the Queen,
brought the royal family, as the public already knows, to New
York, and here M. Goemaere began his adventures with the dis
covery, astonishing to the most hardened of us, that "in Amer
ica the people, and even members of society, seem to know the
words of the national anthem." Boston, "the intellectual and
artistic center of America," with "families who can trace their
ancestors three and four generations back," enjoyed a visit from
the travelers, though even the Boston aristocracy betrayed its
recent origins to "the first glance of a European." This, per
haps, was to be expected, since Americans "have no real history
any more than they have a real intellectualism."
Their digestions impaired by American cooking, "that disastrous
cooking," the party commenced its long journey across the
country fortified only by glasses "filled with hopelessly limpid
water on which a few small pieces of ice floated sadly about.
That endless ice water!" The ordinary Pullman furnished the
Belgians with spectacles which made it worth while to abandon
the royal train now and then. M. Goemaere found himself no
less thrilled than astonished by the sight of "gentlemen and
ladies getting chastely undressed in the aisles . . . and all
this with the greatest purity of morals." The royal train, how
ever, afforded its own thrill in the shape of an engine which
constantly preceded it by five or six miles so that in case of a
collision this engine should be wrecked and not the train sacred
to majesty. M. Goemaere wishes it made plain that the press
was not always accurate in its accounts of the visitors: that
famous legend, for instance, of the engineer-king running his
own train, whereas "in reality our sovereign never touched a
lever"; or the "international sensation" created by the account
of the "Queen of the Belgians struggling with the lions of
America," whereas the facts of the case are that she merely
petted some "darling" little lions "that had been taken from the
[Vol. 112, No. 2910
nest in their earliest infancy and had known no other society

but that of man." M. Goemaere found his greatest sensation in
Santa Barbara when a pretty California girl, driving her own
motor, offered him a lift back to his hotel and in the course of
the ride talked to him only of her biceps. "Charming adven
ture."
Widely different aspects of American life claimed the trav
elers' interest: such as the farmer seen from the car window,
going to his land "comfortably installed in a spacious [automo
bile] body overflowing with a pile of spades, scythes, rakes, and
other implements of plowing"; and large hotels like the Penn
sylvania in whose assembly-rooms "American society congre
gates in the evening." These particular Belgians looked in vain,
it is a pleasure to record, for "Redskins, Sioux, and other
apaches who rush to attack trains with knives in their hands
and war-cries on their lips." The great American legend still
flourishes, apparently, in unnaive and unprimitive Europe.
Ieita Van Doren
What Every Freshman Should Know

Human Traits and Their Social Significance. By Irwin Edman.
Houghton Mifflin Company.
HERE is an unusual reply to the vexing question which
every college faculty periodically raises and half-heart
edly answers, the question what is the irreducible minimum
which should be presented to every freshman? For a quarter
of a century the answer tended to limit itself largely to the
technique of English composition. Let the freshman be taught
to use English prose with reasonable effectiveness, it was
argued, and other courses might be counted on to provide solid
material for thought. As regards the cultural results of this
method there has long been dissatisfaction, which is coming to
embrace the entire cafeteria system of education with a single
prescribed side-dish. It has produced truckloads of textbooks
on composition, but it has not visibly increased undergraduate
zeal for things of the intellect. In "Human Traits and Their
Social Significance" a fresh and hopeful start is made with the
familiar problem. If there is to be a general course for all
freshmen it could hardly be better planned than the one here
developed. It substitutes a body of scientific facts, set in ordered
perspective, for advice about style. It assumes that the ancient
admonition "Know thyself" is pregnant with meaning beyond
the injunction "Write clearly." It seeks to explain in lucid
detail the source and significance of that raw material of human
nature which the freshman unconsciously brings with him to
college, and to show how through recurrent stimuli and inhibi
tions, modified by the rule of reason, this raw material of in
stincts is molded to social form and purpose. It is a sug
gestive conception, developed with admirable sympathy and in
sight. The book divides into two broad parts: the first con
cerns itself with psychology, and presents the main facts
revealed by laboratory experiments; the second deals with the
career of reason in the several fields of religion, art, science,
and morals. Why this latter portion does not include economics
and political science is not apparent from a first reading.
It is fortunate that the experiment has been made by a philos
opher with broad humanistic backgrounds against which to set
his facts, rather than by a pure scientist. Its purpose is not the
presentation of original material, but the organization and syn
thesis of available Ttnowledge ; and its method is that of a skil
ful teacher, concerned with the immensely difficult problem of
quickening the intellectual curiosity of human beings with strong
resistant powers. It rests upon psychology, but it uses psychol
ogy to explain and interpret man in society. To take an illus
tration. The old metaphysics divided the world into warring
camps over the question of the freedom of the will. Mr. Edman
abandons metaphysical analysis. He accepts the conclusions of
psychology that will is the "whole complex organization of the
permanent self set against an alien intruding impulse," and
April 13, 1921]
The Nation
builds the fact into a rational interpretation of man reflecting.

It is such an attitude that justifies the role of the philosopher as
social counselor, a role little honored in America, but greatly
necessary. All about us are two worlds that persist in remain
ing apart, when every need demands that they should become
one. On the one hand is the individual, the product of evolu
tionary processes that reach far back in time to simple organ
ismsthe habit-ridden victim of forces that he might guide if he
took the trouble to understand them. The psychologist is
steadily piling up exact knowledge of this complex of human
nature, to the end that he may explain man to himself; but we
are too busy living to pause to consider how we may live ration
ally. On the other hand is society, the milieu in which we
dwell, a residuum of group customs and herd impulses, created
by the instinct of gregariousness and conditioning our effective
self-realization. Sociology makes it a business to explain its
forces and interpret its processes; but the custom-ridden indi
vidual goes his driven course not realizing how foolishly he is
driven. Enter the philosopher, who gathers up the results of
these related sciencesthe knowledge of instinct, milieu, reflec
tionpours over them a stream of thought, buttonholes the
individual, and bids him pause to consider his ways to his own
good.
It used to be said at Harvard that every undergraduate should
take Fine Arts IV with Charles Eliot Norton, for even if he got
no great appreciation of art, he would at least be brought in
contact with a gentleman. If every freshman could be induced
to listen sympathetically to Mr. Edman's exposition of human
traits, he might not become a psychologist or a philosopher, but
he would be brought in contact with a stimulating body of fact,
and would gain some understanding of what is meant by the
phrase "liberalizing the mind." He would discover the deeper
purpose and justification of the college of liberal arts. He
would find unexpected doors opening into realms more fascinat
ing than he had before conceived of. He would discover that
science is not mere pottering over trivialities, but a highway
leading out into the rich fields of religion, art, ethicsthat by
its help one is equipped to pursue the career of reason and
achieve rationality. If such contact with a philosophizing mind
remains sterile, then indeed is young America hard ridden by
the hag of habit.
But the freshmen to whom this work should be dedicated are
far more numerous than the relatively small body that will
gather next fall at Columbia, from which Mr. Edman writes,
or at any other college which may make use of his book.
The great mass of men and women who have quitted the class
room, or have never entered it, are often no better than fresh
men in their knowledge of themselves or of the social milieu.
While they have been following use and wont the psychologists
have turned many things upside down, and the repercussion of
their discoveries is disturbing a host of traditional conceptions.
The intellectual luggage with which we carefully outfitted our
selves in earlier days, and which too many of us still assume to
be sufficient to our needs, belongs in the garret, with hoops and
bustles. It is antiquated, though we may not know it. To all
such extra-mural freshmen "Human Traits" suggests a new
intellectual outfit; it opens a convenient gap in the wall through
which we may squeeze into the fascinating realm of modern
social psychology.
Vernon Louis Parbington
The Nation's discussions of The Progress of Poetry will be continued

in the Summer Book Supplement with an article on England by Mark
Van Doren.
The Contemporary American Novelists series will be continued as
follows :
April
Winston Churchill
May
Joseph Hergesheimer
June
James Branch Cabell
July
Willa Gather
August
Robert Herrick
559
READERS OF GOOD BOOKS WILL

BE INTERESTED IN THESE TITLES
ROLLAND
This novel, "Clerambault," comes to us out of the war.
It is one of Romain Holland's finest works and will give
a very keen understanding of his attitude during the
World War. In spite of the author's denial, no sympa
thetic reader can help seeing here Rolland, himself the
idealist, battling heroically against the overpowering forces
of reality.
$2.00
DE MORGAN
With this novel, "The Old Man's Youth and The Young
Man's Old Age," William De Morgan's work stands com
plete. As the New York Evening Post says: "The keen
insight, the broad and deep humanity, the understanding,
forgiving tenderness of Joseph Vance, is still warmly and
vividly alive here." De Morgan holds a place in litera
ture that will be honored by history.
$2.00
THE LIFE OF GOETHE
By P. HUME BROWN, LL.D., F.B.A.
Edited by Viscount Haldane
The fruit of a life time study which, according to the
Boston Transcript: "Rounds out supplements, in some re
spects even supersedes everything that has been written
before in English concerning the Sage of Weimar, Lewes
included." Fully illustrated, 2 Volumes.
$10.00
WOMEN in the Life of BALZAC
By JUANITA HELM FLOYD
With a preface by the novelist's niece, The PRINCESS
RADZIWILL
This book puts an end to the notion that Balzac knew
nothing of women in the haut monde of which he wrote
so much. For the first time we have the full story of
his relations with such women as the Duchesse d'Abrantes,
wife of one of Napoleon's marshals, the Duchesse de Cas
tries, George Sand, The Princesse Belgiojoso, Mme. de
Berny, and many others. The influence of these ladies on
the novels is carefully traced. Illustrated.
$3.00
The AGE of the REFORMATION
By PRESERVED SMITH, Ph.D.
Supplies the need for an authoritative study of the
Reformation in its proper relations to the economic and
intellectual revolutions of the Sixteenth Century. "A thick
volume of much merit. The author is well equipped with
knowledge of the period, and writes with clearness and
vivacity," N. Y. Evening Post.
Octavo, $6.00
SHAKESPEARE, ARIOSTO
and CORNEILLE
By BENEDETTO CROCE
Senator of the Kingdom of Italy
J. E. Spingarn, author of Creative Criticism, History of
Criticism in the Renaissance, etc., and editor of "The
European Library" has written to the publishers, saying:
"I regard this book as the most important body of criti
cism that has ever been translated into English from a
modern tongue."
$2.50
PUBLISHED BY
19 W. 44th Street
HENRY HOLT & CO.
NEW YORK
The Nation
560
Popular Science
The End of the World. By Joseph McCabe. K. P. Dutton and
Company.
he Mouvement biologique en Europe. By Georges Bohn. Paris :
Librairie Armand Colin.
JUST as the belief in progress has taken the place, with a
large portion of civilized mankind, of the earlier belief in
a future life, so the need for guidance once supplied by dog
matic theology is now satisfied by popular science. Doctrines
of predestination and grace have made way for theories of
heredity and of the conservation of energy; many men are now
more interested in the size of Betelgeuse than in the election to
salvation. This evolution of the race has been recapitulated
by Mr. McCabe in his own person. Having started as a
Franciscan he left the friary in a passion of Voltairean hatred
for his old faith; this has now, to some extent, subsided, and
he is content tranquilly and tirelessly to pursue the new religion
of science. Of the sixty volumes he has published the most
recent and one of the best is a study of astronomy in its rela
tion to the question of the probable duration of the earth as a
possible home for life.
That life will come to an end at some future date seems cer
tain; the problem is as to the method of extinction. For Faust's
Homunculus, the tiny creature capable of surviving only in the
chemical retort in which he was created, is a true image of
man on the earth, bound by the conditions of his existence to
a thin atmosphere of air and moisture on the surface of an iron
ball flying thrpugh space with a velocity greater than that of
a bullet at the rifle's muzzle. As all the stars are hurtling
through space at an equal or greater speed there might seem
imminent danger of a collision which would knock us all into
a mass of luminous gas, but this danger is really slight, owing
to the vast distances of space. A second possibility is that the
earth may become unfit for habitation by losing its air and
water, as the moon has donethe moon, compared by Mr.
McCabe to the skeleton at the feast with its perpetual reminder
to us of our future fate.
A third possibility is that the sun may burn too low to give
us warmth and light, and this was recently believed by astron
omers and physicists to be only a matter of a few million years.
However, reasons have lately been advanced for thinking that
the vast quantity of energy poured from the sun may be sup
plied by some form of atomic change comparable to radio
activity, and there are now astronomers who estimate the life
of a star not in millions but in billions of years. But only the
dates are in dispute; that the dark death is certain at some
time seems to be agreed.
But long before this happens Mr. McCabe has convinced
himself that mankind will be faced with one of the glacial epochs
that apparently periodically visit the planet. The next such
period, he thinks, will be much more severe than the last, and
may prove fatal to life. But mankind will have hundreds of
millions of years to prepare for it, and may not mind then
again master matter, as it has often done before? Over against
the grandiose and sublime spectacle of eternal matter flaming
through space is to be put the miracle of mind that can now
weigh each star and chemically analyze the matter in some
inconceivably remote abyss. Even now we are only in the
morning of the world and are only stammering the first words
of our scientific language. What may we not hope from the
mature race? The imagination kindled with the idea of that
supreme conflict between man and nature surely sees the uni
verse not as man but as God, sub specie aeternitatis.
It is just because in the light of science the destiny of the
race seems both so great and so perilous that our mutual aniif*sities and ephemeral hatreds seem so out of place. If in
religion, as Paul said, there is neither Greek nor barbarian,
neither bond nor free, then in science there is neither French
nor German. And yet one of the main motives of M. Bohn's
[Vol. 112, No. 2910
otherwise excellent review of recent biological thought is to

discredit German science, while exalting that of France, of
Poland, and of Czecho-Slovakia. Except for this ugly feature
his little book is a thrilling record of recent discovery, all the
more exciting because he has his own thesis to advance and
to defend against rival hypotheses. He is fully convinced that
all life, and particularly evolution, can be explained chemically.
It is a waste of time, he says, any more to discuss Darwin and
Lamarck and the problems of heredity propounded by them.
Recent experiments show, he believes, that every vital func
tion can be explained as a chemical or mechanical reaction to
environment. For example, artificial fertilization of eggs by
electricity or by other agents, and sometimes the fertilization
of the eggs of one species by the spermatozoa of another, show
that the origin of life is but a chemical process. Kammerer
claimed in 1913 to have transformed one species of salamander
into another by change of environment. By varying the diet,
and nothing else, of hens he completely altered their plumage,
thus disposing of Darwin's hypothesis of the development of
this by sexual selection. Still more startling are the results of
various surgical operations on guinea pigs, results, indeed, which
remind us of nothing so much as the Island of Dr. Moreau in
H. G. Wells's fantastic story. By grafting certain glands of
the male on the female, and vice versa, the form of the indi
vidual and its psychological character were both completely
changed.
By such arguments M. Bohn makes a strong case against
vitalism, the invocation of an entelechy that makes organisms
greater than the sum of their parts. He claims that biological
mechanism is at the bottom of evolution; that a living being is
an oscillating system, polarized somewhat on the analogy of a
magnet, and with vectorial properties mathematically calculable.
Preserved Smith
Japan and the World

Taisen-go no Sekai to Nippon (The World and Japan After the
Great War). By Ichiro Tokutomi. Tokyo.
ANEW book by Ichiro Tokutomi, member of the House of
Peers, editor of the Kokumin, and Japan's foremost lit
erary critic, is always an event. His latest work is an elaborate
treatise, dealing lucidly with the problems confronting presentday Japan. It has all the radiant enthusiasm and critical
acumen of his previous books, tinctured with a mordant pessi
mism, peculiar to his later writing, that may be due to advanc
ing years.
The evils now facing Japan, in the opinion of this author,
are the self-complacency and self-satisfaction of the people,
their delusion that the tendency of the world is toward peace,
the isolation of the Japanese by other races, the dominant im
pulse of materialism everywhere among the people, and finally
their extreme lack of self-confidence and independence. Of
course all Japanese do not agree with Mr. Tokutomi in his gloomy
outlook; and this he himself admits frankly. He perhaps fails
to note that the difficulties of Japan are not national but uni
versal at the present time. His idealism is derived from the
feudal Japan rather than from the spirit of the modern world.
It is for this reason that he only painfully accepts industrialism
as a dominant type of society. Japan's progress in productive
power, as well as in commerce and in politics, makes little im
pression on his mind. He is especially hard on the narikin, or
nouveaux riches, a plague resulting from the war, he affirms;
and this "get-rich-quick spirit," he contends, now mars Japa
nese civilization everywhere. He asserts that the whole nation
is not only ruled by it, but is not ashamed of it. The luxury
of the new rich excites the envy of the less fortunate and creates
dangerous social disaffection. The attitude of Mr. Tokutomi in
this portion of the volume recalls the writings of Carlyle and
Ruskin.
April 13, 1921]
The Nation
MARY STUART
John Drinkwater
"A more vivid and imaginative piece than
'Abraham Lincoln.' . . . Among the
finest of modern historical plays."Heywood Broun in the New York Tribune.
$1.25
THE
PEACE
561
LEGENDS
Amy Lowell
Lyric narratives of surpassing power and
beauty that will confirm Miss Lowell's in
ternational reputation as one of the fore
most poets of the present day. $2.00.
NEGOTIATIONS
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proposes to draw a truthful portrait of Mr. Wilson."Oswald Garrison Villard in The
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RISK, UNCERTAINTY
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BANK DEPOSITS
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A complete, timely and impartial discussion of a
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Every reader of "The Education of Henry Adams" will enjoy

A
CYCLE
OF
ADAMS
LETTERS
"A CYCLE OF ADAMS LETTERS," said the Dial, "sheds fresh lustre upon the family
name, while at the same time it admirably serves to reanimate the crucial years of the Civil
War. The correspondence of the American Minister and his two sons has the distinction
which comes from scholarship fused in men of action, and the triangular interplay of the
three keen mindsall absorbed in the same problemsgives this collection of letters an ex
ceptional value. They will be read not alone for their vivid and incisive commentary on
social conditions and public questions, but for their intrinsic literary qualities."
Illustrated. 2 volumes. $10.00
The Nation
562
When Mr. Tokutomi undertakes to indicate how his country
began to deteriorate after the Russo-Japanese war we get a

clearer idea of what he means by moral decline. Up to the time
[Vol. 112, No. 2910
surface accuracy.
The most reflective member of the imagist
group who issued their manifesto in 1915, Mr. Fletcher has
national spirit; the Japanese then knew what they wanted and
continued to confront a many-sided world with a sincere imagi

nation, applying himself modestly, collectedly, and coolly to the
business of registering beauty.
how to attain it. The effect of this policy was a triumph over
all difficulties. The Japanese, he feels, are abandoning the racial
clearly its weakness. If one was not convinced before, one will
of the war the nation had a united ideal and a determined
Yet if his book reveals imagism's strength, it reveals more
and communal idea for internationalism and universal brother
be convinced now that imagism not only had an inferior aim
hood.
but lacked the very means of achieving it. That aim was visual
truth and nothing but visual truthabout one-tenth of poetry
and the single technical problem proposed was the problem of
producing effects which should not be blurreda problem of
which instinctive, first-rate poets have seldom if ever been so
much as conscious. The aim of profound poetry now or at any
time is less to see than to understandto see, certainly, but to
see with eyes unencumbered by prisms that intensify the trees
and dissolve the forest. Good poetry makes us see wholes, and
imagism wishes to be good poetry; but imagism so far has
given us only hard, clear parts that do not blend. Sharp-sight
edness has become short-sightedness, and richness has had to
He is obsessed by ideas of nation and race.
This is a
weakness that has long affected Japanese civilization; it tends

to make the Japanese a race apart. And yet Mr. Tokutomi
laments over the isolation of his country among the nations.
Were Japan to insist on a narrowly nationalistic spirit and
policy she would be still further isolated internationally.

While thus adhering to a nationalistic view of world problems,
Mr. Tokutomi still insists that he is a citizen of the world,

though he does not propose to give this precedence over his
national citizenship. He is ready to revolt against the cult of
wealth while apparently in favor of the cult of power. Mer
cantile power is gross and vulgarizing while military power is
quite consistent with the highest idealism. What he deems the
fruitlessness of the European war in so many ways has lessened
Mr. Tokutomi's faith in the expected new world conscience and,
inferentially, the League of Nations. He refuses, however, to
admit that the necessity for armaments after the war is to be
confused with the necessity of conflict. The book is full of illu
minating discussions of Western nations, especially of England

and the United States, of which countries the author has a knowl
edge above most of his political colleagues in Japan. Of these
important discussions one may here be mentioned as of increas
ing significance: that with regard to the Anglo-Japanese alli

ance. Mr. Tokutomi holds that, because it was made with Rus
sia as the objective, since Russia is no more the alliance ceases
to have any practical significance. He contends that in the
future England's concern will be with Germany; and Japan's

with the United States. The alliance may be of some importance
to England but none to Japan. Japan supported England
against Germany, in accordance with the spirit of the alliance;
but England has not supported Japan against America; and,
moreover England did not stand by Japan in her contention for
racial equality at the Peace Conference. The book is obviously

lacking in consideration of the numerous ways wherein Japan,
England, and America can cooperate for the peace of the world
and the mutual good of their respective peoples.
J. INGRAM BRYAN
do for depth.
man.
Poetic Space and Time

Breakers and Granite.
millan Company.
By John Gould Fletcher.
The Mac
Th: is a collected edition of such old or new poems by Mr.

Fletcher as lend themselves to inclusion in an imagist's
panorama of America. The panorama begins with The Arrival,
dated May, 1920, an impression of New York harbor after
Europe and the Atlantic, and proceeds as if by rediscovery

through Manhattan, New England, Chicago, the lower Missis
Mr. Fletcher, wherever and to the extent that he
has been an imagist proper, proves all the foregoing true. There
is scarcely a line of his, or an image, which is not admirable,
but there are many poems which fail of great effect. Applying
the principles of other arts to poetry never makes it definite.
Rather it makes it vague, and Mr. Fletcher, on the whole too
much the painter in the present volume, is on the whole too
vague. His air is often the air of one who talks abstractedly
to himself before an easel; his concern is generally with the
formulas of description, with the jargon of design. In no such
way does a poet get power. Aloofness and fastidiousness may
discover beauty, but they rarely can hold it till we come.
The error of the imagists after all was the error of sup
posing poetry to be a matter solely of space. If poetry is
solely anything, it is solely time, and had Lessing not demon
strated the proposition in a treatise Mr. Fletcher would have
convinced us of it by example. For his three best poems have
more than mere extension; they have depth. They start and
speed the imagination in the only direction that literature can
gobackward, forward. Their magnitude is the only magni
tude which poetry can assume, the magnitude of duration. The
first of the three, called The Empty House, contains just one
ideathe definitive wisdom of a dwelling which has served its
turnbut that is enough. More ideas, more standing off, more
shaping and tracing, might have left a more delicate creation,
but the effect would have been to freeze the imagination. The
other two pieces are great in part because they are like Whit
In The Great River and in Lincoln Mr. Fletcher has
started up out of his little water-color ecstasy, has laid aside

his delicate fan of cool notes blending, and has plunged with
Whitman into the stream of mighty time. The Mississippi be
comes great for him not because it is wide or long but because
it is old; his grasp, his faculties, his soul expand and roll before
them masses of emotion and thought which imagism never
dreamed of. Lincoln becomes great for the poet because Lin
coln has character, and character, like a tree, is a product of
maturing time.
deservedly the best known poem of Mr. Fletcher's to date, Lin

coln. That the rediscovery is fictitiousthat many parts of the
Ungainly, laboring, huge,

The wind of the north has twisted and gnarled its branches;
Yet in the heat of mid-summer days, when thunder clouds ring
the horizon,
panorama were composed as far back as 1914 or 1915does not
A nation of men shall rest beneath its shade.
sippi, the Old South, the Far West, and the Arkansas River to
a concluding American Symphony which itself concludes with
matter if the net result is interesting, and the net result is

extraordinarily interesting.
The panorama is interesting for the obvious reason that
Down to the granite of patience
These roots swept, knotted fibrous roots, prying, piercing, seek
section after section of it is beautiful, but it is interesting also
1ng,
for the reason that it is the work of a deliberate and conscien

tious modern artist in words, and so is an important document
in modern poetry. As clearly as any one volume of recent
And drew from the living rock and the living waters about it
The red sap to carry upwards to the sun.
Imagism must soon go out. Why not on some such wave as
years it reveals the whole uncanny strength of imagismits

dauntless definiteness of phrase, its concentration, its care, its
this?
h
MARK WAN DOREN
April 13, 1921]
The Nation
563
iio W. 42, Street, NEW YORK

IIS:2IIEailllSIISl
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THE
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|g:2llg:2llg:2llg:2llg:2llg:2llg:2llg:2ll^
[Vol. 112, No. 2910
The Nation
564
Bergson and Balfour

Bergson and His Philosophy. By J. Alexander Gunn. E. P.
Dutton and Company.
Essays Speculative and Political. By Arthur James Balfour.
George H. Doran Company.
"~pHEY told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead"
1 and now they tell me that you live again in Henri Louis
Bergson. For what is the self-styled "philosophy of change"
but the ancient rdrra j>u enriched with every connotation of
modern science? For Bergson time and change are the ultimate
realities known not by intellect but intuitively. The universe
is a constant flux in which there is no such thing as immobility.
All true change, and every single movement, is one and indivisi
ble; if we move in a line from A to B there can be no segmenta
tion of the line, for that would be the destruction of the willed
and felt motion and the substitution for it of two or more other
entities. Thus is the ancient riddle invented by Zeno about
Achilles and the tortoise disposed of. For ages time and space
have been the playthings of the philosophers, who hunted the
two wild categories through a private preserve from which all
poachers were warned by large "no trespass" signs. But in the
last few years the physicists have begun to do a little shooting
on the premises themselves, and the result of their researches
has been violently to suggest that time is no single whole, but
is divided up, like matter and energy, into tiny packets. Our
illusion of a continual, uninterrupted flow of time is exactly
analogous to the illusion we have at a motion picture show; the
rapidity of succession of discrete sensations deceives the sense
organs and hence the brain.
Hardly any philosopher has ever taken such pains to acquaint
himself with the results of science as has Bergson ; but, as Santayana has somewhere said, he knows it all with a sort of hostile
externality, as a Jesuit might know Protestant theology. The
main use of his knowledge has been to enable him to attack the
cherished hypotheses of science. He tries to show that thought
is not a function of the brain, and that the psychologist's belief
that there is a perfect parallelism between conscious activity
and cerebral activity is false. Thus he introduces the probabil
ity that the soul survives the body.
His most famous contribution to the philosophic interpreta
tion of scientific hypothesis, and one well set forth in Mr. Gunn's
able summary, is his idea of the 6lan vital as the motive force
in evolution. Life he compares to a great stream confined by
matter as the river is by its banks; the banks determine the
sinuosities of the course but not its direction, much less its
movement. Adaptation to environment may explain this and
that form taken by life, but it cannot explain the continual
onward push of consciousness to ever greater abundance in
quantity and to ever finer qualitative form. This is explained
by him as the innate effort of spirit trying to free itself from
the trammels of matter; the process of evolution "is as if a
vague and formless being, whom we may call, if we will, man
or superman, had sought to realize himself and had succeeded
in doing so only by abandoning a part of himself on the way."
But life has no conscious purpose; for to Bergson teleology is
false, and necessarily so because of the supreme quality of life,
its free will. Not even God, "who is now making himself," can
know what will happen, because life is endowed with the power
of self-determination, of creating something new and uncaused
save by itself. Free will is proved by intuition, man's highest
faculty; and if it seems to be disproved by reason that is be
cause reason has been evolved by life as an instrument to cope
with matter and is at home only in material concepts, such as
quantity and causality. It is the old story of the army, called
into being to combat foreign enemies, finally making itself mas
ter of the state.
One of the essays in Mr. Balfour's last book is devoted to a
thoughtful criticism of Bergson for inconsistency in explaining
the fundamental life process. How can life keep ever moving
on its way if it does not know whither it is going? If teleology

is rejected, how can life continue in a constant process of intro
ducing ever more contingency into the domain of matter? II
spirit is the prius of all things, must not spirit be an absolute?
Bergson's argument, concludes Balfour, is the familiar theistic
argument from design with the design left out. Better invoke
a God with a purpose than a super-consciousness with none.
Whether or not the digladiations of the thinkers ever eventu
ate in a victory for either side, it is a pleasure to watch their
skilful fencing with exquisitely tempered blades. Mr. Balfour's
versatile mind, trained by long years on the front bench of the
House of Commons, is ready to attack any subject in debate, and
is sure to furnish rare sport to the galleries. After a bout with
Bergson with the foils, he rips up Treitschke in one of the most
cutting and sarcastic of criticisms, and then settles the freedom
of the seas, Zionism, and other questions suggested by the war.
More valuable than his ephemeral and slightly warped polit
ical essays are the speculative, including that on Bergson, one
on Bacon, one on Aesthetics, one on Psychical Research, and
one on Decadence. Bacon's supreme importance he finds neither
in his inductive method nor in his empirical discoveries, but in
the labor of creating the atmosphere favorable to the growth of
science. Consider the contempt in which that Cinderella of the
disciplines had hitherto been held; the fears of the orthodox,
the hostility of the learned, the indifference of the powerful, and
the ignorance of the many, and then consider the vast difference
made by the appeal of Bacon to look for light in the research
into nature's processes.
Fascinating indeed are Balfour's speculations on the laws of
civilization and decay. Many years before Spengler wrote his
"Untergang des Abendlandes" Balfour had been almost per
suaded by the example of Rome that a nation or a type of civili
zation is subject to a final period of decay and death analogous
to that undergone by an individual. When he first wrote the
essay, in 1908, he thought that none of the causes commonly
assigned for the decline and fall of Rome adequately explained
the phenomenon ; since then he has been much impressed by Pro
fessor Simkhovitch's argument that the decline was due to the
gradual exhaustion of the soil.
S.
Drama
John Drinkwater
V/f R. JOHN DRINKWATER, who is a poet, woke up one day
* * and found himself a successful playwright. He had writ
ten a gently realistic chronicle play within a poetic and sym
bolic framework. The public and the reviewers promptly dis
regarded the poetry and the symbolism and enjoyed seeing an
actor who looked a little like Lincoln go through the great man's
traditional gestures. This accident, which did violence to Mr.
Drinkwater's deeper intention, is now impelling him to do vio
lence to himself. The true place for "Mary Stuart" (Ritz
Theater) was among his eloquent and imaginatively built oneact dramas in verse.1 Instead it has been stretched and diluted
and done in prose which Mr. Drinkwater writes with evident
strain and discomfort. Even so it does not suffice for an even
ing's entertainment and its entire symbolical character, at
variance with its watery medium of expression, disappoints an
audience which came to see history and pageantry, loud pas
sions and a piteous end.
For Mr. Drinkwater was not really interested in Mary Stuart
at all, just as in his admirable "A Night of the Trojan War"
he cared very little about the men of flesh and blood who fought
before Ilium. In both cases he goes to the past merely to set
in poetic and philosophic perspective a stinging problem of his
own time and heart, and to transpose it into a mood of serenity
where it can be more calmly and detachedly contemplated. What
fascinates him is the trouble of the young Scotchman, John
1 Pawn*: Four Poetic Plays. By John Drinkwater. Houghton Mifflin Company.
The Nation
April 13, 1921]
Clerical
VITAL
AND
BURNING
565
Union
QUESTION!
JKILLED and unskilled workingmen of this and other

countries have at all times formed their own unions, and
these associations have included railway men, the build
ing trades group: carpenters, bricklayers, stone masons,
plasterers and iron and steel construction workers, as well as those
in the textile and allied industries. Why, then, deny the right to
intellectual toilers, if not for striking purposes, at least for mutual
protection?
For further particulars read "The Underpaid White Collar Class," a new trea
tise on social and economic questions with particular reference to the clerical
drudge in the United States, written in English by the well-known Latin-American
journalist and author, J. LARA, connected for nearly a decade with the largest
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This book will be of unusual significance at this time when the extremely low
salaries paid to all classes of clerical employees has given occasion to lengthy
articles and editorials in leading newspapers and periodicals, a subject that has
not so far been discussed in a special book.
This new volume is divided into three parts, (there are altogether fifteen chap
ters and four appendices in the book) treating respectively : the Labor movement,
the internal regulations in business offices and the social and economic phases of
the problem.
Price $1.50 prepaid, in stiff board covers.
Place your order with your nearest bookdealer or send it direct to us.
THE S. A. PUBLISHING CO.

9-15 MURRAY STREET, Top Floor
NEW YORK CITY
The Nation
566
[Vol. 112, No. 2910
Hunter, who appears in the brief prologue that, in the fashion

of the screen, melts into a merely illustrative anecdote from
the life of the Queen of Scots. John's wife Margaret has come
to love another man without ceasing to love him. He babbles of
his honor; he acts like a man who has been robbed of a dog or
a diamond. A vision of Mary Stuart comes to instruct and to
heal him and to make clear the mystery of Margaret's heart.
We must become love or it spends us, the queen says. She
is, in this presentation, a great soul and one that is greatly wise
in love. She is driven through the world; she cannot find peace
because there is no man whose largeness of nature answers to
her own. Rizzio is a toy, Darnley a sot and a fool, Bothwell can
give her only the intoxication of the minute that is between
them. She attempts, like Plato's lover, to pass from one object
of beauty to another in order to catch a glimpse of the image
of that ideal beauty which alone can fill the soul. Such thoughts
in Mary are not beyond the range of the possible. No doubt
she had read the poems of Du Bellay. But as Mr. Drinkwater
makes her say, Ronsard was her teacher, and the Heptameron
of Marguerite of Navarre appeared, one recalls, only eight
years after Ronsards Odes. But the psychology of the his
torical personage matters little enough. She points a modern
moral and the last note of the play is a tragic one, because John
Hunter remains unenlightened and unconvincedhow was he

to be convinced by an argument so wounding to his pride?and
declares that Mary Stuart can teach him nothing. One wants,
but hardly from Mr. Drinkwater, another act in which John
goes home and stupidly yet so naturally tells Margaret that she
must choose between Finlay and himself. For this Margaret
who, like the lady of Arles in Daudet's play or Penelope in
Hauptmanns The Bow of Odysseus never appears at all, is
the true protagonist of the entire action.
The idea of the play, it will be seen, is both ingenious and

significant. The execution lacks both vitality and the necessary
sense of progression toward some culmination however spiritual
and unseen. And one cannot help referring that to the medium
used.
For so soon as Mr. Drinkwater writes verse his dramatic
vitality becomes as high as the inner rhythm of his work be

comes compact and energetic. His philosophical drift in Mary
Stuart is as sound as in Pawns, but it is cluttered and ob
scured by the ingenuity of dramaturgic devices. All of Mary's
tortuous and falsely simple prose does not hit the mark as do
the verses which Mr. Drinkwater's Trojan soldier speaks to

his comrade:
Capys, it is so little that is needed
For righteousness; we are so truly made,

If only to our making we were true.
Nor is the mere action in Mary Stuart as direct and as
effective as the actions of either The Storm or the really
Art
Archipenko
IT
is quite possible that Alexandre Archipenko's sculpture

may be objected to on the ground that it follows an obscure
cult of remoteness, that it betrays a critical rather than a
strictly creative intelligence. Yet it cannot be justly charged
against Archipenko that, like the Orphic cubists, he lacks cen
tral substance, feeling, and ultimate reality. True to his
Russian origin, he touches earth, albeit fleetly and only on
tiptoe. This, no doubt, will also explain why he does not range
above simple human subjects nor put behind him, as tamely
wornout, the advantage of a pictorial starting-point, even
though his spirit chafes to soar beyond the flesh to a purer
universe.
Several interesting examples of Archipenko's art are being

exhibited at the Societe Anonyme and the Daniel Gallery. The
Societe Anonyme is performing a much-needed service by famil
iarizing us with what is being done by the disciples of the newer
movements both here and in Europe.
Even though Archipenko,
following a sensation in the capitals of Europe, is here pre

sented to us for the first time, he will not, I believe, baffle the
layman so much nor excite the dry cynicisms which the cubists
first evoked on this side.
seek.
The reason for this is not far to
In Archipenko's statuary, bas-reliefs, and sketches we are

not challenged with sheer abstractions, with an emasculated
equilibrium of purity which is the ideal of Matisse in painting.
No interloping fret of subject to mar the harmony of composi
tion! Visual or plastic music, as it is sometimes called, is

therefore scarcely the phrase to apply to Archipenko's work,
save only in so far as rhythm and harmony underlie all plas
ticity. Curiously enough, however, even this element in Archi
penko is largely subordinated to the sharp edge of the eager

intellect.
In this, chiefly, lies the Russian sculptor's modernity. He

tends toward intellectual bleakness, unbroken by the lyric
warmth of animal impulses and emotions. To allege that the
sculptor's chisel aims to model the vision into objects pleasur
able to the senses, is to gibber nowadays in a language no
longer franked in many studios. Nevertheless the feeling is
hard to toss aside that the dominant sculptor of tomorrow, who
ever he may be, will try a pulsating fusion of the intellectual
with the emotional and sensuous appeal; his blood will flow quick
and warm and will not be sluiced upward to the head alone.
Round about him exploration and experiment will go on just the
magnificent God of Quiet in which the madness of war is
same, as it always does.

Archipenko appears to sense this.
creatively set forth as strongly and as permanently as in any
tling with two angels, each pulling him in the opposite direc
piece of contemporary literature.
mawkish that its alienation from their ears and minds is at
tion. In his work, as in that of his Italian contemporary, Um

berto Boccioni (who anticipated several of the former's inno
vations), we can detect a flying endeavor to weld intellectual
and sensuous motives. Certainly Archipenko's experiments, if
so they may be described, are suggestive. You may demur, per
haps, that you do not see the reason for the use of wood, iron,
cement, and papier-mach in a single piece. But if you will
examine the figures and bas-reliefs with an unbiased eye, you
will be bound to admit, I think, that some elasticity is achieved.
At the same time, to be sure, there is a corresponding loss of
clarity and austere feeling. But this is precisely the end the
sculptor had in view; his objective was movement, fluxdy
once betrayed.
The Chronicler in Abraham Lincoln still
namism; and he has got it somehow: he has netted it with flat
brings the memory of the vicarious shame one felt for his sorry
affectation. Perhaps Mr. Drinkwater's reputation will some day
persuade a producer to have a group of actors trained by one
who understands the nature of verse. A full length poetic play
by this dramatist, at all events, is a thing to be hoped for, since
it, if anything, may once more help poetry to return to the
surfaces, planes, diverse materials, and yawning caverns.

In his bas-reliefs we note what seems at first glance another
arresting departure. He has brought his palette into play.
On second thought, however, we conclude that nothing essen
tially new has been released by this trick. The device of color
ing figures and figurines, particularly those made out of wood,
is an old one practiced by both the Egyptians and the Greeks.
The one-act plays in verse were all acted in England.
One
cannot, alas, imagine their production here. It did not, evi

dently, even occur to Mr. William Harris to use one of them in
stead of a quite dull and graceless pantomime as the curtain

raiser which the briefness of Mary Stuart made necessary.
Plays in modern verse strike both our managers and our audi
ences as futile and grotesque and no one seems to suspect the
reason, which is, above all others, that our actors cannot speak
verse. Either they reduce it to prose by every violence at their
command or else they deliver it with an air so insufferably
living stage.
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
He is continually wres
The Nation
April 13, 1921]
567
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568
The Nation
While the larger cities were erecting marble statues to Apollo,

this custom quaintly arose in remote country districts, spring
ing naturally from the simple worship of rustic gods by
rustic men.
Archipenko's concavities and holes or, as they are fantasti
cally termed, his "modeling of the atmosphere," give us the
measure of the mystical proclivities of the Russian sculptor's
mind. Apparently he is entrapped by a transcendental notion,
intriguing and highly poetical it may be, but not quite modern
in scope. Briefly, it goes something like this: If objects poised
in space are legitimate subjects for the sculptor's chisel, why
not the actual space they preempt? Why not the ideality of
objects? Accordingly, instead of a head of a man or the breast
or limb of a woman, Archipenko offers us a hole or a concavity
their non-being, as it were, to ensnare the imagination of the
beholder. This savors a little of medieval equivocation, does
it not? It is like the ascetic gesture of Plotinus who refused
to speak to his mother because she gave him birth, because
she yielded his soul to the frail flesh.
For the curious layman, the key to Archipenko's method will
be found most clearly adumbrated in the manifestos of the Ital
ian futurist mentioned above, Umberto Boccioni. In one of the
latter, issued as far back as 1913, Boccioni outlines his credo in
part as follows: "The traditional desire to fix a gesture by a line
and homogeneity of materials (marble or bronze) has conspired
to make sculpture the static art par excellence. I believe that
one might obtain a primary dynamic element by decomposing
the unity of materials. . . . Between real and ideal form,
between the new form (Impressionism) and the traditional
conception (Greek), there is a changing form in the process of
evolution which has nothing to do with forms hitherto con
ceived. This double conception of form, form in motion (rela
tive form) and motion in form (absolute motion), can only be
rendered simultaneous with the plastic life at the exact mo
ment of its appearance, without pruning it down or dragging it
out of its vital atmosphere, without arresting it in its move
ment" Boccioni has managed to embody his theory, as in his
Spiral Expansion of the Muscles in Movement, in a far more
convincing manner than Archipenko, who appears still to be
groping for proper expression.
Again, touching Archipenko's recourse to color, while it is
not entirely new, it is designed obviously to set sculpture free
from the obligatory sun of artificial lighting. This problem is
more imaginary than real. It will not do, however, to urge
that marble and bronze have always offered a resistant me
dium and that out of the perplexities of the chosen vehicle
itself, out of its native limitations, the great sculptors of the
past have managed suppleness of form interwoven with puis
sant movement. Archipenko cannot be denied the right of
untrammeled experiment.
He does not always use geometrical planes, as is evidenced
by the Nude Woman, which is slightly reminiscent of the
Egyptian manner. Taking him all in all, he is more fluid than
diverse, and his stark intellectual rationale does not quite
hamper his sensuous impulses. At times his "modeling of the
atmosphere" does pull us out of ourselves to go in quest of
the half-finished personality of the figure; we grow into co
workers with the sculptor. Not infrequently, on the other
hand, we are rebuffed by a haze of obscurantism that lingers
about the conception. Paganism or sheer animal joy he appears
to shun, satisfied that the sculpture of the Greeks is informed
with a "fatal deadness," that it is too well balanced and finite.
The late Guillaume Apollinaire held that Archipenko intro
duces harmony into sculpture where previously there had been
but melody. This is extremely doubtful. Even Boccioni's
"form-forces" are more dynamic, more clearly motivated as
well as more skilfully wrought. The explanation may lie in the
divergence of the Latin and Slav temperaments. As between
the two voices quarreling within him, like robins on a hedge,
mysticism rather than modern raucous dynamism trills the
louder.
Pierre Loving
[Vol. 112, No. 2910
Music
The "Third" Italy
I TALY is in the throes of a musical renaissance. Like the
* France and Russia of the last two decades, she too has been
touched by that flame of creative intensity, of passionate seeking
after musical truths that has been the quickening spirit of
modern music. She, too, has wrenched herself free of that
strangle-hold of traditions which was gradually squeezing out
her life. But unlike those of France and Russia, these tradi
tions were not foreign, but her own. The country which, as M.
Casella says, had "given birth to vocal polyphony with Palestrina, to instrumental music with Frescobaldi, to the musical
drama with the Florentine 'Camerata' and with Monteverde, to
the modern symphony and sonata with Scarlatti, Corelli, and
Sammartini, to opera serious and buffa with the Neapolitan
school," had at length succumbed to the most degraded form of
all, the musical melodrama. This last seems to have reached its
highest expression in Verdi, its final decadence in Mascagni and
Puccini. Sporadic attempts had been made to return to "pure"
music. To this, the German influence, which had so thoroughly
penetrated Europe during the latter half of the nineteenth cen
tury, was the strongest contributing factor. This influence is
still discernible in the works of such men as Orefici, a composer
of refinement and taste; of Sinigaglia, who has made extensive
utilization of Piedmontese folk-lore; and of the organist, M.
Enrico Bossi, who remains today an unconscious disciple of
Brahms and who wields a sane and healthy influence as head of
the famous Accademia Santa Cecilia. There is no greater proof
of his liberal teaching than that he should have turned out a
pupil so widely different in style, idiom, and ideas as Malipiero;
he is distinguished as perhaps the most conspicuous example of
worthy musical conservatism in Italy.
For there is also an unworthy conservative element in Italy,
best typified by Arturo Toscanini. Toscanini, as the greatest
and most popular conductor in Italy, and as director of La
Scala, the most important opera house in the country, has it in
his power to push any composer far along the path of success.
One would naturally suppose that a man so secure in the favor
of the people and in his pinnacle of fame would not consider it
necessary to concern himself especially with either. He has
concerned himself with both. He has programmed a few mod
ern works because the men who wrote them have begun to win
their public, and because, as he says, people will otherwise think
that he does not understand modern music. To other composers
of equal significance he has only made promises which as yet
he has not fulfilled. He has not even been true to himself, for
by temperament and tradition he is entirely out of sympathy
with the new movementso much so, indeed, that it la, safe to
say that, up to the present moment, Arturo Toscanini has made
little if any contribution to Italy's "renovation."
Much more has been done, and with much greater sacrifice,
by Bernadino Molinari, leader of the famous Augusteo orches
tra at Rome, and a conductor of unusually fine attainments.
He has both understanding and sympathy, but his position is
much more precarious than that of Toscanini, because he is
more at the mercy of those conflicting elements which are con
stantly tearing at the internal musical life of the country. For
a conductor these elements mean cliques, jealousy, personal
ambition and enmity, and that warfare between Guelph and
Ghibelline that eternally rages between Italian cities. For a
composer of individuality and independence it sometimes means
all these things and one morenamely, the organized commer
cialism of such publishing houses as Ricordi's and Sonzogno's,
a powerful combination that practically controls most of the
concert halls and opera houses of Italy, and that has been des
perately pushing such a weakling as Zandonai, in the hope of
finding a possible successor to the Mascagni-Puccmi-Leoncavallo triumvirate in the profitable affections of the public.
The Nation
April 13, 1921]
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The Nation
It is significant of the struggle now going on in Italy that

though profoundly beautiful and original works are being pro
duced, one seldom hears them performed. For a while there
was some sort of society, of which Pizzetti and Casella were
leading spirits, which tried to bring these works to the public in
concerts organized for this purpose in various parts of the coun
try. Some good was undoubtedly accomplished, although one
still has to go to Paris or London to become familiar with them.
Yet in spite of these handicaps there are three or four men
in Italy today who are bringing back into her music some of
the freshness of expression and boldness of design that be
longed to the golden age of her seventeenth century. These
men are Ildebrando Pizzetti, his pupil, Mario CastelnuovoTedesco, G. Francesco Malipiero, and Alfredo Casella. Piz
zetti might easily be called the Cesar Franck of Italy. Cer
tainly, his sonata in A-major for violin and piano can unhesi
tatingly be ranked with that of the Belgian master's. Written
in a classical idiom that often reverts to the old Greek modes,
inspired by the war and purged of all dross by its suffering, it
is full of a broad, sweet, clean humanity that once more preaches
the gospel of musical purity, not only to Italy, but to the world.
One finds this same quality in his "F6dra," which has lifted
Italian opera out of the realm of melodrama, much as "Pelleas"
did for the French.
Malipiero and Castelnuovo have also, like Pizzetti, been work
ing for a more ideal form of the music drama, and have also,
like him, expressed themselves richly in symphonic and smaller
instrumental works. Both, as it happens, are working toward
the same goal, but, being original in their concepts, have taken
widely divergent pathsMalipiero along that led by a rich,
fantastic imagination, Castelnuovo wherever the dreams of ado
lescence have beckoned. The musical physiognomy of the one
is mature, that of a man who has suffered deeply: of a naive,
tender, audacious spirit, subject to stormy moods of grief and
nostalgia. In the other is all the fine freshness of springtime,
the poesy and genial humor of a youthful heart that seems
equally drawn toward the serenities of nature and of life and
toward the gentle merry legends of the past. And so there has
been no more strikingly original music drama during the past
few years than Malipiero's "Sette Canzoni," no more beautiful
orchestral works than his "Pause del Silenzio" and "Ditirambo
Tragico"; nor, in the smaller forms, anything quite so exquisite
and charming as Castelnuovo's lyrical "Canti all' aria aperta,"
for violin and piano, or the three "Fioretti di San Francisco,"
for voice and orchestra.
Somewhat solitary in his ideals and his ideas stands Casella.
Unlike the rest of his fellow-countrymen, he seems to have no
strong native impulse toward the music drama. Unlike them,
also, he believes that Italy's "new classicism is destined to
reunite in one harmonious eurythmic all the last conquered
sonorities, Italian and foreign." That he has experimented
much and assimilated much, there is distinct evidence in his
works. One hears the mechanical rhythms of the new Rus
sians, the nuances and irony of the French, and, with it all, a
certain passionate lyricism that proclaims him Italian. This
"internationalism" seems to be resented by most of his com
patriots, and has left him a curiously isolated figure, uncomprehended by even those few of whom I have spoken and for
whom he has labored so faithfully and untiringly. Nevertheless,
he is extremely optimistic for the future, and says that the
worst obstacles have been overcome. If this is true, it is due in
large part to his own initiative and patient efforts. In the
meantime one can only hope that out of all this feverish activ
ity, this mighty struggle for freedom of musical thought, will
indeed come that "third" Italy of which he has dreamed so long.
Henrietta Straus
This is the first of several articles by Miss Straus on the present
musical situation in Europe.
[Vol. 112, No. 2910
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Notable
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571
Books
AMERICAN TOPICS
Finney, R. L. The American Public School. Macmillan.
Gilbert, C. E., and J. E. Pogue. America's Power Resources.
Century.
Haig, R. M. (editor). The Federal Income Tax. Columbia
University.
Hammond, J. H., and J. W. Jenks. Great American Issues.
Scribner.
Irwin, Inez Haynes. The Story of the Woman's Party. Harcourt, Brace.
James, H. G. Local Government in the United States. Appleton.
Kellor, Frances. Immigration and the Future. Doran.
Public Opinion and the Steel Strike of 1919. Harcourt, Brace.
Spargo, John. The Jew and American Ideals. Harper.
ART, ARCHAEOLOGY, MUSIC
Arnold, T. W., and Laurence Binyon. Court Painters of the
Grand Moguls. Oxford.
Fry, Roger. Vision and Design. Brentano's.
Bridge, Sir Frederick. Twelve Good Musicians. Dutton.
Hind, C. L. Art and I.Authors and I. Lane.
Hull, A. E. Cyril Scott: Composer, Poet, and Philosopher.
Dutton.
Langfeld, H. S. The Aesthetic Attitude. Harcourt, Brace.
Litchfield, Frederick. Antiques, Genuine and Spurious. Har
court, Brace.
Marquand, Allen. Benedetto and Santi Buglioni. Princeton
University.
Marriott, Charles. Modern Movements in Painting. Scribner.
Parkes, Kineton. Sculpture of Today. Scribner.
Pennell, Joseph. The Graphic Arts. Chicago University.
Sarkar, B. K. Hindu Art. Huebsch.
Sullivan, E. J. The Art of Illustration. Scribner.
Taft, Lorado. Modern Tendencies in Sculpture. Chicago Uni
versity.
Tyler, J. M. The New Stone Age in Northern Europe. Scribner.
Weitenkampf, Frank. How to Appreciate Prints. Scribner.
BIOGRAPHY AND MEMOIRS
Barthou, Louis. A Poet's Loves [Hugo]. Harcourt, Brace.
Benson, E. F. Our Family Affairs. Doran.
Bernstein, Edouard. My Years of Exile. Harcourt, Brace.
Blashfield, Evangeline W. Manon Phlipon Roland [Madame
Roland]. Scribner.
Brown, P. Hume. The Life of Goethe. 2 vols. Holt.
Clark, Ruth. The Life of Anthony Hamilton. Lane.
Conklin, George. The Ways of the Circus. Harper.
Cortissoz, Royal. The Life of Whitelaw Reid. 2 vols. Scribner.
Crothers, S. M. Emerson: How to Know Him. Bobbs-Merrill.
Dana, R. H. Hospitable England in the Seventies. Houghton
Mifflin.
Das, Harihar. The Life and Letters of Toro Dutt. Oxford
University.
Dawes, C. G. A Journal of the Great War. 2 vols. Houghton
Mifflin.
Duclaux, Marie. Victor Hugo. Holt.
FletcheT, J. G. Paul Gauguin: His Life and Art. N. L. Brown.
Floyd, Juanita H. Women in the Life of Balzac. Holt.
Gauguin, Paul. Intimate Journals. Boni and Liveright.
Gordon, A. C. Jefferson Davis. Scribner.
Gorki, Maxim. Reminiscences of Tolstoy. Huebsch.
Hindenburg, Field-Marshal von. Out of My Life. Harper.
The Kaiser vs. Bismarck [letters preceding dismissal of Bis
marck]. Harper.
London, Charmion. The Book of Jack London. Century.
Nekludov, A. Diplomatic Experiences. Dutton.
Moore, Charles. Daniel H. Burnham. 2 vols. Houghton Mifflin.
OXFORD books and Oxford

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Muzzey, D. S. Thomas Jefferson. Scribner.

Nicolson, Harold. Paul Verlaine. Houghton Mifflin.
Sedgwick, H. D. Marcus Aurelius. Yale University.
Smith, C. A. Poe: How to Know Him. Bobbs-Merrill.
Smith, E. F. Priestley in America, 1794-1804. Blakiston.
Strachey, Lytton. Queen Victoria. Harcourt, Brace.
Taylor, C. C. The Life of Admiral Mahan. Doran.
White, W. A. A Friend's Chronicle [of Roosevelt]. Macmillan.
Witte, Count. Memoirs. Translated by A. Yarmolinsky.
Murry, J. M. Aspects of Literature. Knopf.

Pound, Louise. Poetic Origins and the Ballad.
Zweig, Stefan. Roman Rolland. Seltzer.

Gore, J. R. The Boyhood of Abraham Lincoln.
Bobbs-Merrill.
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court, Brace.
Sapir, Edward. Language. Harcourt, Brace.
Shakhnovski. A Short History of Russian Literature. Dutton.
Trent, W. P., John Erskine, S. P. Sherman, and Carl Van
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Putnam.
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Social Philosophy of Carlyle and Ruskin.
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Turquet-Milnes, G. Some Modern French Writers. McBride.

Van Doren, Carl. The American Novel. Macmillan.
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Barrie, J. M. A Kiss for Cinderella. Scribner.
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Monsieur Bergeret in Paris.A Mummer's Tale.On
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Neihardt, John G.
Figures of Earth.Taboo.
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Murray, Gilbert (translator). The Agamemnon of Aeschylus.

Nathan, George Jean.
Knopf.
Black, Alexander. The Seventh Angel. Harper.

Canfield, Dorothy. The Brimming Cup.
Hudson, Holland. The Little Theatre Handbook. Frank Shay.

Jameson, Storm. Modern Drama in Europe. Harcourt, Brace.
Moore, George. The Coming of Gabrielle. Boni and Liveright.
Moses, M. J. (editor). Representative Plays by American
Dramatists, 1856-1911.
Anderson, Sherwood. Poor White. Huebsch.

Atherton, Gertrude. The Sisters-in-Law. Stokes.
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Beresford, J. D. Revolution. Putnam.
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Locke, W. J. The Mountebank. Lane.
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Marshall, Archibald. The Hall and the Grange. Dodd, Mead.
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Bennett, Arnold. Things that Have Interested Me. Doran.

Bewer, J. A. The Literature of the Old Testament. Columbia
Nevinson, H. W.
Original Sinners.
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O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories for 1920. Doubleday,

University.
Broadus, E. K. The Laureateship. Oxford University.

Brooks, Charles. Hints to Pilgrims. Yale University.
Chesterton, G. K. The Uses of Diversity. Dodd, Mead.
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Croce, Benedetto. Ariosto, Shakespeare, and Corneille. Holt.

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Donnelly, F. P. The Art of Interesting. Kenedy.
Eliot, T. S. The Sacred Wood. Knopf.

Ellis, Havelock. Impressions and Comments. Vol. 2. Hough
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Guedalla, Philip. Supers and Supermen. Knopf.

Hackett, Francis. The Invisible Censor. Huebsch.
Kilmer, Joyce. The Circus and Other Essays. Doran.

Lodge, H. C. The Senate of the United States and Other Essays
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Tarkington, Booth. Alice Adams. Doubleday, Page.
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More, P. E. A New England Group and Others. Houghton
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O'Brien, E. J. (editor). Best Short Stories of 1920.

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Phillpotts, Eden. The Grey Room. Macmillan.
Rolland, Romain. Clerambault. Holt.
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The Art of Letters.
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Adams, G. B. Constitutional History of England. Holt.

Adams, J. T. The Founding of New England. Atlantic.
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Beer, M.
A History of British Socialism.
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Bogart, E. L. War Costs and Their Financing. Appleton.

Bruce, P. A. A History of the University of Virginia. Vols.
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Channing, Edward.
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Colby, F. M. (editor). A Reference History of the War. Dodd,
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De Wulf, Maurice. Civilization and Philosophy in the Middle
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Dickinson, T. H. The American Relief Administration. 2 vols.
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Donaldson, A. S. A History of the Adirondacks. 2 vols. Cen
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Tagore, Rabindranath. Thought Relics. Macmillan.
Tansley, A. G. The New Psychology and Its Relation to Life.
Dodd, Mead.
Tridon, Andre. Psychoanalysis, Sleep, and Dreams. Knopf.
Walker, J. G. Religion and Progress. Oxford University Press.
Ward, Stephen. The Ways of Life: A Study in Ethics. Ox
ford University Press.
Watkins, O. D. A History of Penance. Longmans, Green.
Wilson, P. W. The Vision We Forget. Revell.
POETRY
Aiken, Conrad. Punch, the Immortal Liar. Knopf.
Aldington, Richard. Medallions in Clay. Knopf.
Blackwell, Alice Stone (translator). Spanish American Poets.
Brentano's.
575
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576
The Nation
Blunden, Edmund. The Waggoner and Other Poems. Knopf.

Braithwaite, W. S. (editor). Anthology of Massachusetts Poets.
Small, Maynard.
Colum, Padraic. Dramatic Legends and Shorter Poems. Macmillan.
Coutts, Francis, and W. H. Pollock. Icarian Flights [transla
tions from Horace]. Lane.
Deutsch, Babette, and Abraham Yarmolinsky (translators).
Anthology of Russian Poetry. Harcourt, Brace.
Fletcher, J. G. Breakers and Granite. Macmillan.
Grierson, H. J. C. The School of Donne: the Metaphysical
Poets. Oxford University.
Leonard, W. E. The Lynching Bee. Huebsch.
Le Prade, Ruth (editor). Debs and the Poets. Economy Book
Shop.
Long, Haniel. Poems. Moffat, Yard.
Lowell, Amy. Legends. Houghton Mifflin.
Marquis, Don. The Old Soak.Poems and Portraits. Doubleday, Page.
Masefield, John. King Cole [title not finally decided upon].
Macmillan.
Mathers, E. P. (translator). The Garden of Bright Waters.
Houghton Mifflin.
Maynard, Theodore. The Last Knight and Other Poems.
Stokes.
Miall, Bernard (editor). French Fireside Poetry. Small, May
nard.
Millay, Edna St. Vincent A Few Figs from Thistles. F. Shay.
Morton, David. Ships in Harbour. Putnam.
Myers, F. W. H. Collected Poems. Macmillan.
Owen, Wilfred. Poems. Huebsch.
Palamas, Kostes. A Hundred Voices. Harvard University.
Richards, Mrs. Waldo (editor). Star-points. Houghton Mifflin.
Ridge, Lola. Sun-up. Huebsch.
Robinson, E. A. Avon's Harvest. Macmillan.
Scott, Evelyn. Precipitations. N. L. Brown.
Shay, Frank (compiler). Iron Men and Wooden Ships. F. Shay.
Smith, L. P. The Youth of Parnassus. F. Shay.
Speyer, Leonora. The Canopic Jar. Dutton.
Taggard, Genevieve. Hawaiian Poems. F. Shay.
Thomas, Edward. Collected Poems. Seltzer.
Weaver, J. V. A. In American. Knopf.
Yeats, W. B. Selected Poems. Macmillan.
SCIENCE
Conklin, E. G. The Direction of Human Evolution. Scribner.
Cotton, H. A. The Latent Causes of Insanity. Princeton Uni
versity.
Gallichan, W. M. Sex Education. Small, Maynard.
Harrow, Benjamin. Vitamines. Dutton.
Saleeby, C. W. Parenthood and Race Culture. Moffat, Yard.
Singer, Charles (editor). Studies in the History and Method
of Science. Oxford University Press.
Stowell, W. L. Sex: For Parents and Teachers. Macmillan.
Thomson, J. A. Natural History Studies. Holt.
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Andrews, R. C. Across Mongolian Plains. Scribner.
Bland, J. O. P. China, Japan, and Corea. Scribner.
Chesterton, G. K. The New Jerusalem. Doran.
Couchoud, P. L. Japanese Impressions. Lane.
Fabre, J. H. More Hunting Wasps. Dodd, Mead.
George, W. J. Hail Columbia! Harper.
Jennes, D., and A. Ballantyne. The Northern D'Entre casteaux. Oxford University.
Murray, Amy. Father Allan's Island. Harcourt, Brace.
O'Brien, Frederick. Mystic Isles of the South Seas. Century.
Reed, E. H. Tales of a Vanishing River. Lane.
Sheridan, Claire. Mayfair to Moscow. Boni and Liveright.
Thompson, Wallace. The People of Mexico. Harper.
Verrill, A. H. Eastern and Northern South America. Dutton.
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THE WAYS OF THE GODS

By ALGERNON SIDNEY CRAPSEY
(International Press, 150 Lafayette Street, New York)
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The Nation
FOUNDED 1865
Vol. CXII
Contents
577
EDITORIALS:
No War with EnglandI. Reasons for Plain Speech
580
Morals and the Movies
581
Free Trade Against Selfishness
582
What Congress Ought to Do
683
The Critic and the Artist
683
Besoiled Athletes
584
MEXICO1921. IV. CULTURE AND THE INTELLECTUALS. By
Paul Hanna
585
REPEALING THE WAR LAWS. By Albert De Silver
687
SHOULD THE PUEBLO INDIANS BE AMERICAN CITIZENS? By
Elisabeth Shepley Sergeant
688
SLAVERY IN GEORGIA. A. D. 1921. By Herbert J. Seligmann
591
THE DEATH OF LIMERICK'S MAYOR. By K. O'Callaghan
692
693
PRESIDENT WILLARD ON THE RAILROAD WRECK
694
CORRESPONDENCE
596
BOOKS *
In a Style of Steel. By C. V. D
696
More American Chronicles
596
Books in Brief
697
DRAMA:
According to Sarcey. By Ludwig Lewisohn
598
Is Egypt a Nation? IIL
599
Egypt's Position
605
Associate Editors
LEWIS S. GANNETT
FREDA KIRCHWEY
ARTHUR WARNER
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
ERNEST H. GRUENING
CARL VAN DOREN
Managing Editor
Literary Editor
THE NATION. 20 Vesey Street, New York City. Cable Address : Nation, New
THE Vossische Zeitung's charge of a secret treaty or an
exchange of memoranda between England and France
made immediately after the London Conference will, we
hope, be promptly verified or discredited by questions in
the House of Commons. Nothing anywhere else has ap
peared to confirm it, yet there are certain facts which give
the story plausibility. Thus, no one could understand why
Lloyd George permitted without a struggle the further
invasion of Germany to which he had previously said he
would never, never consent. It was suggested at the time
that the French might have purchased his support by giv
ing him a free hand in the East. As the Vossische Zeitung
explains it, France has agreed to support Great Britain
with her fleet if she is ever attacked by an overseas Power
(this can only mean the United States), renounces her inde
pendent policy toward Russia, and declares herself disin
terested in certain parts of Asia Minor, presumably Syria.
The sequence of dates is very interesting in this connec
tion. The London Conference with the Germans began on
March 1 and ended on March 7. The British Admiralty
announced on March 15 the cut in the budget for the com
ing naval year, and the very next day, March 16, the Rus
sian agreement was signed. Curiously enough, we have
just received a letter from London from a most reliable
correspondent which reads thus: "The Russians do not
yet understand how the trade agreement suddenly found
its path smoothed. The British were insisting upon the
clause against Bolshevik propaganda in Persia, Asia Minor,
etc.; in return the Bolsheviki asked reciprocal guarantees
for all the border states from Finland to China, which the
No. 2911
British indignantly refused. Suddenly a compromise was

arrived at and the whole thing went through to the amaze
ment of the Russians."
NOT only did the Emperor Charles of Austro-Hungary
negotiate secretly with France and England for peace
in 1917through the Princes Sixtus and Xavierbut he
was in communication with President Wilson in 1918 with
a similar object. The Paris correspondent of the New
York Tribune has sent the hitherto unrevealed text of the
correspondence, which consists of an opening letter from
the Emperor Charles and an answer from Mr. Wilson. The
Emperor took as a point of departure President Wilson's
message to Congress of February 11, 1918, and expressed
himself as in agreement with the principle that in terri
torial settlements peoples and provinces must not be moved
about by rulers as "mere pawns." He approved of the
declaration that economic war should be avoided in future
and indorsed the suggestion for general disarmament. He
admitted readiness for "entire renunciation of annexation
and complete emancipation of Belgium." President Wilson
replied cordially, asking for detailed suggestions in regard
to a possible territorial settlement, particularly with respect
to the Balkans and the Adriatic. "I can assure His Majesty
that on my side there is the greatest readiness to take into
consideration every solution he envisages," wrote Mr.
Wilson.
THIS letter was received in Vienna and answered by
the Emperor, but this reply was intercepted, and the
correspondence ceased. The Tribune correspondent sug
gests that the letter was seized by officials of the Vienna
court. This suggestion is naive. Such officials were prob
ably sympathetic to the maneuvers, and in any case it is
hard to believe that the Emperor lacked means to get his
second letter beyond his own frontier. There is every
reason to suppose that it fell into the hands of the Allied
censorship, where it would have been suppressed, as the
Allied statesmen were then determined that America should
beat Germany for them, without any nonsense about hu
manity or justice. The correspondence is of no great im
portance, except as it reveals another handle by which
peace might have been grasped previous to the autumn of
1918 ; but the Allies went wrong when they chose to regard
the peace offer made by Germany late in 1916 as a "trap,"
and after America entered the struggle in the following
spring they were determined to attain peace by conquest,
at no matter what costto the United States or anybody
else.
EASTWARD the course of sovietism takes its way. To
understand the meaning of the announcement that
the new Persian Ministry proposes to abrogate the treaty
with Great Britain, one must recall that the former has
recently concluded an agreement with Russia, which super
sedes and makes no longer possible the earlier arrangement
entered into with the British. The Russian-Persian treaty,
The Nation
578
as reported, provides that no third nation shall have any

political control or economic advantages in Persia. Specifi
cally this means that Great Britain must withdraw its
troops and surrender its hopes of industrial exploitation
based on the Curzon policy.
No fair-minded person should
regret this, as the treaty was made behind the back of the
League of Nations and, in its terms, is indefensible besides.
When it comes to lying down with the British lion, that's
not the kind of a Persian lamb it is.
ATRIOTS, where are you?
Haitians' grievances.
[Vol. 112, No. 2911

But a Washington dispatch printed
in New York newspapers of April 5 reports that on his

return Mr. Denby said he made a careful study of the
situation in Haiti and found the Marine posts well con
ducted and that a spirit of cordiality exists between natives
and the devil dogs.
HE so-called Indian Citizenship Bill (H. R. 288) was
last year, after two readings, placed in the hands of the
Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, and is likely to come
We read with alarm that
before the new Congress. The object of the Act is simply
the New York Legislature has abolished compulsory
to remove our Indian wards from their special status as

privileged dependents under the law, to put them on the
same plane of equality and legal responsibility as all other
American citizens. The segregation of their tribal property
is, of course, involved, but the formalities are few: a final
roll call of the tribe to be taken within two years; a certifi
cate of competence to be applied for by Indians of one
half and over Indian blood; within ninety days thereafter
a pro rata division of property and funds to be made by
a commission appointed by the President. The only Indians
excepted from citizenship under this bill are the Four Civi
lized Tribes, the Osage Tribe of Oklahoma, and the Seneca
military drill for all school boys in the State and without
a single dissenting votemerely to save some beggarly thou
sands. And what in the name of preparedness has happened
to those vigilant twins, the National Security League and
the American Defense Society, that they are not making
the welkin ring with protests to Governor Miller because,
on top of the abolition of compulsory schoolboy drilling, he

has mustered out seventeen National Guard units in almost
as many towns for the low and material purpose of saving

$150,000? Is it not obvious that pacifist or pro-German or
Red propaganda is undermining the State? We think a
committee of the Union League Club should investigate
this man Miller who has the effrontery to call himself a
Republican as well as a patriot. We miss our guess if such
a committee would not find it is all part of a nation-wide
plot to leave us naked to our enemies. Certainly such
craven happenings in the Empire State are having their
effect upon miscreants like Senator Borah who now, having
helped to whittle our 300,000 army to 150,000, declares that
it must go down to 100,000, the same figure maintained
before the preparedness campaign was begun. Worst of
all, Senators Penrose, Smoot, and Curtis and Chairman
Good, of the House Appropriations Committee, declare
there is increasing sentiment in favor of large reductions
in army and navy and that without them there can be no
tax reform.
HE American Occupation in Haiti forbade a public

meeting of the Union Patriotique d'Haiti, scheduled
for March 27, the day of Secretary Denby's visit. But they
permitted a vaudou dance in the market place of Port
au-Prince, which was carefully filmed by a battery of
American motion picture photographers. It is important
to note that the vaudouism of which much has been made
by our imperialist propaganda as justification for any

thing we may choose to do in Haiti, has been encouraged
by the American Occupation. Since the days of Toussaint
LOuverture, the Haitian government has legislated against
any exhibition of the fantastic and primitive rites practiced
by a very small fraction among the most ignorant of the

Haitian masses, and the Haitian civil code, for which Ameri
can military law has been substituted since 1915, expressly
forbade it. No such demonstration as regaled Mr. Denby

on his recent visit had ever taken place in the Haitian
capital previous to the American Occupation. The purpose
of staging it at such a time is wholly clear. Incidentally,
Mr. Denby landed on a Sunday morning and left Port-au
Prince early the next day. The Haitian newspapers report

that he conversed for twenty minutes with Dartiguenave,
the President who was imposed on the country by our Ma
rine Corps, but that otherwise he talked with no responsible
Haitians, with no member of the Union Patriotique, nor
took the occasion to inform himself in any way of the
Nation of New York.
But the Pueblo Indians of New
Mexico have appealed to Congress to be likewise exempt

from citizenship and their appeal should receive particular
attention and sympathy. It will be hard to sustain because
the productive tracts of agricultural land held by the va
rious Pueblo tribes since the Spanish days have given these
Indians an enviable position in the State from which
many citizens of the higher races will be all too ready to
see them ousted, by fair means or foul. There is no doubt
that the dice are heavily loaded against them by the ap
pointment of Senator Fall to the Secretaryship of the In
terior. Yet any honest consideration of their domestic,
social, and economic condition reveals that these Indians who
have been seventy-five years under our flag have not been
in any real sense prepared by the education we have offered
them to take their places as American citizens. Of their
background and their culture, few of us have a clear im
pression: Miss Sergeant's article printed elsewhere in this
issue should persuade our readers that they are worth

studying and preserving.
E earnestly trust that proper care of our war dis
abled will not be wholly dependent upon Brigadier
General Sawyer, lately homeopathic doctor of Marion, Ohio,
to whom, the press reports, President Harding has turned
over the problem. Many of these veterans are well
nigh hopeless of relief and to deprive them of the well
known curative possibilities of psychotherapy by such an
announcement merely aggravates their plight. The ghastly
bungling of the Wilson administration in this, the foremost
of its obligations, is the more conspicuous when one recalls
Carry On, the official magazine issued during the war to
tell the war cripples, actual and prospective, what fine things
Uncle Sam would do for them. Now the tangle has become
so serious that heroic measures are imperative. The very
best talent that our country affords, in medicineespecially
in the branches of orthopedic surgery and neurology, and in

vocational trainingparticularly in the specialized forms
such as reeducation of the blindshould be called in at
once, red tape should be ruthlessly cut, and the redemption

of the countrys debt of honor undertaken without another
hour's delay.
-----
April 20, 1921]
The Nation
ENERAL CROZIER resigned his position as head of

the Black and Tans in Ireland when certain of those
miscreants whom he had dismissed for looting were rein
stated by the worse miscreants who are guiding English

policy in Ireland. He then went to that unhappy island
law.
579
Pastor Heber is asked to pick his job and, having a
heart as big as the bounds of the Second Advent church and

a professional reliance on the willingness of Providence to
don with the report that what officialdom thinks about Ire
see him through, he asks for and is granted the custody of

the lost sheep of the house of Israel. It will be distinctly
a missionary enterprise. Mr. Votaw is represented in the
press as having chosen the office as a means of continuing
land is absolutely at variance with what he found to be

the case in his unofficial capacity. In a letter to the London
Times he urges immediate action if Ireland is to be saved
in prison and ye visited me not. He will repair the omis

sion. It is true that a trained penologist had to be dis
at all.
as a civilian, and now after a month there returns to Lon
the sort of work he did in the East.
He has read: I was
Obtain peace, he says, and the Irish will throw
placed to make room for him, but lives there a man with
away their arms. But obtain peace by permitting the Dail

Eireann to meet and function freely, by setting up a Com
mittee of Public Safety, and by putting the administra
tion of the truce in the joint hands of the Crown and of
Soul so dead that he would not prefer a beautiful exercise

of the domestic virtues to such a super-normal thing as
competency in office? We trust no one will be so impertinent
Sinn Fein.
criminology, based on a century of study of the delinquent

and the mental and social processes that have made him
what he is; that there are many men and women and
Let Ulster do as Ulster likes.
After all this
bitter struggle, he asks the Government, has it got the

murder gang by the throat? Allow Ireland to govern
herself within the empire and she will get her own murder
gang by the throat, but she will not help England to do it.
You talk to an ordinary, decent Irishman now about a
murder gang and he asks you which? It is too much to
hope for the miracle which could give every official and
soldier of the Crown an opportunity to view the situation
in Ireland with his blinders off, but General Crozier, to
whom Ireland and humanity already owe a debt, has at least
shown that the plight of his class is not necessarily hopeless.
The more reason, then, why the popular opinion of Great
Britain should have done with the military and official blind
men who have brought the Empire to its present pass.

HE ex-Empress of Germany was beyond question ex
emplary in her domestic life. Indeed, nobody could
better have represented the typical German Hausfrau of
the bygone era than Augusta Victoria. When the Kaiser
made his famous assertion that Germany wished her women
to confine themselves to Kirche, Kinder, und Kiiche (church,
children, and kitchen) no one could allege that his own
home life was inconsistent with that theory of the rightful
sphere of women. But she was a good mother and, as such,
is said to have wept bitter tears over the first escapades
of the Crown Prince. When the crisis of their joint lives

came the Kaiserin was, of course, wholly unable by tem
perament, training, or knowledge to control the Kaiser or
to exercise any influence upon the destiny of their country.

He was the lord and master, she the obedient servant en
tirely devoted to him. There seems to be no doubt that this
imperial pair spent a great part of the last year of the
Empire on their knees in prayer. Both were utter anachro
nisms at that time, both utterly powerless, if not pitiful, in

the tragic train of events which the Kaiser had permitted,
if not encouraged, to come over Germany. To die in exile,
and practically in prison, after such a life of self-satisfied
majesty is tragedy indeed.
HE principle of normalcy could not find a more perfect

expression than it has in the appointment of Brother
in-law Heber Votaw, one time Second Adventist missionary

in India, to the exacting position of Superintendent of Fed
eral Prisons. The highest office in the gift of the people
may be an appalling responsibility, but it is, on the side,
also a gorgeous opportunity to pay one's political debts

and to take care of worthy members of the family. It
appears that the best of sons is also the best of brothers-in
as to suggest to the President that there is a science of
numerous societies that have devoted years of work to the
shaping of penological methods for dealing with the problem

of crime; that in this case normalcy should spell science.
UPID will have his way even where there is economic
disaster.
Austria with a deficit of 42 billions in a
land of six million people, destitute of means to build sorely

needed homes, and unable to feed its children, records 1,300
marriages on a recent Sunday in Vienna alone. In Berlin,
too, the custom of marriage seems in no danger of dying
out. There were 36,352 weddings there in 1913, which
figure fell off to 29,111 in 1918. But the return of the sur
viving soldiers changed that so greatly that there were
51,892 marriages in 1919 and 53,691 in 1920. The officials
in charge of the license bureaus testify that to an unusual
degree these marriages are based on material reasons rather
than pure affection. It is easier for a couple to get a home
than for a single man, and there is greater economy in

doing one's own cooking than living in restaurants. Again
there is an increase in the number of marriages of men
and women wage-earners who go right on with their accus
tomed tasks. No one who has a job gives it up. As for
the other side of the picture, there has been an enormous
increase in divorcesthere were 30,000 in 1919.
OW is the gladsome time of year when robins and such
things appear; when spring leaps briskly from her nap
and flings old winter off her lap. Now marbles roll along
the street and trouble all the adult feet; while over every
vacant lot the yelling keeps the welkin hot.
Somewhere
Babe Ruth is getting fit to break his record and to hit a

hundred times more homers than his best admirers think
he can. The poets, too, are sharpening their vocal cords so

they can sing of birds and buds and bees and booze, and not
a word of grub or shoes. The young man's fancy lightly

turns to tender notions, and he yearns for maidens tender
as his notion and rapturous as his devotion. The sun him
self is gay and bright, and wishes it were never night;
whereas the moon is bright and gay and wishes it were
never day.
The seedsman catches in his toil all hungry
lovers of the soil; and now the greedy hardware clerk sells
hoes and rakesand calls it work!by grosses and by
scores and dozens to all the world and to his cousins. Why,
such a stir is in the season that we all romp without a
reason; and even prosy pens beat time and frolic off in
casual rhyme.
The Nation
580
[VoL 112, No. 2911
No War With England

I.
Reasons for Plain Speech
MANY people nowadays are saying foolish things about

Anglo-American friendship. They are enlarging
upon a sentimental attachment supposed to have been
aroused by our association in the Great War. They are
talking offensively about an assumed superiority of the
Anglo-Saxon and his Kultur. They are pretending that the
British Government is above criticism by citizens of the
United States, and the government of the United States
by subjects of the United Kingdom. With much ceremony
of after-dinner speeches and "hands across the sea" they
combine to cast into the outer darkness, consecrated to the
Sinn Fein-Bolshevik-pro-German, anyone who disagrees
with the Temperamental Tory about any public policy. By
this stupid behavior they imagine that they are giving
reasons against a war between Great Britain and the
United States. As a matter of fact this flummery causes
far more irritation than it cures. And it imposes upon
the advocates of peace a quite irrelevant burden. Not
because of such questionable assumptions must we avoid
war. There are indeed many ties of blood and culture be
tween England and America which war would tragically
sever. But abhorrence of international hostilities rests
now upon nothing less than the almost certain knowledge
that another war between first-clasa powers would involve
the destruction of civilization, if not of the human race.
No person of sound mind in either country can think of
another great war as anything less than a final catastrophe.
Imagine the technical proficiency of the modern military
machine, at the pitch of intensity which it had reached by
the end of 1918, dropping upon the world those three drops
of a poison we have invented to kill any man they touch;
imagine the economic and social results which would assail
those civilians who were unfortunate enough to escape the
lethal gases and other mechanisms of murder, and you
imagine utter devastation. We must not have war with
England first and foremost because we must not have war.
If there is any danger of war, we cannot afford to leave
the duty of preventing it to the snobs, the sentimentalists,
and the hystericals. Such a task is fundamental to all
human welfare, and it deserves the primary attention of
everyone.
If those in either nation who want a conflict are in an
infinitesimal minority, why discuss the danger at all? Yet
the danger is being discussed by persons who ought to
know. Not long ago it was reported that the British Am
bassador to Washington gave an interview in London to
American newspaper men declaring the countries were
drifting into war. The editor of Fairplay, the greatest
shipping journal in Englandand in the worldrecently
wrote: "Anything calculated to check the free passage of
merchandise is bound to give rise to feelings which, if not
heeded, are sure to lead to thoughts of war. . . . It is
being quite openly stated by certain people, who seem to
think that our relations with the United States can be
made even more cordial by a little lick-spitting, that, what
ever our treaty obligations, we could never fight against
America. That may or may not be so. . . ."An
article in the February English Review by Storm Jameson
tates: "It is easy to declare roundly that a war between
this country and America is unthinkable. That statement

argues nothing so much as an imaginative incapacity on
the part of the sentimentalists who make it." And Mr.
J. S. Ewart, senior counsel for Canada in the fisheries
arbitration of 1910, was recently reported as saying in
New York: "Unfortunately, not only are the interests of
the United Kingdom and the United States different, but
in some important respects they exhibit a tendency to clash.
President Wilson has said that the seed of war in the
modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry. When
men in high positions say that the two countries are tread
ing the path that leads to war we should be indeed foolish
were we to deceive ourselves with the phrase: "War be
tween Anglo-Saxons is unthinkable.' "
It used to be the habit of the peacefully inclined to
regard such statements with disdain. Because they did
not want war, they did not want to talk about it. They
thought that not talking about it was a sort of charm for
preventing it. They called all those who pointed out the
danger of war "alarmists" or propagandists for the arma
ment interests. So they scoffed and turned the other waywhile the roots of war put forth sprouts and prepared their
poisonous blossoms. The only persons who looked squarely
at the possibility and reckoned with it were the ones who
rather liked the prospect. And presently the war came,
and the rest of us were roughly awakened from our dreams
of peace and dragged into it by the hair of our heads.
We were fooled in this way because we assumed that
war is caused by someone's conscious desire for it. An
autocracy might be thrust into war by the will of its ruler,
an oligarchy or plutocracy by the will of the ruling group.
But a democratic nation would not fight unless it wanted
to. The way for the United States to avoid war was
therefore to cultivate a friendly feeling for all other peo
ples. And the best way to do that was to disregard the
points of friction, to declare through thick and thin that
there was no danger of war, and to discourage armament.
For many years the majority of the citizens of the United
States followed this policy. It did not prevent war, it did
not prevent hostile feelings toward other nations, and it
did not even prevent large armament. Now the militants
and navalists are beginning to pipe up again. Rear Admiral
Huse calls for a navy equal to "any two." Shall we de
nounce him and then turn away as before? Those who
wish to prevent war in the future would do well to adopt a
different strategy. They should not only be as harmless
as the dove, but also as wise as the serpent. They should
make it their business to know more about the causes
of war, to know more about them in details and in special
cases, and to deal with them more coldly and scientifically,
than do the militarists. Most of those quoted in the para
graph above are apparently proceeding in accordance with
this policy.
Good-will is valuable; much exists and more should be
cultivated. But war between the United States and Great
Britain will not be prevented by the good-will of the citi
zens of either nation. We can be as friendly as we please
for the next ten years, and in the eleventh year something
may happen by which one nation will so threaten the se
curity of the other that most of the good-will is transmuted
into bitter hostility. On the other hand, war between the
The Nation
April 20, 1921]
two nations will not be brought about by frank considera

tion of the causes of friction, or frank criticism of the
policies of either. We can protest as much as we like about
the treatment of Ireland, or Britain could protest as much
as she liked about our treatment of Haiti, without causing
the firing of a single shot. Only in case such stimuli to
emotion masked a substantial economic interest would they
serve the purposes of the war-maker, and then they would
be augmented by many other situations ripe for the prac
ticed hand of the propagandist. It is terrifying to imagine
the case that could be made against either nation by a
hostile commentator, should the occasion arise.
Once the war situation arrives, in such a way that there
is no escape from its implications to the great economic
interests concerned, it will be too late for good-will to do
its work. We shall all be swept into the maelstrom. Our
plain duty is therefore to begin at once, before it is too
Morals
and
WE have with us today another one of those modern

crusades which in recent years have swept the coun
try at frequent intervals and littered our statute books with
needless, unenforceable, and vicious laws. Just now there is
a stalking of legislatures from Portland, Maine, to Portland,
Oregon, with intent to make the movies more moral by
means of State censorship boards. Several States already
have such bodies and others are beset with bills to create
them. New York will probably have enacted such a law
before this is published. In Kalamazoo the chief of police,
spurred by "a delegation of clubwomen," has started in to
enforce an old Michigan law of pre-movie days, which for
bids the exhibition in picture form of any costume or act
which would be illegal in real life.
Now it is not to be denied that there are many objection
able and some indecent motion-picture films ; but every State
has criminal laws adequate to deal with the latter, whereas
experience has shown that the former are beyond the under
standing or reach of officialor officiouscensors. The
indictment of our motion pictures by those who are demand
ing censorship is on two counts: the presentation of crime
and the treatment of sex. Both counts are justified, but not
one in a hundred of the accusers knows how or why; and
neither will the censors. Again, it is sadly true that the
movies do show an amazing disregard for human life. A
"legitimate" killing is the act of almost every film hero. So
just now it is the fashion to blame the motion pictures when
boys commit crimes, and the youthful victims, following the
fashion like everybody else, are adding their testimony to
the theory. It used to be dime novels, the circus, and news
paper comics that got the blame. Every normal boy goes
through the experience of the race; he has at some time an
ambition to be a brigand or a pirate. Safety is not in
ignorance of crime, and thus of life, but in counter influ
ences of a better sort. A difficulty with some boys nowadays
is not that they see bad movies, but that they see too many
movies. Then, too, we have forgotten, perhaps, the example
of so much adult delinquency in real life as well as in the
filmsthe deliberate lawlessness of older people in the mat
ter of the prohibition laws, for instance. Then, is it strange
if the youth of today shows disregard for the sacredness of
human life when its elders have reveled in a four years'
recrudescence of bloodshed, when the State itself takes life ?
581
late, the careful analysis and the plain speaking that will
be necessary to arrange matters so as to avoid a collision.
What are these men of authority talking about when they
speak of the danger of war? Any answer will involve pro
saic matters like trade, shipping, oil, navy, finance. But
with such a background, these matters should be the most
interesting in the world.
In subsequent issues of The Nation we shall treat these
subjects editorially.* We can, of course, make no attempt
to cover their ramifications in any detail, but we do hope
to draw the outlines of the picture. We shall waste no
words in exhortation, but shall attempt to give simply the
facts, with the consequences which arise from them. When
the picture is once seen, it will be time enough for opinion.
Next week's article will relate to Rritish and American rivalry in World
Trade problems. Subsequent issues will deal with Ireland, the merchant and
naval fleets, oil, etc.
the
Movies
What the motion pictures need is not morality through

artificial respiration, but an atmosphere of more genuine art.
Broadly speaking, the only immorality in art is untruth;
particularly is this true of the wholesale killings. From
that standpoint the movies are grossly and unforgivably
immoral. Then, the film "drama of heart interest" is the
lineal descendant of the cheap melodrama of a dozen years
ago, and it is the contemporary relative of the fiction of our
popular magazines. Together they are spreading the absurd
sex doctrine that there is just one man predestined for
every woman, and, vice versa, that the chief end of each is
finding the other, and that subsequently there is nothing to
do but live happilyand easilyever after. In the movies
and the magazines we are all handsome, healthy heroes, or
dark, dire villains; there is no success but making money,
and the shop girl preserves her virtue, not for virtue as its
own reward, but to attain happiness by marrying a million
aireâlthough our newspapers do tell us that millionaires
are not always happily wedded. The crime against art is
the real crime of the movies; their tawdry, commercial, un
truthful picture of life is the real immorality. Can any cen
sorship touch this? Experience with literary and dramatic
censorship is that it never has; the results have been either
barrenness or absurdity. As Bernard Shaw has just written,
after an absurd personal experience, "though the defenders
of the censorship lean so heavily on the control of the drama
by an ideal personage . . . yet the nature of the institution
is such that the best of censors cannot do perceptibly other
wise than the worst."
Another trouble with censorship is that it is purely de
structive. It expurgates and deletes but it never creates. It
may lengthen a few petticoats and shorten a few kisses; it
may banish a few brass knuckles, or squeeze some drops of
blood from a film. To create better pictures we must put
this most commercialized of all the arts in the hands of
artists. We must give the artist at least as much control
over his art as he had in the Dark Ages. One way to do
this is through the ownership of picture theaters by schools,
churches, labor unions, and other organizations. This makes
possible a censorship by selection and by demandthe only
effective or legitimate kind. Morality is more than a
vacuum; art is something beyond an assertion of "Thou
shalt not."
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2911
Free Trade Against Selfishness

E wish that everybody who thinks it necessary for
ting cheap foreign goods and to help them heap up their
the United States in this emergency to slap on ad
profitsearned often by men working in two shifts seven

days a week. Every hoary old argument will be trundled
out, every appeal to cupidity and patriotism made; and then
ditional protective tariffs might be compelled to read Mr.

Thomas W. Lamont's statement of the present financial situ
ation of the Government in the March Harper's Magazine.
For ability, for clear-cut analysis of the problems confront

ing Mr. Harding, for a vivid, forceful setting forth of his
facts, we have seen nothing to surpass it and little to equal
it. What is particularly surprising is that from out of the
House of Morgan should come so clear a presentation of
the tariff situation, so complete a laying-bare of the whole
protection humbug. True, Mr. Lamont prescribes swaddling
clothes for a fewa very fewinfant industries; he be
lieves also that for war reasons it is necessary to build up
by artificial feeding certain trades such as various chemical

lines. But beyond that he is so opposed to tariffs as to make
it certain that he will be chargedif he has not already
beenof still being in receipt of income from the British
Government, this time to put over free tradeprecisely as
the editors of The Nation used to be accused of taking Cob
den Club gold. Whether he is attacked or not, the fact
remains that he has rendered a public service which de
serves to be widely noted.
Primarily he points out that throughout our entire his
tory until 1914 we were a debtor nation. Since then our
situation has been reversed.
if the tariff goes through we shall once more be wondering

how certain favored citizens pile up their riches and why
the cost of living continues to stay up.
Well, happily for America, the old argument that the
tariff is necessary for revenue has been exploded by the

war, during which the Government found plenty of means
of augmenting its revenue from other sources. In 1914 our
customs revenue comprised 292 millions of dollars out of a
total Government income of 734 millions. In 1920 the cus
toms brought in only 323 millions of dollars out of a total
income of $6,695,000,000. The total tariff revenue in 1921
will perhaps not pay one-half of our naval bill. If we
stopped our senseless building of more battleships we could

take off every customs impost and not feel the loss.
Thus
the customs revenue excuse has been exposed for the hollow
sham it is.
Mr. Lamont, we are glad to record, will not be surprised

if the new Congress should find the difficulties of thor
oughgoing tariff revision so great that they may abandon

any immediate attempt at it. Already Washington hears
that the President is alarmed at the number of Senators and
We are now a creditor nation
Congressmen who are planning to introduce measures pro
and we shall be bound and delivered by the economic and

commercial laws that govern creditor nations. We cannot,
Mr. Lamont sees, pile up credits without further disarrang
ing our own and the worlds markets. We cannot sell and
merely import specie in payment for our goods. We must
buy abroad as well, and that, he rightly thinks, must tend
toward freer trade. Indeed, he looks forward, like the free
trader, to that ideal status for the world when our coun
tecting this manufacture or excluding that agricultural

product. But if there are any in Congress who think deeply
they must see that our Allies who owe us some ten billions
of dollars or more must pay us by goodsprecisely as Ger

many can only pay by goods and not by gold the indemnities
to be assessed upon herand that this process will hardly
be simplified if we pile on import taxes. Congressmen will
be asked to aid our merchant marine.
But how can that be
ideal before him he naturally cannot stomach the old pro
aided if we shut out the goods with which war-torn and

half-starved Europe will seek to buy food and fertilizers
and implements from us? Indeed, from whatever angle the
world's problem is studied today the clearer it must be to
all thoughtful men that what the world is crying for now
tection sophistries. He wonders how, under Heaven, a high

protective tariff can stimulate a trade that is down and out;
how dumping can be prevented and, at the same time, one
is freedom of trade. The hope of civilization is the leveling

of every artificial barrier to traffic between States. Every
such barrier postpones the day of recovery, just as every
billion dollars in customs be made to flow into the Treasury,

and how foreign imposts may be collected after imports have
been shut off. Best of all he sees that the tariff problem is
time the French advance the customs houses they have

erected in Germany they strike at her ability to pay just
indemnities, they block the normal processes of trade to
their own disadvantage. In this case protective tariffs are
plainly becoming an instrument for subjection, if not for
try shall seek to produce those things which it can pro

duce cheapest and best, and to exchange those things for the
products of other countries which those countries are able
to produce better and more cheaply than we. With this
not to be solved by mere scientific methodsour noble sci
entific Tariff Commission to the contrary notwithstanding

because the tariff is an economic and not a scientific prob
lem.
Of course he could have gone much further.
oppression. The French will find, we believe, that financially

they will help them hardly at all. The Germans will deal
In America
the tariff is largely not an economic problem but a ques

tion of privilege pure and simple. It is chiefly a matter of
seeing who can get his feet into the trough and keep them
there longest. Now that Mr. Harding is in office and Big
Business feels that it once more owns the Government it is
proposing to go back to the old Payne-Aldrich tariff that the

American people so emphatically rejected in 1910. Some of
these protected manufacturers have had, despite excess
profits taxes, years of amazing war-prosperity of which they
never dreamed; yet here they are again, asking the Gov
ernment once more to keep the American people from get
elsewhere.
Freer trade with us, Mr. Lamont feels, will come very
slowly and gradually. If that is so it will be, then, because
Mr. Harding fails to rise to his opportunity, fails in vision,
fails in charity. It will be because the selfishness of the
few and of the privileged is once more to dictate American
policy. Free trade fights always against selfishness and
self-seeking, but today America's protectionists deliberately

seek to push ally and foe alike deeper into their economic
slough of despond. How can the world pull itself together
even in England they are passing protection lawsif every
country is to erect a Chinese Wall against every other?
April 20, 1921]
The Nation
What Congress Ought to Do

AS we go to press Congress is listening to the first seri
ous message of President Harding delivered in person
doubtless by way of compliment to his predecessor. Con
gress is facing, so the headlines read, the gravest problems
of any similar gathering in many decades. Perhaps; but
one thing is certainit faces unparalleled opportunity.
Primarily, of course, there is the need of peace with Ger
many brought about in such a way as to deal fairly with
those whose property has been confiscated and business
interrupted. This needed peace, we suppose, Congress will
now declare without loss of time, and, we hope, without
any Congressional declaration of readiness on the part of
the United States to run to the aid of our Allies at any time
in the future in which they may again become embroiled,
either with our former enemies or with each other.
Next, the world needs at once a conference for disarma
ment and we an immediate negotiation with Japan and
Great Britain for a cessation of naval building pending
an international gathering for universal disarmament. As
an earnest of this the proposal of Senator Penrose and Sen
ator Borah to cut our army to 100,000 men and to reduce
the navy expenses should be adopted as a matter of course.
As for Russia, Congress should lose no time in sending
a Congressional Committee to that country to see for
itself just what the conditions are and to ascertain if there
exist valid reasons why England should trade with that
country and not the United States. The ratification of the
Treaty with Colombia and the payment to her of the proper
indemnity for our theft of the Panama Canal Zonea theft
freely admitted by the man responsible, Theodore Roosevelt
is an act of national good faith far too long delayed. Re
grettable as is the opposition to it, uncomfortable as is the
report that it is now being secretly coupled with conces
sions to certain big business interests, it is none the less
an act due our national honor. In no other way can a
bloody spot be washed from our hands.
Then, nearer home, there is an even more notable act of
justice to be undertaken. Senator Johnson has already in
troduced into the Senate a resolution of inquiry into our
deeds in Haiti and Santo Domingo. In those republics we
have committed a deadly sin against our own democracy
and our own fair name. We have shed innocent blood and
torn down governments that never offended against us.
We have set up the German policy of might above right.
Here, too, there is no time to be lost; the investigation
promised by Senator Johnson and others should not be
delayed a day.
Coming to domestic problems, there are the tariff and
tax revision. We heartily agree that the latter is neces
sary. The excess-profits tax does not work as it was ex
pected to; it has become confused with an actually wise
and defensible war-profits tax. Indeed, the whole question
of the financial policy of the Government is to be deter
mined. Shall we, like the generation of the Civil War, place
the burden of paying for this terrible epoch of destruction
upon generations not yet born, or shall we manfully disarm
and take some of the billions now wasted on armaments
and wars past and future to pay off the steady accumula
tion of debt? Enormous bonded indebtedness is coming
due in the next eighteen months. A clear-cut, constructive
vision of the whole financial situation is as much demanded
583
of Congress as of the Executive. As for the tariff, we want

no emergency tariff bills and no general tariff revision.
We want the whole matter laid on the table, to be studied
in connection with the greatest issue of allthe economic
reconstruction of the distracted world. It is the time above
all others for tariff barriers to be leveled, if only in the
interest of international peace.
Nor does this exhaust the role of the many constructive
measures to which Congress could devote itself had it the
requisite efficiency, knowledge, and heart. Our whole mer
chant marine is in a dreadful mess. We must decide if the
Government is or is not to stay in the shipping business.
Every port restriction should be lifted, and every legitimate
aid givenespecially in the matter of freeing our ships
from the prohibition law when at sea. Then there is the
housing situation ; a nation-wide famine exists ; the building
industry is all but prostrate, and Senators who have been
investigating declare that only national aid can save the
situation. Great bodies of women cry out for the SheppardTowner bills of special interest to their sex. Last but not
least there is need of an entire reorganization of the Gov
ernment departments for the cutting out of duplication,
waste, and inefficiency. An army of clerks can be dis
charged to the benefit of the Government and of the Treas
ury. The country eagerly looks forward to action. Can
the topheavy Republican majority be held in line and both
houses made to function ? The next few weeks will tell the
tale. And upon what they unfold will be based the reputa
tion of Mr. Harding, his Cabinet, and the Sixty-Seventh
Congress.
The Critic and the Artist

THE notion of a necessary connection between the crit
ical and the creative functions has rarely been enter
tained in America. Our older critics and historians of lit
erature made it a vigorous custom to mention none but the
dead and gave their struggling contemporaries the barren
consolation that posterity would be just. This custom was
wholly derived from England. In France and Germany the
danger has often been the contrary one and critical theory
has, during many periods, shot beyond creative practice.
Today the makers of a vigorous young literature among us
turn to criticism a not unhopeful if not wholly trusting eye.
They are often touchingly humble. Their very crudities
and imperfections constitute a silent question. What an
swer do they receive?
From the group of critics which, by a strange irony, is
the self-appointed guardian of the national shrine, they
meet with irritated repudiation. They should not be what
they are. The frank absurdity of such an attempt to stop
the cosmic processes with a monkey-wrench renders it
negligible. But other and wiser and more liberal voices do
not often present to the poet, the novelist, the playwright, a
more fruitful message. They are sympathetic, they are
benignant. Their councils, however, can be summed up in
the Horatian maxim to turn over the great Greek exemplars
by night and by day. And they are impelled toward a cer
tain insistence on this point because one or two of the very
liberal critics to whom our younger men of letters actually
turn, do not, in fact, make enough of the classics and seem
themselves often at the mercy of tempestuous prejudices
and perverse moods. Thus one, with all the resources of
584
The Nation
his energetic mind and athletic style, announced but the

other day that poetry must always be puerile because it is
neither as intellectual as prose nor as abstractly emotional
as music.
The advice to turn to the classics is, clearly, healthier and
more saving than that. But it must not be given in the
spirit of the rhetorician; it must not regard the classics
as norms of practice but as examples of the creative spirit
in action. There is the critic who is learned in the Homeric
controversy and in the versification of Shakespeare as an
historical test. It is not he who can make the classics seem
either friendly or useful. But there is another critic who
knows how, on a certain night at Tibur, the Falernian stung
the palate of Horace and his friend Thaliarchus, who has
shared the pang of Dante's heart when the vision of the
living Beatrice Portinari had so shattered the poet that his
friends feared for his life, who has caroused with the young
Shakespeare and Falstaff and their friends at some gabled
tavern, who has been with Goethe at Sesenheim and in
Venice and has dreamed with Shelley of the liberation of
mankind and worshipped Emilia Viviani at her convent
gate. This critic understands how such experiences grew
into the works of art that express and commemorate them.
He has lived with the classics and looked into his own heart
and has mastered the character of the creative process itself.
It is by virtue of this knowledge that he can guide others
in the transmutation of life into art, in both the freedom
and the self-discipline that are involved, in the realization
of their personalities through an expression that shall have
a timeless accent, in the embodiment of their unique and
necessary aims.
The artist, then, should be taught to live with the classics.
But he should live with them in order, if possible, to be
come a classic in his turn. And often he can live with them
best by imitating their example but neglecting their works.
"Nous voulons la beauts nouvelle!" exclaims a remarkable
young French poet. In order to be like the classics he
repudiates them. To him as to them the world is new and
beautiful and tragic and inexpressibly his own. This day
and its experiences are his; this morning is the beginning
of the world.
Et si je danse sur les tombes
C'est pour que la beaute du monde
Soit neuve en moi tous les matins!
It is this living spirit of the freedom of all great and
original literature that our critic will seek to communicate
to his contemporaries. His understanding of it will also
guide him in his opinions of work accomplished. Amid the
heavy standardization of thought and taste and ethical
reaction that often weighs so heavily on our national life,
he will guard and direct every precious flicker of person
ality and never tire of driving home the force of Goethe's
maxim:
Urspriinglich eignen Sinn
Lass dir nicht rauben!
Woran die Menge glaubt
1st leicht zu glauben!
But he will never lose sight of that creative process by
which alone such originality of vision can become art. There
must be, not this or that form, but form; not this or that
technique, but organization. For raw experience is mean
ingless save to him who has felt it. Art is communication.
Its symbols must be both concrete and universal. It speaks
for one, but its voice must reach mankind.
[Vol. 112, No. 2911
Besoiled Athletes
AT last we know what has happened to Yale athletes
and Yale athletics. We had supposed that the present
depressing period of decadence and defeat was due to one
of those mysterious cycles of decay that from time imme
morial have affected tribes and nations. As Rome and
Carthage and Greece and Egypt had their day, so had Yale
hers, and as Yale went down there naturally rose the star
of Harvard. Various minor reasons have been advanced
to explain the disaster to New Haven's prestige. Secret
society politics, social "pulls," the loss of "Mike" Murphy,
the slow growth of the college, Percy Haughton, the aboli
tion of "tap day"these were a few. But now science has
produced the real reasonscience can solve any riddle. It
is Mr. Eugene A. Crilly, "expert in chemistry of Litchfield
County, Conn.," who has discovered that it is the exhaus
tion of the soil of Connecticut with the consequent decrease
in nourishing food which is responsible for Yale's athletic
disasters. Land sakes!
Now the satisfactory thing about this explanation is that
it explains so much. Dr. Crilly with one swoop throws a
flood of light upon many matters. Obviously Yale men are
more truly freemen than we had believed. They plainly do
not buy meat from the Chicago Beef Trust, or potatoes
from the South, or wheat from Dakota, or salmon from
Alaska. Connecticut for the Elis is their motto and patron
ize home industries their creed. Then, when we were
in college we heard so much about Yale grit and Yale sand
which we knew to be absorbed internally on Yale Field in
allopathic dosesthat we can well realize that with the
impoverishment of the soil of New Haven it is too much to
expect that her athletes of today should show the fire and
determination of old. Dr. Crilly knows how to remedy this;
he beseeches Gov. Everett Lake to urge the Legislature to
extend the Reclamation Act by enabling the State to fur
nish lime and legumes to all tillers of the soil and thus to
restore the ancient prestige of Yale. Alas, poor Governor
Lake! What is he to do? A veteran Harvard half-back, if
he refuses he will be charged with deliberately trying to
sabotage Yale for Harvard's benefit. If he consents to fer
tilizing Yale, the wrath of all Harvard's alumni will fall
upon him. It will not do for him to wriggle out by saying
that the soil of Massachusetts is as unfertile and that there
are as many rock-bound abandoned farms there. "It is
impossible," Dr. Crilly insists, "for athletes from Yale,
Trinity, or Wesleyan to be properly trained unless they are
fed with proper legumes and receive adequate vitamines."
Well, we are sure that loyal Yale will rise to the occasion.
It will not only recruit Western-fed athletes (now quoted
at $2,000 to $2,250 f. o. b. cold storage cars at Kansas City
or Portland, Oregon) and provide all the vitamines, legumes,
nitrates, humus, guano, phosphates, and lime that Connecti
cut needs for fifty miles around New Haven, but it will pay
special attention to the Yale Bowl. If the soil of that is
not a hundred per cent fragrant and vital by next fall, we
miss our guess. Grit and sand? Why, the beaches of Black
Rock will be stripped twelve inches deep.
Already we are accepting odds of 7 to 5 on next year's
Eli football team. And, come to think of it, now we know
why Yale has just chosen as her new president a corn-fed
native of Michigan. No played-out Connecticut lime or
nitrogen in him!
April 20, 1921]
The Nation
585
Mexico 1921
IV. Culture and the Intellectuals
By PAUL HANNA
GOVERNOR COMO SELLAMA, of the state of X, be
gan at the bottom and fought his way up. It was a
long, hard struggle, but the masses were with him and at
the end of ten years the peons had their land and Sellama
was Governor. The people loved him, but the Governor
nursed a secret sorrow. Envious tongues whispered that
he could not read or write, and rivals made malicious jokes
about it. So the Governor sought seclusion for many
days, and then emerged to address a large meeting of his
followers. "And the enemies of human liberty," he ex
claimed at one point, "now say that Governor Sellama can
not write his own name. This wretched slander must be
refuted! Behold!" And turning to a blackboard set for the
purpose, the chief executive wrote his name with a splendid
flourish where all could see. Passionate cheers swept up
from the audience, dwindling at last to the voice of a bare
foot peon: "Bravo, Governor! Now let us see you write,
'Viva Mexico !' " Hopeful silence fell upon the crowd,
until the Governor crushed his chalk-stick underfoot and
cried: "Begone! I am not here to satisfy every ignoramus
in the state!"
Nearly 80 per cent of the Mexican people were illiterate
ten years ago. Friends of the revolution confess that a full
5 per cent more are illiterate today. Civil war impover
ished public treasuries, closed many of the few schools per
mitted by the Diaz regime, and encouraged human im
pulses more primitive than the desire for culture, which
thrives only amid peace. Yet if land-hunger was a main
spring of the long rebellion it was because through owner
ship of land the peon knew he would acquire some of the
material means and leisure that are essential to education.
Consider again Morelos state, home of the Zapatistas and
maelstrom of the agrarian revolt. Only 5 per cent of its
surviving inhabitants are literate. But it has set the
pace in educational renaissance. Its destitute people set
up school houses of 'dobe and thatch before they repaired
their shattered homes after Carranza fell. In July of last
year 1,165 boys and 860 girls were instructed by sixty
teachers in its forty-one schools. By January of this year
there were 2,675 boys and 1,776 girls being taught by 158
teachers in 108 schools. Twenty-five thousand pesos' worth
of elementary textbooks have been acquired and half of them
already distributed free. In the capital city of Cuernavaca
the Federation of Labor has opened a branch of the Insti
tute of Social Science, the largest free classes of which
are devoted to the three R's. Smaller and more isolated
than Morelos is the state of Colima. Dr. Vasconcelos told
me how the old men of Colima have learned this past winter
to gather in the night schools and study the mystery of
written words. "One is moved," he says, "by the sight
of these bent figures peering through their spectacles at
the alphabet which was hidden from their childhood."
Dr. Jose Vasconcelos, director of the National University
of Mexico, began his public career as a revolutionist against
Porfirio Diaz. His first love is the growth and play of the
mind, for which there could be no broad place in his coun
try, he knew, until political freedom and economic oppor
tunity were established for the masses. To clear the ground

for Mexico's mind and soul he threw himself into the revo
lution, visited the United States five times, as simple refugee
or member of anti-Diaz juntas. "I have spent many brief
terms in the prisons of both countries," he told me. "Good
fortune always attended me, or perhaps I was not important
enough to be treated worse," he smiles. He is less than
forty years oldtoo young and busy to talk of his days
spent in prison. To have been in prison for freedom's
sake is not news in Mexico. Vasconcelos lives entirely in
his ripening plan to abolish illiteracy in his native country,
and then make it the very center of culture for the Span
ish-speaking world.
"Under the Diaz Administration," he explained to me,
"there were a few good schools in the principal cities, but
nothing was done for the rural districts. Education was
thus another special privilege, the same as wealth and
political power. As a result of the revolution all this is
changed. We shall devote all our first efforts to elementary
education. The Government has sent to Congress a bill
creating a Federal Department of Public Instruction which
will have funds and authority to establish elementary and
higher schools in every part of the nation. It provides for
a budget of fifteen million pesos for use entirely outside
the Federal District, which, added to the nine millions
already available, will make a total of twenty-four million
pesos, or twice the highest sum ever before spent in one
year on education in this country. In Mexico we have no
Carnegies to give the people library buildings, but all over
the land we have an abundance of durable stone structures,
very seldom used at present, which under our new educa
tional law will be converted into libraries and schools
equipped by the Federal Government. Instead of the old
colleges in which literature and philosophy were taught, the
Federal Government will spend every cent on elementary
education and technical schools."
I was assured by others that Dr. Vasconcelos will be
appointed Mexico's first Minister of Public Instruction.
And he told me of the project to establish four branches
of the National University in as many different quarters
of the Republic, with faculties recruited from the world's
best-known instructors and fed by a stream of exchange
lecturers from the United States, Europe, and Asia. Na
tional educators elsewhere will envy Dr. Vasconcelos, I
think, when it becomes known that the government print
ing plant of Mexico has been transferred entire to the
National University, of which it is now an integral part.
Ezequiel Salsedo, a veteran of the labor movement, is the
director of public printing, and one happy task which now
confronts him is the production of 100 new volumes autho
rized by Dr. Vasconcelos and designed to constitute what
we may call Mexico's Fifteen-Foot Book Shelf. The list
begins with the Iliad and Odyssey, runs through Plato and
Shakespeare, continues to Ibsen and Shaw, and concludes
with "ten notable works to be designated by the public."
This and succeeding editions will be distributed free among
the public libraries.
586
The Nation
Dr. Vasconcelos speaks English well, delights in Bernard

Shaw, and thinks "Tolstoy was the greatest man who has
lived since Jesus." Had he read Gorki's Eecollections of
Tolstoy? I asked. "Yes; and I think them detestable," he
answered. "They show you Tolstoy through the eyes of
a vulgar man. Gorki could never understand Tolstoy, whose
own books are enough revelation of the author." The ruthlessness of the Zapatistas repelled Vasconcelos. "No good
can come of assassination," he insists. "Under Diaz every
one murdered because Diaz was a murderer. When Madero,
the lover of peace, came into power his character softened
the whole people. And today murder is not practiced in
public life because Obregon is a pacifist, a general who will
not wear his uniform. When he took office Mexico City
swarmed with 'bandits' who had come here to lay down their
arms and pledge their loyalty." Mexico's head schoolmaster
rejects the tactics and program of the Russian Soviet Gov
ernment, and praises what he terms the plan of Karl Liebknecht: "I would limit the size of private fortunes, but I
would not open the door to laziness."
In New York there are many men and women who know
Adolfo Best-Maugard, dreamer, artist, and designer of im
pressionistic ballet settings. From the high balcony of his
studio in Mexico City one looks west to the castle at Chapultepec and east to Popocatepetl, mourning under a cloud
of volcanic smoke for the white-shrouded Ixtocaihuatl, whom
"Popo" slew when as a goddess she refused to marry him
because she loved Orizaba. Best-Maugard loves all three
of the Aztec deities that now are turned to mighty moun
tains. But more than all, perhaps because they need him
so, he loves the unlettered boys and girls who come to his
classes and perform marvelous things at the drawing board.
The classes are free and the instruction very simple. "We
begin with the short straight line and the little circle,"
he explains. "They spend a few days developing combina
tions of the one, then of the other; finally I ask my pupils
to combine the straight line and the curve, and go as far as
their fancy suggests. Look! Done by a girl after three
weeks in class!" He holds up a drawing of a native girl
in peasant costume against a familiar landscape. "You
doubt it? Come to my class and see. It is in their blood
and their fingers!" Don Adolfo ignores politics. When
not at work he roams among the relics of his country's
ancient civilization, lunches with Cabral, Excelsior's staff
artist who did the fearful caricature of William G. McAdoo,
or dines with stage folk and visiting men of letters.
It seemed fortunate that I had brought letters of intro
duction to prominent newspaper editors. They were hos
tile to the Obregon Administration. But they were "intel
lectuals" who could reveal the shortcomings of the new
regime. They were intelligent, I knew, and honest, I be
lieved. They were more difficult to reach than cabinet
ministers, but that appeared natural; they clearly belonged
to an older and higher order.
Mr. Rafael Alducin, editor of Excelsior, conversed gra
ciously with me for a few minutes and then authorized his
chief of staff, Mr. Espinosa, to give me those sidelights on
men and issues that I desired. I would submit my queries
in writing, and did I understand that the responses must be
held as confidential, for my personal guidance? I so under
stood. During the next ten days I saw Mr. Espinosa sev
eral times, but the information that he and Mr. Alducin
promised was never forthcoming. I was sorry for Mr.
Alducin. His rival, Mr. Felix Palavicini, editor of El Uni
[Vol. 112, No. 2911
versal, had frightened Mr. Alducin so thoroughly that the

latter, I believe, did not dare keep his promise to me. Mr.
Palavicini is Italian. He is young and therefore still able
to make those sudden exits from Mexico which I have since
learned is his custom. Withal, he is extremely competent.
"I have no political views," he told me. "I am merely an
editor, to whom publishing is a business, an industry."
Perhaps I showed some pleasure at his confession. At any
rate I said: "Then you are neutral in the political struggle
here, and your opinion would be very valuablea neces
sary balance to the views of friends and enemies of the
Administration, which are so easy to procure." Mr. Pala
vicini smiled faintly, and his response was unanswerable.
"When neutrals express their opinion," he said, "they cease
to be neutral."
So I went away. And although Mr. Palavicini had suf
fered what he told me repeatedly had been an automobile
accident the night before, and wore a bandage about his
head as we talked, he still had strength enough left to in
sert in next day's Universal an item which read: "Mr. Paul
Hanna, editor of the Socialist daily newspaper The Nation
of New York, has arrived in this city. He is the guest of
the Confederation of Labor." Above this item ran a head
ing which said, "News in a Few Lines." To be exact, four
lines containing four lies ! Quite deliberate, but very useful
lies. I had wondered if the press which fights Obregon and
the Labor Party hardest could be trusted. Now it was
easier to make up my mind about that.
A sharp thorn in the side of both the editors I have
mentioned is Celestino Gasca, who abandoned the cobbler's
awl to take up the sword against oppression and who is
now Governor General of the Federal District, by presi
dential appointment. And the more I saw of editors the
more I liked Gasca. Gasca seldom writes for publication
and told me he had grown tired of hearing speeches. He
prefers to sit down with the barefoot men and women who
come in droves to his office every day, and talk to them
about their troubles. His manner is very quiet, his voice
very low, and his smile very gentle. He is pure Indian,
I think. "It takes only a few hours to hear them all," he
said, referring to the mass of petitioners. "And they ask
for so little ! Often they want nothing at all, and have only
made some excuse to come here. It is a new thing for
them to be admitted here as self-respecting equals. They
want to shake hands with the Governor General and con
vince themselves that Mexico is free. That is good; to
gether we are uprooting the old sense of caste and making
democrats of each other."
Perhaps Gasca does not belong to the intellectuals; he
has so much more wisdom than education. He also has
power. In his present office he can do things. "Words
mean nothing to me any more," he told me, "but in acts
there are great sermons." In this spirit the Governor Gen
eral bade farewell to his last humble caller a few nights
ago and then dictated a brief order calling for the distribu
tion to various libraries and schools over the country of
sundry books and educational supplies which had accumu
lated within his jurisdiction under administrations which
felt that books were meant to be kept in storerooms. The
institutions favored in this order were, the Official School
of Cuetzalan; Official School of Cuitzeo de Abasolo; Mu
nicipal School of Tlatlauqui; Official School of Astatepec;
Official School of Mexcaptepec; Public Library of Vera
Cruz, and Library of the Society of Mutual Culture at
April 20, 1921]
The Nation
Guadalajara. "In addition to these gifts," said the brief

announcement, "the District Government is preparing the
dispatch of books and educational equipment to other sec
tions of the Republic in the hope that its efforts will bear
appropriate fruit for the benefit of culture and the welfare
of the nation."
At lunch with Governor Gasca in the Colon Cafe he told
me the story of his life and struggle to help make Mexico
free. He blamed no man and threatened none. Not a
trace of bitterness, boasting, or thirst for revenge revealed
itself. He asked for nothing but time and education to
make his people prosperous and contented. And to pro
mote this end he proposed no method but the propaganda
of good deeds. In contrast with this mood, what are the
enemies of Gasca doing and saying? Mr. Palavicini is
their most distinguished spokesman. All Americans will
be interested in the following "news item" taken from the
pages of El Universal:
Through information received at the Department of Labor
587
we learn that a large number of clergymen are about to arrive

in Mexico City from the United States. Some of these are
Catholics and others Protestants, and they all come with a view
to organizing the Mexican workmen. The Catholic clergy of
the United States as well as the Protestants have supplied
these missionaries with an enormous sum of money, and they
have been given carte blanche in its use for propaganda pur
poses. The Protestants have just issued a manifesto to the
Mexican workmen and revealed themselves as genuine Bolshe
viks, since they aim at the abolition of private property, the
basis of present society, and the erection of a new state founded
in communism. The clergymen from the United States will
arrive in this city next week and thereupon begin their work.
Mr. Palavicini reads English perfectly. He knows that
the "best minds" in the United States attribute all Ameri
can unrest to Russian propaganda. Why not capitalize
religious sentiment and make his readers believe that labor
unrest in Mexico is caused by religious intrigue from the
United States? The editor of El Universal belongs in Park
Row. He has become Americanized.
Repealing the War Laws

By ALBERT DE SILVER
IT will be recalled that among the high resolves made by
the perspiring but embattled Republican delegates in
the Coliseum at Chicago last June was one to end the "auto
cratic war-time powers" of the Wilson Administration and
restore the country to "the form of government provided
for by the Constitution." This being interpreted in nonpolitical language, was intended for a pledge to repeal the
war laws.
When the short session of Congress convened last Decem
ber the House of Representatives set about redeeming the
pledge thus given, and on the seventh day of the session
passed a resolution to suspend the operation of most of the
legislation in question. The method adopted was to declare
the war terminated for the purposes of any statute the ope
ration of which was contingent upon the existence of a state
of war. The resolution then went over to the Senate, where
it lay dormant for some months, and was only brought out,
amended, and passed five days before the end of the session.
The House, because of the shortness of the time remaining,
promptly concurred in the Senate amendments, and on the
first of March repassed the resolution.
Now, the legislation passed by Congress to put the country
on a war basis, besides mobilizing the military and indus
trial resources of the country, imposed certain limitations
upon freedom to speak, to print, to communicate, and to
travel. Let us take stock of Congressional action and see
which of these restrictions have now been made inoperative,
which have been removed permanently from the statute
books, and which merely remain dormant, again to come into
operation in the event of a future war.
The principal restrictions upon civil liberty brought by
the war were contained in the Espionage Act as amended
by the Act of May 16, 1918. Section 3 of Title 1 of that
act as originally passed made it unlawful "when the United
States is at war" to make false reports with intent to inter
fere with the operation of the military or naval forces, or
wilfully to cause insubordination or mutiny in them, or
wilfully to obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service. In
addition to these provisions, Title 12 declared non-mailable
any matter which violated the act, and empowered the Post
master General to exclude it from the mails. By the sub
sequent amendments a number of further offenses were
added, including obstruction of the sale of liberty bonds
and the dissemination of "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or
abusive language" about the Government, the Constitution,
the army or navy, the uniform, or the flag; or of language
intended to bring any of them "into contempt, scorn, con
tumely, or disrepute." Moreover, by the amendments, the
Postmaster General was given the further drastic power to
refuse without notice to deliver any mail whatever to a
person who had attempted to mail matter held to be non
mailable under the act, and to return it to the sender
stamped "Mail to this address undeliverable under the
Espionage Act."
The Espionage Act prosecutions and the Postmaster Gen
eral's "whimsical censorship" over the mails have become
familiar history. They teach such a lesson of the virtual
certainty of a high percentage of injustice from such legis
lation that the need of taking it from the statute books once
and for all should have been clear even on Capitol Hill. And
to a certain extent it was, for the amendments of 1918 were
repealed outright by the resolution in question. The orig
inal section, however, under which the greater part of the
prosecutions were brought, together with the section author
izing the postal censorship, remains on the books. Under
the terms of the resolution their operation is suspended and
they lie dormant to be revived automatically and without
further action by Congress in case of another war. And,
remember, it will not take another world war to bring them
back to life. A war with Mexico would do it or a formal
declaration of war against Haiti or Santo Domingo.
Of the other restrictions upon civil liberty, two were im
posed by the Trading with the Enemy Act. The first of
these prohibited any person from carrying or transmitting
to or from the United States any communication except
through the mails unless it were first submitted to a licens
ing officer. The second required the publisher of every for
eign language newspaper to submit a translation of each
The Nation
588
issue to the postmaster at the place of publication prior to

depositing the paper in the mails. The purpose of these two
sections was obviously to prevent information useful to the
enemy from slipping out of the country. That danger is
now over. Congress, however, presumably because of the
necessity for retaining control over seized enemy property,
excepted the Trading with the Enemy Act from the reso
lution repealing the war laws. Accordingly both of these
restrictions upon freedom to print and freedom to com
municate are still in full force and effect. It is doubtful
whether Congress specifically intended to retain these two
pieces of restrictive legislation, but retain them it certainly
did, and the result illustrates a certain carelessness of detail
which frequently mars legislative action.
This Congressional failure to pay careful attention to
detail is perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in the
treatment of the Passport Control Act, which made it an
offense, after proclamation by the President, for any person
to leave or for an alien to enter the country without a
passport. On February 24 last the House added a rider
to the Consular and Diplomatic Appropriation Bill, which
purported to extend the duration of the act in so far as it
related to incoming aliens, "until otherwise provided by
law." On the next day the bill with the rider passed the
Senate. Four days later the resolution suspending the ope
ration of all the war laws, including the Passport Control
Act, was passed by both houses. The action taken four days
previously had been lost in the shuffle. A nice question is
now presented as to whether or not by the subsequent pas
Should the
Pueblo
[Vol. 112, No. 2911
sage of this resolution Congress has made provision other

wise by law and thus ended passport control altogether. The
Attorney General has just handed down an opinion to the
contrary, holding that the Passport Control Act as to in
coming aliens is still in effect. Such an opinion from one
of the executive departments of the Government was to be
expected, and the matter will doubtless be tested in the
courts. All that can now be said is that the question is by
no means free from doubt and that it is not impossible
that the courts may take a different view. But however
that may be it is certainly clear, and the Attorney General
so holds, that the resolution repealing the war laws has
suspended passport control over American citizens leaving
or returning to the country. Passports will doubtless still
be required of American travelers by European govern
ments, but in view of this Congressional action they should
now be issued to any citizen by the State Department as a
matter of course.
In the meanwhile it should not be forgotten that the
repealing resolution has merely suspended the Presidential
power to enforce passport control and that it can be re
established by proclamation in the event of another war,
great or small. It, like most of the war-time restrictions
placed upon civil liberty, is not actually repealed but merely
slumbers. Some perhaps would have thought it fitting that
the American people should have been left free to choose
which of these relinquishments of liberty were needed in
the next emergency. But Congressand the Republicans
have willed otherwise.
Indians
Be American Citizens?
By ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT

THE church at San Felipe Pueblo stands empty after
the Indian mass. It has two adobe towers, white and
molded like doughmolded by some hand that foresaw how
their heavy twisted open-work would look against a Chineseblue mountain named for a watermelon. The church itself
is long and narrow and white. It backs up against a blackbrowed hill ridged with lava; and the yellow horses painted
on either side of the entrance door face the yellow Rio
Grande.
On this first day of spring and May the apple trees are
in bloom over orchard walls, and the cottonwoods along the
river have feathered into shapes like broad candle flames;
gold pale in the middle, pinkish red on the edges. One must
have known the raw and barren winter to gauge the miracle
of such flames in the desert: the madness of the scent of
fruit blossoms; the strange vibration of this long double
ribbon of Indian dancers, advancing in the hot sun of noon.
Hundreds of Indians from other pueblos have ridden over
the red-ridged land to the plaza where the fertility of earth
is being invoked. The plaza is sunk below a hollow square of
squat, two-story houses. On the flatness of roofs, in the
whitewashed shadow of loggias, rows of heads sternly bound
in red and orange; thick lines of broad brooding shoulders,
gorgeously blanketed ; proud young chests upstanding against
heaven in sapphire velvet shirts strapped with great belts of
silver. And there, in a shrine built of blankets and boughs,
where brown Elders sit hoarily on guard, stands San Felipe,
a bowl of meat and bread before him, his staring Catholic
eyes blessing the corn dance.
Brown legs and lithe brown bodies of men, black smocks

and slim brown legs of women, all moving to the same dull
beaten rhythm. Brown and black and green and robin's-egg
blue ; green and blue and brown and black, swaying and pul
sating.
Soft, soft, still, still moves the woman, heavy-breasted,
her head proud under its blue tablita, her bare toes just
stirring the dust in measure. Bold, bold, free, free, moves
the man, hurling his agile whitened knees, and the coyote
skin trembles on his linen-girded loins. Side by side they
move, pounding out the rhythm on the drum of the earth,
winding their long dark coil of twos back and forward in
the glare, while the gray delightmakers, clapping striped
pot-bellies, stroking striped lank bellies, thread and leap
their way between. The earth is a resonant skin stretched
taut over eternity. The air is a hot cloud full of burning
motes that mock the sun. Water, water, where is water?
Pine boughs shaking, black hair waving, dull drums boom
ing, voices crying, silver and wampum and turquoise rat
tling, long white banner fluttering its eagle feathers, dip
ping, dipping its pollen of parrot feathers over each
dancer in turn.
Come rain, come rain
Corn grow, corn grow.
And the urgent cry flows back into the gray antiquity
of the New Mexican land until it is lost in sun and sand.
"What barbarians!" shudders an Eastern flapper at my

side, endeavoring to turn her concealed camera on the
April 20, 1921]
The Nation
dancers. "The very idea of making them citizens!"

An old Indian standing next her slowly turns a protest
ing head and slowly speaks:
"Pueblo no want to be citizen. You go Washington and
tell President leave him free."
And the head turns away again, scornful and remote.
This old man conceives a ward of the government to be
more "free" than a "citizen," who pays taxes and quarrels
with greedy neighbors. To him the barbarians are the
Americans of this modern competitive United States, which
he fears and understands not, the people who come in highpower cars to spy upon his ancient sacred dances. Inter
lopers in a country he has possessed since the beginning
of time.
When the Spaniards arrived in the sixteenth century,
they found the Pueblo living in many of these same sites,
dressed in the same glowing colors, peacefully cultivating
the same tribal fields with probably the same wise if rude
methods of irrigation used today. In 1846 New Mexico
and Arizona passed to the United States, but the treaty
with Spain again confirmed the Pueblo in the title to his
lands which he has continued to hold communally, in fee
simple. That is why he has never been herded and driven
from one Reservation to another, like the Plains Indians,
whose loss of their hunting grounds meant a definite loss
of personal and racial dignity and tradition. That is why
he has been economically self-supportingand self-respect
inginstead of dependent upon debasing government gra
tuities. His ancestral share in a productive section of our
continentalluvial fields and forest tracts, adobe villages
lost in the desert or on the high mesahas preserved for
him and for us his primitive yet highly developed agricul
tural civilization, with its beautiful handicrafts, and its
immemorial ceremonies.
In the Spanish days, the Pueblos had a "Protector" ap
pointed by the Crown to look after their special interests
as opposed to those of the white man. Our Government
has similarly assumed the protection of these as of other
Indians in all practical affairs. The Indian agent, the
attorney, the teacher have been intermediaries and inter
preters for the Pueblointermediaries accepted by him
as the price of spiritual and tribal detachmentin his
dealings with the American world. Within the tribe he
has been free to govern and administer justice in patriarchal
fashion through his Elders, outside and beyond the juris
diction of our courts; andin spite of priests, mission
aries, and teachersto celebrate his primeval nature wor
ship in any not too obviously "immoral" manner. But all
his knowledge of our government and our institutions has
been second-hand knowledge. For wherever Pueblo rights
and privileges touch or conflict with those of his Mexican
and American neighborsin land sales and leases, espe
cially the agent or the attorney must be called in. And
this gentleman, honest or dishonestthough often gen
uinely devoted to the Indian's interest, he has the repu
tation of being often either an incompetent or a crook
has almost invariably treated his Pueblo ward as an irre
sponsible child whose opinions and decisions are of little
or no weight.
"They are nothing but children"on how many lips has
one heard the kindly-contemptuous phrase in the Southwest.
And in how many outer offices has one not seen these pa
tient Children of the Ages waiting abashed in their
blankets for red tape to unrollabashed and bewildered,
589
but feeling in their heart of hearts much surer than their

patronizing, black-coated advisers where lie the eternal
verities.
One must have seen the Indians of Tesuque, or Santa
Clara, or San Ildefonso grinding their corn on stones,
fetching water from the river in jars on their heads, cook
ing over a three-cornered open fire, sleeping on blanketed
benches along the whitewashed wall, molding pottery ves
sels without a wheel. One must have shaken the claw-like
hand of the ancient "governor" of Taos, as he squats before
his fragrant pinyon fire, and heard his Elders, wrapped in
their white robes, saluting the sunset from their highpiled roofs. One must have climbed the rocky path to
Acoma and looked out over the wide and silent land at the
Enchanted Mesa from a plateau where a few wild children,
innocent even of the Spanish tongue, call shrilly and hide
about a great empty church as big as a cathedral. One
must, in short, have seen how the Pueblo lives and guessed
dimly how he feels, andthis is very importantheard his
American and Mexican fellow-citizens talk covetously of
his rich farm lands to realize that to give him citizenship
today would not be to do him a service.
It would rather be, so the Pueblo himself believes, so
most of his friends in the region believe, to turn him into
a pauper and a nomad. He has little ready money, little
knowledge of business and law as practiced by white men,
save that he is always cheated when he attempts a bargain
and has, in spite of his special Indian attorneys, lost thou
sands of his precious acres through leases that were not
"water-tight." He has little or no education; not more
than half the adult males, it is estimated, can read or write
English. His land, divided into individual allotment shares,
would almost certainly be sold for taxes or "grabbed" by
some of the "sharks" who have long been waiting for this
glorious day. He would, with juries preponderantly Mexi
can, have practically no chance of fair play in the courts.
If abstract justice is involvedand surely it is involved
we owe the Pueblo adequate protection for the next genera
tion: until we have given him the sort of education and
knowledge of the administration of affairs which would
really arm him in the struggle for existence in a growing
pioneer State.
The educational methods of the Indian Bureau have re
inforced the ideain his and his fellow-citizens' minds
that the Pueblo is a creature apart; without, however, giv
ing him the benefit of that difference in a constructive
and disinterested exploitation of his psychology and tradi
tions. An American education of a rudimentary kind has
been dispensed in separate ungraded day schools built on the
edge of the villages and in one large boarding school in
Santa Fe where, in addition to formal schooling, a little
farming, household arts, sanitation, and certain trades have
been taught to such boys and girls as could be induced to
attend. The Indian children have been allowed also to go
to Catholic schools. But as education has never been com
pulsory and has frequently been stoutly resisted, some
pueblos still lack day schools and in others these institu
tions are not ten years old. Santa Domingo, the third most
populous (and one of the richest) of the pueblos, has had
a school only seven years and until lately has refused to
send pupils to Santa Fe. The influence of a few fine women
teachers who date a generation back can still be deeply
measured in places like Santa Clara and Taos, and the in
fluence of the day- and boarding-schools is telling progres
590
The Nation
sively with some of the young men. But the uncertainty

of the teacher as to what he or she was educating the
Pueblo forfor perpetual wardship, for citizenship?must
have greatly undermined the value of Pueblo education as
a whole.
There seems no unanimity of opinion on this point within
the Indian Bureau itself. One very intelligent leading edu
cator told me he was "trying to make a better Indian"not
an American. Another, less leading, exclaimed with horror
when asked to allow his pupils to sing an Indian song.
"We can't allow anything like that." And so the darkskinned pupils who had been made to feel vaguely ashamed
of their own culture chantedwith evident lack of under
standing of anything but the rhythmthat good old Eng
lish ballad, "Johnny's so long at the Fair." Another im
portant official told me that his aim was "to destroy all
distinction between Indian and American"to this end he
believed in discouraging religious dances and allowing the
beautiful Indian churches, which are historically and ar
tistically of first importance, to go to pieces "because they
represent all we are trying to eliminate."
On the whole, one may take it that the Indian Bureau
has stood for a not very enlightened but very well-meaning
sort of Americanization, just as the Smithsonian, working
at cross-purposes with its fellow Government Bureau, has
stood for conservation of Indian folk-lore and archaeology.
And one finds the same disparity of view among the unoffi
cial friends of the Pueblo in the Southwest. Those of the
artist race holding that the Pueblos should never be citi
zens, should rather be preserved like our national parks,
government wards in perpetuum in their little islands
of primitive culture: a source of absorbing interest to
artists, archaeologists, and ethnologists. The "practical
people," on the contrary, urging that the only ultimate and
happy fate for the Pueblo is absorption and Americaniza
tion.
But even the latter, the advocates of Americanization,
feel keenly that the Pueblo is entitled to a period of adoles
cence instead of being plunged directly from childhood into
manhood. Dissolve the antiquated Indian Bureau, if you
like, they say; it has not changed its cumbersome methods
since Jefferson's day. Put the Pueblo children under the
National Bureau of Education, into the public schools where
they will grow up equals among equals, knowing the ways
of their Mexican and American compeers. Turn over the
tangled legal affairs of the Pueblo to the National Depart
ment of Justice. But do not divide the Pueblo's lands and
disrupt his social system by giving him citizenship for
twenty-five years at least. Give him, rather, during that
period, a "Protector": not a "political appointee," but a
really big-minded person of vision and competence, a Pueblo
Hoover let us say, with an adequate salary and very much
broader local powers than are allowed under the present
centralized system. This hypothetical personwho might
well be a woman, if some young man who has found no
outlet for his idealism since the war did not jump at the
job firstshould undoubtedly be familiar with modern
psychological and educational theory and apply the knowl
edge in such specialized education as was found necessary.
It could probably be paid for, as better medical services
could be paid for, from Pueblo funds, provided the Indians
were helped to lease all tracts of alluvial land which they
cannot themselves cultivate, and to exploit their forest land,
now largely neglected. The "Protector" should get their
[Vol. 112, No. 2911
many pending land claims settled ; should really bring home

to Indians of both sexes whatever knowledge of hygiene,
of farming, of business would increase the health and effi
ciency and productivity of the tribe; and should foster, for
the pride of the Pueblos and the advantage of America at
large, the very rare craft technique which has had, up to
date, more encouragement from the Harvey Brothers and
the Santa Fe Railroad than from the Indian Bureau, and is
therefore inevitably beginning to conform to commercial
standards.
There is no question, indeed, that unless the younger
generation is taught respect for native arts, the more pre
cious hereditary secrets of glaze and dye and weave will
be lost within a few years. The material used is increas
ingly poor; the glaze of the black pottery now turns white
with use. Such little craft teachingin basketry, for in
stanceâs one sees in the Indian schools has the public
school instead of the native stamp. Will the next step be
to teach the Pueblos Russian folk dances, because they are
being taught in New York? The Italian lace and linen in
dustries had fallen into much greater disuse when they
were revived fifteen years or more ago, and are now again
flourishing. So it is not too late to save the Pueblo indus
tries if we can only come to realize how valuable they
are. The paintings of their dances which the young
Pueblos are beginning to make under the influence of the
Southwest Artist Colony are a very interesting commen
tary on their powers. Their response to this stimulus has
been real and immediate, and more direction of spontaneous
native energies into new channels might well quicken their
rather slow and halting intellectual development.
The fate of a few thousands of Pueblo Indians will
probably arouse very little interest in our many millions.
America is a reckless squanderer where small racial units
are concerned, and the cause of any Indian race seems
a priori a lost cause. Yet justice and the faith of these
simple self-respecting folk in a benevolent Uncle Sam, who
has, first and last expended considerable sums in providing
them with teachers, lawyers, doctors, and farm machinery,
should not be lightly set aside. Moreover, if we were going
to scrap the Pueblo civilization, consign it to the general
Indian ashheap, better have done so in 1846 than in 1921,
when there are signs that the greatest and richest country
in the world has at last reached the point of creating an
American culture. Is there not, on a purely selfish, if not
on an altruistic basis, solid reason for conserving and pro
tecting the only Indian race that has, as by a miracle,
survived in its original state to the twentieth century?

Paul Hanna's fifth article in the Mexico1921 series, en
titled Relations with the United States, will appear in
the next issue of The Nation.
Albert De Silver is a member of the New York Bar and
chairman of the legislative committee of the New York
City Club.
Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant was an American corre
spondent in France during the war and is the author of
"French Perspectives."
Herbert J. SeliGmann is the author of "The Negro Faces
America," the most important contemporary contribu
tion to the discussion of our colored race problem.
The Nation
April 20, 1921]
Slavery
in
Georgia,
A. D.
1921
By HERBERT J. SELIGMANN
ONE night in Atlanta, just before John Williams was
put on trial on a charge of murdering Negro peons on
his farm in Jasper County, I sat listening to the story of
Addison Fuller, an old colored farmer. He had fled to the
city leaving behind wife and children and all possessions.
He had come after a deliberate attempt had been made to
enslave him, to force him, after imprisonment and brutal
beating, to work off an entirely fictitious debt to a white
planter ; and after a white man had tried to seduce his wife.
The story came out slowly. We were sitting on the verandah
of a house near Atlanta University. Overhead were starlit
skies. Across the street in a frame house colored people
were dancing to a phonograph. We were in an American
city, in the midst of American civilization, and the story
this slave told in soft tones, without bitterness, seemed all
the stranger for the popular dance tunes which accompanied
it from across the street.
There had been a brutal beating. Fuller was caught as
he tried to release his children from the captivity he had
escaped. The white planter who enslaved Addison Fuller
told the sheriff after the capture that he "wanted that
damn nigger whipped," and so one white man held Fuller's
feet, another man held up his clothes, and the planter stood
over him with a drawn knife. All this is in an affidavit
submitted to the United States Attorney in Atlanta;
but not that the sheriff beat him with a leather buggy
trace until he was wet with perspiration and then took
off his coat saying that he had not half begun the
whipping.
It was almost an unbelievable tale this gentle-voiced
old dark man was telling. But it is not an exceptional one.
White men in Newton County freely admitted that peonage
was general in Jasper County. And an officer of the
United States Government out of his own detailed and
accurate information told me that the* terrible murder
cases in Jasper County differed not in kind, only in the
number of victims, from Negro slavery practiced through
out rural Georgia. Later I heard white men, in speaking
of paying fines of Negroes convicted of petty offenses, refer
to the transaction as "buying niggers"; for the Negro so
released from labor on the chain gang is expected to work
off the amount of the fine and as much more as his white
boss can make him. This was the situation of many of the
Negroes on the farm of John Williams. It is at this mo
ment the situation of many Negroes throughout the State
of Georgia.
White men stand together ip Georgia. Their ascendancy
is maintained by force. To them the Negro is a source of
labor. There are many instances of benevolent paternal
ism. But in any full sense the Negro is not considered a
human being. If a crime is committed against a Negro
it is practically impossible to prove it: unless it assumes
the dimensions of the wholesale murders practiced in
Jasper County.
A Negro's sworn testimony will not stand against a
white man's unsworn and unsupported assertion. The sheriff
of Jasper County, who might have been expected to pro
ceed against the owner of the "murder farm," was him
self under indictment in the Federal court, charged with
591
the crime of peonage, at the time the murder trial began.

It was a matter of common gossip that the planter, John
Williams, who was accused of having instigated and com
mitted the murder of his peons, had had financial dealings
with the solicitor who was charged with prosecuting him.
It was also a matter of common knowledge that, in de
fiance of the law of Georgia, a law which is set at defiance
every day by thousands of Georgians, many citizens of
Williams's county would be present, fully armed, in Cov
ington during the trial.
A story which illustrates the difficulty of convicting
white men of peonage was told to me by an officer of the
United States Government, from his own exact knowledge,
as follows: In December of 1920 a Negro farmer found
himself penniless, his crop seized by his landlord against
a debt the landlord claimed was due.
The Negro
escaped to another county and took new employment. He
was pursued with warrants on charges of swindling and
cheating. This is an expedient often employed against
Negro peons who escape. The Negro was convicted, but
his fine was paid by a white man for whom he went to
work. The first employer then sought out the new one
and claimed the Negro owed him money. The new em
ployer agreed to liquidate the debt, but before he could
do so the Negro was seized at night, carried a mile from
his cabin, tied to a tree, and shot. The body was in plain
view next day. There is no reasonable doubt as to who
perpetrated the crime.
From a white Georgian who attended the meeting I
learned how the Governor of the State, within the month,
had met a group of representative citizens and had told
them of twenty or thirty cases of peonage of his own
knowledge. The few white men who burn with shame and
anger at the conditions which they know to exist feel stifled
in their own State. They have no means of speaking out.
There is no liberal press in Georgia, no magazines not de
voted to sensational news, as there are in New York. The
newspapers of Georgia are afraid, not of physical violence,
but of loss of patronage if they tell the truth. On the other
hand they do not scruple to create mobs. One newspaper
brought about the Atlanta riot of 1907. The Georgia news
papers lynched Leo Frank.
It is idle to advise or warn white Georgians. But they
are preparing for themselves a terrible day of reckoning.
They do not realize the spirit they are breeding among
colored people. The Negro Pullman porter on the train
coming North gave more than a hint of that feeling in
Atlanta. He and all his housemates are armed with Win
chester rifles. They have been made bitter. They intend
to use their rifles if they have to defend themselves. He
said to me: "It is bad to have to live in such a state of
suspense, not knowing when the storm may break, when
you may have to fight for your life."
It is bad indeed. The remedy lies with the very white
men who have hitherto made it impossible to convict other
white men of peonage. It lies in a realization that imposing
a sentence of life imprisonment on one of the most delib
erate and cold-blooded murderers in the annals of crime
in a section of the country where the death penalty is
readily inflicted, is not a vindication of Georgian or South
ern justice or in any sense evidence that the ghastly abuse
now uncovered and the relation that it cannotes between
the races can be satisfactorily solved solely by "leaving it
to the South."
The Nation
The Death of Limerick's Mayor

By K. O'CALLAGHAN
Limerick, March 15
I WAS urged by official messengers from the military com
mand, and also formally invited, to attend a public inquiry
into the death of my husband, Michael O'Callaghan, ex-Mayor
of Limerick, and I was assured that the military authorities
desired to have everything open, and as public as possible. How
far the promise of publicity has been kept I can judge by the
newspaper reports, which state that a cordon of military sur
rounded the Courthouse, that the adjacent streets and the
grounds of the adjoining Protestant Cathedral were held by
armed troops, that no members of the general public were
allowed to enter, or even to approach, the building unless pro
vided with special permits from the military authorities.
In a letter to the Press on the 10th inst. I stated that I be
lieved these military inquiries to be a farce and a travesty of
justice. That belief is shared by all my fellow countrymen
who have read the reports of similar proceedings elsewhere
in Ireland. They do not need fresh evidence of it, but as pos
sibly there may be some people outside this country who have
not yet come to appreciate in full the working of the system
by which we are at present governed, I wish to draw their
attention to statements made at the Limerick inquiry.
All the military and police witnesses examined at the inquiry
seemed anxious to prove that the Limerick murders were com
mitted by what they were pleased to call "the extreme section
of the Irish Republican Army." I, however, have no doubt
who the murderers were. They do not belong to the Irish Re
publican Army, who protected my husband and my home while
they could, and who now join with me in my bitter mourning.
My husband was unanimously elected Mayor by the first
Republican Corporation of Limerick in January, 1920. In
March that year, the very day after his return from Lord
Mayor Macurtain's funeral, his first death notice reached him,
similar in terms to that received by the Lord Mayor of Cork.
From that out my husband and I had no delusions of false
security. We knew that those who sent it had the means and
the will to carry out their threat. During the greater part of
his mayoral year my husband seldom slept at home. When he
did sleep in his own house it was not the Crown forces that
protected him, but a guard of the Irish Republican Army.
General Cameron is reported to have paid a tribute to the
services which the late Mayor, Alderman George Clancy, and
my husband rendered in preserving the peace of the city. Of
General Cameron personally I know nothing. His tribute to
the dead men may be sincere, but I should like to put on record
the kind of tribute which the forces of the Crown in General
Cameron's command paid to these men while they lived.
Alderman Clancy's home was frequently raided during cur
few by Crown troops, and his wife had to endure insults and
threats. In August last, on the eve of our departure for a
short holiday, which was not spent in this country, my husband
stayed for a few nights at home without his usual guard. It
was during this period that our house was first raided by a
mixed party of Crown forces. It was the kind of raid with
which Irish people are familiar: every room was tossed and
littered, they helped themselves to some claret and stout, and
when they had gone some articles, silver, etc., were missing.
I notified the officer of the R.I.C. barracks of my loss. The
only result was an acknowledgment of the receipt of the list
of articles "alleged to have been missing."
Our house was again raided on Shrove Tuesday night by a
party of police, some of whom were drunk, offensive, and men
acing. Both my husband and I believed that he owed his life
on that occasion to the presence and restraining influence of
two Irishmen, members of the old R. I. C. .
Our house was again raided on February 22, eleven days
[Vol. 112, No. 2911
before my husband's death, this time by a mixed party of

Auxiliaries, soldiers, English Black and Tans, and women
searchers. During the raid my husband and I were kept apart,
and, o very significant feature, I had to submit to the indignity
of having my room and my person searched by the women at
tached to the Crown forces.
Curfew and martial law conditions put an end to our living
under the protection of our Republican Guard, because my
husband was unwilling to jeopardize these brave lives. While
under the protection of the I. R. A. no harm came to us, thank
God. The extremists kept their trust: they did their duty well,
and now it is one of my proudest and most consoling memories
that they guarded him living and dead. My husband was mur
dered when the city was completely in the hands of the curfew
troops, when no citizennot even the priest and doctor who at
tended himcould be out on the street without peril to their lives.
The desire of the Crown forces in Limerick to apprehend the
murder gang who were abroad on the night of Sunday, March
6, may be judged by a few facts:
1. That one D.I. and three constables represented the entire
strength of the forces which turned out on foot on hearing of
my husband's murder, thirty-five minutes after I telephoned
for them to get a priest.
2. Mayor Clancy's house lies about two hundred yards from
the Strand Barracks. The sentry on guard swore at the in
quiry that he heard the steps of three men pass, going in the
direction of the Mayor's house. Ten minutes afterwards he
heard six shots, the sound of which came from that direction.
He reported the matter, and though he heard the footsteps of
the murderers hurriedly returning in the direction of Sarsfield
Bridge, the men were not challenged, no patrol was turned out,
and the officer then in charge was not examined at the inquiry.
8. On other occasions the citizens will remember that if a
policeman were wounded, or even threatened, in the city, or
within miles of it, troops poured out from all the barracks, the
whole city was surrounded, the bridges were closed, and the citi
zens were roused and searched, in order to discover the criminals.
4. Thirteen minutes after my husband was murdered the
doctor who was bravely coming to attend him met five men
walking leisurely in Sarsfield Street, about a hundred yards
from William Street Barracks, to which I had telephoned, and
apparently going in that direction.
6. General Cameron stated that the relations between the
Crown forces and the inhabitants were friendly, that "about
two months ago a girl was shot while walking out with a con
stable, and since then nothing has happened." Apparently,
many things happened without General Cameron's knowledge.
Has he not heard of the murder of Thomas Blake, a prominent
Sinn Feiner, on Friday, January 28, and is there no record
of the raid on Blake's house the week before his murder, and
of a species of court martial conducted at it by Crown troops?
General Cameron, the head of the Crown military system in
this area, invited me to attend a military inquiry, with the
purpose, I presume, of bringing the murderers of my husband
to account. He set up as a tribunal of investigation one sec
tion of those very Crown forces who held the city absolutely in
their hands when the murder was done. He called the inquiry
a public one, and he took extraordinary precautions, military
and otherwise, to insure that it should not be public.
There are three women who have a bitter right to be satis
fied that every step is taken to end this terror that walks by
night under the military system in Ireland. I, the widow of
Michael O'Callaghan, the murdered ex-Mayor of Limerick, am
one of those women, and I am not satisfied. In my agony that
night, I thought of the countless other women suffering, as I
suffered in my husband's threatened life and in his death. For
their sakes, / demand full and open inquiry before a jury of my
countrymen and countrywomen into the murder of my husband.
There is yet a God of Justice, and whatever verdict the
military inquiry brings in, General Cameron and his curfew
troops are still accountable to Him and to me.
The Nation
April 20, 1921]
In
the Driftway
WHEN Jim Cross flung open the door of the store

room in search of the missing drug clerk he found
him with clothes afire writhing in agony on the floor of the
burning room. In another moment the clerk jumped head
foremost through the closed window five floors above the
street. Jim caught him as he hung for a moment by his
feet and held him by one of them. Then, when he had with
his cap beaten down the flames in the clerk's clotheshis
own clothes were beginning to burn by this timeJim
pulled the half-crazed man back and, then, getting out on a
narrow ledge, pulled and dragged him along this slight path
way to another window, into which in the sight of hundreds
he thrust the half-conscious man before he began to put out
the fire in his own clothes. Several minutes later Jim
emerged from the building bearing the clerk on his shoulder
only to collapse and fall as he came out on the sidewalk
amid the cheers of the crowd. All of this happened in New
York the other week in the Winter Garden Theater building ;
the hero was a Negro porter; the clerk, who has since died
from his burns, a white man the Negro hardly knew. Did
the newspapers which printed the account make their head
lines read: NEGRO HERO SAVES WHITE MAN? No, in
deed, they were the same newspapers which love to feature a
colored man's crime like this: "Negro Brute Assails
Woman." In this case they modestly referred to him as a
"colored porter"; one editorial, speculating on the motives
that led Jim to risk his life for a comparative stranger,
obscurely referred to him as one whose ancestors "came
from the Congo." His last name was not printed. Thus,
the Drifter finds it always goes with the Negro. His good
deeds are, if not interred with his bones, usually carefully
overlooked or minimized. Yet there are many Negro Jims,
as the records of the Carnegie Hero Fund amply testify.
*****
THE Drifter cannot remember when last he went to the
circus, but whenever it was, it was for him still the
"Magic Ring," with enchanting, and undoubtedly enchanted,
giants and pygmies; with side-splitting clowns and glori
ously beautiful ladies dancing on one toe on the broad white
back of a noble charger. For him then the tinsel was still
silver, the jewels were all precious, the trappings were cloth
of gold. Now he has been to the circus again. He was
still captivated by the smellthat inimitable combination
of sawdust and sweat, grease-paint and giraffes, peanuts
and people. He jumped when the lady trapeze artist pre
tended to fall and plunged shrieking to earth, only to be
caught securely at the end of a rope a second before she
would have been dashed to bits. And he watched with
amazement the horses of Mr. Hess falling into their places
in the complicated figures of a horse, instead of a lobster,
quadrille. But for the most part he found the circus too
big, too strange, too bright. He wanted one ring, and at
most three clowns, and above all, a tent. He wanted fewer
people watching, five- instead of fifteen-cent ice-cream cones,
and more vociferous and imaginative barkers. In short, he
yearned for the circus as he remembered itwhich is, in all
probability, as it never was.
*****
THE program, he is bound to admit, was everything that
could be desired. In it were described the "ponderous
pachyderms, performing feats hitherto unknown in any cir
593
cus in any country in the world," and the "seven aerial

wonders, leaping from ring to ring in mid-air, defying the
law of gravitation" and no doubt putting the fixed stars to
shame! In the program also was an account of "the un
tamable tamed! Absolutely the first time in the history of
the world that the wild animals of the impenetrable jungles
of South Africa have yielded to the will of man. Seven
ferocious Bengal tigers performing tricks that might be
required of any kitten." It was undoubtedly true. The
Drifter does not accuse the press agent of one atom of
exaggeration. His objection is that it was too true! He
was, as P. T. Barnum would have known, longing to be
fooled. In the style of the program, the present circus
"leaves not the slightest room for the play of any imagina
tion that has existed since the beginning of time."
*
*
*
IT was at the circus, finally, that the Drifter saw the last
remnant of glory stripped from royalty, and contrary to
what he would have expected, it made him profoundly sad.
There was the King of Beastsin appearance still magnifi
centdethroned, humiliated, and doing tricks for a little
forked radish with a forked stick. The Drifter applauded
every protest that the lion made; he exulted at every roar;
he thrilled at the menace of a lifted paw. And when his
royal majesty obediently spun his little ball, or leapt through
his hoop, one watcher, at least, mourned for the lost glory
of another and better day.
MARION, Ohio, having been put on the map by Mr.
Harding, the ex-mayor of Marion, South Carolina
Palmer W. Johnsonhas determined to put his town on the
map also. His town, too, has a Star, of which he is the
editor, and in it he is telling his townsmen, who turned him
out of office after six years' service, that although republics
may be ungrateful, ex-mayors are not. He wants them to
know that he is happy to quit his job as "public footwiper,"
and summarizes his term in office as follows:
We have settled land disputes, family disputes, dog disputes,
and some unfair accounts.
We have been insulted, disgusted, spat upon, and imposed
upon.
We have locked up culprits for wrong-doing, and then envied
them their place of limbo.
We have been blamed for stopped sewers, blocked streets,
heavenly showers, poor telephone service, and the present price
of cotton.
We have been cursed for cutting down trees, and threatened
with death for allowing other trees to stand.
We have been blacklisted for the bum work of one policeman,
and ostracized for the sterling work of another.
We have been called a liar until we almost believe it.
We have become widely known as a grand rascal, an arch
criminal, a desperado, a policy player, and a bigoted fool.
We have been accused of attempting to give the Presbyterian
Church title to the Town Hall.
Mothers accused us of overrunning the town with dogs, and
dog owners blamed us with the deluge of babies.
One bunch wanted hogs in town, while another said there
were too many hogs already.
They cursed our name when mosquito time came.
They yelled at us when the ditches ran over after having
been filled to capacity by the good Lord.
They blamed us for the many peculiarities of their neighbors'
chickens, dog, man-servant, maid-servant, and mule.
The Drifter
The Nation
594
[Vol. 112, No. 2911
President Willard on The Railroad Wreck

SIR: I have just read in The Nation of March 30 the editorial
on page 469 under the caption, The Railroad Wreck, and it is

because some of the statements therein seem to me to be incor
rect and misleading that I am about to write what follows:

The editorial says in part, Today the Esch-Cummins law is
a complete and admitted failure. I wonder upon what specific
grounds the writer of the editorial based that conclusion. As I
see the matter, the Esch-Cummins law so far has met every
proper and possible expectation. To be specific: The law pro
vides, among other things, that in times of emergency the Inter
state Commerce Commission shall have authority to bring about
such common use of equipment and facilities as may be neces

sary to meet the public's requirements for transportation. Un
der this provision of the law, the railroads, during the twelve
months ended December 31, 1920, moved 9,000,000,000 ton miles
more than the same properties ever moved in the same length of
time before, including the year of 1918 when they made their
best previous performance. The figures which I have quoted

are official and it seems to me they clearly justify the conclusion
that the railroads, with private operation under the terms of
the Esch-Cummins Act, not only can but actually did move more
business than the same railroads could, or, at any rate, more
than they actually did move under Federal control.
Second, the Esch-Cummins law provides a definite rule for

rate-making, and in accordance with that rule the Interstate
Commerce Commission authorized an increase in freight rates
Board, which was charged with the responsibility of dealing

with the subject, gave a decision in July which meant an ag
gregate increase per annum to the railway workers of about
$625,000,000. Other disputed questions between the manage
ments and the employees have been referred to the Labor Board,
but please bear in mind that during this entire period while
the complex labor problem which I have briefly referred to
was being discussed and gradually worked out, the transpor

tation service of the country has continued uninterruptedly.
The purpose of the labor provision in the Esch-Cummins Act,
as I understand it, was to prevent an interruption of the trans
portation service because of disputes growing out of labor ques
tions. Certainly it must be admitted that so far this feature of
the law has accomplished what Congress evidently had in mind.

The particular features of the law which I have referred to
seem to me the ones of most importance, and I fail to find any
justification for saying that the law has failed in any one of
the three particulars mentioned. What has happened, of course,

is this: Our nation, together with the other leading nations in
the world, took part in a great world war and for several years
the utmost energies of all were devoted to purposes of destruc
tion of material and lives. This condition was naturally accom
panied by great economic disturbances.
The war is over, but
the price must now be paid and the process of economic re

adjustment is naturally more or less painful and costly. All
industry was stimulated to an unprecedented degree during the
which was thought to be sufficient to meet the requirements of
war. Reaction has now set in, and the railroads, which do not
create business but act simply as carriers reflect in their earn
the law. It is true that the Commission was unable last August
to foresee the depression which later on was going to take place
in the business world, but you will admit, I am sure, that they
ings the general condition of business and industry as a whole.

During the discussions which took place in Congress in con
nection with the Esch-Cummins Act, Senators and Congressmen
If business had continued at
of both political parties spoke in strongest terms of commen
anything like the volume which obtained in last July or August,

I believe that the rates fixed at that time by the Commission
were not alone in that respect.
dation of the American railroads as a whole. They united in

saying that previous to the war this country had the best
transportation system by rail in the world, had the lowest
would have been adequate.

The statement is made in the editorial above referred to that
transportation charges in the world, and at the same time the
the depression in business is due to the fact that rates are so

high that freight will not move and passengers will not travel.
My study of the matter does not lead to that conclusion. In
fact I have personally asked many large manufacturers and
shippers of goods what effect it would have upon their ship
railway employees had been paid the highest wages. Such was
the railroad system taken over by the Government on Decem
ments at the present moment if freight charges were canceled
altogether and if the railroads would move the tonnage offered

free of all charges. I felt that that was putting the question
in an extreme way, but invariably the answer has been that it
would practically make no difference at all in the volume of
business, because people were not buying at the present time,

and the reason why people were not buying now was not be
cause freight charges are higher than formerly, but because
there was a general expectation and belief that material prices
would be lowerin fact, considerably lowera little later on
and industry was awaiting that event. I repeat that it seems
to me nothing has happened yet to indicate that the provision
of the law which has to do with rate-making has failed. Cer
tainly it cannot be seriously urged that rates fixed so as to yield
only 5% per cent on the actual value of the property used for
transportation purposes are excessive or unreasonably high.
One other important feature of the law is the provision which
has to do with the settlement of labor disputes, and certainly

it cannot be said that that provision has failed up to this time.
Never at any time was the labor situation on the railroads so
serious and disquieting as it was at the termination of Federal
control on the first of March, 1920. The railway workers had

made requests for increased wages nearly a year previous. Their
requests had not been acted upon.
The Esch-Cummins Act
created agencies to deal with such matters, and the whole labor
question after the termination of Federal control was promptly
laid before the Labor Board established by the Act. That
ber 28, 1917.

Despite inadequate and impaired equipment and the serious
labor situation which existed at the end of Federal control, I

repeat that the railroads during the year ended December 31,
1920, performed a transportation service equivalent to 9,000,
000,000 ton miles greater than had ever before been performed
by the same properties in the same length of time.
The problems confronting the railroads today are serious
and complex, just as the problems confronting all other business
enterprises are serious and complex, but in my opinion they
can and will be successfully worked out under the terms of the
Esch-Cummins Act.
The compensation paid railway employees on Class I rail

roads, as last reported, is on a basis 120 per cent higher than
the wages paid in 1914. It should be remembered, however,
that the present basis of wages was fixed by a governmental
body created by Congress to deal with such matters, and they
were fixed having in mind the cost of living and other perti
nent questions. I have no doubt that railway wages will be
readjusted downward when the cost of living has declined suffi
ciently to justify such reductions. Of course, the problem is
a very complex one, and because of its very nature it cannot be
disposed of hastily. The law, however, provides an orderly
method of procedure, by which wages of railway employees
may be fairly adjusted from time to time.
It is not to be ex
pected that matters of such vital importance can be discussed

without evidence of feeling, but the important thing is to keep
the trains running regularly while the discussion is going on,
and so far the public has not been inconvenienced on that
account.
April 20, 1921]
The Nation
There are other statements in the editorial to which I should

like to make special reference if I did not feel that this letter
is already too long, but understanding the matter as I do, it
seemed to me that I ought to call attention to the things which
I have specifically referred to, because I assume it is your de
sire to discuss the railroad subject fairly and constructively.
New York, March 29
Daniel Willabd
[We are glad to print President Willard's letter because of
our readiness to present the railroad side of the case and be
cause of our high opinion of President Willard personally. But
the Esch-Cummins law is based on the theory that the way
to insure cheap and adequate transportation is to guarantee
returns on railroad securities, so far as that can be done by the
rate-making process, thus establishing railroad credit and mak
ing it possible to get cheap capital. It neglects the fundamental
question of valuation, and makes no more than a pious gesture
in the direction of efficient and economical financial and tech
nical management. We repeat that the failure of the law is
complete. It was based on an unsound theory, and even Mr.
Warfield's association of security owners admits the failure.
If this were not the case Senator Cummins would not himself be
demanding a rigid inquiry into the whole railroad situation.
Mr. Warfield himself is proposing an incredibly complicated
machinerysome fifty boardsto put efficiency into the rail
road system.
To be sure, the roads carried last year the heaviest traffic in
their history, but on Mr. Willard's own showing they did it
only by appealing to the emergency powers of the Interstate
Commerce Commission, thus going back on the atomistic private
management theory of the law.
The rates are all right, Mr. Willard declares, but the wretched
traffic just isn't there. But everyone we know insists that rates
are too high. (He must not, however, believe that we hold
high railroad rates responsible for the existing business de
pression. The idea is new to us.) Fix rates, as the Trans
portation Act does, on a cost-plus basis without making certain
that costs are kept down, and you open the floodgates to cost
inflation. That is what the act has done.
Apparently Mr. Willard believes that so long as some trains
move, the law has been a success in regard to labor relations.
But does he really think that the labor problem on the roads
is in a fair way to settlement? If so, we earnestly suggest
that he try to find out the temper of the men on his own lines.
Transportation is primarily a public utility. The Esch-Cum
mins Act treats it as primarily a private-profits machine.
Editor The Nation.]
Correspondence
Why the Sherman Anti-Trust Law Failed
Sir: "I do not doubt the excellence of your intentions, but
youth is the age of credulity and confidence is a plant of slow
growth in an aged bosom." Mr. Gilson Gardner's article, Why
the Sherman Anti-Trust Law Failed, brought to my mind the
words I have just quoted from Lord Chatham with which the
old lion of Liberty gently rallied the young men who had suc
ceeded him on the Ministerial Benches and were pursuing a
policy of conquest toward the revolted colonies. I do not know
Mr. Gardner's age nor what his opportunities for political illu
mination may have been. The writer spent ten years in Wash
ington and every day added fresh confirmation to what was
obvious at first blush, to wit, that the Government, in its execu
tive and judicial branches, and the Trusts were absolutely identi
cal. Does Mr. Gardner expect the Trusts to prosecute them
selves? They know their Burke and reply, "We do not know
how to draw up an indictment againstourselves."
The late unlamented Administration went into office pledged
595
to the hilt to curb the Trusts. In the early days of President

Wilson's first term of office Hon. H. Robert Fowler, a member
of the House of Representatives from Illinois and as honest a
man as ever was sent to Washington, called on his old friend
Col. W. J. Bryan, at that time Secretary of State, and bluntly
asked the Secretary when the party intended to redeem its
pledges touching the Trusts. Colonel Bryan replied that "it had
been agreed, for the sake of party harmony, party regularity,
not to take up the question of the Trusts at that time." Only
one person could have pledged the Administration to this, atti
tude of maleficent neutrality, and that was President Wilson
himself.
Thousands of pages of unimpeachable testimony point irresis
tibly to the conclusion that if the Government had tried as hard
to suppress monopoly as it has to promote itif it had used
the same vicious teeth in invading the offices of the Meat
Packers and the Standard Oil Company that it used in breaking
up and destroying the offices of the I. W. W. and the Com
munist Party, there never would have been a Trust, as we now
know them, in this country.
Kingston-on-Hudson, April 11
John Basil Barnhhx
Kansas and Howat

Sir: The article, The Kansas Court of Industrial Relations,
in The Nation of April 6 must leave many readers wondering
whether, despite its length, there is not an undisclosed side of
the matter presented. The Story of Alex Howat, as told by Mr.
James P. Cannon in the Liberator for April, supplies certain
omissions.
One passage in The Nation article disturbs the recital of the
achievements of the Kansas Court of Industrial Relations. In
deed, it throws more light on the spirit and purposes of that
court than was perhaps intended. The writer says : "Alexander
Howat, the district president (United Mine Workers, District
14), is a radical of radicals, alleged to be a member of the
I. W. W., the Coal Mine Workers' Industrial Union, and charged
with contributing to the financial support of the Communist
Party and in touch with the extremists of the country." What
a catalogue of crimes! It only remains to add that Howat
probably gives money for the relief of the needy children of
Soviet Russiaand reads The Nation.
As for the United Mine Workers of Kansas, especially in
District 14, their status reminds one of the old Roman definition
of liberty, recorded by Justinian: "Liberty is the natural power
of doing what anyone is disposed to do, save so far as a person
is prevented by force or law." Those "huddled" miners, "pe
culiarly susceptible to the radicalism rampant in the coal
regions," ought to be made to understand, through Americanized
educational methods, that they are perfectly freeexcept for
the slight circumstance that they are prevented from striking
by the "force and law" of the present government of
Kansas.
Washington, D. C, April
Ellen Hayes
Workers in the Cabinet

Sir: Your suggestions for the Presidential cabinet are good,
but why should they all be high-classed professional men?
Abraham Lincoln said, "You can always trust the common
people" and "God loved the common people because he made
so many of them." Now, why should not the common people
be represented in the cabinet in proportion to their numbers?
In Christ's cabinet, which was composed of the twelve apostles,
there were eleven laborers, and one, St. Matthew, was a taxcollector. Of course it is not expected that laymen follow the
example of Christ when even the ministers ignore him.
New York, March 11
George Fentrick
The Nation
596
Books
In a Style of Steel
Avon's Harvest. By Edwin Arlington Robinson. The Macmillan Company.
IN a story by Henry James called The Next Time a certain
Ralph Limbert sets out in one book after another to write
something that the casual public will violently want, only to
find on each occasion that he has failed to write less than a
masterpiece. If Mr. Robinson were to try the same experiment
he would probably have the same success; and though he has
not tried it in "Avon's Harvest," which both he and his pub
lishers call a metrical dime novel, he has none the less told his
shuddering "ghost" story in the steel-hard, steel-spare, steelbright style which he has been tempering now for twenty-five
years until it fits all the ranges of tragedy, comedy, irony over
which his imagination moves.
Outwardly a "ghost" story, it is of course inwardly, since
it is Mr. Robinson's, a study of a human character seen in its
revealing moments. What Avon, the protagonist and confessant of the tale, has to tell is a record of the fierce snarl within
him of three instinctshate, remorse, fearall felt toward his
one enemy, whom he hated and wronged at school and who with
a nagging vengeance has ever since kept the wound sore until
not even the report of the enemy's death can assuage the
hate, and until fear springs out of what Avon believes to be
the grave and conquers him. Not one of Avon's instincts has
a reasonable ground or course. He hates his enemy as a dumb
creature hates a snake, as if it were because of
some accrued arrears of ancestors
Who throve on debts that I was here to pay.
He knows even as a boy that his hate is fantastic, but he
knows that it is irresistible. It tortures and rends him, all the
more since some ophidian quality in his enemy, something sinu
ous and slimy, holds Avon in the grip of fascination. Avon,
however, cannot be let off with the agonies of a bird heldas
the fable has itby the eye of a serpent. Behind him are
the many moral centuries of his race, and the enemy
Found a few flaws in my tight mail of hate
And slowly pricked a poison into me
In which at first I failed at recognizing
An unfamiliar subtle sort of pity,
which leads to an attempt at tolerance, and, of course, in the
end to wilder loathing than ever. Years of separation bring
no antidote; a momentary relief comes with the news that
the enemy has been lost with the Titanic:
It seemed as for the first time in my life
I knew the blessedness of being warm;
and then, out of the apparent dark, comes the destroying ele
ment of fear. It too is largely instinct, but it too is more
than the beast's terror: nightand every nightfor Avon
throbs with horrors which he could not have felt had he, like
the beasts, never heard of malicious immortality. Upon this
tangled nature of Avon the enemy plays, leaving him to think
it is a ghost that haunts him, and in the end carrying away
even the shell of his revenge long after he has had the kernel.
Most readers of the storyand even some of the reviewing
crewseem to imagine that the enemy is actually a revenant.
"Avon's Harvest" is indeed not explicit on this point, but Mr.
Robinson's record ought to be. What has he ever had to do with
ghosts out of the abyss? He has found his ghosts in this suffi
cient world. And so in his latest book the interest lies not in
the little war between Avon and a spook but in the vaster war
within vAvon himself between that part of him which is man
and reasonable and that part of him which unreasonably leans
upon its ancestors of the jungle and the swamp. Had Avon
been man enough he could have argued himself out of hating,
since there was no good reason; had he been beast alone he
[Vol. 112, No. 2911
could have pounced upon his enemy and cooled his fury by
the letting of blood. As it was, being a creature of incurably
mixed elements, he alternately rages and reflects, curses and
endures, and so comes to a tragic end.
If this conception of an inner war is characteristic of Mr.
Robinson, still more so is the language in which he has pre
sented it. In a sense it is the Yankee idiom lifted into litera
tureat least, it reminds one habitually of the sly short cuts
to meaning, the reckless conciseness, the stubborn understate
ment of some Connecticut farmer or Maine fisherman.
To look at her and then to think of him,
And thereupon to contemplate the fall
Of a dim curtain over the dark end
Of a dark play, required of me no more
Clairvoyance than a man who cannot swim
Will exercise in seeing that his friend
Off shore will drown except he save himself.
Quotation will no more serve to give a due account of the magic
of this brevity than will a severed feature brought home by a
cannibal to show how beautiful his victim was. Such an astute
antithesis as this:
I was enough a leader to be free,
And not enough a hero to be jealous;
such half-humorous felicity with polysyllables as this:
Unwelcome as it was, and off the key
Calamitously, it overlived a silence
That was itself a story and affirmed
A savage emphasis of honesty
That I would only gladly have attuned,
If possible, to vinous innovation;
or such compression of irony as this:
When the Titanic touched a piece of ice
And we were for a moment where we are,
With nature laughing at us
these perhaps give some notion, but only a notion. It is vain
to deny that at times Mr. Robinson's brevity becomes ob
scurity; at times he saves his syllables until any but a partial
reader of this or that passage will feel as he does when in
the encyclopedia he comes upon mathematical or chemical for
mulae and stumbles over them; there is no royal road to Robin
son. The summit, however, is worth the ascent. The col
lected edition of his poems which we are encouraged to expect
in the fall must be, no matter what else occurs, one of the
thrilling poetical events of the year.
C. V. D.
More American Chronicles

The Narrow House. By Evelyn Scott. Boni and Liveright.
Ellen Levis. By Elsie Singmaster. Houghton Mifflin Company.
The Sand Doctor. By Arnold Mulder. Houghton Mifflin Com
pany.
IT is safe to predict that Mrs. Evelyn Scott's first novel,
* "The Narrow House," will be called "powerful but disagree
able," "morbid and drab," "cheerless and unnecessary." With
all these intrusions of antecedent tastes, standards, norms into
the business of criticism we have nothing to do. Agreeableness, "normalcy," and cheer did not happen to be among Mrs.
Scott's aims. Her purpose is quite simply to project what she
has seen with an unflinching closeness and precision. And the
acuteness of her perceptions, both sensory and psychical, is so
high that she has achieved the purpose she entertained with
consummate skill and completeness. No other test is admis
sible. Veracity of experience and energy of expression mark
the true artist. Mrs. Scott has both.
Her frame is small: a narrow house; her people few: Mr.
and Mrs. Farley, Laurence their son, Alice their daughter,
Winnie the son's wife. These five people have nothing of
beauty and little of health in either body or mind. They are,
April 20, 1921]
The Nation
especially in each other's vision, irritable and gross and ignoble

and weakbundles of ugly infirmities. But if you yield your
self quite passively to the enormous accuracy of the analysis,
to what goes on so sharply and hauntingly in the brain and
nerves of each of these creatures, you come to the conclusion
that Mrs. Scott sees a way out for them all and that she is,
as a matter of fact, more hopeful of human life and fate than
the cheerful liar among novelists for the same reason that the
diagnosis of a scrupulous physician is more hopeful than the
promises of an oily quack. We do not know what happiness
and comeliness the Farleys might not have made their own out
side of that narrow house. But they are herded in it, doomed
to fear and hate and love and rasp each other. They are
united by consanguinity, duty, custom, opinionby everything
except healthy liking and voluntary choice; they are entangled
by futile and febrile emotions; they live together in small,
stuffy rooms and hear each other speak and sigh and mumble
and masticate and yawn to the point of disgust and despair.
Yet Mr. Farley stays, hiding cowardice under a mask of duty,
and Laurence stays because he drifts and distrusts his im
pulses, and Alice because, in the present state of moral opin
ion, her life would be as sterile anywhere. But suppose the
wind of some upheaval had come and swept away the narrow
house with all its sick psychical compulsions and inhibitions!
Only Mrs. Farley might have been left stranded. And even
she, poor soul, would have been a more useful and less ignoble
member of society as matron in a real asylum or an official
jail. Guilt and horror belong here, in a word, to the narrow
house, to an enforced litter as opposed to the freedom of
voluntary companionship, to the will to obey a command that
has neither sense nor sanction.
Except in a special and cerebral sense "The Narrow House"
is not, indeed, a beautiful book. We hope, too, that Mrs.
Scott will resist the temptation toward ultra-impressionism of
style on the plain ground that coherent writing is just as
expressive and far more permanent. But the book is beauti
fully brave and true and formidably searching. It would be
not unimportant in any country; it is of the first importance
to us. American literature is putting away childish things.
The great style, the vision that is large as well as exact, will
come later. We are, at least, beginning to see with adult eyes.
How difficult such seeing is appears in the books of Miss
Elsie Singmaster and Mr. Arnold Mulder. There can be no
question in regard to Miss Singmaster's talent, honesty of
purpose, and knowledge. She must, indeed, know a great deal
more than she chooses to tell us. But the point is precisely
that, with many little excursions toward the closer truth and
one quite brilliant episode, she does not choose to tell. She
will not exhaust her situations. A good deal of her material
all of it that derives from the life of the Seventh Day Bap
tistshas a natural picturesqueness and charm, and she lets
these qualities do duty for any deeper searching of her peo
ple's hearts and minds. Furthermore she is tied to the notion
of "plot," of a pattern of action invented and imposed from
without, and hence to the violent interlacing of the two strands
of narrative with which she started. The result is that the
final outcome of Ellen's story is quite fantastic and sentimental.
This is the more to be regretted since only a strong imagina
tion and a firm hand could have described the progress of the
flabby Amos toward sin and change and communicated the
pathos of the old "Kloster's" desertion and decay.
Mr. Arnold Mulder, who started out with such sane and ripe
sketches of the Dutch farmers in Michigan, goes badly to pieces
in his second novel, "The Sand Doctor." He has a notable
theme: a physician who is all scientist and not at all a business
man, a "joiner," or a flatterer cannot succeed as a general
practitioner and finds his lack of worldly success revealing
more and more the essential shallowness of his wife's charac
ter and affection. But in the first place Mr. Mulder does not
steep himself into his problem at any point, giving us rather
watery synopses and illustrative incidents quite externally seen;
and, in the second place, he ends his story most depressingly

by a series of occurrences so shamelessly miraculous that they
destroy whatever was originally sound and pertinent in his
hero's predicament. Thus the ending of "The Sand Doctor"
even more than that of "Ellen Levis" throws a strong light
upon the fine veracity and unswerving inwardness of develop
ment that distinguishes the work of Evelyn Scott
Books in Brief
I N "Spiritualism" (Dodd, Mead) Joseph McCabe has written
* a lucid, reasonable history of the fantastic movement which
originated in 1847 at Hydesville, New York, in the pranks of
the Fox sisters, naughty girls who found they could produce
"spirit" rapswith the joints of their toesand proceeded to
trick the neighbors. From this little fire a great smoke was
kindled, with the help, of course, of a remarkable amount of
fuel which the superstition found in the minds of a great many
people already determined to believe in the existence of spirits
if anything would give them a ghost of a chance. In many
respects merely another phase of the instincts which in the
seventeenth century had believed in witches, Spiritualism was
nevertheless a gentle doctrine, and for all its vagaries did little
positive harm. At one time it appears to have had hundreds
of thousands of converts in the United States; it had its seers
and prophets and scholars and historians and journalism; it
traveled to Europe and led many tolerable intelligences captive
in its train. Later came reaction, recantation on the part of a
painful number of the mediumsand the unveiling of most of
the remainderand general depression. The Society of Psychi
cal Research, in part reviving the older movement, during the
past generation has devoted an immense amount of effort to
the task of finding out the truth about the matter; so, however,
did King James and Glanvil and Hale and the Boanergic
Mathers of Massachusetts. Mr. McCabe writes with a definite
disbelief in the whole idea, but with a careful use of sources
chosen, on the whole, very fairly. He will probably be as irri
tating to convinced Spiritualists as he is amusing to those less
apocalyptic souls who can occasionally derive a modest pleas
ure from the spectacle of human folly and its ways. Americans
will derive an additional amusement from the habit Mr. McCabe
has of explaining to hispresumably Englishreaders that, of
course, such plants could not have sprouted on English soil.
Yet the Americans of his record are mostly persons of little
claim to education, while the Britons who took to this American
invention include among themselves many illustrious names.
There is a question just where the ground for self-congratulation
lies in this connection.
"THHERE are too many of these columns scattered about the
' country. Amy Lowell was exactly right when she said
that they were sad affairs, pitiful things. It made us sore at the
time, but we see now that she was well inspired." With such
sly encouragements does Mr. C. L. Edson greet the humorous
youngster who would learn from him "The Gentle Art of Columning" (Brentano's). A good joke is not the easy thing it is
cracked up to be, says Mr. Edson. Punning is easy, but it is
badnot because it is the lowest form but because it is the
lowest caliber. "It is a sound instead of a substance; it is a
word instead of an idea. Popping off puns is like shooting at
gnats with a cap pistol ; there are mastodons passing byget an
elephant gun and go after them." The column conductors in
this country who know the difference between the obvious and
the subtle could be counted on the fingers of one hand, and that
hand would have to be the hand of a conductor who was once a
brakeman. In one of the liveliest books of the year Mr. Edson
marshals a host of bad newspaper jests and defeats it with a
host of good from F. P. A., Don Marquis, Christopher Morley,
and B. L. T. But since the book was published B. L. T. of the
Chicago Tribune has died, and there would seem to be but three
[Vol. 112, No. 2911
The Nation
598
men left in the profession who are great because they have ideas.
If candidates for that fourth place want encouragement now,
they can get it from Don Marquis's lines, perhaps :
I do not work in verse or prose,
I merely lay out words in rows;
The household words that Webster penned
I merely lay them end to end.
Drama
According to Sarcey
T was during the two decades from 1870 to 1890 that Fran' cisque Sarcey, with an amazing vigor and resourcefulness
of mind, established the theory of the theater as a mechanism,
a puzzle, and a game. He abstracted his theory from the
practice of Scribe and Sardou, stiffened and tightened it be
yond the use of his models, and applied it to Sophocles and
Shakespeare, Moliere and Ibsen. This thing, he declared, was
"of the theater"; that was not. He insisted on the rigor of
the game he had invented and reduced the creative art of the
drama to a base, mechanic exercise. Since his theory deals
exclusively with the effectiveness of one narrow variety of
form and since his interest in substance and its develop
ment from within was practically nil, he kept the theater both
barren and static and richly deserved as his epitaph the severe
judgment of Lanson: "Au lieu d'aider la foule a s'affranchir,
il la flattait dans la mediocrite de ses gouts."
Why talk about "Papa" Sarcey today? Because he is with
us. He is our neighbor at the playhouse, our vis-a-vis at dinner,
the critic in our class-rooms and on our hearth. When Mr.
Clayton Hamilton extols the technique of Pinero he talks pure
Sarcey; when learned professors lecture of the scene a faire
and refuse to singe their well-kept plumage on the fires of
Hauptmann or Shaw, they are promulgating the same faith;
when, some years ago, the National Institute of Arts and
Letters elected Mr. Augustus Thomas as its president and
presented to him a gold medal for "his life work in the
drama"there was old Sarcey enthroned and declared an
immortal. And the tradition persists. Listen to the chatter
of the playwrights on Forty-second Street. They do not create
their plays in secret. They "make" them in collaboration dur
ing week-end trips to Atlantic City; their highest ambition is
to bring back an article that is "well-made."
It is not difficult to account for the persistence and popu
larity of the theory of the "well-made" play. There are ninetynine men who can mend a machine to one who can write a
lyric; there are nine hundred and ninety-nine who can super
intend the manufacture of sulphuric acid to one who can gain
a new insight into the problem of matter. Ingenuity is plenti
ful, creative vision is rare. The theory of the "well-made"
play installed the ingenious as lords of the theater and dis
credited the creative energy of the great masters at the ex
pense of their supposed craftsmanship. It opened the doors
of dramatic art to the type of mind that likes to solve conun
drums and disentangle puzzles and invent a new can-opener
and treat the business of both literature and life with astute
ness, deftness, and decorum. Successful playwrights needed
now no longer to be born. Cheerful mediocrity could learn all
the tricks of a smooth "facture"; the superficially observed
stuff of life furnished merely the pawns for the game, the
threads for the pattern, the rigid little blocks for the skilful
structure. Thus arose the school of dramatic writing that
marched toward its big scenes by the road of lost letters and
sudden encounters and stolen weapons and overheard conver
sations and lost wills and exotic inheritances, which refur
bished the ancient trick of indistinguishable twins, borrowed
the latest sleight-of-hand of the medium and the clairvoyant, and
made Mr. Augustus Thomas the dean of American dramatists.
Mr. Thomas's new play, "Nemesis" (Hudson Theater), is the

logical successor of "The Witching Hour" and "Palmy Days."
The modern drama, on both its naturalistic and neo-romantic
sides, has not left him wholly untouched. He has felt a change in
the times and been stirred by a gentle ambition to change with
them. During two acts of "Nemesis," even though the elderly
silk-merchant and his young wife and the French sculptor
are but vague and well-worn types, one is almost persuaded
that Mr. Thomas is interested in some fundamental facts of
human nature. But when, toward the end of the second act,
the silk merchant slyly, but in careful view of the audience,
pilfers and secretes a bit of clay bearing the sculptor's finger
prints, we know that the great game is on. Character and
fate and vision are dropped. Now comes the triumph of in
genuity. What will the merchant do with the sculptor's finger
prints? Well, he has them transferred to rubber stamps and
forces his wife to summon the sculptor to their house. There
upon this gentleman of spotless life, addicted, as we are told,
to the North American Review and the American Journal of
Economics, stabs the lady to death with the calm precision of
a stock-yard butcher, wipes the dagger, the table, the door
knobs with a kerchief, and carefully imprints on all these
objects the finger-prints of the sculptor. There follows a trial
scene in the Court of General Sessions, written and produced
with consummate imitative skill in all the external details of
reality, and a final moment outside of the Sing Sing gates.
There is no happy ending. And for that one might be grate
ful, were it not that Mr. Thomas uses a raw shock to the
sensibilities merely to enforce his belief that the one kind of
circumstantial evidence commonly held to be incontrovertible
may land an innocent man in the electric chair. This pre
occupation of his, creditable no doubt to the man and the citi
zen, is artistically of an incurable externality. But from the
point of view of Sarcey and the "well-made" play, it provides
his ingenuity with a bundle of new and effective devices. For
to this school of dramaturgy things and their accidental col
lisions take the place of passions and their fatalities.
The reason for paying even so much attention to a negligible
melodrama is the same for which we recalled the theory of
Sarcey. The full hope of the American drama will not be
realized until that theory and the resultant practice are far
more thoroughly discredited among intelligent people than they
are today; until it is vitally understood, despite noisy repu
tations both critical and theatric, that no creative mind is an
ingenious mind, that no noble play is either "built" or "made"
but grows in the still chambers of the watchful soul, that the
school of Sarcey continues still to produce plays in which, as
Musset justly remarked long ago,
l'intrigue, enlacee et roulee en feston,
Tourne comme un rebus autour d'un mirliton.
Ludwig Lewisohn
Herald Square
Square
New York
Maintains the
largest
and
most complete
Book Depart
ment in New
York City.
Copuright, 1911, R. H. Maey Co.. Inc.
International
Is
Egypt
Nation?
Relations
III.
THE two sections of the report of the Milner Mission

to Egypt, already published in the International Rela
tions Section, covered the provisional conclusions of the
Mission as to the causes of disorder and unrest in Egypt
and the extent of the Nationalist movement, and set forth
the terms of the Memorandum drawn up by the Mission
after its return to England. The concluding sections of
the Memorandum, the report on the Sudan as an AngloEgyptian Protectorate, and the proposals of the Egyptian
Delegation appear below.
3. The British Officials in the Egyptian Service
The seventh clause of Article IV of the memorandum deals
with the position of British officials in the Egyptian service.
This is a matter of supreme importance to the good government
of Egypt. The whole system of internal administration as it
exists today has been mainly built up by the work and example
of British officials, many of whom have spent the best part of
their lives in the country. The immediate elimination of the
British element would bring the whole fabric down in ruins.
Even an over-hasty reduction of that element would threaten its
stability, and greatly impair the efficient conduct of public
business.
It is not indeed to be feared that, with the retirement of the
British officials, the country would relapse into the state of
maladministration from which we have delivered it, and that all
the old evils would return. The number of Egyptians qualified
by education and character to take part in the work of govern
ment on civilized principles has greatly increased since the oc
cupation. All the Egyptians, even the humblest, have become
so habituated to the new standard of orderly, equitable, and
honest administration that a complete return to the abuses of
the past would not be tolerated. Nevertheless, the "new model"
would certainly be exposed to danger of serious deterioration
if the men who have built it up and are still its mainstay were
to be suddenly withdrawn.
Thus it is only natural that the proposal to leave a purely
Egyptian Government entirely free to retain or not to retain
British or other foreign officials in the Civil Service should be
at first sight regarded with considerable uneasiness. But a calm
consideration of the practical aspects of the case is calculated
greatly to allay these misgivings. The idea of any Egyptian
Government, however free to do so, attempting to make a clean
sweep of its foreign officials is a chimera. One has only to pic
ture the plight of such a Government, suddenly deprived of its
most experienced and responsible advisers and confronted with
the general unpopularity which the consequent administrative
breakdown would entail, to realize that no sane men would delib
erately plunge into such a sea of trouble. And it is not only
Egyptian disapproval which would have to be reckoned with,
but the anger and alarm of the foreign residents. The large
and wealthy foreign colonies, on which the economic welfare of
Egypt so greatly depends, would at once be up in arms. For
these have all come to regard the presence of a British nucleus
in the administration as the sheet-anchor of their own safety
and prosperity. Nor is it to be anticipated that the High Com
missioneror whatever the British representative may in fu
ture be calledwould not have a word to say in the matter.
True, he will, ex hypothesi, have no right to dictate to the Egyp
tian Government. But as the representative of Egypt's ally,
as the foremost foreigner in Egypt and the guardian of foreign
interests, he will still carry great weight, and it will always be
a matter of interest to Egyptian Ministers to be on good terms
with him. The influences which would militate against the
Section
abuse by these Ministers of the right to dispense with the ser

vices of British officials are thus immensely strong. And at the
same time the great satisfaction which they would feel at know
ing that they had that right, and that the British officials were
really there to assist and not to dictate, would make them more
and not less ready to rely on British help.
For no sensible Egyptian seriously wishes to dispense with
foreign aid in the government of his country, or believes that
Egypt could, for a long time to come at any rate, afford to do
without it. Egyptians generally no doubt think, and they are
right in thinking, that the importation of British officials has
sometimes, especially of late years, been overdone. They hold
firmly to the principle that no Englishman or other foreigner
should be appointed to any post for which a reasonably com
petent man of their own race can be found. They look for
ward to the time when the whole or almost the whole of the
public service will be staffed by their fellow-countrymen. They
feel that progress in that direction has been unduly slow and
would like to see it sensibly accelerated. But they certainly
do not wish to get rid of those British officialsand there are
a goodly number of themwhom they really respect, or to be
precluded from engaging others of equal competence in the ser
vice of their country in the future.*
The danger lies rather in the opposite direction. There may
be a stampede of British and other foreign officials, scared by
the prospect of finding themselves at the mercy of a purely Egyp
tian Government. That would be a grave misfortune, but it
seems to us very improbable that such an exodus will ever as
sume large dimensions. In the first place, there are in many
branches of the Public Service, such as ports, railways, cus
toms, public works, etc., a considerable number of Englishmen
and other Europeans who are employed as experts for lack of
Egyptians possessing the necessary technical skill. These men
are not likely to feel their position in any way affected by a
change in the political status of Egypt. It is rather those oc
cupying genuinely administrative posts, and having authority
over large bodies of Egyptians, who are likely to fear this
change. Will Egyptian Ministers, they may ask themselves, still
* We took considerable pains to discover the truth about the number of
foreign officials in the Egyptian Service. Returns were prepared for us by
the Statistical Department, showing the distribution of all posts in the 19191920 Budget, while a comparative statement was called for from each Ministry,
Bhowing the distribution of pensionable and contract posts in the years 1905,
1910, 1914, and 1920.
In the returns submitted by the Statistical Department, posts are described
as "pensionable," "contract," "monthly paid," and "daily paid." In the two
latter classes 98% per cent of the posts are occupied by Egyptians. So in this
category foreign competition is evidently not excessive.
An examination of the pensionable and contract posts, however, revealed a
different state of affairs. Omitting the seven ministerial posts, the staff of the
Sultan's Cabinet, the Council of Ministers, the Legislative Assembly, and the
Ministry of Wakfs, in which, with one or two exceptions, the posts are held
exclusively by Egyptians, Egyptians hold 86 per cent of the posts in the
administration and draw 71 per cent of the salaries, while the British hold
6 per cent of the posts and draw 19 per cent of the salaries, others (viz.,
non-Egyptian and non-British) holding 8 per cent of the posts and drawing
10 per cent of the salaries. In some statistical diagrams which were prepared
to show the distribution of these posts and salaries among the different Minis
tries, the posts are divided into six classes. The first three classes range from
the lowest salaries to IE. 799 per annum, and may be described as "Lower
Posts" : the other three classes cover "Higher Posts," and include salaries of
E. 800 to E. 2,999.
Among the lower posts, Egyptians hold roughly two-thirds of those between
E. 240 and E. 499 ; but after that the Egyptian share declines to little more
than one-third of the posts between E. 500 and E. 799. In the higher posts
the disparity is even more marked and the Egyptian share does not amount to
one-quarter. It is true that in the E. l,200- E. 1,499 class, the Egyptian
share rises to over one-third, but this can be traced to the Ministries of In
terior and Justice, which provide Egyptian Mudirs (Provincial Governors)
and Judges. In the higher posts of the Ministries of Finance, Education,
Public Works, Agriculture and Communications, however, there are only 31
Egyptians, as against 168 British and 32 "others" holding posts over E. 800.
Doubtless in these particular Ministries there are many higher posts requiring
special technical qualifications which it is impossible at the moment to find
Egyptians qualified to fill. If, however, Egyptians are to be responsible for
the internal administration of their country, it is essential that better pro
vision should be made for training them to occupy such higher posts.
As far as the comparative tables showing the distribution of pensionable
and contract posts in 1905, 1910, 1914, and 1920 are concerned, owing to the
imperfect state of the records the figures can only be regarded as approxi
mate. They sufficed, however, to give a general impression of the turnover
in personnel. In the total of posts the Egyptian element has grown from 46.1
per cent in 1905 to 60.6 per cent in 1920. Egyptians in lower posta have
also increased from 48.4 per cent of the total in 1906 to 55 per cent in 1920.
But in the higher posts their number has declined from 27.7 per cent in 1906
to only 28.1 per cent in 1920, while in the same category the British share of
posts has increased from 42.2 per cent to 59.3 per cent of the total.
The Nation
600
support them in the exercise of that authority? Will it still

be possible to carry on the perpetual struggle against corrup
tion and nepotism, and for promotion by merit and not by in
fluence, with any measure of success? Such fears are not un
natural, and they may lead some of the men in question to prefer
retirement. But there are others who will feel more confidence
in themselves and in the essential strength of their future posi
tion. For they will not be, like the handful of Europeans who,
before the occupation, fought an uphill battle for decent admini
stration in an unreformed Egypt, and even under those depres
sing conditions were not without influence and certainly were

not treated with any personal disregard. The British officials
who remain in Egypt today will be in a country which is per
meated by European influences, which has now grown used to
British methods of government, and which will remain in con
tact on its borders with concrete evidences of British power.
Moreover, the recognition of Egyptian independence will remove

one great obstacle to their present usefulness. The growing
prejudice against imported officials which threatens, if un
checked, to put an end to all hearty cooperation between them
and their Egyptian fellows, is not due to the men but to the
system. It is because they are, or can be represented to be,
imposed upon Egypt against her will, as the agents and sym
bols of foreign domination, that hostility to them is easily ex
cited. The grounds for such hostility will disappear when they
can no longer be regarded as instruments of a foreign govern
ment, and their efforts to maintain efficiency will then have an
increased amount of native support. For, as individuals, Brit
ish administrators and the British officers in the Egyptian army
are not unpopular. The best of them not only command the
respect, but win the affection, of a people who are very quick to
recognize capacity, especially when it is combined with gra
ciousness and tact.
Given time for reflectionand it is certain
[Vol. 112, No. 2911
4. RESERVATIONS FOR THE PROTECTION OF FOREIGNERS
To the general principle that the Egyptian Government should

in future be free to determine for itself what posts are to be
filled by non-Egyptians, the memorandum in Article IV, $ $ 3

and 4, makes two exceptions.
According to these clauses, a
Financial Adviser and an official in the Ministry of Justice,
whose special function will be to watch the administration of

the law as it affects foreigners, are still to be appointed in
concurrence with His Majesty's Government. It may be asked,
in view of what has already been said on this subject, why it
was thought necessary to make these exceptions. The answer is
to be found in the special responsibilities which under the pro
posed settlement Great Britain would assume for the protection
of foreign rights.
The two points of supreme interest to the foreign Powers

whose nationals at present enjoy special privileges under the
Capitulations are the solvency of Egypt, which is not only of
importance to the bondholders but indirectly affects all foreign
capital and enterprise in the country, and the safety of the

lives and property of foreigners. To insure these objects the
Powers will certainly continue to insist on the maintenance of
some measure of foreign control. They have come to acquiesce
in the exercise of that control by Great Britain.
But if Great
Britain ceased to exercise it, they would demand that some
other Power or group of Powers should take her place.

It is, however, a fundamental principle of the contemplated
settlement that any powers, which may still be necessary to
safeguard foreign interests in Egypt and to assure foreign gov
ernments that the rights of their nationals will be respected,

shall be vested in Great Britain.
This is the reason for the
stipulation that the two high officials already referred to should

continue to be appointed with the concurrence of the British
assisting Egyptians to make a success of self-governing insti
Governmentthe duty of the one being to insure solvency, that

of the other to watch the administration of the laws as affecting
foreigners. The functions of these officials are only described in
general terms in the memorandum, and the scope of their
authority will have to be very carefully defined in drafting the
treaty. Here again we had to content ourselves with agreement
in principle and to leave details to be settled in future nego
tutions.
tiations.
that nothing will be done in a hurryit is likely that these
considerations will determine many Englishmen in the Egyp

tian service to stick to their posts. And indeed Englishmen
could perform no more honorable service than in establishing
a friendly partnership between Great Britain and Egypt and
But while any general or rapid displacement of the British

and other foreign officials is not to be anticipated, it is never
theless desirable to make careful provision for those with whose
services the Egyptian Government may wish to dispense or who
may themselves wish to retire when the new system comes into
force. Such men must be treated not only with fairness, but
with generosity. For nothing could have a worse effect upon
The same applies to the clause (IV, 5) which gives the

British representative in Egypt the right, in certain cases, to
prevent the application of Egyptian laws to foreigners. This
proposal was much discussed. The delegates were very anxious
to avoid this right being converted into a general veto on
Egyptian legislation.
We, on our side, did not desire this.
But
Anglo-Egyptian relations in the future than that a number of
the exact limits of the right were difficult to agree upon, and
for this reason alternative solutions are suggested in the memo
former officials should be left with a sense of grievance. In any

treaty between Great Britain and Egypt their position will have
randum. The subject, indeed, is extremely complicated.

stripped of technicalities, what it all comes to is this:
to be absolutely safeguarded, and the conditions of retirement
Egyptian Government is hampered at every turn by its inability

to make laws applicable to the subjects of foreign Powers
which have capitulatory rights in Egypt without the consent
of those Powers, though that consent may in some cases be given
on their behalf by the General Assembly of the Mixed Tribunals.
As already explained, it has always been the aim of British
policy, and it is part of the scheme contemplated in the memo
randum, greatly to diminish the restrictions thus imposed on the
legislative authority of the Egyptian Government. But it would
be practically impossible, and it is not proposed, to remove these
carefully laid down after consultation with representatives of
those concerned. Under existing law Egyptian officials, who are

retired by the Government for reasons other than misconduct,
receive pensions on a not ungenerous scale proportionate to their
length of service. No new arrangement can infringe existing
rights. But it is evidently necessary, in view of the altered
circumstances, to make special provision for those whose careers
may be prematurely cut short. And it is quite essential that
men who under the new system retire of their own accord,
should receive the same favorable treatment as those with whose
restrictions altogether.
services the Egyptian Government may choose to dispense. In

ordinary circumstances a man voluntarily resigning a public
body must have the right to exercise them.
post before the normal time for his retirement does so at a

certain sacrifice. But this principle does not apply where the
conditions of service are essentially altered. In that case the
official should have the right to choose, whether he will or will
not go on serving under the new conditions, and if he prefers
to retire, should be entitled to do so on the same terms as if his
retirement had been compulsory.
But,
The
In so far as they are maintained, some
In the scheme em
bodied in the memorandum it is contemplated that that right, in

tended as it is to safeguard the legitimate interests of all
foreigners, should be conferred by Egypt on a single Power

Great Britain.
The Sudan
The scheme embodied in the memorandum deals only with
Egypt. It has no application to the Sudan, a country entirely

distinct from Egypt in its character and constitution, the status
April 20, 1921]
The Nation
of which is not, like that of Egypt, still indeterminate, but has

been clearly defined by the Anglo-Egyptian Convention of Jan
uary 19, 1899.* For that reason the subject of the Sudan was
deliberately excluded from all our discussions with the delegates.
This was all along clearly understood by them, but in order to
prevent any misunderstanding in Egypt of the scope of our dis
cussions, Lord Milner, when transmitting the memorandum to
Adli Pasha, also handed him the following letter:
"My dear Pasha,
August 18, 1920.
"Referring to our conversation of yesterday, I should like once
more to repeat that no part of the memorandum which I am now
sending you is intended to have any application to the Sudan.
This is, I think, evident on the face of the document, but, to avoid
any possibility of future misunderstanding, it seems desirable
to place on record the view of the Mission that the subject of the
Sudan, which has never been discussed between us and Zaghlul
Pasha and his friends, lies quite outside the scope of the proposed
agreement with regard to Egypt. There is a wide difference
of conditions between the two countries, and in our opinion they
must be dealt with on different lines.
"The Sudan has made great progress under its existing ad
ministration, which is based on the provisions of the Conven
tion of 1899, and no change in the political status of Egypt
should be allowed to disturb the further development of the
Sudan on a system which has been productive of such good
results.
"On the other hand, we fully realize the vital interest of Egypt
in the supply of water reaching her through the Sudan, and we
intend to make proposals calculated to remove any anxiety which
Egypt may feel as to the adequacy of that supply both for her
actual and her prospective needs.
(Signed) "Milner"
"His Excellency Adli Yeghen Pasha."
At this point it may be convenient that we should briefly state
the reasons which, in our opinion, make it wholly impossible to
contemplate, in the case of the Sudan, a settlement on the lines
proposed for Egypt, indicating at the same time the general line
of policy which appears most suitable to the present require
ments of the former country.
While the great majority of the people of Egypt are com
paratively homogeneous, the Sudan is divided between Arabs
and Negroids, and within each of these two great racial groups
there are a number of races and tribes differing widely from
one another and often mutually antagonistic. The Arabs of the
Sudan speak dialects of the same language as the people of
Egypt and are united to them by the bond of religion. Islam,
moreover, is spreading even among the non-Arab races of the
Sudan. These influences mitigate in various degrees, but they
have not overcome the antagonism of the two countries, which
rankling memories of Egyptian misgovernment in the past have
done much to intensify.
The political bonds which have at intervals in the past united
Egypt with the Sudan have always been fragile. Egyptian con
querors have at various times overrun parts and even the whole
of the Sudan. But it has never been really subdued by, or in any
sense amalgamated with, Egypt. The Egyptian conquest of the
Sudan in the last century was especially disastrous to both coun
tries, and ended in the complete overthrow of Egyptian authority
in the early eighties by the Mahdist rebellion. For more than
ten years no vestige of Egyptian authority was left in the Sudan
except in a small district surrounding Suakin. As a consequence
This Convention, which was signed by the Egyptian Minister for Foreign
Affairs and Lord Cromer, laid it down that Great Britain was "by right of
conquest" entitled "to share in the settlement and future working and de
velopment" of the Sudan. By the acceptance of this principle any claim
of Turkey to suzerainty over the Sudan was disallowed, and that country
was definitely excluded from the area subject to the regime of the Capitula
tions. It was accordingly provided in the Convention that the jurisdiction
of the Mixed Tribunals should "not extend to or be recognized in any
part of the Sudan." and that no foreign consols should reside in the country
without the consent of the British Government. The supreme military and
civil power was to be vested in the person of a "Governor-General," who
would be appointed on the recommendation of the British Government by a
decree of the Khedive of Egypt, and whose proclamations would have the
force of law.
601
of this breakdown, Great Britain was obliged to undertake sev

eral costly expeditions for the rescue of the Egyptian garrisons
and the defense of Egypt, which was in danger of being overrun
by the Mahdist hordes.
Since the conquest of the country by British and Egyptian
forces under British leadership in 1896-8, the government of
the Sudan, which under the Convention of 1899 takes the form
of an Anglo-Egyptian Protectorate, has been virtually in British
hands. The Governor-General, though appointed by the Sultan
(formerly the Khedive) of Egypt, is nominated by the British
Government, and all the Governors of Provinces and principal
officials are British. Under this system of government the
progress of the Sudan in all respects, material and moral, has
been remarkable. When full allowance is made for the simplicity
of the problem, viz., the introduction of the first principles of
orderly and civilized government among a very primitive people,
the great success actually achieved during the long GovernorGeneralship of Sir R. Wingate is one of the brightest pages in
the history of British rule over backward races. The present
administration is popular in the Sudan and, with a few excep
tions, peaceful and progressive conditions prevail throughout the
country.
But while Egypt and the Sudan are essentially distinct coun
tries, and are bound to develop on very different lines, Egypt
will always have one interest of supreme importance in the
Sudan. The Nile, upon which the very existence of Egypt de
pends, flows for hundreds of miles through the Sudan, and it is
vital to Egypt to prevent any such diversion of water from the
Nile as might diminish her present cultivable area or preclude
the reclamation of that portion of her soil, some 2,000,000 acres
in extent, which is capable of being brought under cultivation,
when, by means of storage, the present supply of water available
for irrigation has been increased. Hitherto the amount of water
drawn from the Nile in its passage through the Sudan has been
of negligible amount, but as the population of the Sudan in
creases that country will require more water for its own de
velopment, and a conflict of interest between it and Egypt might
arise. At the same time there is every reason to hope that,
properly conserved and distributed, the Nile waters will suffice
for all the lands, whether in Egypt or the Sudan, which are
ever likely to require irrigation. The control of the waters of
the Nile for purposes of irrigation is a matter of such para
mount importance and the technical and other problems involved
are so difficult and intricate that it is, in our opinion, necessary
to set up a permanent commission, composed on the one hand of
experts of the highest authority and on the other hand of
representatives of all the countries affectedEgypt, the Sudan,
and Ugandato settle all questions affecting the regulation of
the river and to insure the fair distribution of the water.
The contiguity of Egypt and the Sudan and their common in
terest in the Nile make it desirable that some political nexus
between the two countries should always be maintained, but it
is out of the question that this connection should take the form
of the subjection of the Sudan to Egypt. The former country
is capable of and entitled to independent development in accord
ance with its own character and requirements. It is much too
early to attempt to determine its ultimate political status. For
present purposes that status is sufficiently defined by the Con
vention of 1899 between Great Britain and Egypt, which pro
vides for the necessary political connection between Egypt and
the Sudan without hampering the independent development of
the latter country.
Though it is absolutely necessary for the present to maintain
a single supreme authority over the whole of the Sudan, it is
not desirable that the government of that country should be
highly centralized. Having regard to its vast extent and the
varied character of its inhabitants, the administration of its
different parts should be left as far as possible in the hands of
the native authorities, wherever they exist, under British super
vision. A centralized bureaucracy is wholly unsuitable for the
Sudan. Decentralization and the employment wherever possible
602
The Nation
of native agencies for the single administrative needs of the

country in its present stage of development would make both
for economy and efficiency. At the present time the officials of
local origin are still largely outnumbered by those introduced
from Egypt, with whom service in the Sudan is by no means
popular. This difficulty will be overcome as education progresses
and a greater number of Sudanese themselves become capable of
filling official posts. At the same time care should be taken, in
the matter of education, not to repeat the mistake which has
been made in Egypt of introducing a system which fits pupils
for little else than employment in clerical and minor administra
tive posts, and creates an overgrown body of aspirants to gov
ernment employment. There is no room in the Sudan for a host
of petty officials, and education should be directed to giving the
Sudanese a capacity and a taste for employment in other direc
tions, such as agriculture, industry, commerce, and engineering.
The immediate need of the country is material development and
it can do without an elaborate administrative system.
The military forces still employed in the Sudan are very large.
A large army was, no doubt, required to complete the conquest
and pacification of the country, but the time has come when, in
our opinion, the question of the number and organization of its
military forces should be reconsidered, and the financial burden
upon Egypt which the maintenance of that force involves be
reduced. Hitherto, the Governor-Generalship of the Sudan and
the Command-in-Chief of the Egyptian army have been united
in one person. There were good reasons for this in the past,
but it is indefensible as a permanent arrangement. At the first
convenient opportunity a civil Governor-General should be
appointed.
In general it should be the aim of British policy to relieve
Egypt from any financial responsibility for the Sudan and to
establish the relations of the two countries for the future upon a
basis which will secure the independent development of the
Sudan while safeguarding the vital interests of Egypt in the
waters of the Nile.
Egypt has an indefeasible right to an ample and assured
supply of water for the land at present under cultivation and
to a fair share of any increased supply which engineering skill
may be able to provide. A formal declaration on the part of
Great Britain that she recognizes this right and is resolved
under all circumstances to uphold it would go far to allay the
uneasiness which prevails in Egypt on this subject. We are of
opinion that such a declaration might with advantage be made
at the present time.
Visit of Egyptian Delegates to Egypt
At the close of the discussions which resulted in the memo
randum of August 18, Zaghlul Pasha and the other delegates
as well as Adli Pasha left London for France. Four of the
Delegation (Mohammed Pasha Mahmud, Ahmed Lutfi Bey el
Said, Abdel Latif Bey el Mukabati, and Ali Bey Maher) pro
ceeded immediately to Egypt in accordance with the under
standing already referred to in order to enlist the support of
their countrymen for the scheme outlined in the memorandum.
The substance of that document, with certain inaccuracies of
detail, had meanwhile found its way into the press and been
received in Egypt with expressions of approval.
About the same time publicity was given in that country
to a long manifesto from Zaghlul Pasha, in which he emphasized
the representative character of the Delegation and the support
which it had received from the nation. He referred to the
endeavors made by the Delegation to submit the Egyptian case
to the Peace Conference and to the world at large, claiming that
a considerable amount of sympathy had been gained in foreign
countries. He went on to speak of the appointment of the
Special Mission and the obstacle to any direct contact with its
members presented by insistence on the Protectorate, the steps
which had eventually led to the visit of the Egyptian delegates
to London, and the discussions which had taken place there.
This document concluded by announcing that the proposals
[Vol. 112, No. 2911
which had resulted from these discussions would now be sub

mitted to the nation by emissaries appointed for the purpose,
and, should the project be favorably received, representatives
would then be nominated to negotiate a treaty on the basis
suggested.
The inconclusive character of this message appears to have
somewhat damped the enthusiasm with which the local com
mittee of the Delegation in Cairo had, in the first instance,
greeted the announcement of a settlement. The four emissaries,
however, who reached Alexandria on the 7th of September, were
received with warm demonstrations of welcome and their arrival
revived a feeling of optimism. A telegram from the local com
mittee to Zaghlul Pasha expressed the confidence which "the
whole of the country" placed in the Delegation and the prevail
ing enthusiasm of the public. At the same time it was notice
able that there was a marked relaxation of that sense of strain
and tension which had for some time past governed the relations
between British and Egyptians, and conciliation was in the air.
It is true that at first a very determined set was made against
the proposed settlement by the Hisb-el-Watani and other ex
tremists. The critics maintained that the contemplated inde
pendence of Egypt was not a reality, and specifically protested
against the non-inclusion of the Sudan in the scheme. Among
the principal objectors four of the Khedivial Princes, who had
signed the manifesto already referred to, now took the oppor
tunity to publish in the Arabic newspapers on September 11,
1920, a declaration that their views remained unchanged and
that they did not support any agreement which restricted the
independence of Egypt. But this demonstration had little effect
on the public, and in view of the good reception generally ac
corded to the proposals the Princes shortly afterwards en
deavored to explain it away.
While the four emissaries of the Delegation did not enter into
any contact with the official world in Egypt, every care was
taken to insure them complete liberty of action and movement.
The procedure which they adopted was to invite small groups
of representative Egyptians to meet them and to discuss the
proposed settlement. The latter in turn reported to other
groups in the provinces, whence resolutions of adherence were
received by the four delegates, so that within a fortnight of
their arrival it became evident that a substantial majority of
the representative elements in the country were favorable to
the basis for negotiations which they had submitted. But by
far the most important testimony of general approval was
secured at a meeting of the remaining members of the Legis
lative Assembly convened to confer with the delegates on Sep
tember 16. Of the forty-nine members who were present on that
occasion, forty-five recorded their votes in favor of the proposals.
Two abstained from any expression of opinion, and only two
voted in opposition. Two other members who had been unable
to attend in person wrote to express their concurrence with
the project, which thus received the support of forty-seven out
of fifty-one surviving members.
At the same time, while this general approval was recorded,
further interpretation of certain particular points was invited,
and the hope was expressed that the Delegation would on its
return to London obtain definite assurances on these points.
The most important of these was the universal desire for some
definite indication that the Protectorate would cease to exist
with the conclusion of the treaty of alliance.
Concluding Interviews with Egyptian Delegates in London
The four emissaries returned from Egypt to Paris early in
October, and there rejoined Zaghlul Pasha and their other
colleagues who had remained in Europe. At the end of the
month the whole party, again accompanied by Adli Pasha, once
more came to London and had two further meetings with the
Mission, at which the four emissaries related their experiences
in Egypt, and the resulting situation was discussed. It was
apparent from the statement of the emissaries, confirming as it
did the reports which had already appeared in the press, that
April 20, 1921]
The Nation
the terms of the proposed settlement had been well received by

the Egyptian public, and that the determined attempt which
was at first made to excite opposition to them had ended in com
plete failure. At the same time, the emissaries did not fail to
impress upon us that the general approval of the settlement
was accompanied, on the part of the Egyptians with whom
they had conferred, by certain reservations, and that they had
been instructed to try and obtain modifications of it on several
points. What they chiefly desired was a limitation of the func
tions of the Financial Adviser and of the British official in the
Ministry of Justice; the abandonment of the provision of Article

5 of the memorandumthat the coming into force of the con
templated treaty between Great Britain and Egypt should be
dependent upon the previous conclusions of agreements with the
Powers for necessary modifications in the regime of the Capitu
lations; and, above all, the formal abolition of the Protectorate.
Some other points of minor importance were also raised, and
it was evident that, if all these matters were to be gone into
again, we should reopen the whole of the discussion in which
we had been occupied for the greater part of the summer.
This was a course in which the members of the Mission were
unanimously of opinion that it would be perfectly useless for

them to engage. As we pointed out to the delegates, any agree
ment arrived at between us and them could not in any case be
final. All we could do was to pave the way for the official
negotiations, which must be subsequently undertaken, if the
idea of a treaty on the lines which we had been discussing com
mended itself to British and Egyptian opinion.
The points now
brought forward might all be raised in the official negotiations,

as other points no doubt would be on both sides, and for us to
try and anticipate a decision upon every detail, while it would
certainly delay the commencement of those negotiations, might
also seriously prejudice their successful conduct.
The point of view of the Mission was summed up by Lord
Milner in a statement which he made at the second meeting
of the delegates on November 9. It was to the following effect:

It seemed desirable to have this meeting before the departure
of the Egyptian representatives in order to clear up the situa

tion and leave room for further cooperation between them and
the Mission in the future.
The report, which the gentlemen who have lately returned

from Egypt have brought back to us, seems to indicate that
there is a great body of opinion favorable to a settlement on
the basis outlined in the memorandum of August. On the other
hand, they state that there are several points in the memoran
dum which they desire to modify and several fresh conditions
which they wish to add to it before promising their uncondi
tional support. It is not necessary for me to dwell upon these
points today, because the Mission are unanimously of opinion
that no good purpose would be served by a further discussion
of details at the present stage.

The memorandum never professed to do more than indicate
the general lines on which an agreement could be arrived at.
In any case, as we have always foreseen, the agreement itself,
603
What is far more important at the present stage than any

further discussion of details is to influence opinion both here
and in Egypt in a sense favorable to a settlement on the lines
which we both favor, and above all to cultivate and strengthen

by every means the spirit of friendship and mutual confidence
which our conversations here have helped to engender, but which
must become general on both sides if our efforts are to lead to
the desired result. As far as this country is concerned, we hope

that the presentation of the report of the Mission, which we are
anxious to complete as quickly as possible, will conduce to that
end.
But it is equally important that a similar effect should be
produced in Egypt by your endeavors. We gratefully recognize

how much you have already done in that direction. But it is
evident that there is still opposition to be overcome, that there
are great numbers of people in Egypt who are not imbued with
the spirit of the agreement, but are for one reason or another
hostile to a good understanding between Great Britain and
Egypt. They are, or profess themselves to be, suspicious of the
intentions of this country, they do not recognize the generous
spirit in which Great Britain is prepared to meet the aspirations
of the Egyptian people. In so far as you are able to dispel
this suspicion and misunderstanding and create a better feeling
you will be doing more than can be done in any other way to
bring about the settlement which we all so earnestly desire.
To this statement Zaghlul Pasha replied in a speech, the gist
of which was that while he was as anxious as we were to help
create an atmosphere favorable to a settlement, he would be
greatly weakened in his efforts to do so by being unable to
give any promise to the Egyptians about the proposed reserva
tions, and specially by being unable to say that Great Britain
had finally repudiated the Protectorate. To the latter point he
returned again and again, and he subsequently reiterated these
views in a letter addressed to Lord Milner.
This was the last of our interviews with the Egyptians, who
all left England shortly after it. It is only necessary to add
that the tone of our discussions remained throughout of the
most friendly character, and that at parting, though no final
agreement had been reached and both sides remained uncom
mitted, we certainly gathered the impression that, reservations

or no reservations, public opinion in Egypt had been very favor
ably impressed by the terms of the proposed settlement, and
that most if not all of the delegates were hopeful of its ultimate
complete acceptance by their countrymen, and anxious to bring
it about.
IV.
GENERAL SUMMARY
In view of the complicated nature of the subject, and the

length to which our reportthough we have striven to omit all
unessential detailshas necessarily run, we desire to recapitu
late the main features of the policy which we now recommend,
and the stages by which our conclusions have been reached.
When we arrived in Egypt we found a general state of unrest
and discontent. The rebellion had been suppressed, but agita

tion was undiminished, and among an extreme group still took
if it is decided to proceed with it, will have to be the outcome

of formal negotiations between duly accredited representatives
of the British and Egyptian Governments. In those negotiations
dangerous and violent forms. Everywhere the demand was for

complete independence, beginning with the abolition of the
the fresh points which you have brought forward as the result
of the visit of some of your number to Egypt can be raised, as
other points may be raised on one side or the other. It would
be impossible and undesirable to exclude any proposals not
evidently inconsistent with the spirit of the agreement outlined
in the memorandum, which on the face of it requires elucidation
of Egyptian nationality.
and elaboration before it can be converted into a formal treaty.
It would in our opinion not facilitate a settlement if we were to

anticipate these discussions; therefore we think it wiser to
refrain from any expression of opinion on the new points re
cently raised by you at the present time, though we believe that
a satisfactory solution can, and will, be found when regular
negotiations can be undertaken.
Protectorate, which was construed as implying the extinction

To justify this inference, the Nation
alists pointed to the refusal of the British Government to permit

Egyptian Ministers to come to London after the armistice, to
the deportation of Zaghlul Pasha and his associates, to the
increase since the war in the number of British officials, and to

the continuance of martial law. At the same time the enuncia
tion of President Wilsons fourteen points had aroused wide
spread expectations, and the promise of self-determination to

other Eastern peoples whom the Egyptians thought inferior to
themselves had added to their discontent. Religious feeling had

also been inflamed by the defeat of the Turks and the doubts
and uncertainties as to the future of the Caliphate.
On the British side the situation was full of difficulty.
The Nation
604
large number of experienced officials had been lost to the service

since the beginning of the war and their places taken by new
men who knew little of the traditional system by which, in the
days of Lord Cromer, British control was maintained without

wounding Egyptian susceptibilities. The work of the Adminis
tration during the war deserves the warmest acknowledgment,
but it necessarily entailed a certain subordination of Egyptian
to British interests, and the employment of rough and ready
methods likely to be resented by a people whose sympathies were
not actively engaged on our side. When the war ended, many of
the old landmarks had disappeared and there was a break of
continuity with the past. Martial law had become necessary,
not merely to maintain order, but to carry on the civil govern
ment; the Agent-General had become a High Commissioner
[Vol. 112, No. 2911
not be jeopardized, either by internal disturbances or foreign

aggression; that they shall be available in time of war, and
for necessary purposes in time of peace; that the struggle for
ascendancy in Egypt between rival Powers shall not be renewed;
and, finally, that an independent Egypt shall not pursue a for
eign policy hostile or prejudicial to that of the British Empire.
It is therefore necessary that any treaty entered into between
us and the Egyptians should secure the special position of the

British representative in Egypt, enable us to maintain a force
within Egyptian territory for the protection of our Imperial
communications, and take adequate security that Egyptian
who was also Commander-in-chief, and though Egyptian Min
policy shall be in line with that of the British Empire.

The protection of foreign rights presents a problem of even
greater complexity. These are at present secured by the Capit
ulations. But the Capitulations are the greatest of all the dis
isters continued to hold office, the Legislative Assembly was

suspended. The Administration in these circumstances had to
jurisdictions arising out of them, and the facilities which they
be carried on in the teeth of almost universal opposition, affect
ing even the official class, upon which the Government had to
rely for a large part of its executive work.
We soon came to the conclusion that this situation could not
be met by any return to the pre-war system or by any reforms

of a merely departmental character. A more radical change
was required to meet the new conditions. But the agitation
against the Protectorate had greatly increased the difficulty
of finding any acceptable policy which would satisfy the Egyp
tians while securing British interests. The word Protectorate
had become a symbol of servitude in the minds of the Egyptians,
and they insisted that it must mean what they said it meant.
Argument on this point was wholly useless, and it thus became
evident to us that, unless we could get on to new ground, it would
be impossible to reach a settlement by agreement.
Fortunately the informal conversations which we had with
leading men in Egypt encouraged us to hope that such a settle

ment was not impossible on new lines.
They said with one
accord that, though they objected to having an inferior status

imposed upon Egypt by the British Government, they would
welcome a treaty of alliance freely entered into on both sides,
which, while establishing the independence of Egypt, would
give to Great Britain all those safeguards and guaranties which
the Protectorate, as we understood it, was intended to secure.
The greater part of our subsequent work lay in examining this

possibility, and our aim throughout has been to find the basis of
a treaty which should supersede all debates about words and
phrases, and be the sole and final definition of the relations of
Great Britain and Egypt.

There is nothing new in the recognition of Egyptian inde
pendence by Great Britain. Throughout our occupation we have
most carefully respected the theory that Egypt was a national
unit under the suzerainty of the Sultan of Turkey, and when
-
we abolished the Turkish suzerainty we deliberately chose to

proclaim a Protectorate in preference to annexing Egypt or
making her part of the British Empire. We have constantly
renewed our promise of self-government for Egypt. We are of
opinion that the fulfilment of this promise cannot be postponed.

The spirit of Egyptian nationalism cannot be extinguished, and,
though it may always be possible to suppress its more violent
abilities from which Egypt now suffers.
The multiplicity of
give to men of uncertain nationality to escape from the local

jurisdiction greatly complicate the problem of law and order;
while the exemption of foreigners from direct taxation, other
than the land and house tax, cripples the Government in raising
revenue, since it is in practice impossible to impose on Egyp
tians taxes from which foreigners are exempt. Thus, although
the wealth of the country is rapidly increasing and its resources
are now ample for all the needs of good government, the Ad
ministration has for some time past been compelled to starve
essential public services, such as education and public health.
During the war it has only been possible to raise sufficient rev
enue for the auxiliary police (Ghaffirs) by a special tax im
posed under martial law.
It was evident to us that, without the removal of these
restrictions, no Egyptian Government could enjoy any real inde

pendence. To leave an Egyptian Ministry to struggle with con
ditions which threatened to bring the present administration to
a standstill would be to foredoom it to failure.
We foresaw
that, if the Capitulations were maintained, the Egyptian Gov

ernment without British support would in all probability be
exposed to a competing pressure of foreign influences, which
might paralyze its action. It was therefore clearly in the inter
ests of Egypt that the Capitulations should be removed and the
Mixed Tribunals reorganized so as to enable them to take over
the jurisdiction of the Consular Courts and to act in criminal
as well as civil suits affecting foreigners. But this could only

be effected through the mediation of Great Britain, and Great
Britain could only expect to succeed in inducing the Powers to
part with their present privileges, if she were in a position to
assure them that solvency would be maintained and that the
lives and property of foreigners would be secure. Our efforts
were accordingly directed to securing for Great Britain such a
position as would enable her to give this necessary assurance.

In order to achieve this object, it is necessary that any treaty
should provide for the right of Great Britain to intervene in
legislation affecting foreigners and to exercise a certain measure
of control over those branches of the administration which most
directly affect foreign interests.
Subject to these safeguards for the special interests of Great

Britain and the protection of foreign rights, we hold that the
manifestations, the government of the country in the teeth of a
Government of Egypt should be restored in fact to what it has
hostile people who charge us with breach of faith must be a
always, during our occupation, been in theory, a government of

Egypt by Egyptians. We have sufficient faith in the reforming
difficult and distasteful task, alike to those who take part in it

and to the British people who are responsible for it.
But there are formidable difficulties in the way of any sudden
or complete transfer of all the powers of government to Egyp

tian hands. There are essential British interests to be upheld;
it is also imperative to insure the safety and protect the rights
work of the last forty years to believe that such a course can
now be followed with a good prospect of success. But it must

be adopted wholeheartedly and in a spirit of hopefulness and
sympathy. Nothing would be more likely to lead to failure than
to overload this policy with an excessive number of timorous
of the large number of foreign residents whose presence in

Egypt differentiates her position from that of other Eastern
countries and greatly complicates the problem.
restrictions, which would obscure the principle of Egyptian in

dependence, create suspicion as to our real intentions, and defeat
The essential British interests are that the great Imperial

communications which pass through Egyptian territory shall
hearty cooperation between British and Egyptians.
our main objectthe reestablishment of mutual good-will and

We make no attempt to conceal our conviction that Egypt is
The Nation
April 20, 1921]
not yet in a position to dispense with British assistance in her

internal administration. But the Egyptians know this, and
when once the responsibility is clearly theirs, they will be slow
to dispense with such help from us as is essential to the pros
perity and good government of their country. They will be all
the slower to do so, because under this system it will be im
possible to attribute any failure that may occur to British dic
tation, and because the good work of British officials in the
future will redound to the credit of the Ministers who are wise
enough to retain them. Moreover, the whole atmosphere will, in
our opinion, be completely changed when the Egyptians are
satisfied that the purpose of British policy is to help them to
realize their ideal of independence and not to stand in the way
of its attainment. We are greatly fortified in that belief by our
own experience in dealing with the representative Egyptians
with whom we have come into such intimate contact. Once con
vinced of the sincerity of our intentions they showed every read
iness to appreciate our point of view, to recognize the special
interests which Great Britain has in Egypt, the debt of grati
tude due to her for her past work in that country, and the indispensability of her future help in maintaining its integrity and
independence. And we are not discouraged by the fact that they
were not all as yet prepared to commit themselves unreservedly
to every point in the settlement which they had collaborated
with us in devising. We make no doubt that they are whole
heartedly in favor of the main features of the settlement and
that they are anxious to secure its acceptance by their country
men. And, as far as we can judge, public opinion in Egypt is
moving decisively in that direction. There is a sensible diminu
tion of the bitter feeling and violent propaganda which were
recently so prevalent, and the country is anxious to settle down.
The moment is favorable for placing the relations of Great
Britain and Egypt on the satisfactory and enduring basis of a
treaty which will at one and the same time establish the
independence of Egypt and secure the essential interests of
Great Britain. It will be an undoubted advantage to Great
Britain to have those interests carefully defined and placed
beyond challenge in a treaty accepted by the Egyptians, as it
will obviously be an advantage to Egypt to have her integrity
and independence guaranteed by Great Britain. We therefore
strongly advise His Majesty's Government to enter without un
due delay into negotiations with the Egyptian Government for
the conclusion of a treaty on the lines which we have ventured
to recommend. It would, in our opinion, be a great misfortune
if the present opportunity were lost.
Milner,
Rennell Rodd,
Owen Thomas,
Cecil J. B. Hurst,
J. A. Spender.
Egypt's Position
AFTER the publication of Lord Milner's report, Zaghlul
Pasha, head of the Egyptian Delegation, made public
for the first time the text of a draft treaty submitted to
Lord Milner by the Egyptian Delegation on July 19, 1920.
A summary of this treaty has appeared in England, but the
full text, printed below, has never before been published.
Lord Milner rejected these proposed terms in a letter ad
dressed to Zaghlul Pasha on July 22, but they are still held
by the Delegation to represent the Egyptian Nationalists'
minimum demands.
1. Great Britain recognizes Egyptian independence.
The Protectorate proclaimed by Great Britain over Egypt on
December 18, 1914, and the British Military Occupation are
ended; Egypt thus recovers complete internal and external
sovereignty; she will form a constitutional monarchy.
605
2. Great Britain will withdraw her troops from Egyptian

territory within a period of
, dating from the execution
of the present treaty.
3. In exercising her right to dispose of the services of Eng
lish officials, the Egyptian Government agrees to extend to these
officials the following favor: (except for dismissal because of
age limit, physical unfitness, disciplinary reasons, or expira
tion of contract) the dismissed official shall be entitled to a
supplementary compensation of one month's salary for each
year of service. This favor will be extended also to officials
who voluntarily leave the service of the Egyptian Government
within a period of one year dating from the execution of the
present treaty.
4. In order to lessen the inconveniences of the regime of
capitulations, Egypt agrees that the rights of capitulations
actually exercised by the Powers shall be exercised in their
names by Great Britain in the following manner:
(a) Additions and modifications in the regulation of Mixed
Tribunals shall be subject to the consent of Great Britain.
(b) All other laws which can be invoked against foreign
capitulaires only with the consent of the Powers, or by a suit
able deliberation of the Legislative Assembly of the Mixed
Tribunal or of its General Assembly, will be rendered effective
against them by a decree issued to this effect, except in case
of an objection on the part of the British Government com
municated to the Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs within
a period of
, dating from the publication in the Official
Journal and based exclusively on provisions of the law which
have no equivalent in any legislation of the capitulatory Powers,
or if, in case of a financial law, the duty there established
produces inequality of treatment between Egyptians and for
eigners.
In case of disagreement between the two nations regarding
the just basis of this objection, Egypt can submit the question
for decision to the League of Nations.
5. In case of suppression of Consular Courts and the allo
cation to Mixed Tribunals of the repression of crimes and
offenses committed by foreigners, the Egyptian Government
agrees to name a magistrate of British nationality for the
post of Attorney-General of the Mixed Tribunals.
6. The British Government declares itself disposed to con
sider with the Egyptian Government, at the end of fifteen years,
the question of abolishing interference with the territorial sov
ereignty of Egypt by legislative and judicial immunities of
foreigners. Egypt reserves the right, should the occasion arise,
of bringing this question before the League of Nations after
this period.
7. In case of abolition of the Commission of the Public Debt
Egypt will name, upon the nomination of Great Britain, a high
official whose duty it will be to exercise the powers now held
by the said Commission of the Debt.
The said high official will be at the disposal of the Egyptian
Government for all consultations or missions in regard to
finances which he would care to handle.
8. Great Britain can, if she considers it necessary, establish
at her own expense, on the Asiatic bank of the Suez Canal, a
military post to aid in repulsing any future attack on the
Canal by a foreign Power.
The limits of this military zone shall be fixed later by a
commission composed of an equal number of military experts
of the two nations.
It is understood that the establishment of this post does not
confer upon Great Britain any right to intervene in the affairs
of Egypt; it can not affect in any manner the sovereign rights
of Egypt in the said zone, which will remain under the au
thority of Egypt and ruled by its laws, nor interfere with the
powers granted to Egypt by the Convention of Constantinople
of October, 1888, relative to the free navigation of the Suez
Canal.
Ten years after this treaty takes effect, the High Contracting
Parties shall examine the question of whether the maintenance
[Vol. 112, No. 2911
The Nation
606
of this post has not become superfluous, and if the responsi

bility for safeguarding the Canal cannot be left to Egypt alone.
In case of disagreement the question shall be brought before
the League of Nations.
9. In case Egypt, which has the right of diplomatic represen
tation, should not consider it necessary to name an Egyptian
representative in a country, she shall confide the care of Egyp
tian interests in this country to the representative of Great
Britain, who will act according to the instructions of the Egyp
tian Minister of Foreign Affairs.
10. The High Contracting Parties conclude by the present
treaty a defensive alliance with the following objects:
(a) Great Britain agrees to cooperate in the defense of
Egyptian territory against all aggression by any Power.
(b) In case of aggression against the British Empire by any
European Power, even if the security of Egyptian territory
is not directly threatened, Egypt agrees to lend, on her own
territories, all facilities for communication and transport to
Great Britain for military use. The forms of this assistance
shall be determined by special agreement.
11. Egypt agrees, moreover, not to conclude any treaty of
alliance with another Power, without previous agreement with
Great Britain.
12. This alliance is concluded for a duration of thirty years,
at the end of which the High Contracting Parties may con
sider its renewal.
13. The question of the Sudan will be treated in a special
agreement.
14. All provisions in all other treaties relating to Egypt that
are contrary to the clauses in this treaty, shall be considered
null and void.
15. The present treaty shall be placed at the Secretariat
of the League of Nations, to be registered there, and Great
Britain declares her consent regarding the admission of Egypt
to the League, as a free and independent state.
16. The present treaty shall go into effect immediately after
the exchange of ratifications between the High Contracting
Parties.
Ratification by Egypt shall take place after the treaty has
been approved by a National Assembly, which shall be con
vened for the purpose of voting the new Egyptian Constitution.
Money
means
Power
Make Money
and increase
Your
Power
to do good
Decrees and Laws

of the
Mexican
Government
A number of these interesting documents

will be published in the International Re
lations Section of next week's issue of The
Nation. Some of the more radical of these
are:
Law establishing free ports.
Reduction and education of the army.
Cooperative land enterprises for sol
diers.
Manifesto from army officers demand
ing land colonies.
Write for particulars

Desk 47, Circulation Dept.
The Nation
20 Vesey Street
New York
The Nation
FOUNDED 1865
Vol. CXII
Contents
607
EDITORIALS:
No War With England. II. Our World Trade Rivalry
610
A Race CommissionA Constructive Plan
612
Teacher-Baiting: The New Sport
618
Those Good Old Days
618
MEXICO1921. V. RELATIONS WITH THE UNITED STATES.
By Paul Hanna
61*
THE BRITISH COAL STRDXE. By Harold J. Laski
617
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVELISTS. IV. WINSTON
CHURCHILL. By Carl Van Doren
619
A SHORT VIEW OF GAMALIELESE. By H. L. Mencken
621
THE MOONEY CASE TODAY. By George P. West
622
THE INFORMING SPIRIT. By Carlyle Ferren Maclntyre
623
624
CORRESPONDENCE
624
I SHOULD LIKE TO LIVE IN A BALLAD WORLD. By Eda Lou
Walton
626
PLAINT. By Virginia Woods Mackall
626
BOOKS:
On Fighting Japan. By David Starr Jordan
626
From Locke to Bentham. By William MacDonald
629
First Aid to Authors. By Donald Lemen Clark
629
Books in Brief
630
DRAMA:
Margaret Anglin. By Ludwig Lewisohn
631
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS SECTION: MEXICO
A Decree Establishing Free Porta in Mexico
632
The Reduction and Reorganization of the Army
638
Army Manifestos
634
The Organization of the Colony
635
Regulations for Members of the Colony
636
The New Secretary of Labor
687
Associate Editors
LEWIS S. GANNETT
FREDA KDJCHWEY
ARTHUR WARNER
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
ERNEST H. GRUENING
CARL VAN DOREN
Manaqinq Editor
Literary Editob
THE NATION. 20 Vesey Street, New York City. Cable Address : Nation, New
TWO steps forward, and two only, President Harding
took in his first message to Congress. He definitely
discards the League of Nations and asks for a declaration
of peace with Germany. These are substantial gains, but
beyond that all is vague. Both camps claim that the Presi
dent is with them, that the treaty will be eventually ratified
in much amended form, that it will be discarded. The truth
is,- we are reliably informed, that ten days before the mes
sage was read Mr. Harding was for scrapping the whole
treaty and that the Hoover-Hughes influence induced him
to recede from that position, with the result of a document
so obscure that sharply conflicting headlines in the daily
press revealed the complete confusion of the editors as to
what it meant. Emphatically, Mr. Harding is closely related
to Mr. Facing-Both-Ways ; equally true is the fact that he
will take further positions only as he is forced into them
by events or necessity. As for the treaty, we do not believe
it can be ratified in any form. Mr. Viviani's visit, despite
his enthusiastic characterization of its success, has been a
failure. But he can at least report to Briand that the United
States will take only a listless interest in the further co
ercion of Germany and will not act in the matter.
ON May 1 the curtain will rise for another act of the
melodrama (so impossible that it sometimes seems
like roaring farce) staged by the Allies in Germany under
the title "Drawing Blood from a Stone." The expected
No. 2912
refusal of Germany to pay the twelve billion gold marks

that will then be owing will be the signal for France to
step out in the leading role, while England, as the ingenue,
twitters and pretends to understand less of what is going
on than she does. At this writing the plan is to place at
least the entire Ruhr region in the hands of an Allied
receivership, which will take over the whole industrial out
put and sell it for the Allies' account. But receiverships
are notoriously an expensive and ineffective method of ad
ministering property, and the new method will get us no
farther than the old. The only hope lies in the development
of a public opinion in America and England that will insist
on a business-like treatment of a business proposition. Ger
many ought to pay every mark she can toward the restora
tion of France, but it is an industrial absurdity to prevent
the revival of German trade and at the same time to expect
that the country can raise an adequate indemnity. Amer
ica has a right to speak, for the present hocus-pocus in
Europe is as much a menace to the peace of the world as
was ever German militarism.
THE collapse of the Triple Alliance strike in Great Brit
ain settles nothing. It is a positive disaster. It indi
cates that the British public, like the public the world over,
dulled from excessive emotion, is apathetic to fundamentals
of right and fair-play ; also that British labor needs further
education and organization before it can put into effect its
declared principles and policies. Now the hour of pitched
battle is put off again, but the scarcely less devastating
armed truce remains, and the sudden assumption of its old
function which Lloyd George's bought Parliament has dis
played does not offset the truth that nothing has really been
settled, that suffering and bitterness remain. Great Britain
continues a camp and Ian Hay writes in the New York
Times of the government-recruited forces as "the new
100,000." So easily is enmity shifted from the Hun to the
British worker! But the Government could still dispose of
the issue within terms of reason by keeping its declared
faith and abiding by the Sankey report. In a few months,
or a few years at most, this situation, like Ireland, may
have moved irrevocably beyond compromise.
THAT unquenchable comedian Judge Gary has walked
down to the footlights again and joshed the simple
public. He sheds tears like the carpenter and the crocodile
over the poor workingman who unionizes himself and "be
comes the industrial slave of the union"; he admits that in
the wicked days of our grandfathers or some such there may
have been a use for labor unions, for then labor was some
times badly treated, but nowonly union leaders have any
need of unions. Why, the Judge runs on in his merry fash
ion, if labor unions had their way they would seek to in
fluence public policies, elections, and even the conduct of the
police!a trespass upon the ancient and honorable pre
serves of the United States Steel Corporation and its fellows
which those rollicking philanthropists of course simply must
resist. As to the company for which Judge Gary is the
jolly joker, it respects the unions with reservations: "We
The Nation
608
do not combat, though we do not contract or deal with,

labor unions as such. The labor unions, he apparently
means to say, are all right in their placeand their place

is always somewhere else. What the Judge really believes
in, he says, is publicity (we remember the Interchurch Re
port and its fate), regulation (decently safeguarded by in
dustrial espionage), and reasonable control through Gov
ernment agencies (such, we doubt not, as the Department of
Justice and the Pennsylvania State Constabulary).
If this,
the Judge has the air of concluding with a flourish, be not

reason and justice to all men concerned, make the most of it.
OVERNOR MILLER continues to establish his repu
tation for originality, this time by appointing two
Democrats to the new Transit Commission of three which
is to deal with the pending transit problems of the metrop

olis. Of course if he were playing the game by custom and
by right he must have put in at least two Republicans. As
chairman for this body, over whose creation so violent a
storm has raged, the Governor chose Mr. George McAneny,
than whom no city ever had a more earnest, devoted, or
faithful servant. To him the Governor added Major Gen
eral John F. O'Ryan, a modest soldier who persistently

refuses to capitalize in the prints an excellent war service
as commander of the Twenty-seventh Division. Other ap
pointments like that of the former comptroller of the City,
William A. Prendergast, to the Public Service Commission,
show that the Governor has really sought to place merit
above partisanshipwhich makes it all the more regrettable
that he forced through the Legislature the abominable Lusk
anti-sedition bills, which far offset his achievement in sav
ing six millions of dollars in the new budgetthe first
saving in years. As for the transit situation in New York,
Mr. McAneny and his associates will have an almost in
soluble problem before them, one that cannot be solved with
out calling down infinite abuse from one side or the other.
OWHERE have the facts governing our present eco
nomic distress been more clearly presented than in
the Federal Trade Commissions letter to President Har
ding, just made public, upon which he based the recommen

dations in his recent message for a Congressional investi
gation of living costs. Throughout this communication, in
so many paraphrases and in such varying contexts that it
may well be held the dominant note, appears the statement

that the consumer has only in the slightest degree been
1.
[Vol. 112, No. 2912
recommendations which should have the careful attention
of the public and of its representatives in Congress.

TRONGLY confirmatory is Secretary Hoover's demand
for immediate reduction in transportation rates, while
Chairman Clark of the Interstate Commerce Commission
declares that any further increase in railway rates will

result in less revenueobviously already the case. The
coal situation was months ago called to the attention of the
public by Senator Calder as was the housing situation by
Samuel Untermyer. Prompt reduction of passenger and
freight rates, thorough coal production at cost to the con
Sumer as its purpose and a nation-wide investigation and
prosecution of the building industry of the character of
the Lockwood investigation, are essential. Nor should the
brazen increase in public utility rates which are being

levied on the public throughout the land be permitted. The
admission of President Thayer that the American Telephone
and Telegraph Company could easily have paid the in
creased dividend which it is now disbursing at any time
in the last ten years, contains the entire argument against
unwarranted increases in telephone service rates. Essen
tials at cost is the just demand of the times. Congress
must resolutely set itself to solve this problem, and the Re
publican Party ought to realize that the best way to hold its
power is by going to the relief of the ultimate consumer.
LASS hatred, not justice, is served when seventy-nine

Industrial Workers of the World, including Bill
Haywood, go behind Federal prison bars, some on sentences
of twenty years, as a consequence of the United States Su
preme Court's refusal to review their convictions. Largely
because of the lowly industrial and social status of most of
its members, the sincerity of their beliefs, the isolation of
their lives, and many misconceptions of their philosophy

of life, the I. W. W. have been peculiarly subject to perse
cution by the crowd hysteria of the so-called respectable
element in this country. The I. W. W. convictions in 1918
were under war legislation now no longer in effect and on

evidence that their lawyers declare was illegally obtained
by the Department of Justice. The imprisonment of these

men now can serve no practical end, but will embitter thou
sands against the judicial system of the country. Their case

is another argument for a pardon of all political prisoners.
purchaser. This is what The Nation has asserted repeat
HEODORE ROOSEVELT once declared apropos of the

Colombian treaty that the payment can only be justi
fied upon the ground that this nation has played the part
of a thief or of a receiver of stolen goods. He was quite
right. The payment will be an indemnity for Roosevelt's
edly in warning against the deceptive current propaganda

concerning the reduction in living costs. That the con
own action in, as he said, taking Panama. The suddenness

with which we recognized and protected a Panaman revo
reached by the alleged reduction in prices.
Raw material
prices have in many instances been greatly decreased, but

nearly all benefit has been extracted en route to the final
is too high and must be
lution organized in the United States with the knowledge
reduced before renewed buying and normal volume of trade
sumers cost of living
will restore business to healthful conditions is the con
of American officials is in strange contrast to our more

recent hesitation to recognize revolutionary Governments in
clusion formed by the Commission. It mentions the high

cost of coal, of rent, and of transportation as important
against us, and it will do us honor if even at this late date
factors in retarding such restoration. Other factors em

phasized are the unwillingness of the retailer to bear his
share of the loss, and the so-called Open Price Associations.
These are organizations of manufacturers controlling cer

tain essential commodities who limit competition among
Mexico and in Russia.
Colombia has a just grievance
we settle it. Yetit is strange that a Republican Adminis

tration should be so insistent upon an act which is in effect
penance for the deeds of an earlier Republican Administra
tion, particularly when it is recalled that Lodge and others
signed a report declaring the treaty blackmail and rob
themselves, keep costs high, and combine with retailers in
bery when Mr. Wilson submitted ithow different things
deliberate understanding that certain price levels shall be
look when it is your own President who does it! Can the
maintained.
fact that American oil interests find the ill-feeling due to
The Commission makes a series of vigorous
The Nation
April 27, 1921]
non-ratification of the treaty a hindrance to development of

their business in Colombia have anything to do with this
sudden respect for our national honor, and are there new
concessions in the offing?
APAN, with its usual habit of keen-eyed observation,

has apparently learned something from the recent war,
and is convinced that overpopulation is the root of most
international evils. The Japanese family now averages
eight members and the population of the country is in
creasing at the rate of 700,000 a year. In view of these
facts and of the exceedingly limited area of Japan, the Gov
ernment feels strongly that only by a speedy and nation-wide

establishment of the policy of birth control can a war of ag
gression be avoided in the next generation. As a prelimi

nary step toward this end, Dr. Kato, head of the Depart
ment of Medical Affairs under the Japanese Government,
is studying the birth-control movement in the United States,
Holland, England, and Germany. Here in New York, Mrs.
Margaret Sanger has received visits from twenty-five repre
sentatives of various departments of the Government sent
out to study the question. Dr. Kato reports that the Japa
nese Parliament is now convinced of the wisdom of national
birth control and is concerned only with the methods of

teaching it to the people. Sooner or later the rest of the
world will have the intelligence to follow suit. At present
the United States with laws defining discussion of this prob
lem as obscene brings up the rear of the procession.
609
ness policy, and that is what is needed. Our duties to the

victims of war do constitute, as President Harding says,
a sacred obligationone that calls not merely for gen

erous gratitude, but for prompt and effective action.
HEN Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt at the Cleveland
meeting of the National League of Women Voters
called upon the persons present to begin a movement to
end war she did something which she and other members
of the League should have done long ago but for which
she should now nevertheless receive the fullest credit. Skep
tical as we feel toward the notion that women will be found
to have interests or impulses very widely different from

those of men where public matters are concerned, we be
lieve that womenall the late evidences of war hysteria
among them to the contrary notwithstandingnot only
ought to be more anxious than men to see wars ended, but
actually are. The mothers and wives of men will not for
ever be deceived into thinking that mass murder is neces
sary or that the sacrifice therein of sons and husbands is
an honorable lot of women.
The leaders of women cannot be
forgiven if they omit a single effort to crystallize and cap

italize the reaction against war which is now setting in.
Let the women voters of this country make themselves heard
and the programs for a larger army and a larger navy will
melt like snow in summer; let them realize how imperial
istic schemes spell the murder of youth in the interests of
privileged old men and there will be one more nation at
home minding its own business.
NOTABLE event is the launching of the People's
Legislative Service in Washington with Robert M.

La Follette as chairman and Basil M. Manly as director.
No recent departure promises as much.
If it can avoid
obvious pitfalls, create adequate financial support, and make
a reputation for absolutely unbiased facts it will render

a great service to Congressmen and Senators, press and
public. Already the Service has the indorsement of all the
leading Progressives in Congress. There is to be a bureau
of research and information consisting of three divisions:
first, a legislative division, to analyze and keep watch over
all pending legislation, with a view to warning the public
against improper bills; secondly, a statistical division, to
compile the information required by Senators and Repre
sentatives to enable them to make effective fights in Con
gress; and finally, and perhaps most important of all, a
publicity division, to give accurate and unbiased informa
tion as to what is going on in Congress to all who seek it.
It is not to be a lobby nor a source of propaganda, but a
source of facts and therefore an organization around which
the free men of Congress should gradually coalesce. The ad
dress of the Service is 814 Southern Building, Washington.
HE recommendations made by President Harding in
his first message to Congress in regard to our soldiers
and sailors disabled in the European War are deserving of
early and cordial attention. We must not allow these young
men to suffer, and their youth and opportunity to slip by,
while bureaucrats flounder in red tape. Mr. Harding sug
gests, on the advice of a volunteer committee that has
looked into the subject for him, that the chief difficulty is
lack of unity among the various services. He therefore
recommends one directing head under whom shall be cen
tralized hospitalization, vocational training, war insurance,

rehabilitation, and pensions.
This sounds like good busi
HE death of John Daniel in New York on April 17 de

prives America and England of a personage than
whom the two nations could better have spared many a
better man. He had lived in Africa, he had lived in Lon
don, he had lived in New York, and in a sense he deserves
to be called a citizen of the world; but something in his
free spirit made him unable ever to accept the postulates
and accouterments of civilization. Like others in our gen
eration, however, he was constrained to live among cities
and to be often oppressed by crowds. Not a man in years
can be said more truly to have died from the disease of
burdensome humanity; John Daniel was a martyr to that
disease none the less because he was not a man himself but
the gaped-at gorilla at the circus.
O more appropriate or deserved tribute for the highest

kind of service to mankind can be bestowed than the
gift of a gram of radium to Madame Marie Curie which

President Harding will formally present on May 20 as the
gift of American women to the foremost living scientist of
their sex. The $100,000 gift of this mysterious element
will permit the continuation of researches begun by her and
her husband, Paul Curie, nearly a generation ago, which
won for them jointly the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903.
After his death, Madame Curie carried on the work alone,
succeeding him as professor of physics and director of the
physical laboratories at the Sorbonne. It is to her that the
world owes probably the greatest achievement in physical
chemistry in the twentieth century, and a contribution

uniquely twofold.
For most scientific discoveries are in the
first instance abstract and only indirectly and subsequently

beneficial to humanity.
Madame Curie's researches not
only altered fundamental conceptions of chemistry and

physics, but opened up for the allied science of medicine a
new and valuable form of therapy.
The Nation
610
No
War
With
II. Our World Trade Rivalry

THE facts about the United Kingdom from which all
other considerations rise have to do with the suste
nance of its population. On the British Isles live some
fifty million souls, in an area less than half that of the
State of Texas. They cannot feed themselves with the crops
and animals they raise; if they were confined to their own
resources a large part of the population would have to emi
grate or starve. Imports of food into the United Kingdom
have recently ranged in value from a billion to two and a
half billion dollars every year.
These imports must be paid for. They cannot be paid
for with other raw materials. Britain has few agricultural
products to export. She has few animal products. She does
not produce in any quantity valuable commodities like
lumber, cotton, wool, silk, rubber, hides. Her mineral re
sources are limited. She has no copper, nickel, or precious
metals, and little mineral oil, tin, lead, or zinc. Just two
sizable deposits account for by far the greater part of her
natural wealthcoal and iron. But if she exported all the
coal and iron she can economically mine, they would not
pay her annual bill for foods and other articles which civil
ized life demands.
She is forced, therefore, to pay by servicesprincipally
by manufacturing. She takes part of her coal, all her iron
ore, and some imported ore besides, and uses them for
making steel and its products, a large share of which she
exports. But of course she does not stop there. Nearly ten
times as many of her people are engaged in manufacturing
and trade as in agriculture and fisheries. She draws in
raw materials from all over the world, makes them into
finished products, and ships many of them out again. This
process greatly enlarges the value of her imports, but it
increases the value of her exports even more. Britain's
overseas trade is her very life. Whoever interferes with
her sources of supply, with her foreign markets, or with
the transportation between, strikes at her heart. With all
her manufactured exports, moreover, the United Kingdom
does not pay for what she receives. There is still a balance
to be accounted fora balance "unfavorable" in the termi
nology of economists, amounting in normal years to about
seven hundred million dollars. This balance is chiefly set
tled in two ways: by the income on Britain's foreign in
vestments, and by the freight paid for the carriage of goods
in British ships.
To say all this is trite; yet it is here that we must begin
any closer examination of the subject. The fact that the
United Kingdom is and must be, so long as her world posi
tion endures, a manufacturing nation, need not lead to
enmity against anyone, under certain conditions. Nations
who sell raw materials to her will not wish to fight her.
Customers who need and buy her manufactured products
will not wish to injure her. Neither will anyone who wants
to borrow of her capital, or any merchant who ships his
goods in her fleet. Other manufacturing nations may be
competitors, but if they make goods which Britain buys, and
buy other goods which Britain makes, they will be friendly.
To all those who stand in such relations to Britain, her
world commerce is a guaranty of peace.
Suppose, however, there were a nation which stood in a
[Vol. 112, No. 2912
England
different relation to her. This nation, let us say, had been

sending necessary raw materials to England, but now cut
them off. It had been buying British manufactures, but
was now ceasing to do so. It increased the use of its own
raw materials on the part of its own manufacturers, who
not only seized the former British market in their own
country, but began to compete with British manufacturers
abroad as well. It strove to take from Britain her sources
of raw material. In addition to this, it began to supplant
Britain as a foreign investor, and it substituted its own
ships for British ships on the high seas. Such a natioD
would be a commercial rival of the sort most dangerous to
the United Kingdom. If the development of this rival
were slow, Britain might adjust herself comfortably to the
new state of affairs, but in proportion as it was rapid and
aggressive, the shock to Britain would be severe.
Where does England buy her food? During the war, the
United States led in the supply of grains. Canada and
Argentina were close seconds. Before the war, however,
we did not export so much, because there were more ships
available for long hauls, and Russia was open to trade.
British India sent much wheat, and Canada, Argentina, and
Russia were often far ahead of us in other grains as well.
We have long led in British imports of ham, but in bacon
only during the war. The United States normally supplies
only an inconsiderable part of England's beef and mutton,
which come chiefly from Argentina and Australia. Since
the war, our importance as a source of food has diminished.
During 1920 we exported considerably more wheat to Eng
land than in 1918, but only a third as much wheat flour, and
the exports of both have shrunk enormously in recent
months. Our shipments of beef to the United Kingdom
have fallen from five hundred million pounds in 1918 to
eleven million in 1920. Exports of bacon to Britain have
been cut in half, and we shipped only a quarter as much ham
in 1920 as two years before. In short, our subordinate pre
war status is returning with interest. And we shall con
stantly become less important as food producers. The
census of 1920 showed for the first time less than half our
population in rural districts. We are now about to hasten
the process by imposing a protective tariff on farm products,
which will exclude foreign grain from our markets, force
it upon Britain and other food-importing nations, and so
decrease our exports to them and their dependence on us.
Before many years, if present tendencies continue, Britain
will not find us indispensable as a source of food, nor we
her as a food market. We shall rather compete with her in
buying our own supply abroad.
The industries depending on coal, iron, and steel are
the most important in Great Britain. She mines her own
coal, and has enough left over from her domestic needs to
export. We have become large exporters of coal also, and
are competing with Britain in many of the foreign coal
markets, especially in South America, which she was obliged
to neglect during the war. Britain buys some iron ore
abroad, but it comes from Spain rather than from the
United States. In the steel and all subsidiary industries
we are increasingly competitors. British steel production
was enlarged by half during the war, and she is pressing
for more markets. Our steel capacity is constantly growing
also, and we are more than ever turning our eyes abroad
April 27, 1921]
The Nation
for sales. In spite of her increased production, Britain

lost during the war about 70 per cent of her iron and steel
exports to her colonies and South America, because of the
necessities in France, and we stepped into these markets.
Now she is fighting to regain the trade. We are both
striving to fill the gap left by the cessation of German
exports. In tractors, agricultural machinery, automobiles,
and machinery of all sorts, competition between British
and American manufacturers is growing keener, while each
group is increasing its domination of its home market.
In respect to other metals Great Britain is less fortu
nately situated, but in none except copper and nickel is
she to any large degree dependent on the United States.
Even copper she can get in Chile, South Africa, Mexico,
Spain, Australia, and elsewhere. She could not compete
with us in foreign markets for manufactured copper pro
ducts without buying our crude copper, but she could get
enough for her domestic requirements elsewhere if it be
came necessarythat is, as long as she controlled the seas.
The United Kingdom has political and commercial control
of over half the world's tinchiefly in Straits Settlements,
Bolivia, and Chile. Lead she can get from Spain and Aus
tralia, zinc from Australia and Italy. Other essential min
erals she controls in various parts of the world.
Next to metal products, Britain's most important in
dustry is textile manufacturing. Over a million persons
are employed in it. It accounts for about half the value of
her imports of raw materials, and a third of her exports of
manufactured articles. The largest section of it is devoted
to cotton, although the United Kingdom cannot raise an
ounce of raw cotton. Her supplies come, normally, 75 per
cent from the United States, 17 per cent from Egypt, and
3 per cent from India. The manufactured product goes
all over the worldexcept to the United States. Our own
cotton mills have been rapidly increasing their production,
with the result that they are using up more of the Ameri
can supply, and competing with British export trade. In
1916 our mills took 20 per cent of our entire cotton crop,
as compared with 12 per cent in 1913. In 1918 we supplied
only 65 per cent of Britain's imported raw cotton. Much
more cotton was manufactured in 1920 than in 1918. Al
though we exported not quite a third more raw cotton to the
United Kingdom in 1920 than two years earlier, we ex
ported more than twice as many cotton manufactures to
the world as in the former yearespecially to Britain's
large markets in the Orient. So threatening to England's
spindles is our increased consumption of our raw cotton
that she has taken steps to enlarge its growth in Egypt,
India, and South Africa. Here we see the gradual with
drawal of our raw material from Britain's industry and
the injection of our manufactures into her markets. This
tendency is all the more serious because British cotton
exporters are also meeting more competition from Japan.
Great Britain does not depend on the United States for
raw wool, which she receives normally from Russia, Aus
tralia, New Zealand, and South America. Of much of this
supply she has commercial control, which on occasion has
been converted into monopoly. The United States also is
largely dependent on these foreign resources, since we im
port many times as much raw wool as we export. We are
therefore competitive purchasers of this product. The
United Kingdom sells much of her woolen and worsted
cloth in the United States, but our growing woolen industry
is encroaching on this market. The tariff will further
611
weaken this link between the two Anglo-Saxon nations.

We do buy much of our linen from Great Britain, and she
sells a large proportion of it to us. She does not manu
facture enough silk for her domestic needs, and her market
is open to our silk mills. Neither nation produces large
crops of flax or raw silk. In these two trades, therefore,
our interests do not clashthough the products themselves
are not of the most important. The chemical supply from
Germany which was cut off by the war was replaced by home
manufacture as far as possible in both nations. England
receives most of her hides and leather from other countries
than the United States, and her timber and wood from
Russia, Scandinavia, and Canada as well as from this
country. With the rapid depletion of our forest areas and
the reopening of trade with Russia our supply will steadily
become a less important factor in foreign trade.
The questions of shipbuilding and merchant marine, of
oil, and of finance, are so crucial that separate articles must
be devoted to them. But from this briefest of surveys it
is possible to picture the background of Anglo-American
relations. As long as we sell Great Britain millions of
bales of cotton, bushels of wheat, and barrels of oil, and
buy her woolens and some of her metal products, there is
little acute danger. But this margin of mutual interest is
rapidly shrinking. We are in sober truth approaching the
status of the hypothetical nation whose interests Great
Britain must regard as hostile to her own. American banks
and commercial associations are daily issuing statements
which show that we are ceasing to be a self-supporting
country as far as food and raw materials are concerned;
that we are producing a "surplus" of manufactures which
we must sell to foreign purchasers. In 1920 we exported
nearly three billion dollars' worth of goods more than we
imported. Of these exports, 34 per cent were crude mate
rials and raw foods; 66 per cent were manufactured prod
ucts. Of our imports, about 66 per cent were crude mate
rials and raw foods, and 34 per cent manufactured products.
Over one hundred associations of manufacturers for foreign
trade have been registered under the Webb-Pomerene Act,
each selling a different product, each pressing vigorously
against European exporters throughout the world in fastgrowing competition.
All European industrial nations, to be sure, have an
excess of manufactures to sell abroad, but to none of them
is their overseas trade so vital as it is to Britain. None
of them is in anything like so strong a position. And with
none of them is the competition of American manufacturers
so direct. There is no escaping the fact that even today the
foremost commercial rivals in the world are Great Britain
and the United States. There is no escaping the fact that
the development of both is intensifying that rivalry. The
sketch that we have drawn does not threaten any imme
diate trouble. Tendencies of this sort could go on for
years, and adjustments could be made which would enable
the two nations to avoid a collision. The background would
be appropriate for war only in case some bold stroke in the
foreground brought the opposing forces to a dramatic issue.
We do not wish to over-emphasize its importance; but it
must be borne in mind in our future discussions of more
pressing matters. It may all too easily become a setting for
the tragedy we wish to avoid.*
* Next week's article in this series on the relations between England and
the United States will deal with merchant marine problems.
The Nation
612
Race
Commission A
structive
Con
Plan
THERE is no more useful paragraph in President

Harding's message than that which deals with the
race question because he has several constructive proposals
to make. In the first place, he comes out against the abomi
nation of lynching. In the second, he dwells on the sug
gestion that some of the difficulties of the race problem,
might be ameliorated by a humane and enlightened considera
tion of it, a study of its many aspects, and an effort to formu
late, if not a policy, at least a national attitude of mind cal
culated to bring about the most satisfactory possible adjust
ment of relations between the races, and of each race to the
national life. One proposal is the creation of a commission em
bracing representatives of both races to study and report on the
entire subject. The proposal has real merit. I am convinced
that in mutual tolerance, understanding, charity, recognition of
the interdependence of the races, and the maintenance of the
rights of citizenship lies the road to righteous adjustment.
This is in marked contrast, of course, to the attitude of the
Wilson administration, which sought, ostrich-like, to evade
the whole questionafter instituting segregation in the
several departments at Washington. Now President Har
ding senses the possibility of at least obtaining the scientific
facts. Who knows, for instance, whether there is or is not
an undue criminality among the Negroes? Who knows all
the facts about the actual economic status of the Negro?
We have had our eyes opened to the existing peonage by
the horrible murders, now declared to be eighteen, of Negro
slaves upon the plantation of John Williams of Jasper
County, Georgia. How much of this is there? Even the
census helps little. Hence the very first step toward a
readjustment of race relationships should be the obtaining
of all the information necessary to sound and scientific
judgments unaffected by theories, or prejudices.
Of course The Nation approves and commends Mr.
Harding's proposal. Just eight years ago its present
editor laid before President Wilson, then newly in office, this
very plan to which Mr. Harding now leans. The approach
to Mr. Wilson was in cooperation with the National Asso
ciation for the Advancement of Colored People, and a
printed plan was laid before the President, after consulta
tion with many different kinds of Northerners and South
erners. Mr. Wilson would not approve; he rejected it for
fear that it might offend the feelings of the South, despite
the fact that it was suggested that a Southerner be the
chairman. Because the program has never been published
before and the scheme seems to us as practical as it did
eight years ago, we print it here in the hope that it will
commend itself to President Harding. It is as follows:
A Proposal for a National Race Commission
(To be appointed by the President of the United States)
Plan and Purpose (May, 1913)
To be modeled on lines of President Roosevelt's Country Life
Commission and President Taft's Industrial Commission.
To be financed by private subscriptions to the extent of
$50,000 or $60,000.
Program:A non-partisan, scientific study of the status of
the Negro in the life of the nation, with particular reference
to his economic situation. This study to include
A. Physical health and efficiency. B. Homes and property.
C. Work and wages. D. Education. E. Religious and moral
[Vol. 112, No. 2912
influences. F. Citizenship, legal status, and participation in

government.
Organization and Membership
The proposed President's Race Commission should consist of
fifteen persons, five Southerners, of whom one shall preferably
be the Chairman; five Northerners, and five members of the
Negro race. It is suggested that they be selected from the
following lists:
SOUTHERNERS
Dr. James H. Dillard, Pres. Jeanes Fund and Director of
the Slater Fund, of New Orleans.
Mrs. Desha Breckinridge, of Lexington, Kentucky.
Alfred H. . Stone, of Mississippi.
Rev. Dr. J. G. Snedecor, of Alabama, Secretary of the Col
ored Evangelization of the Presbyterian Church, South.
Hon. James H. Slayden, Congressman from Texas.
northerners
Jane Addams, of Chicago.
Hon. A. E. Pillsbury, ex-Attorney General of Massachusetts.
Prof. J. E. Spingarn, of New York.
Julius Rosenwald, of Chicago, Illinois.
colored
Major R. R. Moton, of Hampton Institute.
Prof. Kelley Miller, of Howard University.
Rev. Archibald Grimke, of Washington, D. C.
John Mitchell, Jr., Editor the Planet, Richmond, Va.
W. Ashbie Hawkins, Attorney-at-Law, Baltimore, Maryland.
methods of work
They shall aim:
A. To systematize, evaluate, and make available material al
ready collected. B. To collect further general material by ques
tionnaires and reports covering the nation. C. To make cer
tain local intensive studies by means of experts. D. To publish
a report which shall indicate (1) the progress of the Negro
during his half century of freedom; (2) the obstacles to progress
in the past and future; and (3) practical suggestions as to his
future welfare. This report to be submitted by the President
to Congress if he so desires.
cooperating agencies
The following organizations or groups, interested in the Negro
or in the "Negro problem," should cooperate:
(1) The Federal Commission on Industrial Relations.
(2) Southern agencies: The University Commission on
Southern Race Questions; the Southern Sociological Congress;
the Southern Education Association, Nashville; the Y. M. C. A.
international committee in the South (Weatherford) ; Social
workers, like Little of Louisville; college teachers of the Negro
like Hammond of Paine College, Augusta; the two PhelpsStokes fellows on the Negro in the Universities of Georgia and
Virginia.
(3) Negro agencies: National Business Men's League and
other business organizations; colleges like Atlanta, Fisk, Wilberforce; industrial schools like Hampton and Tuskegee; re
ligious, fraternal, and other organizations; women's clubs.
(4) Independent organizations, like the National League on
Urban Conditions of the Negro, the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People, etc.
(5) General funds: Jeanes, Slater, Southern Education, Gen
eral Education, Miner, Peabody, Phelps-Stokes, etc.
(6) Government agencies, such as Department of Education,
etc., and trained sociologists and statisticians.
We sincerely believe that if such a race commission could
be instituted it would be a great step forward in the his
tory of the Negro race in America provided only that it
was properly manned and managed; and that it would be
found to be of very great economic and spiritual benefit to
the masses of colored and white people in the South.
April 27, 1921]
The Nation
613
Teacher- Baiting: The New Sport
Those Good Old Days
TEACHER-BAITING is becoming one of the most pop

ular sports of our State legislatures. It is cheaper
than automobiling and requires less skill than one-old-cat;
it is more refinedly cruel than a cocking main or a dog fight,
and yet is not against the law; it is as safe as shooting
skylarks, or stoning humming birds, because the victims
haven't a chance in the world to defend themselves. They
have already been reduced in self-respect, and the respect
of others, by low salaries ; they have had their individuality
and spontaneity crushed by standardized curricula. It is
easy to attack such brain and conscience as happily sur
vive among them.
The first rule of the sport is to require an oath which
singles teachers out as a particularly dangerous and unre
liable class, and subjects them to the suspicion of pupils
and parentsthus, of course, increasing their influence and
usefulness. Through the efforts of gallant sportsmen of
the American Legion, a law to this effect has been passed
recently in Oklahoma. But the essence of the sport is best
seen in legislation proposed in California and passed in
New York (although, at this writing, not yet signed by the
Governor), whereby it would be illegal for a teacher to
advocate, or believe in, any change in government by lawful
means. In sponsoring this legislation Senator Lusk, the
celebrated heresy-hunter of New York, said:
Teachers who are paid out of public funds to instruct school
children have no right either to believe in, or to advocate
changes in the State or national government. I do not deny that
men and women have the right to advocate governmental
changes by peaceful means, but they have not the right to do
it while they subsist on public funds.
There is at least one thing to be said in favor of that
view. Legislators as well as school teachers "subsist on
public funds." Therefore they could not advocate any
change in government, and the law that Senator Lusk him
self proposes in regard to teachers would be impossible.
But if teacher-baiting is to become a broad, national, and
democratic sport, uniform rules ought to be adopted. We
propose, therefore, that five times daily every teacher shall
face the Past, and kissing the Book of Lusk shall repeat:
1. I swear that I do not believe in any change in the State
or national government.
2. I swear that I do not believe in any change or progress in
political science.
3. I swear that I do not believe in any change or advance
ment in any other branch of knowledge.
4. I swear that I do not believe in any change or improve
ment in the human race.
5. I swear that I do not believe in any change in anything.
This, we feel, is more comprehensive and logical than
any law or proposal so far, and is calculated to eliminate
among teachers the last vestige of ideas, ambition, or hope.
It is certain to reduce pupils to a similar state, and thus in a
few happy years to transform us into a nation of wooden
Indians among whom Senator Lusk will naturally take his
place as Grand Imperial Wizard of the Order of Blockheads.
And then it will no longer be necessary to bait our teachers ;
for they will have been turned into squeaking manikins,
croaking all day before lifeless classes: "Change not, pro
gress not, aspire not ! Think nothing, dare nothing ! Every
stupidity that is, is rightand Senator Lusk is its
Prophet!"
IN these wild days, says a sage of our time, young men

call out "Hello" when they meet young ladies, and do not
blush; they address them over the telephone in the same
vulgar way, and the young ladies do not blush either. Both
sexes jest and romp in unseemly fashions; they keep strange
hours and dance to strange measures and on subterranean
occasions drink strange beverages. Our grandfathers and
grandmothers behaved quite otherwise, avers the sage. Yes,
but their grandfathers constantly complained to them of the
decay of good manners that had followed the Civil War,
and pointed to the more decent days of their own youth
to the days of the early century when there were three-bottle
men under the table at the end of every dinner and when the
Prince Regent in England set the mode for the domestic
virtues of the polite world among Anglo-Saxons. Lord
Byron, a modest man in his way, was shocked at the waltz
and thought things had been better in the good old days,
and yet a hundred years before him Pope in London hardly
less than Cotton Mather in Boston had bewailed the loss of
simplicity and sobriety out of the world. Go back as far as
you will and the accusing hands of sages point further still
into the past when things were better. Medieval poets sang
the virtues of the Roman Empire, but under the empire
itself Juvenal remembered the republic. The imagination
of Greece mounted up age by age to Homer, and he per
petuated legends "of a long antiquity. Adam must have told
his grandchildren of the superior proprieties of Eden; and
like enough our earliest lake-dwelling ancestors often
warned their young of the degeneration which had gone on
since the anthropoids came down from their arboreal habi
tations.
For our part we do not find in history any adequate con
solation for the praisers of times past. The rank and file
of the virtues have not greatly changed, so far as we can
see, during the comparatively few years in the life of the
race over which the memory of man runs. All that appears
is a certain pendulum swing from one repression or indul
gence to another, reaction setting in whenever the virtues or
vices of an age begin to bore it. Instead of repining that
the present generation is unmitigably naughty, we observe
that drunkenness throughout the world is pretty certainly
on the decline and that the improving status of women bids
fair to make them able to look out for themselvesa con
dition which we candidly prefer to all the chivalry that ever
was invented. What worries us is not the age itself but the
fear that its hilarities portend a reaction in the direction of
insipid, smug propriety. The dour Commonwealth of Crom
well begot the Restoration, and that in turn the bourgeois
reaction of the early eighteenth century. At the end came
the Napoleonic eruption, the regency of the fat gentleman
of fifty in England, and as an inevitable consequence the
Victorian decorum. Now we feel ourselves at the end of the
swing in the other direction ; the sweep toward naughti
ness is slowing up, for all the world is talking about it;
almost before we shall be aware, and before we can do any
thing to prevent it, back we shall go. In a little while our
children, more quickly susceptible than we to the new move
ment, will be looking with pained eyes upon the frivolities
of their eldersand we shall be talking of the good old days
before the blight set in upon us and carried us away from
polite vice to violent virtue.
614
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2912
Mexico 1921
V. Relations with the United States
By PAUL HANNA
International politics today are oil politics.Premier Briand.
To promote their vast design these oil magnates are capable
of starting revolutions in Mexico, instigating civil wars in Asia,
or setting fire to Europe and the world to crush a competitor.
Le Petrole, Paris, January, 1921.
MEXICO'S relations with the United States, therefore,
are her relations with the great rival oil corporations
in the Tampico and adjoining petroleum regions. If the Ad
ministration of President Obregon can placate the oil com
panies the United States will enjoy peace and profitable
trade with Mexico henceforth. If the oil companies remain
obdurate and hostile then the press agent, trained bandit,
and professional revolutionist will tighten their grip upon
the scruff of our sovereign necks and lead us straight into
bloody war and the conquest of Mexico.
To conquer Mexico would be comparatively easyfrom
the club arm-chairs and the editorial sancta thousands of
miles from the burning mesaand in harmony with in
numerable precedents. Mexico is used to being con
quered, and Uncle San is not unused to sharing in the
conquest. But in 1847 we were fighting for real estate;
we knew when we had won and, roughly, how much
we had won. In this second go at our southern neighbor
we should be drawn by the lure of a different prize. Oil!
And oil is very slippery. How many Americans realize that
a second glorious war with Mexico, accompanied by the usual
suffering, death lists, bond issues, and higher taxes, may
bring "under the flag" nothing more precious than a few
miles of geysers gushing salt water! Well after well is
turning to salt water in the Tampico field. The sun rises
upon them blowing 10,000 to 40,000 barrels of heavy pe
troleum daily. At nightfall, and permanently thereafter,
they blow nothing but salt water. While I was in Mexico
newspapers reported that the Corona Company had com
pleted a new pipe line to its prize gusher, at a cost of sev
eral million dollars. And the same week they reported that
the prize gusher had "gone into salt." At Laredo I talked
with Americans just up from Tampico who confirmed the
story of the Corona disaster. Our cause for war with
Mexico lies upon the surface of subterranean lakes; nat
ural gas drives it through the drilled opening into the tanks
of the exploiters. After the oil comes salt water, of which
the seas are full and for which nobody would start a war.
While they last, however, these Mexican oil wells are the
richest in the world. And fresh pools are still being struck
to compensate for those that turn to salt. Into the ears of
exploiters already flushed with enormous profits and the
lust for greater gain the siren tongue of rumor whispers
that Mexico's oil fields have hardly been tapped as yet. To
one syndicate of world-wide fame its principal geologist is
said to have reported that much of Mexico is but an earthy
crust above a sea of petroleum! Tranquil readers may
scoff, but in the feverish El Dorado of oil these tales are
believed and acted upon.
With so much in hand and so much more in prospect, and
supported by the modern world's ravenous demand for more
and more oil, it is not surprising that the exploiting cor
porations should come to regard themselves as a rival sov

ereignty within the borders of Mexico. Ten years of revo
lution, moreover, gave the invading capitalists both pretext
and opportunity to flout the laws and decrees of successive
Administrations or to denounce them before the world as
the looting devices of adventurous upstarts. In this sinister
light the American people are asked to regard that provision
of the Mexican Constitution of 1917 which reaffirms the
Government's title to all deposits of oil, gas, minerals, etc.
The retroactive application of that clause, decreed by Carranza and still in effect, has been especially attacked by the
oil interests as a just cause for military intervention by the
United States. I am convinced that the Obregon Admin
istration will annul that retroactive application. I am con
vinced also that the oil interests know it will be annulled.
But I doubt if that will satisfy them, since their real de
sire is for a right of way to the still undisclosed oil deposits
and not a simple acknowledgment of title to their present
rich holdings.
It has been carefully concealed from the American people
that land ownership in Mexico has never, since the Span
iards came there, carried with it any title to the sub-soil
deposits or any right to exploit them. To the soil and its
contents three kinds of titlesalways separateare granted
under the Spanish practice. There are, first, pastural titles,
granted to stock raisers exclusively; second, agricultural
titles, granted to soil tillers exclusively ; third, mining titles,
procurable only from the Federal Government by persons
desiring to prospect for clearly specified kinds of ore, gas,
oil, coal, or asphalt. Owners of grazing or agricultural lands
have always had to recognize the state's ownership of every
thing under the surface; and the Constitution of 1917 re
affirms that principle. Mining laws of some American States
once a part of Mexico are still based on that principle.
In Kern County, California, the simple right to prospect
for oil on 160 acres of public land was recently sold at auc
tion. Newspaper reports state that the highest bidder was
Edward L. Doheny, owner of the Huasteca Oil Company,
dominating corporation of the Mexican oil field. For this
right merely to prospect for oil Mr. Doheny offers nearly
$500,000. In addition he agrees that the Government shall
receive 25 per cent of all the oil taken out by his enterprise.
The point is this: In an American field, where the richest
wells produce only 1,500 barrels of oil daily, Mr. Doheny
offers $500,000 and a quarter of his prospective output for
the mere right to search for oil; in Mexico the same Mr.
Doheny revels in a field where the wells gush from 10,000 to
50,000 barrels daily, yet his company declares it is being
robbed because the Mexican Government tries to collect a
reasonable tax on the selling price and to reassert its un
questionable title to oil not yet discovered. Extremely perti
nent to this issue is the following declaration by George
W. Dithridge, of Hollis, Long Island, on the recognized right
and practice of oil taxation :
Fifty-five years ago I was president of the Grant Well Com
pany, owners of the Grant Well at Pithole, Benango County,
Pennsylvania, flowing at the moderate rate of 1,600 barrels
April 27, 1921]
The Nation
daily. The United States Federal Government never had the

original titles to the lands of the Thirteen Colonial States, and
therefore never gave any concession or right for the boring for
petroleum in the State of Pennsylvania. Yet in the year 1866,
under its unchallenged power of taxation, the American Con
gress placed a Federal tax of $1 per barrel upon Pennsylvania
crude oil, payable at the wells by the producers, that being the
only place of production at that time. At the time the Federal
taxgatherer appeared on the scene Pennsylvania crude oil
brought only $2.50 per barrel, so that the tax was equal to 40
per cent of the gross value. Not only so, but the tax dated
from the passage of the act, so there was a tremendous arrear
age due the Government, and it took months of steady applica
tion of the entire receipts from the sale of 1,500 barrels daily
to liquidate the claim of the Government. This was a sample
of the taxing power of the American Governmentof any
governmentin time of war, or to pay the indebtedness follow
ing war.
In the Tampico field there has raged for a long time be
tween the American corporations and the Mexican Govern
ment a quarrel over the payment of a 10 per cent tax on the
selling price of crude oil. A common practice there illus
trates the cupidity of the concessionnaires. A drilling com
pany sells its output to an associated pipe-line company for
as little as 40 cents a barrel, and demands that the Govern
ment take its tax on the 40-cent basis. The Government re
plies that this transaction between associated corporations
does not establish a bona-fide selling price, and insists that
the tax shall be 10 per cent of the New York quotation for
crude oil, which is the basis of the enormous profits paid
by the oil companies. The Obregon Administration has also
offered to solve the controversy by accepting outright onetenth of the oil produced.
With respect to the charge that the Mexican Government has
been oppressive in its administration of the laws [says Mr.
Dithridge], there is something that the American people should
know. During more than a decade of residence and business
in Mexico I never knew the state or federal taxes or charges to
be excessive, even upon concessions and privileges of great value.
On the contrary, they have always been the acme of moderation
and liberality. And no matter what taxes were imposed or supposable, the hundreds of millions of barrels of petroleum yielded
from the treasure house of the Mexican people would represent a
sum of profit so vast as to make it look both absurd and shame
ful for complaint to be made to a neighbor friendly Power to
wantonly exert its power right along into war-coercion! It is
infinitely worse than what is or could be expressed by "pulling
the chestnuts out of the fire." It is rather up to Mr. Doheny
to show that the chestnuts were ever his, whether before or
after they got into the fire.
Mexico's new Constitution is so easily defended in inter
national law that the interventionists have begun to dis
card it as a cause for war. At present their propaganda
deals more in generalities which aim to strengthen a lazy
popular illusion that the Mexican people are inherently in
capable of preserving order and protecting foreign interests,
even when they are confessedly tired of revolutions and
possess a government which is trying to do the right thing
by everyone. Upon the cause of this change in tactics by
the oil men an American business man of fifteen years' resi
dence in Mexico City shed much light when he said to me:
Hitherto the oil men have been able to play a fine game of
bluff and wave a big club over the heads of Mexican officials.
That was because the 6,000,000 or 7,000,000 pesos which they
paid monthly in taxes was the Government's chief income.
When they held back their taxes the Government couldn't pay
its bills and began to totter. Carranza was in that fix, and
615
several months before he went out he was able to meet only

70 per cent of the public pay-roll. When he fell the Treasury
was empty. But the new Administration, with De la Huerta
as Minister of Finance, has freed itself from such helpless
dependence upon the oil companies. By the application of wise
taxes, big economies, and efficient accounting, the National
Treasury now enjoys a monthly revenue of some 6,500,000 pesos
entirely apart from the oil revenue. So, when the oil men hold
back their taxes, the Government does not totter. On the con
trary, it prepares to enforce the delinquency penalties. Last
month some of the companies withheld their taxes, but within
three weeks they found they were living in a new era, so they
paid up. That is why the Obregon Administration has today a
treasury reserve of 16,000,000 pesos, and to this reserve it is
in a position to add every month virtually the whole sum of
six or seven million pesos collected from the oil industry. By
midsummer I am sure that Minister De la Huerta will be able
to resume interest payment on the national debt, with a good
chance of meeting some of the deferred interest by the end of
the year.
Resumption of interest payment would win for the Mexi
can Government thousands of influential friends among
foreign holders of its securities. This would divide the
camp of those who have looked with more or less satisfac
tion upon the drift toward intervention. So De la Huerta's
desire to resume the payments is equaled only by the need
of the oil men to prevent it. And there are many observers
of the struggle in Mexico City who believe the growth of
the treasury reserve may precipitate some act of inspired
mischief that would bring an international crisis and save
the situation for the interventionists.
Rumors of such inspired mischief fill the days and nights
of an inquiring visitor to Mexico City. I have read extracts
from letters written to a friend in the Mexican capital by a
gentleman who was traveling on the special car of President
elect Harding during December and January last. This
gentleman referred to a forthcoming complete reorganiza
tion of the Mexican Government, by force of arms, assisted
or entirely accomplished by the United States. Although it
had not yet been announced who would be chosen to fill
those posts, this letter writer stated that under the Harding
Administration "the Secretary and Assistant Secretary of
War will both be friends of mine, and I know exactly what
they will do." Was this private correspondent telling the
truth or merely painting his own importance to a distant
friend? I don't know. But I saw extracts from letters by
a clergyman who busies himself quietly in international
politics, and these letters referred to those I have quoted
from and assured the confidential recipient that "there will
be wigs on the green" in the near future. Another state
ment by the first correspondent explained that several mil
lions of dollars had recently been expended in the United
States to create opinion favorable to the Obregon Adminis
tration. But all in vain, he added; the problem would not
be adjusted by friendly negotiation: "You have been told
how it will be done, and it will happen just that way." At
least one prominent editor in Mexico City is involved by
the documents in this scheme to "reorganize" the Mexican
Government by force of arms. On the other side, one may
hear exciting and wholly unverified stories about how one
Cabinet member has poisoned another, or attempted to
poison President Obregon, and for his services will shortly
be elevated to the Presidency by powerful American finan
cial interests. Gossip among idlers in Mexico City knows
no bounds and bothers with no proofs.
In this atmosphere, however, the cause of the interven
616
The Nation
tionist thrives. For to make war easy the interventionist

must furnish some "news" or rumor that will obscure facts
and the calm consideration of them. He must make the
American people forget that the total unpaid interest on
Mexico's foreign debt is less than $45,000,000; must keep
them from knowing that the vast majority of American
business men in Mexico are prosperous and contented ; must
conceal from them that the Obregon Administration is anx
ious to make reparation for all loss of life and property as
soon as foreign governments will consent to negotiations
for that purpose. If the American people will forget these
essential truths about Mexico, I am convinced that the in
terests capable of "setting fire to the world" to gain their
ends will furnish a palace revolution, another raid over the
border, the kidnapping of another consul, or whatever other
preamble to invasion may be required.
These ruthless petroleum dynasties are already at odds
and preparing for open war with each other. Kegardless
of her desire to satisfy both the American and British oil
groups, Mexico may easily become a battleground because
one of these groups is determined to overthrow and oust the
other. On the floor of the United States Senate, April 12,
Senator Lodge read from a letter to himself, in which Secre
tary Fall charged the British oil interests with having be
trayed the American Association of Oil Companies by "ac
cepting the Mexican Government's demands with reference
to oil-drilling permits," and abiding by its laws! "British
oil interests are giving every assurance to Obregon and
Mexican officials of their support and friendly coopera
tion," Secretary Fall complains, "seeking advantage against
or over American companies, while the British Government
owning this company [Cowdray's Aguila Company], is os
tensibly standing by the United States Government in its
action" of resistance to Mexican laws. Was ever the iden
tity of oil, governments, and diplomacy more perfectly
established or more blatantly confessed? Was ever the
menace to Mexico and the world's peace more clearly sug
gested? Secretary Fall and his oil friends are able to
draw only one moral from the "conspiracy" they have un
covered. By conforming to Mexican laws and decrees, which
Americans resist, the British are cutting under the Ameri
can oil companies; therefore, down with Mexican laws and
decrees! And the American Government and people are
supposed to join in the cry. Mr. Fall does not intend that
American business shall be undone by the laws of a neigh
boring country which bless those who obey and punish
those who do not.
From President Obregon down to the humblest policeman,
Mexican officials know that highly financed intrigue can
produce "bandit" uprisings, outrages against foreigners, or
"revolutions" which they are unable exactly to foresee or
prevent. The nervous suspicions of an impulsive populace,
no less than the weight of sheer bribery, makes this so. To
an American visitor who had just recounted his reasons
for believing that armed intervention was near, a highly
placed Mexican official exclaimed: "I beg of you don't tell
that story to many of our people. There would be riots
before the American Embassy within twenty-four hours!"
That is an indication of the human high explosives which
alien mischief-makers have ready at hand. It is in large
part a result of American conquest in 1848, revived by the
invasions of Vera Cruz and Chihuahua under President
Wilson, and kept alive by the elevation to Cabinet rank of
Senator Fall, whose draft of demands upon Mexico has
[Vol. 112, No. 2912
opened fresh wounds in the pride of every patriot below

the Rio Grande.
In his letter addressed to a Mexican attorney, and then
given to the press, Mr. Fall says: "Personally I am ex
ceedingly desirous that this Government should cooperate
with any such Government or proposed Government of
Mexico in the most friendly, earnest, and sincere manner."
Fine words. Yet the very letter in which they are set down
carried insult to the Mexican Government as direct as if
it had been deliberately drawn to humiliate a proud people.
When I asked him to comment on the Fall demands Presi
dent Obregon made a visible effort to reply with words
that should not convey his bitter resentment. To under
stand this resentment, let us glance at the Fall demands.
They are: (1) That a commission be appointed to ascer
tain the extent of damage suffered by Americans and Amer
ican property, and by Mexicans and Mexican property on
both sides of the frontier; (2) that another or the same
commission be directed to settle boundary and irrigation
disputes between the two countries; (3) that Article 27,
or any decree or law issued thereunder, shall not apply to
deprive American citizens of their property rights thereto
fore legally acquired; that clauses with reference to the
teaching of schools by ministers of the Gospel, to the teach
ing of Christianity by Americans, and like clauses, shall not
be enforced against American citizens; (4) that agree
ments be signed for the protection of American citizens and
their property rights in Mexico in future; (5) that as the
only acceptable price of recognition the Obregon Adminis
tration shall give previous signed allegiance to the above
points, which "shall be embodied in a formal treaty between
the two countries as soon as the Mexican Government is
recognized." Religion and property rights are crudely mixed
in Senator Fall's prescription. But this effort to mobilize
the Church for war on Mexico ought not to get far in the
light of comment by Enoch F. Fell, associate secretary of
the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mis
sions, who says:
So far as I have been able to ascertain, our missionaries in
Mexico do not suffer any disabilities or persecution either from
the Government or from non-governmental sources. I cannot
say that our work has been seriously handicapped by any pro
visions of the Mexican Constitution or laws passed thereunder.
I don't think that our Government would ever be justified in
demanding that the Constitution of Mexico be changed to suit
our tastes. As for the teaching of schools by ministers of the
Gospel and the preaching of Christianity by Americans and so
on, they do not bother us the least bit. Under no circumstances
would we, the representatives of American churches, allow our
missionary interests to be so closely tied up to those political
and financial questions that are involved in Secretary Fall's
letter. If any Protestant missionaries or Christian leaders
urged these things upon Mr. Fall, then they must have done
so in their personal capacity and not as representatives of the
boards or churches.
Omitting the religious issue, which does not exist, Mexico
is able and anxious to meet every requirement set forth in
the Fall letter. But her leaders and common people regard
as infamous Secretary Fall's contemptuous ultimatum that
they stand at the point of a gun and give bond that they
will not lie and steal from foreigners. I had been told that
several notes sent to Mexico by Secretary of State Colby
were so insulting that no response was ever made to them.
So, when, seated at President Obregon's side in the Na
tional Palace, I referred to the protocol demanded by Sec
April 27, 1921]
The Nation
retary Fall as the price of recognition for his Administra

tion, I was not surprised when Mexico's new Chief Execu
tive refused to repeat Mr. Fall's name or to discuss the
terms of his proposal. "Is Mexico prepared to sign such a
protocol as the price of recognition?" I asked. "Mexico
has not sought recognition from the United States," the
President replied, and then was silent long enough for the
answer to interpret itself. In a moment he continued :
Nevertheless, the Government and people of Mexico crave the
friendship and good will of the Government and people of the
United States, and the formal recognition that would naturally
follow. We have much to gain through peace and cooperation
with the United States, and much to give. And we have no
objection to making a treaty which would establish important
policies affecting the two countries. But a treaty between in
dependent nations must contain reciprocal advantages. Such
a treaty Mexico is ready to negotiate. There is, however, no
factor in the actual circumstances between the United States
and Mexico, and no precedent in international law, to justify
a demand that Mexico sign a treaty as the price of formal
recognition.
With two members of the Obregon Cabinet I enjoyed
frank discussions of the intervention peril. The first of
these officials professed to have no fear that the United
States would provoke a war. He is an idealist in philosophy
and a realist in action, yet his words sounded naive. "There
is no cause for war," he said ; "we have concluded our revo
lution, and American capital is secure in Mexico and re
turning a good profit to its owners. The oil corporations
are much better off under our laws than they would be if
they had to pay the heavy taxes made necessary in the
United States by the World War. Your country has a ter
rible load of debt, and the party in control is pledged to
curtail expenditures and reduce taxation. A war with
Mexico would defeat that program, and win nothing more
than Mexico is willing to guarantee through peaceful nego
tiations." Yet, I insisted, what if invasion should come
in spite of all that? "We can hold out for many years,"
he replied; "we know the mountain paths and our people
are skilled in guerrilla fighting."
The second Minister was a shade less sanguine, but still
hopeful that peace would prevail. "We think Secretary
Hughes will be just because he is honest and intelligent,"
this man told me. "We realize that the United States is
an invincible Power, that it contains elements at present
hostile to Mexico, and that our policy must conform to the
actualities. But we will never accept the status of Cuba,
whose position as a dependency of the United States is some
times recommended as a 'solution' for Mexico. Within the
shadow of a peril which we fully comprehend, the policy of
this Administration is to busy itself with a just solution of
its domestic tasks and not worry too much about a danger
that we cannot control."
And so the peril stands, and grows. Yet if there be any
reverence left in the American soul for illustrious example
and acclaimed wisdom of the past, then intrigue, lies, and
organized selfishness will not serve to stain the flag with
ruthless conquest and strew the continent with fresh hor
rors of war. In concluding this brief study I commend to
the people in general and to the Republican Party espe
cially some words in which all I feel and far more than I
have said about Mexico are luminously expressed by the
best-beloved figure in American history. Were he alive
today Abraham Lincoln could hardly pen a message more
filled with wisdom and timely analysis than the note he
617
sent forward to his representative in Mexico City a few

months before violent death struck him down. Maximilian
had fallen and Mexico was struggling again to her feet
under the guidance of President Benito Juarez when Lin
coln wrote:
For a few years past the condition of Mexico has been so
unsettled as to raise the question on both sides of the Atlantic
whether the time has not come when some foreign Power ought,
in the general interest of society, to intervene, to establish a
protectorate or some other form of government in that country,
and guarantee its continuance there. . . .
You will not fail to assure the Government of Mexico that
the President neither has nor can ever have any sympathy with
such designs, in whatever quarter they may arise or whatever
character they may take on. . . .
The President never for a moment doubts that the republican
system is to pass safely through all ordeals and prove a perma
nent success in our own country and so be recommended to
adoption by all other nations. But he thinks, also, that the
system everywhere has to make its way painfully through
difficulties and embarrassments which result from the actionof antagonistical elements which are a legacy of former timet
and very different institutions.
The President is hopeful of the ultimate triumph of this sys
tem over all obstacles, as well as in regard to Mexico as in
regard to every other American state; but he feels that these
states are nevertheless justly entitled to a greater forbearance
and more generous sympathy from the Government and the
people of the United States than they are likely to receive in
any other quarter.
The President trusts that your mission, manifesting these
sentiments, will reassure the Government of Mexico of his best
disposition to favor their commerce and internal improvements
/ find the archives here full of complaints against the Mexi
can Government for violation of contracts and spoliation and
cruelties practiced against American citizens. It is not the
President's intention to send forward such claims at the present
moment. He willingly defers the performance of a duty which
at any time would seem ungracious, until the incoming Admin
istration in Mexico shall have had time, if possible, to cement
its authority.
To that utterance nothing can be added in definition of
the duty owed to Mexico by the United States.
The British Coal Strike

By HAROLD J. LASKI
London, April 4
WITHIN less than four months since the last great
strike the coal industry of this country is again
plunged into complete chaos. This time the stoppage can
without exaggeration be described as the most serious the
country has ever known. For the first time in its history
the Miners' Federation has withdrawn labor of every sort
from the pits, so that the flooding of the deeper mines will
be, if the stoppage be at all prolonged, a certainty. For the
first time also, it has definitely appealed to the remaining
partners of the Triple Alliance for aid; and it is difficult to
believe that assistance can be withheld at so critical a time.
Unless, therefore, something unforeseen occurs in the next
two or three days the country will be confronted by the
greatest industrial dislocation of its history. It is purely
idle as yet to talk of revolution, though there are doubtless
elements in both camps to whom that prospect is inviting.
The present issue is purely one of wages. How much more
618
The Nation
it is to become will depend upon the policy of the Govern

ment.
The present dispute turns upon the sudden decision of
the Government to decontrol the mines. The causes of
that step are very difficult to assess. Everyone knew that
peace depended upon owners and men having a sufficient
amount of time to work out a solution of their common
problems. If control had been maintained until its nor
mal date (August 31) a settlement would have been in
evitable for the sufficient reason that the united public
opinion of the country would have demanded it. But the
sudden resolve of the Government to predate decontrol to
March 31 made settlement impossible. The owners were
living through a bad financial period. They disliked the
system of national wage agreements to which control had
committed them. They saw an admirable opportunity not
only of returning to the old system of district settlements,
but thereby also of striking a decisive blow at the prestige
of the Miners' Federation and of destroying the large in
creases of wages which the men secured from the war. The
time, moreover, was from their standpoint excellent. Large
stocks of coal had been everywhere accumulated; the trade
position made coal-getting profitable only in a bare handful
of the best mines; and the miners' funds were low as a
result of the November strike. Postponement of decontrol
would, at most, have cost the Government a few scores of
thousands; the present dispute, if it be prolonged, will cost
not only millions, but possibly the export trade in coal. The
decision taken fits in so admirably with what the owners
must have desired as to make the hypothesis of collusion
between them and the Cabinet at least worthy of considera
tion. It comes moreover at a moment when Mr. Lloyd
George has been insisting on the danger of the Labor Party
to the State.
Once it was seen that decontrol was inevitable, the
owners took the steps expected of them. Mining, they
argued, is no longer profitable; therefore wages must be
reduced. There is to be no standard reduction uniformly
through the coal fields, but district reductions varying from
a 50 per cent cut in South Wales to something like 20 per
cent in Durham. That, broadly speaking, would mean in
real wages the loss of all the miners' war gains, including
the special Sankey award made in March, 1919, on the
special and specific ground that the miners' standard of life
was inadequate. It is to be noted that no statistical proof
of the degree to which the industry is unprofitable was
offered. We do not learn of the profit in by-products, the
sale of coke, and the transference of coal to blast furnaces
connected with not a few mines. We do not learn how the
rate of profit varies from mine-field to mine-field, much
less from mine to mine. We are simply given the owners'
contemptuous ipse dixit as the basis of action. Nor was
there consultation with the men. The reductions decreed
were simply posted at the pithead; all existing contracts
were terminated; and the Miners' Federation was abso
lutely ignored. Autocratic government could hardly go
further.
The miners' position is a simple one, though they have
hardly succeeded in making their case plain to the public.
That decontrol must mean a reduction in wages is common
ground. Mr. Frank Hodges, indeed, has asked for a na
tional subsidy for the mines until the present crisis has
passed; but that is not practical politics and may well be
ignored. In our present financial position no one industry
[Vol. 112, No. 2912
can be allowed to become parasitic upon the country. Alter

natively, they demand national negotiations of wage-rates.
This, it should be noted, they have already had for six years,
and it does not preclude variation according to districts, so
long as the center of negotiation is the executive of the
miners. What they resent, and rightly resent, is that their
wages should be cut without regard to a standard of life,
to the price of coal, to their employers' rate of profit, or
even to the necessary data without which the owners have
left them to fight in the dark. Their one tactical mistake
is to have withdrawn the pump and enginemen and so to
have made possible the flooding of the mines. This has
set the opinion of the usually indifferent man in the street
against them; it is a grave menace to the recovery of our
trade; and it is a positive inducement to the owners to
prolong the dispute. The explanation offered is that if
the mines were kept open, the Government might have
helped the owners to blackleg; but most people will think
that a prior agreement on this head could have been had.
Probably the action is simply a symptom of the temper in
which the struggle is to be fought
That the real culprit in the struggle is the Government
will be obvious to everyone. Its action is akin to that sin
ister folly which in Ireland and India, in Egypt and Central
Europe destroys both our good name and our prosperity
in the interests of reaction. Mr. Lloyd George was com
mitted to the Sankey Report, and when he deliberately
evaded that pledge he laid all the foundations of the present
trouble. He had to choose between power and his honor,
and, characteristically enough, he chose power. That the
mines are a good investment for the nation will be obvious
to anyone who remembers that in the six years from 1914
the owners received more than their capital value in profit;
an investment which pays 100 per cent in six years might
have attracted even a vote-catching Prime Minister. But
just as Dr. Addison was afraid of the building guilds and
did his best to block their progress, so Mr. Lloyd George
was afraid that if the nationalization of the mines was a
success, the railways and shipping would follow. As virtual
head of the Tory Party he had, of course, to reject nation
alization if he wished to retain office.
The effect on the nation of this strike is bound to be
disastrous. If the miners lose the present strike, they will
merely gird up their loins for a further struggle, and it
is that absence of certain peace which is chiefly working
havoc with the coal industry. If they lose, their defeat will,
confessedly, be the signal for a frontal attack upon wages,
which will result in a grave degradation of the national
standard of life. That is why the railway men and the
transport workers will probably think it imperative to assist
the miners now. It is better to have a strike of their own
choosing than to have one forced upon them, and it is well
that capital the country over should be taught that wages
cannot be reduced with impunity. But we have far to
travel before that realization will have been grasped. When
it is, I think a different government will be in power.

Harold J. Laski, formerly of Harvard and the School for
Social Research, is a professor at the University of
London.
George P. West is a well-known writer on political and
sociological subjects.
April 27, 1921]
The Nation
Contemporary
American
619
Novelists
By CARL VAN DOREN

IV. WINSTON CHURCHILL
THE tidal wave of historical romance which toward the
end of the past century attacked this coast and broke
so far inland as to inundate the entire continent swept
Winston Churchill to a substantial peak of popularity to
which he has since clung, with little apparent loss, by the
exercise of methods somewhat but not greatly less romantic
than those which at first lifted him above the flood. Those
early methods, certainly, were not his own inventions. Full
allowance being made for the dubiety of literary lineages,
"The Virginians" will still do well enough as an ancestor
of "Richard Carvel," in both of which gallant young Ameri
can provincials learn the way of the world in England ; and
"Lorna Doone" will do well enough as an ancestor of "The
Crossing," in both of which precocious and virtuous lads
of a backwoods disposition rise through adventure to mar
riages with charming ladies. "The Crisis," one of the
earliest Civil War romances on something like the grand
scale, and "Coniston," with its Jacksonian democracy mis
behaving among the Yankees, seem perhaps hardly so legiti
mate in descent. The proportion of originality among the
four, however, is of course neither determinable nor im
portant. Romance always actually follows the methods it
obviously followed during the Middle Ages, advancing some
what anonymously through the generations, alternately
waxing and waning like the moon; and Mr. Churchill is
of the sound romantic tradition.
He came when romance was in that ascendant mood,
enlarged by that moment of national expansiveness, which
attended the war with Spain. Patriotism and jingoism,
altruism and imperialism, passion and sentimentalism shook
the temper which had been slowly stiffening since the Civil
War. Now, with a rush of unaccustomed emotions the
national imagination sought out its own past, luxuriating
in it, not to say wallowing in it. In Mr. Churchill it found
a romancer full of consolation to any who might fear or
suspect that the country's history did not quite match its
destiny. He had enough erudition to lend a very consid
erable "thickness" to his scene, whether it was Annapolis
or St. Louis or Kentucky or upland New England. He
had a sense for the large general bearings of this or that
epoch; he had a firm, warm confidence in the future im
plied and adumbrated by this past ; he had a feeling for the
ceremonial in all eminent occasions. He had, too, a knack
at archaic costume and knack enough at the idiom in
which his contemporaries believed their forebears had ex
pressed themselves. And he had, besides all these quali
ties needed to make his records heroic, the quality of moral
earnestness which imparted to them the look of moral
significance. Richard Carvel, by the exercise of simple
Maryland virtues, rises above the enervate young sparks of
Mayfair; Stephen Brice in "The Crisis" by his simple
Yankee virtues makes his mark among the St. Louis rebels
who, however, are gallant and noble though misguided
men; canny David Ritchie in "The Crossing" leads the
frontiersmen of Kentucky as the little child of fable leads
the lion and the lamb; crafty Jethro Bass in "Coniston,"
though a village boss with a pocketful of mortgages and
consequently of constituents, surrenders his ugly power at

the touch of a maiden's hand.
To reflect a little upon this combination of heroic color
and moral earnestness is to discover how much Mr. Churchill
owes to the elements injected into American life by Theo
dore Roosevelt. Is not "The Crossing"to take specific
illustrationsconnected with the same central saga as "The
Winning of the West"? Is not "Coniston," whatever the
date of its events, an arraignment of that civic corruption
which Roosevelt hated as the natural result of civic negli
gence, and against which he urged the duty of an awakened
civic conscience? In time Mr. Churchill was to extend his
inquiries to regions of speculation into which Roosevelt
never ventured, but as regards American history and
American polities they were of one mind. "Nor are the
ethics of the manner of our acquisition of a part of Panama
and the Canal," wrote Mr. Churchill in 1918 in his essay
on The American Contribution and the Democratic Idea,
"wholly defensible from the point of view of international
democracy. Yet it must be remembered that President
Roosevelt was dealing with a corrupt, irresponsible, and
hostile government, and that the Canal had become a neces
sity not only for our own development, but for that of the
civilization of the world." And again: "The only real peril
confronting democracy is the arrest of growth." Roose
velt himself could not have muddled an issue better. Like
him Mr. Churchill has habitually moved along the main
lines of national feelingbelieving in America and de
mocracy with a fealty unshaken by any adverse evidence
and delighting in the American pageant with a gusto rarely
modified by the exercise of any critical intelligence. Morally
he has been strenuous and eager; intellectually he has been
naive and belated. Whether he has been writing what
was avowedly romance or what was intended to be sober
criticism, he has been always the romancer first and the
critic afterwards.
And yet since the vogue of historical romance passed
nearly a score of years ago Mr. Churchill has honestly
striven to keep up with the world by thinking about it.
One novel after another has presented some encroaching
problem of American civic or social life: the control of
polities by interest in "Mr. Crewe's Career"; divorce in
"A Modern Chronicle"; the conflict between Christianity
and business in "The Inside of the Cup" ; the oppression of
the soul by the lust for temporal power in "A Far Coun
try" ; the struggle of women with the conditions of modern
industry in "The Dwelling Place of Light." Nothing has
hurried Mr. Churchill or forced his hand; he has taken
two or three years for each novel, has read widely, has
brooded over his theme, has reinforced his stories with
solid documentation. He has aroused prodigious discussion
of his challenges and solutionsparticularly in the case
of "The Inside of the Cup." That novel perhaps best of all
exhibits his later methods. John Hodder by some miracle
of inattention or some accident of isolation has been kept
in his country parish from any contact with the doubt
which characterizes his age. Transferred to a large city
he almost instantly finds in himself heresies hitherto only
latent, spends a single summer among the poor, and in
620
The Nation
the fall begins relentless war against the unworthy rich

among his congregation. Thought plays but a trivial part
in Hodder's development. Had he done any real thinking
he must long before have freed himself from the dogmas
that obstruct him. Instead, he has drifted with the gen
eral stream, and learns not from the leaders but from the
slower followers of opinion. Like the politician he absorbs
through his skin, gathering premonitions as to which way
the crowd is going and then rushing off in that direction.
If this recalls the processes of Roosevelt, hardly less does
it recall those of Mr. Churchill. Once taken by an idea for
a novel, he has always burned with it as if it were as new
to the world as to him. Here lies, without much question,
the secret of that genuine earnestness which pervades all
his books: he writes out of the contagious passion of a
recent convert or a still excited discoverer. Here lies, too,
without much question, the secret of Mr. Churchill's suc
cess in holding his audiences: a sort of unconscious poli
tician among novelists, he gathers his premonitions at happy
moments, when the drift is already setting in. Never once
has Mr. Churchill, like a philosopher or a seer, run off
alone.
Even for those, however, who perceive that he belongs
intellectually to a middle class which is neither very subtle
nor very profound on the one hand nor very shrewd or very
downright on the other, it is impossible to withhold from
Mr. Churchill the respect due a sincere, scrupulous, and
upright man who has served the truth and his art accord
ing to his lights. If he has not overheard the keenest
voices of his age, neither has he listened to the voice of the
mob. The sounds which have reached him from among the
people have come from those who eagerly aspire to better
things arrived at by orderly progress, from those who desire
in some lawful way to outgrow the injustices and inequali
ties of civil existence and by fit methods to free the human
spirit from all that clogs and stifles it. But as they aspire
and intend better than they think, so, in concert with them,
does Mr. Churchill. In all his novels, even the most ro
mantic, the real interest lies in some mounting aspiration
opposed to a static regime, whether the passion for inde
pendence among the American colonies, or the expanding
movement of the population westward, or the crusades
against slavery or political malfeasance, or the extrication
of liberal temperaments from the shackles of excessive
wealth or poverty or orthodoxy. Yet the only conclusions he
can at all devise are those which history has devised already
the achievement of independence or of the Illinois coun
try, the abolition of slavery, the defeat of this or that
usurper of power in politics. Rarely is anything really
thought out. Compare, for instance, his epic of matrimony,
"A Modern Chronicle," with such a penetratingif satiri
calstudy as "The Custom of the Country." Mrs. Wharton
urges no more doctrine than Mr. Churchill, and she,
like him, confines herself to the career of one woman with
her successive husbands; but whereas the "Custom" is
luminous with quiet suggestion and implicit commentary
upon the relations of the sexes in the prevailing modes of
marriage, the "Chronicle" has little more to say than that
after two exciting marriages a woman is ready enough to
settle peacefully down with the friend of her childhood
whom she should have married in the beginning. In "A
Far Country" a lawyer who has let himself be made a tool
in the hands of nefarious corporations undergoes a tragic
love affair, suffers conversion, reads a few books of modern
[Vol. 112, No. 2912
speculation, and resolutely turns his face toward a new

order. In the same precipitate fashion the heroine of "The
Dwelling Place of Light," who has given no apparent
thought whatever to economic problems except as they
touch her individually, suffers a shock in connection with
her intrigue with her capitalist employer and becomes
straightway a "radical," shortly thereafter making a pa
thetic and edifying end in childbirth. In all these books
there are hundreds of sound observations and elevated senti
ments; the author's sympathies are, as a rule, remarkably
right; but taken as a whole his most serious novels, how
ever lifelike and well rounded their surfaces may seem,
lack the upholding, articulating skeleton of thought.
Much the same lack of spiritual penetration and intel
lectual consistency which has kept Mr. Churchill from ever
building a very notable realistic plot has kept him from
ever creating any very memorable characters. The author
of ten novels, immensely popular for more than a score of
years, he has to his credit not a single figureman or
womangenerally accepted by the public as either a type
or a person. With remarkably few exceptions he has seen
his dramatic personae from without, anddoubtless for
that reasonhas apparently felt as free to saw and fit them
to his argument as he has felt with his plots. Something
preposterous in the millionaire reformer Mr. Crewe, some
thing cantankerous and passionate in the Abolitionist Judge
Whipple of "The Crisis," above all something both tough
and quaint in the up-country politician Jethro Bass in
"Coniston," resisted the argumentative knife and saved for
those particular persons that look of being entities in their
own right which distinguishes the authentic from the arti
ficial characters of fiction. For the most part, however, Mr.
Churchill has erred in what may be called the arithmetic of
his art: he has thought of men and women as mere frac
tions of a unit of fiction, whereas they themselves in any but
romances must be the units and the total work the sum or
product of the Active operation. Naturally he has succeeded
rather worse with characters of his own creating, since his
conceptions in such cases have come to him as social or
political problems to be illustrated in the conduct of beings
suitably shaped, than in characters drawn in some measure
from history, with their individualities already more or
less established. Without achieving fresh or bold inter
pretations of John Paul Jones or George Rogers Clark or
Lincoln Mr. Churchill has added a good deal to the vivid
ness of their legends ; whereas in the case of characters not
quite so historical, such as Judge Whipple and Jethro Bass,
he has admirably fused his moral earnestness regarding
American politics with his sense of spaciousness and color
in the American past.
After the most careful reflection upon Mr. Churchill's suc
cessive Studies of contemporary life one recurs irresistibly
to his romances. He possesses, and has more than once
displayed, a true romanticalmost a true epicinstinct.
Behind the careers of Richard Carvel and Stephen Brice
and David Ritchie and Jethro Bass appear the procession
and reverberation of stirring days. Nearer a Walter Scott
than a Bernard Shaw, Mr. Churchill has always been willing
to take the memories of his nation as they have come down
to him and to work them without question or rejection into
his broad tapestry. A naturalistic generation is tempted
to make light of such methods; they belong, however, too
truly to good traditions of literature to be overlooked. A
national past has many uses, and different dispositions find
The Nation
April 27, 1921]
in it instruction or warning, depression or exaltation. Mr.

Churchill has found in the American past a cause for exal
tation chiefly; after his ugliest chapters the light breaks
and he close always upon the note of high confidence which
resounds in the epics of robust, successful nations. If in
this respect he has too regularly flattered his countrymen,
he has also enriched the national consciousness by the colors
which he has brought back from his impassioned forays.
Only now and then, it must be remembered, do historical
novels pass in their original form from one generation to
another; more frequently they suffer a decomposition due
to their lack of essential truth and descend to the function
of compost for succeeding harvests of romance.
Though
probably but one or two of Mr. Churchill's booksperhaps

not even onecan be expected to outlast a generation with
much vitality, he cannot be denied the honor of having
added something agreeable if imponderable to the national
memory and so of having served his country in one real
way if not in another.
A Short View of Gamalielese

By H. L. MENCKEN
N the first sentence of the historic address from the east
front of the Capitol, glowing there like a gem, was that
piquant miscegenation of pronouns the one-he combination,
621
a sample strophe from the canto on the budget system in

the message: It will be a very great satisfaction to know
of its early enactment, so it may be employed in establishing

the economies and business methods so necessary in the
minimum of expenditure. This is awful stuff, I grant you,
but is it actually unintelligible? Surely not. Read it slowly
and critically, and it may boggle you, but read it at one flash,
and the meaning will be clear enough. Its method is that of
pointillisme. The blotches of color are violent, and, seen
too closely they appear insane, but stand off a bit and a
quite simple and even austere design is at once discerned.
I hope it is adopted soon, so that we may employ the econo
mies and business methods needed to hold down expenses:
this is the kernel. What else is there is the style. It is
the style of what the text-books of rhetoric call elevated
discourse. Its aim is to lend force to a simple hope or plea
or asseveration by giving it the dynamic whoop and hoopla
of a revival sermon, an auction sale, or a college yell. The
nuclear thought is not smothered in the process, as Demo
cratic aesthetes argue, nor is it true that there is sometimes
no nuclear thought at all. It is always present, and nine
times out of ten it is simple, obvious, and highly respectable.
But it lacks punch; it is devoid of any capacity to startle

and scorch. To give it the vigor and dignity that a great
occasion demands it is carefully encased in those Swath
ings of sonorous polysyllables, and then, the charge being

rammed home, it is discharged point-blank into the ears
and cerebrums of Christendom.
for years a favorite of bad newspaper reporters and the
Such is the Gamalian manner, the secret of the Gamalian
inferior clergy. In the fourth sentence of the first mes
state paperwho knows?may caress and enchant us with

Whom can deny? And the next with I would have had
style. That style had its origin under circumstances that

are surely not unknown to experts in politico-agrarian ora
tory. It came to birth on the rustic stump, it developed to
full growth among the chautauquas, and it got its final
polishing in a small-town newspaper office. In brief, it re
flects admirably the tastes and traditions of the sort of
to have had. And the next with between you and I. And
audience at which it was first aimed, to wit, the yokelry of
the next, going the whole hog, with alright, to date the
the hinterland, naive, agape, thirsty for the prodigious, and

eager to yell. Such an audience has no fancy for a well
knit and succinct argument, packed with ideas. Of all ideas,
indeed, it is suspicious, but it will at least tolerate those that
it knows by long hearing, those that have come to the estate
sage to Congress is illy, the passion of rural grammar

teachers and professors of rhetoric in one-building univer
sities- We are, as they say, getting warm. The next great
gaudiest, loveliest, darndest flower of the American lan

guage, which God preserve!
Hog: flower? Perhaps the distemper is contagious. But

certainly not uninteresting to study and snuffle overcer
tainly no dull thing to the specialist in morbid philology.
In the style of the late Woodrow there was nothing, after
all, very remarkable, despite the orgiastic praises of Adolph
Ochs, the Hon. Josephus Daniels, and other such fanatics.
It was simply the style of a somewhat literary and sentimen
tal curate, with borrowings from Moody and Sankey and
Dr. Berthold Baer. Its phrases lisped and cooed; there was
a velvety and funereal gurgling in them; they were made to
be intoned between the second and third lessons by fashion
able rectors; aided by fifes and drums, or even by cost-plus

contracts, they were competent to vamp the intellect. But
intrinsically they were hollow. No heart's blood was in
them; no gobs of raw flesh. There was no passion there,
hot, exigent, and challenging. They could not make one
puff and pant.
One had to wait for Dr. Harding
for that. In his style there is pressure, ardency, effortcy,

gasping, a high grunting, Cheyne-Stokes breathing. It is
a style that rolls and groans, struggles and complains. It

is the style of a rhinoceros liberating himself by main
strength from a lake of boiling molasses.
In the doctrine that it is obscure I take no stock what
of platitudes, those that fall readily into gallant and highfa

lutin phrases. Above all, it distrusts perspicuity, for per
spicuity is challenging and forces one to think, and hence

lays a burden on the mind. What it likes most of all is the
roll of incomprehensible polysyllablesthe more incompre
hensible the better. It wants to be bombarded, bawled at,
overwhelmed by mad gusts of the parts of speech. It wants
to be entertained by orators who are manifestly superior
fellows whose discourse is so all-fired learned and unintelli
gible, so brilliant with hard words and trombone phrases,

that it leaves them gasping. Let the thunder sound, and it
takes all else on trust.
If a sentence ends with a roar, it
does not stop to inquire how it began. If a phrase has

punch, it does not ask that it also have a meaning. If a word
stings, that is enough.
Trained to the service of such connoisseurs, Dr. Harding
carries over the style that they admire into his traffic with
the Congress, the effete intelligentsia, and the powers and
principalities of Europe. That style is based upon the sim
plest of principles. For every idea there is what may
be
called a maximum investiturea garb of words beyond
ever. Not a single sentence in the two great papers is in
which it is a sheer impossibility to go in gaudiness.
comprehensible to me, even after I have dined. I exhume
every plain word there is a word four times as big. The
For
622
The Nation
problem is to think the thing out in terms of harmless

banality, to arrange a series of obvious and familiar ideas
in a logical sequence, and then to translate them, one by one,
into nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and pronouns of the
highest conceivable horse-powerto lift the whole discourse
to the plane of artillery practiceto dignify the sense by all
the arts of sorcery. Turn to the two immortal documents.
The word citizen is plainly banal; even a Congressman can
understand it. Very well, then let us make it citizenship
and citizenship it becomes every time. But even that is not
enough. There comes a high point in the argument; a few
more pounds of steam must be found. Citizen now under
goes a second proliferation; it becomes factor in our
citizenship. "We must invite . . . every factor in our
citizenship to join in the effort"to restore normalcy. So
with women. It is a word in common use, a vulgar word,
a word unfit for the occasions of statecraft. Also, it be
comes womanhood. Again, there is reference; it swells up
a bit and becomes referendum. Yet again, civil becomes
civicmore scholarly, more tasty, more nobby. Yet again,
interference has a low smack; it suggests plow-horses that
interfere. En avant! there is intermediation! And so with
whole phrases. "The views of the world" gives way to "the
expressed views of world opinion." "Heedless of cost" be
comes "in heedlessness of cost." "Public conscience" be
comes "the expressed conscience of progress." The "uplift,"
now ancient and a trifle obscene, is triumphantly reincar
nated in "our manifestation of human interest." "The Gov
ernment's duty to develop good citizens" shrieks upward like
a rocket and bursts magnificently into "the Government's
obligation affirmatively to encourage development of the
highest and most efficient type of citizenship." And so on
and on.
Naturally enough, this style has its perils, no less hellish
than war's. A man, so blowing up the parts of speech, may
have one burst in his face. I discern something of the sort,
alas, in "Congress might speed the price readjustment to
normal relationship, with helpfulness of both producer and
consumer." Here there has been an accident, just what I
do not know. I suspect that "normal relationship" was sub
stituted for normalcy, and that normalcy somehow got its
revenge. Or maybe helpfulness came to its rescue and did
the dirty work. Furthermore, the little word of has a sus
picious look. I let the problem go. It is not one that a
literary man engages with much gusto. He knows by harsh
experience that words have a way of playing tricksthat
they run amok at times, and toss him in the air, or stand
him on his headthat fooling with them is like training
leopards and panthers to leap through hoops and play the
violoncello. There is, I have a notion, a foul conspiracy
among words to pull Dr. Harding's legs from under him.
He has tortured them for yearson the stump, in the chautauquas, beside the felled and smoking ox, at the annual
banquets of the Chamber of Commerce, the Knights of
Pythias, the Rotary Club, the Moose ; above all, on the floors
of legislative halls and in the columns of the Marion Star.
He has forced them into strange and abhorrent marriages.
He has stretched them as if they were chewing-gum. He
has introduced pipes into them and pumped them until they
screamed. He has put them to cruel and unusual uses.
He has shown them no mercy. . . . Now, at last, they
have him before a crowd that loves mirth, and make ready
to get their revanche. Now they prepare to put the skids
under him.
[Vol. 112, No. 2912
The Mooney Case Today

By GEORGE P. WEST
ONLY a pardon from Governor Stephens can give
Mooney and Billings their freedom. Each has spent
more than four years in prison*- under life sentences fol
lowing their conviction for planting the bomb that killed a
score of people during the San Francisco Preparedness Day
Parade of July, 1916. No intelligent citizen any longer
denies that they were convicted on perjured testimony.
Recent confessions by witnesses and a city detective have
\ completed the destruction of the case against them. The
'Judge who presided at Mooney's trial, the detective ser
geant who procured the State's witnesses, the Attorney
General of California, the district attorney who succeeded
Fickert, the Episcopal Bishop of San Franciscoall these
and many more have urged action to correct a flagrant
miscarriage of justice.
The Supreme Court has washed its hands. Denying the
petition of the trial judge and the Attorney General, it
held, more than two years ago, that inasmuch as the official
record of the Mooney trial contained no evidence of perjury
the conviction must stand, because the court cannot go out
side of the record. It would take a legal training to under
stand how such a decision could have any other effect than
to bring the law and the whole judicial process into con
tempt. But at least the decision put the case squarely up to
Governor Stephens, and for two years the responsibility
has been solely his. His latest acknowledgment was to deny
rather brusquely, a year ago, the request of an official dele
gation from the State Federation of Labor for an audience
on Mooney's and Billing's behalf.
District Attorney Brady, who defeated Fickert last year
largely with the help of Fremont Older, editor of the Call
[of San Francisco], and others who had organized the de
mand for Mooney's and Billings's release, stands ready to
investigate every new disclosure bearing on the corruption
that resulted in the convictions. When John McDonald, the
migratory laborer whose testimony identified Billings as the
planter of the bomb, came to San Francisco prepared to
testify that he had perjured himself, Mr. Brady took him
before the grand jury and attempted to get him immunity.
A committee of six members of the grand jury promised
the immunity, but it was later withdrawn and McDonald
was threatened by agents and friends of principals in the
original frame-up. Mr. Brady's good faith is not ques
tioned, but no ambitious politician would yet dare to show
zeal and enthusiasm in Mooney's behalf. Many of Mooney's
friends are urging that Mr. Brady bring Mooney to trial
on one of the remaining indictments, while others insist that
a new trial would be a farce, as all the available witnesses
have been already completely discredited, and if Governor
Stephens will not now sign a pardon there is no reason to
suppose that he would act after an acquittal. The Mooney
prosecution might even be strengthened, because attention
would be diverted from the record as it stands to the merits
of the second trial, in which the prosecution's failure to
make a case would be excused on the ground of the time
that has elapsed and the dispersal of the witnesses. The
first convictions would, of course, stand.
Melodrama and sordid comedy and amazing corruption
are in the tale that has been told and retold. What the
The Nation
April 27, 1921]
world outside of California must wonder, must want to

know, is why nothing is done about it, why the years pass
and Mooney and Billings still remain in prison. What do
, the Californian opposed to a pardon have to

self? Simply this, that Mooney was a Bolshevik, a bad egg,
and belongs in jail on general principles!
Here is the most interesting and significant fact of the
whole case. You can go about among-the-pillars of society
anywhere in California and hear one champion of law and
a dangerous man,
order after another calmly waive the question of whether
there was a single bit of valid evidence proving Mooney's

guilt and still insist that Mooney belongs in prison and
should stay there!
| The sensational arrests a few hours after the bomb ex
plosion
centered on Mooney and his fellows the abhorrence
and hatred of the community. The weight of it has never
been
lifted, because the trial proved, not that he was a
/murderer, but that he was a particularly obstreperous agi

/tator who dramatized his rather childish and malicious
mischief-making as an important contribution to the class
struggle. Mooney never grew up, and left alone he would

have exhausted the patience of the few radicals who still
applauded his abortive, inept, melodramatic attempts to

organize the unorganized or to capture control of unions
already in existence. Trades union bosses hated him as
bitterly as the managers and promoters of San Francisco's
big public utilities. Labor union politicians have been half
hearted and halting in coming to his defense, and privately

they have cursed him even while publicly urging a pardon
or a new trial. The story of Mooney's alleged transgression
in addressing a priest who called on him in prison as Mr.
623
by which justice was habitually bought and sold under

Fickert's nose in the police courts. It did finally defeat
Fickert. It even elected a district attorney who favors a
square deal for Mooney. But there was no indignation, nor
even intolerance, in the gesture of dismissal. Fickert made
good. He carried out his mandate. But he had served

ten years. The police court scandals were pretty raw !
Fickert remains a popular figure.
Not that even San Francisco is cynical and honest enough
to see it this way! It is still the forces of law and order
that, oppose Mooney's pardon. And a large part of the
business community thinks of Fremont Older as an enemy
of law and order because he has stood for those things on
several occasions when they were the antithesis of what
San Francisco wanted!
The judge who sentenced Billings was discussing various,

things with Charles Edward Russell during a week-end at
Mr. Older's ranch some years ago in the days when Mr.
Russell's grouches ran along less unexceptionable paths than
they at present take.
But surely you believe in law and order? asked the

judge.
I don't know, replied Mr. Russell.
any.
never
Saw
The Mooney case is a sensational enough demonstration

of how justice may miscarry in an American court.
Yet it
is merely better advertised than scores of similar miscar

riages in which public officials have been equally brutal and
corrupt. They are almost typically so in isolated industrial
communities dominated by open-shop employers afraid of
labor unrest. Congressional hearings and the reports of
probably has done as much to keep him in prison as the
government agents supply many instances.
strongest link in the chain of perjuries that make up the

record of his trial. He has a genius for antagonizing
case is, after all, a shocker for the naive and the uninformed.
And it is even something when public officials are forced
to become law-breakers in order to work injustice. In Cali
fornia prisons today are a score of men serving long sen
tences legally inflicted under laws that throw a mantle of
respectability over the ferocity of the ignorant and the
malice of men who manipulate the passions and prejudices
of the mob. No bishop concerns himself over their fate.
Personally I should rather see intolerance and hatred and
stupidity break the laws than make them. The entirely
legal conviction and imprisonment in California of members
of the I. W. W. and the Communist Labor Party strikes
me as more sinister than the plight of Mooney and Bill
people.
What has all this to do with the conviction and continued
imprisonment of an innocent man? Well, in California at
least, everything! Adherence to an abstract principle such
as justice breaks down when it conflicts with a strong
prevalent emotion. San Francisco differs from other towns
only in being a little more sophisticated, a little more cyn
ical, a little less prone to render lip service to these abstrac
tions. It is a little more deliberately and consciously law
less than other communities. Not many years ago the graft
prosecution disclosed a lot of popular corporation promoters,
restaurateurs, and politicians as law-breakers. The town
had to decide whether it wanted to enforce the law and put

these men in prison or condone their offenses. It chose
to condone, and it is more than a coincidence that the same
election that registered this choice, by defeating Heney,
put into office as district attorney the Charles M. Fickert
who prosecuted Mooney and Billings seven years later. His
first mandate from the community was to dismiss the graft
prosecutions. The same lawless public opinion that kept
Schmitz and Calhoun out of prison put Mooney and Billings
in prison, and is keeping them there.
could do
he pleased at the Hall of Justice so long as he regarded and

f
eS.
ese prejudices
Were often lawleSS:
inded immunity for corpora
*
tion bribe-givers. They demanded a victim for the bomb

outrage. They demanded non-enforcement of State laws
against vice.
What the town wanted required a district
attorney not too scrupulous, and the town was not deeply
shocked last year when Fremont Older exposed a system
The Mooney
ings. If Southern States were to pass laws legalizing the

lynching bee for unpopular Negroes the race question would
appear even more hopeless than it is today.
The Informing Spirit

By CARLYLE FERREN MACINTYRE
Galatea gently slumbers
In a womb of marble stone.
Cold, austere, the shell encumbers

Prisoned loveliness unknown.
Quick, Pygmalion, with tender

Chisel strike this beauty free;
Softly, lest you mar the slender
Lily of eternity.
The Nation
624
In
the Driftway
SO the prisoners at Sing Sing are no longer to get out a

newspaper ! Too bad ! The Drifter has read that pub
lication with pleasure in the past, and he has always thought
that it would lessen the monotony of prison life to write for
it if sometime he were sent "up the river" for bigamy,
mayhem, or subornation of perjury. He must be careful
now to choose a crimeand thus a prisonthat will not
entirely shut off his journalistic activities. The reason
given by the officials of Sing Sing for stopping the prison
newspaper is that it was costing too much money. This
sounds familiar; it has been the reason for stopping many
another publication from the days of papyrus down to the
advent of the news-print trust. A correspondent of the
Federated Press suggests another possibilitythat the
newspaper was stopped because of the publication of an
editorial stating that 176 out of 1,200 inmates of Sing Sing
had served in General Pershing's forces overseas and sug
gesting army life as a cause of crime. However this may
be, the Drifter conceives that the first serious mistake was
the change of the newspaper's name. When started more
than twenty years ago, it was known as the Star of Hope.
A pleasing and appropriate name, that, which ought to
have been retained. But in recent years a rival called the
Bulletin was started. The two were eventually merged,
after the manner of modern newspapers; the combination
was called the Star-Bulletin and, finally, just the Bulletin.
That was a pathetic mistake. There is a Bulletin of some
sort in almost every sizable city of the country, but the
Star of Hope was unique.
A GOOD deal has been said of the uplift value of prison
journalism, but the Drifter thinks its possibilities
as a punishment have been too little appreciated. Instead
of putting the insubordinate poet on bread and water, would
it not be more salutary to cut off the last two lines of his
sonnet in the prison review? Or, in the case of a disobe
dient essayist, his article might be revised and "decked out"
by the prison officials without his knowledge, after the
fashion instituted by the wardens that preside over the
editorial sanctums of some of our great metropolitan news
papers and magazines. But perhaps that would be pre
cluded in prisonthough possible in the "free" world out
sidebecause of the Constitutional prohibition against
cruel or unusual punishment. Anyhow one of the attrac
tions of Sing Sing is gone for the Drifter. He fears now
that when he goes "up the river" there will be nothing for
him to do but break stoneand even an honest life might
be preferable to that!
*****
"\T 0TABLES t0 Aid in Unveiling Bolivar Statue," says
1^1 a newspaper headline. Needless words. Was a
statue ever "unveiled" for any other purpose than that
"notables" might "aid"?
ACCORDING to a newspaper dispatch from a corre
spondent in London, "The Government has scotched
the Bolshevist snake in the situation before it had a fair
chance to sting." Many strange things have been said of
Soviet Russia, but this is the first news that Bolshevist
snakes sting. Perhaps it is only the correspondent who was
stung.
The Drifter
[Vol. 112, No. 2912
Correspondence
A New Destiny for Ireland
Sir: Is not the true solution of the Irish problem suggested
by the recent remark of a prominent supporter of Irish inde
pendence that an Irishman is an American who has had the
misfortune to be born under the British flag? Why should not
Ireland become the forty-ninth free and independent State in
this great and glorious Union? Ireland is as near to Washing
ton as California and far nearer than Hawaii or Alaska, both
of which will eventually become States. Ireland's senators and
representatives could make the trip by fast steamer from
Quecnstown to New York in five days. As a part of the United
States she would be. more truly independent than as a minia
ture European republic at the mercy of any strong predatory
power. With our markets thrown open freely to her products,
she would prosper commercially as never before. Her State
government would have absolute freedom in local affairs, sub
ject only to the Constitution of the United States. Her sons
would be eligible to the Presidency and all Federal offices.
America would welcome her, for while Irishmen have always
made bad British subjects, they have always made good Ameri
can citizens. Half of them are with us already, and from the
battle of Bunker Hill to the battle of the Argonne, Kelly and
Burke and Shea have proved their loyalty on many a hardfought field.
The English people repeat every day that Ireland can have
anything she wants save only her separate republic. They
say, tooand all good Americans except those blinded by
ancestral hate say it with themthat good-will between Great
Britain and the United States must be maintained and that
war between them must be made forever impossible. Why,
then, should the British not cordially acquiesce in the plan
suggested? A perpetual treaty of amity and alliance should
follow hard upon the admission of the State of Ireland. Great
Britain could, indeed, make this a condition of her consent;
but she would surely feel no fear of the nation that has lived in
unruffled peace with Canada for more than a hundred years
and never lifted a finger to erase imaginary boundary lines.
Objection, it is true, might come from Ulsterso lately her
self in rebellion against the British Crown. Still, we have
millions of citizens of North of Ireland descent who rank
among our best. Who knows but that Ulster, too, could be
won over, and a political revolution which would be far more
significant of progress and more hopeful than any that has
yet followed the war be peacefully carried through with scarcely
a dissenting voice?
Brooklyn, N. Y., April 8
F. C. W.
A College of Solid Thinkers

Sir: Gopher Prairie College, so aptly labeled by C. G. J. in
your issue of March 16, pretends to be nothing more nor less
than what she is. She did not pawn her soul to an ad writer,
in preparing that book, because the text was written by a
highway engineer around the fundamental points outlined by
the president of the college himself, and with the directing
influence of a dealer in liquid hog remedies, all graduates of
the college.
That Golden Calf will not be found under one tree but under
many of those fine beeches, elms, and maples of the historic
campus of Gopher Prairie College. It is each of those young
American men who are seeking in the classic halls, even as
C. G. J., verification of their ideals. For they have ideals, and
rather high they are if you remember your own college days.
It is this young man whom the Wabash of 1832 and the
April 27, 1921]
The Nation
Wabash of 1921 has set up to honor. It is he to whom def

erence is shown, for whom sacrifices are madefor a pro
fessor too often does make sacrificesand it is he, the student
of history and of man, who is the firm foundation for this re
public and for every other democratic government under the sun.
Ah, C. G. J., don't you remember when you were one of those
Golden Calves? Perhaps my father was one of those profes
sors who gave you in the classroom some of the basic reasons
why Wabash is what it is. He was and is an American, and
he typifies the great class of solid thinking people which ac
cepts what is new if it is good.
Wabash is proud of the fact that she has not altered her
course from Pure American Idealism in eighty-nine years. And
few of her sons, thank God, have charted their courses in
other, more dangerous channels, as has C. G. J., if I mistake not.
Chicago, April 7
Robert Kingeby
Kansas Court of Industrial Relations

Sir: I read with amazement and much indignation the article
on the Kansas Court of Industrial Relations law by Clyde M.
Reed in your issue of April 6. As a coal miner and mem
ber of the United Mine Workers of America, along with all
organized workers in this country, I am vitally interested in
this law and I have closely followed the news with reference
to it. With the exception of several articles that have appeared
in employers' publications, I fail to recall a more misleading
or unfair article on this subject than the one in The Nation.
Organized labor the country over has condemned the Kansas
law for the reason that it provides for compulsory labor and
makes it a crime to quit work, thereby curtailing the consti
tutional rights of the workers. That is the issue, the only
issue. That is the principle involved, the principle upon which
organized labor will fight it out. There is no room for com
promise; there is no middle ground.
The fight in Kansas is not Alex Howat's fight, as Reed, in
line with the employing interests, would have it appear. Neither
does the radicalism or the conservatism of the Kansas miners,
nor the claim that "80 per cent of the Kansas miners are foreign
born or of the first generation in this country" have any bear
ing on the question. The matter of the personality of Alex
Howat, whom Reed brands, without citing proof, as a "radical
of radicals, alleged to be a member of the I. W. W., the Coal
Miners' Industrial Union, and charged with contributing to
the financial support of the Communist Party, in touch with
the extremists of the country, and viciously fighting the Miners'
International Union," does not and should not enter into the
controversy. I am not writing this letter as a partisan of
Howat, but I might enlighten Reed by informing him that the
Illinois miners by referendum vote last summer appropriated
$100,000 to aid the Kansas miners in their fight against this
law. It might enlighten him further to know that the officials
of the Miners' International Union are as strongly opposed
to the Kansas law as is Howat. In spite of other differences
between them, on this they are agreed, that the Kansas indus
trial court law is a menace to the workers of America, that it
interferes with their constitutional rights, and must be re
sisted to the last ditch.
Reed cites a few individual cases and draws the inference
that by these minor settlements the Kansas law can be judged.
He cites that in the first year of its existence the court handled
twenty-eight cases in the essential industries of the State.
What is this compared to the thousands of cases settled in the
same year by the Mine Workers' joint conference method in
Kansas alone and the hundreds of thousands throughout the
jurisdiction of the International Miners' Union, not to men
tion other unions? But the mere settlement of industrial dis
putes is not sufficient. No matter how well governed a people
may be, if they have any self-respect they will not be satisfied
625
unless they have something to say in their own government.

So it is with the settlement of our affairs in industry. We, as
self-respecting workers, demand a voice in the settlement. The
voice labor demands is not that of the petitioner, but a voice
in a joint conference with equitable representation, with the
right to dissent and resort to its only weapon, the strike, when
manifest injustices are being thrust upon the workers. The
Kansas law is especially vicious in that it not only denies labor
a voice in deciding these questions, but makes it a crime to
disobey the mandate of a board composed of politicians ap
pointed by a politician.
Let no one make the mistake of believing that labor in
America will quietly submit to such laws. Only after our
organizations have been destroyed will we be subjected, and
then the need for anti-strike legislation will not existthe em
ployer will be able to exploit us without the aid of the power of
the State. The enactment of similar legislation in other States
will find organized labor in those States no more conciliatory
than is Howat of Kansas.
Belleville, Illinois, April 12
Edw. A. Wieck
The Offspring of Familiarity

Shi: In Mr. Villard's editorial on ex-Secretary Lansing's
book I find this paragraph: "Mr. Lansing thinks that Mr.
Wilson's distrust of him came originally from the fact that he
is a lawyer. At the conference of the American Peace Com
missioners on January 10, 1918, Mr. Wilson bluntly told Mr.
Lansing that he 'did not intend to have lawyers drafting the
treaty of peace.' "
Turning to the biography of Mr. Wilson in the Congressional
Directory I find this statement: "... Following his gradua
tion [from Princeton College] he entered the University of
Virginia, Charlottesville, Va., as a law student, and was grad
uated in 1881. For two years he practiced law in Atlanta, Ga."
My information is that on leaving the Presidency Mr. Wilson
resumed the practice of law in Washington, D. C.
What is the answer? Perhaps this excerpt from "Treasure
Island"; at their first meeting, Ben Gunn says to Jim Hawkins:
"Gunn . . . puts a precious sight more confidencea precious
sight, mind thatin a gen'leman born than in these gen'lemen
of fortune, having been one hisself."
Washington, D. C, April U
J. A. Hennesy
The American Legion

Sir: I wonder if a sufficient number of American Legion
members, especially those high in the counsels of the New York
County Chapter, read the two brief editorials in The Nation of
April 6, anent the fundamental point of consequence involved
in the expulsion of Lieut. Col. Alexander E. Anderson. Inas
much as I am a member of the American Legion and take a
keen interest in its good works in behalf of the ex-service men,
I wish that everyone of my comrades might give your point of
view careful and thoughtful consideration.
As a non-political organization, the American Legion is doing
itself immeasurable harm by attempting to pass judgment on
the private or public opinions of its members. Lieut. Col.
Alexander E. Anderson, expressing himself openly against the
use of African troops by the French in the occupied parts of
Germany, may or may not have the approval of the American
people. But his motive in saying what he thinks in the matter
is surely without blemish and in complete agreement with true
Americanism. Personally I find nothing in his stand that is
destructive of the principles and aims for which the American
Legion is so energetically working. It is to be regretted that
it still harbors irresponsible local agencies, such as the New
[Vol. 112, No. 2912
The Nation
626
York County Chapter, which permit themselves the costly

luxury of governing their action in various important cases
by their narrow-minded and bigoted views.
The issue is clear; there are no two ways about it. For the
American Legion to endure as an active force in our national
life, the watchword should be: "Hands off politics and leave
the individual members to think and speak and write as con
science dictates!" Our ex-service-men brotherhood will thrive
best under a constant discussion of the conflicting opinions
concerning the great problems of the day.
In order to reestablish itself in the good opinion of the
American people, the Legion through its National Executive
should unequivocally repudiate the action of the New York
County Chapter in expelling Lieut. Col. Alexander E. Ander
son and demand his prompt restoration to his former place of
honor in the post.
Hurley, South Dakota, April 5
Isadore Berkowitz
I Should
Ballad World
By EDA LOU WALTON
I should like to live as a ballad maid
Who loves, is loved, and dies,
Or bears four sons as a matron staid
To her lord's amazed eyes.
Birth, and youth, and womanhood,
Ripe lips and golden hair,
Death and a lover understood,
And a black silk shroud to wear;
And all the long years left untold
The long hours left unsaid,
While swift, rare moments of life unfold
Bronze and silver and red.
Correcting a Historian
Sir: Mr. Charles Andrews, in a recent issue of The Nation,
characterizes Lincoln Colcord's attempt to demonstrate simi
larity between the struggle of the American colonies for inde
pendence and the present Irish struggle as not "particularly
good history." Without entering into the issue under imme
diate controversy, upon which I have nothing to say, may I
point out a statement in Mr. Andrews's letter which is not
"particularly good history." Mr. Andrews states that "in the
middle of the last century the concession of representative gov
ernment [to Canada and Australia], the repeal of the corn
laws and the navigation acts, and the eventual granting of re
sponsible government brought to an end all desire for inde
pendence." Professor Andrews should know that the repeal of
the corn laws and the navigation acts was deeply resented by the
colonies, and that instead of conciliating them to the British
connection it led to the development in Canada in the late
forties and early fifties of a formidable movement for annexa
tion to the United States.
Chicago, April 11
Jacob Viner
The Initiative, Referendum, and Recall

Sir: The foundations of our liberties are being destroyed.
In fact, the cornerstone"freedom of speech, freedom of the
press, and the right to peaceably assemble"has been blasted
by legislative action, executive policy, and judicial decisions and
interpretations. Our supposed Bill of Rights has been treated
as a "scrap of paper." There is no need to elaborate, for every
body knows that our boasted liberty is the standing joke of the
world. I am not writing this as a protest. The tyrannical
usurpers care nothing for protests or petitions. I am writing
to urge action, from one end of the land to the other, to secure
the Initiative, Referendum, and Recallan amendment to the
Constitution restoring to the people the power to initiate and
make laws, to demand a referendum upon laws made by Con
gress or unmade by five of the Supreme Court judges, and to
recall representatives who fail to do their bidding, such as all
employers have.
If in the face of all the legislative blunders and outrageous
wrongs of our representatives, the rulings of departmental
chiefs, and court decisions the people fail to exercise their sov
ereign power and demand to be clothed with the power to
approve or disapprove of the acts of their servants, then there
is little hope that they ever will. If the Bolshevists' regime of
the dominating few is to continue unchecked, who can deny the
possibility of a real bolshevist revolution?
Paicines, California, March SI
J. W. Wells
Like to Live in a
I should like to live in a ballad world

While vivid lips of song
My leaping, lingering tale unfurled
Of a fate six stanzas long.
Plaint
By VIRGINIA WOODS MACKALL
You
And
You
You
You
And
can do so many things!

I only one.
can build monuments of triumphant stone,
can compass large and awesome subjects,
can subdue the sea with tree trunks,
catch the stars in steel nets.
All I can do is to tell you about it

To sing how great you are!
Naturally, you listen with impatience;
You have known it for a long time.
Books
On Fighting Japan
Must We Fight Japan? By Walter B. Pitkin. The Century
Company.
THIS is a powerful and compelling book, packed full of meat
and worthy of the most careful consideration. It is a non
partisan study of the conflicts, corrosions, and conciliations
where East meets West and greed meets greed across the nar
rowing Pacific. The author aims to dispel illusions whether
roseate or sinister and strikes hard at some of those most
widely cherished. In places its tone is dogmatic, a fact to be
forgiven in view of the author's wide studies and evident
sincerity.
The unsophisticated visitor to the Far East is surprised and
bewildered at the apparent absence of any middle ground in
the judgment of Japan. Every American or European is antiJapanese or pro-Japanese and does not care who knows it
Fulsome praise and biting criticism are heard on all sides, and
each is in its degree founded on fact and each subject to gross
exaggeration.
In the pro-Japanese view, the busy people of the islands are
April 27, 1921]
The Nation
human beings like the rest of us, simple-hearted, sincere, courte

ous, lovable, idealistic folk for the most part, acutely patriotic,
sensitive to praise or blame, very hospitable, very fond of com
panionship, prone to making judgments gregariously, and hav
ing a special genius for adaptation and cooperation. Their
speech, dress, and customs have grown up in isolation, but such
matters are skin-deep, in no wise fundamental to race or na
tion. Politically they do the best they can under changing
circumstances, for the traditions and conciliations of two thou
sand years cannot be obliterated in a half century. The status
of a people cannot be judged by present conditions, but rather
by the line of direction in which it is moving.
The anti-Japanese view goes somewhat as follows : The Japan
ese know that Western civilization cannot be escaped, but they
despise and fear it. They imitate what they cannot under
stand, therefore undertake what they cannot carry through.
Being extremely clannish they are bad neighbors to outsiders.
Individually eager for wealth, pull and graft beset every walk
of life. Militarism they cherish because Germany has taught
its value and it has already brought Japan into the front rank
of the nations. Hence its ruling forces follow German models.
The Government is a close corporation of bureaucrats, di
rected by the "Elder" statesmen (Genro), a clique of leaders
of the three "fighting clans" (Satsuma, Choshu, Settsu), ex
ploiters, militarists. Bureaucrats direct foreign policies and the
Government subordinates personal freedom to its system of pub
lic welfare (minhon). Their water-front mobs clamor for war
because war brings a livable wage. The village boss controls
the rural population. Only fear of revolution gives the people
any voice, and that voice, through the adroitness of the Cir
cumlocution Office, is mostly still and small. The prophets
cry in the wilderness, most earnestly, no doubt, but unheard
by either of the chief political parties.
These two paragraphs I wrote in 1911. Each can be defended
as true so far as it goes. They represent merely different
points o f view. The first arises from knowing the student-class
and the bourgeoisie of the provincial towns. The second pic
tures so>me phases of the political life of the capital.
But American opinion, friendly as a whole, has become em
bittered by recent events in which the rulers of Japan are con
cerned. Toward China Japan has behaved even as the other
powers "have done and to the scandal of her rivals in spoliation.
The twenty-one demands, the operations in Siberia, the control
of Shantung, the mandate-absorption of a chain of coral reefs,
have shocked our moral sense. The assertion of a "Monroe
Doctrine" of monopolistic spoliation as unlike that of Monroe
as our own worst attempts at perversion is naturally offensive
to our own exploiters, who cannot admit it unless they can in
deed strike hands with its perpetrators.
Hence arises another picture of Japan, elaborately and ac
curately drawn by Professor Pitkin as a composite of our
"yellow journals." This view (page 40) is as false as malice
can make it, but it matches perfectly the portrait of America as
drawn by the yellow press of Japan, a vile caricature which
seems justified by the atrocious moving picture films which our
dealers dump on Japan. The "rising wave of crime" which is
breaking over our cities, as shown on the front pages of our
great dailies, also serves to confirm the low opinion water
front Japan already has of us.
It is true, of course, that the commercial classes in both
nations are on excellent terms with each other. "Hands across
the sea" are reached almost daily in San Francisco and Tokyo,
and "the Pacific binds together, not separates," "two peoples
destined to be each other's neighbors for a thousand years."
But friendly banquets, good intentions, and fine words from
internationalists and business associates do not reach the heart
of the matter. The memory of Perry at Kurihama, our mag
nanimity at Shimonoseki, and the modesty of General Grant at
Nikko do not touch the hearts of militarists bent on exalting
their calling. Nor does it reach the narikin (new rich), who,
bent on the conquest of Asia, regard army and navy as their
627
own lackeys. From such conditions, found in a degree in every

country, together with the ever present fear of the loss of
power on the part of those who wrest it from the people, arises
the "hyena theory of nations," to borrow a phrase from Pierre
Loti. In accordance with this theory every nation must main
tain a perpetual or chronic enemywhich is by no means to be
allowed an increase of armament, such as we plan for our
selves.
This abhorrent idea being still "in the saddle," strengthened
by the moral and political lapses of the war, Mr. Pitkin asks
his question "Must we fight Japan?" His answer, of course, is
"No," but he is not blind to dangerous tendencies on both sides
of the Pacific. That such a war, whatever its nominal cause
or motive, would be incalculably senseless, degrading, costly,
and futile will not of itself ward it off. The wisdom of Norman
Angell's "Great Illusion" did not save Europe in 1914. Pow
erful forces are working now for war; greater forces, though
less active, are drawing toward peace. War and peace are
possibilities; neither is a certainty.
Mr. Pitkin has developed a number of vital propositions,
only a few of which I have space to summarize. The Japanese
press notes our imperial expansion in Asia, while we are active
in blocking all Japanese moves in that direction. In these
matters and others our attitude is regarded as both unjust and
provocative. From Perry's expedition of coercion through our
successive seizures of Hawaii, the Philippines, and Guam we
have stood in the way of Japan's normal extension. We have
been high-handed in dealing with Japanese who are legally in
America and we have drawn lines of racial discrimination such
as we have not dared to apply to Europe. We (that is, some
Americans) have tried to monopolize Asiatic trade, to withhold
Japan's coveted prizes of war, to restrain her salutary entrance
into Siberia and Mongolia, to stimulate Korean unrest, to bank
rupt Japan by forcing on her a ruinous naval expansion, to
say nothing of the varied mendacity tolerated in our press.
In every Congress humiliating bills are introduced, without offi
cial check, and apparently for no other purpose save insult,
our two political parties being alike in these regards.
Without discussing this one-sided view of patent facts, I have
found Japanese officials rarely able to understand why our
Government allows the press to promulgate slanderous lies.
Examples of this are found in the wild extravagances which
centered in 1911 about Magdalena Bay and which gave rise to
the "Lodge Resolution," fortunately left unsigned by President
Taft. We may read any day that the "Japanese have no home
life," tea-house and geisha monopolizing men's attention; that
Japanese banks employ Chinese tellers, not trusting their own
people; and the like ad nauseam. In 1911, I had what was called
"a heart-to-heart talk" with members of the Sayonji ministry,
and the question of why our Government allows such whole
sale lying was the first that arose. The answer was simple:
A free press, even if venal and mendacious, is safer than a
censored one, as it is better for the people to decide public ques
tions badly than to have them adjusted from above.
Mr. Pitkin regards the strongest influence for peace, so far
as the United States is concerned, as resting in "the widespread
disgust and disillusionment as to the value of war as a method
of getting results." The only result of the late victory worth
the name has been the crumpling of a pasteboard Caesar, at the
cost of a ruined continent. Our author finds further that the
intellectual classes of the world are getting together. "In this
movement the intellectuals of Japan are playing a worthy part,
at times under handicaps little realized by us." Moreover,
Japan as a nation is on the verge of bankruptcy without the
resource utilized by Germany of wholesale robbery of her own
people. Japan's industries are dependent on the United States,
and our nation "will not be dragged into any but the most
obviously defensive war, unless the public is tricked by poli
ticians or propaganda." That "Europe, as everybody knows,
but few like to say, is insolvent from Bordeaux to the Urals"
is also "a tremendous insurance against war." "The most un
628
The Nation
popular proposal that the mind of man could invent and present
to Americans today would be one calling to an increase of taxes
to be spent in an army and navy."
But nations bankrupt and inchoate still fight on, throwing
stolen money after bad, their soldiers the only people who
escape starvation. Meanwhile Japan has not learned the
lesson of "The Great Illusion." Rulers and common people
alike fail to realize that "money spent on wars of conquest is
a dead loss and worse." There is danger not alone from mili
tarists and from fools or kaisers in power. Beggars have been
known "to smash in shop windows to seize a loaf of bread."
Two classes in every country can always be reckoned as in
favor of war: those who gain by war and war preparation, and
those who have nothing to lose. Withal we have to deal with
"that fatal incapacity of most men to think clearly and take
intelligent action concerning matters that lie beyond the routine
of everyday life." The crimes of diplomacy are due far more
often to ignorance than to malice. Even in high places, "there
is no substitute for intelligence." Moreover, we must count on
the venerable tradition that an insult from one politician to an
other is reasonable cause of war even at the cost of national
suicide. This idea is a sort of survival which used to lead the
insulted Samurai to commit suicide when homicide was not
practicable.
Our author gives us a certain assurance that both Japan and
the United States are impregnable from the sea. The most that
either could do, without base of supplies in a military way,
would be the burning or poisoning of a few coast cities. Inci
dentally Japan would be debarred from her best customers, her
necessary machinery, and from future tradea corresponding
result, though less damaging, naturally following on the other
side.
I cannot claim the space necessary even for an outline of this
close-packed book. Mr. Pitkin regards the Japanese question
in California as part of a world problem never to be settled,
but to be ameliorated by wise statesmanship. Japan, with small
areas of great richness and a wilderness of mountains, is vastly
overcrowded. The great empty areas in the north and in Korea,
fit for grazing and little else, cannot be utilized without capital
and without a market for products. Milk, butter, and cheese
find little market in Asia. Cattle, dwarfish and half-starved,
are beasts of burden mainly and in regions virtually destitute
of roads. The outlook for sheep raising is better and is being
considered. Japan has been too much occupied with her place
among the nations to build adequate railways, or even public
roads. Korea has the former, thanks to the enterprise of Baron
Shibusawa, but a system of highways would be a grotesque
novelty. Those farmers who have any capital or hold on the
land will not leave their present homes "where our customs fit
us like a garment." Those who can be moved are in general
the homeless farm-hands, the class with which the enterprise
of our steamship companies populated Hawaii, or the unskilled
workmen of the cities. The birth-rate question, I may say in a
word, appears nowhere as racial. The percentage falls just as
soon as woman is emancipated to the extent involved in sepa
rate apartments. And within limits as the birth-rate falls the
survival rate rises.
The notion that the Asiatic races will by a "rising tide of
color" get together and overwhelm the white races our author
deservedly treats with scant respect. The white races have their
enemies withinmainly war and vice. I may note further that
the blend of races which inhabits Japan is at least as near
Caucasian as Mongolian, and in everything except looks has
more in common with Southern Europe than with China. The
Japanese are no more inscrutable than any other divergent race,
if we get behind the veil of language and tradition. The rising
generation of Japanese who acquire citizenship assimilate al
most perfectly in all matters except in looks, much more readily
and fully than most of the Mediterranean races. And in this
connection I may add that the strongest single bond of peace
is found in the thousands of Japanese men and women educated
[Vol. 112, No. 2912
in the universities of America and England. These imbibe all

our traditional college loyalty, with a real appreciation of the
advantages of democracy, however defective, over the bureau
cracy and political favoritism which they encounter at home.
Mr. Pitkin's work, so far as details are concerned, centers
about affairs in California. In spite of his thoroughness and
general sobriety, he finds this problem full of pitfalls. Special
criticism of minor matters is ungracious, but the light needs
shifting a little.
It is quite true, as he says, that the state of mind in Cali
fornia cannot be set aside as "a case of nerves." It is rather
a recurrent malady which comes on every fourth year, after
the fashion of the seven-year cicada. Save for a few interna
tionalists and a few purveyors of cheap labor, no one here
wants to see California racially stratified or marred by class
distinctions. Cheap labor or alien labor would enrich the State,
while impoverishing its society. In the late election the act
further restricting Japanese agricultural activities was passed
by a vote of about two to one. The vote of the 200,000 who
opposed this bill deserves an analysis. It comprises in general
the commercial classes, the churches, the university people, and
the large number who hate to see California take a blundering
initiative in international affairs, matters in which it entangles
the whole nation while assuming no responsibility of its own.
As Roosevelt is largely quoted, they would not discredit his dic
tum : "It always pays for a nation to be a gentleman."
It is not true that Japan in any official sense has pushed into
California. Apparently most of the farm laborers came from
Hawaii. When we annexed those islands, half the population
was Japanese. It is so still. It was then dominated by a small
but interesting and forceful oligarchy of Americans with thou
sands of plantation serfs, brought in from every country from
which cheap labor could be secured. Hawaii was then, and is
still, in a degree a commercial and social annex of California.
As to the acts of their nationals in Hawaii, the Government of
Japan may have wishes or opinions but can exercise no control.
The "Gentleman's Agreement" might be made more restrictive.
The Japanese Government will respond to any courteous re
quest, or to any adjustment that will not overturn politics at
home, but there is no evidence that the present agreement has
been violated even in a single case. Nor is it likely that any
considerable number of Japanese have been illegally smuggled
in. A system of registration could be used to prevent this.
The agitation against the Japanese in California seems to
have four separate motives: (1) The desire to elect officials
on an anti-Japanese platform; (2) the desire to prevent the
growth and spread of alien colonies; (3) the desire to cut off
immigration of labor from Asia; (4) the desire to keep up a
chronic sore in our relations with Japan. This fourth may be
the motive of the yellow press, to see that "something is doing,"
or it may have the motive equally sinister, but more dangerous,
of spreading war-scares, for the purposes of a larger army, a
greater navy, or even a bigger naval base on San Francisco
Bay.
As to the second of these, I may say that Japanese legally
here will not go home. They are clannish partly because we
make them so. It is never wise to exclude from citizenship any
group of permanent residents. The Japanese, Chinese, and
Hindus should be allowed to find their way to citizenship, not
an easy way, and not without renunciation of any rights at
home. To enter our cosmopolitan nation does not mean inter
marriagethat is a personal matter. Nor should it depend on
race or religion or any other condition save personal fitness
and orderly behavior.
As to checking immigration from Asia, we shall find ample
help in cooperation with the Japanese Government. They would
rather our people knew Japan from scholars, travelers, and busi
ness men than from the overflow of the rice fields. The leaders
understand, as I have often said to them, that just such an
opposition as has grown up in California would rise in Japan
if a colony of Americans, Italians, or Siamese should establish
April 27, 1921]
The Nation
themselves among the "Seven Beauties of Omi." The case is

"a condition not a theory." But the matter is not helped by
gross exaggeration of the present "menace," nor by its use as
leverage in local politics. To use it as a means of promoting
militarism and war expense is even more reprehensible and
more dangerous. The real problem of immigration is how to
maintain our own democratic standards of living in the face of
hordes who have never known it and have never known how to
demand it.
Mr. Pitkin outlines an international policy which should per
manently dispose of the "Japanese crisis." Not much (how
ever wise) of it will be accepted by America or Japan, for
rulers are short-sighted as compared with professors, and the
art of government is the most backward of all human enter
prises. One element of most importance is the restoration of farm
industry by relieving it of the heavy burdens laid on it in the in
terest of manufacture and commerce. The rush to the cities
is becoming appalling. Meanwhile it is "not a mass move
ment" but individual. "Every person who moves from the
country to the city does so for individual reasons."
To this volume are contributed certain "expert opinions" of
high value. Professor E. T. Williams of the University of
California writes on Conflicting National Policies; Mr. Warren
S. Thompson on Cheap Labor and Standards of Living; Pro
fessor Elwood Mead on New Agrarian Policies; and Professor
S. J. Holmes on Racial Intermarriage. The last essay may be
specially commended as a just summing up of our knowledge
and ignorance of much-vexed questions.
David Starr Jordan
From Locke to Bent ham

Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham. By
Harold J. Laski. (Home University Library.) Henry Holt
and Company.
RARELY has the task of summarizing the main character
istics of an intellectual movement been performed with
more notable success than that which Professor Laski has at
tained in this concise account of the development of English
political thought from Locke to Bentham. Any writer who
essays to narrate the history of ideas is beset by two dangers.
One is the danger of framing a series of essentially detached
studies whose subjects are the more striking personalities of
the period with which he deals. The other is that of forcing
an appearance of development or logical connection where in
fact little or none exists. Mr. Laski has avoided both of these pit
falls. Naturally, the men whose writings bulk largest in his
brief survey are the dominating thinkers of the timeLocke,
Hume, Burke, Adam Smith; but the sketches of the work and
teachings of these leaders are so skilfully interwoven with
equally just appreciations of lesser writers and, what is quite
as important, with a review of the political and economic his
tory of the period, as to show clearly such coherent develop
ment as actually took place. It was with the eighteenth cen
tury as history shows it to have been with other centuriesa
few profound thinkers opened the greater highways while a
host of lesser workers scouted the forests, blazed connecting
trails, or toiled at the debris which others had left; and if we
get from Mr. Laski's illuminating pages a matured philosophic
view of Locke and Hume and Burke, we also see in judicial
setting the work of Leslie and Hoadley and Bolingbroke, of
Blackstone and Tucker and Delolme, of the nonjurors and
the protagonists of the Bangorian controversy.
Broadly stated, the problem of English political philosophy
in the eighteenth century was to find a sound doctrine of
democracy after the Revolution of 1688 had made an end to the
doctrine of the divine right of kings. It was the task of
Locke to justify the changes of 1688. He was hampered by
his lack of perception of "the psychological foundations of
poli tics," he was bound to the theory of the social contract as
629
"the only possible retort to the theory of divine right," and

in his doctrine as a whole there is little that is novel; but he
nevertheless stated more clearly than either Hobbes or Burke
"the general problem of the modern state." One would like to
know, however, why Locke's view of toleration was ap
parently less generous when he published his great "Letter on
Toleration" than it was when he drafted the "Fundamental Con
stitutions of Carolina," some twenty years before. Mr. Laski's
exposition of the long controversy over the theory of the re
lation of church and state, which followed naturally from
Locke's attempt to separate the visible church from the es
sence of religion and to exalt the state above the church, is
able to the point of brilliancy, and the more because the essen
tial nature of the problem of religion as distinct from the
problem of ecclesiasticism is not at any time lost sight of. If
the problem remained unsolved throughout the period to which
the book relates, and remains unsolved nowwitness the dia
metrically contrasted claims of Lord Haldane and the Arch
bishop of Canterbury in 1919 (pp. 125, 126) it was not from
lack of proffered solutions or acrimonious debate, but because
the problem itself is insoluble save on the familiar British
plane of compromise. So also one must say of the mooted
issues of non-resistance and passive obedience and of the deeper
question of revolution.
The period of political stagnation which extended from the
accession of George I to the fall of Walpole, in 1742, at least
prepared the way for Hume, the first series of whose essays
was published in the latter year. The most that Mr. Laski
can say for Hume is that he is suggestive and that utili
tarianism owes its foundation to him, but neither the man
nor his times permitted the erection of a system. Until 1770,
when Burke's "Thoughts on the Present Discontents" appeared,
"there is no work on English politics of the first importance."
But it was the period in which the ideas of Montesquieu and
Rousseau were making themselves felt, when Blackstone in his
"Commentaries" was presenting a picture of the English Con
stitution as it was not, and when the beginnings of revolution
in America were dividing political theorists and practical poli
ticians alike. That Burke should have had "the singular good
fortune . . . not merely to obtain acceptance as the
apostle of philosophic conservatism, but to give deep comfort
to men of liberal temper" is the more surprising in view of the
fact that "he was not a democrat, and at bottom . . . had
little regard for that popular sense of right which, upon occa
sion, he was ready to praise." It is easy to see that his un
selfishness, his keen insight, his maxims of political wisdom,
his emphasis upon practical accommodation in the face of
complex difficulties, and the noble sweep of his literary style
should have made him lovable; but in hardly any other respect,
and least of all as the expounder of a coherent system of politi
cal philosophy, is anyone who reads Mr. Laski's analysis likely
to think Burke great. The real precursor of liberalism Mr. Laski
finds in Adam Smith. It was, indeed, to be a liberalism which
saw the state as something "untrammeled in its economic life
by moral considerations," but it was also "the road to those
categories wherein the old conception of cooperative effort might
find a new expression."
William MacDonald
First Aid to Authors

The Lure of the Pen. By Flora Klickmann. G. P. Putnam's
Sons.
// You Don't Write Fiction. By Charles Phelps Cushing.
Robert M. McBride and Company.
A Plea for Popular Science. By Edwin E. Slosson. Eilert
Printing Company.
SOMETIME in his life, it would seem, every magazine editor
becomes surfeited with manuscripts pencil-written on both
sides of foolscap sheets, rolled, and tied with a pink ribbon.
Then he does one of two things. Either he becomes a hopeless
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2912
630
misanthrope, or he writes a book to inform the young and am
bitious author how it should be done. To the second class belong
Miss Klickmann, Mr. Cushing, and in a measure Dr. Slosson.
All write from editorial experience. All write to that vast
army of inexperienced men and women who wish to write ac
ceptable articles on some subject or other for contemporary
magazines.
Miss Klickmann, editor of The Girl's Own Paper and Woman's
Magazine, has chosen a good title for her purpose. "The Lure
of the Pen: A Book for Would-be Authors" would lure few
readers who would not profit from her remarks. The high
school girl who writes of bloody murder and disappointed love,
the idle wife who essays descriptive fiction because her friends
assure her she writes charming letters, the heartbroken biog
rapher of a deceased lapdog would find Miss Klickmann's vol
ume full of much needed, even if discouraging advice. They
are warned against sending to the editor illegible manuscript,
writing voluminous explanatory letters, or camping on his or
her doorstep. They are urged to have something to say, to say
it in straightforward, colloquial language, and to send it to the
editor of a publication which circulates among that class of
readers who are likely to want to read it. One would suppose
that such elementary advice would be unnecessary; but in
spite of the correspondence schools, the fact remains that there
are still novices who would profit from Miss Klickmann's devas
tating common-sense and who could follow it if they had a
chance.
Mr. Cushing has addressed a similar reading public of inex
perienced young people who "want to write." But in subject
matter there is a difference. Conceding the fact that the pub
lisher's lists are well supplied with textbooks and treatises on
the technique of the short story, he has written a guidebook to
the marketing of non-fiction. Mr. Cushing says very little
about composition. He believes that if the writer has the
"nose for news" and sends to the proper magazine an article
on the proper subject, illustrated with proper photographs,
post-card size, on gloss paper, the absence of style will matter
little. The rewrite man on the magazine will inject the style
along with the grammar. But in the entertaining exposition
of the obvious Mr. Cushing is at home. He tells the neophyte
to start his manuscript half way down the first page, and
inclose a self-addressed envelope for its possible return, but
he tells him so gaily and with such an air of comradeship that
his advice loses its power to blight. The charm of this thin
little book lies in the delightful autobiographical chapters.
These chapters of narrative are more instructive and hearten
ing than the exposition of how long to expose a film. They in
struct the ambitious youngster by their examples of industry,
common-sense, and persistence, and hearten him with their
good spirits, vigor, and the example of the common obstacles
overcome.
But after all it is Mr. Slosson who should have done a book
on the art and craft of writing informative articles for the
magazines. Authors, old and young, would have profited from
his fourfold angle of vision as scientist, teacher, author, and
editor. Instead, in a pamphlet of fifteen pages he has reprinted
two articles and the substance of an address to the School of
Journalism, Columbia University. In the first article he la
ments the scientist's inability to write clearly and interestingly
for a wider public, and the writer's blindness to the rich mate
rial buried in scientific publications. In the second paper, The
Middleman in Science, he points out the importance, the diffi
culty, and the methods of communicating to the intelligent but
uninformed reader the revolutionary truths discovered by the
scientist. The last item is a series of Don'ts for would-be
writers of scientific articles for the public press. Quotable as
these aphorisms are, they should be read in their context. Two
kinds of people study the art of writingthose who "want to
write" and those who wish to learn how to say something to
someone. Mr. Slosson is writing for the second group.
Donald Lemen Clark
Books in Brief
'"yHE Behavior of Crowds" by Everett Dean Martin (Har* pers) is not an attack on democracy, like Gustave Le Bon's
"The Crowd." Mr. Martin, believing the crowd to be identifiable
with no particular class, is interested merely in analyzing its
processes whenever and wherever they begin, and in suggesting
a cure for its invariable intellectual devastations. His analysis
is psychoanalysis, and his cure is pragmatism or pluralism.
The crowd mind, he says, is a sick mind, requiring some such
treatment as is required for paranoia in the individual. It is
collective self-delusion, feeding on platitudes and never learning
anything. Among the governing classesin a Department of
Justice, for instanceit takes the form of the persecutionmania; a group begins to consider itself society and charges
that another groupthe Bolshevists, for instanceis the nega
tion of society. Among the governed classes it lives on the
dream-stuff of Utopias, which comprise "a mechanism of com
pensation and escape for suppressed desires." In time of war
among all classes it automatically releases the cruelty in our
natures which the censorship of peace has kept unconscious.
Always it is futile, obscuring, and vicious, and we shall con
tinue to suffer from its fogs until we cease to be idealists, ab
solutists, Platonists, until we cease to hunger after unity, and
become strong enough to stand each by himself before a com
plicated world whose problems call for analysis rather than
agitation. Mr. Martin has written a stimulating book, less
valuable perhaps for its formal applications of Freud and
Schiller and James than for its detailed diagnoses and its nu
merous illustrations drawn from a rich experience.
TT^ROM the notebooks kept throughout his thinking years by
* "W. N. P. Barbellion," or Bruce Frederick Cummings, two
volumes, "The Journal of a Disappointed Man" and "Enjoying
Life," have been published. Now "A Last Diary" (Doran),
scribbled between March 21, 1918, and June 3, 1919, while Bar
bellion was dying and waiting chiefly for a copy of the "Journal"
to come from the printer's with H. G. Wells's preface, is put
forth with an excellent life of the naturalist by his brother,
A. J. Cummings. The volume is much shorter than either of the
other two, and in a sense contains no ideas that they did not,
but it will be welcome to those who are for possessing every pub
lished word of this brilliant, pathetic man. His passion for life
is as hopeless and strong as ever here, except that death, being
definitely expected, presses his humor into constant play and
sharpens his vision of nature till it is desperately keen. On
almost the last day he observed: "Rupert Brooke said the
brightest thing in the world was a leaf with the sun shining on
it. God pity his ignorance! The brightest thing in the world
is a Ctenophor in a glass jar standing in the sun."
O EVEN new anthologies with a civilizing trend attest the
^ vitality of literary man's passion for "selecting and ar
ranging." "A Book of Jewish Thoughts, Selected and Arranged
by the Chief Rabbi (Dr. J. H. Hertz)" (Oxford) is a learned
collection of the profoundest tributes that have been paid to
the Jewish race by its own members and others, and a summing
up of the best that has been said by Jews. "The Great Kin
ship, an Anthology of Humanitarian Poetry," edited by Bertram
Lloyd (London: George Allen and Unwin), represents an un
usually intelligent and profitable search for zoophilist poetry
among the peoples of Europe during the past three centuries.
"French Fireside Poetry, with Metrical Translations and an
Introduction by the late M. Betham-Edwards" (Small, Maynard) attempts to do for French poetry what more pretentions
volumes in English have never doneshow the kind of verse
which the French are fond of and safe in reciting en famille.
Many of the pieces are mediocre in translation because they
were insipid in the original, but eleven fables from Florian
are included, and they are delicious. "The Writer's Art, by
The Nation
April 27, 1921]
Those who have Practiced It" (Harvard) , selected and arranged

by Rollo Walter Brown, is a corpus of disquisitions on the art
of prose by nineteenth-century masters who were all reflective
and attentive as regards their art. "Songs of Joy" (Oxford),
compiled by Grace Beckett, is a brilliant little repertory of the
highest-spirited lyrics in the English language. It has no false
note anywheresomething that cannot be said for "Star-Points:
Songs of Joy, Faith, and Promise from the Present-Day Poets"
(Houghton Mifflin), selected by Mrs. Waldo Richards, which
mixes trash with treasure in about equal proportions. "A
Physician's Anthology of English and American Poetry" (Ox
ford), selected by Casey A. Wood and Fielding H. Garrison, is
an excellent volume intended as a tribute to Sir William Osier
before he died and dedicated now to his memory. It is calcu
lated to humanize doctors who are too stern realists, but mem
bers of other professions may benefit by Shakespeare and Whit-
Drama
Margaret Anglin
TVÎSS ANGLIN dares to be heroic; she has the courage of
* * the grand style. It is a rare thing today and only success
can make it a virtue. For all the arts have a constant ten
dency toward the ease of the rhetorical gesture, toward ex
ternality and glitter and the trumpet tone. The danger is
never so far that we can afford many unguarded moments. To
write merely sonorous verses, to wear golden armor on the
stage and use one's voice like a 'cello, to build orotund prose
periodsthese are great temptations to the child strutting in
each of us. Think of the fine writing we once perpetrated, the
noble gestures with which we once debated. Now our cheeks
burn at the memory. Yes, to dare to be heroic is to dare
greatly. Perhaps it was to prepare herself for this venture that
Miss Anglin acted all winter in "The Woman of Bronze" and
wrung the last ounce of inner veracity from an inferior part.
Now she acts Joan of Arc (Shubert Theater) and Clytemnestra
in the "Iphigenia in Aulis" (Manhattan Opera House) and
gives one a strong impression of bound wings set free.
"The Trial of Joan of Arc" by Emile Moreau cannot, by
any stretch of language, be called a good play. It is like an
old-fashioned historical painting. Its explicitness is deadly and
its purpose is to edify. It draws largely upon historical fact but in
a wholly uncritical fashion. It does not attempt to interpret a
spiritual crisis but to solidify a legend. That legend, however,
has a beauty of its own, and one allows, in the end, for the too
immaculate dungeon, the hopeless artificiality of the alterna
tion of jangle and pause in the trial scene, the conscious overpicturesqueness of the poses when the smoke of the pyre floats
into the portico. It is a devotional picture. But in the center
of the picture stands Miss Anglin as Joan, dun and simple amid
the flash of color, unbelievably young, almost with a touch of
boyishness, quite unaffected amid so much tortuousness and
stiff sophistication. Yet she always remains within the pic
ture. Her simplicity is not that of a peasant girl, carefully
as the human touches and recorded words are woven in, but
that of a saint. She is not simple like a tree but like a staff
of bronze; it is not a simplicity that has grown but one that
has been fashioned. She writhes on the wooden couch of the
dungeon not like a woman in pain but like an angel in exile,
and even her great human moment of terror and recantation
is, we know at once, only the prelude of a more eloquent and
fervent triumph. Style, in a word, is substituted for reality
a style that glows and has deep modulations, but always style.
The imitative function of art is slurred. And Miss Anglin,
when she lifts up her voice, declaims. At all the tense mo
ments it is not acting; it is pure declamation. But it is like
the declamation of gorgeous yet clear odes. Her voice has a
great swell and lift and curves of tonal beauty that never be
631
come monotonous by repetition but are like the recurrent

stanzaic measures of a noble poemnot the flaming music of
Crashaw or Shelley, but the easy though determined elevation
of Pindar or Gray. There is more breadth than intimacy and
more splendor than passion. Yet do not the very terms of this
characterization illustrate the nature of Miss Anglin's achieve
ment? To what other American actress could they have been
applied without obvious absurdity?
The "Iphigenia in Aulis" of Euripides is, of course, a play
of very different caliber from Moreau's picturesque chronicle.
It is a very curious play indeed, full of a conscious or un
conscious but unmistakable world-historic irony. Iphigenia is
to be sacrificed so that the gods may raise a wind by which
the Greeks can set sail for Troy. And why are the Greeks
to sail and the bodies of thousands of them to be eaten by the
ravens of the Ilian plain? Because a light woman who hap
pened to be the wife of a magnate had run away with a roving
gallant. The other magnates were naturally indignant and
went in for a pompous anti-Trojan propaganda and declared
the country to be in danger. When Iphigenia first appears
the propaganda had obviously not touched her yet. The notion
of having her throat cut on the altar of Artemis does not
commend itself to her. But presently the patriotic flame kindles
her heart. She is willing to die, glad to diefor Greece, for
Greece. As Miss Mary Fowler stood there and spoke to the
skilfully orchestrated strains of Dr. Walter Damrosch's music,
one almost believed that it was indeed for Greece instead of
for the shabby interests of an individual and a class. Is this
an ultra-modern and irreverent interpretation of the tale of
Troy divine? Well, it is no more than Euripides makes Cly
temnestra say in terms that admit of no misunderstanding. No
doubt he had to confine this reasoning to the lips of an angry
woman and outraged mother. Perhaps the one-hundred-per
cent Athenians in his audience would not have tolerated a more
directly rational interpretation of the great national legend.
But the words and their meaning are clear and no one can
doubt, from the Euripidean account, that Clytemnestra did
right to be angry and had cause to feel outraged. Her story
throws a strong light forward into the future and makes the
murdered Agamemnon seem a far less tragic and pitiable figure.
Miss Anglin plays the part of Clytemnestra with passion
but with less iron forcefulness than one had, perhaps, a right
to expect. Mellowness and aspiration and a soaring energy
are more native to her than rage and reason and compact
power. When she uses the grand style her wings are better
than her feet. The performance, however, was a notably in
teresting and beautiful one. The choral odes were declaimed
a little thickly. We have heard them more clearly enunciated
and far more rhythmically led. The dances, on the other hand,
had a wild and natural grace, and the blending throughout
of primitive force with tempered and harmonious motion
showed the skill and imagination of the producers.
LUDWTG LEWISOHN
Herald Square
Jtnct <S
New York
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Copyright. 1911, R. H. Macv & Co., Inc.
International
Relations
A Decree Establishing Free Ports in

Mexico
THE following decree of Provisional President de la
Huerta on the establishment of free ports in Mexico
appeared in the Diario Oficial of October 11, 1920. It repre
sents the beginning of two great social reformsfree trade
and the single tax. Engineers, headed by Modesto C. Rolland, the originator of the project, are at work now on the
practical details involved in the carrying out of this decree.
The first free ports will be those of Puerto Mexico (Coatzacoalcos) on the Atlantic and Salina Cruz on the Pacific. A
railroad connects the two, and before the days of the Panama
Canal an enormous traffic was carried on between them. By
means of its free-trade project, the Government hopes to
revive these ports. A free zone will be established midway
between the two ports, and here the single-tax system will
be tried out with the idea of extending it to the rest of the
Eepublic if it proves successful.
I, Adolfo de la Huerta, Acting Constitutional President of
the United States of Mexico, in accordance with the extraor
dinary powers granted to me with relation to the treasury,
considering:
1. That the geographic situation of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec qualifies it to serve both as a transportation route and as
a commercial distributing station for European and Oriental
countries, as well as for North and South America, and that
the National Railroad of Tehuantepec was constructed and im
proved for the purpose of filling the needs of international
traffic;
2. That in spite of the fact that the merchandise trans
ported from one ocean to the other is not subject to customs
duties, being merchandise for transportation only, neverthe
less, fiscal intervention in the conveyance of these goods between
Puerto Mexico and Salina Cruz has been a serious obstacle to
international commerce because of the red tape with regard to
customs and other matters to which the merchants and trans
porters are subject; wherefore it is necessary to abolish all this
red tape relating to merchandise which is not being brought in
for home consumption if the railroad is to fulfil the purpose
for which it was created;
3. That some European ports, even though not situated in
such exceptionally advantageous locations as the ports of the
Isthmus of Tehuantepec, have extensions known as free ports,
where fiscal formalities do not apply and where merchandise
destined for reexportation is not subject to duty;
4. That the customs extensions must not favor any mer
chandise except that for transportation or for reexportation
from the country, and that the creation of these extensions must
not injuriously affect other ports on the Gulf or on the Pacific
used for importation or exportation of merchandise meant only
for home consumption or produced in the country, and that
there is, therefore, no obstacle of a mercantile nature to hinder
the establishment of free ports on both shores of the Isthmus
of Tehuantepec;
5. That the zones of the free ports can serve as districts
for the concentration of raw materials produced in various
countries of the world, which can be manufactured in these
zones, and in general free ports can be used for the establish
ment under favorable conditions of industries for the manufac
ture of all kinds of national and imported raw materials, which
when manufactured can be freely reexported abroad, thus im
proving the general economic situation of the country, and most
particularly of the working classes;
6. That at the same time the establishment of free ports
Section
will permit the opening of large stations where various raw

materials can be mixed, for the advantage of those that can be
sold only in that form in certain regions, to all of which the
fiscal organization now existing constitutes an obstacle;
7. That the port of Guaymas is admirably situated because
of its location on the Gulf of California, because of its position
with regard to American and Asiatic commerce, and because
also of its importance as an outlet of the Southern Pacific Rail
road, which would transport to this place the native products of
the whole western part of the Republic, the organization of a
free extension in this port will convert it into a most active
center of traffic and industry, an impossible condition today
because of the present economic situation which the creation
of the free port would radically change;
8. That the establishment of free ports on the Isthmus of
Tehuantepec and at Guaymas, besides giving an extraordinary
impetus to national commerce, will bring the other nations
into closer contact with our country;
9. That for its most effective operation it is indispensable
that the zone established by the free port should be exempt from
fiscal laws which are detrimental to industry and commerce,
because this zone is considered neutral and must be so, in order
to get rid of all kinds of obstacles to the natural development
of free ports, and because the sum total of these fiscal charges
will be considered as included in the rents and indemnities paid
by the commercial and industrial establishments, as provided in
this law;
10. That the establishment of these ports is a public utility
and justly constitutes a case for the application of expropria
tion as constitutionally authorized; and that, in accordance with
the constitutional provision, and because otherwise it would be
difficult in every way, it must be established that all lands
pertaining to the zone of the free port must always belong to
the nation, and can never be taken away from it;
11. That it is imperative to establish a relatively autono
mous council of directors to take charge of the management,
administration, and development of the free ports and other
enterprises connected therewith, in order to make of them a
commercial organization and to bring about the greatest amount
of decentralization, as well as to determine the most efficient
method of holding responsible those who manage public works;
12. That the members of this council must be named by the
Government, which must draw up a contract for their services
for a reasonable term, in order to insure the cooperation of
competent persons who can dedicate themselves to the im
portant work which is intrusted to them with the security
offered them by their respective contracts;
13. That to carry out the purposes of the free ports of
Salina Cruz and Puerto Mexico, as well as to fulfil the aims
for which the National Railroad of Tehuantepec was created,
it is absolutely necessary for this enterprise also to be ad
ministered by the above-mentioned council, in order to facilitate
traffic and to avoid tariff difficulties, as well as to prevent, by
means of an adequate organization, fiscal obstacles from inter
fering with the free interoceanic traffic of merchandise, and
also to protect the interests of the national treasury;
14. That since the climate of Salina Cruz and Puerto Mexico
might be detrimental to the development of certain industries,
it is advisable to establish a neutral zone or free port in the
interior of the Isthmus along the route of the National Rail
road of Tehuantepec, where climatic conditions are more fav
orable, and where, moreover, the products of the region can be
more easily concentrated and can find a certain market;
and, acting upon these considerations, have decided to decree
the following:
Article 1. Free customs extensions shall be established in the
ports of Salina Cruz, Puerto Mexico, and Guaymas.
Art. 2. These extensions, which shall be called "free ports,"
shall be considered as additions to the marine customs houses
April 27, 1921]
The Nation
to which they belong, and consequently shall be subject only

to the jurisdiction of the Federal authorities.
Art. 3. The free ports shall be governed exclusively by this
law, its regulations, and the provisions of the sanitary laws.
Art. 4. In the free ports merchandise of all kinds shall come
and go without being subject to tariff laws. For the entrance
of arms and munitions of war, authorization by the consular
officer of the country concerned will be needed.
Art. 5. In the free ports all kinds of merchandise may be
stored, exhibited, unpacked, repacked, refined, purified, manu
factured, mixed, and transformed into any form freely, subject
only to the provisions of this law.
Art. 6. The ships entering and leaving the free ports shall
not be subject to any formalities except those established by
the laws for sanitation and for employment of pilots.
Art. 7. The Secretary of the Treasury shall organize and
direct the free ports, designate the extension and boundaries
of each one, generally determine upon the methods necessary
to carry out the present decree, and, wherever advisable, reform
and add to the General Customs Ordinance and the regulations
relating thereto.
Art. 8. The organization, administration, and management
of the free ports shall be directly under the control of a council
composed of five members, one of whom shall act as chairman.
The Secretary of the Treasury shall draw up a contract for
each member of the Council of Directors, for a period not ex
ceeding five years. The council shall have full authority to
appoint and remove all other employees.
Art. 9. All contributions and duties that should fall upon
industrial or commercial establishments and operations in the
free ports will be considered as included in the rents and in
demnities paid by these establishments in accordance with the
following article, for which reason such establishments should
not be called upon to pay any duties.
Art. 10. The Council of Directors must draw up contracts
which provide against the transfer of ownership, and which
are favorable to the establishment and development of mills,
stores, general storage houses, factories, shops, banking and
commercial institutions, and public works within these free
ports, in accordance with the tariffs and regulations approved
by the Secretary of the Treasury.
Art. 11. The Secretary of the Treasury, through the Council
of Directors, shall expropriate the lands necessary for the
establishment and enlargement of the free ports, in accordance
with the following procedure:
(a) Payment of indemnity to the owner of the expropriated
land, as provided in paragraph 8 of Article 27 of the Constitu
tion;
(b) The declaration of expropriation shall be made to the
Secretary of the Treasury, after which the Council of Directors
can, in case of failure of the owner to comply, apply to the
district judge to obtain immediate possession of the land;
(c) Any owner resisting the declaration of expropriation
can oppose it through judicial channels within thirty days fol
lowing the date of expropriation;
(d) When the owner of the land is not definitely known,
the declaration of the Secretary of the Treasury shall be made
public for two weeks in the form designated by the regulation,
and if at the end of this period the owner appears, the pro
cedure designated above shall be followed;
(e) The whole process shall be governed by these regulations.
Art. 12. When the Council of Directors declares that the
free ports of Salina Cruz and Puerto Mexico are open for
traffic, the administration, management, and development of
the National Railroad of Tehuantepec shall be turned over to
this council, which shall make a careful inventory of the
enterprise.
Art. 13. There shall be established, at a point designated
by the Council of Directors, on the route of the National Rail
road of Tehuantepec a free interior port, with the exemptions
established by this law.
633
Art. 14. The Council of Directors shall determine the meth

ods necessary to bring the free ports of Salina Cruz and Puerto
Mexico in contact with the interior free zone referred to in the
preceding article, in such a way as to avoid fiscal obstacles and
formalities, and at the same time to provide a reasonable
guaranty to financial interests.
Art. 15. The Council of Directors shall name the day on
which the free ports authorized by this decree will be opened
for international traffic.
Article 16. The Council of Directors shall propose to the
Secretary of the Treasury the regulations and provisions neces
sary for the carrying out of this decree.
Art. 17. The Secretary of the Treasury is authorized to
invest a sum not exceeding $500,000 toward the expropriation
of lands, the construction of the necessary works, and the
maintenance of the personnel and services of the free ports.
Art. 18. The Secretary of the Treasury and the ComptrollerGeneral of the Nation shall be responsible for the employment
of funds, and for the execution of the laws, regulations, and
tariffs, as well as of the contracts made by the Council of
Directors, through the agency of an authority which each of
them shall appoint for the purpose.
Meanwhile, I demand the printing, publication, circulation,
and careful examination of this decree.
The Reduction and Reorganization of
the Army
In the Diario Oficial of March 17 appeared the following
Presidential decree on the reduction and education of the
army :
Considering, That one of the most urgent demands of the
nation is for the reduction of the standing army to a size which
may permit it to accomplish its important function, and at the
same time not be a heavy financial burden upon the nation by
disturbing the equilibrium of the public finances and contribut
ing to the imposition of onerous taxes, and estimating that an
army of 50,000 men, well-armed, organized, and disciplined,
could carry out the task intrusted to it, and realize the strongly
felt national aspirations;
Considering, That it is also palpably necessary to spread, as
far as possible, education and culture among the troops, so as
to place the army on a level with contemporary civilization and
to obtain a better military discipline. . . ;
Considering, That the army is the guardian of the country's
honor and of its institutions, and for that reason it ought not
to, nor can it, be stained by sending out under its banner indi
viduals stamped with the stigma of vice or crime;
Accordingly, I have the honor to submit for the approval of
the Chamber of Deputies the following proposed law, which re
forms Articles 1, 3, and 673 of the General Organization of the
army and adds notes to the same regulation, in the following
terms:
Army
Article 1. The forces of the nation which carry on war in
defense of independence, integrity, and honor and secure con
stitutional order and peace in the interior constitute the army
and navy of the country and are directly responsible to the
President of the Republic, and in time of peace will have an
effective organization of not more than 50,000 men.
Art. 3. The standing army is characterized by length of
service. Those who belong to it follow a professional career,
the term of which will be decided by a general of a division in
the army, and a rear-admiral in the navy.
It is strictly forbidden to recruit into the army, and give pro
motions to, individuals of notoriously evil character and to
delinquents under prison sentence or to those who are on trial.
Art. 673. Elementary and higher instruction shall be obliga
tory for all members of the national army who are not edu
cated. Said instruction will be gratis and laical and will be
The Nation
634
given by the State without prejudice to military instruction,

which must be received by all who are not engaged in the work
of recruiting in such form and order as may be determined by
the proper regulation.
Note
Art. 3. The Secretary of War will proceed to the prudent
and gradual dismissal of the troops, to the end that on March
31, 1922, the effective forces of the national army will be
reduced to 50,000 men.
President of the Republic,
A. Obregon
Secretary of War and Navy,
E. Estrada
Mexico, March 15, 1921
Army Manifestos
THE manifestos printed below were issued by soldiers
and officers of the Mexican Army who are desirous of
forming cooperative agricultural colonies with the assist
ance of the Government.
The Appeal of the Soldiers
To the Director of the Department of Colonization and Industry
We, the undersigned, who form a part of the First Reserve
of the National Army, and who are farmers by trade, declare
to you with full respect that, desiring to be useful to our coun
try and not wishing to be a constant charge upon the public
treasury, believing that we have fulfilled our duty as revolu
tionary soldiers, and considering the fact that peace actually
exists, without fear that the present order may change, we
have decided that just as yesterday we took up arms to defend
our rights, which we have fortunately preserved, and since the
betterment of the country depends on work, so today we desire
to take up the plow; and for this purpose we have resolved
to form a union of revolutionary elements with the object of
developing, by means of our labor, one of the estates actually
at the disposal of the Federal Government.
The Federal authority is not unconscious of the relations that
exist between us and the rest of the country, which judges us
by its attitude toward all revolutionary elements, which is based
not on our acts as such, but on acts of individuals with no
toriously bad pasts, who drink heavily and under cover of the
cause of liberty give free play to their criminal passions. And
so when we, strong workers, try to return, we find all doors
closed against uswe are faced with civil death. For which
reason, we turn to the Federal Government, asking from it the
aid that we need; and we also inform this Government that we
do not see how we can satisfy the needs of our families without
the aid which we seek; if we do not obtain help we shall find
ourselves in the most wretched circumstances. In view of the
fact that what we had before throwing ourselves into the armed
struggle we naturally had to spend for our families, and in
view of what we have said above, it can be seen that we have
now no credit with which to start our work, and consequently
no means of livelihood. This subsidy for the establishment of
the colony will be a guaranty to society and a stimulus to our
comrades in arms, since it will show that the Government gives
facilities to men of good-will, who, in devoting their energies
to work, will be useful to society and to their country, instead
of being a burden upon it. Moreover, if the Government will
favor us by granting what we ask, it will put an end to the
idleness of many individuals who used the revolution as a means
of livelihood, who have not realized that the country needs pro
ductive elements for its progress, and who are, therefore, a con
stant menace to the society in which they live. Furthermore,
as the Federal authority knows, each one of our members, in
his own sphere of activity, has worked for the consolidation of
the present Government, which justifies our feeling that setting
us on the road of labor will be for the welfare of the country.
[Vol. 112, No. 2912
This is especially true since what we ask is to be no longer a

burden upon the public treasury, inasmuch as all the materials
at our disposal for a period to be fixed by the Government will
be paid for in such a way that neither the colonies no'r the
nation will suffer.
With the assurance of our support, we have the honor to ex
tend to you, once again, our loyalty and respect.
Signed by the Colonists
The Officers' Manifesto
We, the undersigned, have the honor to make to the personnel
of the First Reserve of the Army an appeal for the formation
of one or more agricultural colonies, on the national lands and
estates now owned by the Government, because we believe that
this form of work is the only thing which can save the country
and assure the future of our families, and because we are con
vinced that the time will come when the nation will not be able
to sustain the number of military units it is now supporting.
We feel that as we were the first to take up arms to defend the
rights of our people, so we should be the first to return to the
use of the plow which gives life to the nation and honor to its
inhabitants.
Mexico, D. F., February 25, 1921
In the City of Mexico, D. F., on March 1, 1921, there as
sembled in No. 2 Palmer Street, the undersigned, chiefs and
officers of the First Reserve of the Army, who proposed the
formation of a military agricultural colony, and received from
the commission appointed on the 18th of last month, the follow
ing information: "On the 25th of last month we were received
by the President of the Republic, to whom we explained the pur
poses of the corporation in a most detailed manner, and we ob
tained the promise of the Chief Executive to aid us in this work
and his congratulations for the whole group which we repre
sent. After seeing General Antonio Villareal to find out what
lands were at the disposal of the Department of Agriculture,
we told the President that we wanted to send a commission to
study these lands and decide for us on the most suitable one,
and that since we lacked the resources to carry out this work,
we should like to count on his aid, which would consist in pro
viding the money and means to cover the expenses of the com
mission. The President agreed to help us. This ended the inter
view and convinced us that the President not only sympathized
with our idea but made it his own, for he had asked us to extend
it to the whole army. He authorized us to give to the press
the facts of our interview with him. On the 28th of last month
he received us again and we showed him a report on the proper
ties owned by the nation. Again he promised to help us in
every way he could."
In view of this information it was decided to appoint a com
mission to examine the lands, and the following members were
agreed upon: Brigadier General Roman Bon ilia, Colonels Nestor
Arana, Porfirio Sanchez, and Emeterio Guerra, and Lieuten
ant Colonel Juan Rivera, who were informed that the object
of the commission was to visit the lands indicated by the
Secretary of Agriculture and to choose the one most suitable
to our needs. It was decided to create a commission for
propaganda and for the regulation of any matters relating to
our project. Since there was no other business, the votes were
taken, resulting in the appointment of the following members:
Colonel Edward Royo, Major Manuel Viniegra, First Captains
Pedro Velasquez and Alberto Herrera, Second Captain Ezequiel
Torres, and Second Lieutenant Nicolas Lundes. The meeting
was then adjourned.
The plans of the officers were accepted and fifteen
government haciendas were put at the disposal of the officers
for a beginning. The Government, however, added three
conditions to the officers' plans :
1. That all military rank disappear in the colonies ;
2. That the products of the colonies be offered in all cases
to workers' cooperatives or directly to their organizations
April 27, 1921]
The Nation
635
in case they have no cooperatives because "it is the duty of

these military cooperatives to help the city proletariat" ;
3. That any officer member of the colony who misbehaves
or refuses to become a good cooperator be returned to
the army with the rank he held as a punishment.
The Organization of the Colony

A SUMMARY of the basis for the formation of the ag
ricultural colony, to be called the "First Reserve,"
follows.
1. This colony shall be formed by forty or more individuals,
according to the size and value of the property.
2. To be a member of this colony, one must be well known as
a revolutionary, have some agricultural knowledge, be honest,
and submit to all the regulations relating to the colony.
3. Without ceasing to belong to the Firs}; Reserve of the Na
tional Army, we constitute a rural agricultural colony, and
we shall continue to be paid for two years only, after which
time we should begin to see the fruits of our labor, provided
the other members of this institution live up to their obliga
tions.
4. We are to be allotted land, either public or private, at a
satisfactory price, as well as implements, seeds, etc., necessary
for agriculture, live stock of all kinds, and the most modern
equipment, only on condition that the value of the property be
riot less than two hundred thousand pesos, provided that the
number of colonists does not exceed fifty.
5. The Secretary of Agriculture is to allot to us a part of the
public lands, the location, price, and grade of which are to be
determined by a commission appointed for the purpose.
6. The property sold to us is to be estimated at its statistical
value, plus a charge for interest.
7. The value of the property, as well as of the implements,
seeds, etc., and the amount of the subsidy for general expenses,
is to form a debt to be paid off in annual amounts after the
first year of labor, within a period of not less than twenty years.
8. When the problem of installing the colony is once solved,
we are to be granted allowances for five or six persons, who
shall constitute the commission for the revision and examination
of the estates with the object of designating the most suitable
one, this commission to determine the subsidy needed to cover
its own expenses as well as those of subsequent commissions
to be established by the colony.
9. For security in the regions where the property is situated,
we are to be given arms and munitions to be used to guard our
lives and property, and to be ready to give military aid when
ordered by the Government.
Additions
A. For the payment of our wages, a paymaster is to be named
who shall make the payments at the colony.
B. Schools are to be established for the inhabitants of the
colony, and we are all to be given books on agriculture, to in
struct us in our work and to stimulate progress, and we are to
make a library of them.
C. We are to have a doctor with his medicines.
D. Free transportation is to be granted to our families from
their present place of residence to the new colony.
E. The colony is to be allowed to appoint some of its mem
bers as representatives to cooperate with the civil authorities.
F. In case our proposition is accepted, we respectfully ask
that the necessary steps be taken to put it in practice, with
attention to our needs and the pressure of time, for we wish to
carry it out very soon.
DON'T
SMOKE
PAINT

WE MAKE THEM
Mail Orders Filled
BARCLAY PIPE SHOP

Form in which the Debt for the Agricultural Colony is to
be Paid
1. If the debt is $200,000 for the property, and ?50,000 for
the implements, seeds, and other expenses, the total debt will
41 BARCLAY STREET
Corner Cknrck Street
636
The Nation
amount to $250,000, which will be paid by the fifty colonists.

2. This debt shall be divided into amounts of $5,000 for each
member, to be paid in twenty years in payments of $250 a
year, making a total of $12,500 which will be paid back each
year.
3. In order to avoid any injury to the properties placed at the
disposal of the colonists, the Federal Government may appoint
someone to inspect the operations of the colony, or the colony
can submit a detailed report at the end of each year.
Obligations of the Colonists during the Two Years in
which they Form Part of the First Reserve
1. To guarantee against banditry the region wherein the prop
erty is situated, to protect the interests of the colony, and to
be prepared for any service ordered by the Government.
2. Not to permit any colonist to leave the corporation without
having paid the sum total of his contracted debt.
Considerations
We call the attention of the Government to the fact that in
asking to form part of the First Reserve for two years, we
desire support for our families until we have time to see the
fruits of our labors.
Since our families have suffered untold privations during the
seven years that the struggle has lasted, we feel that they have
a right at least to the necessities of life.
We extend to you our most distinguished consideration and
esteem.
Mexico, D. F., February 25, 1921.
Regulations for Members of the Colony

nnHE plan for the formation of the "First Reserve" inX eludes regulations for all persons making up the colony.
These regulations appear below.
1. It is absolutely necessary for anyone wishing to belong
to the colony to possess the qualities of morality necessary for
all who are obliged to live in society, as well as to enjoy all his
faculties, so that he may not be hindered from carrying out
any work assigned to him by the Board of Directors.
2. For the favorable progress of the work of the colony, a
Board of Directors shall be appointed from the members, to
which the rest shall be subject, and whose orders relative to
work and administration shall be respected. The Board of
Directors shall be composed of a president, a vice-president, a
secretary, an assistant-secretary, a treasurer, an assistanttreasurer, only three possessing votes.
Powers of the Board of Directors
1. To convoke a general assembly whenever deemed con
venient and when the necessities of labor demand.
2. To distribute work among the colonists in accordance with
their knowledge and ability, as well as to supervise the execu
tion of all measures undertaken, making sure that no work is
neglected for any reason whatsoever which affects the interests
of the colony.
3. The program of work shall be intrusted to various com
missions at the beginning of each week, and announced pub
licly to all the colonists, and none of the members of the colony
shall modify the said program of his own accord, but when a
change may be necessary under special circumstances it shall
be made by agreement with the Board of Directors.
4. To care for the well-being, progress, and welfare of the
colony in general, providing that, in case of accident to, or ill
ness of, any one of the colonists, efficient attention be given
him, and that he receive all the necessary supplies, which shall
be in charge of a section of the reserve created within the
colony.
[Vol. 112, No. 2912
5. Secret meetings are prohibited. To keep all colonists con

stantly informed regarding the needs and progress of the colony
the Board of Directors will always keep its books and docu
ments up-to-date so that when any colonist wishes to have any
data it may be supplied to him as well as to the Departments
of State.
6. For no reason shall the Board of Directors permit the
removal or destruction of any property, or the sale of products
without its authorization, since the only authority responsible
for all that the land produces and all operations which are to
be undertaken, besides the Board of Directors, is the unani
mous will of the members of the colony attested by their sig
natures.
7. When the Board of Directors finds a colonist who does not
obey orders, who becomes habitually intoxicated, or who is a
reckless character, and in any way molests another colonist,
and also if any trouble of an economic nature arises among the
colonists, the Board of Directors shall meet and constitute itself
a council of justice, and if the judgment against one or more
colonists is severe enough for dismissal, an act of dismissal
shall be passed and shall be referred to the Department of the
First Reserve, a higher body.
8. For the execution of the preceding article, the Board of
Directors shall be careful to keep constant watch over the con
duct of each one of the colonists, so that when occasion arises
it can do its work with absolute justiceas it must set an
example of morality as well as of labor.
9. When a colonist is dismissed on account of misbehavior
the colony must see that he is compensated for the amount of
money which he has actually given, so that he will lose only
the labor which he has performed, and only if he is destitute,
will the amount needed for transportation to the place where
he wishes to settle be given to his family.
10. Causes for which the Board of Directors shall ask the
dismissal of colonists are: pillage and theft; continual and
offensive drunkenness; acts of any character which would be
obstacles to the favorable progress of the colony.
11. The Board of Directors shall not permit any colonist to
cease work without due cause for a period of more than fifteen
days; though in case of necessity, he can take all the time he
needs, if he leaves a person in his place who can perform his
work to the satisfaction of the Board.
12. In order that the Board of Directors may be able to
render an annual account, it shall keep a memorandum of work
accomplished during its tenure of office, as well as one for each
individual member.
13. The Board of Directors shall take care that, in the
interior regulation of the colony, military rank is not taken
into account in the performance of labor, since in this every
one should be on an equal footing, working for the common
good.
14. The Board of Directors shall see to it that whenever
feasible all questions of consumption of goods in the colony,
and matters involving considerable expense, shall be discussed
by the colonists, in order to promote the welfare of the colony
in general.
15. As one of the aims of the colony project is to help also
the city proletariat, the products shall not be sold to store
keepers, but in the principal places of the Republic, markets
shall be established where the products will be sold without
competition, so that the consumers in general will benefit, and
the colony can at the same time sell its merchandise more
profitably than it could to merchants.
16. All the undertakings which, after due consideration, it
proposes shall be investigated by properly qualified persons
before they are put into practice. . . .
20. The Board of Directors shall not accept any debt, nor
can it contract one, with private individuals. Such action
would be cause for asking it to resign and immediately appoint
ing another to take up the responsibilities of the outgoing
Board. . . .
April 27, 1921]
The Nation
637
The New Secretary of Labor

THE duties usually performed by a Secretary of Labor
have heretofore, in Mexico, been assumed by various
other secretariats, to the consequent confusion and neglect
of this important phase of the government.
Considering, That among the economic questions of great
importance which now occupy the attention of legislators and
statesmen are found those relating to labor in its many and
varied aspects; and that the social, political, and moral prob
lems which these questions have brought up are of such mag
nitude that in reality the social problem which so fundamentally
concerns the governments of the civilized world reduces itself
clearly and completely to the lawful regulation of labor and to
the complete determination of the rights and prerogatives of
the laboring class, from the humble peasant of the fields to the
technician or professional man who solves the most difficult
problems of human life; and that, on the other hand, it is wellknown that the conflict between capital and labor presents very
serious incidents of a political and legal nature which profoundly
affect the economics of society, and to solve these troubles a
detailed knowledge of their various inter-related questions is
needed, as well as possession of data which only offices created
for that purpose can supply;
Considering, That the economic and moral situation of the
workers which exists in the Republic makes it especially neces
sary for the government to go to their aid and to secure their
betterment in the various spheres of human activity, particu
larly because modern public law has definitely placed upon the
state the obligation of forming institutions established for the
improvement of the worker's condition and the raising of his
intellectual and moral level; and that to realize the former it is
necessary to create the office of a secretary of labor whose
duties will be the study and solution of the aforesaid economic
problems and the administrative organization of the various
offices by means of which the aspirations of the proletariat will
be satisfied, and the much desired economic equilibrium estab
lished between capital and labor;
Therefore, In view of the importance and complexity of all
the matters which we have mentioned, the need is indisputable
for creating a new branch of the executive power whose duties
will lie particularly in that field, which will undoubtedly bring
greater efficiency and skill to the solution of all the questions
pertaining to labor, so that our laws may respond to the actual
demands of the times, and for establishing the office of Secre
tary of Labor which already exists in the great European
nations.
From the foregoing considerations it is decreed:
Article 1. The office of Secretary of Labor shall be created,
whose administrative function shall be to provide for every
thing which relates to the rights and obligations of the worker
and to the aid which is due him from the state.
Art. 2. The Secretary of Labor shall have jurisdiction over
workmen's compensation, courts of conciliation and arbitration,
strikes and lockouts, chambers of labor, workers' associations
and syndicates, savings banks, societies, especially cooperatives,
and consumers' leagues, labor funds, professional associations,
labor contracts, apprenticeship and technical instruction, work
ers' legislation, and statistics of occupations.
Notes
1. The duties which are now vested in the various state sec
retaries and those which, by the terms of this law, pertain to
the Secretary of Labor shall from this time on be vested in the
latter.
2. This law will go into effect from the date of publication.
A. Obregon
ZUBARAN,
Secretary of Industry, Commerce, and Labor
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The Nation
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[Vol. 112, No. 2912
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The Nation
FOUNDED 1866
Vol. CXII
NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, MAY 4, 1921
Contents
689
EDITORIALS:
Our Aggressive Foreign Policy
642
The German Crisis
648
No War with England. III. Merchant Marine Problems
644
The Roots of All Evil
646
NapoleonAfter One Hundred Years
646
JEWRY AT THE END OF THE WAR: A REVIEW. By Judah L.
Magnes
647
ZIONISM TODAY. By Louis Lipsky
649
PALESTINIAN PROBLEMS. By Hiram K. Moderwell
661
A JEW AMONG THE FORDS. By Louis WeiUenkorn
662
THE NEW EDUCATION. I. ITS TREND AND PURPOSE. By Eve
lyn Dewey
654
FASCISMOTHE REACTION IN ITALY. By Carleton Beals
666
GERMANY'S DWINDLING RADICALISM. By S. Miles Bouton
667
PATERNALISM VERSUS UNIONISM IN MINING CAMPS. By Powers
Hapgood
661
GLASSHOUSE DIALOGUE. By Harold Kellock
662
662
CORRESPONDENCE
668
SEX. By Arthur Guiterman
666
BOOKS:
Democracies and Democracy. By J. A. Hobson
666
Andrew Carnegie. By Stuart P. Sherman
667
England's Critical Compass. By Mark Van Doren
669
The Physics of Metaphysics. By Preserved Smith
670
Books in Brief
671
DRAMA:
"Clair de Lune." By Ludwig LewiBohn
672
Economic Effects of the Paris Resolutions
678
Woman Suffrage in Mexico
676
OSWALD GARRISON VILLARD, Editoe
Associate Editors
LEWIS S. GANNETT
FREDA KDJCHWEY
ARTHUR WARNER
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
ERNEST H. GRUENINO
CARL VAN DOREN
Managing Editor
Literary Editor
R. HARDING'S praise of Bolivara great American
M who has not yet received his due at the hands of our
North American historianswill, of course, fall gratefully
upon South American ears. But what our Latin neighbors
ask of us is deeds not words. The ratification of the Colum
bian Treaty and the payment of the long overdue indemnity
to that injured country will help a great deal to reestablish
our reputation to the south of us. So will also help our
friendly and successful arbitration in the election difficul
ties of Cuba. But fear of the Northern peril will prevail
just as long as we occupy Haiti and Santo Domingo contrary
to the wishes of their peoples and in contradiction to all
our pretenses as to self-determination and the rights of
small nations; just as long as we threaten Mexico and dic
tate our will to Nicaragua and Costa Rica and take the tone
in our diplomatic notes which Mr. Hughes has assumed
toward Panama and its next-door neighbor.
WHILE the eyes of the United States have been turned
eastward toward Europe, or westward toward
Japan, or at least no further southward than Mexico, a new
nation has casually sauntered into existence in other parts.
The ratification by Guatemala of the pact for the forma
tion of the Federation of Central America constitutes the
third acceptance of the agreement, and thus the number
necessary to make it binding, Honduras and Salvador having
-
No. 2913
previously voted for the union. If Costa Rica and Nicara

gua join later, as is hoped, the new nation will have more
than 5,000,000 inhabitants. In its form of executive gov
ernment the Federation of Central America is to have
neither the responsible ministry of Europe nor the presi
dential system of the United States, which latter has been
generally adopted, with modifications, in South America.
Instead, the new union is to have what in our cities is
called the commission form of government. Executive au
thority will rest in a Federal Council, one member from each
state, elected for five years. One of them, it is true, will
be chosen by the Council as President, but he will serve
only one year and will act merely as a chairman. We wel
come the Federation of Central America. It is a happy
sign of increasing friendship and solidarity in a region
that has been too long torn with jealousy and dissension.
STILL further ramifications are added to the net of in
trigue and absurdity in which the Allies are enmeshed
by a secret treaty which, according to a dispatch to the
New York Times, was concluded in March between Italy
and the Turkish Nationalists. Italyalthough publicly
bound, along with the other Allies, to carry out the Treaty
of Sevres, for the fructification of which Greece is fighting
the armies of Mustapha Kemalhas privately agreed to
defeat the ends for which Greece has hopefully gone to war
in Anatolia. The agreement was arranged at the recent Lon
don conference and, as reported, provides for the with
drawal of all Italian troops from Ottoman territory and a
pledge by Italy to support in her relations with the Allies
"all demands of the Turkish delegation relative to the peace
treaty, and especially restitution to Turkey of Smyrna and
Thrace." The quid pro quo is a series of economic conces
sions to Italy in Asia Minor. This action of Italy, taken in
connection with the withdrawal of French troops from
Cilicia, shows how completely Greece has been betrayed by
the Allies and how outrageous it is that her young men
should be laying down their lives in the name of "patriot
ism" in a hopeless fight for an absurd "cause." That word
"patriotism" ought to be stripped of most of its humbug
by now for anybody who can readand understandthe
news. According to the dispatch to the Times, the Turks
are even using Italian munitions in their operations against
the Greeks!
SWITZERLAND is learning from France how uncom
promising a big nation can be. France has announced
to Switzerland her intention of denouncing the treaty con
ventions which for a century have given the Swiss canton
of Geneva special customs rights in adjacent French terri
tory. The history of these zones, which goes back to
Napoleonic days, was recounted by Mr. Robert Dell in The
Nation for February 9. The most essential of them depend
upon the treaty imposed by England, Austria, Prussia, and
Russia upon defeated France in 1815. France today con
tends that the great Powers which made the "zones" in
1815 could unmake them, without consultation of Switzer-
The Nation
640
[Vol. 112, No. 2913
land, in 1919; and the Treaty of Versailles indeed states
fective, compiled, as they are, from the imperfect and unsys
that the old conventions are recognized as no longer con
tematic returns of steamship companies. The Census Bu

reaus figures, if correct, render the alien menace about as
sistent with present conditions, leaving a settlement in

detail to France and Switzerland. Those two nations have
been unable to reach an agreement; Switzerland has sug
important as a five-cent cake of ice at the portals of Hades.
gested arbitration, but France refuses, and cynically an
OW independent is our press? The New York news

papers at least, are we not often told, great metro
politan journals that they are, have freed themselves from
advertising controlsay what you will of their feebler
nounces her intention of carrying out her desires whether

Switzerland acquiesces or not. One of the big Powers which
signed the treaty of 1815 was absent at Versailles in 1919;

Russia has given no consent to the implied abrogation which
the other great Powers signed in 1919. It is a beautiful
opportunity for Lenin and Chicherin to write a protest note

defending the rights of small nationsand there are no
subtler masters of diplomatic irony than they.
CHOOL boards in various cities of the country seem to
be trying to outdo each other in obscurantism. Buffalo

has been considerably stirred by the disciplining of six
teachers because of real or alleged connection with the pub
lication of a pamphlet on the city's education last Summer;
the Courier has come out on the side of the teachers.
In
Los Angeles the Board of Education has excluded The

Nation and the New Republic from the school libraries in
spite of a protest of teachers. This has been partially re
sponsible for the teachers' decision to back a ticket of their
own for the next Board of Educationwe trust they will
succeed. Some weeks ago the Board of Education of New
York City decided that the Community Forum, conducted

by the Rev. John Haynes Holmes, could no longer meet in a
public-school building. More recently it decreed that Dr.
Holmes be not allowed to address the Brooklyn Civic Forum,
which meets in a school building. We are glad to note that
the Rev. John Howard Melish, who took Dr. Holmes's place,
occupied part of his time in defending the latter and censur

ing those who had excluded him. Dr. Holmes's crime is well
known: he is one of the pitifully few clergymen who, having
talked against war for years, proved his sincerity by refus
ing to get behind the band in 1917 and whoop it up for blood
and buncombe. He was to have spoken on The Collapse of
Civilization; Can it Be Saved? Perhaps the members of
the Board of Education think it doesnt matter whether civ
ilization be saved or not. We would share that opinion if we

thought its future was in their hands.
ACK of team-work in Washington has an indecorous
way of holding the Federal Government up to ridicule
now and then. On the heels of much exaggerated propa
ganda in regard to the alien menace, and while Congress
is in the midst of legislation to restrict immigration, the

Census Bureau runs amuck by announcing that the foreign
born population of the United States increased only 358,442,
or 2.6 per cent, in the last ten years!
The total number of
foreign-born in 1920 is placed at 13,703,987. Such statistics
and more venal contemporaries in Philadelphia, Boston,

or Pittsburgh. Yet in the New York morning papers of
April 21 appears a storyof two fashionably dressed
people, who had posed as society persons and lived in
style at the Hotel Vanderbilt, convicted of shoplifting and
sentenced to the penitentiary. The Times alone gives the
name of the store which had been pilferedJames Mc
Creery & Company. The Herald refers to it as a Fifth
Avenue store. The American calls it a Thirty-fourth
street department store. The World merely alludes to a
department store. The Tribune avoids the predicament
which embarrasses three of its competitors by omitting the
item entirely. It is interesting to note that all of the
stories unhesitatingly feature the Hotel Vanderbilt. The
Vanderbilt does not advertise in the newspapers.
HOPEFUL aspect of the revelations of peonage in
Georgia, and of cruelty and violence to Negroes in
connection with it, appears in the desire manifested to
search out and stop further horrors. Both State and Fed
eral officers seem to be in earnest in this, and some notable
public meetings testify to an at last aroused public opinion.
Governor Dorsey has announced that he will demand the
persecution of all persons guilty of mob violence or other
crimes toward Negroes and will do all in his power to
bring the real situation in Georgia before its citizens.
At the same time the United States Department of Justice
is said to be ready to send fifty agents to the State, if
necessary. This is far better than the Palmer method of
employing them in the generally needless and frequently
illegal hounding of so-called radicals. Meanwhile, there are
additional horrifying revelations as to murders and lynch
ings of Negro peons and as to the extent of the peonage.
HE North Dakota bond issue offered directly to the
people of the United States after the refusal of the
bankers to touch it, affords every citizen an opportunity
for service. The sale of these bonds is necessary to carry
on the Nonpartisans program which is a substitute for
and a challenge to the exploitation of producer and consumer
that has wrought such havoc with the agricultural life of
our nation. The vicious assaults on the North Dakotans,
the misrepresentation of their policies, and finally the boy
cott of their bond issue, duly authorized by the State's
are surprising when one considers that the foreign-born

population increased three million between 1900 and 1910.
constituted authorities and legalized by the United States
It is true that immigration was slight during the last half

of the decade 1910 to 1919, inclusive, but on the other hand
special privilege feel themselves imperiled. The Nonpar

tisan movement is an evolutionary development born of
it reached its peak during the first half. More than a million
necessity, bred of common-sense, and dedicated to the thor
aliens entered the United States in each of the five years

from 1910 to 1914, inclusive, the total amounting to more
than six millions. The Census Bureau figures do not tally at
all with those of the Bureau of Immigration. According to
Supreme Court, are conclusive evidence that the forces of
oughly American ideal that all men are entitled to an equal

opportunity and a square deal.
Neither the farmer nor
the records of the latter, 3,748,030 more aliens arrived in
the consumer have been getting the latter. Consequently

all those who prefer progress to standpatism or retrogres
sion, cannot better apply their energies than in backing up
this country from 1910 to 1919, inclusive, than departed from

it; but the statistics of departing aliens are notoriously de
ment the bonds are excellent.
the North Dakotans in this stressful hour.
As an invest
The Nation
May 4, 1921]
641
ENTS may be limited and controlled by law anywhere
public references to it and the insidious pressure which it
in the United States, when the legislative power con

siders that the welfare of the community is menaced, in
consequence of the decision of the United States Supreme
Court affirming legislation of that character in New York
exerts upon publishers to compel them to touch Science
and the District of Columbia.
The decision was written
by Justice Holmes, with Justices Brandeis, Clarke, Day, and
Pitney concurring, and the other four dissenting. Justice

Holmes upheld the right to regulate rents, as it had pre
viously been affirmed by the highest tribunal of New York,
as a legitimate exercise of the police power, calling atten
tion to the fact that the possible return on property had
already been limited by regulating the height of buildings.
Justice McKenna, expressing the view of the minority, was
concerned over the other possibilities opened up by the de
cision. Houses are a necessity of life, he wrote, but
other things are as necessary. May they, too, be taken from
the direction of their owners and disposed of by the gov
ernment? To this we reply, without dismay, Yes. We
appreciate the dangers of legislative and executive tyranny
in this direction, but we are even more mindful of the
crushing and appalling power of property, as developed in
America, to blight the life of humanity. We hold that
property must be restored to its earlier conception as a con
venience to the community, capable of change as the latter
directs; we cannot justify it as an institution of fixed
status, or one to be used by the few to support their privi
leges against the interests of the many. Modern property
rights must be susceptible of modification unless we want
violent revolution, on the one hand, or hopeless discontent
and unrest on the other.
only in the accents of compliment or at least of consid
erate euphemism. In this respect Christian Science aligns

itself with the other compact minoritiesthe Mormons are
also protesting against the Cambridge Historyarmed
with some kind or assumption of vested interest, which

contrive to muffle any dissent from the notions which they
happen to favor.
ITHOUT ceremony and with no apparent recourse to

the university publicity department, organized in
recent years, Harvard has quietly reopened to the public its
Germanic Museum. An inconspicuous notice in Boston
newspapers announced that the Museum would henceforth
be open Wednesdays and Saturdays. Verily, tempus fugit.

How recently was not every superpatriot in Boston and the
Cambridge hinterland convinced that the Germanic Museum
was conceived solely in the iniquity of pro-German propa

ganda? Was it not even whispered that the foundations of
the museum were of solid concrete, ten feet thick, obviously
a potential base for Hun howitzers? Yet now, with the ex
ception only of Professor Arthur Kampf's original portrait
of Kaiser Wilhelm II, which has probably been relegated to a
cellar, all of the former exhibits appear to be intact, untar
nished by the fiery breath of 100 per cent Americanism, un
scathed at the hands of American Legionaries or of the De
partment of Justice. In fact, the considerable crowd of
placid New Englanders which has visited the museum ap

pears to bear no animosity whatever toward the Mater
Dolorosa of Nuremberg or the Christ Crucified of Wechsel
burg. The quiet peacefulness with which our Cantabrigian

ITH fanatic fingers delicately gloved and with firm
words thickly buttered the Christian Scientists have
achieved another of those suppressions of free discussion
which have helped and are still helping the progress of
culture has rewelcomed Kultur would indicate the return of
that sensitive sect.
be able to contemplate the statue of the Great Elector with

out frothing at the mouth.
This time it is a volume of The Cam
bridge History of American Literature which has hurt
an era of good-will and sanity, at least so far as art is con
cerned. It is not too much to hope that one of these days

even Mr. William Roscoe Thayer, historian emeritus, will
their feelings, and the particular item of offense is a section

dealing with Science and Health by Professor Wood
bridge Riley of Vassar, who in spirited language has indi
cated the manifold plagiarisms which went into the making
of Mrs. Eddys revelation. The apparent grounds of
complaint are that Professor Riley's language lacks respect
for the prophetess and her followers, and it is true that
he has written with a full sense of the comic aspects which
have attended the rise of her cult. But, presumably, the
fault which makes the chapter seem most dangerous to
Scientists is the sharp analysis which traces the doctrine
of Mrs. Eddy to certain constituent elements she is con
vincingly shown to have derived from the Shakers, from
the magnetic healer Quimby, and from that tedious arch
angel of transcendentalism Bronson Alcott. Was it not
once thought blasphemy for the higher criticism to in
vestigate the Babylonian or Egyptian analogues of Old
HE news that John, son of Ephraim, son of Zitho of

the tribe of Demitro, by his illness in Detroit en
dangers the succession of a dynastic house among the

American gypsies, brings to mind a hundred old tales of
those fascinating nomads whom we call gypsies because
our ancestors thought them to be Egyptianstales of horse
jockeying and baby-stealing, swarthy ruffians and impec
cable maidens, uncanny foresight and exotic craftiness. All
these are folk-tales, and perhaps the gossip concerning
chieftains and kings among the Romany tribes is of the
same casual foundation.
But the essential fact about the
gypsies still remains, and remains exciting: that for half

a thousand years they have preserved nomadic habits among
the civilized nations of the world, without any fatal con
tamination from the cultures of the settlements.
What
these needs so much to be called to public attention as that
a wealth of romance inheres in the very idea we know from

the romances of George Borrow. Some analogous romancer
who shall follow the gypsies through the enormous ranges of
the American continent has an opportunity greater than
Borrow ever dreamed of. Nor is it merely romance that
strikes us in this connection. Have the gypsies not solved
the problem of house and land and constricting statutes as
no other race has done? What stubborn, powerful instinct
in this tribe of men has kept them in their migratory state
of the pious espionage which the sect exercises over all
while the rest of the world has settled down somewhere?
Testament myths and to look among the pagan Greeks for

New Testament ideas? Intellectually, the Christian Scien
tists occupy the position of those dutiful believers who in

the past century tried to pack Christianity in cotton and
keep it from the air and the sun. The intellectual methods
of Christian Science, however, are, of course, unimportant
in comparison with its strategical devices.
And none of
642
The Nation
Our
Aggressive
MR. HARDING himself may be infirm of purpose and

without a constructive program, but there is no doubt
of the determination of his Secretary of State and of his
party to institute an aggressive foreign policy. This has so
struck the Washington correspondent of the New York
Evening Post that he is led to sound an alarm against the
bellicose tendencies of the present Government. Is it pre
paring for war? he asks. Well, he should know, like every
body else, that nothing less than vigor was to be expected
of Mr. Hughes and that the historic policy of the Republican
Party is to show, or to use, the mailed fist when it comes to
foreign affairs. The party is essentially imperialistic, and
if it had not been it must be so now by reason of the big
business forces that dominate it. If, on the other hand, it
be rejoined that the Democratic Party has also been ex
tremely imperialistic, notably in the Caribbean, we reply,
Of course. Have we not been saying for a long time past
that there is no essential difference between the two parties?
Wilson Democrats are making much of the fact that at sev
eral points, notably Yap, and the cable question, the Re
publicans are paying Mr. Wilson the compliment of fol
lowing in his footsteps albeit more vigorously, while the
absence of any positive declaration thus far on our wrong
doing in Santo Domingo and Haiti is similarly suggestive.
Well, what really thoughtful student of political affairs
expected anything else?
It is true, however, that the Republicans are going to the
mat with a good deal more vim and aggressiveness than dis
tinguished the State Department in Mr. Wilson's time. Also,
the saber is being rattled vigorously, probably for several
purposes. It may be in order to impress the Japanese; it
may be because of Mr. Harding's avowed belief that we can
not bring about universal disarmament until we have a lot
to disarm and have impressed everybody with what a dan
gerous character we are. So it is announced that we are to
concentrate the entire fleet in the Pacific; that we are to
push forward the great naval base at Hawaii ; that General
Pershing is immediately to organize a skeleton war staff
similar to that he headed in France, "to be instantly prepared
for active military operations in time of war"something
hitherto supposed to have been the function of the General
Staff. Also immediate and extensive development of the
aeronautical services is to have the favorable attention of
Congress, the dispatches report. Mr. Harding himself has
added fuel to the flames. Not only is he especially inter
ested in immediate strengthening of the Panama defenses,
but in his inaugural address he gave considerable space to
what would take place in our next war and threatened that
everyone would have to take part in the conflict, without
any exceptions, apparently, even for Quakers. Then he
went out of his way to announce at the unveiling of the
Bolivar statue that we should uphold the Monroe Doctrine
to the extent of cheerfully fighting for it whenever neces
sary. No wonder that Washington correspondents are be
ginning to ask what it all means.
In our relations both with our Allies and with Germany
Mr. Hughes's natural vigor of expression is making itself
felt. We have told England in plain and unvarnished terms
where she stands in the matter of her oil claims in Costa
Rica, and we have about reached a deadlock with Japan over
the question of Yapthe most miserable little island in mid-
Foreign
[Vol. 112, No. 2913
Policy
ocean that ever brought about an impasse between two great

nations. It is currently reported that Mr. Hughes will
shortly take up the matter of Shantung and serve notice on
Japan that she has got to fix the date for her withdrawal
from that raped province and that she must do it quickly.
Her conduct in Siberia, too, is to come under our review.
The rest of our Allies have been clearly informed that
though we are not a party to the Versailles treaty we pro
pose to have every one of our rights under that treaty, not
a jot nor a tittle less, and that there we shall take our
vigorous stand. As for the Germans, we have twice lately
rapped them over the knuckles, the second time in declining
to arbitrate for them while also making the useful and wise
suggestion that they and the Allies get together once more
to negotiate the question of the indemnity. We have per
emptorily served notice on Panama and Costa Rica that they
will not be allowed to fight, no matter what they may wish
to do, and we have laid down the law to Panama itself,
again in no uncertain terms. If the Republicans go on this
way they may certainly "point with pride" at their next
national convention to the manner in which they have walked
softly and wielded the Big Stick.
Whether they thus serve best the world, the poor, dis
organized world, is another question. Certainly, he must be
blind who does not perceive that our relations with Japan
grow steadily worse. Not only have we challenged the
whole system of mandates, which mean so much to Japan in
connection with her part of the spoils of Versaillesand
thereby also raised the question of the value of the secret
treaties of 1917 under which our other Allies guaranteed
certain spoils to Japanbut we are adding steadily to the
unrest in that country in its relations to us. The organiza
tion last week of a group of Representatives and Senators of
seven Western States under the leadership of a liberal gone
wrong in this instanceSenator Johnson of California
to bring about complete exclusion of Japanese from America,
will again react most unfavorably in the Island Kingdom,
where it will be received as further proof of the dislike and
hostility of the American people. Last week saw also the
revival of the regularly recurring sensational stories as to
the menacing program for naval construction upon which
Japan is secretly working. Only the other day someone
originated the story that Japan was obtaining a tremendous
air fleet from England, and so it goes. If there is anything
lacking in the old familiar game of setting one nation at
another's throat, it is not visible in this instance. We
are heading for trouble just as surely as were the British
and the Germans when, about 1900, there began the press
campaigns in both countries with the object of proving in
each country that the other was menacing its trade and its
future.
But it is this aggressive foreign policy that the American
people voted for, whether consciously or unconsciously, last
November. That it should give way to a spirit of friendship
and conciliation without the rattling of the saber, in accord
ance with an enlightened, humane, and broadminded pro
gram to bring about reconciliation in the world, immediate
disarmament, and a rational reconstruction along the lines
of a true association of nations and the Hague Tribunal,
goes without saying. But this can plainly come to pass only
if public opinion promptly makes itself felt in Washington.
The Nation
May 4, 1921]
The
German
THE new German terms, although not wholly outlined

at this writing, prove conclusively the correctness of
the position taken by those like ourselves who censured the
abrupt breaking off of the Allied negotiations with Ger
many early in March. Then the bargainers were much
nearer together than anybody realized. Today, if the fore
casts are correct, Germany is offering 200 billion marks
over a period not to exceed forty-two years in addition to
the 21 billions which she claims to have paid already, or
within five billions of marks of the amount demanded at the
Paris Conference last January. In other words the Allies
and their former foe are now so close together in the game
of bluff which both have been playing that a failure to
reach an understanding would seem incredible. Certainly
if after such an offer the French continue to press for the
immediate occupation of the Ruhr the world will have the
right to believe that there is an ulterior motive at work,
that it is annexation and the destruction of German in
dustry upon which French passion is bent.
This is not to say that the Germans have behaved well
in the negotiations or that they have been other than ex
tremely trying. They were warranted, of course, in fencing
for the easiest terms possible at London ; they had the right
to assume that the Allies were probably asking for more
than they would take. Yet it would surely have been the
wiser course had they offered their uttermost then and
therefrom now on every proposal they make will be sub
ject to the suspicion that, despite their protests, it is only
a trial balloon. It was not a time for jockeying, but once
more they failed in strategy as well as in tactics. Our
London advices are to the effect that the old German in
ability to enter into the psychology of other peoples, or to
present their case well, or to put the best foot forward
was as much in evidence at the London conference as here
tofore. They have not yet learned how to win the good
will of the world, in this case to be earned only by completest
frankness and straightforwardness. They neglected, for
instance, the opportunity to present effectively, as they have
since, through the words of Dr. Simons, their readiness to
do the honorable thing about the reconstruction of France
without which they cannot hope to regain the favorable
opinion of mankind. Men like Dr. Simons realize this, but
they have failed to make it clear until now. The Germans
ought also to have realized more clearly how desperate is the
financial condition of France and how profound her need.
But that is for the moment past. At this hour it appears
as if the reparations issue, the failure to settle which has
kept all Europe in turmoil for two years, were finally on the
verge of settlement. It is true, of course, that at the last
moment an excited and intemperate French public opinion
may yet dictate the occupation of the Ruhr, in defiance of
the real wishes of Great Britain and Italy. But it is hard
to see how this can be done, particularly in view of the
attitude of the Harding Administration. Thus far, we are
happy to record our view, Mr. Hughes has handled the
situation faultlessly. He has refused to umpire, yet left the
door open to our acting as mediator, and there is no indica
tion that he has walked into M. Briand's trap by which the
United States would become responsible for the fulfilment
of German obligations. There is no doubt that our State
Department is today in the best position possible to bring
643
Crisis
correct pressure to bear upon the Allies to wind the matter

up and to prevent the proposed French action which the
Manchester Guardian has characterized as certain, if car
ried out, to bring about the complete ruin of economic
Europe. We do not believe that Mr. Hughes has entered
upon the course he has without a careful consideration of
whither it might lead him and a weighing of the conse
quences. We believe that he is prepared to see it through,
and if he does, and prevents the Allies from making the
incalculable mistake of advancing further into Germany, he
will have achieved at the outset of his Secretaryship a most
brilliant diplomatic success, certain to redound to his credit
as it will confer vast benefit upon the whole world which
cannot settle down until the economic fetters of the Central
Powers are struck off and a reconstruction program is
clearly outlined. For ourselves, we welcome with unquali
fied satisfaction the appearance of the United States as a
friendly mediator, the role for which we are best fitted.
As for the terms, no one disagrees with the principle that
Germany must pay all she possibly can without economically
enslaving her people or depriving them of the conditions
necessary to adequate livelihood. The whole issue has been
of agreeing upon the utmost possible amount of reparation.
To liberals everywhere it has seemed as if the way to obtain
this was to negotiate fairly and in a friendly spirit with
the Germans and that the French attitude of military
threats in the spirit of revenge and hostility was precisely
the wrong way to go about it. Reason alone will count.
Proof of this is the lesser stress laid by the Germans on
their impossible proposal of assuming the Allied indebted
ness to the United States and their willingness to pledge
their customs revenues as guaranties. Their renewal of
their offer to reconstruct at once the devastated districts
of France by German labor and materials, either through
the Government directly or through specially constituted
associations of business men and workingmen, will compel
the French either to accept or definitely decline proposals
to which they have hitherto declined to give a yes or no
answer. It is a striking fact that although Germany at
first protested violently against the possibility of indefinite
terms she is herself suggesting making the annual repara
tion payments flexible in accordance with the recovery of
German industries. It is also reported that it is proposed
to spread the payments over a period of between thirty
and forty-two years. An interesting new development is
the suggestion of an international loan so that the Entente
and France in particular may receive immediate cash.
Finally, the dispatches suggest additional pledges of good
faith in the way of participation in German industrial
enterprises, while the proposed and unworkable export tax
of 12 per cent is not mentioned.
These are not easy terms and time alone will show
whether they can be carried out. But we have such faith
in the already demonstrated capacity of all the belligerent
nations to recover from the effects of the war much more
quickly than had been anticipated as to believe that this
will hold true of Germany as well. At any rate, if by the
time this Nation is in the hands of its readers a definite
settlement appears nearby, there will be greater cause for
rejoicing than has appeared since the needless and fruitless
slaughter of millions came to an end on Armistice Day.
The Nation
644
No
War
With
III. Merchant Marine Problems

NO Englishman, realizing the dependence of his country
on overseas commerce, looks with equanimity on a
challenge to England's merchant marine from any source.
In the event of war, any nation owning the ships in which
British trade is carried would be in a position to cut off
her supplies. But in time of peace the ships are necessary
also. Ideally, of course, it ought not to make any difference
who owns the ships as long as there are enough ; but prac
tically it makes an enormous difference. There are so many
affiliations between shipping concerns and others having to
do with trade, such as bankers, concessionnaires, sellers of
coal and oil, insurance companies, exporters and importers,
that a nation which needs a far-flung commerce normally
develops control of a large part of ocean shipping also.
The two things are interdependent. Great Britain, as the
largest foreign trader, has become "mistress of the seas"
and as "mistress of the seas" she has become the largest
foreign trader.
In addition, there is the solid consideration that the money
paid for freights in British ships balances a large part of
her "unfavorable" excess of imports over exports. With
out this income, the United Kingdom would have to become
more nearly self-sustaining, to the tune of about threequarters of a billion dollars a year. It is a curious and
significant fact that Great Britain has nearly always made
war upon nations which threatened her supremacy of the
seaSpain, France, the Netherlands, the United States in
1812, Germany in 1914. Other issues have been involved,
but this one was present in each case. At only one period
has any nation seriously challenged the British merchant
marine without becoming involved in war. During the
middle years of the last century the United States did so ;
and Great Britain regained her supremacy not by warfare
but by the normal course of industrial and commercial de
velopmentin which the supplanting of the sailing vessel
by the steamship was a prime factor. England has been the
greatest developer of all the possibilities of the tramp
steamer.
In June, 1914, the gross tonnage of Britain's ocean-going
vessels, excluding that of the Dominions and colonies, was
18,892,000. Germany, second in rank, owned 5,099,000,
and the United States, excluding the tonnage on the Great
Lakes, 1,912,000. Then came the war and the submarine
campaign. Between June, 1914, and November, 1918, the
British lost 9,031,000 tons of ships. Subtracting from this
the tonnage built, purchased, and captured by the United
Kingdom, we find that there was a net loss of 3,443,000
tons. Building and purchase since the armistice has brought
the British merchant marine back to pre-war strength, with
18,111,000 gross tons in June, 1920, while keels have been
laid for additional British merchantmen aggregating many
millions of tons.
The war eliminated Germany as a serious competitor.
At the same time, however, the United States developed a
merchant marine for ocean traffic of 12,406,000 tons, more
than twice as large as Germany's in 1914, and two-thirds
the size of Britain's. We have not only taken Germany's
place on the sea, but are also chiefly responsible for a net
addition to the total of the world's shipping of some 8,-
[Vol. 112, No. 2913
England
000,000 tons. Moreover, we have the physical ability to

maintain and enhance the position we have acquired, since
our shipyards have a larger capacity than those of any
other nation, including Great Britain. During the fiscal
year ending June, 1920, we built 3,880,000 tons, a total
greater than the yearly production of the entire world
before 1914; we added to our own ocean-going fleet in that
year more than the entire tonnage in existence under any
one foreign flag, except Britain's. Eighty-five per cent of
our present sea-going tonnage consists of new and modern
steamers. Of the oil-burning craft, comprising one-fifth of
the world's total merchant tonnage, the United States now
possesses much the larger proportion.
Although Great Britain has brought her merchant marine
back to pre-war strength, she has nevertheless lost her
relative position with regard to the total world's tonnage.
If world commerce had grown proportionately with ship
ping, we should be the sole gainers in the carrying trade.
If it were continuing to grow by leaps and bounds, Britain
would have a chance to regain her former position by
future building, and we should be spectators of a feverish
race between American and British shipyards. This situ
ation would be dangerous, but not unduly menacing. But
because precisely the opposite has happened, the existing
situation is one of the most critical and delicate imaginable.
World commerce has rapidly shrunk during the past few
months, and there seems little likelihood of more than a
slow increase for several years to come. In so far as our
new surplus over former German tonnage is employed, it
has invaded the territory held by British shipping before
the war. And there are many more ships than there are
cargoes. Freight rates have fallen until none but the
strongest companies can operate their steamers without
heavy loss. Hundreds of thousands of shipping tonnage
are being tied up at our wharves. The moment enough
freight appears so that rates can be raised, more vessels
will be released for business and rates will fall again. The
moment any sign arises that more ships will be required
than are now built, idle shipyards eager for business will
leap at the opportunity even though construction prices
are low. The inevitable result is bitterly intensified com
petition, with all the special privileges and underhand prac
tices which such competition cultivates.
There is a chance that the British companies will win
this commercial battle so easily that our ships will not long
cause them great concern. They have the tradition, the
personnel, the training, the affiliations throughout the
world, and the intimate knowledge of a business in which,
more than in any other, expert handling of detail makes
all the difference between success and failure. And, what
is even more important, the book value of their ships has
been written down to such figures that they can afford to
charge much lower rates than the vessels which have been
held by the United States Shipping Board at prices com
mensurate with the war-time cost of construction.
But other factors are likely to reduce this chance of the
British. More than half our fleet is still owned by the
Government because it cannot be sold at the prices asked.
Such of these vessels as are being operated are in the
hands of private companies, which, of course, cannot afford
to bear the loss due to the high capital value. Therefore
May 4, 1921]
The Nation
the Shipping Board, for the sake of keeping our flag on

the seas, bears the loss and compensates the companies by
an arrangement which takes little account of the profits of
the ship. This amounts to a government subsidy applied
for nationalistic purposes. The British shipping companies
cannot afford in the long run to compete with the taxing
power of the United States Government. Even if this par
ticular arrangement is dropped, government aid in some
form is sure to be invoked. The enormous amount of
American capital and energy which has gone into ship
building and operation will not suffer its own extinction
without a struggle. It is politically powerful. It wants
discriminatory railroad rates on goods destined for ship
ment in American bottomsthese are already provided for
in the Jones law; it wants discriminatory tolls in the
Panama Canal; it will apply for subsidies or subventions,
direct or indirect. Behind it will be mustered all the in
calculable forces of nationalism and patriotism. The result
may be a merchant marine maintained in part out of the
public treasury as a national asset. Such a policy would
certainly breed similar measures in Britain, and the brunt
of the competitive struggle would then be transferred to
the respective governments. How dangerous such a struggle
is even in its least striking manifestations history tellsfor
those who will read.
Writes Fairplay, the great British shipping weekly: "A
state-financed and manipulated marine could not but cause
international friction of the acutest kind, for disputes
which individuals can arrange without loss of dignity or
prestige are incapable of such humble solution when official
panoply is involved; and undue protection would mean de
liberate retaliation." This is true no matter what form
government support of the merchant marine should take.
A nationally owned and operated marine would be the most
dangerous of allas long as the price and profit system
existsbut any discriminatory measures or financial aid
would lead to much the same result. And to these the
new Republican Administration is committed. It promises
discriminatory tolls in the Panama canal. President Hard
ing said in his Inaugural: "We know full well we cannot
sell where we do not buy and we cannot seU successfully
where we do not carry." An Administration which in
dorses a protective tariff cannot logically deny protection
to shipping.
"The great wars of the past," writes Fairplay, "were
almost invariably due to territorial ambition; and today,
not counting Germany, one nation at least might be forced
by genuine land hunger to have recourse to the sword if
facilities for expansion were refused her. But the pressure
of overpopulation is accentuated by the fact that, with the
possible exception of the United States, all the greater
nations are compelled to look abroad for their supplies even
of the necessaries of life. Accordingly anything calculated
to check the free passage of merchandise is bound to give
rise to feelings which, if not heeded, are sure to lead to
thoughts of war, and it is for that reason that, in this
country anyhow, grave distrust would be aroused were it
to be found that our naval supremacy were being endan
gered in order that some competitor's perfectly normal
commercial ambitions might be forwarded."
And this leads us to consideration of the navy, and of the
fuel supply for both navy and merchant marine.*
* The next article will deal with the menace of the naval fleet* ; the one
thereafter with the mad rush for oil as it affects the interests of the two
ffreat Anglo-Saxon nations.
645
The Roots of All Evil

[Special Cable to the New York Tribune!
London, April 8.A new theory to explain the phenomena
of bolshevism was propounded at the London Medical Society
dinner last night by Dr. E. H. Stancourt, the well-known physi
cian, who said he was sure that Lenin and Trotzky were suffer
ing from decayed teeth. "The only thing standing in the way
of bolshevism in a country is good health," he added.
AT last ! We have all along been sure that science would
get right down to the root of things and tell us just
why all the evils in the world should crop out in Russia, and
now we have it. Stupid of us not to think of it! Have we
not been reading of the marvelous cures in a New Jersey
lunatic asylum accomplished by the use of the latest electric
excavator, the sandpaper disk, and a few silver, gold, and
cement fillings? Of course; teeth are the root of all medical
evil, just as the appendix used to be a few years ago. Rheu
matism, lumbago, sciatica, head-noises, neurasthenia, neu
ritis and chilblainswe all know that these are now demon
strably and pathologically attributable to the teeth, and
mania, too. So certain are some medical men that our dental
equipment is responsible for most of our mortal ills that we
hear of those who advocate the removal of all adult teeth as
soon as they have grown and the substitution of false ones.
What a saving in time and money this means, how invaluable
as a preventive of disease this practice, is obvious. To these
we would add, as our contribution to the technology of
dedentalizing, two other reasons: first, the available gold
reserves of the world, so depleted by the war, will be largely
conserved as soon as the necessity of gold teeth, gold fillings,
and gold crowns disappearsall crowns are in the discard
today. As silver is now a debased metal we need not dwell
upon the saving there. When this news reaches Berlin, we are
sure that half the German reluctance to give up the Reichsbank's gold will disappear. Second, many, many dentists
will be released from lives spent in arresting decay for less
gainful but more constructive pursuits.
How simple are the discoveries of the great! And how
easy the application of a scientific truth once it is explained
to us! We look soon for dispatches like this in the ever
sober and veracious Tribune:
Berlin, May 10.Professor Guckinsluft today discovered the
reason for the German Government's obstinate refusal to accede
to the Allied demand for reprisals. Doctor Simons, it seems,
suffers from delayed and inverted wisdom-teeth, which ex
plains his inability to comprehend the Allied position. Presi
dent Ebert, it is said, has lost all the nerves of his lower teeth,
which, Professor Guckinsluft declares, explains why his jaw
is so slow to help frame the words the Allies wish to hear.
London, May 15.The striking coal-miners insist that Lloyd
George's inability to see their side of the case is due to his lack
of sound eye-teeth. A Parliamentary Liberal-Labor delegation
met at 10 Downing Street at midnight to discuss the matter
with the Premier.
Paris, June 12.It is officially announced that M. Briand's
mania to acquire German money has practically disappeared
since his teeth were drawn. Much precious metal was recovered
in the process.
Petrograd, July 1.Trotzky and Lenin have today abandoned
and publicly renounced all forms of collectivism, communism,
and socialism. This is the result of Doctor Stancourt's revolu
tionary discovery and the fine work of an American dentist,
whose expenses to Russia were jointly borne by Herbert Hoover,
Judge Gary, and the New York Times.
646
The Nation
Napoleon After
One
THE death of Napoleon, one hundred years ago this fifth

of May, ended the most striking career of modern
times. At the age of twenty-five he was an obscure pro
vincial serving in the army, scarcely heard of ; within fifteen
years he had made himself master of France, and with this
newly won power had established, on the ruins of the
ancient political system of Europe, an empire whose fron
tiers were on the Niemen and the Adriatic ; five years later,
while not yet fifty, his power was at an end, and he was
carried off to fret himself to death in helpless and hopeless
inactivity on the island of Saint Helena. "Power is never
ridiculous," Napoleon said. The remark, upon analysis,
proves to be essentially meaningless ; but it is characteristic
of the man, and furnishes one of many keys to his character.
Before he acquired power, and after he lost it, he at least
was a little ridiculous; but during the brief years of his
opportunity he bestrode the narrow world like a colossus by
virtue of being, more perhaps than any man who ever lived,
pure will and intelligence, combined with boundless energy,
and unfettered by custom or tradition, by any moral scruple,
or delicacy of feeling, or human sympathy. An egoism so
complete, combined with an intelligence so perfect in its
kind, gives one a sense of having to do less with a person
ality than with an impersonal cosmic force.
With Napoleon it was not so much ambition in the ordi
nary sense, as a restless and irresistible nervous energy that
impelled him to action. He could no more inhibit the im
pulse to great undertakings than the dynamo can inhibit the
electric current it generates. With his genius for adminis
trative rectification, he quickly systematized and consoli
dated the results of the Revolution in France; with France
set straight, his fingers itched to clean up Europe. What
might seem impossible to others, seemed only too easy to
himand was so. One step led to another; and as first
Italy, and then Germany, crumbled at his touch, his vision
of power expanded, and his ideal of a reconstructed world
became more ordered and precise. Was he "sincere"? Was
he actuated by mere love of glory, or by a genuine desire for
the welfare of Europe? Futile questions! As well ask the
ocean whether it seeks the admiration or the welfare of
mankind. Like most great men, Napoleon had the capacity
for identifying personal ambition with the ultimate good.
The man who could say that if France had no literature
it was the fault of the Minister of the Interior was not
likely to appreciate the best side of that old Europe. What
he saw clearly was its worst sideits accumulation of out
worn institutions, its flagrant inequities and useless aristoc
racies, its pointless but interminable conflicts; all the lost
motion of its antique political machinery was a perpetual
irritation to the man who, as Madame de Remusat said,
never voluntarily made concessions, even to grammar. To
liquidate this Old Regime in favor of the Revolution was
the task of his Empire as he came to conceive of it. Yet
the Empire was itself not all new. "The magic of an
aristocracy," Napoleon said, "consists in time and antiquity,
the only things I was not able to create." The substance of
the Empire was to be his creation ; but to give his creation
a hold upon the imagination of men it needed to be overlaid
with a veneer of time and antiquity. This Napoleon found
in that persistent tradition of European unity derived from
th<> Roman Empire and sanctified by Holy Church. He
[Vol. 112, No. 2913
Hundred
Years
therefore dressed himself in the habiliments of Charle

magne, and conceived of himself as renewing the Holy
Roman Empire, an institution which had never been wholly
national but always something European. Henceforth its
capital should be Paris, since the new Charlemagne had
revived the ascendancy of the Franks, and Rome as well,
now that the patrimony of Saint Peter had been "reannexed" to the one-time Frankish kingdom lately become the
French Republic. "The government of the Republic is con
fided to an Emperor"so reads the Constitution of the
Year XII, thus combining the tradition of European unity
with brand new ideals of democratic equality.
Much war was necessary to "end" war and effect an "en
during" peace; but by 1810 the form of what was to be a
regenerated and federated Europe began to emerge. Over
all was the Emperor, but with a greatly enlarged France as
his main support, and many minor kingdoms and principali
ties as his proteges. As the government of France was
"confided to" the Emperor directly, the government of such
subordinate kingdoms as Naples, Italy, Holland, and West
phalia was confided to members of the imperial family who
ruled their kingdoms by virtue of being kings, but only
under the supervision of the Emperor. Less intimately
bound to the Empire were the federated states of Switzer
land and South Germany, or the semi-independent but
greatly diminished states of Prussia and Austria; yet still
bound by defensive and offensive treaties, or by diplomatic
intimidation, to accept the Emperor's "protection."
Under the Empire, thus conceived, the "liberty" of the
idealogues would no doubt disappear; states and dynasties
and nationseven France herselfwould lose their muchprized "independence." But what harm in that, since they
would gain in return security, peace, and prosperity? It
is true they would have to contribute men and money for
the Empire; but the Empire would confer upon them the
benefits of a superior civilization: free commercial inter
course; an efficient civil administration; a uniform and
intelligible system of money and of weights and measures;
an equitable system of taxation; the Code Napoleon; and
for all men equality of opportunity. National egoism would
disappear, as well it might, and with it the oppression of
one people by another. So in the future the distinction
of being French or Prussian or Serbian would be lost in the
higher distinction of being a European, a citizen of the
Empire. French would become the imperial language, the
language of government and administration, of commerce,
of learning, and of polite society, while other and less
effective languages would sink to the level of provincial
dialects. If Italian or Saxon or Dutch literature and art
should unhappily fall into decay, that was no more than
might happen to any country. Let the Minister of Public
Instruction attend to it; it would be after all an immense
gain if literature and art, like science, should lose their
national, that is to say their provincial, character, only to
become European and universal. No doubt the ideal was
far enough removed from the actual. No doubt it was all a
gorgeous anachronism. History is profoundly ironical. The
chief result of Napoleon's effort to abate the spirit of
nationality was greatly to intensify the spirit of nationality,
which later transformed itself into the spirit of modern
imperialism, with Germany as its chief exemplar.
May 4, 1921]
The Nation
Jewry at the End of the War:
647
Review
By JUDAH L. MAGNES
THE after-the-war imagination plays busily about the
Jew. Books, magazine articles, newspaper editorials,
the talk of the man in the street, figure him as a sort of
Mephistopheles of the peoples. It is the Jew, they say, who
is bedeviling this distracted world.
But what has the World War been doing to the Jew?
What is the position of Jewry at the end of the Great War?
During the war the belligerents overlooked no opportunity,
however insignificant, to strengthen their position, and al
most all of them sought the help of the Jews. Not that there
was anything lacking in the spontaneity of the patriotism
of the Jews anywhere. Everywhere they furnished more
than their quota of men and money. But the moral help of
the Jewish people as a whole was sought by the belligerent
governments. They issued proclamations and declarations
and promises to the Jews. They almost pacted with the
Jews. This was not only because the Jews were strong, but
also because they were weak. In an appreciation of any
Jewish situation it is well to look for two coexistent factors :
the Jews are strong and the Jews are weak. The govern
ments said to the Jewish people : If you give us your moral
and intellectual and financial help, we shall give you freedom
wherever you are enslaved. It made no difference: Russian
or Turk, British or German, Italian or Austrianaside
from the patriotism of the Jews in every land, the govern
ments of both sides treated with the Jewish people as though
with some non-belligerent Power.
This was due, of course, to the anomalous position of the
Jews of Europe. Five millions of them in Russia and Ru
mania were huddled together beyond the law, without the
status of citizens. Another million in Galicia and Bukowina
were economically "Luftmenschen," among the poorest of
the poor. Another 500,000 in Germany were spiritual suf
ferers under the unrelenting pressure of organized antiSemitism. The war was fought for freedom. So the Jews
everywhere rallied to the colors. In Russia and Rumania
they were to fight for their own freedom. In Germany and
everywhere else the spilling of blood in common with their
Christian countrymen was to seal the bond of universal
brotherhood. When the Russian Grand Duke Nicolai Nicolaevitch entered Warsaw he promised freedom to the Jews
of his own country. When the Germans and Austrians were
on the march eastward they issued proclamations in Yiddish
promising liberation and national rights to the Jews of the
countries about to be conquered. When the revolutionary
Russian armies were threatening to overrun Rumania in
May, 1917, the Rumanian Government, then a fugitive in
Jassy, promised "to solve the Jewish question." When the
fortunes of war were unfavorable to the Entente in Novem
ber, 1917, the British and French Governments held out Pal
estine to the Jewish people as a National Home ; whereupon
the Turks made their own counter-proposals. It might be of
interest to collect the public proclamations and promises to
the Jews ; and, seeing that secret diplomacy was part of wellnigh every situation, there are doubtless other than public
documents to be added to this collection of war-time promises.
As a result of the war and these promises the Jewish peo
ple has achieved a formal political victory. But whether
they are in fact stronger, physically and spiritually, is open
to question. Politically, their distinctness as a religious,

racial, and linguistic group has been recognized in the
treaties with Poland, Rumania, and the Succession States
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the treaty with
Poland the Jews are specifically guaranteed religious liberty
and a kind of cultural autonomy. Moreover, in the public
law of the world there is now established, as the result of
the San Remo Conference, the conception of a National
Home for the Jewish people in Palestine.
But both the minority rights in Eastern Europe and the
National Home in Palestine present grave problems to the
Jews. The grant of minority rights recognizes the existing
fact that the Jews make up a nationalistic group in Eastern
Europe, where they have lived massed for hundreds of years,
and where they have developed their own language, customs,
and life. But their neighbors are not accustomed to this
new and elevated political status of the Jews, and they are
not spiritually and economically ready to live and work with
the Jews on equal terms. As a consequence, the present atti
tude of the newly liberated Polish people themselves toward
their Jewish neighbors is much worse than in the old Rus
sian days; and if the minority rights are to work out there
and elsewhere it will depend not so much on the League of
Nations, which is charged with enforcing from without the
terms of the treaty, as upon the ability and willingness of
the Jews and Poles themselves to find a modus vivendi based
upon mutual respect and common labor.
As to Palestine, the recognition of the Jewish claim to a
National Home is an acknowledgment of an ancient and his
toric aspiration of the Jewish people. Yet Zion restored
and dedicated to the service of humanity is enmeshed in the
purposes of British imperialism, and the political superimposition of a Jewish National Home upon Palestine is but
another instance of the loose way in which the self-determi
nation of peoples has been conceived by the treaty-making
Powers. The fact that the majority Arab population is not
hospitable to these political claims places the Jewish settle
ment under a distinct handicap which only labor and sacri
fice and genuine good-will can overcome. Both the grant of
minority rights and the recognition of Jewish aspirations
in Palestine, while basically just, exhibit all the disadvan
tages of political privileges bestowed from above upon those
not strong enough to achieve privileges or even to defend
them by themselves.
Physically, the scattered Jewish people has been even more
scattered than before. The Jewish reservoir of population
in Central and Eastern Europe is broken and is flooding in
all directions. The Jews are on the march. It is a veritable
wandering of Jewish peoples. In 1915, early in the war, over
200,000 Jews were driven out of Lithuania by the Russians
on a night's notice. Ever since that time not a week has
gone by without reports of Jews wanderingvillages of
them on the firing line, refugees in the cities, crossing Si
beria, overcrowding Constantinople, knocking at the gates of
America, sailing, walking to Palestine. On the Eastern
front, during the war, their homes and synagogues and
towns were destroyed by the thousand, and since then they
have been hounded like beasts and terrorized and maimed
and slain. In accordance with conservative figures, there
648
The Nation
are 181,000 Jewish war orphans in Eastern Europe. Let

any one look into Heifetz's "The Jewish Slaughter in the
Ukraine" (Seltzer, 1921) for authenticated documents of
the dreadful story of these constant, never-ending pogroms.
The Jews of Eastern Europe have been shunted like play
things from one political nationality to another and back
again. When the armies of the new rulers would come into
a town, Jews were accused of loyalty to the old regime, and
when the old armies came back Jews were hanged for having
welcomed the new troops too effusively. It is all too often
overlooked that, despite arbitrary political boundaries, the
Jews of Eastern Europe have formed a rather compact mass
territorially. Jews, whether on the Russian, the Galician, or
the Rumanian side of a border line, have been as alike in
speech, dress, and ways of life as three peas in a pod. In
addition to the native Yiddish, it was only the Russian and
Polish languages that Jews had to acquire. Now this terri
torial compactness, while still unchanged except for the
number of Jews, is crossed and criss-crossed by new and
strange boundary lines; and the Jews of each new state or
resurgent nationality must put on new political garments
and speak new patriotic tongues. The result of this upon
his Yiddish speech and culture, upon this territorially con
tiguous but politically split-up mass of Jews is regarded
with dismay by many who consider the free intercourse of
the Jews of Eastern Europe with one another as basic to the
development of their Jewish culture.
Their minority rights are assured by treaty; but this at
a time when the centuries-old Jewish homes of Eastern Eu
rope are breaking up, when the ancient Jewish wan
derer's staff is in each man's hands, and when strange new
flags wave over the familiar soil.
Beyond this, the uncertainty of the future in Soviet Rus
sia is a factor of no mean importance. There are now per
haps two to three million Jews in Soviet Russia, including
the Ukraine. In Russia, where in all of the long his
tory of Jewish martyrdom Jews have suffered most, Jew
ish life is safe at last. All manifestations of Jew-baiting are
put down by the Soviet authority. But the way of future
Jewish development in Soviet Russia is problematical There
are Jews now all over Russia where they never were per
mitted before ; and with peace in Russia and an improvement
in transportation, there seems to be but little doubt
that thousands of them will want to settle in other
parts of Russia, or leave Russia altogether, thus aiding in
the break-up of the territorial compactness of the Jews of
Eastern Europe. Moreover, despite the liberal policy of the
Commissariat of Nationalities toward the cultural autonomy
of all nationalities, the tendency is decidedly away from the
Yiddish culture toward the Russian. On the other hand,
some Jewish nationalists have been discussing the sugges
tion that the Soviet Government set aside a definite terri
tory, perhaps in Western Siberia, for Jewish colonization,
with the ultimate intention of having an autonomous Jewish
community as part of the Federated Soviet Republic. More
over, it is held by some that with the cessation of warfare
and the need in Russia of productive forces large numbers
of Jews will leave Poland and other East European countries
for Russia.
Meanwhile, Poland contains more Jews than any other
East European country, although Rumania, with the Jews
of Bessarabia and Transylvania and the Bukowina, now has
a Jewish population of over one million; and Lithuania,
with its smaller Jewish population, has been so liberal in its
[Vol. 112, No. 2913
Jewish policy as to institute a Ministry of Jewish Affairs.

The 600,000 Jews of Germany are hardly to be envied.
Materially, they are as prosperous as any other part of the
population. Indeed, they are charged with having their
share of profiteers and food smugglers. Other crimes of
which they are accused are: Having brought on the war
and having stopped the war, having bought out President
Wilson and having made a bad peace for Germany, having
been too friendly with the Kaiser and having made the
German Revolution. The early promise of the war that
anti-Semitism in Germany would vanish has not been ful
filled, and the German Jew is harder put to it than ever
before. Interestingly enough, however, it is the Jews of
Germany who are now producing more literary and artistic
work of sincerity than any other part of Jewry.
With the Balfour promise of Palestine for the Jews, and
with a British mandate over Palestine, it is intelligible how
the small British Jewry is regarded by many Jews as now
the most important of all, politically. Many Jews, indeed,
when considering the relations of states and peoples, now
ask themselves this question first of all : How will this affect
Britain? It is thus not too much to say that Great Britain
has received from the Jewish people her equivalent for the
Balfour declaration. Indeed, Mr. Zangwill and the Jewish
Chronicle of London suggest that the Jewish people are
paying altogether too high a price.
If it was the fate of the Jews of Eastern Europe and the
d stiny of Palestine which were made the objects of Jewish
political endeavors during the war, it was equally the sym
pathy and aid of the great Jewry of America which the bel
ligerents sought with these pawns to secure for themselves.
The Jews of the United States, numbering now about three
and a half millions, are a larger aggregation than under any
other sovereignty. They are also wealthier and more pow
erful, and it is they to whom their weaker brethren in other
parts of the world primarily look for succor. On the other
hand, one of the striking accompaniments of the war has
been the virulent outbreak of organized anti-Semitism in
both England and America, and the imminent closing of the
gates of America to persecuted peoples is a tragic blow to
thousands of intending immigrants.
With the possible exception of the Jews of Germany, the
war has not had a quickening effect upon the spiritual
productiveness of the Jews. The mind of Jewry has been
taken up almost completely with securing the political
status of the oppressed Jewish people. Jewish literature,
art and philosophy, scholarship and religious thinking have
received but slight enrichment. Here and there the peculiar
reaction of the Jewish working masses and many Jewish
individuals to the war has formed the basis of theories con
cerning the essentially humane and compassionate nature of
the Jewish heritage, and has emphasized for many the great
duty of developing the distinctive Jewish outlook upon life.
Mankind's need of a true internationalism can be helped to
fulfilment by the international Jewish people.
The impress of individual Jews upon the world and how
far this can be accounted for by their Jewish origin or up
bringing cannot be discussed in a matter-of-fact review.
The contributions of Jews to present-day schools of French
thought, for example, or to the German Revolution, or to
Russian statecraft, naturally have their retroactive in
fluence upon the position of Jewry as a whole. All of that
belongs to the interesting chapter on the influence of the
Jews upon the present-day world.
May 4, 1921]
The Nation
Zionism
649
Today
By LOUIS LIPSKY
THE Palestine mandate given to Great Britain is the
successful culmination of the organized effort of the
Jewish people to obtain recognition of their status as a
nationality and the requisite political conditions for the
establishment of the Jewish National Home.
In 1897 Theodor Herzl, a Viennese journalist of striking
personality, organized the World Zionist Congress, formu
lated in the Basle program the aim of the movement, and
subsequently created the World Zionist Organization and a
variety of financial institutions which were to be the instru
ments for the realization of the Zionist ideal. In spite of
great difficultiesthe idea of concerted action by Jews for
the realization of their ancient hope was novel and met with
Jewish oppositionthe movement developed, some little
progress was made on the political side, finally a slight
movement into Palestine took place, and schools and other
institutions were established. Theodor Herzl died without
having acquired the charter from the Turkish Government
he was working for. His successors did little more than
strengthen the positions he had won. Since the beginning
of the Great War the actual leadership of the World Zionist
Organization was assumed by Dr. Chaim Weizmann, a
British chemist of Russian birth, who was elected president
of the Organization in the summer of 1920.
Great credit is due Dr. Weizmann for carrying through
the difficult political negotiations with the British Govern
ment which resulted in the issuance of the Balfour Declara
tion and subsequently its incorporation in the treaty with
Turkey which was adopted at San Remo. Impressed by his
personality, inspired by his prophetic imagination, and
guided by what they believed to be a high humanitarian
motive as well as political sagacity, leaders of British poli
tics like Arthur James Balfour, the late Mark Sykes, Lord
Robert Cecil, and others became the advocates of the recog
nition of the Jewish right to Palestine and of the terms of
the mandate recognizing the Zionist Organization as the
Jewish agency to cooperate with the mandatory govern
ment in making Palestine the Jewish National Home. Dr.
Weizmann stands out as the legitimate successor of Theodor
Herzl, having brought to a successful conclusion the latter's
ambitious dream of the renascence of Jewish national life
in Palestine.
The Jewish people now face the practical realization of
an age-long hope, a hope incorporated in the prayers of
centuries. It was with Zion on their lips that martyrs of
the Middle Ages went to the stake. It was the consolation
of this vision that made possible the persistence and re
sistance of Jews during their exile. For the first time in
over 1800 years a chance is offered them to return to the
land of their ancestors and to put into material form the
ideals of life for which they have always struggled.
The San Remo decision is an invitation and a challenge.
It is to be the test of the capacity of the Jewish people to
reconstruct their national life. It is to be the test of the
vitality and the validity of their hopes and prayers. The
opportunity finds the Jewish people in a very precarious
position. The Great War disintegrated the life of the Jews
in Eastern Europe. They were in the very center of the
conflict and suffered both as civilians and as soldiers. They
were the victims of every shift of national interest through

which Eastern Europe passed during the Great War. Every
where throughout Europe the Jews now find themselves in a
worse plight than the rest of the population. Two conse
quences arise out of this conditionone bad, the other good.
The first is that over eight million Jews, practically twothirds of the entire race, are in a state of poverty and help
lessness and can only feebly help in the work of redemption.
The other side of the shield is most favorable.
A large exodus has started out of the lands of persecution
of thousands of the best sons and daughters of Israel. They
are marching not to the west, but to the east. They are
driven by necessity, but the inspiration of their march is
the comforting thought that at last they are moving home
ward to the land to which they have a recognized right to
go. Not the old and the helpless are going, but young men
and women, the capable, the talented, the vigorous, and the
determined. Included among them are skilled workmen,
engineers, physicians, laborers, students, merchants. They
feel as if the traditional Shofar has been sounded and that
they are being called to redeem Zion and to console Mother
Rachel who has been weeping for the return of her children.
The terrors of war have not killed their spirit ; the horrors
of pogroms have not made them forget Zion.
The tramp of their marching is heard on the highways
leading into Warsaw, into Vienna, into Budapest, and all
seek the port which will enable them to embark for Pales
tine. They are ready to suffer the greatest privation. They
walk with bleeding feet, but their determination to reach
Zion is unshaken. Several thousands of them who have
already entered the land of promise are now engaged in
building roads for the Palestine Government. They are
accommodating themselves to the severest hardships. They
sleep without shelter under the blue sky. They lack the
proper apparel for the hard work they are doing. In spite
of the fact that they are unaccustomed to this hard labor
they do their work well, even better than the Arabs who
previously used to do this kind of work. In other words, the
situation in Eastern Europe has brought about a flow of
immigration into Palestine, unaccelerated, uninvited, press
ing with the vigor of ambitious life to find an outlet in a
land of their own.
During the Turkish regime, with the Government im
posing obstacles, the Zionist Organization did not succeed
in creating the machinery for the development of a Jewish
homeland. The institutions founded by Theodor Herzl,
still existent and operative, are insufficient for the larger
purposes. The Jewish National Fund is dedicated to the
purchase of land for the whole Jewish people; in other
words, national land never to be alienated from the people.
The Jewish Colonial Trust in its charter has a broad field,
including all sorts of colonization efforts, but actually it
has been engaged in Palestine in ordinary commercial bank
ing through the Anglo-Palestine Company. Both agencies
together represent a capital investment of less than three
million dollars. Even if the forty-eight or fifty Jewish
colonies are included, the land purchased by Jews through
the National Fund and otherwise is insignificant. A few
cooperative colonies are still struggling to find a modus that
650
The Nation
will be adapted to Palestine conditions and to the social

habits of Jews. An experiment farm was set up and ex
perts in agriculture had made slight preliminary studies of
conditions. A network of Jewish schools was taken over
by the Zionist Organization soon after the outbreak of
hostilities. There was the beginning of a technical institute
at Haifa, established cooperatively between German and
American Jews. The cornerstone of the National University
was laid at Jerusalem. But, in effect, no program was, or
probably could be, devised to meet conditions as presented
by the San Remo decision. The Zionist Organization as the
Jewish agency must now begin its initial step in the way
of nation-building.
The aim of the Zionist Organization is, as I understand
it, to frame a workable program which will make it possible
in the course of five or six years to settle in Palestine at
least half a million Jews, and not only settle them on the
land in industrial and agricultural pursuits, but at the same
time build up a national organism which shall hold the
Jewish people together and transform the scattered settle
ments and the scattered efforts into a national life. To
this end there will be required a large central operating
force, augmented by groups of individuals who, inspired
with the hope of themselves settling in Palestine and pro
vided with means of their own, will become active in agri
cultural industry and commerce. The Zionist Organization
as such will be the initiator of the large national enterprise
and will be the guide of those who of their own initiative
desire to settle.
Stripped of all poetry, Palestine is at the present time
a land which will require upbuilding from the bottom. Dur
ing the Turkish regime the forests have been denuded of
trees. Large tracts of land have been uncultivated. Roadbuilding was an unknown or unused science among the Turks.
It seems to have been their policy to reduce the country to a
state of beggary. In order to begin the work of Jewish de
velopment in Palestine the Zionist Organization will have to
begin with the foundations of life. It is now practically a
tabula rasa. There is no irrigation of any consequence, most
of the water in agricultural sections being derived from
wells. Fuel is an expensive article, although Palestine has
the elements to make power inexpensive.
One of the first projects considered by the Zionists has
been a plan worked out by engineer Pincus Ruttenberg to
harness the water of the Jordan River and to turn it into
electrical power, at the same time making provisions for
the use of the water for irrigation purposes. The estimates
are that the waterfall of the Jordan River would provide
sufficient power to electrify the entire country. The plan
of Ruttenberg has been approved by experts in France and
in England and everything is in readiness for its execution.
The Zionists will also have to engage in the establishment
of key industries essential for the introduction of industry
for which the land is capable. Cement plants are being
contemplated as well as brick factories. The scarcity of
houses makes it imperative that public moneys be used for
stimulating building. At the present time Palestine lacks
a credit system. It is one of the essential things contem
plated by the Zionists to establish a series of credit banks,
banks for workingmen who engage in cooperative industry,
banks for farmers to enable them to purchase machinery
and to build up their home equipment, banks for merchants
to engage in commerce and local trade. The land must be
made healthy and habitable, swamps must be drained, ma
[Vol. 112, No. 2913
laria must be exterminated, the hills must be afforested,

etc.
Of course, a large immigration presupposes also a coloni
zation plan because the country cannot be expected to absorb
thousands of newcomers without engaging in large con
structive enterprises. There will have to be a plan for set
tling men and women upon land where they can engage in
agriculture and industry. One such plan has already been
formulated to establish a cooperative settlement under
Zionist control of a large number of Jews. Land must be
purchased for this purpose and probably the Government
itself will make certain grants of land to the Zionist Or
ganization.
The Palestine Government will naturally do its share in
the general upbuilding of the country. But the Zionist
Organization is expected to be the agency which shall place
all its resources at the disposal of the Jewish settlement.
The Palestine Government will in all probability take up
all such enterprises as are of a municipal character, or of
a general public character. For example, the improvement
of conditions in Jerusalem, the building of docks, the clear
ing of roads, the policing of the country will be in the hands
of the Palestine Government. But the establishment of the
economic foundations of the country with a view to the
large Jewish immigration is a matter that must be in
trusted to the Zionist Organization.
For this purpose the Zionist Organization at the London
Zionist Conference established a fund to be known as the
Keren Hayesod, Foundation Fund. It is intended to appeal
to all Jews to contribute to this national central fund, in
order that the Zionist Organization may through proper
corporations to be created undertake those public utilities
and those national enterprises that are essential if a large
Jewish immigration is to come to Palestine. For the exe
cution of all plans an Economic Council has been created
with Sir Alfred Mond, now Minister of Health of the
British Empire, as chairman. All funds collected will go
to the Keren Hayesod and all funds for the economic under
takings of the fund are to be allocated to the Economic
Council, which shall be responsible for the execution of all
economic plans.
There will, naturally, be no cut-and-dried plan for the
upbuilding of the Jewish National Home. Under the cir
cumstances it is very hard to conceive of any plan that
will meet with the changing situation. The National Uni
versity at Jerusalem, the cornerstone of which has already
been laid, seems to be out of place in any well-conceived
plan of economic development, but the Zionists see in the
National University a token of the spirit which animates
them in their return to Zion. It is not merely for the purpose of gaining a livelihood under free conditions that
Jews are summoned to return to Palestine; it is because
the Zionists feel that their return to Palestine means some
thing of value to the civilization of the world that they put
all their enthusiasm and their devotion into this cause. The
National University is the symbol of the idealism of the
movement. It is most significant that Professor Albert
Einstein, whose remarkable contributions to the science of
physics have astounded the world, is lending his efforts
to the establishment of the National University. The
Zionists seem to see in this effort a realization of the
prophetic utterance with regard to the word of the Lord
going forth from Zion.
It is this spirit as illustrated by the National University
May 4, 1921]
The Nation
which sheds light also on the attitude of the Jews toward

the Arabs, their neighbors and their fellow-citizens in Pales
tine. A great deal of inspired literature has been printed
with regard to the antagonism between Arabs and Jews.
If the Jews were returning to Zion as a commercial people,
as a people desiring to exploit the natural resources of the
land and to reap large profits, then indeed might the Arabs
regard their return as a menace. But those Jews who are
now returning to their homeland have little of the grasping
spirit in them. They are idealists and the pioneers of
Palestinian
651
Jewish ideal. The university which is to be erected on

Mount Scopus is to them more inspiring than the establish
ment of a cement factory. Just because that spirit of devo
tion and self-sacrifice animates the pioneers the world at
large may rest assured that in the building of the New Zion
they are witnessing the renascence of the ancient Jewish
people, the Jews of the Bible and the Jews of the prophets,
who have carried their ideals unscathed through generations
of persecution and who still have a message of uplift to
bring to the peoples of the world.
Problems
By HIRAM K. MODERWELL
IF ever it was dangerous to rock the boat it is now. And
if ever there was a boat requiring expert navigation it
is Palestine under the terms of the Balfour declaration.
And yet, just now there walks into Palestine (or at least,
into Palestinian affairs by way of his Egyptian visit) Mr.
Winston Churchill as Minister of Colonies, although neither
the one country nor the other is a part of the British
Empire, let alone a colony. Winston Churchill, chief bull
in the British china shop, the reckless mouther of boasts,
he who didn't "dig the rats out of their holes" at Kiel,
he who didn't capture the Dardanelles with battleships,
he who didn't overthrow Soviet Russia, he who messes
everything and riles everybody he touches, he who keeps on
his desk a bust of Napoleon, that most magnificent of fail
ures, though he hasn't been able to imitate his mag
nificence !
Winston Churchill putting his finger into Palestine where
a pebble dropped may cause a religious scandal, and a tiny
letter on a coin a racial uproar; where a man who buys a
field is accused of tyranny and a man who buys a house
of conspiracy; where property titles may depend on what
was in the mind of Abdul Hamid's tax collector or on what
Robert of Normandy wrote to the Sultan; where if the
British High Commissioner judges, or rules or guesses
wrong, the Beduins may get out their scimitars or the
Jewish race may appeal to the League of Nations, or a
great power may break off diplomatic relations !' Palestine,
in which the rival claims of two races, three religions, and
innumerable sects, crossed by political intrigue and secular
bigotry, have only been held in delicate balance by the ex
traordinary wisdom and tact of Sir Herbert Samuel!
Popular myth pictures Palestine being turned over to
the Jews by British fiat, that they may all emigrate there
and restore Solomon's kingdom and dance to the timbrel
and the harp. This picture is bizarre enough. But inter
ested persons elaborate on it, and paint a fresco of the
Jewish tyrant oppressing, or exiling, or mayhap massa
cring the gentle Arab residents. Even those who know
the facts and state them fairly, allow themselves to slip
into those prejudicial phrases about the Jews "seizing the
country" and "driving the Arabs from their homes."
If the situation were as melodramatic as this, it might
be amenable to a fire-eater like Mr. Churchill. But the real
truth is quite prosaic. Great Britain has taken the country
under a paternalistic guardianship, and is permitting a
limited number of individuals to emigrate there. It is
1 Those eases are not fanciful ; each Is drawn from some serious problem
which has recently challenged the British High Commissioner.
true that these emigrants happen to be almost exclusively

Jews (and if you take one look at the rocky country you
will understand why no one cares to come there to live
unless he has a religious interest in the site). But all it
amounts to in law is that the Jews may come to Palestine,
if they want to, on equal terms with other people, just as
they may come to America.
The phrase "a Jewish National Home" as applied to
Palestine in the Balfour declaration has offended some who
insist that the Jews are not "a nation" but "only a race"
(see the dictionary), and has frightened others who see
in the word "national" the implication of a Jewish political
state. Whatever Zionist extremists may have said, Great
Britain, we may be sure, is never going to relinquish her
hold upon the other side of the Suez Canal. Palestine will
certainly remain in its politics British and nothing else,
though a million Jews come to make their "national home"
there. In short, what the British administrators in Pales
tine are worrying about is not the problem of placing King
Solomon on his throne. They are worrying over the more
extraordinary difficulties of speaking narcotic words to the
two-and-seventy jarring sects, of building up an exhausted
and misgoverned country, and of soothing and confining
explosive racial passions.
Those who have piously trembled for the sacred sites of
the Christians and Mohammedans in Palestine are deceived
or deceivers. The British are distressed enough at having
to decide which stones belong to whom in the Wailing Wall
and having to mediate between the Greek and Latin monks
who dispute the custody of the Cenacolo. They are having
too much trouble keeping things as they are to want to
risk a pogrom by disturbing the Mosque of Omar, or a
diplomatic explosion in Europe by permitting anyone to
lay a finger on the Holy Sepulcher. So it may be stated
bluntly and confidently that all the holy sites will be pro
tected, and every hoofprint of Mohammed's winged horse
Al Borak and every picture painted by Saint Luke will
remain exactly where and as it is, and there will be no Ark
of the Covenant on Mount Moriah and no synagogue on
Golgotha, and there will be no cause for Crusading or
Jehading.
The British are the less inclined to risk any religious
feuds because of the extraordinary difficulty of their eco
nomic task. Palestine is an arid and exhausted country,
neglected or superficially cultivated by the Arab peasants
for centuries, and almost denuded of its live stock by the
war. The soil must be restored and reinvigorated by af
forestation, fertilization, crop rotation, and better seeding.
652
The Nation
Roads must be built, railways extended, and docks con

structed. Cities must be planned, sewage installed, ma
larial areas drained, public buildings erected, and large
tracts of waste land reclaimed. The money for these works
must come from increased production of wealth, so small
industry must be fostered, raw material supplies assured,
and electric energy provided from the great engineering
works projected in the Jordan and Yarmuck valleys. A
railroad is to be run from Mesopotamia across the desert
to Jerusalem and Jaffa, and perhaps a pipe line for oil
besides.
The Jews who are coming in must provide the large
mass of the technical knowledge and skilled man power.
These immigrants (who are now limited to thirty thousand
a year) must themselves provide the increased production
which is to sustain themfirst by intensive cultivation
of the soil, each farm under the eye of a skilled agricul
turist; then by small industry, and all with the greatest
care, for Palestine is too poor to permit of anything being
wasted. In short, Palestine must achieve by unified plan
and foresight what western countries have come to through
evolution by private enterprise.
But this program unchains all those social and racial
questions which constitute the most perplexing problem
facing the British administration. For this administration
is attempting to guide the influx of one race on a soil for
centuries held by another. There is, of course, no question
of "driving the Arabs from their homes." All the land
which the Zionists acquire they must acquire by purchase,
just as you or I should. But here arises a vista of diffi
culties which appears to have no end. Shall the Arabs be
permitted to exact the last farthing of the increased value
which the Jewish immigrants, by their labor and ability,
are going to give to the land? Shall the Jews be per
mitted to displace from the land which they purchase all
those Arab tenant families who have cultivated it per
haps for centuries? Shall land be permitted to lie idle,
through laziness or for speculation, when there is not
enough food to go around? These are problems which exact
at once a bold and a tactful solution. But there are others,
peculiar to the place. Shall Arab landowners be dispos
sessed because their titles are faulty,- in a country mis
managed for decades through corruption or negligence?
Shall land whose income is devoted to religious purposes
be reckoned as ordinary land? Shall a burial ground be
uprooted if it lies in the way of a work of public necessity?
The harassed British administrator could multiply these
questions to infinity.
The High Commissioner (who is in reality High Dic
tator) has decided that land can be valued only at a cer
tain percentage above pre-war prices, with an extra allow
ance for religious land; and that land held out of culti
vation for more than a fixed term of months shall be sold
at the market valuationthe whole ruling being made sub
ject to exceptions at the High Commissioner's discretion.
Discretion!what else could solve these problems? Only
you may be sure that the Briton wants to exercise it to
preserve the maximum attainable tranquillity in this land
seated on the right hand of Suez.
Again, shall the Jews, who are speaking ancient Hebrew
in daily life, be prevented from using their language in
the courts and public services? The High Commissioner
has decided that Hebrew shall be an official language of
Palestine along with Arab and English in those districts
[Vol. 112, No. 2913
where it is spoken by 20 per cent or more of the inhabi

tants. Well then, shall the judges in these districts be
exclusively Jews, as must happen, since neither Briton
nor Arab is likely to be a fluent Hebraist? In sum, how
shall parity be maintained when an aggressive and highly
equipped race lives in daily contact with a placid and
primitive one?
The Jews come with their schemes for turning sleepy
Palestine with its 800,000 inhabitants into a modern in
dustrial community of two million or even three. They
talk of "hydroelectric energy," "docks," "silos," "technical
schools," "tractors," "commercial museums."
Strange
words to the Arab peasant, to whom a wooden stick is a
plow and the village money-lender a bank! And stranger
still the new-fangled social organizations that come with
them.
But it is not from fondness for radical ideas, but from
economic necessity that Sir Herbert Samuel has come out
for state control and condemnation of land, for state aid
to private groups, and for state interference in all sorts of
transactions whereby man seeks to do his neighbor. And
economic necessity has forced the Zionists (whatever their
private inclinations) to establish the principle of common
ownership of land, cooperative cultivation, cooperative
banking, buying, selling, and public works construction.
(The new sewage system of Jerusalem and the projected
engineering works in the Jordan and Yarmuck are Zionist
cooperative undertakings under government control.) Not
less essential is the Zionist organization of voluntary courts
of justice, regional councils, and administrative organs cul
minating in an elected Jewish assembly which serves in
some sense as lawgiver to the Jews and adviser to the
Britishall of which may give to the future a valuable
example of group autonomy under centralized state control.
But how all this social and economic machinery must
terrify the childlike Arab! And how easily one clumsy
finger-poke from a reckless politician might destroy the
delicate adjustment!
Yet is there not something precious to the world in this
first attempt to effect the migration of peoples in a planned
and orderly way? Throughout all history this readjust
ment of races has been effected by the sword. But here,
for once, is a people (to whom the world owes an accumu
lated debt of many centuries for the crimes it has com
mitted against them) asking only to earn its right to new
land by peaceful agreement, and to increase the produc
tivity of the world a little by its own skill and toil. Would
it not be a pity if the venom of propagandists or the
maladroitness of politicians were to turn it to bloodshed
and futility?
A Jew Among the Fords

By LOUIS WEITZENKORN
LATELY I have been made aware of my Jewishness. The
matter has been brought to my attention through such
innumerable incidents that I am forced to write this, not as
a protest against Mr. Henry Ford, but as a plea to him. I
want to be saved from the Jews.
It took Americans one hundred and forty-odd years to dis
cover their one hundred per cent Americanism, and I re
member that in the process of doing it we often apologized
profusely to friends of German extraction the while we
May 4, 1921]
The Nation
clouted their heads as a general measure of our patriotism.

One of the best inciters to class-consciousness, it seems, is a
powerful wallop on the chin. I have been content, hitherto,
to go along, vaguely feeling that I was a Jew as I often
vaguely felt that I was lefthanded. There have been times,
of course, when I was rather embarrassed by my lefthandedness. In school it fell little short of crime to write with my
left hand, and there is a lurking instinct yet among people
which attributes genius, insanity, and criminal tendencies
to citizens who lean toward the left. No one knows how
thankful I am not to be redheaded as well. Imagine being
lefthanded, redheaded, and Jewish!
But what I am getting at in this essay is Mr. Ford's un
doing of all the freedom which I had achieved since depart
ing from my childhood days in the synagogue. I had gotten
to a point among a large acquaintance and friendship among
liberal and radical non-Jews where I forgot that I was a
Jew. They would invite me to their homes, to theaters, and
to clubs, and never for a moment allow me to see that I was
not of the ordinary human race. I never had a single host
or hostess, since growing up, who took me for one of the
Elders of Zion, and while my nose is extraordinarily long I
have even had girls of other race or faith kiss me without
shuddering and even without ordinary bumping.
And now all these friends are apologizing to me. I have
learned from them, as they fly to defend me from Mr. Ford,
that my race is the remarkablest on earth. I have had a
dozen tell me that in my deep brown eyes is the smoldering
depth of ages, that look of wisdom and suffering which only
a Jew has. I am told by them that I am born with a heri
tage of countless civilized generations behind me. And no
longer do I get the laughing benefit of hearing a good Jewish
story for fear of my taking offense. In a word I find myself,
so far as these old friends go, a suddenly pedestaled saint
(by inheritance!) belonging to a race of marvelous antiquity
and ten million virtues. I am afraid to sin . . .
And then there is my father, whose Jewishness was like
Americanism before the war. It was there, of course, but
not rampageous. He took his religion as I took my lefthandednessdressed himself in a frock coat two or three times
a yearduring Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashonahand went
to the synagogue. He, too, mingled with his Gentile neigh
bors, living a rather ordinary, contented existence, proud of
any number of middle-class virtues, his reputation for hon
esty, his pride of shrewdness, and his musical taste. Now
suddenly the appearance of Mr. Ford in a brand new role
has changed my peaceful parent. Changing him it has like
wise changed the many other Jews whom I know and used to
love. For instance, there is a fine, scholarly old gentleman
in Brooklyn whose taste until recently was impeccable. A
few days ago he wrote to the Saturday Evening Post and
ordered a hundred copies of a very bad story by Viola Broth
ers Shore, which went to prove that the Jew was a Jew and
that the Dutch have again captured Holland. My father was
given this story to read. He, too, puffed out with pride of
race and passed the story on to me with the adjuration that
I confine myself to proving that Jews are Jews and confirm
ing the report that the Dutch have captured Holland.
I am told also, and it is again Mr. Ford's fault, that we
Jews are God's chosen people. There is Moses and Christ
and Heinrich Heine and Jacob Schiffto give but four ex
amples. I am told to think of a nation from whose bowels
such heroes sprung. Think what the Jew has done for civi
lization ! Look at the great financiers, the great doctors, the
653
great artists! There is no race on earth but the Jewish

which has lived an epic! For thousands of years it has
maintained its entity, its customs unchanged. It has sur
vived all cataclysms. . . . And so my father and my
Jewish friends are donning their frock coats and striped
pants with serious regularity and are going to the syna
gogue, reading Zangwill's "Voice of Jerusalem," exhorting
me to subscribe to Jewish periodicals, to visit such plays
as "Welcome, Stranger" and "The Unwritten Chapter," and
as the Jews always have in moments of persecutionare
coming together to reestablish themselves and prove once
more that the melting-pot won't melt unless the fires beneath
it are tended by human beings who know how to cook.
I didn't want to get serious in writing this, but I resent,
on the one hand, my Gentile friends idealizing me, and on the
other my Jewish relatives and friends making me national
istic. When I read a magazine I don't want to plop into a
fiction story which tells me my race never produced anything
but Spinozas when I know from experience the nationality
of certain ticket speculators and pawnbrokers. Nor, among
its love incidents, do I want suddenly to come upon the sta
tistical tables of Jewish philanthropies, the number of our
orphan asylums, hospitals, or soldiers shot in the Great War.
I don't want to visit a theater and have Mr. Sam Shipman
tell me that only Haym Salomon and his coterie of Jewish
friends fought the American Revolution when I know, from
things I have read and heard, that George Washington had
something to do with it and, perhaps to a lesser extent, a
few others along the Atlantic coast. The longer I live the
more thoroughly my reason tells me that the Jewish race is
about as good as any other race, neither better nor worse,
and with about the same characteristics.
You see, I can't forget the recent war. I was carried
away in that war. I had thrills sent up and down my spine
by hundreds of brass bands. I stood up in theaters when
the Star Spangled Banner was played, and I donned a uni
form and went to France with the Tanks. All in all, Amer
ican nationalism got me and made me pretty uncomfortable
taking in the life of the camps, the troopships, and in
France. Now, through Mr. Ford, my Jewishness is being
aroused along with the Jewishness of millions of others, and
I am afraid, if it develops, that some member of my race
around the musical studios of Tin Pan Alley will compose
a Jewish national anthem, some garment cutter produce a
flag, some Jewish financier a war, and then I'll have to go out
and get shot or something.
For when it is all said and done, a man must be proud.
I'm not proud of anything I haven't done by my own voli
tion or creative power. That is, I'm not proud of my Jew
ishness, my lefthandedness, nor my long racial nose. These
things happened to me, and it is entirely up to the Creator
to be proud of this work. At any rate He did it while II
haven't done much except raise a few radishes in New Jer
sey, write a few magazine stories, and, with some help, pro
duce two youngsters of my own. I'm rather proud of those
radishes and the children, and I hope, as time goes on, that
New Jersey won't suddenly start some campaign to make
my boys go to war for a cranberry crop or four per cent beer
or Jersey climate.
And I wonder if the youngsters will be proud of me?
The China Consortium
Important documents hitherto unpublished in this coun
try, will appear in a forthcoming issue of The Nation.
The Nation
654
The
I.
[Vol. 112, No. 2913
New Education
Its Trend and Purpose
By EVELYN DEWEY
PARENTS are not the only ones who have discovered

that graduates of our schools are not endowed with all
the knowledge and character necessary in a perfect state.
Teachers know it too. Many of them are doing something
about it. They can at least give a learned analysis of the
failure of the present educational system to educate. Even
those who do not admit the analysis usually admit the fail
ure. This group are like most parents. They explain the
failure from their own temperamental slant on things. The
explanations are as numerous as temperaments are numer
ous. But they come under two main heads: the satisfied
selves and the unsatisfied selves.
For the former schools fail because education is not as
it used to be. We coddle the child and lap him in frills
and fancies instead of devoting ourselves to the four essen
tials: Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and the Big Stick.
"If it was good enough for me," they say, "I guess it is
good enough for my children."
For the latter the trouble is that things are just as they
used to be. If their education was classical: "What can
you expect from a system dominated by our colleges where
the classical tradition largely prevails?" If they worked
hard and left school young: "What can you expect in a
country where laws do not compel children to stay in school
until they have learned a useful trade?" If they got good
marks: "Memory is the only thing that counts. I happen
to have an excellent memory, so of course," etc. If they
got poor marks : "No attention is paid to the individual. I
was an exceptional child, dreamy, always writing stories
and longing for the fields. No one appreciated me."
Some teachers keep this strong personal slant on educa
tion. They are apt to start schools from the fulness of their
hearts. The chief aim, often unconscious, is to avoid doing
to other children the things that were done to them. The
result is an excellent school, where little children are safe
and happy. We cannot help wondering at the faith of the
initiator that what might have been good for her will be
good for all children. The correction of a single misfit
seems a limited basis for a thing as complicated as bring
ing up children. But it is a kindly human limitation after
all. It makes sure that the school will be interested in
each pupil. Such schools are rather shocking to many
people because they present a new set of limitations. But
are they any less suited to the business of education than
most of our big successful systems?
Before you laugh at the crazy ideas you astutely discover
in some of the so-called new schools suppose you make a
list of some of the ideas in the old ones. They are none
the less crazy because you have grown used to them. There
is one school principal who says: "Yes, of course we have
outgrown the old ways, but we can't change them. We
must pin to them until something is worked out to take
their place." Such modesty might be a virtue in a school
girl, but in the head of a school the kindest name that can
be given it is caution. Why not demand that teachers
themselves do a little of this working out, at least while
we are waiting for a diviner revelation? How long would
a railroad last if its president said : "Oh, yes, wooden cars

are unsafe. But we cannot change them. All our cars are
wooden" ? There is another system where a superintendent
boasted that by looking at his desk clock he could tell what
every child in town was doing. But even this ideal was vain.
It was in one of his schools that a pupil said : "Oh, mother,
now I know what you mean when you tell me to concentrate.
I have learned how. You know how I dislike my new
teacher. Well now she can talk all day long and I never
hear a word she says."
You mere parent can choose as well as the educational
expert. To help you sift the chaff from the wheat answer
these questions: What is education? What do my children
do in school? What is a lesson for? Do children exist for
lessons in this school, or is the school for the children? If
you have answered them honestly you are ready to choose
between the old and the new according to your lights.
Are there any general impersonal facts that stand out
from this struggle between the old and the new to convince
us that our dissatisfaction with schools is more than a
tempest in a tea pot? Decidedly yes. Three great factors
in modern civilization require changing the school if they are
to survive. These factors have nothing to do with educa
tional theories. The man on the street, the slum child, the
farmer is more affected by them than the university pro
fessor. Hence, perhaps, the slowness in changing schools.
They are the increase in scientific knowledge, the resulting
industrial system, and a democratic form of government.
The first has made specialization necessary. It used to
be possible for a single individual to learn about all there
was to know in his corner of the world. All that was known
could be pretty well compressed in a few books. By earnest
and continuous reading it was possible to master it. It
was the sort of abstract and speculative knowledge that
could be grasped by reading. The discovery of scientific
laws has revolutionized the world. Keep a child reading and
reading from the first grade through college, as we still
do, and he has only scratched the surface of knowledge.
There are so many facts and each individual needs such
a different set of facts that it is folly for schools to attempt
to teach children all the things they may need to know.
But the majority of schools are still doing this. And the
facts they teach are the sort that were popular in the
Middle Ages: the name of the highest mountain in South
America, and the names and reigns of the kings of England.
But, honestly, how much do you think they have to do
with education? Did you get that general understanding
which is the foundation of your intelligent attitude toward
your job and your life from them? How much did school
help you in acquiring it? Not very much, you say; you
got it from experience.
So schools are not experience; or at least their curricula
are not. They are magic doses from a medieval prescrip
tion. They are the continuation of a method entirely unsuited to the subject matter of today. Suppose we tried
to supply the world's present demand for cloth with hand
looms. It would not be much more impossible than trying
May 4, 1921]
The Nation
to educate by teaching facts. Education today must con

sist in learning to learn; finding out about knowledge and
what it is for, so it can be acquired and used when needed.
This means a child must know how to read. Reading is not
merely pronouncing words. It is using books. He must
know how to write. Writing is saying something, not
merely guiding a pen. He must know how to figure, not so
that he can tell the teacher when train A will meet train
B, but so that he can buy a loaf of bread or find out how
long it will take him to walk the five miles to the lake. It
means, too, that he must know something about his own
physical and social environment ; physics, chemistry, biology,
fundamentals of industry, and social relations, both political
and historical. He cannot get this by memorizing a few sam
ples in a textbook. What he can get is the knowledge that
such sciences exist; that they explain his own world, the
things he wears and eats and passes in the streets and the
habits of his friends and relatives. He can get control of
the intellectual methods that have enabled society to pile
up this vast classification and explanation of ideas and
things. It is only as children, all children, get this under
standing that the fruits of knowledge can serve everyone.
Machines and so the industrial system are the direct
result of scientific discoveries. They have multiplied the
needs of man by supplying them. They have infinitely com
plicated the process of supplying them by taking manufac
turing out of homes and concentrating it in factories. When
it was carried on at home children had opportunities to
supplement the magic facts of textbooks by real work. Proc
esses were simple so that they understood what they saw
and what they did. Compare the educational value of the
weaving industry as carried on in a New England home and
a visit to a modern cotton factory. And how few children
today even get a chance to visit the factory !
What does a child today have to give him the under
standing of his world that came from helping in the end
less activities that went on in every home a hundred years
ago? A little if he lives on a farm, nothing whatever if he
lives in a city slum. But schools have done nothing to sup
ply the real experiences that he got outside of school when
each home or community was a self-supporting unit. The
manual training and domestic science introduced in the
upper grades of most schools are an obscure realization of
the need. But most of their value is lost because work has
been distorted into textbook form; into a list of facts. It
is an educational axiom that children cannot know what
they have never experienced. Examine the curriculum of
the average school and then get the daily life of children in
a crowded city. There is almost nothing in these children's
experience to prepare them for the world they will plunge
into when they begin earning a living.
But you say schools cannot really be so unsuited to the
process of growing up. They have been going on like this
while men were discovering scientific laws, inventing ma
chines, and reorganizing society. What education these men
had they got in school. This is not strictly true. Leaders
are not a typical product of education under any conditions.
A streak of genius lifts them above the common run of
men. They find experience and turn it to account in things
at hand no matter how meager the environment. Not the
least advantage of being born poor is the opportunity it
offers for getting real experience in childhood. The success
of an educational system should be judged by the ability
of people to live intelligently who had no useful environ
655
ment or experience except school; not by the well-being of

people whose daily life would have equipped them with the
tools of learning and the experience to understand their
world without school.
Schools must be judged by such standards if our ideas of
social justice or democratic government are to be any more
than an abstract conception. Any democratic organization
of society depends on the ability of every individual to par
ticipate. The conception grew because of every man's sense
of his own individuality. It can succeed only to the extent
that each man's or woman's individuality finds expression.
Educationally individualism and democracy are not opposed.
They are the same thing. We have not made good citizens
when we have taught every child to read and write and
salute the flag. That is not education but a gilded ignorance
that leaves undeveloped leadership, independence, and initia
tive, all the qualities that are necessary in a democratic
society. An educated person is one who has had a chance
to learn as much as his natural capacity allows and thinks
honestly along the lines of his own temperament and per
sonality toward a better understanding of his physical and
social environment. Such characters do not spring into
existence with manhood. They develop gradually from the
day the person is born. It is the school's business to see that
they develop so that they are a constructive force in society,
not a deadweight or a destructive misfit.
Laburnums
By PADRAIC COLUM
Over old walls the laburnums hang cones of fire;
Laburnums that grow out of old mold in old gardens:
Old men and old maids who have money or pensions have
Shuttered themselves in the pales of old gardens:
The gardens grow wild; out of their mold the laburnums
Draw cones of fire.
And we, who've no lindens, no palms, no cedars of Lebannon,
Rejoice you have gardens with mold, old men and old maids :
The grey and the dusty streets have now the laburnums,
Have now cones of fire!

Judah L. Magnes is the chairman of the Bureau of Jew
ish Education.
Louis Lipsky has been prominently identified with the
Zionist movement for twenty-two years.
Hiram K. Moderwell is an American journalist who has
recently made a survey of the Near East
Louis Weitzenkorn is a writer for magazines.
Evelyn Dewey has done important research work on
modern educational methods.
Carleton Heals is an American student of international
affairs now traveling in Italy.
S. Miles Bouton is the author of "And the Kaiser Abdi
cates."
Philip Douglass was an assistant professor of modern
languages in the United States Naval Academy for sev
eral years and spent some time in the Caribbean.
Powers Hapgood is connected with the Bureau of Indus
trial Research.
656
The Nation
Fascismo The
Reaction in
[Vol. 112, No. 2913
Italy
By CARLETON BEALS
Milan, March 2U
LAST night the windows of my room overlooking the
Porta Venezia in Milan puffed inwards with a mighty
roar. The Diana Theater a block and a half away had
been wrecked by a bomb. For the next hour the hospital
guards carried out the dead and the horribly mutilated.
Later two other bombs were found unexploded in different
parts of the city, the new Socialist Party headquarters were
attacked with hand bombs and subsequently burned, one of
the union headquarters was raided, and the police stopped
a rush on the anarchist paper L'TJmanita Nova. Four days
ago on the same Porta Venezia the fascisti (White Guards)
and Communists battled. Two days ago a bomb exploded
in the midst of a socialist meeting in the Via del Greco.
Yet Milan, they say, is practically untouched by the White
Guard terror; nearly every other city and every farming
district in Italy has witnessed more terrible disasters.
These scenes of violence occur at a time when Italian
industry is threatened with panic; when the metal trades
are paralyzed; and the textile mills are expected to close
their gates. They occur at a time when the liberal Govern
ment of Giolitti is marching to a fall, when that Govern
ment has itself acknowledged its own impotency, and has
declared that with the present Parliament "it is no longer
possible to govern."
This wave of reaction is the partial outcome of the dis
integration and lost prestige of the Socialist Party, which
began with the failure of the revolution of last year, when
the world watched breathless while Italy trembled on the
edge of bolshevism. There is little doubt that the spirit
and the means were at hand for a proletarian revolution.
But the very mildness of the Government disarmed the
Socialists, and led to a limitation of the "occupations" to
the metal trades and the signing of a compromise agree
ment, guaranteeing a large measure of workers' control in
the industry. That agreement has yet to pass through the
tedium of parliamentary action.
The revolutionary ardor has had time to cool. An ap
parent victory is rapidly turning to actual defeat. From
Moscow came the thundering charge of betrayal of the
Italian revolution, and after it the bomb of the twenty-one
conditions. In the ensuing national congress those condi
tions were rejected, the door was shut upon affiliation, and
the weapon of armed revolution cast aside. The Communists
bolted.
This spirit of internal dissension infected the Confederazione Generale del Lavoro, the Socialists and Communists
fighting for control at the recent Leghorn Congress. Both
won a Pyrrhic victory. The C. G. L., hitherto subordinate
to Socialist Party direction, will perpetuate the union, but
with a certain degree of autonomy which augurs approach
ing independence of action. The C. G. L., numbering 327,000 members at the end of 1913, today has over 2,000,000,
or double the number of adherents to the Socialist Party.
The Communists effected the separation of the C. G. L. from
the Amsterdam International and the passing of a reso
lution favoring the creation of, and affiliation with, the
new red, syndicalist International being promoted by Mos
cow. Obviously this is a temporary encampment. Moscow
has just recognized the Communist Party as the only revo

lutionary organization in Italy. Will it recognize a con
federation of labor affiliated with the Socialist Party? Thus
the C. G. L. faces the probability of being cut off from
Amsterdam because of international considerations and
from Moscow because of national affiliations. The C. G. L.
has been further debilitated by the conditions in Italian
industry; non-production, lockouts, widespread unemploy
ment, the breaking of strikes by fascisti and federal troops.
This waning of revolutionary spirit, the demoralization
and break-up of the Socialist Party, the internal struggles
to establish a new orientation have given heart to the fright
ened heads of industry, to the reactionary wing of the Gov
ernment, and the newly created bands of fascisti who are
carrying war into the disorganized camp of the revolution
ists. These fascisti are supposedly organized groups of
patriotic citizens saving the country for the king and main
taining its prestige before the world. To what extent their
lawless acts are directly inspired by the industrial heads, as
the Socialists charge, it is impossible to say. In any event
a large part of their ferocity is the aftermath of that war
fanaticism and brutality which is easier to arouse than con
trol.
The acts perpetrated are everywhere similar to those in
Milan : the burning of socialist and union headquarters, the
disruption of radical and union meetings, the destruction
of the radical press, armed attack on radical manifestations
and parades. In addition they undertake to break strikes
and labor contracts, and to guard private property. To their
attacks the Socialist Party and the C. G. L. have been unable
to offer any effective resistance beyond public denunciation
and futile parliamentary bickering. The Communist Party,
on the other hand, has scarcely had time to perfect its organ
ization. In spite of that fact it has been obliged to bear the
greater share of the persecution, and has opposed the greater
resistance. Impromptu conflicts have usually taken place be
tween armed groups of fascisti and Communists. About the
first of March the aggressions of the fascisti led to three
simultaneous communist uprisings in Florence, Trieste, and
among the farm-workers of Puglia respectively. In Flor
ence the assassination of the communist leader, Spartaco
Lavagini, and the throwing a bomb into a procession of
"pacifist students" resulted in street fighting and barricades.
In Trieste the burning of the labor temple resulted not only
in street fighting but in the destruction of millions of dol
lars' worth of property. Thus in a few months Italy has
been precipitated into a whirl of lawless terror where vio
lence has answered violence and death has paid for death.
In front of this hurricane of hate the Government an
nounced its strict neutrality. All violators of the law, all
perpetrators of outrages will be punished, whether Social
ists, Communists, or White Guards. Yet in spite of such
declarations the civil war continues, and apparently the
fascisti are immune from punishment. Daily in Parliament
the demands of the Socialists that the Government explain
fascisti outrages become more pressing; daily the reaction
aries arise and shake condemnatory fingers at Giolitti be
cause of the cannon thundering in Florence, or the riots of
the Communists. Is this violence, asks the outsider, due to
The Nation
May 4, 1921]
governmental weakness or intention? If it is weakness the

strong man must arisethere are few in Italy these days
who will restore the country to orderly methods, or the fire
which perhaps may still be trodden out will be quenched
only in rivers of blood.
If it is intention, the Government is wielding a dangerous
two-edged weapon. There is always the possibility that
some such uprising as that in Florence might be successful,
and if so might easily precipitate a general revolution. Nor
is it exactly the method to reestablish the financial credit
of Italy, or to reorganize its railways and factories. But
according to the Socialists the Government knows how far
to gojust far enough to break the backbone of radicalism
and make possible the nullifying of the agreement reached
last year in the metal trades. With the failure of those
trades, capital insistently demands that the Government
quit its position with regard to workers' control. Some of
the officials who helped to write that agreement are already
announcing their change of front.
Apparently, however, this is part of the general under
mining of the Government, which has announced its own
impotency in face of a turbulent tripartite Parliament of
Conservatives, Liberals, and Radicals. The violence through
out the country has precipitated the bitter attacks of the
Conservatives and the Radicals, which have been followed
by constant, stubborn opposition. Giolitti is daily attacked
by the Socialists for his secrecy regarding the London Con
ference and his refusal to report upon the actions of Count
Sforza, and at the same time by the imperialists because
of his weak foreign policy. He is attacked by the anti-Ger
mans and the indemnity adherents for his indifference to
Germany's refusal to pay. The final slap in the face has
come with the appointment of a commission to investigate
the bureaucracy of Giolitti, empowered to reorganize the
whole administrative machinery and effect desirable econo
mies. Because of these onslaughts Giolitti has declared,
Germany's
657
"With this Parliament it is no longer possible to govern."

In calling for a new election he has in turn aroused pow
erful opposition. Nitti, pro-D'Annunzio, pro-war, imperial
ist, and reactionary, was expected to lead the revolt and per
haps return to power on a program of strict repressive
measures, but his attacks on Giolitti degenerated into such
personal abuse as scarcely to arouse confidence. Besides the
followers of Nitti, at least seventy of the Socialist Deputies
are behind Turati in opposing an election at this time.
These last see in all this a coup d'etat on the part of
Giolitti, who is surely intelligent enough to realize that a
new election would scarcely under normal conditions do any
thing but cut down his own liberal following in favor of the
two extremes. In the eyes of the Socialists, to whom yester
day he was an enlightened statesman, he has now thrown
his lot in with the forces of reaction. With some justice
they declare that no election can be conducted at the present
hour without the gravest scenes of disorder. It would be
an election of, by, and for the fascisti, and indeed one paper
in Rome has gone so far as to advocate putting this nefari
ous organization in charge of the polls. The Socialists
declare that the result of an election will be a "Turkish Par
liament" with Giolitti as "Supreme Sultan," at best an
enlightened despot.
Certain it is that reaction is fighting hard in Italy, the
one country in Europe that for two years has pointed the
way toward a liberal, enlightened policy. Nor is this reac
tion that of a clever statesman, a Bismarckian reaction of
opportunist compromise, which might still have led Italy
back to a period of capitalistic reorganization. It is a reac
tion of brutal lawlessness and murder which has not yet
reached its culmination. While this will further break the
Socialist Party it will swell the ranks of the Communists.
Terrorism has never terrorized. The reflection occurs, Will
not the pendulum swing but the more violently to the other
extreme?
Dwindling
Radicalism
By S. MILES BOUTON
Berlin, April 2
THE Communist uprisings in Central Germany will have
been put down long before this is printed, but as I
write railway bridges, government buildings, and villas are
still being dynamited, banks and post offices are being
robbed, factories seized, and honest workmen terrorized.
A large part of the loss could have been prevented and the
movement practically crushed by this time if two or three
regiments of the Reichswehr (the 100,000-man army) had
been promptly sent into the disaffected districts. Instead
of this, however, the Prussian officials called on the Schutzpolizei (protective police), who, with but one machine-gun
to every dozen possessed by the Communists and without
artillery, found themselves pretty regularly outnumbered
as well as outgunned by their enemies, and were frequently
obliged to retreat and await reinforcements. That they
accomplished as much as they did was due to their su
perior leadership and quality as soldiers and to the fact
that the Communists included in their number some vicious
and criminal elements, with no appetite for fair fighting, and
many half-grown boys.
But why was not the Reichswehr thrown in? Why were
the members of the Schutzpolizei, with their armament cut

down below the extreme limit of effectiveness, called on to
take up the unequal struggle? The answer is simple. Herr
Horsing, president of the Province of Saxony, where the
trouble began, and Herr Severing, Prussian Minister of the
Interior, are Socialists, and the experiences of the last two
and a quarter years have been unable to overcome the
training and traditions of a lifetime. Not that they have
any fondness for the Communists as such, or that they
did not earnestly desire to put down the uprising, but they
and the party leaders behind them cannot shake off the
feeling that those responsible for such outbreaks as the
present are merely "misguided idealists" from the ranks
of the "class-conscious proletariat." It is bad enough to
use force against them in any guise, but the army must not
be called on ; that might look like counter-revolution.
For the first day or two of the revolt there was reason
to believe that those responsible for putting it down had
learned by sad experience that even proletarians must not
be permitted to violate all penal laws with impunity. Not
only the Majority Socialist organs, but even the Independ
ent Socialist papers, at their head Die Freiheit, denounced
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2913
$6,000, 000
THE
STATE
OF
EXEMPT FROM ALL TAXES
To Yield 5%, 534 and 6%

These Bonds are secured by the faith and credit of the State of North Dakota
* backed by taxable property assessed at $1,600,000,000.00
The banking interests have refused to handle or to sell the bonds of the sovereign State
of North Dakota.
They base their refusal on no question of security or validity.

They have admitted that in point of safety and interest yield, North Dakota bonds are
second to no other State bonds that have been floated. (The total outstanding debt of the
State of North Dakota$247,000is unique as the lowest indebtedness of any State in the
Union.)
The reason the banking interests have refused to sell the North Dakota bond issue is that
they are hostile to the public ownership policies of the people of North Dakota. These poli
cies, which include State ownership of a flour mill, a bank, and a grain elevator, together with
a program of home building and State insurance, do not, as a matter of fact, constitute an
extremely radical program. The State of New York in the past few years has expended
state funds to the amount of $170,000,000 for a state-owned waterway, a canal.
New York State has erected a state-owned grain elevator with a 1,250,000 capacity at
Gowanus Bay and will build two more at Buffalo and Oswego, respectively. The people's
money has entered the New York subways to the amount of $250,000,000. In these two enter
prises alone $420,000,000 will be used for purposes similar to those to which this bond issue will
be applied in North Dakota. North Dakota is by no means the first or the only State to invade
private business.
The North Dakota program of serving the people has merely been somewhat more com
prehensiveand more successfulthan that of any of her sister States. Knowing this, the
great banking and public utility interests who feel their domain invaded or threatened by the
success of what they like to term the North Dakota experiment, have determined to make
a final effort to ruin it if possible. Hence, their boycott of the North Dakota bond issue.
The State of North Dakota therefore appeals directly to that higher authoritythe
American people.
The North Dakota bond issue affords them an opportunity to subscribe to a gilt-edged,
iron-clad, totally tax-exempt security, at least the equal of any other State bond issue in the
United States, easily excelling most of them and far ahead of the countless municipal, county,
public utility, and private corporation issues floated every day by the banking interests.
This issue is backed by the entire faith and resources of a sovereign State of our Union.
Coupon Bonds Registered on request.
May 4, 1921]
The Nation
659
EOND ISSUE
NORTH
DAKOTA
INCLUDING FEDERAL INCOME TAX
Issued in Denominations of $1000, $500, $100

STATEMENT OF ASSETS AND RESOURCES
70,837 square miles
Total area of State. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Total tillable land. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Total land under cultivation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
29,159,300 acres
17,033,885 acres
Tons of coal in ground (estimate). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 600,000,000,000 tons
Assessed valuation (1920) of all private property. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $1,600,000,000
In addition the State owns
Securities valued at. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Buildings valued at. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Unsold land1,547,117 acresvalued at . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
$25,000,000
7,034,353
22,242,617
Total property owned by State exceeds...............................
$50,000,000
LIST OF BONDS ISSUED BY THE STATE OF NORTH DAKOTA AND NOW OFFERED
1
Series
Amount
Bank . . . . . . . . . . .
Bank . . . . . . . . . . .
Real Estate . . . .
Real Estate . . . .
Real Estate . . . .
Real Estate . . . .
Real Estate . . . .
Mill & Elevator. .
Mill & Elevator. .
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
..
..
..
. .
..
..
..
..
..
. $958,000
.
992,000
. . 300,000
.
300,000
.
450,000
.
600,000
. 1,350,000
.
500,000
.
500,000
Interest
Date Issued
Rate
711919
71-1919
7-1-1921
7-1-1921
711921
7-1-1921
711921
711921
71-1921
Denominations
5%
5%
534%
534%
534%
534%
534%
$100; 500
1,000
100
100
500
1,000
1,000
6%
100; 500
6%
1,000
Interest payable semi-annually, January 1st and July 1st.
Maturities
July
July
July
July
July
July
July
July
July
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1,
1929
1934
1931
1936
1941
1946
1948
1941
1946
At
96.64
95.28
100.00
100.00
100.00
100.00
100.00
100.00
100.00
8
To Yield
5%%
5%%
534%
534%
534%
534%
534%
6%
6%
At price indicated in Column 7 and interest.
(There is no material difference in the security behind these issues. The shorter term bonds yield a slightly lower interest
rate, but all are equally secured by the entire faith and assets of the State of North Dakota.)
Fill out the coupon below (or a similar one) and mail with cheque, draft or money order to Spurgeon Odell, Special
Representative, Bank of North Dakota, 20 Vesey Street, New York City.
[-
BANK OF NORTH DAKOTA
|
|
SPURGEON ODELL, Special Representative, 20 Vesey Street, New York City.

Cheque
Enclosed find $
Draft
}:
ones
Money Order
for which please send me Bonds of the State of North Dakota as follows (Coupon or Registered):
|
$100 Denominations
$500 Denominations
$1,000 Denominations
(Cross out ones not wanted)
The right is reserved to reject any applications for the above bonds and also to award a smaller amount than applied for.
|
|
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The Nation
the troublemakers in the harshest terms. Die Freiheit, it

is true, had done the same thing on the occasion of other
uprisings, but those denunciations were merely pro forma
and nobody took them seriously. But this time its attacks
were so unreserved that it appeared to have left itself no
loophole to crawl out of later. The very next day, how
ever, it began to run true to form again, and today, while
still making a pretense of condemning the "misguided ideal
ists," it is referring to the bourgeoisie in general as "lawand-order beasts," warning all proletarians to be on their
guard against "white terror" and counter-revolution, and
threatening all non-Socialists with dire vengeance if they
do not deal gently with "the laboring classes whose irrita
tion rests upon most justified grounds." And even the Ma
jority Socialist Vorwdrts is speaking a similar language.
One of the chief sources of strength of the Communists,
one of the things forming the greatest threat to orderly
government in Germany, has been the knowledge that, even
if their uprisings should be put down, nothing would be
done to them. The chances were all against their ever be
ing brought to trial, and still stronger against any prison
sentence being imposed. If both these unlikely things
nevertheless came to pass, they knew that a general am
nesty for "political prisoners" would follow as surely as
night follows day, and dynamiters, looters, and murderers
have been political prisoners ever since the revolution if
they were members of a Socialist Party and had committed
their crimes in a revolt against the "bourgeois bloodhounds
of capitalism." And so one was not surprised when, on the
second day of the present uprising, President Horsing an
nounced that rioters who voluntarily delivered up their
arms would not be asked their names and no action would
be taken against them. Since the expiration some weeks
ago of the period fixed for the voluntary surrender of
military weapons by all Germans, anybody even in posses
sion of such weapons is ipso facto guilty of a felony. The
head of the German disarmament commission called the
Government's attention to this law, whereupon Herr Hor
sing's announcement had to be declared invalid.
Minister Severing was in charge of the troops that pro
ceeded against the Communists in the Ruhr district in
March, 1920. He ordered that they should not advance
more than five kilometers a day, so that "the misguided
laboring classes" might have time for sober reflection and
that bloodshed might be avoided. Thus the rebels were
able to get away with large quantities of their arms, and
dozens of loyal members of the protective police are now
paying for it with their lives.
After all these experiences one might expect to find a
different tone among the leaders of at least the more con
servative Socialists. That one does not find it is due in
part to that party training and tradition already referred
to, but undoubtedly in part also to a growing realization
that there is nothing to be gained by coquetting with the
great middle class or with intellectual Germany. For not
only can no more recruits be expected from those quarters,
but some hundreds of thousands of voters who were car
ried from them into the socialist camps are now returning
to the bourgeois fold. The first signs of this came with the
Reichstag elections of June, 1920, when the combined social
ist vote showed a small decrease from the figure of January,
1919. Twice since then the great majority of the Germans
have had an opportunity to give a verdict on applied social
ism. Both verdicts were unfavorable.
[Vol. 112, No. 2913
Elections for the Diet were held in Saxony last Novem

ber. This state had a socialist majority almost twenty
years ago. The existing Diet consisted of 57 socialist
Deputies of all factions and 39 bourgeois members. The
November election gave the combined Left only 49 Depu
ties, against 47 for the bourgeois parties. The story told
by the popular vote was even more significant. There was
a big stay-at-home vote, but while the bourgeois parties
lost 126,000, the Socialists lost 200,000. Their combined
majority of the popular vote was only 77,000 in a total of
two millions, and since the Communists' total vote was
115,000, the Majority and Independent Socialists were in
an actual minority.
Final official returns of the Prussian general election of
February 20, now available, form a verdict even more un
favorable for the Left. The following table illustrates the
shift in the eight months since the last Reichstag election :
Per Cent of
Popular Vote
. . 26.2
7.4
Independent Socialists . . ..
6.5
. . 18
German People's Party. . . . 14.1
. . 17
6.1
.
2.6
Economic Middle Class..
1.1
1
Party
100
Deputies
Elected
in Feb.
114
31
28
76
68
81
26
11
4
Deputies
Elected
in June
145
..
24
48
23
89
66
8
,.
428
402
Gain or
Loss
-31
+31
+ 4
+27
+35
8
-39
+ 3
+ 4
It will be seen that the Majority and Independent Social

ists together lost 27 of the 169 delegates who formerly rep
resented them in the Prussian Diet. The combined Left
secured only 4 of the 26 additional members in the new body.
Alone, the Majority Socialists lost 81 mandates, and their
influence in governmental affairs is further weakened by
the losses of the other two parties in the Government bloc,
the Democrats and Clericals.
A significant indication of the trend of events was given
by the results in Greater Berlin. The national capital has
been red for years, a big majority of the present Common
Council consists of Independent Socialists, and the Majority
Socialists are also well represented. In the Reichstag elec
tions of June, 1920, the Socialist parties together had a pop
ular majority of nearly 200,000 votes. In the election of
February, Berlin gave a clear majority of its popular vote
to the bourgeois parties, whose candidates received 961,171
votes, against 954,916 for the Left. The Independent So
cialists were the chief losers, dropping from 437,166 votes
last June to 197,031. About 100,000 of the lost votes obvi
ously went to the Communists and another 30,000 to the
Majority Socialists, but another 100,000 Berliners did not
vote at all. Against this loss of 100,000 was a gain of more
than 100,000 for the bourgeois parties.
The strength exhibited by the Communists is more ap
parent than real. That they had no Deputies in the Diet
elected last June but will have 31 in the new Diet is not due
to any such surprising increase in strength as would appear
on the surface, but to the fact that they had no ticket in
the field eight months ago. Despite the trouble they are
now making, there is no reason to suppose that they will
ever be importantly stronger than now, and much reason to
indicate that they will never again be as strong. It is
The Nation
May 4, 1921]
also fairly certain that the Independent Socialists have

had their day. The chief difference between them and
the Communists is that they lack the courage of their con
victions. They want the same things, but do not dare try
to get them. Thus their appeal is limited in the main to ex
treme but scholarly revolutionists and to timorous fanatics.
They are too radical for Socialists of the school of Bebel
and the elder Liebknecht and too conservative for the Com
munists. Between the two they are beginning to dissolve.
But it is the losses of the parent Socialist Party, still the
largest Socialist party in Germany, that are of importance
in estimating the status of socialism in the country, for,
despite their losses, they still polled four times as many
votes as the Independents and three and one-half times more
than the Communists. In the old Saxon Diet they had
43.7 per cent of the total membership; in the present Diet
they have but 28 per cent. In the Prussian Diet they have
dropped from 38 per cent to 26.5 per cent. And the total
combined vote in Prussia of Majority and Independent So
cialists was but 32.7 per cent, against 42 in January, 1919.
Twist the figures as one may, they still amount to a vote
of lack of confidence by several hundreds of thousands of
Germans who, a year or two ago, saw in socialism the
salvation of the country. That the Socialists are losing
ground is frankly admitted by many of the party's clearer
heads. And thus the hope of the leaders of the chief
Socialist Partythe party of Severing and Horsinglies in
gaining more recruits from the laboring classes. The other
elements are turning from them daily, resentful of their
weakness in dealing with enemies of the peace. A change
of front now would come too late. There is nothing to do
but be tender of the "misguided idealists"the only reser
voir from which, if I read the signs aright, socialism in Ger
many can hope to draw strength in the future.
Paternalism
in
Versus
Unionism
Mining Camps
By POWERS HAPGOOD
IN the course of my wandering existence as a casual

laborer in the West a few months ago, it happened that
I worked as a coal digger in two mines which were being
operated under very contrasting conditions. One of them
was the Frederick Mine of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Com
pany, located at Valdez, Colorado, in the Trinidad district.
Here the union was not recognized, as it had been broken
in the Colorado coal strike of 1914, and the mine was being
run under the so-called Rockefeller Plan of employee repre
sentation. The other coal mine in which I worked was a
strictly union mine located at Bearcreek, Montana, where
the United Mine Workers of America have been recognized
and have obtained closed shop conditions. The contrast be
tween the lives of the people at the two places is significant
in showing the difference in attitude between workers who
live under the rule of a paternalistic bureaucracy and those
who live under their own guidance.
The living conditions at the Frederick Mine of the Colo
rado Fuel and Iron Company are excellent. Near the mine
there is a well-kept main street lined with attractive houses
in which the married miners live in comfort with their
families for very low rents. A white school house is located
661
just beyond the line of houses, and a good-looking brick

building stands out conspicuously as the center of village
life. This is the Y. M. C. A., built and maintained by the
company for the benefit of its employees. Here there are
moving picture shows twice a week, and now and then a
dance is held in the large reading room. The bowling alleys
and the pool tables in the basement and the checker boards
and other games upstairs afford opportunity for light amuse
ment for the miners, while a reading room with books and
magazines gives a chance for the more serious minded to
educate themselves. Evening classes are held for those who
wish to advance from their places as coal diggers to positions
as fire bosses, mine foremen, and mine superintendents. Men
who are injured at work are taken care of by the company
in return for a small fee each month from the individual
miners, and in case of the death of an employee of the com
pany his family is permitted to remain in the house which
it occupies as long as it wishes free of charge. A weekly
income is paid to the widow of a miner who is killed, with
an additional amount for each child.
In great contrast to all this is "Brophy's" Mine at Bearcreek, with its cluster of weatherbeaten houses scattered in
the coulee about the coal tipple and power house. Here there
are scarcely any of the benefits enjoyed in the mining camps
of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. Most of the houses
might well be called shacks, and, while the little coal town
of Bearcreek, surrounding which there are seven or eight
mines, boasts a moving picture show and what used to be
saloons, there is no Y. M. C. A. or place where the miners
can read and attend classes of instruction. The scale of
wages is a little higher, but this in no way makes up for
the lack of Y. M. C. A.'s, well-built houses, and benefits to
the families of deceased miners.
There is one institution here, however, which seems, judg
ing from the attitude of the miners, to make up for the lack
of material benefits. This is the local union of the United
Mine Workers of America, into which several other new
comers at the mine and I were initiated with due ceremony
at the first meeting after our arrival. Every week we would
go up the coulee to the little meeting hall of our local, and
here we would plan ways of helping ourselves. At the regu
lar and special meetings which I attended during my stay
here, members discussed everything from grievances as to
working conditions to larger questions concerning the whole
district, such as the exploitation of the miners in this dis
trict by the powder trust. (Miners have to buy their own
powder to shoot down the coal which they are going to load
and there was a very large difference between the price
charged for black powder in the State of Montana and that
charged in other States.) The grievances were usually
adjusted between the management and the men by the dif
ferent committees appointed by the local union, and the
powder question was to be discussed and plans made for its
solution, when I left, by representatives from all the locals
in the district. During my stay at Bearcreek our local
signed a contract with a group of doctors who agreed to
take care of the men and their families and to give them
hospital attention, if necessary, for a fee of two dollars a
month per member, a sum no larger than that charged by
the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company as a doctor fee.
The Mountain-View Local, as our local union was called,
was one of the main things in the lives of many of the
miners at "Brophy's" mine, especially the Americans. Here
they met to plan ways of helping themselves, and they
The Nation
662
learned to do things here on their own initiative. Under

conditions like this the men were interested in something
besides the comfort of their own material existence. They
were interested in promoting the welfare of miners all over
the country as well as the welfare of their individual selves
and families. This was clearly shown in contributions to
help the striking miners in Alabama, which were made at
one of the meetings which I attended. In a larger sense
they were interested in helping the entire population of
wage earners, as many of them indicated in talks they made
at the meetings. And above all they were conscious that
they were independent as a group and that each one of them
had a voice in hi3 own destiny, and because of this they
had gone a long way toward acquiring that feeling of selfrespect which is so necessary to the happiness of normal
men. They were not dependent upon the good-will and
kindly disposition of a group of benevolent beings for their
rights. They were prepared to act in the only way that
workingmen can act to remedy conditions when they are
such that a remedy is necessary.
Machinery for the adjustment of grievances, to be sure,
is given the employees of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Com
pany under the Rockefeller Plan of employee representa
tion, which provides for meetings of elected representatives
of the workers and of the management to discuss questions.
But it is a plan handed down from above as a substitute
for unionism, and it is one under which the employees can
accomplish nothing if the management wills otherwise. It
is significant, as far as this plan is concerned, that several
men with whom I worked underground, my own partner
included who had worked in Colorado Fuel and Iron Com
pany mines for several years, did not know that there is
such a plan in existence, and in no case did I find anyone
who was really interested in it. The following answer to a
question I asked many times is typical of the attitude : "Yes,
the Rockyfeller plan's a good thing," said the mule driver
who delivered empty cars to my partner and me and took
away our full ones, and then he added, "that is, it's good
for the company. They've got the workers right where they
want them."
There were very few Americans working at the Frederick
Mine. Most of my companions there were Spaniards and
Mexicans. American miners like to help themselves rather
than to take things that are due them as charitable gifts
from an authority that can refuse them if it wishes or
thinks it to its best interests to do so.
"Don't ask for rights," says Mr. Dooley. "Take them. An'
don't let any one give them to ye. A right that is handed
to ye f'r nawthin' has somethin' the matter with it."
Glasshouse Dialogue
By HAROLD KELLOCK
[The city room of any newspaper. The copy reader is creat
ing headlines from a pile of manuscripts before him.]
City Editor. Yes, we all have to take chances in getting
born. Why, a fellow might have been born in Russia. That
would be the limit. Just think of living in that mess of
murder and anarchy! (Watch out for that race riot story
from the West Side. Two women shot.)
Copy Reader. It's a wonder the way those Anarchists
can hang on so long. (Writes headline: "Spend a Billion
to Elect Mayor.")
[Vol. 112, No. 2913
City Editor. Force and corruption. That's the answer.

Copy Reader. And ignorance, of course. They never
had any education in Russia. ("60,000 Cheer Billy Sun
day.")
City Editor. It's tough on the kids over there.
Copy Reader. Hoover says they just let 'em starve.
("Factory Children Happiest, Asserts Noted Clergyman.")
City Editor. And it must be awful for the women. (Get
that story on body of missing girl found in river?)
Copy Reader. How do they get away with that nation
alization of women stuff? ("Noted Banker Leads Octuple
Life.")
City Editor. You'd think the women wouldn't stand for
it. (Get a funny twist on that story of scrubwomen's wages
reduced 60 per cent.)
Copy Reader. Life is cheap there. With the Red Terror
and all, people are used to getting shot. ("Gunmen Slay
Social Queen in Ballroom.")
City Editor. They've driven all the good people out, and
they keep the workers in slavery. (Anything on the wire
tonight about the peonage in Georgia?)
Copy Reader. Yeah. ("Dr. Flunkey Defends TwelveHour Day.") They've got the Russian people bunked. That's
all there is to it. ("Administration Says We Must Serve
Humanity in Mexico.")
City Editor. We ought to have canned Lenin and Trotzky
when we had the chance. Hello. Here's a wire from Helsingfors. "Lenin driven into exile by enraged populace."
Boy, take this to Mr. Smatter in the editorial room. They'll
want an editorial on that.
Copy Reader. Yes. They always do. That's good stuff.
("American Press Best in the World, Says Russian Prin
cess.") Cop-ee !
(Humane Curtain.)
In the Driftway
NO anti-feminist note has usually been allowed to sound
in this column. The Drifter is all for women's rights
unless, of course, they interfere with his own. But it
does make a difference whose ox is gored. For instance, he
strolled into a barber shop in Greenwich Village the other
daya small, quiet place where, from previous experience,
he was confident that his hair would not be cut any worse
than usual. One seldom had to wait there, he knew. Upon
entering, the Drifter usually found one barber screened be
hind the sporting pages of the morning newspaper, while
the other woke with a startled stare from a nap he was
taking in a corner. But upon the occasion in question it
was the Drifter who, upon entering, was startled out of a
nap. Instead of the usual quiet and ease, both barbers were
at work at their chairs and in each chair was a very young
woman having her hair trimmed! The Drifter gulped and
looked toward the chairs along the wall. There sat two
customers waiting their turn, and one of them was a woman !
Now to the Drifter a barber shop had always seemed sacred
to the male sex. He would as soon have expected to find
women holding down the famous bleachers behind the Union
League Club's plate-glass windows on Fifth Avenue as to
encounter them reading the Police Gazette and the comic
weeklies in the waiting chairs of a barber shop. But times
changeand all that sort of thing. The bob-haired tribe
of Greenwich Village have discovered the Drifter's quiet
The Nation
May 4, 1921]
little shop, and hereafter the barbers, who never paid much
attention to his instructions, will pay none at all. Of course
a barber shop is a public place, and the flapper is entitled
to have her hair bobbed there if she pleases.
*
*
*
*
THE business men of Dubuque, Iowa, are a queer lot. A

newspaper dispatch says that a farmer of the sur
rounding region went into the city, taking with him twentytwo calf skins as tribute. He sold the twenty-two calf skins
at six cents a pound, and then set out to buy a pair of shoes.
They cost him $12, after paying which the newspaper dis
patch records that the farmer went home with $1.20. That
leads to the reflection that the business men of Dubuque,
Iowa, are a queer lot. How did they come to let him get
away with that $1.20?
*****
GREAT are the ways of government finance since the
World War taught nations how to spend billions that*
they never had and probably never will have! Credit is the
greatest thing in the world until somebody calls your bluff,
and in these days when men believe so fanatically in the
"divine right" of national governments, the financial in
tegrity or methods of the latter are not often called in
question. Rash individuals who attempt it are likely to
learn from personal experience all that there is to know
about the inside of a calaboose. So the Drifter greets with
respect the announcement from our Treasury Department
that $16,000,000 has been loaned to Italy although there
was "no actual cash transfer." The loan, it is stated, was
advanced to Italy "for payment to Great Britain, who re
turned it to this country for the account of France." But
ton, button; who's got the button? Beginning with next
month the Drifter is going to try to pay his bills with "no
actual cash transfer." If nobody calls his bluff, he will be
able to stop doing even such little work as fitfully and
badly he does now.
The Drifter
Correspondence
Americanizing Santo Domingo
Sib: The United States of America will never Americanize
Santo Domingo. The military may give way to a disguised
civil occupation, but if the latter lasts one hundred years, it
will never be other than an alien occupation. And a good
reason there isthe Dominicans are the original Americans
of European origin, and they know it. The Columbus family
did not make its home in New York City, or in Boston, but
in Santo Domingo City.
In my sojourn of two months, covering the entire island
as an American commercial traveler, I did not meet a single
Dominican who did not want the Americans out, bag and
baggage. Moreover, I did not meet one "native" who treated
me discourteouslymore than I can say for the treatment
accorded by my own people. The nearest approach to dis
courtesy by a Dominican was from a gentleman whose brother
had been handled most brutally by our national representa
tives. After inveighing passionately against the conquerors,
he perceived my embarrassment and placed an order with me.
Sunday evening, October 24, I got my first insight into
what a foreign military occupation means to sensitive Domin
icans. Walking up the street that leads from the barracks
to the Parque Colon, I encountered two marines returning
to their quarters. As they espied me, one said loudly, "Wait
663
a minute; let me get this s. o. a. b." As he crossed the

street, he asked me roughly, by way of introduction, in five
per cent pidgin Spanish, where in hell the wharf was. I
probably avoided a two-to-one street-brawl by answering him
in English. The fellow was evidently surprised, for he im
mediately explained how he and his pal had just been set
upon in the streets.
Returning to the hotel, I had been standing in front of it
for a few moments when I noticed some colored boys and a
marine jumping out and grabbing one. The marine was
about to give him a good beating with the stick the boy was
carrying when I intervened. The soldier told me that some
boys had just stoned an officer, riding up Calle Separation in
a coach. He explained that the officer, who was armed, might
have shot the boys, but refrained. The fact that this boy was
carrying a stick was enough evidence for the marine, though
the latter admitted that he had not seen the boy before. At
my suggestion the exponent of the rights of powerful nations
finally released the boy, with a shove in the neck and an asper
sion on his parentage.
The "natives" in the interior fare much worse, I venture.
I talked with a marine on the wharf one day and he told me
about their "free-hand" when in the country. When the boys
wanted any fruit or vegetables they took them. When they
wanted a pig or a turkey they took it. Of course, they paid
for the things when they could find the owner. Often they
do not find him.
Not only is it the spirit of our Military Occupation, from
officer down to private, to bully the Dominican, but it is also
its apparent desire to play "dog-in-the-manger." One morning
in Puerto Plata I found on the mole an exchange of words
in progress between a marine and some Dominicans. A fiat
freight car, loaded with some projecting machinery, had come
to a halt between a large army truck and an army Ford. The
marine would not move his Ford without authorization from
his commanding officer. Finally I suggested that he permit
the Dominicans to move the Ford several inches over on the
sidewalk. He assented in ill humor when the Dominican boss
agreed to pay any damages. In one minute the car had been
pushed by and the Ford placed back in the street.
About the first of December I went over to Barahona to
visit the trade. There were restrictions on at the time, due
to the small-pox epidemic in Haiti. I was permitted to land
in the morning. When I purchased my ticket to Sanchez I
had to present, and leave, a certificate of health I obtained
from the Provost Marshal. After having lunch on board ship
I was prevented from going to town again. The permit I
had got that morning from the Dominican Sanidad didn't
countthe "native" service was permitted to function just out
of good-will, the marine assured me. The holding of a ticket
was not sufficient. I had to get a permit from Captain M.
Luckily for me Captain M. was on board, dining with some
guests, men and women. I returned to the dining-saloon and
waited. I waited for him to eat his meal. I waited for him
to smoke his cigars. I waited for him to finish his discourses
on fine liquors. He knew I was waiting for him to give me one
minute and his magic signature. He knew I had business
ashore, and he knew that commercial travelers did not wait
over ten days for the next boat in order to work the village
of Barahona. He knew that the boat was leaving that after
noon. I ask the reader how Dominicans fare when officers and
gentlemen representing American power take pleasure in dis
playing to American travelers their pompous and petty
authority?
1
In Puerto Plata I met a young captain just arrived from
the United States. At noon he was panting like a fish out
of water, and he kept assuring me that he was going to get
drunk. His face was as chubby as his talk was silly. He
told me several times that he was the ranking officer there
and he could throw them all in jail if he wanted to. Having
already spent several years in a Spanish-speaking country, he
664
The Nation
spoke Spanish, and to show it kept pronouncing loudly one of

the coarsest words in the language. The presence of Domin
ican ladies did not interrupt the emphatic flow of his Spanish.
At supper time he returned, drunk enough to enjoy saying
monotonously, "I'm drunk; Christ, I'm drunk." Here was a
fair sample of the superior American, just arrived, with su
periority undimmed: and the Dominicans smiled quietly and
sadly.
Two days later I arrived at the Hotel Aleman, Sanchez.
There I found another sample of the official exponent of
American superiority and fitness to rule weak nations. This
captain was leaving, and was indulging in the apparently
favorite pastime of American marine officers of getting drunk.
It was indeed a pretty spectacle to sit smoking in old Hagan's
dining-room vestibule and see this overgrown boy, an officer,
get more and more bleary eyed, and sillier and sillier, until
he could scarcely raise his eyelids and move his tongue.
Yet withal this mean, petty, and unintelligent spirit animat
ing the military, Dominicans dare not protest too strongly, or
they will get what Horacio Blanco Pombona got, and others
before him. One week in November this young man pub
lished on the front page of his review, Letras, a photograph of
a Dominican whose chest had been fearfully seared by Ameri
can soldiers, using Belgian-Congo, or Prussian-Belgian, methods
of eliciting information. All at once, the office of Letras was
invaded by armed soldiers and closed up, and Mr. Fombona
got free board and lodging in prison at Dominican expense.
And lest anyone should enter the establishment of Letras, an
armed sentryarmed with a high-power riflewas sent to pace
before it, night and dayat Dominican expense. Several
weeks later Mr. Fombona was let out with a fine and a couple
of weeks to clear out of the latest territorial acquisition of the
United States of America. No one who ever talked with Pom
bona, as I did, would ever have considered this writer and poet
anything but a sensitively patriotic gentleman.
The people who are now holding the reins in Santo Domingo
through steel and gunpowder had better return to the United
States. Law and order need to be maintained here in more
extended regions where lynching bees are as regular as every
fourth day. If they want to organize street-cleaning brigades
there is more work, relatively, in New York than in Santo
Domingo City. If they want to develop civic pride, Kensington,
Philadelphia, will claim their attention for a decade. If they
want to develop a good system of schools, let them go to Dela
ware, or to any State in the South. If they want to raise the
standard of well-being of a Caribbean people, Porto Rico, our
Porto Rico, cries out most pitifully. Infested with disease, beg
gary, and utter human degradation, despite the countless ma
cadam roads, that island needs all the energy we have to spare.
For twenty years we have been trying to Americanize that place,
and if human happiness is a measure of our intentions, we can
work there for fifty years with undivided energy before the
poor classes are as happy, as well fed, as self-respecting as the
poor classes of Santo Domingo.
New York, April IS
Philip Douglass
Britain, America, Japan and Yap

Sir: The American note of April 6 to the Powers on the Yap
mandate bases our right on the hoary axiom embodied in the
Treaty of Versailles, that "to the victor belong the spoils,"
and tacitly commits the United States to the method of im
perialism. Although we had "nothing to gain" from the war,
we find ourselves at the peace as one of the victors jointly
possessed not only of Yap, but also, by the same right, of the
former German colonies in Africa, and of the Pacific islands
south of the Equator. Our rights in these two latter groups
we propose to yield to Great Britain gratis. But through
Yap, unfortunately, we are bound to keep open a line of com
[Vol. 112, No. 2913
munication so long as we hold the Philippines or desire to cable

to China. And this discrimination in our assertion of right
offends Japan.
It is imperative for Americans to do a little straight think
ing and to recognize the facts in this issue as they are. Japan
is not to be blamed for taking Yap if she can get and keep
it. She has learned her diplomacy from European statesmen,
even as today she is learning her war-aeronautics from Euro
pean bird-men.
The unofficial reports from London intimate that the Teply
of the British Government to the Hughes note will be to the
effect that "this affair of Yap is now one for the United
States and Japan to settle between them." If this view be
officially confirmed as the British attitude, an American may
well exclaim: "Exactly what we desire! But it is rather a
pity you have come to this view of it so late! Who gave Yap
to Japan and created this issue? When in 1916 by the Treaty
of London British statesmen pledged Yap to Japan, were
they entirely unmindful that the United States would of neces*sity by the first law of tactics be compelled to dispute Japan's
title? Is there not, then, a certain . complacency in their pres
ent assumption of the role of innocent bystander? Wasn't
that treaty of 1916 of a piece with the traditional practice
of British statecraft at its worst?" And an American of any
moral fiber might even demand: "By what right came Yap
in 1916 under the award of Great Britain, anyhowunless by
the assumed right of naval power? And is, then, this very
naval power, which it is sought to justify as 'the great police
force for maintaining open sea-ways for the commerce of all," to
become itself the instrument for creating explosive issues be
tween other peoples, maintaining itself by the policy divide et
impera?"
In his "Outline of History," Vol. II, p. 550, Mr. Wells re
marks critically of the conscious independence of the American
people seen in their aversion to the League of Nations: "They
had never been deeply stirred by the idea of a human com
munity larger than their own." At least, it may be replied,
no American statesman ever deliberately created for Great
Britain an explosive issue with a friendly people, such as
has been created for us at Yap. The difference in method may
be due to a difference in aimBritish statesmen looking to
Mr. Wells's so-called Pax Britannica, where the American
mind would be content with an ordinary peace.
Much has been said of late of "open diplomacy." Mr.
Hughes's note now presents an issue with perfect clearness to
anyone willing to see the facts. Those Americans who stand
for reduction of naval armament are demanding that we seize
the present occasion of enforced and recently expressed con
sent of Great Britain to cooperate to that end. They are
right in mutual good faith. But as some ideas are in them
selves more powerfully explosive than material armament, it
would be well to remember that the idea, in 1916, of giving
Yap to Japan is worth to British statesmen ten superdreadnoughts today, and will be worth twenty-five in 1927.
It is altogether probable that a firm and fair policy with
Japan will be able to settle this dispute amicably, and reach
a permanent understanding. The task will be easier to ac
complish if our European friend of world-organizing predilec
tion can be persuaded not again to reach a meddling hand
across to the Pacific. The American people would be very
wise now not to judge Japan too severely, but to place re
sponsibility for the present dispute squarely where it belongs.
Haddonfield, N. J., April 15
Joseph W. Pennypacker
A Plan for Settling Industrial Disputes

Sir: No subject of general interest is of greater impor
tance just now than the question of how to substitute har
mony for strife between employers and wage earners, the strife
May 4, 1921]
The Nation
which has seriously checked production. The method of effect

ing this change advocated by the International Brotherhood
of Electrical Workers and the National Association of Elec
trical Contractors and Dealers deserves attention. Both
employers and employees recognize and have agreed that
(1) Strikes and lockouts are commercially disastrous to all con
cerned, including the public; (2) organized labor is here to
stay; (3) contentment means efficiency; (4) it is better to work
out industrial questions with labor leaders as consultants and
as partners rather than as combatants, and as if the interests
of employers and employees were not identical; (5) as every
fair settlement is eventually decided by argument and logic, it
is better for both sides to have arbitration before cessation of
work rather than during or after a strike or lockout.
With these most vital tenets agreed upon, a strikeless in
dustry is not only possible but is within sight, for the employers
propose to abolish the lockout and the workmen the strike.
Both have agreed even to disentangle themselves from sympa
thetic movements. The far-reaching importance of this cannot
be overstated if it is realized what an enormous loss is annually
caused by stoppage of work due to disagreements. Very large
statistical figures could be given in support of this statement.
The machinery which brings this Utopian method of har
monizing employers and employees is known as the Council on
Industrial Relations for the Electrical Construction Industry.
It consists of five members of the I. B. E. W. and five of the
National Association of Electrical Contractors and Dealers.
Although it has been functioning scarcely a year, it has already
settled ninety disputes without the loss of a day's work. Fur
thermore, the decisions have been received with a far greater
degree of satisfaction by both sides than ever would have been
possible by the old method of waiting until one side or the
otheror both sideshad been worn out and exhausted.
Publicity and public opinion are the only agencies by which
the Council proposes to win recognition of and compliance with
its pronouncements. Abandoning the philosophy of power and
struggle, it relies upon the theory that the public will think
and act correctly when it has the facts.
The Council has adopted the following rules under which it
will serve as conciliator in disputes: When a dispute arises
which cannot be adjusted by the existing local machinery, and
notice to that effect is received by the secretary of the Council,
from either of the parties to the dispute, the secretary of the
Council or the executive committee, after investigation, may, if
circumstances warrant, request each side to submit the dispute
to a board of conciliation to be composed of two representatives
from each side, parties to the dispute, and one representative
to be selected by the Council, who shall act as chairman but
cast no vote.
The appointment of representatives by the parties to the
dispute to act for them on the board of conciliation shall con
stitute a voluntary agreement between the parties to accept
as an effective agreement between them the unanimous decision
of the board of conciliation.
If the board of conciliation does not reach an agreement it
shall make a finding of the material facts and state the reasons
why it has been unable to reach an agreement. The chairman
shall report such finding and statement to the Council and the
Council shall determine the matters so submitted as arbitrator.
If the Council reaches a unanimous agreement it shall report
its decision back to the board of conciliation through its chair
man, and the board shall then state the agreement between
the parties to the dispute the same as if the board itself had
reached a unanimous decision. If the Council shall fail to
reach a unanimous decision it shall make majority and minority
reports and transmit these to the chairman of the board of con
ciliation, who shall immediately publish them in order to inform
the public of the material facts and the reasons why the Council
has been unable to reach an agreement.
The success of this method has been so pronounced that it is
planned to extend it to other trades. If and when it is taken
665
up generally we may look to a strikeless condition in the build

ing industry, and if this can be brought about the credit will
be due to the electrical workers and their contracting employers.
New York, April 11
L.
The Tail Goes with the Hide

Sib: Reasons and explanations for the existing economic
depression, labor troubles, and crime waves have been many
and varied. As yet I have not read one that placed the blame
squarely where it belonged. All blame the war in a general
way and let it go at that. We have these conditions for the
simple and sufficient reason that we bought them. They were
the figures in small type on the price tags of war which we
failed to notice when we bought the thing. Now the bill is
presented for payment, and, having bought, we must pay.
Waves of crime do not suddenly spring up of their own
volition. Their cause lies in the fact that certain forces have
been diverted from their normal channels, and the result cannot
be avoided. While it is a trite saying that everything has its price,
still it is a truth that will easily bear repetition since it is so
generally overlooked. Money, viewed in its correct light, buys
nothing at all. It is a mere symbol, a medium of exchange.
What, then, shall be said of the price of war? It cannot
be estimated in billions of dollars, that was the smallest part
of it. In order successfully to conduct the war it was necessary
that we, first of all, learn to hate. Mankind would do very
little hating if left to its own devices, for it is not an integral
part of its makeup. So we proceeded to learn to hate. We
taught some four million young men how to put that hate into
action, taught them brutality in the most extreme forms we
could conceive. We taught them to be oblivious to life, to use
brutal force to accomplish all things. They are still using it,
many of them, and we are amazed. Having started these forces
in motion in a certain direction, we now stand aghast at the
effects. We somehow imagined that we would be brutes only
until the signing of the peace treaty. That done, they would,
overnight, revert to peace-loving, property- and life-respecting
citizens, or so we hoped.
Nor were those who remained at home immune from the in
fluence of hate. Never was business in general so unscrupulous,
so unmoral. We lived on a wave of unnatural excitement and
extremes in every department of life. It was merely the same
misdirected force exerting itself here as abroad.
We have a very uncertain control over the forces which we
have discovered, and we can direct them only in a most general
way. The engineer can only approximate the volume of earth
and rock that will be dislodged by a stick of dynamite. We
can fire a gun in almost any direction we desire, but the exact
spot where the bullet will stop is a matter of conjecture. Is it
not easier to unleash a ferocious animal than it is to catch it
and tie it up again? So it is with war, the wave of hate, so
easily put in motion by the declaration of war, cannot be
brought into control in a moment by the mere signing of a
treaty of peace. The force, once started, must spend itself
whether we like it or not. With our President, we believed in
force to the uttermost. We have it. But the gun, the knife, the
repudiation of contracts, the expectation of enormous unearned
millions, in short all forms of ruthlessness, are but poor stand
ards by which to live.
The tail goes with the hide. Having danced, we must pay
the fiddler. Perhaps in generations to come mankind will, with
enlarged vision, learn to look for the small type on the price
tag of war, and to reckon the price too high. Thus far, the
universe has never been adjusted in such a way that something
might be secured for nothing, and I feel safe in the prophecy
that it never will.
San Francisco, April 11
Henrique Channing
The Nation
666
Sex
By ARTHUR GUITERMAN
Amoebas at the start
Were not complex;
They tore themselves apart,
And started Sex.
And Sex has thrilled the earth
From then to this,
Producing grief and mirth
And pain and bliss.
Through Sex the seedling wakes
To cleave the ground;
'Tis really Sex that makes
The world go round.
It sublimates the mind
With noble themes,
Or sends it unrefined,
Suggestive dreams.
'Tis Sex that rules the lives
Of clowns and kings;
It gives us books and wives
And other things
Ambition, love and strife
And all the ills
And ecstacies of life,
And Freuds and Brills.
Books
Democracies and Democracy
Modern Democracies. By James Bryce. The Macmillan Com
pany.
IN these two volumes Lord Bryce brings his unrivaled re
sources of political experience and reflection, historical eru
dition and travel, to bear upon a valuation of the working of
modern democracy as it presents itself in a variety of selected
instances. Although the countries chosen for full descriptive
treatment are only sixFrance and Switzerland among the old
European states, the United States and Canada among the
newer states of the Western Hemisphere, Australia and New
Zealand in the Southern Hemisphereno close limits of time
or space are set upon the range of Lord Bryce's information and
reflection. In a word, we have here the largest, clearest, and
best-informed attempt that has yet been made to bring to
gether, for judgment and political guidance, the diverse experi
ments, among peoples of various types and under various
physical and mental conditions, in the art of popular selfgovernment.
Though Lord Bryce formally eschews all discussion of politi
cal philosophy and abstract doctrines as such, professing to deal
exclusively, or mainly, with facts and their interpretation, the
latter process brings in inevitably, and most fruitfully, innu
merable issues of theoretical importance in political science.
Nevertheless the staple of this great work is its full and orderly
marshaling of facts, drawn chiefly from the six chosen examples,
but reinforced in the interpretation by innumerable references
to the history of other countries including that of his own,
withdrawn here from full survey for a reason perhaps less valid
[Vol. 112, No. 2913
in Lord Bryce's case than it would be in that of any other

modern commentator, viz., the suspicion of partiality.
This detailed study of the operation of democracy in these
several countries is preceded in Volume I by a discussion of
general considerations in which the meaning of such terms as
liberty and equality is discussed, and general estimates are
given of the role played by party and tradition, education,
religion, and the press in the life of modern democracies. The
latter half of Volume II returns from the examination of par
ticulars to a general comparative survey of democratic insti
tutions in order to extract therefrom practical principles and
estimates serviceable in the art of modern democratic statecraft.
Although American readers will naturally turn with special
interest to the large section devoted to their own institutions
(a new and independent study, not an epitome of "The Ameri
can Commonwealth"), they will, I think, find no large change
from the earlier interpretations and valuations of American
government. The tendency to sacrifice liberty to equality, im
patience of the slowness of legislative and judicial processes,
excesses of party organization, the politics of the "pork barrel,"
the power of money to prevent administration or legislation
or to corrupt the electorates, extravagance in administration
these and other charges against American democracy are once
more submitted to the test. But they are examined in compari
son with the institutions of other countries and with other forms
of government. The general result of this comparative study
is to explain rather than to extenuate the defects in the work
ing of democracy in America and other countries. Certain
special defects are noted in the American case, due partly to
constitutional weaknesses, such as the separation of powers,
partly to misapplication of electoral methods, responsible for
the inferior honesty and competence of many State judiciaries.
But the great troubles in the working of the American system
are manifestly due to the rapid growth of wealth on the one
hand, and the pace of foreign immigration on the other, putting
temptations and strains upon democracy from which no system,
democratic or other, could have escaped unscathed.
But while a very large part of this voluminous study is
necessarily given to a citation and discussion of the defects
and delinquencies of democracy as it appears in our time, the
general judgment and outlook is not one of condemnation but
of hope. Things are bad in many ways today, but the historic
attitude shows them worse yesterday: democracy has its vices,
but those of autocracy and oligarchy are more numerous and
more incurable. Moreover, much of the trouble and misconduct
of affairs is not inherent either in human nature or in demo
cratic forms, but is attributable to the vast size of great modern
nations and their congestion in huge amorphous cities. The
most serviceable study on this point is of Switzerland, in which
the substantial success of democracy is established beyond
doubt. Indeed, it may be said that Switzerland is a perpetual
feeder of democratic faith in Lord Bryce. For there he finds
the best support of public opinion, honest, steady, and informed,
the true will of a people operating through trusted institutions.
The amount of attention given in these volumes to the methods
of direct government, in particular the referendum and ini
tiative, is very noteworthy. Unless the people can be educated
to some real responsibility for important political decisions,
it is doubtful whether any perfection of representative ma
chinery can express the popular will. In the small commu
nities of the Swiss cantons or even the Swiss Federation, the
referendum and the initiative are found to work safely and
with satisfactory results. It is also evident that Lord Bryce
thinks well of the experiment of the referendum in some of
the Western States of the American Union, but is doubtful
of the use of the initiative. How far the federal method can
be applied so as to break up the unwieldy empires of the old
world, and so secure the healthy local atmosphere required for
the play of vigorous popular opinion, is perhaps the greatest
of all the distinctively political problems. On this I cannot
forbear to quote the striking passage with which Lord Bryce
May 4, 1921]
667
The Nation
concludes one of his most searching and valuable chapters.

"It was in small communities that democracy first arose; it
was from them that the theories of its first literary prophets
and apostles were derived; it is in them that the way in which
the real will of the people tells upon the working of govern
ment can best be studied, because most of the questions which
come before the people are within their own knowledge. The
industrial and commercial forces which draw men together
into large aggregations seem to forbid the hope that small
governing units may reappear within any period to which we
can look forward. Yet who can tell what may come to pass
in the course of countless years? War and the fear of war
were the chief causes which destroyed the small states. If the
fear of war could be diminished, there might be some chance
of their return."
In the final part of this work there constantly arises to the
forefront of attention the great underlying question as to the
reality of self-government in these larger nations styled democ
racies. How far is an intelligent popular will effective in any
of these countries? How far is the executive government really
responsible to the people? Lord Bryce comments keenly upon
the various ways in which the Cabinet in Great Britain, the
Legislature in France, or the party organization in the United
States has arrogated to itself the real governing powers. In
every great state the fixing of responsibility is a difficult pro
cess which enables the real control over public policy to pass to
quite other hands than constitutional forms have intended, in
America to the President or the Supreme Court or the party
boss, in Britain to the inner Cabinet or the permanent heads
of departments, in France to some brief-lived fascinating Presi
dent or astute bloc-maker. But behind all these defects and
difficulties in the inner working of the political machinery stand
those problems connected with the formation and efficiency of
public opinion and popular control. Lord Bryce has not ignored
them in his interesting chapters on the Money Power and his
discussion of the press and the practices of lobbying and elec
tioneering.
"Of the six countries, the United States has been that in
which money has been the most generally powerful during the
last sixty years, France that in which it is probably most
powerful now, while Canada comes next, Australia, New Zea
land, and Switzerland being practically exempt, though, of
course, a party or a group of men with ample funds for elec
tions and able to run newspapers in its interests enjoys every
where an advantage."
Many readers will, however, feel that such discussion of the
direct political pressures of the Money Power does not deal
adequately with the economic corruption of democracy. There
is a curious passage in which Lord Bryce declares that "de
mocracywhich is merely a form of government, not a con
sideration of the purposes to which government may be turned
has nothing to do with economic equality, which might exist
under any form of government. Political equality can exist
either along with or apart from equality in property." Now,
while it is true that the scope of this work relieves the writer
from any obligation to discuss concrete proposals for using
government to alter the distribution of wealth or other eco
nomic conditions, the question how far sound democracy is
compatible with oligarchic control of industry and wide diver
gencies of income cannot be so easily disposed of. The honest
and effective working of democracy has very much to do with
economic equality (as indeed Lord Bryce shows in his appre
ciation of Swiss democracy). It is not merely or mainly a
matter of bribery, and lobbying and legislative pressures. The
oligarchic government of industry makes it very difficult for
working men and women "to call their souls their own," in the
sense of possessing full liberty and opportunity to form, ex
press, and give effect to that personally enlightened will which
is the true unit in democracy. It was a great American con
servative who said: "Give a man power over my subsistence
and he has power over the whole of my moral being." There
is no single organ of the democratic system whose fair and

free working is not injured by the economic inequalities and
disabilities which prevail in most great modern nations. The
rejection of a despotic communism, as destructive of personal
liberty and initiative, does not dispose of the demand for sub
stantial economic equality as an essential of "the honest and
effective working of democracy."
J. A. Hobson
Andrew Carnegie
The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie. Houghton Mifflin
Company.
A NDREW CARNEGIE'S countrymen felt in his lifetime that
** $350,000,000 worth of power over them was more than any
man ought to hold. Accordingly, except when they were asking
him to found a library or to endow a college, they did what
they could to keep him humble and to persuade him that no
one envied him and that no one would bow an inch lower to
him out of reverence for his fabulous wealth. This was, no
doubt, sound democratic discipline. He himself must have ap
plauded the spirit of it. "It was long," he says in commenting
on his own radically democratic upbringing, "before I could
trust myself to speak respectfully of any privileged class or
person who had not distinguished himself in some good way and
therefore earned the right to public respect." But he knew
all the time, and his countrymen knew at heart, that adding up
his stocks and bonds would not summarize his talents and vir
tues. His gifts made him appear the most magnificent phi
lanthropist that the world had ever seen. And by qualities
which remained with him after he had distributed his fortune,
he was one of the most original, interesting, and representa
tive men of his generation.
The Iron Master possessed intelligence of the first rank in
its kind, an open and free spirit coupled with extraordinary
firmness of character, indefatigable energy and initiative, and
a "creative" benevolence, together with abundant humor, poetic
sentiment, and deep feeling with regard to the things that mat
ter. He was, in short, a personality. He appreciated, further
more, the significant and picturesque aspects of his own career
and savored its contrasts like a man of letters. When in his
old age, at his retreat on the Scotch moors, he undertook at the
insistence of his friends to compose his memoirs, he had the
material, the perspective, and the mood for a book fit to stand
on the shelf by Franklin's. Following his own precept and
Franklin's example, he wrote out his recollections simply, mod
estly, blithely, like an old gentleman with a good conscience tell
ing the story of his life to his friends and relatives.
The war diverted him from his work before the manuscript
was in shape for publication. He wrote on the margin: "Who
ever arranges these notes should be careful not to burden the
public with too much. A man with a heart as well as a head
should be chosen." Professor John C. Van Dyke was selected
as an editor possessing both these qualifications. His task,
which he says was little more than to arrange the matter in
chronological sequence, he has performed unobtrusivelyjust
a shade too unobtrusively. Carnegie had far more than the
ordinary manufacturer's respect for literature, and he clearly
hoped that his autobiography would be considered, in the
stricter sense, as "literature." It contains, however, more in
stances of the "dangling participle" than perhaps ever before
appeared in a single volume. There should be nothing sacred,
to one charged with the editing of an unfinished manuscript,
about Mr. Carnegie's dangling participles. Before the book
goes into its second edition, these and such like easily corrigible
slips should be silently amended. Then the really charming
spirit which pervades itI do not recall a harsh or ill-natured
word from the beginning to the end of itshould make it a
place in the best company, where it belongs.
Andrew Carnegie was born in 1835 at Dunfermline, Scot
668
The Nation
land, son of a damask weaver who was ruined by the introduc

tion of steam looms and who in 1848 borrowed twenty pounds
to bring his family to America, where "Andy" made his "start
in life" at the age of thirteen as a bobbin boy in a cotton fac
tory at a dollar and twenty cents a week. A second-rate
"self-made man" might have attributed his success to the
change of environment and to his own industry. It is a char
acteristic and attractive trait in Carnegie, creditable to both
his heart and his head, that he recognizes and handsomely
acknowledges his obligations not merely to his employers and
employees and partners but to a multitude of benign forces
cooperating in his success.
Though he had, for example, but a few years of common
schooling, he makes it clear that he received from various di
rections the incentives of an excellent education. He declares
that he was fortunate in his ancestors and supremely fortunate
in his birthplace. He is proud of a grandfather on one side
who was familiarly known as "the professor," of a grandfather
on the other side who was a friend of Cobbett, of an uncle
who went to jail to vindicate the right of public assembly,
of a father who was one of five weavers that founded the first
library in Dunfermline, and of a mother capable of binding
shoes to help support the family, in her morality an uncon
scious follower of Confucius, in her religion consciously a dis
ciple of Channing. As for the town, it had the reputation of
being the most radical in the kingdom : the stimulus of political
and philosophic ideas was in the air; the editorials of the
London Times were read from the pulpit; "the names of Hume,
Cobden, and Bright were upon everyone's tongue." Dunferm
line was radical but with a radicalism nourished on history
and inclined to hero-worship; for, in the midst of her, abbey
and ruined tower fired the young heart with remembrance
of King Malcolm and Wallace and Bruce. "It is a tower of
strength for a boy," says the old man, "to have a hero." The
thought of Wallace made him face whatever he was afraid of,
and remained "a real force in his life to the very end."
When the Carnegie family settled in America, their capital
was brains, pluck, honesty, willingness to work, and loyalty to
one another. The early stages in their pecuniary progress were
marked first by payment of their debts, then by purchase of
their first little house, and later by their first investment, in
five shares of the Adams Express Company. "Andy" did not
long remain a telegraph messenger, because he promptly devel
oped his faculty for doing "something beyond the sphere of his
duties," which attracted the attention of those over him. He
picked up telegraphy while waiting for messages; he learned
to receive by ear while others used the paper slip; he mastered
the duties of a train-dispatching superintendent of division
while sending the messages of his superior. When his chief's
arrival at the office was delayed one morning and the division
was in confusion, he assumed responsibility and sent out the
orders in the superintendent's name, saying to himself, "death
or Westminster Abbey." The union of special knowledge with
courage which made "the little white-haired Scotch devil" a
first-rate assistant at the age of eighteen, promoted him in six
years to the superintendency of the Pittsburgh Division. "I
was only twenty-four years old," he says, "but my model then
was Lord John Russell." Two years later he was assistant
director of telegraphs and military railroads for the Govern
ment. After the Civil War, by swift combinations of his forces
and rapid marches into new fields, he established his position
at the center of the industries on which the internal develop
ment of the country most directly depended. At the age of
thirty-three he had an annual income of fifty thousand dollars;
its subsequent expansion there is not space to recite.
The record of his early life shows a boy grounded by family
discipline in self-respect, moral purity, and intellectual ambi
tion. It indicates that the wide beneficence of his later years
was not the mere after-thought and diversion of a satiated
money-getter but the object toward which his efforts tended
from the start. His first note to the press, written at the same
[Vol. 112, No. 2913
period, was a plea to have a certain small library opened to

working boys of his class. The 7,689 organs that he afterwards
gave to churches and the 2,800 libraries that he founded were
his acknowledgment to society for the impulse it had given him.
He had worshiped a popular hero, Wallace, from the Dunferm
line days; and the hero funds that he established throughout
the world were tokens of his lifelong hero-worship. By the
school of thought in which he was nourished, war among civ
ilized nations was reckoned an obsolescent and absurd instru
ment of statecraft; his Palace of Peace commemorated the
aspirations of a genuine friend of all the people.
In 1868 he had made a memorandum, indicating it as hia
intention to retire in two years and to "settle in Oxford and get
a thorough education," and then to "take part in public affairs,
especially those connected with education and improvement of
the lower classes." Like another famous man of our time, he
discovered that it is not easy for a leader in the fulness of his
powers to retire"he had come to the ring and now he must
hop." But he continued his education and his educating, when
he could, by reading Plato, Confucius, and Buddha, by traveling
in various lands, and by earnestly advising and taking the
advice of philosophers, presidents, kaisers, prime ministers,
secretaries of state, and other experts. He acknowledged the
impulse to intellectual growth that society had given him by
gifts of buildings or endowment funds to five hundred educa
tional institutions at home and abroad and by his great central
foundation with its liberal charter for "the advancement and
diffusion of knowledge and understanding among the people of
the United States."
Some of us criticized him because he did not give away his
three hundred and fifty millions stealthily and secretly, as we
slip a quarter into the collection box, God alone being aware of
our munificence. But he knew that one of the most important
of his benefactions was precisely the publicity with which he
restored his vast accumulations to the people and put them at
the service of the upward-striving members of society. It was
for him to declare conspicuously and with magnificent and un
mistakable emphasis what money is good for: to promote science
and literature and music and peace and heroism. He owed the
friendship, he tells us, of Earl Grey, who later became a trustee
of the ten-million-dollar fund for the United Kingdom, to the
publication in the Times of these sentences from his instruc
tions to the trustees of his gifts to Dunfermline :
"To bring into the monotonous lives of the toiling masses of
Dunfermline more 'of sweetness and light'; to give to them
especially the youngsome charm, some happiness, some ele
vating conditions of life which residence elsewhere would have
denied, that the child of my native town, looking back in after
years, however far from home it may have roamed, will feel
that simply by virtue of being such, life has been made happier
and better. If this be the fruit of your labors, you will have
succeeded; if not, you will have failed."
Large-scale beneficencedoing good to towns and entire
classes of society and nationsestablishes one as a member of
a privileged order, which the average man regards with a cer
tain uneasy envy. If Carnegie had not taken from us that
$350,000,000, we might all and each have had the credit of
contributing to the purchase of those organs, the foundation
of those libraries, the establishment of those hero-funds, the
building of that Palace of Peace, the pensioning of those em
ployees, the endowment of those universities, that great fund
for the advancement of knowledge.
True: we might have contributed. We might have taxed our
selves at that rate. We might have made similar investments
in human progress. But we know pretty well that we wouldn't
have done so. After we had taxed ourselves for the necessary
upkeep and expansion of our army and navy, we should have
felt too poor to bear an additional tax for such remote objects
as the promotion of heroism or science. We should have felt
that we owed it to ourselves and to our families to apportion
our little "surplus" to our tobacco-fund, and our soft-drink
May 4, 1921]
The Nation
fund, for the tranquilizing of our nerves and the alleviation of

our thirst, or perhaps, if we were a notch above such sensual
indulgence, to our fund for the collection of canceled postagestamps. Our popular education is poor in incentives to large
enterprise. Our unorganized good-will remains scattering and
impotentunutilized, like the by-products lost in the waste of
old-fashioned manufacturing.
In the age of individualism which produced Andrew Carnegie,
society had scarcely begun to "tap the resources" of collective
effort for any genuine amelioration of common conditions. The
people "perished" because they had no vision of powers united.
In this present hour, clamoring for a high leadership which
fails to appear, we average men may look back a little regret
fully at our Carnegies, shrewd and level-headed in their means
but whole-heartedly and aspiringly democratic in their ends,
being fain to confess, we average men, that it is the pressure
of the "hero's" exaction, the spur of high example, a vision not
our own, a power not ourselves, that we must depend upon, if
we are ever, in Pindar's great phrase, "to become what we are."
Stuart P. Sherman
England's Critical Compass

Charles Baudelaire: A Critical Study. By Arthur Symons.
E. P. Dutton and Company.
The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. By T. S.
Eliot. Alfred A. Knopf.
Instigations. By Ezra Pound. Boni and Liveright.
The Art of Letters. By Robert Lynd. Charles Scribner's Sons.
THESE four books, as far apart from one another as the
points of the compass, represent four distinct kinds of lit
erary criticism in England today. That the authors of the
second and third are Americans does not at all make their
criticism American; it was brewed in London and emanates
expressly thence. For that matter, the author of the first was
born in Wales and the author of the fourth in Ireland.
Mr. Symons's "Baudelaire" belongs to a critical kind that
is probably dying. It represents impressionism without char
acter, Paterism withered beyond seed. Mr. Symons has written
some clear and beautiful books among his twenty-eight, but
this is a hashish dream, a tired, irrelevant train of phrases.
Baudelaire needed a good book in English, one that might match
the several fascinating ones in French, and Mr. Symons, a
passionate lifetime admirer, might have been expected to pro
duce it; but Swinburne's elegy still must be called the most
informing treatment of the subject in this language. Neither
a biography nor an essay, Mr. Symons's book reads like scat
tered musings on Baudelaire, with more or less pertinent chap
ters on Poe and Villiers de Hsle-Adam inserted without transi
tion or explanation. That the grammar and syntax are bad
throughout could be pardoned if the matter were fine. That
the technique is sheer reverie could be forgotten if the move
ment had gusto or the visions could be traced. On some pages
it is as if the writer had had to rouse himself from the deepest
critical lethargy and whip himself by exclamation and desperate
remark to the merest critical appetite. The work is weary,
without a line of clean analysis anywhere, and without the power
in any paragraph to prove that Baudelaire was one of the
surest and most cruelly definite artists who ever lived. A
crisp, six-page essay which Mr. Symons wrote concerning an
edition of the letters in 1906 was a better "study" than this
as indeed Mr. Symons seems to recognize, since he draws upon
it for his few good passages here.
If Mr. Eliot has read Mr. Symons's book he has been out
raged, no doubt; for he is leading what might be termed the
school of the younger responsibles, and he has set himself
unalterably against impressionistic criticism. His "Sacred
Wood" shelters the best essays and reviews that he has con
tributed to the Athenaeum and other periodicals during the
past few years, and represents in a way the most conscientious
669
critical effort now being made in England. Those knife-sharp

faculties of his which year in and year out have been trimming
and clipping poems from the devil's own brain have also been
busy at criticism, which, Mr. Eliot insists, is not an art, or a
hobby, or even a business, but an exact science. Above all it
is not creation. The trouble with Mr. Symons as a critic, says
Mr. Eliot, is that he is trying to produce something more than
criticism and only producing something less than creation.
The real creatorand it is a pity that in England, where
critics are so few, so many creators must turn off into criticism
has no such difficulty when he discusses literature, since he
has already satisfied his nature and is not the victim of a sup
pressed creative wish. Mr. Eliot is all for analysis, and for
keeping the categories straight. He chastises emotion from the
critical scenethe emotion which is concealed behind the ab
stract jargon of the pseudo-scientist no less than that which
is displayed in the languorous synonyms of the impressionist
with the sobriety of an ascetic. His remedy for England's criti
cal anemia is exercise in ideas, for which the teachers should
be a Frenchman, Remy de Gourmont, and a Greek, Aristotle
two men at least who see straight. Mr. Babbitt and Mr. More
in America, says Mr. Eliot, powerfully possess ideas, but their
vision suffers from ethical refraction. The perfect critic will
be as cold as steel and as free from color as plate glass.
Eliot is not a perfect critic, because he does not write well
enough in prose; but in the course of his essays on Tradition,
Rhetoric, Euripides, Marlowe, Hamlet, and Ben Jonson he has
drawn permanently valuable distinctions, and he has vindicated
with rare intelligence the right, indeed the necessity, of the
critic to think and to go on thinking.
One of Mr. Eliot's ideas, that poets improve themselves by
learning to appreciate tradition, is also Mr. Pound's, who
rambles for almost four hundred pages among his literary hates
and loves of the past and present, conveying gossip, making
comparisons, quoting at length, and damning by contrast, all
for the purpose of instigating minds to read and have views
on literature. He, too, insists upon France and Remy de Gour
mont, upon definition, intelligence, and the efficient imagination.
But he is not the orderly workman that Mr. Eliot is. His
volume is a mess, if an agreeable and often erudite mess. A
good deal of the material is reprinted from the Little Review,
which has regularly served Mr. Pound as a notebook for his
jotted opinions. The first section, called A Study of French
Poets, little more than an anthology of modern French verse
from Jules Laforgue to Jules Romains, can take its place
alongside the work of Amy Lowell and F. S. Flint in the
same domain. There are essays on Henry James and Remy de
Gourmont, and there is a brilliant analysis of the poems of
Mr. Eliot, whom Mr. Pound immensely admires in all things.
He says a good word for James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis
and passes on through a Provencal chapter to shapeless com
mentary on some English and Latin translations from the
Greek. Mr. Pound believes in translation as few men believe
in anything. Golding and Marlowe and Chapman are heroes
on his horizon, and he is of the faith that poetry which cannot
be translated to effect is inferior poetry. Hence an undying
resentment of Miltonperhaps his only inexcusable heresy.
Mr. Symons languishes in Gallic decadence; Mr. Eliot and
Mr. Pound energetically announce dogmas and import a Con
tinental intellectualism ; Mr. Lynd, caring nothing for France
or the rest of the world, continues as the undefiled and healthy
British critic, succeeding by his gusto and good sense in making
the books live that he talks about but professing no definite
or difficult principles. He ranges neither to Greece nor to
Provence, but shuts himself up with the literature of his native
islands and frankly, tremendously enjoys it. He is not thought
ful; after superb beginnings at the surface he fails to go deep;
yet while the illusion lasts that we are in the presence of his
authors it is a perfect illusion. It would be hard to match for
shrewdness of epigram, Tightness of epithet, and glitter of
illustration the opening paragraphs of the essays on Walpole
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670
and Cowper, or perhaps of the Bunyan and Pepys. Mr. Lynd

is at his richest when he can be a miniaturist of manners,
when he walks among diminutive soulsWalpole, Cowper
whom he can see easily and casually around. The larger, dis
appearing spirits he does not pretend to follow. Here lies a
large and shining body of literature, he seems to say, that will
amuse the right kind of man a lifetime if he treats it gene
rouslyif he refrains, that is, from dogma and destruction.
"The good critic," he concludes, "must in some way begin by
accepting literature as it is."
Mark Van Doren
The Physics in Metaphysics

THE same tendency toward concentration witnessed in the
political and economic worlds is seen in stronger form in
the world of ideas. Professor Hjelt says that chemistry is now
physics; Professor Edwin P. Adams that physics is geometry;
Bertrand Russell proves that mathematics are nothing but "sym
bolic logic." And finally the philosophers claim that the most
recent developments of science prove what philosophy has taught
all along, and that Einstein's chief glory is that he has at last
succeeded in putting the physics in metaphysics, or vice versa.
The most brilliant exponent of relativity in its purely philo
sophical aspects is probably the German epistemologist E.
Cassirer.1 His reception of it is like a cry of joy approaching,
at times, an "I told you so," in which the "I" stands for heavenborn Philosophy and not for his own person. Just as Kant
found valuable data in the constant progress of science due to
Galileo and to Newton, so, Cassirer claims, the modern meta
physician finds in relativity a new lease of life for his own
a priori concept of the universe. Behind all the marvelous revela
tions of contemporary science lies the even greater miracle of
mind that conceived it. In short, at bottom, the laws of science
are but the laws of epistemology.
To grasp this truth we must begin by imagining a world in
which as far as possible the anthropomorphic is excluded; a
world in which there is neither passion nor sensationno sight,
taste, smell, touch, hearing, love, nor hatred. For the moment
it seems as if nothing were left; as if we were in the position
of Alice in Wonderland when Tweedledum told her she was a
thing in the Red King's dream and that when he woke up she
would go out bang like a candle. But, says Cassirer, this is not
so; deducting all that we have deducted there would still be left
a purely mathematical world in which the inhabitants would be
figures, numbers, forces, masses, and movements. As far as
thought goes, we are living in a gigantic equation; one com
pared to which Einstein's differential of ten terms is child's
play. This world is never quite reached; for we cannot jump
out of our skins or eventhough some thinkers pretty nearly
succeedout of our heads. Physics, chemistry, and the rest
of the sciences are always changing the qualities of felt and
seen and heard nature into quantities; the empirically known
existence into an exactly measured symbol. Thus much had
always been evident to the philosopher; but it was only borne
in on the scientist by the apparent failure of some natural
forces to come into the universal mechanism. From purely
physical grounds, based on the electrodynamic and optical
phenomena discovered by Faraday and Maxwell, the scientist
had felt the strong pressure of thought to turn him from the
study of objects to the study of principles, i.e., of mathematics.
But, according to Cassirer, he might have learned all this at
the very first had he heeded the warning voice of the phi
losopher. When Newton propounded his law of gravitation he
assumed that absolute time and space were physical concepts,
whereas, in reality, they were psychological concepts in which
certain undemonstrated theories had unnoticed been mixed.
Though the physicist found that he could, in practice, measure
1 "Zur Einsteinschen RelativitStstheorie" (1920: Berlin: Bruno Cassirer)
nnd Philosophische Probleme der Relativitatsthcorie, in Neue Rundschau,
December, 1920.
[Vol. 112, No. 2913
time and space only by an arbitrary, given standard, yet the

standard he grasped seemed so natural that it was swallowed
whole by the scientists who asked no questions of the premises
which came to them laden with such valuable goodshitherto
lost, strayed, or stolen.
But the philosophers were not so simple-minded. Leibnitz
promptly asked Newton to show him where he got the absolute
time and space, as well as the "action at a distance" that he was
spending so freely on his pet laws. When Newton replied, Leib
nitz rejoined, completely demolishing the three fundamental
axioms, or assumptions, on which Newton's laws rested. The
great scientist, however, loved the laws so much, and found that
they did such excellent practical work in moving the planets
around just as they ought to go, that he continued to "get them
up regardless" of what an impertinent philosopher might say.
But worse was yet to come. If Newton's three assumptions
were killed by the cheerful Leibnitz, they were solemnly buried
with decent rites by Bishop Berkeley, who showed that we could
know no real absolute at all, not even absolute existence, but
could only deal with the relations of phenomena. "There is no
matter," shouted Berkeley. "No matter" echoed the dauntless
threeAbsolute Space, Absolute Time, and Action-at-a-Distanceand went on working. But though they seemed to have
as many lives as cats, the philosophers continued to belabor
them. Kant, starting as Newton's disciple, soon criticized his
concepts of Time and Space, endeavoring to show that they
were forms of thought, not things; that is, that they were
relations without objective reality. But they kept turning up,
as poor relations will, until Einstein and his fellows were forced
to drop them even as working hypotheses in stating some of
their formulas. The old problem of Achilles and the tortoise
was perhaps the first battle between the scientist and meta
physician; the final surrender of the empiricist came when in
1905 Einstein published his "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter
Korper." He found that the only satisfactory description of
the conservation of energy was reached when time and space
were disregarded. Stating that a moving body never changes
speed or direction except under influence from other bodies sim
ply means that it always keeps still in reference to itself. All
efforts to find any standard of motion, especially the effort to
make ether that standard, have disastrously failed. Thus it is
that Einstein has at last reconciled physics and metaphysics.
But in doing so he has not destroyed philosophy, but built it up,
for relativism leads to no solipsism, but to a new concept of
valid reality. All problems of nature, said Goethe, are conflicts
between perception and the power of thought. But now the
very science that deals with things as perceived has been forced
to flee to pure reason. The validity of the processes of thought
has been demonstrated anew.
So much for Cassirer. Two English philosophers, H. Wildon
Carr' and A. S. Eddington,* have been moved to somewhat sim
ilar reflections. Carr again emphasizes the fact that Einstein
leads back to, or is derived from, Leibnitz's "monad-world," in
that he is forced to assume that space is not an actuality but
merely a mode of arranging perceptions. Eddington tries to
conciliate scientists suspicious of theories of time and space by
showing that these are physical as well as logical concepts.
Relativity, according to him, is no more metaphysical than the
atomic theory. But whether metaphysical or not it must be
reckoned with by scientists. Take, for example, the treatment
of light. A certain wave-length appears green; if we travel
rapidly toward the source of light it turns blue, if away from
it orange, and this illusion (if it be one) is shared by spectro
scope, photo-electric cell, chlorophyl of plants, and everything
that can be brought into any relation with the light at all. So
it is with time, mass, force, energy, and all the other phenomena
dealt with by physics: they vary according to the standpoint
1 "The General Principle of Relativity in its Philosophical and Historical
Aspect" (1920: Macmillan).
'"Space, Time, and Gravitation" (1920: Cambridge University) and The
Philosophical Aspect of Relativity, Mind, New Series, vol. 116 (1920).
May 4, 1921]
The Nation
of the observer; and this is obviously the essence of relativity.

But though these laws are even more important to the experi
menter than to the abstract thinker, they are, nevertheless,
essentially laws of the mind. Many things, says Eddington,
that we assume to be laws of matter are not objective but are
automatically imposed on the mind in selecting what it con
siders substance. As an illustration of what he means he
imagines a book-keeper who had no knowledge of the actual life
of the institution for which he kept accounts, but whose experi
ence was confined to the figures on the ledger before him.
Would he not soon "discover" and hail as the law of the uni
verse the observed fact that the credit and debit accounts always
balanced? He would really know nothing about the life of the
institution, not even about its financial condition, for it might
be prospering or tottering to ruin; in either case the books
would, from the nature of double-entry bookkeeping, balance.
W. D. Ross attacks relativity with the assertion that the pos
tulates of absolute time and space are not merely prejudices of
common sense, but are notions underlying all our thinking, and
notably Einstein's. We could not conceive, he says, of relative
space or time, did we not have an idea of absolute space and
time. The word "relativity" itself has no meaning except as a
contrast to "the absolute." Whether this is so or not, Mr. Ross
is weak in answering the physical arguments as to the absence
of observed motion as tested by the assumed ether. He explains
it by saying that perhaps our earth is really at rest in the ether
and that the sun, planets, and fixed stars all circulate around it.
This, however, would put our earth in such a strangely unique
position, and would cause so great a strain on our imagina
tions, that it cannot be accepted. The calculus of probability ia
weighted, almost infinitely, against it.*
F. A. Lindemann, while accepting relativity, seems to come
perilously near the old absolute when he draws a distinction
between convenient assumptions and true assumptions. It is a
true assumption, he says, that the earth is round; a convenient
assumption that it is crossed by lines of latitude and longitude.
Einstein, he adds, has shown that time and space belong to the
convenient, not to the true, category; that is, that they are co
ordinates personal to the observer.
Has it ever been noticed that relativity is a kind of prag
matism of science? Though not so stated, this idea is borne in
on the reader of W. C. S. Schiller's recent discussion of The
Meaning of Meaning. When we ask what is the meaning of a
thing, what do we want to know about it? Really, we want to
translate it into terms clearer to us, or referring to a more vital
interest. Both these requirements are met by bringing the
thing into some more personal relation with ourselves. As Pro
fessor Schiller puts it, in one of the most illuminating of sen
tences penned since death claimed his master, William James,
"What if Meaning be neither an inherent property of objects
nor a static 'relation' between objects at all, not even between
the object and a subject, but essentially an activity or attitude
taken up towards objects by a subject and energetically pro
jected into them like o-particles until they, too, grow active and
begin to radiate with meaning?"
Preserved Smith
Books in Brief
CERTAIN trite theological dogmas remind one of the oyster
in George Ade's fable, which made an honest but strenuous
living by going from one church fare to another to form, in
each, the basis for oyster soup. Were John W. Graham's "The
Faith of a Quaker" (Cambridge) merely another decoction of
the already well-cooked articles of faith, it might seem lacking
in strength and flavor. But, in fact, the author has mingled so
much sound and sweet sense with the old materials that he has
produced a book inspiring and well worth reading not only by
Quakers but by all Christians. The doctrine he presents in the
4 This, as well as the two articles next quoted, are in Mind, 1920.
671
first chapters he compares to that of Mr. Wells's "God the

Invisible King," though he had written it before the war had
produced that book. In Quakerism he sees the. final step in the
liberation of religion effected by the Reformation, the mystical
wing of Puritanism. The fundamentals of the faith he finds
not in the external ordinances, some of which, such as the rule
against intermarriage of Quakers with others, he deplores, but
in the cultivation of the inner light. After the dogmatic sec
tion comes an historical sketch of the founders, George Fox,
Isaac Pennington, William Penn, and Barclay, whose "Apology"
John Wesley called "that solemn trifle." Some sound economic
ideas are found in Penn's writings, for he was one of the first to
distinguish economically wasteful and economically remunera
tive expenditure. Mr. Graham concludes with some fine obser
vations on social service and on war. To the eternal honor of
the Friends be it said that they alone, of all Christian bodies,
upheld the ideal of Christ in the Great War, and that they have
done the most, in labors of love to our late enemies, to heal the
wounds caused by that disastrous conflict.
/CONSIDERING the nature and scantiness of the evidence,
Professor Ivan M. Linforth's "Solon the Athenian" sur
prisingly and gratifyingly succeeds in the visualization of the
individual, statesman, and poet Solon. We leave these pages
with the hitherto remote and unreal figure of the Athenian law
giver brought near and humanized, feeling that "we need not
despair of knowing Solon in some sort even as he was"; and
that his was "a noble career which is clear at least in its main
outlines, and a personality of sterling worth ... a highminded, loyal, and unselfish supporter of the principle of polit
ical and economic freedom; ... a frank, sincere, and unaf
fected artist, who instead of being a slave to his technique
wielded it with supple dexterity." Mr. Linforth's book is severe
in method and conclusion, the performance of a scholar. We
note only that it was hardly the valley of the Peneus which was
commanded by Crisa, that fragment XLIII is not given space
in the translation. But Mr. Linforth's book is also a humanistic
performance of the first order. The biographical essay is
attractive in style as well as interesting in substance; the worst
that could be said of it is that it betrays a slight tendency to
diffuseness. Of the rendering of the fragments into English,
one can speak only with enthusiasm.
" A HISTORY of the Art of Writing" by William A. Mason
** (Macmillan) is a popular account of man's most re
markable invention, the alphabet. With handsome illustrations
and an exclamatory style the author traces the development of
the mechanics of writing through the three important stages of
pictograph, hieroglyph, and alphabet. His chapters on iconographs and ideographs among the North American Indians, the
ancient Mexicans, the South Sea Islanders, the Chinese, the
Egyptians, the Babylonians and Assyrians, and the Hittites
are admirable for their purpose, which is romantic, while his
handling of the Phoenician-Greek-Roman alphabet is satisfac
tory and clear. Mr. Mason is not always accurate. "The skalds
of Scandinavia," for instance (p. 20), were poets, not poems,
and it is not true that inflections and conjugations come into a
language late (p. 57).
MR. JOHN M. BERDAN has written a quarter of a million
words on "Early Tudor Poetry: 1485-1547" (Macmillan).
A zealous believer in the value of the historical approach to
poetry, he has selected these sixty years as his field not because
they produced good poetry but because they did not. For only
among a tentative and abortive generation of writers, he says,
can clearly be seen "the working of literary law"which fact,
one might observe, rather damages the case for the study of
literary law. With apparently unlimited space at his disposal,
Mr. Berdan has been able to quote at length from both the
poets and the prose writers of his period, and he unquestionably
has gathered a remarkable store of information. As an inter
The Nation
672
preter of all this, however, he is prosaic and literal, and fails

to establish the connections which happen to be most highly
desired. In the chapter called Humanism, for instance, he has
ably blocked in the philosophical background represented by
More and Erasmus, and he has methodically described the poeti
cal reflection of those men's light and learning which was
Tottel's "Miscellany," but he has not employed imagination in
making the influence of the one force upon the other interesting.
The remaining five chapters, on The Background to the Litera
ture, The Medieval Tradition, The Scholastic Tradition, The
Influence of Contemporary Literatures, and Henry Howard, Earl
of Surrey, are copious monographs not without considerable
value for historians of literary law.
Drama
"Clair de Lune"
THIS moonlight is not the hard, sensuous radiance of Mau
passant, nor is it, for all Michael Strange has borrowed
incidents and names from "L'Homme qui rit" for her play
(Empire Theater), the greenish romantic glare of Victor Hugo.
It is the clair de lune of Verlaine, mild and mysterious over a
land of sensitive and stricken souls
un paysage choisi
Que vont charmant masques et bergamasques
Jouant du luth et dansant et quasi
Tristes sous leur deguisements fantasques.
It is that country of Pierrot lunaire into which the modern soul
withdraws to speak shyly of its hidden maladies. To its making
in the mind has gone the Watteau landscape of Pater where "the
secular oaks will hardly outlast another generation," and the
weary witticisms of Oscar Wilde, and an evocation of the
rococo so strangely different from the thing itself. Perhaps
Michael Strange has been reading not only Verlaine but has
turned once more the pages of the Yellow Book and lingered
over drawings by Aubrey Beardsley and faint, passionate, disil
lusioned verses by Arthur Symons and even remembered certain
tales and illustrations of Howard Pyle. All these memories
belong to the now remote nineties of the last century. But
the imaginative convention that arises from them, though it
is fragile, is not wilted. The "calm, sad, beautiful moonlight"
still "makes the birds in the trees to dream"
Et sangloter d'extase les jets d'eau,
Les grands jets d'eau sveltes parmi les marbres.
If only Michael Strange's sense of style served her more
steadily! There are bits of speech that tingle both in the heart
and in the nerves; there are rich, strange images worthy of
Yeats or Hofmannsthal ; there are long stretches of sentimental
and banal words. But the dialogue is here, in fact, only a
part of the deliberate enchantment, even as the fable, absurd,
grotesque but acceptable since it never competes with the real,
is only a vehicle for the minor-keyed and lyrical passions of
those who do not believe in happiness and are too sensitive for
the sun. The queen is a lonely queen. The imperfections of
humanity chill her at every passionate moment; the duchess
wants to wound herself upon the thorns of life and is flung
back upon a useless loveliness; the mountebankhimself but a
symbol of the ache of the divided soulleaps into the dark
waters. He has not been true to himself. Had he a self to
which he could be true? A disfigured face and a poet's mad,
hurt soul. What could he do with the sharp intricacy of life?
Dialogue and fable blend with the scenes, those of the first
two acts being after designs by John Barrymore. And these
scenes are altogether magical. The masque in the queen's
garden, the booth and the performance of the mountebanks
the shape and color and rhythms of these haunt one's dreams.
The loveliness is morbid. But it has more active emotional
atmosphere than anything else of its kind seen on our stage.
Here the art of the theater does indeed rise into something
[Vol. 112, No. 2913
like independence. For the scenic detailsthe dancing Indian

slave, the masked mountebank, the eerie dwarfs, the cool for
mal gardens in the backgroundthe queen who need not have
spoken to tell us that she wanted no more memoriesall have
their own high emotional expressiveness and a value both in
themselves and as elements in a composition. And when in the
second act the duchess opens the door of her chamber and
shows the terrace, the stars, the perfect fountain, we are aware
without words of beauty that cloys, magic too steady not to
weary the soul, and we feel all her yearning for harsh, bitter,
unfamiliar things.
The play was undoubtedly written because John Barrymore
saw himself as Gwymplane or, rather, saw Gwymplane in him
self even as he has seen Falder and Gianino and Fedya and
Richard III and, on a more obvious plane of symbolism, Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Will he go on to Triboulet in "Le Roi
s'amuse" and Hauptmann's leper prince in "Henry of Aue"?
His work is lyrical first and representative only as by an
afterthought. It is, like the novels and plays of the romantics,
one long confession, one long cry of the heart He rebels
against the apparent dualism in the nature of man. He sees
no harmony, serenity, synthesis, repose. The arrow of mor
tality is in his flesh. He pushes it deeper and deeper and bleeds
in public to deaden the throb and hurt. The question whether
he is a great actor is flat and uninteresting beside the spectacle
of his personal genius, poetry, and pain. By his designs for the
settings and costumes of this production he places himself in
the front rank of our scenic artists. But he does not find calm
in craftsmanship. The scenes, despite their restraint of color
and simplicity of line, project an inner desolation and need.
Miss Ethel Barrymore is full of mellow gTaciousness in the
part of the queen. There is a pathetic catch in her voice, a sud
den half breaking of the voice followed by a smile that depre
cates its own pain. Pictorially she is magnificentsplendid as
alabaster, a passionate woman banished to the isolation of
majesty. Miss Violet Kemble Cooper as the duchess has the
central scene of the play. She carries it off brilliantly if with
a little inner uncertainty of herself. Herbert Grimwood em
bodies with malign and stealthy grace the forces that will
some day arise and dance the carmagnole through the alleys
of these melancholy gardens.
We do not forget that the play has obvious imperfections
and crudities. Yet what a profoundly civilized thing it is in
temper, intention, literary and spiritual background, and with
what memorable charm it is set forth! The reviewers, how
ever, who were on their knees before Miss Barrymore in the
cheap claptrap of "Declassee" and admired John Barrymore
in "Peter Ibbetson," were cool, irritable, facetious. Perhaps
their souls have never been on the edge of dark waters, beauty
has never been a wound to them, the murmur of Verlaine's
"Clair de Lune" has never sounded in their ears.
Ludwig Lewisohn
Herald Square
tjfrux
New York
Maintains the
largest
and
most complete
Book Depart
ment in New
Y ork City.
Copyright. 1931, R. H. Mncy A Co.. Inc.
International
Economic
Effects of the
Relations
Paris
Resolutions
ON March 1, Dr. Simons handed to the Allied Conference
the following official memorial of the German Expert
Commission composed of thirty-three prominent German
financiers, economists, and industrialists. The memorial
sets forth financial and economic arguments against com
pliance with the Paris program, but offers no alternative
proposal.
Pursuant to the Paris resolutions the following demands are
made by the Allies irrespective of the restitutions Germany is
to make under Article 238 and of any other obligations under
the treaty:
1. Within 42 years Germany is to pay 226 milliards of gold
marks, viz., in
192122
2 milliards of gold marks annually
192325
3
"
" "
192628
4
"
" "
192931
5
"
" "
193262
6
"
" "
2. For 42 years Germany is to pay 12 per cent ad valorem
of her exports in gold.
3. Germany is not to undertake any credit operation outside
her own territory without the approval of the Reparation Com
mission.
4. In the case of non-fulfilment of the obligations stated
under 1 and 2 the Reparation Commission reserves the right
to attach the proceeds of the German customs and to take such
other measures as it may deem appropriate.
An annuity of 6 milliards of gold marks would impose upon
the German population an annual per capita charge of 100
gold marks or 1,000 paper marks. According to the statement
prepared by the Allies' experts, the tax charges in Germany
today amount to 699 paper marks as against 390 paper francs
in France. An annuity of 6 milliards would increase these
taxes to 1,599 paper marks even if no further charges are
added. It is of importance, in this connection, not to lose sight
of the fact that the most capable tax-payers' capacity has been
quite materially impaired by the well-known taxes on capital
(war profit-tax, emergency war-tax [Reichsnotopfer]).
The Bureau of the League of Nations estimates the average
income in Germany at about 3,900 marks paper, as against
about 3,200 francs in France. An additional charge of 1,000
marks paper would raise the proportion of charges in Ger
many to 41 per cent of the average income, as against 12.2
per cent in France, without taking into account the additional
12 per cent of the exports, but considering only the annuity.
The balance remaining for living expenses would therefore be
about 2,300 marks paper annually in Germany, 2,810 francs,
i. e., about 11,800 marks paper in France.
Payments from country to country can be made: (1) by
transfer of currency; (2) by transfer of credits, securities, and
property; (3) by service and labor for foreign nations; (4) by
loans; (5) by exports of merchandise.
1. Payment by transfer of German currency. So far as
Germany is concerned, this mode of payment is eliminated by
the fact that the creditor nations would be unable to utilize
German currency to the extent required, and that, moreover,
the German currency, if so used, would keep depreciating
through continued inflation. The larger the amounts paid in
German currency the smaller would be the value of such pay
ments.
2. The continued transfer of securities and property rights
would result in the gradual transfer to Germany's creditors of
Section
all her means of production. In that case, however, these

creditors would receive their income in German currency only;
and more harm would be done because the energies of German
labor employed for foreign interests are bound to slacken.
3. Germany is practically prevented from rendering services
and doing work for the benefit of foreign nations, because, on
the one hand, she is deprived of the means of such services
(especially ships), and, on the other hand, she cannot send her
workmen abroad to do work against the wishes of her creditors.
4. Foreign credits, now even more difficult to secure owing
to the Paris resolutions, require a permanent debt service,
which again leads to the problem of payments from one country
to the other, and therefore results only in deferring and increas
ing these payments. Anyway, no success would attend the
endeavor to obtain regular credits of the required size either
from private individuals or from foreign governments.
5. There remains the export of goods as a means of payment.
Excluded are, however, raw materials and goods indispensable
for consumption at home, and also the means and tools of pro
duction, which have been created in the course of many years,
and have already been largely reduced in number through the
great clearing sale. The export of the former would result in
unemployment and famine. Therefore, nothing but surplus
production must be exported, i. e., the excess of production over
irreducible inland consumption. Such payments as are now
demanded can only be made after imports have been paid for
from the surplus of a national household most carefully econo
mizing in the matter of home consumption.
In view of the results of the first 6 months of the year 1920
the excess of imports for the whole year will have to be esti
mated at a minimum of 2.5 milliards gold marks.
The exchange balance is even more unfavorable, because it
includes payments for interest and principal of debts contracted
abroad, liabilities under the international clearing, all other
payments to the Allies, and interest on foreign capital invested
in Germany. The total of these regular annual payments
exclusive of those for reparation is estimated at 1.6 milliards.
To cover these amounts Germany will therefore have to transfer
abroad 5 milliards gold marks annually at least.
Prior to any reparation, Germany will therefore first have
to square her trade balance of 2.5 milliards gold marks; in
addition she will then have to provide an excess of exports of
1.5 milliards gold marks, if an equilibrium is to be restored.
The demands of the Allies are based on a balance of trade with
an increasing annual surplus of from 2 to 6 milliards gold
marks. The 12 per cent ad valorem involving an additional
increasing charge of milliards in the course of time will further
swell these figures.
Germany can improve her balance of trade by restricting
imports. A most economic mode of living being prerequisite
to the payment of reparations, the consumption of foreign lux
uries, especially, can and must be restricted. In this way it
may be possible to save a little over .75 milliards gold marks.
It should be borne in mind, however, that as a consequence
Germany would lose important sources of revenue, in fact the
very sources the development of which has been repeatedly
urged by the Allies' experts. Moreover, the interest of the
Allied and neutral countries would be severely affected by such
restrictions. If spirits, tropical fruits, flowers, coffee, tobacco,
tea, and the like were to be excluded from German imports, then
the countries dependent upon the exportation of such goods
would have to suffer particularly, and their purchasing power
would be weakened.
Should Germany decide to go a step further, and exclude
manufactured goods also, as far as possible under the Treaty
of Versailles, then the opposition of the exporting countries,
just beginning to be felt now, would become irresistible.
But the worst of it is that the purchasing power of the
The Nation
world, severely affected as it is even at this time, would then
be still further reduced.
It is impossible to effect any saving on food-stuffs. Even
before the war the food situation in Germany required a con
siderable supply of foreign produce to cover the domestic
deficiency. Since that time the German farmers have been
forced to produce at the cost of a severe deterioration of their
soil, buildings, and machinery, so that their productive capacity
is now very much reduced. At the present time, after separa
tion from the eastern and western provinces (Posnania, West
ern Prussia, Schleswig, Alsace-Lorraine) with a surplus produc
tion, Germany cannot produce more than 42 per cent of her
normal requirements. In order to restore the normal pre-war
standard of nourishment of the population, it will be necessary
to import 11 milliards gold marks' worth of food, feed, and fer
tilizers. Under such conditions, of course, no surplus of goods
for exportation could be produced. For a long time to come it
will therefore not be possible to relieve the food restrictions to
which the German people have been subjected for some years
past, and which are menacing the very existence, both of the
present and future generations in Germany, unless a way
could be found to curb the prevailing and regrettable ten
dency of changing from intensive to extensive method of agri
culture.
It is likewise impossible to economize in industrial products
for inland consumption, as all machinery is worn out by over
work and urgently needs replacing and improvements. On
the other hand, the inland consumption of the goods most
urgently needed for clothing and equipment is reduced to the
utmost. Fundamental renewal of implements and clothing
material is an unavoidable necessity if merely for sanitary
reasons.
The following statement shows the decline of per capita con
sumption by the German population of food and staple goods.
1913
1920
Meat
52
about 20
Flour
125
83
Sugar
19.2
14.1
Cotton
7.2
2.3
Wool
2.2
1.0
Hard coal
2,370
1,770
Iron
253
100
The balance of trade can therefore be but moderately im
proved by savings and restriction of imports; the only way to
secure a larger measure of improvement is by increasing pro
duction and exports.
Agricultural production can be increased only very slowly,
making it impossible to expect any material reduction of im
port requirements for the next few years. For the present,
then, no excess exports can be supplied except by the German
industries.
The German industries and the German export business have
always been dependent on the importation of foreign raw
materials. By the loss of territories this necessity will be
further increased.
German experts estimate that about 60 per cent of any future
increase of production should be set aside for imports, for
enlargements of plant and facilities, and for feeding and sus
taining additional labor required, leaving but 40 per cent from
which to create an excess of exports. Other German experts
arrive at much higher figures than 60 per cent.
In order to cover, from available surplus of exports, both
the deficit of 4 milliards and the annuity of 6 milliards, the
present export of 5 milliards would have to be raised by 25
milliards to about 30 milliards gold marks. The 12 per cent
ad valorem of exports would necessitate a further increase of
the excess of production by about 3.5 milliards. Total exports
then would have to be raised by another 10 milliards, viz., to the
dizzy height of 40 milliards gold marks. These performances
are expected of an economic system intensely weakened by a
disastrous and devastating war and the transfer abroad of 20
[Vol. 112, No. 2913
milliards gold marks' worth of property and productive capital

German exports of 40 milliards gold marks would, however,
be about twice the total exports of England in 1920 (i. e., 1,335.6
million pounds, equal to, say, 19 milliards gold marks in round
figures, calculating the pound sterling at 15 gold marks). Such
German figures would materially exceed even the United States
of America's quite abnormally high export figures of 1920
(8,228 million dollars, or, say, 34.5 milliards gold marks).
Largely consisting of manufactured goods, they would exceed
the combined total exportation of manufactured goods by Amer
ica and England.
Upon such figures only can the demands of the Allies be
based. If they became realities, they would create conditions
both in Germany and in the rest of the world, which cannot be
even approximately appreciated.
Such an enormous increase of Germany's production for ex
port would logically lead to a rapid rise of the prices of raw
materials in the world's markets. Even today Germany's own
means are insufficient to finance her imports. She would cer
tainly be unable to increase these imports of raw materials to
the enormous extent required, without calling on the interna
tional money markets, and the size of her requirements would
be such that to satisfy them she would want all the credit
available. There is no doubt that all other producing countries
would keenly oppose such a concentration of raw materials,
credits, and distributable goods.
For the treatment of raw materials a sufficient capacity of
Germany's industries, a sufficient number of operatives, and a
sufficiency of financial means are required. On the basis of
the prices of 1913 the productive capacity of the German
industries amounts to a little over 14 milliards gold marks
tojlay. Compared with the actual production of 1913 this figure
shows a decrease of 11 per cent due to the loss of German terri
tories and to insufficient provision for maintenance of plant.
The German industry therefore would have to be placed on a
broader and more modern basis.
Of the pre-war production about 8 milliards were sent
abroad, and about the same amount, besides a large quantity
of imported manufactured goods, was consumed at home.
Supposing that our present industrial capacity for export is
6 or even 8 milliards, it is easy to understand to what an extent
our existing plant would have to be enlarged in order to pro
duce export goods of the value of 40 milliards. It would obvi
ously take a long time to attain such capacity. However, con
sidering the extremely high cost of construction at present
prices, the erection of new plants could in most cases not even
be expected to yield a profit on the investment. No one would
be prepared to build new factories of any size or enlarge exist
ing ones. At all events, in order to increase productive capacity
to the necessary extent, additional material, labor, and capital
would first have to be sunk into the new enterprise for many
years.
The Paris demands cannot be fulfilled, unless the supply of
human labor is increased to an extent which can only be realized
in decades. Increased numbers of laborers again involve in
creased consumption.
For the present, however, an alarming decline in efficiency
as well as in numbers has taken place. The measure of work
done by the underfed operatives has gone down.
Barring insignificant exceptions, the numerous foreign work
men, formerly employed by Germany, are no longer at her dis
posal, owing to the change of political conditions of the neigh
boring countries and to the present economical conditions in
Germany. Germany's industries alone have lost approximately
half a million of such men.
An extension of working hours therefore remains as a last
resort. By international agreement the world's working day
has been reduced to eight hours. In order to accomplish what
is demanded of Germany the working hours of the German
operative would have to be raised from eight to fourteen hours.
But even then it would still be indispensable that, besides, all
May 4, 1921]
The Nation
preliminary conditions as to capacity of plant, raw materials,

markets, and capital were also fulfilled, and that the present
efficiency of labor and technics [sic] could be maintained. Even
in the early period of Europe's industrialization, which dealt
rather harshly with human labor, such achievements would
have been looked upon as unbearable and impractical. No
country can demand such inhuman performance from the
majority of its own people. It can never have been the Allies'
intent to force Germany to make such demands, in violation of
both the spirit and the text of Part XIII of the Treaty of Ver
sailles. High class special work is called for both by the organ
ization of Germany's industries and by the necessity of in
creasing her output. Such special work can only be performed
by healthy people, happy and willing to work, not by underfed
slaves devoid of all hope. The introduction of such working
conditions in any country of the world, not to speak of Ger
many, would mean a dangerous step backward in civilization,
involving incalculable consequences for the population of the
whole world.
Moreover, no fundamental change in this respect could be
brought about anywhere, without the consent of the labor
organizations of all civilized countries, having regard to the
interdependence of working conditions in the various countries.
In order to force up Germany's output to the tremendous
figures required, capital would be necessary to an extent which,
at the present juncture, neither Germany herself nor the whole
world could supply.
No issue of notes, however inflated, can produce real capital.
Simultaneously with the crisis of consumption a crisis of capital
is spreading over the whole world, the effects of which we, too,
are beginning to feel.
Should our creditors, however, undertake to place the neces
sary capital at Germany's disposal during the next few years,
then these annual payments would more than counterbalance
all reparation demands.
Should it be possible to produce 40 milliards of German
goods and to dump them on the markets of the world, which
would be necessary in order to comply with the Paris resolu
tions, the result would be a complete change of the mercantile
and industrial aspect of the world.
Germany would become the central workshop of the world;
although operating under depressing conditions and at famine
wages, her central shop would stretch out its tentacles to all
markets of the world, aided by the boundless passion and
tenacity of a people fighting for life and the whole force of its
concentrated productive machinery.
The world market is smaller than is generally assumed. The
combined export figures of all civilized nations do not amount
to as much as 100 milliards gold marks. In the past Ger
many has supplied one-tenth of this total; according to the
Allied scheme, she would be compelled to increase her share to
40 per cent and to oust a corresponding proportion of competi
tors' goods.
This could be done only against the powerful opposition of all
nations concerned, and it would result in a general lowering of
the prices of all goods to an extent rendering production un
profitable in all other countries. Whatever the market position,
Germany would be forced to undersell her competitors; if she
did not do so of her own accord, her currency would continue
depreciating until the requisite quantity of goods is automatic
ally forced out of the country and sold in the world's markets.
Germany does not wish to disturb the markets of the world
by dumping. But forced exports result in dumping, and she is
to be forced to export to an extent hitherto unknown. No
human will-power can avail to suppress such exports sustained
by a depreciating currency. Both industrial countries and
nations exporting raw materials would take a stand against
such dumping. The latter would be in a position to thwart
the whole plan by refusing to supply Germany with the neces
sary raw materials or by supplying them only on conditions
degrading to the existence of the German laborer.
675
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cA Story No One Else

Dared to Tell
DUST is a story hundreds of married men and
women will recognize. And yet no one has ever
told it before. No other American has ever had
the courage. It is too starktoo ruthlesstoo
mercilessly shorn of sentimentality.
No one person could have told it! Only a man
and a woman together could have probed so deep into
life and seen it so completely.
Mr. and Mrs. E. Haldeman-Julius have the gift
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The Nation
676
Germany's export would have to consist principally of fin

ished products; only in that shape could she furnish such con
centrated values as are required by both her productive organi
zation and the magnitude of the demands imposed upon her.
The market of finished goods, however, is more sensitive than
any other market. The struggles going on here are the more
violent, because the chief nations are loaded down with debts
and because they are all anxious to transfer their internal
indebtedness to the world's markets.
Even at this time there are numerous products for the con
sumption of the world in which the German export is absolutely
preponderating, so as to render any further increase of Ger
many's share altogether impossible without destroying all for
eign competition. Cutlery, toys, ordinary chinaware, chemicals,
and dyes are among these products.
The crisis of consumption is not only caused by the dropping
out of a large number of consuming territories involving a
population of about 200 millions, but also by the weakening of
the consuming classes even within the wealthiest nations. The
purchasing power as a whole has shrunk to a level far below
that of the end of last century. The tendency to save is in
evidence everywhere; it is accompanied by a diminished ability
to absorb products together with increased efforts to export. If
these universal efforts to export goods meet in every corner of
the world with the flood of German goods perforce seeking buy
ers, an embittennent in commercial intercourse must result,
surpassing all struggles of competition in the past.
Thus, the impossibility of Germany's attaining export figures
of 40 milliards becomes evident; the impossibility, in the exist
ing economical state of the world, of making transfers of the
magnitude required under the Paris proposals is a logical con
clusion.
Reparation cannot be the problem of an individual economic
system; it is the first problem of a system of a world economy
to be newly created.
Germany is resolved to go to the limit of her capacity, in
order to shoulder within that universal system the heaviest
part of the burden, as she is bound to do. But freedom in her
economical movements is an indispensable condition for the exe
cution of her task. . . .
Eduard Arnhold
Peter Klockner
Edler von Braun
Heinrich Loffler
Hermann Dietrich
Dr. Carl Melchior
Dr. Otto Frentzel
Hermann Silberschmidt
Dr. Georg Heim
Franz Urbig
Dr. Maximilian Kempner
Dr. Otto Wiedfeldt
Hans Kraemer
Dr. M. J. Bonn
Dr. Wilhelm von Meinel
Friedrich Derlien
Dr. Walter Rathenau
Anton Erkelenz
Hugo Stinnes
Rudolf Havenstein
Franz Wieber
Otto Keinath
Friedrich Baltrusch
Eugene Kongeter
Dr. Wilhelm Cuno
Georg Lubsen
Dr. Carl Duisberg
Dr. August Muller
Carl Hansen
Dr. Emil Georg v. Stauss
Ewald Hilger
Albert Vogler
Rudolf Wissell
Woman Suffrage in Mexico

THE following project for giving Mexican women the
right to vote by expanding Articles 35 and 36 of the
Federal Constitution was read in the Chamber of Deputies
on December 24, 1920. The argument introducing the de
cree gives some notion of the present Mexican attitude
toward women.
. . . It is up to the Socialist Party of Yucatan, which
has freed the Indian and improved the condition of the worker,
to liberate woman, who is more slave than the Indian, and to
[Vol. 112, No. 2913
improve her condition, which is more wretched and miserable

than that of the worker.
Married or unmarried, prostitute or respectable, the woman
of today lives a parasitic life at the expense of man. The
liberation of the woman of the future must begin by her eco
nomic liberation; she is beginning to compete with man in all
spheres of activity; but this liberation must be completed, and
all her rights, social as well as political, must be recognized.
Legalized prostitution is the greatest shame of modern so
ciety. The official prostitute is exploited by the keeper, by the
man of her own type, by the doctor, and by the government.
It does not seem possible that her exploitation should be the
means of existence of so many people. Woman has just as
much a right to free love and to experiment in search of her
happiness as man. . . .
It would be difficult to find a more painful lot than that of
the woman of the present day. Her fate vacillates between
two torments: if she is poorwork, work of the heaviest
kind, with all manner of suffering; degradation and vice, pub
lic shame, accepted and legalized, because it suits man's vices;
if she is richjail, the jail of her own home, where her honor
is guarded as if she were a bird which father and husband
must cage up jealously, at the same time permitting themselves
all kinds of freedom and indulgences.
A woman is not free until she is independent of man for
her maintenance. Only when she has attained this freedom,
will she be able to love, and be loved for love itself.
Man, in his mentally deranged egoism, has crippled the
ideal by clipping its wings. . . .
"Woman, I claim you!"
Why have we come to this assembly if not to rectify the
errors of past generations?
Let us put behind us the romantic politics of yesterday, the
great wrong we have done by chaining up the womanhood of
Mexico; and conscious of our duty, of our social mission, let
us throw open to woman the gates of her economic, social, and
political freedom; so that tomorrow, perhaps today, like Cor
nelia, mother of the Roman Gracchi, she can offer the country
her potent strength, to show to everyone the path of justice
and the way of duty.
Let us grant to woman the political right demanded by her
life and interests, so that we may in justice speak to the child
of civic rights and duties.
Let us not forget that the language and traditions of the
home, including religious ideas, which have done so much harm
to humanity, are instilled into the child by its mother, because
she, like the Vestal Virgins, tends the fire of the domestic
hearth in her suffering.
Civic education of mothers is today unknown in Mexico.
It must be realized at all cost.
We have heroic mothers who weep at the tombs of their sons
who have died for their duty, but we have not yet civic mothers
who are the champions of the country and the educated and
wise counselors of future generations.
If we want civic mothers, we can have them only by insuring
the right of every Mexican, especially the woman in the home,
to liberty and justice, granting to women active and passive
rights in all public offices, in order not to interfere in any
way with the restoration of liberty in a nation where un
fortunately 80 per cent of the people are illiterate.
For the reasons given above, we propose to your sovereign
consideration the following:
Decree
Article 1. To Arts. 35 and 36 of the General Constitution
of the Republic shall be added: The prerogatives acquired by
all sections of Art. 35 and the obligations contained in Art. 36
shall include also Mexican married women of 18 years, and
unmarried women of 21 years.
Signed by the Congressional Representatives,
Felipe and Benjamin Carrillo Puerto, Manuel Berzunza,
and Edmundo G. Canton.
The Nation
FOUNDED 18(5
Vol. CXII
Contents
677
EDITORIALS:
The Final German Opportunity
680
No War with England. IV. The Menace of Naval Competition.... 681
The Manchester Guardian
,
682
The Undesirable Sales Tax
688
THE NEW EDUCATION. II. The Modern School. By Evelyn Dewey 684
FRANCE'S SECOND VERDUN. By Lewis S. Gannett
686
A FOOTNOTE TO EGYPTIAN HISTORY. By Hiram K. Moderwell
688
690
CORRESPONDENCE
690
BOOKS:
The Suicidity of Suicide. By Robert Herrick
691
Count Witte. By William MacDonald
692
Fashions.. By Mark Van Doren
693
Kansas
698
Upper Silesia
694
Books in Brief
604
DRAMA:
"Liliom." By Ludwig Lewisohn
695
Russia's Treaties with Persia and Afghanistan
696
Associate Editors
LEWIS S. GANNETT
FREDA KIRCHWEY
ARTHUR WARNER
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
ERNEST H. GRUENING
CARL VAN DOREN
Managing Editor
Literary Editor
Mexico ; to Canada, $5.50, and to foreign countries of the Postal Union. $6.00.
rjflRE Nation takes pleasure in announcing the addition
JL to its staff of the following contributing editors:
Prof. Robert Herrick, of the University of Chicago; H. L.
Mencken, of Baltimore; John A. Hobson, of London, and
Prof. Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster, now of Zurich. It feels
certain that the counsel and the contributions of these gen
tlemen will add much to its usefulness, and it proposes to
increase the board, notably on the Continent, to obtain a
still wider range of interest. The distinguished American
members of the new board need no characterization to our
readers, who are also familiar with Mr. Hobson's writings ;
his vision and his profound knowledge of economic problems
render his accession to the staff most welcome. Professor
Foerster opposed the militarists in Germany from the be
ginning of the war. He paid a high price for his refusal
to go with his country, but his soul is untarnished, his head
high, and his life dedicated to good-will among all peoples.
AT the one hundred and second anniversary of the Inde
pendent Order of Odd Fellows, President Harding
told the assembled "boys" how, at a lodge meeting, he had
found himself sitting next to his own "shofer." Business
of mutual surprise. "Ever after,'' said the President, "he
was a better chauffeur and I was a better employer." The
twofold moral adorning this tale is clear. A better boss
for being a lodge brother, Warren G. Harding should surely
make a grand President. Is he not a Mason, a Shriner, an
Odd Fellow, and for all we know, an Elk, Owl, Eagle, Moose,
Red Man, and Knight of Pythias? For all his lodge brothers
he becomes a better President. But how about those be
nighted outsiders to whom he does not belong? The Knights
of Columbus and the Independent Order of B'nai B'rith
No. 2914
should promptly forward their application blanks to the

White House. As for the residuum of non-joiners, they
should take steps to secure the maximum of service out of
their chief Executive, by electing him immediately High
Cockalorum of the B.U.N.C.O.M.B.E.the Benevolent Unassociated Non-Conformers of Mentality Beyond Elevation.
A/'OU live and breathe the spirit of this Republic. The United
* States does not want anything on earth that does not right
fully belong to us, no territories, no payment of tribute. But we
do want that which is righteously our own, and by the Eternal
we mean to have it! You of the navy are the first line of de
fense. I wish you might never be compelled to fire a gun in war,
and I believe that if all the governments on earth were impelled
by the same motives as our own is, this world would be at peace
forever starting with today. But I would not want peace with
out honor. I would not want peace without the consciousness
that America is doing right, and is protecting its citizenship in
the most effective way.
Thus President Harding to the officers of the North
Atlantic Fleet, thus Kaiser Wilhelm at Kiel on many a
similar occasion, thus Premier Briand every day to Ger
many, and thus every imperialistic ruler at all times. Mr.
Hughes says it is right for our oil men to have a chance at
business wherever there is oil, and by the Eternal we mean
to have it. A foothold in Yap, a share in all the good things
under all the mandates is also our right, and by the Eternal
we mean to have it. Of course, if every country had motives
as pure, noble, and inspiring as our own we should not have
to mean to have it. But, alas '. Every other country wishes
it could raise the rest of the world to its own standard of
morality, its purity, its nobility, its Kultur, and its altruism
so as to be safe from attack and sure of what is righteously
its own. By the Eternal, now we come to think of it, the
Germans, too, were certain they were fighting for nothing
else all the time. Was not their place in the sun theirs
righteously? Alas, the world, it appears, and President
Harding certainly, has learned nothing from the war. The
same old lying phrases which drove peoples into the catas
trophe still do service, still fall from the lips of those
intrusted with power.
THE House of Representatives is debating, at this writ
ing, whether we should have an army of 175,000 men,
as the Secretary of War recommends, or of 150,000, as saner
counselors are advising. Economy is the chief argument
working toward reduction. It is not the highest reason,
but in the present state of public opinion it is the most
effective. Since the House has just voted the huge sum of
$396,000,000 as one year's expenses for the navy (rejecting
amendments calling upon the President to initiate a con
ference on disarmament), it behooves it to scrutinize so
much more closely the army appropriation. In this connec
tion it is worth while to turn to the statement that the Sec
retary of the Treasury has sent to the House Ways and
Means Committee. For the first three-quarters of the
present fiscal year, he says, the national expenses have been
$3,783,771,996, or at the rate of five billions for the year.
Of the expenses so far $850,000,000 have gone to the War
678
The Nation
Department and $500,000,000 to the navy. That is to say,

$1,350,000,000, or more than a third of our total expendi
ture, has gone into the upkeep of our present fighting
machines. This, of course, takes no account of expenses
for pensions or previous wars. (The total war costs for
the fiscal year 1920 were 92 per cent of our expenditure.)
It is this enormous burden, keeping up, as it does, the cost
of living, that we ought to attacknot fair wages to the
workers.
SECRETARY MELLON'S proposals for the readjust
ment of the tax situation are notable because of his
unqualified assertion that "the nation cannot continue to
spend at this shocking rate" and that the "burden is un
bearable," and because of his opposition to the sales tax.
With that obnoxious proposal, certain to shift the burden
of taxation from the rich and powerful to the weak and
the poor, we deal at length elsewhere in this issue. Secre
tary Mellon's opposition should happily prevent any action
on that proposal by Congress. That body will, however, be
less inclined to accept his recommendations that the incometax be readjusted to a combined maximum for normal and
surtax of 40 per cent for the tax year 1921 and of 33
per cent thereafterit is now 73 per cent. Mr. Mellon
explains that this recommendation is not due to any desire
to relieve the rich but because he is certain that the higher
surtaxes have already passed the collection-point and that
the Government would actually obtain a greater revenue
if the tax were lowered. This may well be; from our point
of view, however, nothing should be done just now to
change the income-tax. With the excess-profits tax it is
different. Originally meant to be a war-profits tax, it un
deniably today works injustice and hampers business. But,
while agreeing with the Secretary that the so-called minor
nuisance taxes, like those on soft drinks, can be omitted,
we desire heavy taxation to pay off the war debt, and to
bring home to the wealthy, particularly, that they can get
relief only by stopping the shocking waste upon army and
navy.
BIT by bit the poor decrepit old Treaty of Versailles goes
tottering to the gravenow an arm, now a leg, now a
hip joint, now an eye tooth. And none so poor to do it rev
erence ! On top of the passage by the Senate, 49 to 23, of the
Knox resolution to put an end to the state of war with
Germany, it is reported that President Harding has again
changed his mind and will not try to save any part of the
document of Versailles for the use of the United States.
The hope that the League of Nations covenant might be
amputated from the body of the Treaty, and the rest pre
served, has been abandoned. Senator Lodge says it would
take seventy-two amendments to get the League out, and
then "nothing but a shell" would remain. So the President
is expected to negotiate his own treaty and to submit it to
the Senate within a month. So far, so goodprovided Mr.
Harding does not see another light tomorrow. It is an in
teresting fact that this decision of Senator Lodge finally to
abandon the treaty comes precisely two years and two
months after Mr. Wilson boasted that he was going to in
tertwine the League of Nations Covenant with the Treaty
so that they could not be separated. Now comes the fulfill
ment of the boast, but with just the opposite result from
that which Mr. Wilson intended.
[Vol. 112, No. 2914
NOW it is Holland with which the mad rush for oil is

bringing us into contact. It is an interesting story.
That country was about to dispose of a concession in the
Djambi, Sumatra, oil-fields. Our Standard Oil Company,
looking for new worlds to conquer, not only submitted a
bid through its Dutch company but succeeded in interest
ing the State Department to such an extent that it sent a
note to the Dutch Government expressing its "great con
cern" that a monopoly "of such far-reaching importance
in the development of oil is about to be bestowed upon a
company in which foreign capital other than American is
so largely interested." This had no effect whatever on
Holland, for the Parliament has adopted the bill giving the
concession to a combination formed by the Dutch-Indian
Government and the Batavia Oil Company, the latter be
longing to the Shell group which is now supposed to be
largely controlled by British capital. It was the report that
British capital was to get this concession which so aroused
our State Department, a fact well worth bearing in mind
in connection with recent happenings in Colombia, Costa
Rica, and Mexico. In a note to Holland the State Depart
ment gave the following explanation of its interest in this
matter:
The United States attaches the highest importance to the
recognition of the principle of reciprocity and equal oppor
tunity in the solution of the oil problem, as well as the exten
sion to American capital organized under Dutch law of the
same privileges and benefits which are granted to other foreign
capital similarly organized under the laws of the Netherlands.
THE foreign trade statistics for March give a graphic
illustration of the falling off of the exports of our
country. They ought to bring home to the remotest farmer
and the smallest trader the stupidity of the attitude of
those who believe that we can afford to deal with our eco
nomic problems from the purely selfish point of view, dis
regarding the fate of Europe and putting up further tariff
barriers to keep out imports. Even in the highest Repub
lican circles in Washington the lesson of the falling off of
exports by 436 millions as compared with March, 1920,
ought to have some effect. Fortunately there are signs that
the Administration sees that a solution of the European
tangle, and notably of the German indemnity question, is
very much an American affair and not one in which only
Europe is interested. This is the view of so sound a finan
cial expert as Mr. Paul M. Warburg, who has just become
chairman of the new International Acceptance Bank. At
its opening he stressed the fact that if a reasonable settle
ment is brought about between the Allies and Germany
"gradual revival of trade could be expected, and in that case
America would have to play a leading part. With gold
flowing our way and with the increasing strength of the
Federal Reserve System, it will again be plainly up to the
United States not to hoard its vast banking strength, but
to make it available for other countries for the purpose of
once more starting the wheels of commerce going."
TV/TR. WARBURG declared that American banks can well
JL'-l take upon their shoulders the burden of short-term
credits amounting to a billion dollars or more and to that
extent relieve Europe, but he is very clear that United States
business interests can undertake relief measures on a really
comprehensive scale only when political and economic
peace has been re-established in Europe. As it is per
May 11, 1921]
The Nation
fectly plain that America, if it is to be a financial world

power, must develop a system of acceptance and discount
ing banking houses of the same character and importance
as those which have so long existed in London, the establish
ment of the International Acceptance Bank with so able
and constructive a financier as Mr. Warburg in charge
becomes a matter of note. Europe is prone to believe that
America is not doing her share in solving the world's
troubles. We cannot deny that the Government of Mr.
Wilson merely marked time after his second return from
Paris, but it now looks as if under Mr. Hughes's leadership
our political influence will be exercised more energetically
and, let us hope, more wisely. But after all, so far as our
financial cooperation is concerned, the degree of our help
fulness depends upon France and Great Britain rather than
upon ourselves.
OF course, every right-thinking person knows that the
present unpleasantness in Ireland, which, by the way,
has been greatly exaggerated, is due entirely to a small
band of Sinn Fein malcontents who refuse to recognize
that Ireland has never been so happy and prosperous as
now, and are keeping up a malevolent agitation against
His Majesty's troops. These forces are maintaining order
in a splendid way and anyone in the United States who
doubts it is a Bolshevik, a pro-German, and a Sinn Feiner
all three at once. One has only to read the New York Times
or the New York Tribune or the writings of Mr. John
Rathom, the famous editor-confessor, or even the official
pronouncements of Sir Auckland Geddes, to be set right
about these agitators who are attempting to foment interna
tional strife. So it is a bit rough for Lord Charles Parmoor,
most respectable of British Tories, to get right up in the
House of Lords to ask and secure a resolution calling for
an immediate public and impartial inquiry concerning the
invasion of the Shannon View Hotel, at Castleconnell, by
brave British defenders of the Empire.
BARON Parmoor, according to a special cable dispatch
to the New York World, read letters from his own
brother, an aged surgeonalways loyally British on Irish
matterswho had narrowly escaped death in the hotel. He
wrote :
Our landlord, a perfectly innocent, honorable, and muchbeloved man, was killed almost before our eyes. My wife
and I were held up by revolvers pointed at our breasts. The
whole place was shot to pieces by a machine gun brought inside
the hotel. It was the most wicked attack you could imagine,
and to my horror the perpetrators were Black and Tan aux
iliary forces, sixty in number. Over a thousand shots must
have been fired, and the auxiliaries behaved like demented red
Indians. Of course, we thought it was an attack by Sinn
Feiners.
And Lord Parmoor added a charge of graver character.
He produced a dumdum bullet which his brother had picked
up unexploded. "The bullet," the latter wrote, "had been
reversed, thus converting it into an expanding bullet of
the most deadly character. Such bullets inflict the most
terrible wounds and were prohibited in the late war. It
is not suggested," he concluded, "that anyone fired except
the government auxiliaries." Every once in a while even
a well-bagged cat somehow manages to leap way out. The
customary procedure for humane and civilized governments
when confronted with the evidence of their misdeeds is to
679
deny that any atrocities have been committedexcept, of

course, by the other side.
IT has remained for the American Museum of Natural
History in New York City to publish to the world the
latest and most heinous Bolshevik atrocity. Beside the
Museum's stuffed specimen of the European bison a placard
proclaims: "Described by Caesar, hunted by Charlemagne,
and exterminated by the Bolsheviki." The full story of
cruelty and hate is further elaborated by an explanation
that the European bison had gradually become reduced in
numbers, until at the beginning of the World War there
remained only a herd in Lithuania, protected by imperial
edict, and a few in the Caucasus Mountains. "During
the World War of 1914-1918," says the Museum's historian,
"the Lithuanian and Caucasian herds are reported to have
been exterminated, partly for food and partly for the sake
of killing animals that had been protected by royalty." Cu
riously enough, the history of the American bison runs
counter to this. Our "buffalo" hit it off well enough with
our Reds, surviving readily until 100 per cent Americanism
arrived on the prairies with gunpowder, a desire for furs,
and the doctrine that to kill game for food was sordid while
to destroy it for fun was sport. But this man Lenin had
better watch his step from now on. He was only annoyed
when the chancelleries of Europe took after him, but if our
societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals get going,
they won't stop until they have chased the chief Sovieteer
down the Nevski Prospekt, thrown a net over his head,
and packed him off to the Bide-a-Wee Home. Our humane
societies, in defense of the European bison, will yet have
those Bolsheviki buffaloed.
THAT verse is in itself a hopelessly unpopular form of
literature is an error of the sophisticated but imper
fectly informed. Every period has its widely read poets.
Only these poets rarely rise into the field of criticism, since
they always echo the music of day before yesterday and
express as an astonishing message the delusions of the huge
rear-guard of civilization. The popular poet of our moment
in time is Robert W. Service. His publishers announce
"another smashing hit." A million copies of his earlier
books have been sold. These figures are not greatly exag
gerated. We have found his books strapped in with novels
of Zane Grey in the satchels of particularly graceless school
boys and resting on the "parlor" tables of apartments be
side dream books and manuals of etiquette. Service sings.
One can no more mistake his tunes than those of a hurdygurdy. He sings like a Barrack-Room Ballad pricked out on
paper and run through a pianola. He is Kipling put up in
tins for the home. His substance is red-blooded. He crys
tallizes the romance of the unintelligent. The anemic clerk
dreams of conquering the Yukon. Service does it for him.
Now the poet changes his field. Everybody is becoming
sophisticated. He goes to what the fashion papers call
"gay Paree." Apache, cocotte, grisetteMurger plus water
and pathos and wholesomeness. Who can compete with
that? Nor are such poets made. They are perfectly sin
cere and rely proudly on the great heart of humanity to do
them justice. Try, moreover, to convince an admirer of
Mr. Service of his error. The deepest perceptions are the
incommunicable ones. You have them or you must, as
Mathew Arnold only half humorously used to say, die in
your sins.
The Nation
680
The
[Vol.112, No. 2914
Final German Opportunity
GOOD, sound advice Secretary Hughes gave to the Ger

man Government in his note of May 2to lose no
time in making "clear, definite and adequate proposals which
would in all respects meet its just obligations." The Allies
have given Germany an extension of ten days for just this
purpose. They should make use of it by publishing promptly
their uttermost offer. As we pointed out last week, it was
within their right to bargain and haggle over this whole
indemnity matter, but it was extremely poor business for
them to do so. The dignified and effective thing for them
to have done would have been to have presented on March
first in London their final proposal in such clear-cut, compre
hensive form that every newspaper reader the world over
could have read it. This they should have supported, for the
Supreme Council's information, with unquestionable facts
certified to by neutral economic experts. In handing this
plan over to Messrs. Briand and Lloyd George the Germans
should have said to them that this was the uttermost they
could do and that if these terms were not accepted the Allies
must take over the country and govern it themselves. Such
a course would have been safe from any misunderstanding
and would have at least won the respect of the world.
Instead, even the latest offer, which The Nation last week
so confidently, but mistakenly, hoped would end the whole
indemnity issue, was so confused as to compel the British
experts to ask Berlin for elucidations. As the terms ap
peared here they could not stand expert banking analysis;
they did not even make clear whether previous German pay
ments were to be reckoned in or not and they made no ref
erence to the sums due on May 1. In places they merited
even the adjective disingenuousand so once more the Ger
man people have been misrepresented by their leaders. Only
on one point was the offer clear and specificin the matter
of reparations in the devastated districts, to which, like the
previous offers on this subject, the French will, of course,
make no reply; the terrible needs of those districts are be
ing subordinated to political opportunism and to chauvinism.
Indeed, what makes the attitude of the German leaders so
incomprehensible is the fact that they are fully aware that
they are dealing with a psychologically abnormal people.
The French people were never so much to be pitied as today.
Their Government and their press are owned by a group of
high financiers, who also own many of their politicians.
The trail of selfish politics and more selfish business runs all
through the Peace Treaty and the indemnity negotiations.
Having roused false hopes and expectations the politicians
feel that they must achieve some spectacular results or lose
their jobs. Again, there is good ground for the belief that
the high financiers, having obtained the Lorraine iron, also
insist upon having the Ruhr coalit is not only where iron
is that the Fatherland is to be found 1while there are mul
titudes of sober French people who really believe that they
and their children's children must always live in dread of
the coming of another such horror if Germany is not de
liberately dismembered and ruined.
So this was the time of all times for the German leaders
not to have bluffed or played politicsit seems to us that
politics and high finance are wreaking much evil in Berlin
as well as in Paris. Ebert, Fehrenbach, and Simons must
know that, justly or unjustly, there are enormous masses of
people who at present do not trust any German promises;
who see in the slow progress of the negotiations only a de

liberate German effort to avoid responsibility. The only
way to meet that belief was by absolute frankness and
straightforwardness. We do not believe that the latest
Allied terms are capable of enforcement and we have not
changed our opinion that further invasion of Germany will
do far more injury to the Allies than to Germany; that it
will endanger the whole structure of European civilization,
an opinion in which we are fortified by finding ourselves
in accord with the finest English spirits and the best of the
British press. Were we in charge of the German Govern
ment we should certainly not continue to govern if the
Allies entered the Ruhr, made a naval demonstration off
Hamburg, took over the customs and then destroyed the
German export trade by putting on a tax of 25 per cent
That way lies madness, nothing more and nothing less. It
spells a slavery which no free men ought to accept, a slavery
which will do much more harm to those who impose it than
to those who endure it. Hence the Germans should have
made their case clear to the world and assumed a "take it
or leave it" stand. Their unfortunate inability to under
stand the psychology of others and to present their case
to the world was never more evident.
We hoped last week that Secretary Hughes would be
able to prevent the disaster of a further invasion of Ger
many. On this he seems to have yielded, though friendly
in his tone to Berlin and giving it, as we have said, the
soundest advice possible. We believe today that he realizes
the terrible mistake the French will make from the point of
view of their own welfare and that of the world, if they take
the extreme measures they propose. Invasion will produce
less money for France than abstention. The truth is that
we are witnessing another dreadful breakdown of Chris
tianity. Never was there such an opportunity to follow the
Golden Rule and the teachings of Jesus, of the Sermon on
the Mount. From the very beginning hate and vengeance
have dominated the Allies and cruelty as well. They have
failed to realize that the war is the greatest failure of force
to accomplish anything that the world has ever seen. They
are so under the spell of the misery of it all, and so con
trolled by the vile passions that every war arouseswhether
it be avowedly for an ideal or notthat they cannot take
the attitude of the Good Samaritan, which would have got
more money out of Germany than can all the 75's in the
French army. If ever there was a case for applied Chris
tianity, this was it. How can the church be surprised if in
consequence its power wanes, and deservedly? Noblesse
oblige, and nobility ever responds to nobility.
Doubtless, we shall be told that all this is impractical
nonsense ; that when you are dealing with a lot of conscience
less ruffians like the Germans the only argument is a pistol
at the forehead. To that we can only reply that our faith
in human nature is as unshaken as our belief in the prac
ticality of the teachings of the Saviour. How anyone can
fail to see the impracticality and uselessness of everything
that has been done in Europe through force and violence,
is beyond us. The proposed policy of the Allies, if the Ger
mans refuse to accept their terms, is simply another long
step toward the bottomless abyss into which Europe is drift
ing under the leadership of the men who now, to its misery,
control its destinies.
The Nation
May 11, 1921]
No
War
With
IV. The Menace of Naval Competition

ADMIRAL A. T. MAHAN wrote in "The Influence of Sea
Power Upon History" in 1889: "The necessity of a
navy, in the restricted sense of the word, springs, there
fore, from the existence of peaceful shipping, and dis
appears with it, except in the case of a nation which has
aggressive tendencies, and keeps up a navy merely as a
branch of a military establishment. As the United States
at present has no aggressive purposes, and as its merchant
service has disappeared, the dwindling of the armed fleet
and general lack of interest in it are strictly logical con
sequences. When for any reason sea trade is again found
to pay, a large enough shipping interest will reappear to
compel the revival of the war fleet." Naval competition is
the normal accompaniment of competition in merchant ma
rine. As long as the United Kingdom is dependent on for
eign commerce for its sustenance, as long as it is determined
to carry this commerce largely in its own ships, as long as
the British Empire has dependencies, ports, concessions,
and fuel stations to defend on every trade route, and as
long as there is any possibility of war, Great Britain will
place naval supremacy first among her national policies,
and will go to almost any length to maintain it. Likewise,
now that the United States has determined to enlarge her
foreign commerce and to compete with Britain in the carry
ing trade, there has been, as Admiral Mahan shrewdly put
it, "enough shipping interest to compel the revival of the
war fleet."
It was on February 3, 1916, that President Wilson said
at St. Louis, "There is no other navy in the world that has
to cover so great an area of defense as the American Navy,
and it ought, in my judgment, to be incomparably the most
adequate navy in the world." The most adequate navy to
the largest area must necessarily be the largest navy.
And "area of defense" is not a precise phrase. It might
mean merely the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of continental
United States. But that would not be so large as the coastal
and sea area of the British Empire. It might include also
Hawaii, and the Philippines, and the Panama Canal. But
if we remember the fact that at the time of the speech,
over a year before our entry into the war, we were still con
testing vigorously with Great Britain as to the rights of
our commerce in respect of blockades and seizures, we may
infer that in the back of Mr. Wilson's mind "area of de
fense" had something to do with merchant ships on the
Seven Seas. At any rate, the distinction between offense
and defense in naval affairs is a meaningless one. It is an
established principle of naval strategy that the best defense
is an attack, and consequently the largest navy adequate for
defense would be capable of a general supremacy. Naval
boards of strategy in considering their building programs
take into account capabilities rather than existing
intentions.
On August 29, 1916, in response to the words of the
President, Congress passed a naval appropriation act au
thorizing, in the words of Secretary Daniels, "a continuous
building program comprising 156 war vessels, with 16 cap
ital ships, the largest number ever provided for at any one
time by any nation." During the war, in order to concen
trate on the anti-submarine campaign, most of our naval
681
England
building energies went into modern destroyersof which

we now have over 300and the rest of the program was
delayed. Many thought that this enormous program was
adopted chiefly for its moral effect on Germany ; but now the
war is won, and in spite of the fact that Great Britain
has authorized no new capital ships, our program is going
ahead full speed. The delay enabled us to take into account
the lessons of the Battle of Jutland in designing the capital
ships. Before 1925, on the basis of the programs at
present authorized, we shall have a navy markedly superior
to that of Great Britain both in tonnage and in effective
fighting strength.*
We shall have twelve battleships of post-Jutland design
to Britain's one. We shall have twenty-one battleships of
the first line in all, to Britain's eighteen. We shall have
six battle cruisers carrying fourteen-inch guns to Britain's
four, ours of later design than hers. We shall have 285
destroyers capable of 34 to 36 knots, to England's 193. We
shall have 163 modern submarines, 94 of post-war type, to
Britain's total of 105 modern subsea boats. Our navy will
be inferior only in cruisers for commerce-destroying and
other accessory ships. But the three-year program recom
mended by the General Board last September is chiefly de
signed to make up this deficiency. Our navy will also be
about twice as strong as the Japanese, even if Japan's full
projected program is completed. Secretary Denby, giving
the Republican indorsement to the policy adopted by the
Democrats, says, "I am in favor of a navy equal to the
greatest in the world." And, not content with that, Admiral
Huse, commandant of the Third Naval District and former
member of the Allied Armistice Commission, declares at a
dinner of the American Legion that he is in favor of "a
navy equal in strength to that of any two navies in the
world." Thus we cement the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, by
forcing Britain to look for help on the seas.
The Imperial Defense Committee, sitting in secret con
clave on the naval policy of the British Empire, is likely to
take these facts more seriously into consideration than
Admiral Huse's declaration that a war between Great Brit
ain and the United States is "inconceivable." If that be
true then what is our need for a two-Power navy? The
sober truth, obvious alike to the expert and to the news
paper reader, is that the United States Government appears
to have chosen to wrest the supremacy of the seas from
Great Britain, and perhaps from Great Britain and her
chief ally combined. Yet British tradition of the past
three centuries interposes a forcible veto on such an attempt
by any nation. No people in all that time has made the
attempt without being checked by war. John Lloyd Balderston writes from London to the New York World, "To put
the matter bluntly, I believe that if the British feel com
pelled to make the sacrifices involved in a cut-throat naval
competition with America, war between the two peoples in
the not distant future will be not impossible."
Of course, there remains the chance that naval competi
tion will be alleviated by mutual disarmament. It would
be foolish and impossible, say all the authorities, for one
nation to cease building before the others do. We should
all come to some agreement limiting the size of our navies.
The new British building program, recently announced, though it does
not greatly enlarge the total tonnage of the British navy, wiU increase its
effectiveness not a little.
The Nation
682
In the meantime, naval opinion seems to favor the build

ing of as large a navy as possible by the United States, in
order to be in a favorable position when we come to dicker
[Vol. 112, No. 2914
The Manchester Guardian
about the future size of the respective navies, and to en
UMAN liberty owes much to the North of England,
force on our poorer friends a sense of the folly of pouring
to something solid and uncompromising in the temper

of Yorkshire, something cool and clear in the temper of
Westmoreland and Cumberland, something level and reason
so much treasure into dreadnoughts.
It is this argument
dealing with the enormous expense of the modern navy that

is ordinarily cited in favor of armament limitation. Yet,
while it would be highly beneficial to the public treasury
and the pockets of the taxpayers to limit armaments in this
fashion, the argument overlooks the crux of the whole mat
ter in its relation to possible war. You must bear in
mind, said Admiral Huse, that there is no such thing as
a powerful navy, used as an absolute term; the power of the
navy is purely a relative term. Suppose all the great nations
should agree among themselves to cut down these building
programs by one-half or three-quarters or nine-tenths, if
you like; the relation of the forces would remain the same
as before.
So the general intention to reduce navies does
not solve the problem of whose navy is to be the largest.

We go to a conference on disarmament resolved that our
navy shall be as large as Great Britain's, or as Great Bri

tains and Japans combined; Great Britain goes to the con
ference resolved to retain her sea supremacy. Such a
conference can lead to nothing, without reconsideration of
fundamental national policy. Is Great Britain willing to
renounce her control of the seas? Are we willing to allow
Great Britain to retain it? Such questions, the imperialists
stridently insist, must be answered before disarmament is
able in the temper of Lancashire. The Manchester Guardian,

in being the spokesman of liberal Lancashire for the one
hundred years ending May 5 of this year, has contrived with
increasing power to be the voice of liberals everywhere. In
its early days it outspokenly advocated parliamentary re
form against a resistance of established stupidity which can
be matched but once or twice in the history of the English;
through the middle of the century and onward it held stoutly
to Cobden and Bright, supported Gladstone's more enlight
ened policies, stood from the first for Irish Home Rule,
fought imperialism without relaxationduring the Boer
War magnificentlyand came through the Great Warthat
acid test of the liberal intelligencewith a remarkably
clear record for a newspaper which approved of England's
going in. Even more important during its second half
century than before, it naturally owes much to the personal
integrity and capacity of Mr. C. P. Scott, editor since 1872
and owner since 1905, whose long control has served to give
the Guardian its masterful unity and continuity.
At the
Or can navies be internationalized
same time, the paper has been more than a personal organ.
It has attracted to it many kindred dispositions among
journalists and public men, and it has found enough read
ers to constitute, throughout the United Kingdom, a sub
stantial block of public opinion which cannot be stampeded
by the noise of the herd periodically thundering off in this
or that direction under the influence of this or that frenzy.
What seems most interestingmost encouragingabout the
through the establishment of some super-government ca
career of the Guardian is the fact that it has not been an
pable of exercising its power impartially?
endowed organ, maintained by some philanthropist or other,

but a normal business enterprise, which has paid its own
way out of its own lawful earnings.
Two qualities have, perhaps, done most to account for its
possible, and they must be answered before long unless the

situation is to grow worse rapidly.
A conference capable of solving such problems must go
into the whole region of international relationship. Is total
disarmament feasible?
There can be
little doubt that the existing governments might answer an

unqualified negative to both these questions. On what terms,
then, should any nation be allowed to retain naval supremacy?
This leads us back to consideration of freedom of the seas,
merchant marine and commerce, and forward to considera
tions of finance, oil, communications and canals, and impe
rial policy. If the United States is prepared to yield naval
supremacy to Great Britain in exchange for concessions in
related fields which Great Britain is prepared to grant, there
may be another way to avoid a naval competition. A move
toward mutual limitation of armaments might possibly lead
to a stable agreement on these weighty questions, but when
traditionally minded statesmen get to bargaining with
threats against commercial advantages, we are in the outer
eddies of the whirlpool. Yet how incredible it seems that
two such kindred nations should be pouring out treasure
to arm against one another because the conventional states
man's mind is so bound up in trade questions and in re
gard for precedent! What the situation calls for is
frank, straightforward world disarmament. If that is not
possible, then at least an agreement between Japan, the

United States, and England. If that is also not possible, we
agree with ex-Secretary Bryan that the United States must
take the risk and go it alone; it must set the wise and
Christian example of cutting armaments before they bring

the great Anglo-Saxon countries to war.
influence.
One is its admirable combination of local interest
with international outlook. While the provincial newspapers

of Britain do not carry the burden of neighborhood small
talk which is demanded of such papers in this country, still
the Guardian has never neglected the affairs of Manchester.
But the affairs of Manchester, as a manufacturing center
for the world, happen to reach far; and the Guardian has let
its eyes run along all the routes of trade, and so has con
tinually directed the opinion of the British trading classes
to the remotest consequences of their activities. The other
quality of the paper which must be noted is its admirable
temperateness of language and argument. This is not, how
ever, though ordinary opinion says so, a characteristic Eng
lish trait.
The islands have made their mark on the world
not half so much by sober reason as by eccentric vigor,

impetuous courage, stubborn perseverances, lyrical rages.
Yet the Guardian, holding its course in the midst of so much
tumult, has employed no methods more ruthless than those
of simple candor, no accents more loud than those of civil
truth.
That these methods have been effective it is for the
violent and bad-tempered to deny and for the judicious to

study and understand. For there exists no other daily in
any other country which ranks with the Guardian. It is
the greatest daily newspaper which our civilization today
*The next
in this
series will deal with the oil p
problem as it affects
England
and article
the United
States.
has to its credit.
The Nation
May 11, 1921]
The Undesirable Sales Tax

T last the sales tax has found a champion among the
professional economists at the very moment when

the Secretary of the Treasury flatly rejects it. In a state
ment published in the newspapers of April 25, Professor
Charles J. Bullock, of Harvard University, declares himself
flat-footedly for the tax. I offer it, he says, as the
sane and logical solution of this country's greatest problem.
Taxation such as that under which we are at present suffer
ing creates a nation of liars. The present tax would almost

wholly become a tax on honesty if it is allowed to continue.
This notable accession to their ranks must be embarrassing
to some of the supporters of this measure. So long as the
professional economists and tax experts, led by such men
with administrative difficulties is of great importance to

us. France, of course, is not distinguished for the excel
lence of her fiscal administration generally, but the fact
remains that a tax of the type we are being urged to adopt
is proving difficult to administer in that country. It must
be remembered always that the proposed sales tax is to be
in addition to the income tax. Only a few of the most ex
treme adherents of the measure see in it a complete sub
stitute for income taxation. Consequently, the Treasury,
already three to four years behind with its income tax
work, would be required to build up a machine capable of

enforcing a tax on sales with enough to prevent us from
becoming, or remaining, a nation of liars. The scope of
this administrative task would depend largely upon the
as Seligman of Columbia and Adams of Yale, were solidly

against them they countered by pointing out with great
directness, and with rather bad manners, the inherent folly
of expecting trustworthy advice from theorists and college
to goods, wares, and merchandise, the task would still be a

very large one quantitatively. It would probably prove
professors.
In that organ of sound finance, the Bache Re
less difficult in its nature than the administration of the
view, the influence of such doctors was stamped as a
income tax. But even this should not be too readily con
ceded, for it requires no very active imagination to visualize
a flood of Treasury regulations, decisions, rulings, and notes
interpreting the nice questions as to when a sale is a sale.
Leases, conditional sales, instalment sales, returned goods,
bad debts, price guaranties, agency arrangements, and the
complicated ramifications of accrual accounting are all in
volved in determining sales.
Those who defend the equity of the sales tax under the
assumption that it will be completely shifted, must attempt
to demonstrate that the gross expenditure is a more exact
and satisfactory standard of ability to pay than net income.
This is a hopeless task. A standard of gross expenditure
would relieve savings from all taxes. Our greatest savers
are the richest classes. But not only would the sales tax
apply to a much larger share of the small man's income
than of the rich man's, but the tax would also fall just as
heavily on the small man's dollar as on the rich man's.
This will not appeal strongly to those who believe in the
equity of progressive taxation. Indeed, the sales tax is
menace to our national welfare.
But now that one econo
mist declares himself in favor of the tax, what is the result?
His opinion is hailed by the president of the Tax League

of America, whatever that may be, as the most important
remark yet made in favor of the sales tax, and Professor

Bullock himself is crowned the very highest authority in
the country on this subject.
This is all very well.
Let
both the eminence, if not the preeminence, of Professor

Bullock and the importance of his remark be quickly con
ceded. Nevertheless, in introducing the testimony of Pro
fessor Bullock, do they not acknowledge the value of what

the other theorists and college professors have to say? In
fact, some apologies seem to be due.
Word now comes from another professor. On the same
day that Mr. Bullock announced his support of the sales
tax, a letter arrived from Professor J. W. Garner, of the
University of Illinois, just now giving the Harvard lectures
on the Hyde Foundation in the provincial universities of
France, which contained the following interesting para
graph, written in response to a request for information as
to how the French tax on sales is working out in practice:
I have talked with several intelligent Frenchmen about
the French law. They say it is impossible of execution; to
enforce it would require an army of fonctionnaires so large
that the cost would consume the proceeds of the tax. The
comparatively few actually provided give their attention to
the larger firms, leaving the petit commercants to go free.
In consequence, the payment of the tax is largely voluntary.
Nearly everybody who makes declarations of their business
understates the amount
Professor Garner con
firms the press reports regarding the disappointing yield of

the tax, stating that the collections will fall at least sixty
per cent below the budget estimate. He reports that all the
Chambers of Commerce and Commercial Unions of France
have protested against the law and that in general French

experience indicates the probable failure of the sales tax
under conditions obtaining in America. Thus, while the
income tax, according to Professor Bullock, is making us
a nation of liars, the sales tax, according to Professor Gar
ner, is having the same effect upon France. This simply
means that the administration has broken down in both
cases.
But the fact that France has found the tax fraught
character of the tax but even if the levy were restricted
grossly unfair to the poor man, and should be dropped for

that reason alone. Something might possibly be said for
a small sales tax which would constitute a very minor part
of the revenue system on the ground that it would amount
to a minimum income tax on incomes too small to be reached
by the method of direct listing. But this effect can, after all,
be better gained by a few specific commodity taxes on arti
cles of general consumption. Regarding the effects upon
business, the testimony of a distinguished French scholar
is worth citing. Gaston Jeze writes: The tax is essen
tially a tax upon expendituresthe worst kind of tax
for both producers and consumers. At this very time it
tends to increase the price in a formidable manner; in con
sequence, it helps to restrain consumption; it helps to close
channels of sales at the moment when it is necessary to
Open new ones. In my opinion, the tax upon sales prices
is responsible in large measure for the economic crisis
which has now begun and bids fair to be long and terrible.
If forced by financial necessity to adopt this unattractive
expedient, let us at least be intelligent enough to realize
that it is not a refined and nicely adjusted piece of fiscal
machinery, but at best a crude, difficult, unfair, and inequit
able tax, to be got rid of in the shortest possible time.
684
The Nation
The
II.
New
[Vol. 112, No. 2914
Education
The Modern School

By EVELYN DEWEY
HOW are schools to reorganize so that every child shall

have the real experiences that are necessary to enable
him to be an efficient, independent, and creative member of
society? If we examine all the new schools we will find
many ways of approaching the problem. Public schools
have done comparatively little toward a fundamental read
justment. Individuals in a system here and there have had
the courage to do what was possible within one room to
give their pupils a living education or to meet some crying
need. But they have been hampered by the accepted notions
of what a school must be, and by the machinery involved in
meeting one of the biggest phases of the problem: compul
sory attendance. Schools have reached every child. But
this has been a wholesale task with administrative problems
uppermost. Taxes, buildings, equipment, teachers' salaries,
supervision, and attendance were new problems that must
be met. We had inherited a curriculum. It was natural
perhaps that it was used unquestioningly and the new things
came to be thought of as the important things; as educa
tion. Teachers like Mrs. Harvey and Mr. Wirt have seen
their problem unencumbered with traditional organization.
They have built public schools that are giving as nearly a
real education as external conditions allow. But such pio
neers are rare.
The big colleges of education and their practice schools
do not as a rule make rapid changes. They accept the tra
ditional curriculum and organization by grades and sub
jects and work on efficiency problems. What is the best
way to teach reading and writing; or how much arithmetic
should a child of ten know? Such work has done a great
deal to make teachers conscious of the technique of their
profession. The standardized tests for each grade in each
subject have shown up the amount of bad teaching; the
extent to which children go through grade after grade and
assimilate practically nothing of what the teacher is spread
ing before them. By showing it up they have forced teach
ers to rejuvenate themselves to the extent of seeing that
their grade was up to standard not only in what was pre
sented but in what was learned. They have also been the
moving force in introducing handwork in the public school
system.
The practice schools of these institutions have put the
findings of the departments of education into practice. The
Horace Mann School in New York and the University Ele
mentary School in Chicago serve as demonstrations of
expert methods and so furnish the concrete inspiration for
progress and improvement for many teachers. They also
serve as laboratories for experiments in new subject mat
ter or gradual changes in organization.
For the fundamental reorganizations that are attempting
to express a complete and organic conception of education
we must look to a different group of schools. Some of these,
like the Lincoln School in New York and the Francis Par
ker School in Chicago, are working toward the realization
of their conception under conditions that approach those
in the public school systems of our middle-sized cities. A
good many smaller schools, like the City and Country School,
the Moraine Park School, or the Shady Hill School, are

attempting to work out even more complete reorganizations.
Comparatively free from administrative and traditional
problems, they are attempting to express a definite educa
tional purpose of the founders. The philosophies of these
schools vary widely. But there is one fundamental point
of agreement. Real education is impossible without free
dom. This is the ABC of educational theory. Without
freedom interest is impossible and without interest real
work is impossible. Mental training and discipline do not
come from thwarting interest, nor from an endless perform
ance of imposed and difficult tasks. They come from the
opportunity to find expression for real interests, those gen
erated within the child, and to bring them to their con
clusion in a finished piece of work. This kind of work can
not go on under traditional classroom routine, where the
curriculum is divided into pieces by minutes and fed to the
children by a teacher with absolute power. It demands an
organization that permits children to work together in
groups on different things that have some meaning to them
as children.
The Children's School in New York City furnishes a con
venient example of what a school is like and what it can
accomplish when it organizes to meet these conditions. The
head of the school believes that the conscious aim of every
teacher should be the fullest development of each pupil.
This development includes freeing all the child's capacities
so that they can find expression. But real expression de
mands a well-developed self-control. In order to think hon
estly, carry out all the processes in making something or
work with a group a person must not only be free to express
himself, he must also be able to do his work up to standard
and adjust it to his surroundings. This means that the
physical life of the child, his health, muscular control, and
coordination are the business of the school. His intellec
tual development is its business, too. He must get control
of the necessary tools of knowledge, books, figures, and ex
pressing his thoughts and he must learn to use these tools
in an honest, accurate, and objective way. But it is the
school's business to see that in developing these faculties it
does not do violence to the child's emotional life. Physical
and intellectual control cannot exist unless an individual is
able to adjust to his surroundings temperamenfally as well.
He must find scope for what creative ability he has, free
dom in social intercourse, and intelligence in meeting his
disabilities and likes and dislikes.
The school organization makes the achievement of these
theories possible through the everyday life and creative
activities of the children. The school-day lasts from nine
in the morning until four in the afternoon, except for the
very little children. There is a hot dinner at noon and a
rest time for all the children. Afternoon school is devoted
to excursions for science or history, play, games, skating,
and swimming or to some special project in the shop or
studio. The children work in small classes of from ten to
twenty. The classes are made up of children of about the
same age and experience. There are no promotions or re
May 11, 1921]
The Nation
peating grades because a child is behind in some specific

part of his lesson. The class works together year after year
and an individual is moved only when he is too old or too
young to work as an efficient part of his group.
The building is not equipped in the conventional way.
There are no screwed-down desks and no platform for the
teacher. Instead each class has two good-sized rooms. In
one there are chairs and a small table for each child and a
library of the books the class is using. This room is used
for the regular lessons, for reading, writing, and for class
discussion. The other room is used as a workshop and
recreation room for the class. It is equipped with a work
bench or two, with tools and with the materials that are
being used in any plan that is on foot at the time, such as
the scenery and costumes for a play. There are two science
rooms where classes go for work that requires special equip
ment. One is used for a greenhouse. Here the older chil
dren have been learning about soils and seed germination
by analyzing soils and raising tiny crops. Two kitchens
open off the dining-room. One is for getting the school
dinner. The other is for the children. Here a small group
will prepare one of the dishes for lunch, each child making
a small portion, or they will get the whole meal for their
class. There are two roof playgrounds on the school. One
of these belongs to the little children, where they play out
doors most of the day. There are a sandbox, a slide, a see
saw, and plenty of playthings. The children have real con
structive play, instead of the idleness forced on them by
days in city parks or streets.
The school program is kept as flexible as possible. The
only formal time for the youngest children is their midmorning lunch and a short time for story telling. The rest
of the morning they play with all sorts of free material,
blocks, paper and crayon, or scissors, clay, etc. Montessori materials are on low shelves where the children can get
them when they want to. A number of very young children
learn to write and form words without any formal lessons
with this material. As far as possible they are allowed to
learn to read and write when they begin to be interested in
it. Sometimes a child needs a little urging from the teacher,
but usually the example of the rest of the children sends
him to it when he is ready for it. The teacher's function is
that of a leader. She answers questions, gives technique,
sees that the children get along together, and that their
work or play develops significantly so old experiences be
come the basis for new activities that increase their power
and information.
The older children have definite hours for French, cook
ing, science, or history, any subject that requires special
equipment or a special teacher. The rest of their day is
spent with the class teacher. She devotes enough time to
drill in reading, writing, spelling, and arithmetic so that the
children's command of these things does not lag behind
- their intellectual interests or their experience. But this
drill is never presented as an end in itself. The children
realize their need for these tools because the real experi
ences they are having in science, on their excursions or on
the playground, are constantly calling for them. By follow
ing this plan of giving intensive drill when a class needs
or is interested in a particular process the school has found
the children keep ahead of the conventional school curricu
lum. Classes are given opportunities to check themselves
up by the standardized school tests. They are usually ahead
of other classes of their age, but if they have lagged behind
685
in anything the children themselves are the first ones to

ask for a chance to catch up, their greater freedom early
developing a sense of responsibility in them.
The same care is taken to see that the rest of the school
work is done up to standard. A real carpenter comes in to
help a class that is interested in toy-making. A college
history teacher lectures to the three oldest classes once a
week on American history. He gives them the inspiration
and background for the detailed work they do with their
classroom teachers. An Indian woman comes in the after
noons and tells the children about the literature and customs
of her people. She teaches them dyeing and basketry as
these trades were carried on by her tribe. Cooking includes
the marketing and keeping accounts and paying bills.
No fixed lessons are assigned from textbooks. Instead
a number of different books are put on the shelves and each
child does his own piece of work on the subject that is being
studied. The interests of the class are followed in decid
ing what to work on. These interests develop naturally
from one piece of work to the next. A constructive thread
is given the reading by having different kinds of books on
the classroom shelves. If the majority of the class become
interested in one book it is made the point of departure for
a study of that period or class of books.
The children are made to realize that the school is theirs.
The older classes run themselves and elect a chairman every
week to see that the rooms are kept in order; that the class
gets to lessons on time, and that the pupils are quiet and
considerate when they are studying. The teacher is a mem
ber of the class and has her say about what shall be done
with the others. Even in class discussion a child acts as
chairman and the teacher is the leader only because of her
greater skill and experience instead of through a position
of dictatorship. She also performs the important function
of seeing that each child has a fair chance with the other
members of the group. But the children are remarkably
just when shown the right standards. The order, courtesy,
and workmanlike spirit of the classes stand out. The school
seems to realize its aim of being a real world where each
pupil is learning to live by living physically, intellectually,
and creatively all the time.
There may be comparatively little in the financing, daily
program, or class procedure of this school that could be
bodily translated to public schools today. But from such
schools the public can get a vision of its job; a vision that
will enable it to raise a generation without the blind spots,
the ignorance, and the stamp of standardized inferiority
that makes the majority of people a stumbling block in the
way of their own achievement. It is not the school's fault
that these conditions exist; but the schools are the only
places where fundamental changes can be wrought, because
they are the only places that give everyone a chance. When
you realize this many of the fundamental changes worked
out in private schools can easily be taken over in public
schools. Isolated teachers have already developed organiza
tion plans to make the transfer. The duplicate school plan
of Mr. Wirt's and the Dalton Laboratory Plan have proved
that it is possible to adopt some of the essential points in
the practice of progressive private schools in the present
public school systems. But the changes in public schools
will not be general until you stop judging schools good be
cause they are like the ones you went to or because no child
dares speak or move in them. They belong to you and can
not change very much until you want them to.
686
The Nation
France's
Second
[Vol. 112, No. 2914
Verdun
By LEWIS S. GANNETT
Paris, April 18
MAY Day this year will bring to France no such nation
wide strike as stopped the railroads and disrupted
industry a year ago, nor any such impressive cessation of
the capital's life as was staged before the peace delegates
two years past. But it brings France face to face with a
crisis more important than either of these, a crisis which
some, both radicals and conservatives, liken to a second Ver
dun in the uncertainty and fatefulness of its outcome. The
cities and villages of the north of France, despite optimistic
and misleading official figures, are still in ruins; equally
official and more relevant figures1 suggest that it will re
quire ten years at the very least, and probably twice that,
to rebuild the heaps of stone that were homes; and money
for the rebuilding is not forthcoming either from Germany
or France. May Day is the date set by the Treaty of Ver
sailles for fulfilment by the Germans of obligations which
they have not and will not have fulfilled, and the date on
which the Allies will have a treaty right to apply "sanc
tions." The present supposition is that France will adopt
the "strong hand on the collar" policy, occupy more German
territory, blockade German ports, and take other measures
intended to reduce Germany to a state of subjection and
utter misery. France must choose: either to ruin Germany,
thereby eliminating, as she hopes, any menace of military
or economic competition for decades to come, but by the
same token giving up hope of money or goods for repara
tions; or to cooperate actively and openly with Germany,
and get what reparation is thus possible. The former
policy seems to most American and British observers in
France today to be suicidal; yet it is the officially announced
policy of the French Government.
There is no group in France fighting vigorously and effec
tively against this policy which can only add to the French
military budget and reduce the reparations receipts. Tradeunion leaders and Socialists oppose it, but they do not dare
or care to wage a strenuous campaign against it. The
Communists watch the spectacle with a kind of grim amuse
ment, welcoming, as a forerunner to their revolution, the
financial havoc which it causes. But Socialists, Communists,
and trade unionists in France today are most of all inter
ested in attacking each other, and they are almost without
influence on the course of Governmental policy. There is
no doubt that M. Briand himself is well aware of the im
possibility of the French demands, and of the futility of a
screaming-eagle policy, but he is more politician than
statesman, and like Mr. Lloyd George, he is the prisoner of
a stupid and reactionary Parliament, elected rather for its
super-patriotism than for its common sense. Former Presi
dent PoincarS, vigorously demanding what he calls "action,"
is maneuvering to win Briand's premiership from him, and
Briand cares more for power than principle. The present
Parliament is incapable of abandoning flag-waving for rea
soned discussion of economic possibilities, despite the dis
illusionment caused by the evident failure of Viviani's
mission to America, and by the terrible revelations of the
1 Less _ than 3 per cent of the destroyed houses have been rebuilt. The
optimistic^ official statements refer almost entirely to the repair of "partially
destroyed" houses, many of which had merely lost a chimney or suffered one
or two shell-holes.
new budget. (Apart from the 15 to 20 billions of paper

francs for which there are as yet no receipts, these being
supposedly charged to Germany, the ordinary budget shows
such astounding deficits as 820 million paper francs in the
operation of the railroads, 628 million in the post and tele
graph service, etc.) Briand, while busily denouncing the
Germans in public, has been nervously negotiating with
them ever since the London Conference was broken off, but
he does not dare adopt the policy which he knows to be
reasonable.
It is easy to understand why the French are so unwilling
to face disagreeable realities. They have always been rather
impossibilist romanticistsbut for that they would never
have held Verdun against impossible odds in 1916. They
are today the most vanquished victors which this world
has ever seen, and quite unwilling to abandon the unreal
glories of victory for the realities of a world defeat which
has hit them worst of all. They stand alone among the
great Powers in what they have suffered. Their popula
tion is reduced by millions; those who are left are for the
most part the old and the very young, weakened by war
time privation. The state is, according to ordinary stan
dards, close to bankruptcy. Their best industrial regions
lie in ruins. A million of their people are still without
homes worthy of the name. All this they suffered and are
suffering in what Allied statesmen always called a common
cause. Today America stands aloof; England seeks, in
French eyes, only profitable commerce with Germany; Ger
many piteously cries that she cannot pay. And when France
tries to collect, as a first charge, the cost of her army of
occupationan army of more than 60,000 menshe finds
the Americans presenting for an army only one-fifth as
large a bill almost equal to her own, and demanding simul
taneous payment.2 No wonder she feels isolated, frustrated,
and acts as a frustrated man does, blindly and foolishly.
When Frenchmen discover the wicked unreality of the war
time promises that Germany would pay for everything, they
are less likely to study methods of partial payment than to
shrug their shoulders and revert to the "je-m'en-ficheisme"
of "Que voulez-vous? C'est la guerre!" days. In such
a mood, the premise that France is ruined readily leads to
the conclusion that Germany should be ruined, too. That
the premise is false does not alter the state of mind.
It is true that there are industrial and financial interests
which have realized the necessity of a Franco-German busi
ness entente. The proposal that the French be given shares
in German enterprises has been favorably commented on
in several of the manufacturing and financial journals, and
it is generally understood that M. Loucheur, the war-made
millionaire Minister for the Liberated Regions, is so little
averse to Franco-German cooperation that he has, in some
of his interests, formed a working alliance with Hugo
Stinnes, the jingo German capitalist who also made his
pile from war-time speculation and who is commonly re
ferred to jn France as the dictator of German policy. One
'The costs of the armies of occupation to May 1, 1921, apart from mate
rial requisitioned in Germany and paid for in paper marks requisitioned
from the German Government, will be about as follows: France, 1,215 million
gold marks ; United States, 1,022 M.M. : Great Britain. 895 M.M. ; Belgium,
May 11, 1921]
The Nation
French official in touch with business interests told me that

he regarded it as most unfortunate that France had per
mitted Lloyd George to stop Stinnes speaking at Spa. "Two
strong men have emerged," he said, "one on each side of
the frontier: Stinnes and Loucheur. They are the only
two men capable of solving the reparations problem; get
them to cooperate and the problem can be solved; otherwise
probably not." War-time profiteers play a curiously large
role in these plans; after all they are the men, dirty as
they are, who have shown executive ability in the system
which men are seeking to preserve and restore. The pro
posal for French participation in German capital is being
urged in the German press by that romantic profiteer Dr.
Helphand ("Parvus") who escaped to Germany and after
a brilliant academic career made a penurious living writing
for German Socialist papers, then early in the war intrigued
for the German Government at Constantinople and Sofia,
became rich, subsidized imperialist Socialist papers, had
villas in four capitals, and, until revelations of food specu
lations led to his expulsion, was with King Constantine the
only foreigner authorized to use an automobile in the can
ton of Zurich. Arnold Rechberg, in the Berliner Tageblatt,
has also suggested that France be given a one-third share
in all profits of German enterprises, and elaborately demon
strated that this should soon yield France an annual return
of three billion gold marks. His article has been widely
quoted in the French press, and while the plan is thus far
a mere sketch, it is being studied by experts of the Repara
tion Commission.
This program of a money return to France is naturally
welcomed in certain industrial circles which do not relish
plans for payment in goods. It was undiplomatic of Herr
Simons to say so, but it is notorious in France that enor
mous profits are being made out of reconstruction, and that
important French interests have been opposed to material
aid from Germany because it would have cut into their
profits and opportunities for profit. You cannot talk for
five minutes with a French architect or engineer or govern
ment official without hearing such complaints. Deputy
Jean Henessy has publicly charged in L'CEuvre that there
is "a conspiracy among French reconstruction profiteers to
prevent reconstruction by the Germans." France, if she
is to have her wounds healed, must lend a very sympathetic
ear to German proposals for reparation in kind, for mass
manufacture of houses in parts in Germany, and for the
use of German labor in the immediate work of reconstruc
tion. Thus far, France has made large demands for build
ing materials, in general, but has declined to specify details
and place of delivery, and in the few cases where details
have been given, there have been the usual Franco-German
bickerings over the price at which German deliveries are to
be credited, France insisting upon the low price current in
Germany, Germany upon the higher price current in the
world market. It is one of the great faults of the treaty
that it contains no method of judicial judgment of such
disputes; reference to the Reparation Commission obviously
is to a partisan body.
Delivery of coal cannot be carried much farther than it
has already gone. Germany has been delivering on an aver
age more than two million tons per month since the Spa
Conference last July, and although she is about 500,000
tons behind on her total deliveries, that is less than 3 per
cent arrears, and the French do not need the extra coal.
The present industrial depression has left France actually
687
with a surplus of coal and she is said to be selling German

coal abroad. Indeed, a former member of the Reparation
Commission privately prophesies that a year or two hence
Germany will be fighting to pay more of her indemnity in
coal than France will be willing to accept.
German workmen if used in France would obviously have
to be lodged in colonies in the liberated regions. There
are plenty of jingoes in Paris and a few people in the
ruined villages to applaud the cry of Deputy Grespel,
"Rather than see them profaned by the hands of assassins
we would prefer that our ashes be left in peace and our
ruins left untouched in the majesty of their desolation."
Deputy Grespel himself, to be sure, though mayor of ruined
La Bassee, lives comfortably in one of the finest streets of
unshelled Lille. There is little doubt that the peasant whose
words are reported by Senator Polie is more typical. "I
would rather have the Germans mend my roof," he said,
"than have no roof at all." Three times the Germans have
made propositions regarding the use of German labor in
the North of France, and M. Loucheur has recently admitted
in debate that the chief reason for non-acceptance of these
offers was that the Germans demanded ordinary tradeunion rights. That, he said, he would never admit. He also
took occasion to protest because the Germans even sug
gested baths and reading rooms, but surely these are not
extraordinary demands when hundreds of men workers are
to be asked to work far from their families in a foreign
land. Even unemployed Paris workmen balk at being sent
into the lonely North. The French Government has been
able to import nearly a hundred thousand Polish laborers,
who are now working in the mines and villages of the
devastated districts at low wages, without baths or read
ing-rooms and without trade-union rights; it has also im
ported a considerable number of Italians who do without
bath-rooms, and it is obvious that difficulties might arise
should German workmen come in and be better treated.
That is the real sticking-point. French labor stands with
the Germans in this matter, but thus far in vain. Repre
sentatives of the French and German national building
trades unions recently met at Geneva and reached a detailed
agreement, satisfactory to both groups, regarding condi
tions of employment of German labor in France. The
French workers themselves object to the employment of
Germans under conditions inferior to those under which
they themselves work, and insist that German workers
should have the same union rights as the French and be
affiliated with the French building trades union. The build
ing trades have not suffered the same unemployment as
other industries in France, and the trade unions are
ardently advocating the use of German labor in recon
struction.
Labor groups have recently been very active in developing
what they call constructive programs for reconstruction.
The General Confederation of Labor, in association with
the allied Economic Council of Labor, in which the coope
ratives and the engineers' union are also represented, sent
a commission through the devastated districts to study con
ditions and report suggestions. These suggestions, without
important modification, were adopted at the International
Trade Union Conference which met at Amsterdam March
31 and April 1. In brief, they urged greater utilization
of the cooperatives, both in evaluation of damages and in
rebuilding, reconstruction of large sectors by German labor
using German material, financing of international loans by
688
The Nation
the cities of the North, with the German indemnity as ulti

mate guaranty. A similar program was adopted at a meet
ing of representatives of the German Independent Social
Democratic Party, of the British Independent Labor Party,
and of the French Socialist Party (the moderate minority
which refused to accept Communist leadership) at almost
the same time.
These programs are favorably regarded far outside the
ranks of labor. In the present temper of French politics
they suffer by the fact that they are advanced by Socialists
or syndicalists, but the desperate need is becoming so evi
dent that even non-Socialists such as the mayor of Rheims
respond to the Labor Confederation's call for a conference
on the situation, and accept office in the Confederation's
new organization. Anything suggesting international loans,
too, is sure to be welcomed in France. The French have
never abandoned the feeling that their debts are Allied
debts, incurred in a war in which all the Allies shared and
should have shared in proportion to their resources, in
which French losses, both in men and material damage, sur
passed all the rest; and that ultimately the quondam Allies
will have to share the burden of France's financial diffi
culties.
[Vol. 112, No. 2914
Yet these various projects are still too hazy, too purely
paper propositions, to receive the serious detailed attention
necessary before May Day. Loud voices call for "action,"
and "action," if only as a screen for negotiation, is almost
sure to come. The tragic question is whether that action,
itself a mere gesture, may not render futile further discus
sion of these constructive plans, and make the restoration
of northern France an insoluble problem. The actionists
refuse to face that question; of those who do face it only
the Communists smile. The impasse fits their theories to
a T. As a Belgian Communist put it, "The two capitalisms
are faced today with a problem caused by their own errors,
their own contradictions, their very nature. It is impossible
for them. In vain they attempt to solve it, in vain the
victorious capitalism tries to discharge upon the conquered
capitalism a maximum part of its burdens. The recent inci
dents are only a continuation of the war born of capitalism,
and it will continue"until the revolution. The Com
munists today count upon the folly of the French actionists
to bring on financial ruin and achieve for them the revolu
tion which their own propaganda has been unable to bring
about. No wonder thinking radicals and conservatives
liken France's present crisis to a second Verdun.
Footnote to Egyptian
History1
By HIRAM K. MODERWELL
WHENEVER a political dispute becomes hot, certain
simple cliches gain popular currency, purporting to
describe the situation. These are usually misleading and
sometimes wholly false. Now the clich6 which expresses
most people's understanding of the Egyptian situation runs
somewhat like this: "England offered Egypt virtual inde
pendence, but the Egyptians are still quarreling over the
details." And this is one of the wholly false kind.
It is true that what happened looks very like the cliche
version. After the Egyptian rebellion of the spring of
1919, the British Government sent to Egypt the Milner
Mission to investigate the disease and its remedies, under
terms of reference which allowed it great latitude. The
Mission, in several months, excogitated a scheme which
would grant the form and most of the substance of national
independence to Egypt, under a close alliance with Great
Britain, only reserving to the latter limited military gar
rison rights for the protection of the Suez Canal; limited
supervision over the departments of finance and justice, to
protect foreign interests after the contemplated abolition
of the Capitulations; and the right to exercise a certain
fatherly care in regard to Egypt's foreign relations.
The Mission then sought to obtain the consent of the
Egyptian Nationalists, through their recognized represen
tatives headed by Zaghlul Pasha. The Egyptian delegates
demanded that in addition to the articles of the Milner
memorandum, the British protectorate over Egypt be for
mally abolished ; that the powers of the financial adviser be
limited and defined; that Egypt be granted "equal rights
with Great Britain in the Sudan"; and that the size and
privileges of the British army in Egypt be clearly stated.
And there matters stuck.
Now all this is fairly described by the clich6 which I
have quoted, except for one nuance which makes all the
difference. The Milner proposal never was an "offer" from
the British Government. It was merely the recommenda

tion of the Mission. True, the Government announced that
Parliament would consider the Milner memorandum in due
time, and that eventually some action would be taken on
the Egyptian question. But it stayed at a distance from
the memorandum itself as though it were an explosive shell.
"Why, then," you may ask, "did the Milner Mission nego
tiate with Zaghlul Pasha and his delegation?" The official
British answer is that it didn't negotiate but only "con
versed"; and the delegation was not a delegation but only
a group of conversers. Why, anyone could offer his advice
to the British Government concerning Egypt, and then go
and chat with his Egyptian friends about it. But that
wouldn't bind the British Government. Surely you can
see that. But, one may still object, certainly the British
Government would not have gone to all the trouble of ap
pointing the Milner Mission and making public its recom
mendations and facilitating discussion if it had not meant
to offer the Egyptians something of the sort.
The difficulty is explained by one very simple fact: When
the Milner report was written, Great Britain was most
awfully frightened over her position in Egypt. Now, she
isn't. The Egyptian uprising caused more acute distress
to the British imperialist mind than anything that had hap
pened within the Union Jack's orbit since the Boer War.
The British imperialist mind hadn't believed the uprising
possible, but now that it was possible, it believed anything
possible. It seems certain that the imperialist mind was
convinced there was nothing to do but make its rapid get
away with as much dignity as possible.
But later a new and unexpected factor came to British
aid, a factor which imperialism had never reckoned with
1 The report of the Milner Mission and the reply of the
alists were published in the International Relations Section
in its issues of April 6, 18, 20.Editor.
Th* Nation
May 11, 1921]
The Nation
and whose very existence it doggedly denied. That factor

was the class struggle. It may seem quaint that the class
struggle should come to the aid of imperialism, but the
thing is unintelligible only to those who insist on thinking
in cliches. Briefly, Britain has always maintained her
hold over Egypt by protecting the poor peasants against
the native landlords and bureaucrats. During the war, she
allowed this protection to lapse, and permitted numerous
outrages on the peasants to be perpetrated in her name. So
for a few brief months after the war, the devil in the
peasants' mind ceased to be the landlord and became the
British. It was this momentary alliance between the
classes, and only this, that made the 1919 situation serious.
It mattered little to the British what the city mobs might
do; they could always be quelled by a whiff of grapeshot.
But it made all the difference when the peasants cut the
railroads and telegraphs, isolated the various portions of
the British army, and began massacring British soldiers
at leisure. Britain sent her best man, Lord Allenby, to
Egypt to make what he could of the bad business. He exor
cised the immediate peril. Then things began gradually
to get quieter. The British ruling class, which didn't un
derstand what made the trouble, failed equally to under
stand what was curing it. It, doubtless, gives Lord Allenby
all the credit. There is no evidence that it made any at
tempt to manipulate the class struggle to its own advan
tage as British imperialism at its shrewdest would do.
But the class struggle manipulated itself, with the aid of
cotton. There came an era of unimagined prosperity for
the cotton-raising peasants. They forgot about the "tyrant"
in Cairo, and if there was an enemy left it was the rackrenter and usurer in the village. They resumed their an
cient struggle with the native oppressor for the product of
the soil. They no longer responded readily to the pere
grinating student propagandists from El-Hazar. The Cairo
mobs might still make newspaper copy, but they could not
make revolution. Egypt was once more, in the face of the
Briton, dividedand conquered.
Now, whether the British ruling class folly understood
this or not, they knew that the change had taken place.
And they repented them of their folly. Were they going
to relinquish Egypt? Whoever said anything of the sort?
As for the Milner memorandum, it represented only the
opinion of Lord Milner and his associates. "It should never
have been given to the press," said Lord Allenby to me.
The British Government would deal with the matter at
the opportune time, and when it saw fit to negotiate it
would negotiate not with "unauthorized persons," like
Zaghlul, but with the Egyptian Government. (It is part
of the British genius for government to be able to say
things like this in an earnest and affable manner, and with
an absolutely straight face, as though the "Egyptian Gov
ernment" were anything more than a British committee.)
It is possible that the politicians whose business is poli
tics, as distinguished from the politicians whose business is
war, do not regret that the Milner memorandum was given
to the press. It made a splendid impression on the world,
and it kept a large part of Egypt quiet during several criti
cal months. But the time for that is past. Instead, comes
something new.
The Milner Mission had been authorized to report on
"the form of government which, under the Protectorate,
will be best calculated to promote," etc. But now, contem
poraneously with the visit of Mr. Winston Churchill, the
689
new Minister of Colonies, it decides to inquire "what type

of relation between Great Britain and Egypt can best be
substituted for the present Protectorate." Now this implies
the repudiation of the Milner scheme, which has probably
by this time become nothing better than an "archive." And
somehow it suggests to the innocent reader that the Pro
tectorate, like the Milner report, is to be canceled in order
to meet the wishes of the Egyptian Nationalists. Yet it
can as well mean that Egypt is to become a British colony.
Whatever the British Government contemplates, it has
repudiated any implied responsibility for the Milner "offer,"
and has sent its new Minister of Colonies to Egypt. Just
what legitimate business the Minister of Colonies might
have in a nation which forms no part of the British Empire
is not stated. Anyhow, Mr. Winston Churchill is there,
and we must suspect that his business is somehow connected
with Egypt and with colonies.
The only official statement of British policy that I know
of is Lord Allenby's assertion that whatever the Govern
ment grants to Egypt it will be in the direction of increas
ing self-government for the Egyptians. That is a wise
formula, for sudden and complete independence would find
Egypt ill equipped to manage herself. It would put in
power the land-owning and city professional classes, who
have had little experience in governing, and might con
ceivably bring about chaos in a few years' time.
It is really quite true, as the British assert, that the
Egyptians are not ripe for self-government. But it is not
solely the Egyptians who are to blame. The intelligentsia
of the country have in general been kept out of responsible
government offices by the British administration, and those
who have been permitted to serve have often been chosen
for their servility rather than for their ability. Education
is terribly degraded, for it has been definitely a part of
British policy not wantonly to encourage the increase in
the number of persons able to read inflammatory Egyptian
newspapers. Even the technical schools are in one way or
another kept effectually subservient to the interests of the
British occupation.
Yet there is easily enough ability, even enough disinter
ested patriotism, among the Egyptians to enable them to
administer their affairs after five or ten years of appren
ticeship granted to them in good faith. To my mind the
substantial criticism which can be made against the British
occupation is that it has not earnestly sought to provide
this apprenticeship. There is today, probably, a larger per
centage of British in the responsible public services than
when Lord Cromer ruled. And young Britishers are still
continuously coming out to take the posts which the Egyp
tians covet.
I think the evidence of Britain's good intentions toward
Egypt would be found not in a sudden dramatic withdrawal
from Egypt, but in a deliberate, gradual, and honest with
drawal from Egyptian affairs in favor of Egyptians. She
could, in this interval, undo some of the wrongs committed
against the peasants and fortify their position in the com
monwealth. She could, and of course would, protect what
she considers the essential interests of the Empire and of
foreigners, by measures similar to those contemplated in
the Milner memorandum. This would offer a good chance of
peace and prosperity for all concerned. But if the Minister
of Colonies is contemplating adding Egypt to his perma
nent collection it is hard to foresee anything but chronic
trouble.
The Nation
690
[Vol. 112, No. 2914
not arrived at by any general association of nations, but

dictated by the victors in the Great War. It has not secured
In the Driftway
a diplomacy proceeding frankly and in the public view, as

REGON is a State of which much good is doubtless to
be said, but somehow it fails to bring its citizens up
with a proper respect for what is elsewhere known as a

debt of honor.
In other communities such a debt repre
sents a gambling loss, and is the one Simon-pure debt in

most men's code of morals. As it is legally uncollectable,
it is the one debt that most men insist upon paying, with
out fail and without pressure. The only crime worse than
the discreditable intrigues with the Russian adventurers in

arms against the Bolsheviks and the secret agreement between
France and Belgium show. It has not prevented the blockade
of a great part of Europe in peace time. It has done nothing
to check the drift of Central Europe into famine and revolution.
The revision of the Versailles Treaty in the light of modern
international thought, of the pre-armistice utterances of Presi
dent Wilson culminating in the Fourteen Points, and even in
the earlier utterances of the Entente statesmen themselves is
repudiating a gambling debt is to squeal about a gambling

loss. Now it appears from the public prints that a man in
imperative. This revision should be carried out by the repre

sentatives of all nations, irrespective of the parts they played
Oregon has done bothand worse. He has taken advantage

of one of those strange laws to protect gamblers from their
folly which no one ever stooped to invoke heretofore. It
seems that one Sol Swire lost $800 to one Joseph Mozorosky
at the great American game of poker. Now, if ordinary
gambling debts are sacred, those incurred in poker are
super sacrosanct; but, apparently, Sol doesnt know it. He
sued Mozorosky for double the amount of his loss, under a
State law permitting such action, and a morally obtuse
jury gave him the full amount. Mozorosky declined to pay,
whereupon Sol invoked an ancient law authorizing a body
execution against persons refusing to honor court awards.
This landed Mozorosky in jail. Even so, he might have
escaped after ten days, by taking the pauper's oath, had
he not inadvertently testified in court that he was worth
$16,000. So Mozorosky stays in jail, the great American
game of poker is dishonored, and the morals of Oregon
go to the dogs.
THE DRIFTER
during the Great War, and should aim at:
Correspondence
1.
The abrogation of all clauses in the treaty which de
mand ruinous and unworkable indemnities and other crippling

economic conditions;
2. The immediate and general reduction of armaments;

3. The publication and registration of all existing treaties
and understandings with a definite repudiation by each Power
of any secret understandings to which it may be committed;
4. The honest application of the principle of self-determi
nation with adequate safeguards for racial minorities;

5.
The provision of adequate credits to countries ruined
by the war, accompanied and conditioned by a wide extension

of freedom of trade;
6. The immediate admission, on the same terms as those
admitting the original framers of the League, of any nation

desirous of joining the League of Nations;
7. An adequate supervision of the mandates by the League
in order to secure the liberty and well-being of the native races

and an open door for trade.
The world has taken the wrong road and has manifestly lost
its way; it can only recover it by retracing its steps to the
sign post erected by those who had studied the path to peace.
To preserve civilization now manifestly threatened by destruc
tion, it is necessary to go back to the policy identified with the
Fourteen Points and to the widespread world ideal which it
Revise the Treaty of Versailles!
A. Aall (professor of philosophy at University of Chris
SIR:
embodies.
More than two years have now elapsed since the Cen
tiania), William A. Albright, Norman Angell, Lord Ashton
tral Powers sued for peace, and actual fighting between them
and the Entente ceased. Even yet, however, the world is not
of Hyde, Lady Barlow, Henri Barbusse, Sir Hugh Bell,
at peace; nowhere have normal conditions of life been restored,

while over lands inhabited by hundreds of millions of people
it has not been possible even to begin the work of restoration.
To us as to many thousands more this is a profound disap
pointment, not only because such a state of things is deplorable
in itself, but because of the high hopes that might reasonably
H. N. Brailsford, Charles Roden Buxton, Noel Buxton,

Lady Byles, Edward Carpenter, Lord Henry Cavendish
Bentinck, Lady Courtney, A. C. Drolsum (chief librarian
University of Christiania), Miss M. E. Durham, Very Rev.
Moore Ede, Norman Garstin, Principal A. E. Garvie, Lady
a basis for the future peace the famous Fourteen Points of
Dorothea Gibb, Y. Gleditsch (dean of the Diocese of Chris

tiania), General Gough, (Mrs.) M. A. Hamilton, Knut
Hamsun (Nobel prize-winner in literature for Sweden),
Carl Heath, J. A. Hobson, Jerome K. Jerome, Rudolf
Kycken (professor at University of Upsala), R. C. Lam
President Wilson.
Whether, in any case, the Central Powers
bert, H. B. Lees Smith, Sir H. S. Leon, Lucien Le Foyer
would then or later have been compelled to surrender at discre

tion, it is certain they had every right to expect a settlement
(sec.-general of Dlgation Permanente des Socits Fran

caises de la Paix), Jean Longuet (editor of Le Populaire),
Earl Loreburn, J. Ramsay Macdonald, (Mme.) Magdeleine
Marx, Y. Meinich (former mayor of Christiania), Lord
have been entertained in November, 1918.

The Allies, it must be remembered, one and all accepted as
substantially on the basis then laid down.
And had the terms
ultimately imposed at Versailles been conceived in the spirit

to which this program committed the Entente, it is certain that
immeasurably greater progress in the task of reconciliation and
reconstruction would have been made ere now.
The Fourteen
Points not only represented the opinion of President Wilson,

they put into definite shape ideas that had been forming in the
minds of thinking people ever since the world began.
The Union of Democratic Control in this country and similar
organizations abroad had familiarized the world with the ideas
of (1) democratic control in foreign politics, (2) increased
freedom of international trade, (3) reduction of armaments,
(4) self-determination of peoples, and (5) a League of Nations.
The peace treaty has been dictated by men who have pro
claimed, but have not followed, these ideals. It is a settlement,
Mersey, F. Merttens, S. Michelet (professor of theology at

University of Christiania), P. A. Molteno, Oscar Montelius
(Ph.D., LL.D., Stockholm), E. D. Morel, Dr. W. E. Orchard,
Lord Parmoor, Sir George Paish, Arthur Ponsonby, Arnold
Rowntree, (Miss) Evelyn Sharp, G. Bernard Shaw, F. J.
Shaw, Robert Smillie, (Mrs.) Ethel Snowden, Philip Snow
den, Ben Spoor, M.P., (Mrs.) H. M. Swanwick, Gustaf F.
Steffen (Ph.D., professor at University of Gothenburg),

Bishop Y. Tandberg (Norway), Brig. Gen. C. B. Thomson,
Gouttenoire de Courcy, Charles P. Trevelyan, Ben Turner,
E. A. Walton, P.R.S.W., R.S.A., Professor James Ward,
Lady Warwick, Israel Zangwill.
London, April 18
May 11, 1921]
The Nation
the incidence of the burden meantime is shifted from the backs
Books
of the few to the broad shoulders of the manysecretly, inevi

tably, irresistibly. One can observe the preparations for this
shifting in the attitude of the dominant political party in the
The Suicidity of Suicide
United States.
To prevent this process necessitates a dubious
The Next War. By Will Irwin. E. P. Dutton and Company.

HAT is a reasonable pacifist? At first sight this would
struggle for the worker, in which he is unwillingly engaged,

at best an ugly one and a long one.
seem to be a contradiction in terms, likelet us saya

reasonable Christian or a reasonable capitalist, yet in human
Mr. Irwin does not dwell on these remoter, more speculative

aspects of the curse of war, for much deception has disillu
sioned the plain man about the abstract, the intangible, the
spiritual. Yet the worst losses of great wars are not the
experience it is intelligible. Just as, no doubt, the reasonable

Christian is one who while admiring the moral elevation of the
Sermon on the Mount would never seriously consider applying
its precepts to the practical business of livingand there are
many such reasonable Christians even among the clergy; and
just as a reasonable capitalist would be one who believes in
the square deal between capital and labor provided he can
dictate the terms of the dealand in this sense there are few
unreasonable capitalists; so the reasonable pacifist must be

one who has nothing against war in itself as a human institu
tion provided it does not go too far. If it can be proved not
to pay he is against it. In this sense Mr. Irwins reasonable
pacifism as developed in his little primer on human suicide
(which he rather lamely calls The Next War) will satisfy
the most unreasonable pacifist. War as conducted by modern
societies not only does not pay either victor or vanquished, but
if encouraged to ravage human society at the accelerated rate
of intensity developed by science must lead inevitably to the
degeneration and ultimate extinction of the human race.
Like a good journalist addressing a journalistically minded
people, Mr. Irwin does not deal in large pulpit phrases and ab
stractions, which from their oft repeating seem to have lost all
material losses, which our industrial processes enable us to

make good with comparative speed, nor even the human losses,
terrible as they are and fatal to the improvement of the human
species. The irreparable losses after all are the moral losses
the lowering and the coarsening of the entire standard of
human life. We have had spectacular evidence these past two

years of the degradation of popular government under the
strain. If it had not been for the war, would England have
tolerated the Lloyd George Government? or France her aim
less imperialists? or America the cynical materialism of the

present Administration? Government throughout the world is
in the hands of mediocritiesor worse.
And more universally
the degeneration of all human relationships may be felt in the

prevalence of violence, crime, dishonesty. Men in war having
justified force and every egoism, having abandoned all pretense
to chivalry, to the restraints of code or law, what loftier motiva
tion should be expected in private life? What little of our
vaunted civilization, for which so many million men died, is
now lefta thing of spirit not of matterwill melt like chaff
in the furnace of another outbreak of suicidal mania.
These
force as moralities on the modern mind. He is wary of ideals

and sentiments, in a world where reason and ideal have
are the enduring losses of war, not the money and the muni
equally fallen into disrepute through betrayal. To the lethar

gic minded citizen who thinks Men have always fought and
always will fight, but the world has survived many wars and
will outlast my time, Mr. Irwin addresses himself with an array
of big figures and startling facts that may whip his jaded
imagination to fresh conclusions. The probable developments
The way to end war is to end it, and here the pure pacifist
is on firmer ground than the reasonable pacifist, who has to
traffic gingerly with the specious principle of preparedness.
If the great war proved anything, it proved that the way of
preparedness leads always and inevitably into war, and further
that no two experts can agree as to what adequate prepared
of aerial and chemical warfare in future wars, by means of
ness means either in amount of armament or kind of armament.
which noncombatants will be placed in the front line and instead

of army corps whole populations will be wiped out, furnish his
main argument. War is no longer the small enterprise of
minorities; it is the will to suicide of the race. It is no longer
a boil on the leg of humanity; it is a cancer of the vitals. Few
escaped in some sort the consequences of the first world war;
no oneman, woman, or childwill escape the consequences
of the next.
Another, possibly more cogent, approach to the conscious

ness of the average citizen, harried by the income tax and the
tions and the men.
Preparedness is the thin coating of the professional mili

tarist for the bitter pill of war, offered to the loose-minded
civilian who thinks vaguely in terms of cleaning up this or

that backward country (or nourishes secret fears of mob vio
lence at home). The truculence of war leads naturally to the
truculence of going armed to the teeth to prevent war! The
first task of the sincere pacifist is to tear off the mask of pre
paredness propaganda, to expose its fallacy and its hypocrisy.
The way to end war is to end it. Until mankind in the mass
has acquired sufficiently the instinct of self-preservationan
cost of food and rent, is through the pocket nerve, which is not
instinctive repulsion to this form of suicide; until millions of
merely the most sensitive but the most pervasive nerve in the
anatomy of modern society. The figures of the war bill are so
colossal that they must be translated into more comprehensible
terms, and this translation Mr. Irwin has made so graphic that
men instinctively react to the proposal of war as normal men

today react to the proposal of individual murder, suicide, or
incest; until one is no more respectable or thinkable than the
otherthe world will not be safe. So long as we allow business
the remotest dweller in Gopher Prairie can easily estimate just

what his immediate share in the cost of the recent seven years'
debauch is. The morning after of payment for that debauch
is likely to be so prolonged and so complicated that nobody can

predict what the eventual payment must be. For all the money
costs of a great war are not at once apparent and terminable,
even after the lapse of generations. The remoter economic
consequences of war may well be more terrible than the nearer
ones, though less poignantly demonstrable by cinema and graph.
Yet there can already be felt, in the embitterment of the class
struggle over the vital question of who is to pay the bill for
the war by lowered standards of life, one of the most poisonous
results of the catastrophe. We know well enough what ele
ments in the population have paid the lion's share of past wars.
Economists tell us consolingly that war merely shifts the titles
of property ownership from class to class. That may be. But
enterprises like the Chicago Tribune (and many others) to

advocate, daily, arming against Japan or Mexico, to ferret out
every provocative argument against foreign nations, to rattle
journalistically the sword, we shall have war, whether the sen
timent of the country is reasonably pacifist or not. The
General Woodses and the Winston Churchills must be deported
to some safe Arctic zone where they can indulge their dementia
bellicosa harmlessly, instead of elevating one to be president
of a university, the other to be colonial secretary. I am aware
that such a revulsion of popular feeling about war and its advo
cates (including the timid devotees of preparedness) presup

poses nothing less than a religious conversion. The movement
must come from the hearts of the multitude, from the innumer
able burden bearers of all wars, from the little, the unpriv
ileged, the uncounted, from whom all real religious impulses
have always come. To stir the hearts of these masses, so sorely
The Nation
692
wounded and betrayed, it will take something more than the

arguments of the "reasonable pacifist": it will take the passion
of the fanaticand the real pacifist, convinced of the insanity
of human suicide, must be something of a fanatic.
Robert Herrick
Count Witte
The Memoirs of Count Witte. Translated from the original
Russian Manuscript and edited by Abraham Yarmolinsky.
Doubleday, Page and Company.
ONE puts down these memoirs with the strong impression
that Count Witte was quite as anxious to pillory his ene
mies and all whom he did not like, and they were many, as he
was to justify for posterity his own eventful public career.
After all, the former aim was as natural as the latter, for Witte
was a man of pronounced convictions,' aggressive and stubborn
manner, and downright likes and dislikes. Few statesmen have
recorded more frankly their own opinions on public questions
or commented more unsparingly upon the sins and shortcomings
of their contemporaries. Alexander III, he tells us, "was the
only man in whose presence I spoke my mind with complete
unrestraint and with that bluntness which is rooted in my
temperament." This "natural sharpness and looseness of
speech" always stood between him and Nicholas II, who "in this
respect, as in many others, ... is the direct contrary of his
most august father." Throughout the memoirs the criticism
of Nicholas is severe, although at the same time entirely just.
"The Emperor's character may be said to be essentially fem
inine. Someone has observed that Nature granted him mascu
line attributes by mistake. . . . His Majesty does not tolerate
about his person anybody he considers more intelligent than
himself or anybody with opinions differing from those of the
court camarilla. ... He is incapable of playing fair and he
always seeks underhand means and underground ways." Yet
Witte can speak of the Emperor as "the autocratic monarch
of the Russian Empire, responsible for his deeds to God alone,"
and at the end of the last chapter but one can describe himself
as "a sincere monarchist, as a loyal servant of the reigning
House of the Romanovs, as a firm and devoted collaborator of
the Emperor Nicholas II, and as a man profoundly attached to
the Emperor and full of compassion for him."
Witte was himself a Russian noble, but his memoirs show
little save contempt bordering upon hatred for the nobility of
Russia as a class, notwithstanding his disclaimer that he enter
tains any such feeling. The majority of the nobility "is politi
cally a mass of degenerate humanity, which recognizes nothing
but the gratification of its selfish interests and lusts, and which
seeks to obtain all manner of privileges and gratuities at the
expense of the taxpayers generally, that is, chiefly the peas
antry." Few of the Russian notables with whom he had to deal
as members of the Government commanded his respect, and with
many of them he was constantly at swords' points. Kuropatkin
acted in Manchuria "with his customary flightiness and char
acteristic lack of foresight." The appointment of Alexeyev as
commander-in-chief in the Russo-Japanese war "was the height
of absurdity." Plehve "found in me an implacable opponent."
The administration of Stolypin, bad as it was from any point
of view, grows blacker than ever under Witte's pen. Crowned
heads and dignitaries generally he weighed and found wanting.
President Roosevelt, whom he met during the negotiation of the
Treaty of Portsmouth, and whose luncheon at Oyster Bay af
fords the starting-point for a number of disparaging comments
upon American cooking and domestic habits generally, im
pressed Witte as, like other American statesmen, ignorant of
international politics. The rank of count which was bestowed
upon Witte in recognition of his services at Portsmouth was
given, he tells us, not only in spite of the personal dislike of
the Emperor and the Empress, but also "in spite of all the
[Vol. 112, No. 2914
base intrigues conducted against me by a host of bureaucrats

and courtiers, whose vileness was only equaled by their stupid
ity." Nor does the Russian Church escape his condemnation.
Witte was a devout man, and repeatedly turned to prayer in
difficult moments; but he could also write: "Our church has
unfortunately long since become a dead, bureaucratic institu
tion, and our priests serve not the high God of lofty orthodoxy
but the earthly gods of paganism. Gradually we are becoming
less Christian than the members of any other Christian church."
There is small reason to doubt the truth of most of these
bitter characterizations, and they are the more forcible because
Witte, notwithstanding the political rottenness which he saw
everywhere about him, remained a staunch monarchist and con
servative. He could denounce the leaders of the Jew-baiting
"Black Hundreds" as, for the most part, "unscrupulous political
adventurers, with not a single practical and honest political
idea," and with "all their efforts . . . directed toward goading
and exploiting the low instincts of the mob"; and at the same
time insist "that the abolition of Jewish disabilities must be
gradual and as slow as possible." The grant of autonomy to
the universities, which took place during his absence in America,
seemed to him "one of those sudden, ill-calculated acts which
characterized the fitful course of the Government's policy." He
dreaded the approach of revolution, and prayed "that the change
may come about bloodlessly and peacefully"; yet he felt sure
that Russia would eventually have a constitutional govern
ment, and he could point with pride to the fact that, in spite
of the October revolution, "throughout the six months of my
premiership I did not enact a single extraordinary measure re
lating to the administration of St. Petersburg and its district,"
and that there was not "a single case of capital punishment."
Witte is not to be begrudged his dogmatism or his confidence,
for he had, by the standards of his time, a great career. Coming
to prominence first in the railway service, he was the reorganizer of the Russian railway system and the chief promoter of
the Trans-Siberian Railway. He opposed the Russo-Japanese
war and was under no illusions regarding the fateful conse
quences which the war would entail; but he fought skilfully
and hard for Russia at Portsmouth and turned a military and
naval defeat into something like a diplomatic victory. The
Russian loan which he negotiated after the war, the largest
foreign loan which any nation had contracted up to that time,
enabled Russia to maintain the gold standard which he had
introduced in 1896. He could claim a large share in preventing
a clash between Germany and France over Morocco. But he
could not overcome the ignorance and inertia of the Russian
masses, or reform the aristocracy, or root out graft, or circum
vent in the long run a monarch who lacked both intelligence and
will; nor could he do anything to extricate Europe from the
maze of alliances, understandings, and secret agreements which
was leading straight to war. To most of these latter tasks,
indeed, he seems never seriously to have set his hand. One
wonders if, in the years of his virtual exile at least, he did not
perceive that the Russian revolution which he dreaded was to
come only with blood, and that he himself, in spite of all his
efforts at reform, would be denounced as one of those who had
done most to hold it back.
The English translation as a whole is well done, but there
are a number of idiomatic infelicities which should have been
got rid of. "Gouverneur" for private teacher (pp. 10, 26), "im
possible to sleep of nights" (p. 39), "the Imperial appearance
fenestral," meaning a leaning out from a window (p. 41),
"sacred truths . . . were enounced" (p. 97), "several sharp
explanations with the Minister" (p. 101), "built with the close
participation of Admiral Makarov" (p. 105), "anticipating upon
the course of events" (p. 28 and elsewhere), "perlustration of
letters" (p. 179 and elsewhere), and "expediency" for expedition
(p. 222), are the more conspicuous illustrations of faulty or
unusual renderings. The index leaves a good deal to be desired.
William MacDonald
The Nation
May 11, 1921]
Fashions
Spieewood. By Lizette Woodworth Reese. Baltimore: The
Norman, Remington Company.
Resurrecting Life. Michael Strange. Alfred A. Knopf.
A Canopie Jar. By Leonora Speyer. E. P. Dutton and Company.
~\F these three ladies, each of whom dresses in a distinct
poetic fashion, Miss Reese dresses in an old one and prob
ably is proud of it. When Jessie B. Rittenhouse in 1904 wrote
sketches of eighteen "Younger American Poets" she put Miss
Reese in the second place as one who was mistress of a certain
poignant primness, as one who was a feminine Robert Herrick.
The quality implied in the comparison was debatable then and
is more debatable now. Miss Reese's sonnets and quatrain-songs
are impeccable in meter and phrasing, are irreproachable in
sentiment; but they lack original salt. Their edges are frilled
and lavendered, while their central designs are woven of gentle
archaisms"nowhit," "of a surety," "this many a year,"
"hushes where the lonely are," "all palely sweet," "candlelight,"
"wayfarer," "deem"which Herrick did not or would not now
employ. A little conscious archness in rhyme-words and endinglines will not make up for a great monotony of neatness. Any
poetical idea is new to the poet who makes it so; Miss Reese's
are laced and ivoried over with unvarying, respectable age. Her
book is not without charm, but it is without force.
Michael Strange's book is nothing if it is without force. Its
author has risked everything for thischarm, tranquillity, clar
ity. The result is excitement in every line and force in almost
none. The free verse foams like a fountain too zealously fed;
adverbs do for phrases, dashes do for transitions. The theme
is love, and the cant is psychology. There used to be a cant of
the soul and the conscience which was very tiresome, but this
of the nerves and the consciousness is no less so. For the
bruised heart's pain we now have "agony bubbling hotly";
for the agitation of the poet's brain we have the muse "stirring
my reactions . . . causing me to effervesce into expression";
for the searching of the soul we have
the grinding gash of scruples
Exploding inversely to the fore
Despite the bleating din of appalling infirmities arraigned
Against the inquisitorial frown of ascending conscience.
One or two experiences are simply and vividly realized in the
course of these eighty pages, but most lie buried beneath rank,
artificial, behaviorist flowers, beneath ugly, pseudo-Freudian
orchids.
Leonora Speyer falls somewhere between her two contempo
raries, probably a little nearer the second than the first. She
is free of the lavender and the lace, and she is superior to the
psychology of the salon; she is simply and lucidly modern. She
is brave when it comes to metaphorsreckless, indeed, nine
times out of ten; but her intelligence can be depended on to
rescue her eventually, and her energy conducts her most of the
while through free verse that is not every day surpassed for
decisive comment, clear conviction, and unexceptionable cadence.
Spring, I am tired !
Your brisk young buds and vigorous green
And all the bustle of your clouds and winds
But add to my great weariness;
Ask the long grass how heavy falls my foot
Across the excitement of the meadow.
I pray you, still your restless sprigs and sprays
And dancing leaves,
Trying their newest steps on every bough and bush,
And tell the birds to call their mates
More modestly.
Mark Van Doken
693
Kansas
Dust. By Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius. Brentano's.
Folks. By Victor Murdock. The Macmillan Company.
" l^vUST" is a strong, spare, brief book. It is gray as granite,
' but through the stone runs a crimson vein of tragedy.
The authors have probably lived among the "boomers" and
"boosters," among those who have professionally represented the
opening of the Mississippi Valley as one long romance and
the personal lives of the pioneers as undeviatingly idyllic. Yet
their book is no counter-blast; there is no word of polemics;
the objectivity of vision is scrupulously observed. But there is
the clearest seeing and the deepest probing.
The story concerns itself with one man and one woman who
loom very large but never melt into symbols. Through them
the land and its people and its history are seen. Thus all
detail is highly concentrated and given in the shape of its
psychological effects. There is no set description of scene either,
but the sense of the prairie is pervasive and the Kansas dust
comes finally to seem gritty between one's teeth. In this dust
the pioneers themselves perished. Their son, Martin Wade,
survived and prospered greatly. But the harsh necessity of
wringing the land from the wilderness, and then the fertility
from the land, leaves him, despite his energy and rough intelli
gence, a stunted creature, a slave of field and plow, barn and
byre. He is rooted to the soil by pain, by a kind of hunger, by
stubbornness, by loveby a sense of conflict and a deep sense of
possession that grows out of conflict. He marries vaguely
marries poor Rose for companionship and cooking and the care
of chickens and then with a blank, malignant unconsciousness
wreaks vengeance on her because she never had any magic for
him. He is a miser and a bully; he stints his wife and son
cruelly to put the money into machinery and farm-buildings.
He reduces her to premature decay and drives the boy to the
coal-fields and so to his death. But he has starved his own
nature with an equal fierceness. When he is far past fifty,
beauty comes suddenly and breaks him and the unknown possi
bilities of life flood his heart. But it is, of course, too late.
Dust is his portion. The farm even kills him before his time.
Then a traction company sweeps the farm away and all his
toil and poverty of soul have availed nothing. Rose is rich
and old and free and futile and reflects vaguely on Martin's
wasted life and death.
The book is profoundly honest and uncompromising. But it
is quite without needless subtlety. The authors have so mas
tered and absorbed their material that they could project it by
the starkest methods and in a few brief chapters. Its union
of brevity and completeness makes "Dust" a notable contribu
tion to the new fiction in America. It is forceful and exact,
calm and luminous. It would come near being a little master
piece if the diction itself were more sensitively selected and
more finely tempered, if the stylistic workmanship were, in the
most liberal and creative sense, more literary in character.
But the newspaper is, contrary to a common notion, a poor
school of authorship. For if newspaper writing were as exact
and sensitive as it is vague and blunted, newspapers would
tell the truth. And what would become of our particular brand
of civilization then? Thus Mr. Victor Murdock, Congressman
from Kansas and once editor of the Wichita Daily Eagle, calmly
writes and sees through the press the following: "The house
hold had a library with current magazines in a reading-room.
The furniture was uniform and of a style, and the few pictures
on the walls evidenced the quality of having been selected rather
than to have been accumulated." After that we are not sur
prised when Mr. Murdock calls Edison "the Wizard" and gives
this inimitable description of a campaign oration of his idolized
McKinley: "It was without humor, a wholesome, unimpassioned declaration of faith in a protective tariff, a reference to
the Civil War ending with a stanza, and a tribute to his politi
cal party and its achievements." How marvelous to call a dec
694
The Nation
laration of faith in a protective tariff "wholesome"! Who does

not yearn to know what stanza the unimpassioned orator quoted?
Mr. Murdock's sketches deal with the pioneer period in Kan
sas, the frontier life, the growth of Wichita. His memories are
very full and varied and his observation of mere externals is
shrewd enough. But the amusing and significant thing about
his book and mind is that, in a deeper sense, he never per
mitted himself to observe at all. He merely used his eyes to
discover what he believed a nice eye ought to seepathetic
gestures, homespun virtues, quaint, harmless follies, domestic
sentiments, American faith and hope. Had he known Martin
Wade he would have extolled the man's industry, zeal, pros
perity, his wife's devotion to her husband, her chickens, her
cows, the broad acres, the golden corn. Neither tragedy nor
distinction enters his world. Roosevelt and Fairbanks visit a
farm and talk about the price of bacon and the scarcity of
tenderloins, the names of girl-babies and the question of hired
help. Mr. Murdock's bosom swells at the thought that the
great ones of earth are "just folks." Is it surprising that out
of the Middle West come books with a touch of the cruel, the
harsh, the bitter? Mr. William Allen White complained re
cently of the hard-heartedness of the younger novelists. Alas,
only unsparing veracity can cleanse away these soft confusions
and awaken a sense for the qualitative distinctions that make
life civilized.
Upper Silesia
The Upper SUesian Question and Germany's Coal Problem. By
Sidney Osborne. London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd.
1\/f R. Osborne's book throws a new and much needed light on
* * the vexed Upper Silesian problem, carefully surveying
historic, economic, and political facts, bringing to light many
aspects which have long been buried in propaganda, and pre
senting them all forcefully and convincingly. He reminds us
that the only historic basis of Poland's claim to Upper Silesia
is the fact that from 1000 to 1163 a.d. it was in Polish hands.
In 1336 the King of Poland solemnly and unconditionally re
nounced all rights to Upper Silesia. In fact, Poland's claim
dates back only to the discovery of coal there. Ever since the
twelfth century Germans have been developing the resources of
this territory, and it is owing to their science and labor that
Upper Silesia is one of the richest spots in Europe today. Be
sides supplying Germany with machinery, textiles, one-fourth
her coal, and many other commodities, it is a very important
source of her agricultural products, thanks to the intensive
cultivation of a rather unpromising soil. And since Germany
provides Upper Silesia raw materials and a market for her
goods, the economic interdependence of the two regions is un
questionable.
Perhaps the best proof of Germany's educational work in
Upper Silesia is the fact that German is understood every
where. It is claimed that most of the inhabitants are Polish by
language, but Mr. Osborne shows us that Wasserpolnisch, the
language spoken by the uneducated, which is a mixture of
Polish and German, is so unlike Polish that when Polish agi
tators went to Upper Silesia to gain support among the people,
they could not make themselves understood, and were forced to
express themselves in German, wlrich everyone understood. The
schools and universities are German, and the comfortable con
ditions of the workers are distinctly typical of Germany in con
trast to the practical serfdom which is the lot of Polish workers.
Poland has shown no interest in the development of Upper
Silesia, and practically none in its politics. Poland's need of its
coal is insignificant, since only about one-seventh of Polish coal
comes from Upper Silesia, and Poland's own mines have not
been fully developed.
And so Mr. Osborne proceeds, knocking the bottom out of com
monly accepted doctrines with his invaluable collection of
authoritative data. The book is too detailed and dry in parts
[Vol. 112, No. 2914
for the ordinary reader, and much of it is written in a clumsy

style. By a better arrangement pf the material, a good deal of
repetition could be avoided. But the book is indispensable to
any student of the Upper Silesian question.
Books in Brief
rp'HE first English version of Baron Dr. von Schrenck Not* zing's "Phenomena of Materialization" (Dutton) gives us
the results of his experiments with the medium "Eva C.," car
ried on for four years in the realm of "subjective occurrences
and mental mediumship." He recounts in detail the alleged
"teleplastic phenomena," the appearance on many occasions of
"vital efflorescences," proceeding from the body of the medium,
"the production of white threads; clouds and mists; materials
resembling muslin used for the clothing of the apparitions or
of the medium [during transfiguration] ; the appearance of
forms of an undefined character; vague half-shadows ; visible
and tangible hands, fingers, and structures resembling human
limbs; impressions of these on lamp-blacked paper, or in clay;
photographic reproductions of ideoplastic forms in various
stages of development, including those invisible to the normal
human eye; sketches of artistic reproductions of faces, or frag
ments of animal and human limbs; and finally, fully formed
phantoms of distinct character and definite features and forms."
The author confesses that 54 per cent of the sittings were
without result, but asks us to believe that in the other 46 per
cent these repulsive manifestations really occurred. We are
assured that every precaution was taken to prevent fraud,
but are forced to conclude that either the Baron was basely
deceived or that he is perpetrating a tremendous hoax upon
us. The book has 225 illustrations, many of them his own
alleged photographs of "spook" veils, hands, and phantoms.
Hereward Carrington and others have shown exactly how ex
cellent ghost-pictures may be made, giving extraordinary spec
tral effects. They have also made a complete exposure of
materialization phenomena. Dr. Notzing claims that his search
ing examination of the medium at the beginning of each seance
precluded all fraud accomplished by mechanical contrivances,
but if the savants have been deceived for long periods by
Eusapia Palladino and other clever mediums, is it not wholly
probable that our author has also been deceived in his in
vestigations?
"/"UCERO: A Biography" (University of California Press),
V^* by Thorsten Petersson, is a large, free book with which its
large, free hero would be well pleased. The panorama of a
great life which just missed being very great is amply, loosely
spread before us, Cicero's own speeches and treatises and letters
forming the principal basis of the narrative. The shortcomings
of that many-sided man Mr. Petersson admits but does not
expound ; the many-sidedness itself, and the almost supreme vir
tue of wide-mindedness, he expounds without qualification. A
statesman who was after all an orator, a philosopher who was
after all an encyclopedist, a letter-writer who was after all more
an intellect than a soul, Cicero lives in these pages to the extent
that he can be made to live anywhere. The best chapters are
the first four, filling in the ever amazing social and physical
scene which Rome was in the first century B.C., and the last,
setting forth with affection and dignity the fabled incidents of
Cicero's magnificent death.
CICERO was a representative Roman in that he was incapable
of an economic interpretation of history. That Rome indeed
was incapable even of an economic policy has been evident to
more than one generation of modern scholars, and is proved
again in "An Economic History of Rome to the End of the
Republic" (Johns Hopkins Press) by Tenney Frank. Mr. Frank
has had to work with the meagerest of ancient materials
remarks by the way, inscriptions, letters, poems, coins, archaeo
May 11, 1921]
The Nation
695
he doesn't doubt that there are police courts in heaven as there

are on earth, that there are cleansing, purgatorial fires, and a
last chance, maybe, to be good. But neither the fires of hell
nor his belief in them have power to change the essential char
acter with which the implacable universe brought him forth.
His notion of an expiatory action is to steal a star from the
sky for his little daughter. He is Liliom still, and the joke is
on the order with which man has sought to snare the wild
cosmos. The joke is on a man-made world and a man-made
heaven, because both that world and that heaven have used
force. The joke is not on Julie. Julie has used love. "There
AG. GARDINER'S "The Anglo-American Future," listed
are blows that don't hurt; oh, yes, there are blows that you
in The Nation's Spring Book Supplement as an Oxford
don't feel." Love does not feel the blows. Love does not de
University Press book, is to be published in America by Thomas
mand nor coerce nor imprison. Paradise is in the heart of
Seltzer.
love. For the sake of that ending you forgive Molnar the
shoddy, sentimental little patches, for the sake of that moment
which is beautiful, which is indeed great.
Drama
Among the many admirable productions of the Theater Guild
that of "Liliom" may unhesitatingly be classed first. It is of
"Liliom"
a beautiful perfection. A scrupulous respect for reality is
combined in it with a strong and sober imaginative sense. The
FRANZ MOLNAR'S "Liliom"the "Roughneck"presented
first may be attributed to the direction of Mr. Frank Reicher.
by the Theater Guild at the Garrick illustrates with ex
He was brought up in a school where veracity was understood
traordinary force and freshness the plasticity of dramatic form.
and practiced as in no other period of theatrical history. The
Instead of a play in three acts or four we have here a dramatic
imaginative lift that the production has is largely due to Mr.
"legend in seven scenes and a prologue." To emphasize this
Lee Simonson. Better than any other scenic artist among us
matter of form is to recall, of course, the unteachableness of
he can convey the sense of out-of-doors, of the free air, of gar
the human mind. Despite the theater of the Hindus, the
dens and horizons. His spring really blooms, his autumn is
Greeks, the medievals, the Elizabethans, the moderns, your
russet and full of melancholy. His railroad embankment in
average director, critic, playwright believes that the form of the
the fourth scene is a triumph of the imaginative vision of
drama is now immutably fixed. He has substituted a dead
reality, his "courtroom in the beyond" of an airy, restrained,
formula for a living reality and guards that formula with
compelling fancy.
belligerent ardor. Therefore to us, at this moment, the very
The actors were assisted by the fact that the directors did
form of "Liliom" has a special and exhilarating charm.
not tamper with the play. Its folk-character is preserved and
That form was used in a tentative way by Hauptmann in
so its people retain their fine, concrete humanity. Thus, for
"Elga." It was deliberately cultivated by Frank Wedekind
from whose works the Hungarian Molnar undoubtedly-dewrw"" instance, Miss Eva Le Gallienne, whose impersonations have
hitherto been slight and faint and bloodless, is here transformed
it. It seeks to substitute an inner for an outer continuity, suc
into a peasant girl, awkward and rude but full of the patience
cessive crises for a single one, and to blend chronicle with cul
of a deep passion and the tenacity of a noble endurance. Mr.
mination. It takes the crests of the waves of life as the
Joseph Schildkraut fulfilled all the expectations that weTe en
objects of its vision. The last wave merges into the indistin
tertained of him. Once or twice he forced the note of stub
guishable sea. Film technique may be said to have influenced
born impudence, as in his entrance into the infernal flames.
this form or even the chronicle method of Shakespeare. But
But predominantly his Liliom is memorably racy, vivid, and
it does not select its episodes to tell a story. They must un
exact. Miss Helen Westley surpasses all her recent perform
fold the inner fate of souls. In Wedekind and the expressionists
ances in a part that demands not only harshness and verve
the scenes are not only symbolical from the point of view of
but a bitter pathos and a wise relenting; and Mr. Dudley Digges,
the entire action but also in their inner character, and little
whose portrait of The Sparrow is a little masterpiece of sly
attempt is made to preserve the homely colors of life. What
rascality, heightens our sense of his flexibility and insight.
makes "Liliom" so attractive is that Molnar has avoided this
And it would be ungrateful not to mention the no less excel
extreme. He has used the expressionist structure and rhythm;
lent accomplishment in minor parts of Hortense Alden, Henry
the content of his scenes is beautifully faithful to the texture
Travers, Edgar Stehli, and Albert Perry.
of reality.
Ludwig Lewisohn
Poor Liliom, barker for a merry-go-round in an amusement
park, what is he but once more the eternal outcast, wanderer,
unquiet one? He hasn't been taught a trade; he can't settle
down as a care-taker; he isn't canny like the excellent BerkoA New Book
witz. But he loves Julie. She weeps over his worthlessness
and he strikes herstrikes her out of misery, to flee from selfabasement, to preserve some sort of superiority and so some
Denmark
liking for himself. She is to have a child and something cosmic
A Co-operative Commonwealth
and elemental tugs at the bully's heart. Are love and father
hood only for the canny ones, the treaders in the mill, the
by
hewers of wood? This is the conflict that destroys him. He is,
Frederic
C. Howe
viewed in another fashion, Everyman, and the little play,
which has its shoddy, sentimental patches, is a sort of gay and
rough and pitiful Divine Comedy. Liliom did not ask to be
$1.69
born with those imperious instincts into a tight, legalized, moral
world. Society demands so much of him and gives him nothing
wherewith to fulfil those demands. The world process has
not even given him brains enough to think himself beyond
demands and restrictions. He struggles with his body and
Herald Square
New York
nerves. His mind is docile. He believes that he is a sinner;
logical remains; for no Roman historian or orator ever wrote

fully about land-holding or commerce while politics, intrigue,
and ceremony existed to engage him. Mr. Frank, in addition to
knowing the literature of his subject, is familiar at first hand
with the geography and the soil of modern Rome, so that his
chapters on agriculture are particularly crowded with informa
tion. His book as a whole, being based on monographs by him
self in learned periodicals, is detailed and dry, but it is of
permanent value.
International
Relations
Russia's Treaties with Persia and

Afghanistan
THE following full texts of Soviet Russia's treaties
with Persia and Afghanistan are taken from the
Manchester Guardian of March 31. The Persian treaty was
signed in Moscow on February 26, and the Afghanistan
treaty at the same place two days later.
Treaty Between Russia and Persia

The Government of Persia on the one side and the Govern
ment of the Russian Socialist Federate Soviet Republic on the
other side, moved by the desire to establish for future time firm,
good-neighborly, and brotherly relations between the Persian
and Russian peoples, decided to enter upon negotiations with
this object, for which purpose they appointed as their plenipo
tentiaries :
The Government of Persia,
Ali-Guli-Khan Moshaverol Memalek.
The Government of the Russian Socialist Federate Soviet
Republic,
Georgii Vasilievich Chicherin and
Lev Mikhailovich Karakhan.
The above-named plenipotentiaries, after mutual presentation
of their credentials, which were found to be drawn up in proper
form and due order, agreed as follows:
Clause I
The Government of the R.S.F.S.R., in accordance with its
declarations set forth in notes of January 14, 1918, and June 26,
1919, of the principles of the R.S.F.S.R.'s policy with regard to
the Persian people, once more solemnly declares Russia's im
mutable renunciation of the policy of force with regard to Persia
pursued by the Imperialist Governments of Russia that have
been overthrown by the will of her workmen and peasants.
Accordingly, wishing to see the Persian people independent,
flourishing, and freely controlling the whole of its own pos
sessions, the Government of the R.S.F.S.R. declares all trac
tates, treaties, conventions, and agreements concluded by the
late Czarist Government with Persia and tending to the di
minution of the rights of the Persian people completely null
and void.
/
Clause II
The Government of the R.S.F.S.R. brands [as criminal] the
policy of the Government of Czarist Russia, which, without the
agreement of the peoples of Asia and under the guise of as
suring the independence of these peoples, concluded with other
states of Europe treaties concerning the East which had as their
ultimate object its gradual seizure. The Government of the
R.S.F.S.R. unconditionally rejects that criminal policy as not
only violating the sovereignty of the states of Asia but also
leading to organized brutal violence of European robbers on
the living body of the peoples of the East.
Wherefore, and in accordance with the principles set out in
Clauses I and IV of the present treaty, the Government of the
R.S.F.S.R. declares its refusal to take part in any measures
whatsoever tending to weaken or violate the sovereignty of
Persia and declares completely null and void all conventions and
agreements concluded by the late Government of Russia with
third Powers for the harm of Persia and concerning her.
Clause III
Both the High Treating Parties are agreed to recognize and
observe the frontier between Persia and Russia in that form
and outline in which it was established by the Frontier Com
Section
mission of 1881. Moreover, the Government of the R.S.F.S.R.,

not wishing to enjoy the fruits of the rapacious policy of the
late Czarist Government of Russia, resigns the use of the islands
of Ashur Ada and the other islands lying along the coast of
the Astrabad province of Persia, and further returns to Persia
the village of Firuze and the land surrounding it, ceded by
Persia to Russia according to the agreement of the 28th of May,
1893. The Government of Persia for its part agrees that the
town of Seraks, known under the name of Russian or Old
Seraks, with the adjoining district bounded by the river Seraks,
remains in the possession of Russia.
Both the High Contracting Parties shall make use of the
river Atrek and the other frontier rivers and waters on equal
terms, and for the final regulation of the question of the usage
of frontier waters and for the settling of all disputed frontier
and territorial affairs in general a commission of representa
tives of Persia and Russia shall be appointed.
Clause IV
Recognizing the right of each people to the free and unhin
dered settlement of its political fate, each of the High Con
tracting Parties disclaims and will strictly refrain from inter
ference in the internal affairs of the other party.
Clause V
Both the High Contracting Parties bind themselves:
1. Not to permit the formation or existence on their territory
of organizations or groups, under whatever name, or of sepa
rate individuals, who have made it their object to struggle
against Persia or Russia, and also against states allied with
the latter, and similarly not to permit on their territory the
recruiting or mobilization of persons for the armies or armed
forces of such organizations.
2. To forbid those states or organizations, under whatever
name, which make it their object to struggle against the other
High Contracting Party, to bring into the territory or to take
through the territory of each of the High Contracting Parties
anything that may be used against the other High Contracting
Party.
3. By all means at their disposal to prohibit the existence
on their territory of the troops or armed forces of any third
state whatsoever, the presence of which would constitute a
threat to the frontiers, interests, or security of the other High
Contracting Party.
Clause VI
Both the High Contracting Parties are agreed that in case on
the part of third countries there should be attempts by means
of armed intervention to realize a rapacious policy on the terri
tory of Persia or to turn the territory of Persia into a base
for military action against the R.S.F.S.R., and if thereby danger
should threaten the frontiers of the R.S.F.S.R. or those of
Powers allied to it, and if the Persian Government after warn
ing on the part of the Government of the R.S.F.S.R. should
prove to be itself not strong enough to prevent this danger,
the Government of the R.S.F.S.R. shall have the right to take
its troops into Persian territory in order to take necessary
military measures in the interests of self-defense. When the
danger has been removed the Government of the R.S.F.S.R
promises immediately to withdraw its troops beyond the fron
tiers of Persia.
Clause VII
In view of the fact that the combinations set out in Clause VI
might similarly take place in relation to security on the Cas
pian Sea, both the High Contracting Parties are agreed that
in case in the personnel of the ships of the Persian fleet there
shall prove to be citizens of third Powers making use of their
presence in the Persian fleet for purposes unfriendly with re
gard to the R.S.F.S.R., the Government of the R.S.F.S.R. shall
have the right to demand from the Government of Persia the
removal of the said harmful elements.
May 11, 1921]
The Nation
Clause VIII
The Government of the R.S.F.S.R. declares its complete re
jection of that financial policy which the Czarist Government
of Russia pursued in the East, supplying the Government of
Persia with financial means not in order to assist the economic
development and flourishing of the Persian people, but in the
form of a political enfetterment of Persia. The Government
of the R.S.F.S.R. therefore resigns all rights to the loans fur
nished to Persia by the Czarist Government, and declares such
loans null and not to be repaid. It similarly resigns all de
mands for the use of those state revenues of Persia by which
the said loans were guaranteed.
Clause IX
The Government of the R.S.F.S.R., in accordance with its
expressed condemnation of the colonial policy of capitalism,
which served and is serving as a reason for innumerable miser
ies and sheddings of blood, renounces the use of those financial
undertakings of Czarist Russia which had as their object the
economical enfetterment of Persia. It therefore hands over
into the complete possession of the Persian people the financial
sums, valuables, and in general, the assets and liabilities of the
Discount Credit Bank of Persia, and similarly the movable
and immovable property of the said Bank existing on the terri
tory of Persia.
Note. The Government of Persia agrees, in each town where
Russian Consular institutions shall be set up, and where there
are houses belonging to the Discount Credit Bank of Persia,
handed over to the Government of Persia according to this
Clause IX, to provide for the gratuitous use of the Government
of the R.S.F.S.R., one of such houses at the choice of the Soviet
Government as a Russian Consular Institution.
Clause X
The Government of the R.S.F.S.R. repudiates the tendency
of world imperialism which strives to build in foreign coun
tries roads and telegraph lines not so much for the cultural
development of the peoples, as for insuring for itself the means
of military penetration. In view of this, and wishing to pro
vide the Persian people with the possibility of free disposal of
the means of communication and correspondence, vitally neces
sary for the independence and cultural development of each
people, and further, as far as it can, to compensate Persia for
the losses caused her by the troops of the Czarist Government,
the Government of the R.S.F.S.R. gratuitously hands over as
the absolute property of the Russian people the following Rus
sian erections [sic] :
(a) The chausseea Enzeli-Teheran and Kazvin-Hamadan with
all the lands, buildings, and inventory attribute to these roads.
(b) The railways Djulfa-Tauris and Sofian-Lake Urmia,
with all buildings, rolling stock, and other property.
(c) Quays, goods stores, steamers, barges, and other means
of transport on Lake Urmia, with all attribute property.
(d) All the telegraph and telephone lines constructed by the
late Czarist Government within the boundaries of Persia, to
gether with all property, buildings, and inventory.
(e) The port of Enzeli, with the goods stores, electric power
station, and other buildings.
Clause XI
Proceeding from the consideration that, by virtue of the prin
ciples set out in Clause I of the present treaty, the peace trac
tate concluded between Persia and Russia in Turkmancha on
the 10th of February, 1828, Clause 8 of which deprived Persia
of the right to have a fleet on the Caspian Sea, has lost its
force, both the High Contracting Parties are agreed that from
the moment of the signing of the present treaty they shall
equally enjoy the right of free navigation on the Caspian Sea
under their own flags.
Clause XII
The Government of the R.S.F.S.R. solemnly renouncing the
enjoyment of economic privileges based on military predomi
697
nance declares null and void also all other concessions besides
those enumerated in Clauses 9 and 10 forced from the Gov
ernment of Persia by the late Czarist Government for itself
and its subjects. From the moment of the signing of the pres
ent treaty it returns to the Persian people in the person of the
Government of Persia all the said concessions, carried out and
not carried out alike, and all the portions of land received on
the basis of these concessions. Of the lands and properties
belonging in Persia to the late Czarist Government there re
mains in the possession of the R.S.F.S.R. the lands occupied by
the Russian Mission in Teheran and in Zergende, with all the
buildings and the property that is in them, and also the grounds,
buildings, and property of the late Russian consulates general,
consulates, and vice consulates in Persia.
Note. The Government of the R.S.F.S.R. renounces the right
of ruling the village of Zergende, which belonged to the late
Czarist Government.
Clause XIII
The Government of Persia, on its part, promises not to hand
over the concessions and property returned to Persia according
to the present treaty to any third state or its citizens, in pos
session or for disposal or enjoyment, but to preserve the said
rights to itself for the good of the Persian people.
Clause XIV
Recognizing the whole significance of the fishing industries of
the southern shores of the Caspian Sea for the normal supply
of Russia with means of nourishment, the Government of Persia,
on the expiration of the legal force of the treaty obligations
which it has at present with regard to these industries, is
willing to conclude an agreement with the proper organs of
supply of the R.S.F.S.R. concerning the exploitation of these
industries on special conditions which shall by that time have
been worked out.
The Government of Persia similarly is ready to consider with
the Government of the R.S.F.S.R. means which at the present
time, before the above-mentioned conditions come about, should
be capable of insuring the organs of supply of the R.S.F.S.R. the
possibility of supplying Russia from the said fishing industries.
Clause XV
The Government of the R.S.F.S.R., proceeding from the prin
ciple it has proclaimed, of the freedom of religious faiths,
wishes to put an end to the missionary religious propaganda
in the countries of Islam, which had as its secret object action
on the popular masses and supported in this way the rapacious
intrigues of Czarism. It therefore declares all those religious
missions closed which were established in Persia by the late
Czarist Government, and will take measures to prohibit in fu
ture the sending of such missions into Persia.
The lands, buildings, and properties of the Orthodox Re
ligious Mission in Urmia, and similarly all the property of
other institutions of this kind, the Government of the R.S.F.S.R.
gratuitously hands over into the perpetual possession of the
Persian people in the person of the Government of Persia.
The Government of Persia will make use of the said lands,
buildings, and property for the establishment of schools and
other cultural educational institutions.
Clause XVI
In accordance with the regulation set out in the note of the
Soviet Government of the 26th of June, 1919, concerning the
abolition of Russian consular jurisdiction, Russian citizens liv
ing in Persia, and similarly Persian citizens living in Russia,
will from the moment of the signing of the present treaty enjoy
equal rights with local citizens, and will be subject to the laws
of the country in which they are. All their affairs of justice
will be considered in the local institutions of justice.
Clause XVII
Persian citizens in Russia, and similarly Russian citizens in
Persia, are exempted from military service and from the paying
of any military taxes or contributions whatever.
698
The Nation
Clause XVIII
With regard to the right of free circulation inside the coun
try, Persian citizens in Russia and Russian citizens in Persia
will enjoy the rights given to the citizens of the most favored
Power, other than those allied with Russia.
Clause XIX
Both the High Contracting Parties in the shortest time after
the signing of the present treaty will set about the renewal of
trade relations. The means of organizing import and export
of goods and payment for them and similarly the order of col
lecting and the amounts of customs duties set by Persia on
Russian goods shall be defined by a special trade convention,
which shall be worked out by a special commission of repre
sentatives of both parties.
Clause XX
Both the High Contracting Parties mutually give each other
the right of transit of goods through Persia or through Russia
into a third country, and further goods taken through must
not be taxed with a duty larger than that on the goods of the
most favored nation.
Clause XXI
Both the High Contracting Parties in the shortest time after
the signing of the present treaty will set about the renewal of
telegraphic and postal relations between Persia and Russia.
The conditions of these relations shall be defined in a special
telegraphic convention.
Clause XXII
With the object of supporting the good-neighborly relations
established with the signing of the present treaty and for the
strengthening of good mutual understanding, each of the High
Contracting Parties shall be represented in the capital of the
other party by a plenipotentiary representative, enjoying in
Persia as in the R.S.F.S.R. the right of exterritoriality and
other prerogatives, according to international law and cus
toms, and according to the rules current in both countries with
regard to diplomatic representatives.
Clause XXIII
Both the High Contracting Parties, with the object of de
veloping relations between their countries, shall mutually estab
lish consulates at points which shall be settled by mutual agree
ment The rights and competencies of consuls shall be defined
by a consular convention, to be concluded immediately after the
signing of the present treaty, and also the laws and rules cur
rent in both countries with regard to consular institutions.
Clause XXIV
The present treaty is subject to ratification within three
months. Ratifications shall be exchanged as soon as possible.
Clause XXV
The present treaty is drawn up in the Persian and Russian
languages in two original examples. In interpretation both
texts shall be accounted authentic.
Clause XXVI
The present treaty comes into force immediately on its signa
ture.
In confirmation of which the undersigning have signed the pres
ent treaty and affixed their seals to it.
Drawn up in Moscow 26 th February, 19SI.
6. Chicherin
L. Karakhan
Moshaverol Memalek
Treaty Between Russia and Afghanistan

With a view to strengthening friendly relations between Rus
sia and Afghanistan, and with a view to confirming the actual
independence of Afghanistan, the Russian Socialist Federate
[Vol. 112, No. 2914
Soviet Republic on the one side and the Sovereign State of

Afghanistan on the other, decided to conclude the present treaty,
for which purpose they appointed as their plenipotentiaries :
The Government of the Russian Socialist Federate Soviet
Republic,
Georgii Vasilievich Chicherin,
Lev Mikhailovich Karakhan,
and the Government of the Sovereign State of Afghanistan,
Muhammed Valy Khan,
Mirza Muhammed Khan,
Hulyam Sidluik Khan.
The above-named plenipotentiaries, after mutual presentation
of their credentials, which were found to be in due form and
order, agreed as follows:
Clause I
The High Contracting Parties, recognizing their mutual in
dependence and promising to respect it, mutually enter into
regular diplomatic relations.
Clause II
The High Contracting Parties bind themselves not to enter
with any third State into a military or political agreement
which would damage one of the Contracting Parties.
Clause III
Legations and consulates of the High Contracting Parties
will mutually and equally enjoy diplomatic privileges in ac
cordance with the customs of international law.
Note I. Including:
(a) The right to hoist the state flag.
(b) Personal inviolability of the registered members of lega
tions and consulates.
(c) Inviolability of diplomatic correspondence and of persons
fulfilling the duties of couriers and every kind of mutual assis
tance in these matters.
(d) Communication by radio, telephone, and telegraph, in
accordance with the privileges of diplomatic representatives.
(e) Exterritoriality of buildings occupied by legations and
consulates, but without the right of giving asylum to persons
whom the local Government officially recognizes as having
broken the law3 of the country.
Note II:
The military agents of both contracting parties shall be at
tached to their legations on a basis of parity.
Clause IV
The High Contracting Parties mutually agree upon the open
ing of five consulates of the Russian Socialist Federate Soviet
Republic on Afghan territory and seven consulates of Afghan
istan on Russian territory, of which five are to be within the
boundaries of Russian Central Asia.
Note. Over and above these the opening of further con
sulates and consular points in Russia and Afghanistan shall
be defined in each particular case by special agreement between
the High Contracting Parties.
Clause V
Russian consulates shall be established in Herat, Meimen,
Mazar-i-Sherif, Kandahar, and Gazn. Afghan consulates shall
be established: a consulate general in Tashkent and consulates
in Petrograd, Kazan, Samarkan, Merv, and Krasnovodsk.
Note. The order and time of the actual opening of the Rus
sian consulates in Afghanistan and of the Afghan consulates
in Russia shall be defined by special agreement between the
two Contracting Parties.
Clause VI
Russia agrees upon the free and untaxed transit through her
territory of every kind of goods bought by Afghanistan either
in Russia herself, through the state organs, or directly from
abroad.
Clause VII
The High Contracting Parties agree upon the freedom of
The Nation
May 11, 1921]
tê
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700
Eastern nations on the principle of independence and in ac

cordance with the general wish of each nation.
Clause VIII
In confirmation of Clause 7 of the present treaty, the High
Contracting Parties agree upon the actual independence and
freedom of Bokhara and Khiva, whatever may be the form of
their government, in accordance with the wish of their peoples.
Clause IX
In fulfilment of and in accordance with the promise of the
Russian Socialist Federate Soviet Republic, expressed by its
head, Lenin, to the Minister Plenipotentiary of the Sovereign
State of Afghanistan, Russia agrees to hand over to Afghan
istan the frontier districts which belonged to her in last cen
tury, observing the principle of justice and the free expression
of the will of the people. The order of the expression of the
free will and the expression of the opinion of the majority of the
regular local population shall be regulated in a special treaty
between the two states through the plenipotentiaries of both
sides.
Clause X
In order to strengthen the friendly mutual relations between
the High Contracting Parties the Government of the Russian
Socialist Federate Soviet Republic agrees to give to Afghanis
tan financial and other help.
Clause XI
The present treaty is drawn up in the Russian and Persian
languages and both texts are accounted authentic.
Clause XII
The present treaty becomes valid after its ratification by the
Governments of the High Contracting Parties. The exchange
of ratifications shall take place in Kabul, in confirmation of
which the plenipotentiaries of both sides signed the present
treaty and set their seals to it.
Drawn up in Moscow on the 28th of February, 1921.
Supplementary Clause
In development of Clause 10 of the present treaty the Gov
ernment of the Russian Socialist Federate Soviet Republic
gives to the Sovereign State of Afghanistan the following help :
1. Yearly free subsidy to the extent of one million rubles in
gold or silver in coin or bullion.
2. Construction of a telegraph lineKushka-Herat-KandaharKabul.
3. Over and above this the Government of the Russian So
cialist Federate Soviet Republic expresses its readiness to place
at the disposal of the Afghan Government technical and other
specialists.
This help the Government of the Russian Socialist Federate
Soviet Republic shall afford to the Government of the Sovereign
State of Afghanistan within two months after the present treaty
becomes valid.
The present supplementary clause has equal legal validity
with the other clauses of the present treaty.
Moscow, the 28th of February, 1921.
In the forthcoming issue of The Nation

John Kane Mills, a writer on economics
and an authority on international finance,
will contribute an important article, en
titled Would the Use of Gold Bring Down
the Cost of Living?
[Vol. 112, No. 2914
Practically immediate
- relief of pain follows
a dose of
It Is equally efficacious for

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NEURALGIA
iand in addition to being
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In aluminum boxes
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94 N. Moore Street, New York
The Nation
FOUNDED 1866
Vol. CXII

Contents
701
EDITORIALS:
Panama Tolls and American Honor
704
The Railroad Problem Again
705
No War With England. V. Oil
706
Haiti Speaks
708
The Courage of Your Conventions
708
THE COLLAPSE OF THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE. By Felix Morley
709
IN THE COURT OF PRESS-MADE OPINION. By Walter Nelles
711
TURGENEV AND HIS HEROES. By Jacob Zeitlin
712
AMERICAN EMIGRES. By Lily Winner
714
"THE CASE FOR THE MINERS." By Siegfried Sassoon
716
715
CORRESPONDENCE
716
BOOKS:
Clio: Maid of All Work. By Preserved Smith
717
The Seven Stories
717
Notable New Books
718
DRAMA:
Revivals. By Ludwig Lewisohn
719
The Russian-Polish Treaty
720
Associate Editors
LEWIS S. GANNETT
FREDA KIRCHWEY
ARTHUR WARNER
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
T H. GRUENING
CARL VAN I
(AoiNO Editor
Literary Ei
Contributing Editors
JOHN A. HOBSON
H. L. MENCKEN
FRIEDRICH WILHELM FOERSTER
ROBERT HERRICK
THE NATION. 20 Vesey Street, New York City. Cable Address: Nation, New
LET it be said at once that the final demand made upon
the Germans by the Allies was a very marked improve
ment upon anything that the Allies have hitherto offered.
Not only are the initial payments much smaller, but the pro
posed bond issues will make the burden much easier to bear
and the 26 per cent tax upon the total amount of her exports
is far better than the 12!/2 per cent tax originally asked on
the actual exports. The sum now demanded totals 33 billion
dollars. There is to be an issue of three billion dollars of
5 per cent bonds bearing date of May 1 and another of nine
and one-half billions as of November 1. The remainder of
the indemnity is to be covered by bonds to be issued later.
Germany is to pay to the Reparations Commission $500,000,000 as an annual instalment of interest plus 26 per cent of
the value of her exports, of which 26 one per cent will go
toward a sinking fund. The issuance of further bonds will
depend upon the results; if Germany recovers rapidly
enough to bear this burden and more besides, then additional
bonds will be issued. We agree with Mr. J. M. Keynes that
"the decision of the Reparations Commission that Germany's
total liability under the treaty amounts to 137 billion gold
marks, inclusive of the sum due before May 1 and inclusive
also of Germany's liability for the Belgian debt to the Allies,
is a signal triumph for the spirit of justice. . . ." We
are the more ready to acknowledge it because we have been
such severe critics of the figures hitherto demanded. At
the same time this has nothing whatever to do with Ger
many's power to pay. That time alone will show. We
merely wish to record our belief that the terms are far
better than any lately offered and that Mr. Lloyd George's
speech communicating them to Parliament was of a better
tone and temper than his recent utterances.
No. 2915
IT is no happy choice which confronts the Germans. If

they sign and if it appears, as Mr. Keynes believes,
that the terms, although much improved, are still impos
sible of fulfilment, they will be promptly charged with
being liars and tricksters, whose word is not as good as a
dicer's oath. More than that, so bent are the French
on possessing the Ruhr that every single failure to live up
to an obligation will be a fresh excuse for invasion, no
matter how zealously the Germans may be seeking to execute
their other obligations. The alternative to accepting the
Allied terms is the surrender of the Ruhr to the French with
very little likelihood of their ever getting out unless forced
to by dire events at home, or by a vigorous labor ministry
in England. That seizure would bring with it every single
one of the evils which are the inevitable result of military
occupation, widespread immorality, and disease, hatred, bit
terness, and a never-ending planning for revenge by the Ger
mans. Moreover, the huge French garrisons would deprive
France of a man-power sorely needed at home* Politically,
of course, the occupation of the Ruhr would be a grave blow
to the new German democracy and to the new republic,
besides being an economic disaster. If the French carry
it out, all Europe will pay bitterly for it. But the Germans
will doubtless sign.
rt iHE Nation has right along felt that the United States
JL must retake its place in the economic councils of
Europe. Hence, on principle it heartily approves the Presi
dent's, or we presume Mr. Hughes's, decision that the United
States shall reenter the Supreme Council officially, the
Conference of Ambassadors as an observer, and the Repara
tions Commission unofficially. So bound up is all the world
in the economic fortunes of Europe and so blessed in means
and resources is our country that there cannot possibly be a
general salvaging unless the United States does its share.
But everything depends upon the way in which we conduct
ourselves in these various situations. The President gives
his pledge that we shall not have anything to do with purely
European affairs, but Mr. Harding is the greatest maker of
pledges he does not live up to we have on hand just now
as witness his pledge to make a separate peace with Ger
many as soon as he was seated, and his Omaha promise to
get the troops out of Germany just as soon as the power to
do so was his. If this "sitting in" the Allied game leads
us into deep entanglements, makes us a party to the wicked
nesses of the Treaty of Versailles, renders us as sub
servient a tool as Lloyd George to the imperialistic and mili
taristic designs of France, or leads up to our entering the
present League of Nations, the resumption of our place in
the counsels of the Allies will be a disaster to ourselves, to
the Allies, and to all humanity. But the opportunity for
enlightened leadership, for financial counsel and aid, and for
playing the Good Samaritan generally, is glorious.
THERE is something extremely suspicious about the date
of the Polish invasion of Upper Silesia. It occurred on
May 2, at the very time the French confidently believed that
they would be marching into the Ruhr. Lloyd George and
702
The Nation
Mr. Hughes's interference prevented that, and apparently

there was not time to get proper instructions through to
Korfanty, so he carried out his share of the plan. It is idle
to pretend that the Allies were taken by surprise by this
move. The German papers have been full of prophecies of
it, and of detailed accounts of Polish preparations. It is a
long time since the Polish Government did anything with
out the Allies knowing about it. Of course, the Allies claim
that they knew nothing about Korfanty's plans, and neither
did the Italians about D'Annunzio's at Fiume, but we ven
ture to risk a hat upon Poland's gratefully accepting all of
Upper Silesia if Korfanty should conquer it for them. The
Allied garrisons in Upper Silesia were curiously weak ; even
more striking is the fact that as soon as the raid occurred
the French press blamed it upon the Berlin newspapers for
printing misleading accounts of what the Allies would do
about the plebiscite. Finally, it is to be noted that the
French have promptly refused to allow German troops to
enter Upper Silesia, and the press despatches state that the
French troops in Poland will not fire on the Poles. For the
Germans it is once more a case of "heads I win; tails you
lose." For the Allies and the League of Nations it is a great
test of efficiency and sincerity. If Germany loses Upper
Silesia and the Ruhr she is sufficiently wrecked to satisfy
the most Catonian of French imperialists. But what hypo
crites it makes of the Allies and what hypocrisy is the
recent plebiscite so solemnly held to let self-determination
settle the fate of Silesia! At this writing the seeds of
another war are perhaps being sown under our very eyes.
LET no one question Mr. Hoover's fitness for the Hard
ing Cabinet. His recent pronouncement upon the
necessity of a high tariff clearly establishes that fact if it
also proves that he is sadly lacking in economic wisdom,
not to say common sense, in tariff matters. "I am thor
oughly imbued with the idea that we must have protection
on a large scale," he told the House Ways and Means Com
mittee. Germany, it appears, is the enemy again, or, should
we say, yet? It appears that she is subsidizing production
to the extent of sixty billions of paper marks ( !) with the
result that she is already putting our optical glass industry
out of business. "It is," the Secretary assures us, "a finan
cial process that can't go on unless all economic laws are
abandoned, but at present, for instance, they are able to
put their steel on the market at a price no other Govern
ment can meet." Does Mr. Hoover propose to await the
inevitable disaster from such a crazy business? Does he
plan to watch the result of the heavy taxes the Allies are
putting on German exports which will surely offset a lot
of subsidizing? Not a bit of it. On the contrary, he urges
us to do the same foolish thingsubsidize our private busi
nesses by a tariff-wall, just as if tariffs were not now a
tremendous stumbling-block to economic recovery through
out Europe. As the New York Globe remarks one has to
"think hard on his [Hoover's] good proposal for gathering
commercial statistics in order to retain a friendly feeling
for him"and we shall add, for his intellectual processes.
TWO chief subjects of disagreement led to the marine
strike on American-owned shipping in the coasting
and cross-ocean trade. The United States Shipping Board
and the American Steamship Owners' Association proposed
a 25 per cent cut in pay and the open shop, later modifying
the reduction in pay to 15 per cent. The steamship owners
[Vol. 112, No. 2915
are undoubtedly in a difficult position. The Shipping Board

has failed to follow the example of Great Britain in writing
off part of the huge cost of war-built shipping as a war
expense. Naturally it cannot operate this overcapitalized
shipping at a profit in the face of a big slump in cargoes
and carrying rates. The seamen are not responsible for
this situation, but at the same time ought to examine openmindedly any plan for reducing costs, since 30,000 to 40,000
of them have been out of jobs since the first of the year,
owing to idle vessels. The men offered to submit the ques
tion of wages to arbitration, but the Shipping Board and
the other owners refused the suggestion, thereby weaken
ing their case with the public. The unions have also won
sympathy with the public by reason of the fact that there
has been almost no violence on their part. At this writing
the vessel owners appear ready virtually to concede the
union shop to the men, but there is a deadlock on wages.
REDUCING high wages to conform to a lower cost of
living is a hard thing even for an honest man to do
fairly, while in the hands of the disingenuous it can in
variably be turned against the workers. The first question
at issue is when the last wage increase was granted and
what it was. The figures of the United States Bureau of
Labor Statistics show that although there was some de
crease in the cost of living between June, 1920, and the
first of this year, such decrease was just about enough to
offset the increase during the first six months of 1920.
Thus living costs in January of this year had barely got
back to those of January, 1920, if that. Since then there
are no comprehensive figures. It may be said, therefore,
that no wage increase granted more than a year ago can
fairly be taken away because of any great fall in the cost
of living. Moreover, most wage increases have lagged far
behind the cost of living, and there is the further funda
mental difficulty of determining what increases have been
bona fide compensations for higher living costs and what
have been advances in hitherto inadequate standards of
living, won by workers when their labor was in demand.
Violative of all these considerations is the 20 per cent cut
in the wages of day workers of the United States Steel
Corporation. The last wage increase was on February 1,
1920, and then only 10 per cent. The company's statement
says that there were nine increases from 1915 to 1920.
aggregating 150 per cent; but this was on a base of the
pathetically inadequate wage of $2 for a ten-hour day in
1915!
WHEN the Senate rejected, by a vote of 60 to 15, the
amendment to the Immigration Bill introduced by
Senator Hiram Johnson to admit the victims of political or
religious persecution abroad, a fundamental American tradi
tion was scrapped. Our country was conceived in political
and religious liberty, and grew great through the accession
of men whose independence and idealism made them rebels
against autocracy and oppression in other lands. America
beckoned to them as the land of freedom. This it ceased to be
during the late war to "make the world a better place to live
in," and the Senate is merely reading the formal obsequies
over a shriveled corpse. It only remains now to dismantle
Bartholdi's statue in New York harbor, or at least to substi
tute a large illuminated Verboten sign for the torch. Amer
ica is no longer a haven of refuge for the oppressed. It is
enough to make the Founders turn in their graves.
May 18, 1921]
The Nation
AMERICANS all! We cull the following names from

the so-called "slacker lists" being enthusiastically pub
lished by some of the newspapers: Benevento, Dehmke,
De Rose, Forbes, Jimenez, Hadasin, Kerasiotos, San Lee,
Lukesiewicz, O'Connor, Turnasawa, Wisniewsky. Needless
to say, a large proportion of those listed turns out to have
fought, to have been decorated for bravery, and to have
lost their lives in the service. The publication of an ade
quate "slacker list" is quite an impossible task. Many slack
ers after fighting valiantlyagainst being conscripted
yielded to the inevitable and may be discovered today among
the most violent hundred percenters of the American Legion.
Still others gracefully entered our various non-combatant
services. Of course the slackers who ran away are entitled
to no sympathy, and the publication of their names is neither
undue punishment nor persecution. Had they not been cow
ards, or had they opposed war as a matter of principle, they
would have faced the music as did the conscientious objec
tors, who are quite wrongly classed by the average patrioteer
as slackers. But this whole belated business is both silly and
futile. Some of the biggest slackers are now slacker chasers.
FOUR large religious organizations, the Federal Council
of Churches of Christ in America, the National Cath
olic Welfare Council, the Central Conference of American
Rabbis, and the United Synagogue of AmericaProtestants,
Catholics, and Jewshave united in issuing an appeal for
an international conference looking to disarmament. They
have sent 100,000 letters to clergymen, urging them to ap
peal to their congregations to send letters to Congress and
to President Harding. More than that there will be a con
gress of all the religious agencies in the United States in
Chicago from May 17 to May 19 to work out a complete plan
for the international disarmament congress at that time.
But President Harding remains obdurate. He does not
believe that the way to disarm is to disarm; that there
never could be a better time to disarm than the present.
For him the way to international "normalcy" remains the
way of stupidity. He puts off even the discussion of a reduc
tion in armaments until after the treaty of peace with Ger
many is signedas if a completely disarmed Germany had
anything to do with the disarmament of the rest of the
world. His own Secretary of the Treasury tells us that if
we do not disarm we face bankruptcy. His common sense
ought to tell him that disarmament will do more to bring
about political stability in Europe than anything else.
IS it not a combination in restraint of trade that the
Protestant ministers of Worcester have covenanted to
gether to refuse to marry any couple already turned away
from the altar on "moral grounds," or to remarry "the
guilty party in divorce proceedings," or to marry any per
sons at all whom the Protestant ministers of Worcester
consider unfit for the "sacred responsibilities" of the con
jugal order? Here we have the censor again. Here we
have another little vested interest interpreting the law ac
cording to its own bias. Here we have once more a serious
Mrs. Partington brandishing a broom in the face of the
tide. How large and loose are the words about refusing
"marriage in all cases to those whom we deem unfit for its
sacred responsibilities"! The only comfort is that the
words mean nothing and presumably will do no particular
harm. What is the ministers' poison will merely turn out to
be meat for the magistrates.
703
NEWS has recently been received of the death in Upper

Burma, on the frontier of Tibet and China, of one of
the boldest and ablest of scientific English explorers. Mr.
Reginald Farrer, scion of an old Yorkshire family and a
distinguished Oxford University graduate, spent the years
1915 and 1916 in a long journey through Northwestern
China, traversing regions which were almost unknown to
Europeans, and which no European traveler seems to have
ever described. They were wild and mountainous regions,
lying on the borders of Tibet, where the explorer had not
only to endure hardships but to face dangers at the hands
of robbers, and in some, a sort of civil war was raging. By
combining boldness with wariness and tact, he made his
way through and discovered a large number of new species
of plants, for his aims were chiefly botanical and he brought
back with him a great number of seeds of herbaceous plants
and shrubs, some of which now adorn English gardens.
NOT a few of the Alpine flowers he collected are of sin
gular beauty. His journeys and researches are re
corded in a work of two volumes published in 1918 and
entitled "On the Eaves of the World." The drawings he
made of the flowersfor he was a skilful artistwere ex
hibited in London and excited much admiration. Two years
ago his love of botany and passion for adventure led him
to undertake another no less perilous journey into the
mountain wilderness where Northern Burma, China, and
Tibet meet, and here, attacked by a sudden malady for
which no remedies could be procured at a distance of many
days' marches from the outposts of civilization, he died a
few months ago. American, as well as British, botanists
have cause to mourn the untimely death, in the pursuit of
their science, of one of its most ardent and adventurous
votaries ; and the gardens, both of Europe and of America,
will be the poorer by the loss of the new species which he
had meant to bring back from a region hitherto unexplored.
QUIETLY enough, no doubt, but with a profound
spiritual gratitude many men and women all over the
world will turn in their thoughts on the twenty-fifth of this
month, which is his sixtieth birthday, to Arthur Schnitzler.
It is hard to think of Schnitzler as growing old, though the
works even of his youth are tinged with the melancholy of
one who has thought his way to the end of things. But
side by side with this melancholy he always cultivated a
Mozartian gaiety and sparkle which age should not touch
nor decay tarnish. His many plays and stories have given
him a wide international fame. Yet the spirit and mean
ing of his art are but ill understood. The stories are more
than stories, the plays more than plays. He is the least
didactic of writers and the most instructive. By a final
and relentless dissection of the soul of man he has given
us the fullest sense of its actual complexity and of the
necessary relativity of all rough and ready moral values.
But his relentlessness has been scientific, never bitter nor
personal, and has been coupled with the tenderness of a
great physician, and the love of beauty of a great artist.
All translations wrong him. The prose both of his narra
tive and of his dialogue is limpid and exact and supported
by a delicate inner rhythm which is the very music of his
pity, his understanding, his love. His city is crumbling
about him. It may never recover. The finest fruit of its
modern civilization is permanently preserved for mankind
in his works.
704
The Nation
Panama Tolls and American

IF, as is reported to be likely, Congress should now
proceed to reestablish the discriminatory Panama canal
tolls voted in the Act of 1912 and repealed in 1914, our
lawmakers will treat as another scrap of paper a solemnly
signed and executed treaty and put the United States
in a class with the Germany of 1914. The Panama Canal
is ours, but it is ours upon terms, and those terms require
us to open the canal to the vessels of all nations without dis
crimination; we have no right to exempt American ships
from canal tolls. When the Senate, in 1912, voted such a
tolls exemption, The Nation declared that the vote was "a
greater disgrace to this country than would have been a
naval defeat in the waters off Colon" and pointed out that
the act was "in flat disregard of the letter of that treaty,
and runs counter to its whole spirit." In 1914, upon the
honorable insistence of President Wilson, the exemption
was repealed and a black mark wiped off the escutcheon
of the United States. It should not be smootched back.
Our rights in Panama go back three quarters of a cen
tury, to a time when the Monroe Doctrine was not so farreaching and paternalistic a conception as it has since be
come. In 1850 the United States was a young country
with no capital to export to South or Central America, ex
panding within its own borders, only remotely interested
in the countries to the south of us, and concerned with
trans-isthmian routes chiefly because transcontinental rail
lines were not yet laid and much of our commerce with our
own West coast passed by the Panaman, Nicaraguan, or
Tehuantepec routes. British traders were more active than
our own in Central America, Great Britain had territorial
interests there which were very ill-defined, and she claimed
not only what is today known as British Honduras but a
sort of protectorate over the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua,
and a special position in the islands of the Fonseca Bay,
commanding the western approach to the Nicaraguan route,
as well. Talk of canal construction was current, especially
on the Nicaraguan route, and it took new life following
the Californian gold rush of '48. But the United States
had little capital to invest, and it seemed likely that Eng
land might build the canal. Under these circumstances the
Clayton-Bulwer convention of 1850 was negotiated, signed,
and ratified. Article I of this treaty declared:
The Governments of the United States and Great Britain
hereby declare that neither the one nor the other will ever obtain
or maintain for itself any exclusive control over the said shipcanal, agreeing that neither will ever erect or maintain any
fortifications commanding the same, or in the vicinity thereof,
or occupy, or fortify, or colonize, or assume, or exercise any
dominion over Nicaragua, Costa Rica, the Mosquito Coast, or
any part of Central America; . . . nor will the United
States or Great Britain take advantage of any intimacy, or use
any alliance, connection, or influence that either may possess,
with any state or government through whose territory the said
canal may pass, for the purpose of acquiring or holding, directly
or indirectly, for the citizens or subjects of the one, any rights
or advantages in regard to the commerce or navigation of the
said canal which shall not be offered on the same terms to the
citizens or subjects of the other.
At the time this treaty seemed to be a good bargain for
the United States. Half a century later, when we had
become a World Power, when the Monroe Doctrine was
growing under President Roosevelt's careful cultivation,
[Vol. 112, No. 2915
Honor
when the United States was ready to begin building a canal

with its own capital, the treaty seemed only an obstruction
Under these changed circumstances, Mr. Roosevelt's Sec
retary of State negotiated a new treaty, the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, concluded November 18, 1901, and proclaimed
February 22, 1902, in which Great Britain renounced muck
of the special position granted her in the earlier agreement
The Hay-Pauncefote Treaty expressly superseded the Clay
ton-Bulwer Convention; it declared further that the
canal may be constructed under the auspices of the Government
of the United States . . . and that subject to the provi
sions of the present treaty the said Government shall have and
enjoy all the rights incident to such construction as well as the
exclusive right of providing for the regulation and management
of the canal.
The provisions of the treaty to which this right was sub
ject were the adoption of a set of canal rules based upon
those applied by the British Government in operation of
the Suez CanaL Of these Rule One, the most important,
read:
The canal shall be free and open to the vessels of commerce
and of war of all nations observing these rules on terms of
entire equality, so that there shall be no discrimination against
any such nation, or its citizens or subjects, in respect of the
conditions or charges of traffic or otherwise. Such condition*
and charges of traffic shall be just and equitable.
That is the binding clause. Great Britain had greater
rights under the old treaty. She gave them up in exchange
for only this, giving her ships and those of all nations
equality of treatment, in conditions and charges, with the
ships of the United States. We cannot violate that solemn
pledge without condemning ourselves before the bar of tho
world as a nation which refuses to keep its plighted word.
Our right even to fortify the canal under that treaty was
questionable, but Sir Edward Grey renounced the British
claim against such fortification in November, 1912, in a
note to Secretary Knox declaring that "Now that the United
States has become the practical sovereign of the canal, His
Majesty's Government do not question its title to exercise
belligerent rights for its protection." When the tolls bill
exempting American ships was passed, in Mr. Taft's Ad
ministration, Great Britain solemnly protested. After a
long fight in which the better sense and self-respect of the
American people triumphed, that bill was repealed in 1914.
It was a notable victory for right. We cannot believe that
the American people wish their nation to be less honorable
today than in 1914. Indeed, we can only repeat what we
said at the time of the British protest in July, 1912 :
Now we know that the nation's honor and the nation's duty
are touched. We see the danger of trying to drive a subsidy
coach-and-four through a precisely worded treaty. If such a
thing could be done, American faith would get as bad a name
as Punic. No boasting and no protestations of good motives
would avail, for we should have placed this country in a situa
tion like that described by John Quincy Adams in his "Diary":
"Any effort on our part to reason the world out of a belief that
we are ambitious will have no other effect than to convince them
that we add to our ambition hypocrisy."
Commercial rivalry makes villains of us all, and com
mercial rivalry is nowhere more keen than in the carrying
trade of the world by sea; but in the long run national
interests and national honor will be found to be not far
apart.
May 18, 1921]
The Nation
The
Railroad
WE gladly give a page in this issue to letters on the

railroad problem from President Willard of the Balti
more and Ohio Company, and from Mr. S. Davies Warfield, president of the Association of Owners of Railroad
Securities. If space permitted, we should gladly set aside
at least a page each week to present all sides of a subject
which more and more fills the daily press with statements
so directly contradictory as sorely to puzzle the ordinary
newspaper reader. We had, of course, no intention of mis
representing Mr. Warfield's position, but we had naturally
thought that when he and his association felt compelled to
devise the extremely complicated machinery of some fifty
boards so soon after the passage of the Esch-Cummins Law
this at least indicated a belief that the new law had
left much undone, and to that extent had failed. As for
President Willard's rejoinder, we certainly cannot share his
optimism as to the railroad labor situation; nor would a
perusal of even a week's labor dispatches warrant us in so
doing. But we are quite willing to accept his assurance
that labor conditions on the Baltimore and Ohio are better
than we had supposed. On the other hand, there has been
much labor testimony within the last two weeks before the
Railway Labor Board that the railroad employees are not
satisfied with present wages, much less ready to accept any
"deflation." Inquiry in Congress shows, moreover, much
dissatisfaction with the results of the Esch-Cummins Law
even among those who voted for it, and Senator Cummins
is himself busily inquiring into what is wrong.
With that inquiry we are heartily in sympathy. In the
debate which has been going on between the economists
of the railway unionswho are formidably attacking the
railway executives from a new angleand the railroads
there should be some arbiter to pass upon the merits of
the controversy in the interest of the public. The Nation
may be biased in believing that the railroad executives are
more than ever on the defensive, but that it does believe.
The burden of proof is upon them, both as to the EschCummins Act and as to the efficiencynow so gravely chal
lengedof their own management. The Railway Labor
Board's decision will throw some light upon these ques
tions, and a Congressional inquiry also, but an even more
judicial tribunal would be welcome. The fact is that after
a year of the Esch-Cummins Act the situation of the rail
roads is worse than ever, the new rates are so high that
every shipper knows they are killing businessNew York
City is so much in danger of a vegetable and fruit famine
this summer, because of prohibitive rates, that the Ship
ping Board is being besought to run steamers direct from
California to the Atlantic ports in order to prevent an
actual dearth of vital foodstuffs. The railroads maintain
that it is not the rates but the general business depression
which is responsible for the thousands of idle locomotives
and freight cars, so they are asking for the deflation of
labor, without, however, any suggestion that they are ready
for a reduction of rates. Yet those rates were given them
chiefly for the purpose of paying the last increase in
wages. If those wages are reduced, the rates should go
down likewise. It is our sober judgment that if they do a
long step will have been taken toward the revival of busi
ness; the high rates were plainly not responsible for a
world-wide, after-the-war depression, but they have in
Problem
705
Again
tensified it. Every manufacturer knows this to be true.

Later we hope to go more into detail of the charges made
by Mr. W. Jett Lauck for the railway unions. Today we
wish to stress again, and emphatically, certain phases of the
situation which are above and beyond the Esch-Cummins
Act and are so fundamental in the controversy that we wish
every reader to keep them clearly in mind. They are first
and foremost that the issue has now clearly come down to
the point where the country will soon be called upon to
decide between government ownership plus private opera
tion, (or operation by employees), or government ownership
and operation, or private ownership approximating a mon
opoly and highly controlled and regulated by the Govern
ment. It is toward the latter that Mr. Warfield's associa
tion tendswe sincerely trust that we do not again mis
understand him. His plan calls for the incorporation of
the National Railway Service "as an agency to purchase
cars and other equipment to be furnished to the railroads
without profit" and to coordinate "facilities and service and
to otherwise assist in economically producing adequate
transportation." We find it difficult to see wherein this
will differ seriously from a monopoly-operating company;
it certainly seems to prove that Mr. Warfield's association
believes with Mr. Lauck that the methods of purchase of
supplies have been and are wrong. It is surely a plan to
finance and operate all the roads as one unit with, as has
been said, "the connivance and financial backing of the
Federal Government." This is going to the very verge of
government ownership and we are frank to believe that it
savors so strongly of a monopoly as to be impossibleat
least impossible for long.
For it would strengthen the present Wall Street control
of the railroads. The railway executives may berate and
denounce Mr. Lauck and Senator La Follette all they please,
but they cannot deny that twenty-five bankers and execu
tives, interlocking directors, control and link together
ninety-nine Class I railroads which operate 211,280 miles
of road, 82 per cent of the country's steam railroads, and
that this means that the railroads are not operated primar
ily in the interest of the public, or of the employees, or even
of the bulk of the security holders, but for the benefit of the
rings within rings in Wall Street. Here lies the great
issue. Are the railroads to be run for shippers and public,
or for the benefit of the executives and directors and bank
ers? President A. H. Smith of the New York Central has
taken the latter standpoint and, as a result, has invited upon
himself a stinging and just rebuke from President Haley
Fiske of the Metropolitan Life for protesting because Mr.
Fiske, Mr. Warfield and other holders of securities dared
to inquire directly of labor whether there was not a way by
which all concerned could, by pulling together, solve the
existing problems. So brilliant an executive as Mr. Fiske
must see very clearly where this sort of arrogant and arbi
trary control will inevitably lead us to: to public owner
ship by purchase upon a fair valuation of our transportation
lines, so that they may be operated for service at cost, with
the profit-making idea eventually eliminated from the whole
system, just as Mr. Warfield now proposes to eliminate it
from the purchase of supplies and thus end unquestionable
and far-reaching grafting and favoritism in other roads
besides the New Haven under Mellen.
706
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2915
No War With England

V. Oil
PETROLEUM, in its short and stormy life as a com
mercial product, has had an extraordinary effect on
human relationships. First used in humble lamps and
stoves, and as a lubricant, it drove the whaling fleets of
New Bedford and Nantucket to their last moorings. An
age of prospecting and wild speculation resulted in the
creation of the giant monopoly whose founder has been re
warded by the largest fortune in the world's history. The
perfection of the gasoline engine, and the consequent de
velopment of the automobile, the motor truck, the tractor,
and the aeroplane have fostered a series of great industries
which have gone far to transform the life of peaceful com
munities, and are indispensable in war. Last of all has come
the use of heavy oil as a fuel in ships, both under steam
boilers and in internal-combustion engines of the Diesel
type. This development, almost within the last five years,
now causes danger to international harmony. As the Man
chester Guardian has said, "The question of oil tends to
overshadow all other international problems."
A vessel burning oil is far more efficient than one burning
coal for the simple reason that a given weight and bulk of
oil will produce more heat than the same weight and bulk
of coal. In warships the advantages of oil are so marked
that both American and British navies will soon depend ex
clusively upon it. Oil-burning destroyers enabled us to de
feat the German submarine campaign; Earl Curzon said
truly that "the Allied fleets floated to victory on a sea of oil."
The Diesel motor ship is about 2y2 times more efficient
even than the oil-burning steamship. If it were certain that
oil would be as plentiful and as cheap as coal, oil ships would
drive coal ships off the seas as surely within the next fif
teen years as steamships drove sailing vessels off the best
trade routes in the past fifty. If, on the other hand, the
supply of fuel oil is inadequate, those ships which have
access to it will have an enormous advantage over those
which have not.
When this state of affairs began to be apparent, about
the time of the beginning of the Great War, it looked as if
the United States would be enabled thereby to upset, if she
wished, Britain's mastery of the seas. While hardly any
oil is to be found in the United Kingdom, over 60 per cent
of the world's supply has for years come from within our
borders. And it was Britain's large and cheap supply of
coal, and her string of coaling stations around the earth,
that had been one of the chief factors in her control of
ocean shipping. Suddenly, by virtue of the invention of
new technical processes and an accident in the distribution
of natural resources, England saw the very foundation of
her merchant marine and her navy about to slip away.
Although American oil fields are the best developed, they
are by no means the only potential resources. More than
one-half the world's recoverable petroleum lies in two great
areas: one in North America and in South American coun
tries bordering the Caribbean Sea, and the other in Western
Asia and Southeastern Europe lying about the Caucasus as
an axis. These two fields are of nearly equal importance.
Strangely enough, they are not far from the two great
interoceanic canalsPanama and Suez. In 2 per cent of the
world's area rests about 30 per cent of the world's future

supply of petroleum, and about this 2 per cent pivot most
of the forces of international politics today. There are
also sizable deposits of oil on other trade routessuch as
those in Borneo, India, Japan, and Argentina.
While we were resting in the knowledge of our resources,
foreign companies went energetically and quietly to work
gaining control of the undeveloped fields. The Mexican
Eagle Company, a British concern, received large conces
sions in Mexico. The Shell interests, another British group,
invested heavily in many parts of the world. The Royal
Dutch Company, originally in appearance at least a Dutch
concern, was formed to exploit oil in the Dutch East Indies.
Behind it was the financial power of the Rothschilds. Later
occurred a merger of the Royal Dutch and the Shell com
panies under British control, and the Mexican Eagle Com
pany came under their wing. The Anglo-Persian Company
was formed to exploit fields in Persia and the Near East,
the British Government, on account of the needs of the
navy, furnishing 2,000,000 of the capital and retaining
control. This company now has close affiliations with the
Royal Dutch-Shell. This gigantic aggregation of British
oil interests, with its subsidiaries, now owns or controls a
large share of the oil deposits in California, Oklahoma,
Louisiana, Mexico, Trinidad, Venezuela, Colombia, Rumania,
Russia, Persia, Egypt, India, and the East Indies. Except
in North America, most of its concessions are virtually so
large as to exclude American companies from the most
promising fields.
In the meantime experts of the United States Geological
Survey came to disquieting conclusions. Perhaps 40 per
cent of the petroleum originally in the ground of the United
States has already been exhausted, and if the present rate
of production continues even without increase, our oil may
be entirely gone in from fifteen to twenty years. Domestic
demand, moreover, has risen so rapidly that for the past two
years we have had to import more oil than we exported.
In 1920 the excess of oil imports over exports was nearly
100,000,000 barrels, or over one-sixth of our entire consump
tion. And British interests, in close affiliation with the
British Government, now have exclusive control, according
to Captain Foley of the United States Shipping Board, of
between 90 and 97 per cent of the future visible supply of
the world. A dramatic reversal indeed!
American interests quickly went to work to restore the
balance. But they have found their pathway blocked. The
Department of State, in response to a resolution of inquiry
moved by Senator Gore, reported that while the United
States had always maintained the "open door" to foreign
investors and purchasers in its own oil resources, other na
tions, by national ownership or exclusive concessions, had
shut the door to their resources against American interests.
It is the exclusive policy that causes the trouble. In the first
place, American oil owners wish to protect their invest
ments by substituting new and fruitful properties for those
which are likely to run dry. In the second place, the United
States Navy and the shipping interests want to be assured
of a future bunker supply without the possibility of dis
crimination.
The chief area of dispute at present seems to be Mesopo
May 18, 1921]
The Nation
tamia. Here the British group just before the war had
received a concession from the- Turkish Government, a
quarter of which they had to share with the Deutsche Bank.
After the war, the German share was claimed by Great Brit
ain as part of the spoils of victory. France, however, put
in a claim for the German share also, and eventually re
ceived it, in exchange for British control of the exploitation
of deposits in the French colonies. This arrangement, con
summated in secret at San Remo, cemented an AngloFrench oil entente, and American interests find themselves
barred from the rich possibilities of Mesopotamia, as well
as from a major part of the French market. Our State
Department has protested on the ground that the open
door must be maintained in mandatories. Great Britain
agrees in principle, but maintains that since her concession
antedates the war it must be recognized, open door or no
open door. A long diplomatic correspondence has ensued.
The real issue is that British companies have the oil, and
that American interests want part of it. For us whose
chief interest is peace, the important thing to remember is
that in this crucial controversy there is a substantial iden
tity between the British Government and British capital
on the one hand, and between the American State Depart
ment and American oil interests on the other.
In his last annual report, Secretary Lane wrote that the
oil situation "calls for a policy prompt, determined, look
ing many years ahead." He recommended three imme
diate governmental policies, one of which was a refusal
to sell oil to any vessel under foreign registry if its
government discriminates against American ships or oil
interests. President Walter C. Teagle of the Standard Oil
Company of New Jersey addressed these significant sen
tences to the 1920 convention of the American Petroleum
Institute: "If foreign governments insist on pursuing the
policy of nationalizing oil lands and reserving subsoil rights
to be held under government direction; if they persist in
attempting to keep all of their own petroleum deposits for
their own future benefit, while relying upon the United
States for a large share of their present needs, then, and
in that event, this nation will have no alternative but to
take cognizance of the attitude of foreign governments, and
as a matter of necessary self-protection to consider the
adoption of means reciprocally to conserve its petroleum
resources for its own people. . . . With its position in
world trade and the economic and financial weapons ready
to hand, the United States could undoubtedly compel a new
allotment of foreign territory so as to give it a share of
what other nations are proposing to keep for themselves."
As if in response to these statements, Secretary Daniels
as one of his last official acts wrote a letter to the chairman
of the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs, recommending
the passage of a bill which would give the President power
to impose an embargo on exports of oil from the United
States, whenever in his opinion the situation should war
rant such an act. Although this measure is only one of
the "economic and financial weapons" which Mr. Teagle
must have had in mind, its application alone would be dras
tic, since it would forbid the British companies from ex
porting their own oil from their extensive properties in the
United Statesan act which our Government would
strongly resent if it were applied against us by any other
nation.
Statements about "nationalization" of oil are ordinarily
understood to apply to Mexico, and no doubt they do, in
707
part. But we must not forget that the quarrel over Mexican
oil is a three-cornered one, and that intervention by the
United States would undoubtedly involve trouble with Eng
land unless a previous arrangement should assure her of
what she might regard as an equitable share of the spoils.
Righteous argument will not cause either side to give
way. How little impression it makes may be inferred from
a passage in the speech of Sir Charles Greenway, Bt., chair
man of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, Ltd., to its last
annual meeting. Speaking of the controversy with the
United States, Sir Charles said: "I would like to refer to
the pathetic account which was given recently in the press
of the enormous sacrifices which the United States had
made in depleting itselfnot without valuable considera
tion, be it rememberedof its reserves of oil for the benefit
of the rest of the world. This was made the basis for
claiming that American producers are entitled to their
share in future oilfields outside of America as well as the
enormous ones in the United States and elsewhere which
they already hold. I am now wondering when we shall
see similar demands put forward by the Bolshevists in re
gard to the oil supplied to other countries from Baku dur
ing the last 30 or 40 years and from the gold producers in
South Africa and even from our own colliery proprietors for
the gold and coal of which they have depleted themselves
for the welfare of the rest of the world!" (Laughter.)
If there were a real League of Peace, its first business
would be to internationalize the oil supply, conserve it for
the most vital uses like lubrication and shipping, drastically
limit its consumption in pleasure cars, and ration it among
the peoples of the world according to need. There being
no possibility of such a league while Anglo-Persian and
Standard Oil Companies continue to exist, no such intelli
gent policy can be pursued. Of course, the parties at in
terest may arrange things temporarily by dividing the field.
But there is danger of something else. If you have a navy,
you must have oil. If you have oil, you must have a navy.
If you have a navy without enough oil, you must have a
bigger navy than that of someone else who has the oil, so
that he cannot refuse it to you. If you have a navy with
lots of oil to protect, you must have a bigger navy than
someone else who has a navy without oil, so that he cannot
deprive your navy of oil the moment war breaks out. And
then, if you haven't enough oil, you must exert pressure
through finance and commerce and shipping, and if you
have more than enough oil, you must keep ownership of the
oil so that you can sell it and so meet the pressure of com
peting finance and commerce and shipping. So it goes while
one piece after another is brought into play on the great
chess board, and someone may rashly precipitate action by
taking a pawn.
The problem of oil is, to be sure, only a minor one in the
course of the centuries; before many years are gone petro
leum may be entirely exhausted, or may be superseded by
some other source of power such as alcohol. Nevertheless,
it constitutes a present danger to the peace of the world,
and we might possibly witness the grotesque comedy of
the human race endangering its very existence in a quarrel
for possession of a fuel which has not been in use more
than sixty years and may not be used sixty years from now.
The trouble over oil is a perfect symbol of the trouble with
the whole present organization of human relationships.*
* The next article In this series will deal with the question of the financial
relations of the two Anglo-Saxon countries.
The Nation
708
[Vol. 112, No. 291
Haiti Speaks
TheCourage ofYour Conventions
NO graver indictment of an American Administration

has ever been made than is contained in the temper
ately written thirty-thousand-word Memoir of the Dele
gates to the United States of the Haitian Patriotic Union
outlining the history of the American Occupation in Haiti
which was presented to the Department of State and the
Senate Foreign Kelations Committee last week.* Despite
its moderation, it more than confirms every charge made
in The Nation in the last year. The first official pronounce
ment from the Haitians themselvesfor a rigid military
censorship sealed their lips for five yearsit establishes
that our conquest of Haiti was neither justified under any
principle of international law nor sanctioned by any con
ceivable necessity. It should finally put an end to all the
excuses alleged in our defensesuch as the protection
of American interests, restoration of order, suppression
of banditry, bad Haitian finances, etc. The report again
makes plain that the local revolutionary disturbances of
July 28, 1915, merely furnished a long-sought pretext for
intervention, that our interests were in no wise imperiled,
that far from there being disorder when the marines landed
it was their brutalities which created and then perpetuated
the previously non-existent "Caco-ism," a banditry not of
crime but of revolt against the alien invasion. The sjate
of the Haitian finances is lucidly set forththey were by
no means in a tangle; the external and internal debt of
the country had always been fully paid until the American
Occupation inaugurated an era of mismanagement (to put
it charitably) quite unprecedented under Haitian control.
The appended list of atrocities it is difficult for an Amer
ican to read without shame and horror. It does not purport
to be a complete record. On the contrary, it is limited to
the comparatively few cases called, in writing, to the at
tention of the Naval Court of Inquiry sent to Haiti last
fall by Secretary Daniels to offset Senator Harding's cam
paign attack, and published, upon the refusal of the Court
to consider them, in the newspapers of Port-au-Prince.
Murder of women and children, wholesale killing of prison
ers, torture with red-hot irons, the "water cure," arson,
robbery, violence of every kindthey constitute an -ever
lasting stain on American honor.
If this report does not arouse the American people then
its conscience is indeed dead. The Nation cannot believe
that it is and that all our professions of good faith, decency,
fair play, all our great and honorable traditions upheld
for nearly a century and a half, can be thus lightly cast
on the scrap-heap. Here is a small and inoffensive country,
next to our own the oldest republic in this hemisphere,
self-governing for 111 years, a republic which achieved one
sort of freedom fifty years before our own (for it abol
ished slavery when it became independent), made the vic
tim of wholly wanton, brutal, militaristic conquest. These
are facts that cannot be whitewashed, propagandized, or
lied away. It matters little what President Harding said
at the foot of the statue of Bolivar, or what fine phrases
President Wilson uttered. What really countsthe acid
testis what we have done and what we shall do to little
Haiti, the one country which, by a curious irony, made a
really substantial contribution to the cause of Bolivar and
South American freedom while we stood aloof.
The Memoir will be printed in full in the International Relation! Section
of the next iaaue of The Nation.
THERE was once an honest young lady who for some

worried weeks had been reading the deeds and words
of HermioneDon Marquis's Hermione, that foolish virgin
whose words always come true to form. The honest young
lady grew desperate, and confessed: "But now I don't dare
say anything any more at all. Everything I want to say I
have already seen in Hermione, or I am afraid I may see
if there tomorrow." "Ah," replied the sage to whom this
honest young lady had made her serious admission, "you
haven't the courage of your conventions."
This phrase, dearly beloved, has a lesson for all of us.
How few, indeed, in our slack and slippery age, have the
courage of their conventions! Here and there a few may
be found who hold by their convictions through thick and
thin. But another courage is necessary to hold by the an
cient, the approved forms of language and decorum. Pro
priety is as timid as the ground hog on his proper day.
It sees its shadow and ducks back into its hole. "Well,"
says Propriety, "I may be old-fashioned, but
" What
then? Does Propriety go on with the sentence and say:
"I think that woman's place is the home"? No, it limply
says: "I think a woman ought to be as domestic as pos
sible." Oh, scandalous concession! Or Propriety begins
thus: "I don't know anything about art, but
" Once
the continuation would have been clear, peremptory, strong:
"I know what I like." In our degenerate decade it emerges
falteringly, something like this, for instance: "I have a
kind of instinct for my own peculiar preferences." Or for
a third and last illustration, Propriety bursts out: "I know
what I want to say but
" The honorable conclusion is:
"I can't find the words." Lamely, tamely, Propriety now
ends up : "I have an inhibition, a sort of impediment of ex
pression, that keeps me from uttering all that is in me."
In a little while who will have the moral energy to say:
"I stand for liberty but not for license"?
The courage of your conventions! It is this, dearly be
loved, which has made us what we are. But for it what
would have been the fate of the Espionage Act? But for it
where would there be such an organization as the New York
Society for the Suppression of Vice? Without it, how
could we find Congressmen enough to run this Government?
The courage of your conventions is the mortar which holds
the stones of our institutions together. Once free and flow
ing, it hardens into the strength of stone if we let it. And
we must let it. The modern tendency has most damnably
been to insist that life should be kept free and flowing.
Consider the horrid consequences. Today the least yield
ing of reactionaries wears the mask of liberalism. He
vociferates: "I am as much a friend of labor as any man."
He demands that we keep the country free and equal as in
all the great days of the country's history. And, as to con
servative journalism, it dares not show its hand, however
much it shows its face. It makes no ringing assault upon
the excesses of the young, upon the advance of error; it
weakly reviews the times without the roaring or rollicking
insolence of absolute security; and by its timidity it re
veals the general tone of the age. Who, dearly beloved,
will lead us back from the morass into which our radicals
have led us, to the impregnable rock where
Conventions on convictions stand
And competently rule the land?
709
The Nation
May 18, 1921]
The
Collapse
of the
Triple
Alliance
By FELIX MORLEY
London, April 16
ENGLAND has just passed through one of the most
amazing crises of her history. In two short weeks
she has seen the cloud which to most was no larger than a
man's hand, spread with the rapidity of fire and cover the
whole industrial sky. From London to South Wales and
northward to the banks of the Clyde she has heard the rum
blings of that which Communist miner and Unionist banker
agreed to call attempted revolution. She has seen the
streets of her cities placarded with posters of a national
emergency and echoing with the tramp of regiments in war
equipment; motor trucks and houses have been comman
deered for military purposes, volunteers for the National
Defense Force have rolled up in tens of thousands to swamp
hastily established recruiting offices, English warships have
trained their -guns on the docks of English cities, and the
parks of London, closed to visitors, are still, as in 1914,
lined with tents and filled with marching men.
And now, as quickly as it rose, without the loss of a
single life by violence, the danger of upheaval on a nation
wide and concerted basis has passed from the horizon of
the average middle-class Englishman. The strength of
labor, which a few days ago seemed united and defiant as
never before, has faded like smoke before the massed forces
of Capital and Government. The Triple Alliance, on paper
the most powerful body in the world of labor, has failed
on the eve of action. Close to a million miners, sullen and
stupefied by the turn of events, are continuing their fight
alone and the Government is curtailing none of its emer
gency precautions. But by and large Lloyd George has met
the enemy and they are his. "It is no use trying to mini
mize it," says this morning's Daily Herald. "It is no use
pretending that it is other than it is. Yesterday was the
heaviest defeat that has befallen the labor movement within
the memory of man."
To students of the industrial situation emergence of
serious trouble was assured when at the end of February
the Government announced its intention of removing war
time control of the coal industry on March 31, five months
ahead of the date originally appointed by statute. It is at
least interesting that as early as this a wedge was driven
between the miners and railwaymen by keeping the date
of decontrolling the railways at August 31, originally the
day on which coal decontrol was scheduled. To the miners,
coming when it did, decontrol meant utter collapse of the
plan for establishing a uniform national system of wage
payments with the conjunct maintenance of a financial pool
for the industry as a whole. Admission and consideration
of both these contentions were won by the strike last au
tumn, and the abrupt manner in which Lloyd George has
now swept them aside seems to the miners a repetition of
his tactics with regard to the recommendations of the
Sankey Commission. But far more important to the labor
movement as a whole was the frontal attack on wages in
volved in decontrol of the mines. The new wage scales
beginning April 1, the owners blithely announced, would
in some cases be 50 per cent less than those terminated by
government decontrol. In many of the less productive dis
tricts the miners' new wages amount to no more than 15
or 16 shillings a week in pre-war values. In South Wales,

which is a wealthy field, a general laborer under the new
scale would receive 32 shillings a week where before the
war, with living costs about one-third of what they are
today, he made 29 shillings a week. The attack on wages
was brazen, heartless, and sweeping. All contracts were
terminated on March 31 and the miners told they could
return to work at the new scales or not at all. It is because
they refused to come to heel on these starvation wages that
the present dispute is judged a lockout and not a strike.
To understand what happened it is necessary to sum
marize the events of the vitally important week from April 8
to April 15. They show how anxiously and sincerely the
trade-union leaders worked for a peace which would be
both just and honorable. They also reveal a hostility to
revolutionary methods which has caused English Commu
nists to characterize the events of this week as "the Great
Betrayal."
On the morning of April 8 the lockout of the miners had
been a week in progress. The Government, long prepared
for this emergency, stood solidly behind the owners in re
fusing pointblank to countenance the miners' demands for a
National Wages Board and a National Wage Pool, although
five months ago steps leading to the establishment of the
former had been officially conceded. On April 8 the resouices of the miners, already strained by their strike last
autumn, were beginning to run low. Accordingly the two
other members of the Triple Alliance (railwaymen and
transport workers) on that day voted to come to the miners'
aid. Both these organizations realized that in fighting
against wage reductions the miners were fighting their
battle and deserved their aid.
It should, however, be kept in mind that the Triple Al
liance was not bound to any effort of united action. Its
constitution, while reserving complete autonomy to each
member body to act on its own behalf, states that "no move
ment shall be instituted by any of the affiliated bodies if it
is likely to involve the others, until it has been submitted
to the joint body for consideration." The Triple Alliance
was ready to strike against the miners' reduced wages and
sanctioned such action. It was not ready, although at first
a contrary impression was given, to strike for the miners'
political demands nor did it sanction a general strike for
that end. In the failure to make this distinction clear at the
outsetin trying a bluff which Lloyd George calledis
found the real reason of the collapse. The policy of the
miners in refusing to separate the issues of wages and in
dustrial policy proved faulty. The policy of railwaymen
and transport workers in leading the miners to think they
would support them without this separation of issues proved
fatal.
At the meeting on April 8 it seems to have been the de
sire of some few of the two involved executives to call a
lightning strike for April 10. This was overruled by a
majority, including J. H. Thomas and Robert Williams, who
desired a week's notice. A compromise decision was made
to send out provisional strike notices to all rail and trans
port locals for midnight of April 12. The Government im
mediately hastened its preparations for possible revolution.
710
The Nation
On April 11 negotiations between the mine owners and

miners were resumed, the Government having dropped its
decision that there could be no further parleys unless the
pumpmen first returned to insure that the mines would not
be flooded. On their side the miners agreed not to inter
fere with any volunteer pumpmen. The negotiations were
continued on April 12 while the Government was rushing
troops into London and industrial centers, enrolling volun
teers by tens of thousands, and commandeering lorries and
omnibuses to organize an emergency transport service. Be
cause of these negotiations the strike was postponed, al
though three hours before it was due the coal negotiations
had broken down completely because the Government and
the owners again refused consideration of either the uni
fied national scale of wage payments or the national pool.
The miners' executive then asked for a strike of the full
Triple Alliance at midnight April 13. It was called instead
for ten p.m., April 15. Other unions, particularly the
electrical workers, promised to come out in sympathy. Peo
ple dimly realized that when the crisis came English cities
would at first be without electricity, gas, perhaps even
water. The cooperative societies offered labor food, credit,
and financial assistance. Strike committees, labor relief
associations, local "councils of action" were formed all
over the country. The Government landed marines, hur
ried troops and artillery back from Ireland, issued procla
mations, and hastened its emergency arrangements for
maintenance of transport and public utilities. Further ef
forts at compromise failed because the miners refused to
treat the wage reductions as an isolated issue.
On the night of April 14 an unorganized group of some
200 members of the House of Commons took it into their
own hands to try and find an eleventh-hour outlet from
the crisis. They summoned certain representative mine own
ers to state their position on the drastic wage reductions,
which, it is admitted, was found unsatisfactory. At ten
p.m., just 24 hours before the transport strike was due, they
called Frank Hodges, secretary of the Miners' Federation,
to what developed into a two hours' hearing and crossexamination. During the latter Hodges suggested that the
miners would probably accept a temporary agreement on
the subject of wages alone, provided later recognition of
the principle of a National Wages Board was not jeopar
dized thereby. At one o'clock the morning of April 15 this
information was hurried to Lloyd George. Immediately he
suggested to mine owners and miners a renewal of nego
tiations, at 10:30 that morning. The owners appeared;
the miners did not.
For on this morning of April 15 the full miners' execu
tive, realizing how often before they have been tricked by
the Government, had (it is said by one vote) overruled
Hodges and refused to parley further until the two principles
of the National Wages Board and the National Pool are
definitely conceded. Hodges offered his resignation, but none
would permit it to be accepted. He again assumed leader
ship and informed Lloyd George of the decision.
Following this dramatic turn Thomas and Cramp of the
railwaymen, Gosling and Williams of the transport work
ersall deeply anxious to avert the horrors of threatened
civil wartogether informed the miners' executive that in
their opinion negotiations should be resumed on the basis
of Hodges's suggestion before the members of Parliament.
The miners refused, and shortly after four p.m., on April 15,
it was announced from railway headquarters at Unity
[Vol. 112, No. 2915
House that the general strike scheduled for ten o'clock that
night had been definitely called off. Alone and defiant,
hard-pressed financially, and feeling themselves deserted by
their fellows of the Triple Alliance the miners are con
tinuing their fight. The Government announces that there
will be no suspension of its military and anti-revolutionary
activity. Among the members of the Federation of British
Industries there is mutual congratulation and jubilation,
coupled with discussion of the advisability of permanently
shackling trade-union strength by legislation making sym
pathetic strikes a criminal offense.
To labor sympathizers the collapse of the Triple Alliance
is a staggering blow. Today the industrial solidarity of
British labor, the work of a quarter century of patient
toil, is smashed. In every section of the country miners
are proclaiming that they have been "disgracefully deserted"
and that the leaders of the railwaymen and transport work
ers will regret their action when they face a similar attack
on their own wages. On the other hand it is certain that
if the miners' leaders had confined themselves to the dollar
and cents aspect of the wage question, as Hodges was willing
to concede, they would not have been abandoned. On the
question of wages alone they have an unanswerable case,
and widespread sympathy both in Parliament and among
the public. Instead of concentrating on this their major
efforts were centered on the issue of industrial organiza
tion. Not only is the meaning of the National Wages
Board and the Pool for the Industry but dimly understood
by many of the railwaymen and transport workers, but
also the attention paid to these demands weakens the miners'
originally valid contention that they are not striking but
"locked out." However desirable the question of unifica
tion and central control for the entire coal industry, it was
not one on which many of the other members of the Triple
Alliance were prepared to go out on a sympathetic strike,
certain to lead to violence, if not more serious results. It
was not even an issue properly sanctioned by the two other
executives. The strike could have been called and enough
railwaymen and transport workers would have responded
to throw the whole nation into chaosbut what then? That
was the question which Thomas and Cramp, Gosling and
Bob Williams had to faceand not being Bolsheviks they
quailed before the answer.
The Triple Alliance was a loose-knit, horizontal combina
tion of three great unions, each in itself a federation. The
split which has shattered it cuts vertically through structure
without regard to trade groupings. On the right side of
this fissure stand the trade unionists of traditional "con
stitutional" type, still a great majority of both railwaymen
and transport workers. On the left stand those who have
lost faith in parliamentary practice and evolution, and are
ready to try short-cuts to the reformation of society. They
are in a majority among the miners and are growing in
numbers in the other unions, but they are as yet far the
weaker section. Inevitably the result of the last few days
will be to widen the breach and make effective cooperation
much more difficult. Perhaps the advent of communism
made this inevitable, and there are some who argue that
it will be, in the long run, beneficial. Certain it is that in
both the industrial and political fields there is now going
to be a very thorough overhauling, repairing, and replace
ment of machinery which has failed to meet the test of
action. But however these efforts may turn out that which
stands out now is the fact that the debacle has broken that
The Nation
May 18, 1921]
solidarity which for many years has proved the greatest

strength of British labor.
Nor does the opposing side intend to let its opportunity
slide. Says today's Morning Post: "There is a growing
opinion among other (than labor) quarters of the House
that the Government should now take steps to put some
curb on the power of these great trade unions to threaten
the dislocation of the life of the nation for purposes which
are political and not economic." Powerful interests are
eager to break the strength of English trade unionism now
as completely as French trade unionism was broken after
the railway strike fiasco there a year ago. In England the
offensive has passed into the hands of capital.
In the Court of Press-Made

Opinion
By WALTER NELLES
T NSCRIBED beneath a full-page portrait of Tito Ligi in
A an illustrated daily paper a week after his arrest:
This is the first intimate picture to be published of Tito Ligi,
who is said to have been identified in Scranton, Pa., by a gov
ernment witness as the driver of the death wagon that caused
the fatal explosion in Wall Street, September 16. Although
this one witness is certain Ligi is the man long sought as the
missing link in the chain of evidence that would clear up the
mystery, there are others who differ. What do you think?
The case of Ligi illustrates a sinister process.
He is an Italian workingman, resident at Scranton. He
was arrested on April 19 charged with being a draft
evader. For four days he was interrogated by detectives
and not allowed to see his family or even his lawyer.
Publicity "broke" in the afternoon papers of the day
after his arrest. The news items on that day were mys
teriousa "Wall Street bomb suspect" was in custody at
Scrantonname not statedreason for suspecting him not
statedinspiration of news not stated.
. .
Detectives, "bomb squad" men, special agents of the
United States Department of Justice flocked about Ligi in
the Scranton jail. Eager news-hounds flocked about the
detectives. The detectives were careful in their public
statements; none of them suggested any charge against
Ligi other than that of draft evasion. The head-lines,
however, continually featured Ligi as a "bomb suspect."
And the news-hounds either concocted or absorbed melo
drama. They noised it across the United States that Tito
Ligi lived over an abandoned coal minea reasonably safe
statement to make of almost any resident of Scranton. For
the city is built upon a thin crust of earth, supported by
pillars of anthracite as slim as the law will permit the
mining companies to leave them. It was further noised
over the country that the underlying mine was connected
with Ligi's dwelling by a subterranean passagea romantic
falsehood. There was no such connection. To give color
of verisimilitude to this falsehood, the papers attached
to Ligi a house two blocks away which had nothing to do
with him, where, however, there are in fact two small holes
from which coal had been taken, one under the cellar and
under the garden. These holes are not connected either
with each other or with any mine shaft, and are used sim
ply as dumps for ashes and refuse.
Further, in journalese, "most interesting of all the devel
711
opments which have leaked out despite the attempt at

secrecy" was the story that some men emerged from a mine
somewhere about Scranton one night and exploded in a
field, apparently for experimental purposes, a bomb they
were supposed to have made in the mine. No ground was
suggested for supposing that Ligi had anything to do with
any such episode. I could not learn any basis in fact for
the story itself. Blasting is, of course, ordinary in Scran
ton, and dynamite more familiar than pop-corn.
Pieces of sash-weights are said to have been found about
the scene of the Wall Street explosion. Sash-weights were
the material of the real triumph of incriminating inge
nuity in the Ligi romance. It was first reported that there
was a sash-weight factory in Scranton; next, that pieces
of sash-weights had been found there in a vacant lot, per
haps deposited by the "test bomb"; finally, that a box of
sash-weights had been found in the rear of the restaurant
at which Ligi had worked. The papers did not trouble to add
that Ligi's connection with the restaurant in question had
not commenced until over a month after the Wall Street
explosion; they did not explain why a supposed perpetrator
of the Wall Street disaster should go from place to place
attended by sash-weights. One paper, however, had the
fairness to report the truth about the pieces of metal found
by detectives in the restaurant"that they were not pieces
of window-weights, as at first supposed, but were irregular
blocks of iron and steel such as are used by Italians in the
city playing a game somewhat like quoits."
It would be tedious to enumerate all the clap-trap auxilia
ries of what might easily have become a journalistic lynching.
Toward the end of Ligi's week's career on the front page,
some public attention was called to the fustian character
of the "case" against him, and one newspaper man was bold
enough to intimate that the "identification" of Ligi by a
person who had previously studied his photograph was un
reliable. On April 26, Chief Flynn of the Secret Service,
answering a letter of protest from Carlo Tresca, wrote :
The attention of this Department was called to Ligi by the
Scranton Police Department, whereupon a number of witnesses
who made statements concerning the Wall Street explosion
of September, 1920, were called upon to look at the photograph
of Ligi which was placed with twenty-five others. Three wit
nesses, Clark, Nally, and Smith, selected from these photographs
that of Ligi as resembling the man they saw at the wagon
containing the explosive. These three men were asked to go
to Scranton with the view to identifying the suspect. Two
of them failed to identify Ligi; the third witness, Smith,
seemed to be positive that Ligi was the man he saw at the
wagon on Wall Street last September. Frankly, I think he
is mistaken.
From this time the case of Tito Ligi rapidly receded from
the front page. But with slight differences in nearness to
the terrible event and in popular reaction, it might easily
have stayed there with fatal result. People at large did not
make up their minds against Ligi with quite sufficient
velocity, vehemence, mass, and momentum. Yet, although
there was not, from beginning to end, any intimation of
probable ground or reason why Tito Ligi at Scranton,
rather than any other obscure Italian or non-Italian work
ingman anywhere else in the United States, was chosen
to be a subject of speculation as to the probability of his
guilt of heinous crime on the basis of his physiognomy,
a great many people did make up their minds against him.
And the sources of what passes for information, with sub
stantial unanimity, abetted.
712
The Nation
Turgenev and His Heroes

By JACOB ZEITLIN
OF Russia's great novelists Turgenev1 is the one who
comes nearest to the apprehension of the western
reader. His world of men and women presents no striking
abnormalities, his portraiture hardly ever invades the prov
ince of pathology, his view of life reasonably satisfies our
standards of sanity, and his art has the chastity and re
straint of the best European tradition. To impute this
result to the influence upon him of western culture might
be misleading. His literary powers attained their maturity
on Russian soil and his art followed the path that had been
blazed by his great countrymen, Pushkin and Gogol. But
it is also true that he became conscious at an early age of
the great need in Russia of the fertilizing elements from a
richer cultivation and dedicated himself with missionary
enthusiasm to the importation of those elements from
abroad. Hence the self-imposed exile which lasted through
nearly his whole creative career. What one is likely to
overlook, however, is how perfectly Turgenev embodied in
himself certain of the fundamental Slavic traits with which
his own teachings were at war. The seeds of the ailment
which was devastating the life of his people were planted
in him also, but he at least saw it as an ailment, and instead
of sinking under it inertly, gave himself up to discovering
and applying the remedy. Western ideals of conduct and
positive western culture offered him the escape from the
stagnant morasses of Slavic indifferentism and supplied
the motive power for his principal stories.
In the heart of Turgenev there lurks a cosmic sadness,
born, it may be, of the spirit that broods over the vast
desolate steppes of his native land and shedding its melan
choly light over his whole universe. Nature appears to him
insensible and the fate of man in the world evil. A thin
partition separates him from despair or even pessimism.
In moments of spiritual crisis this despair wells up from
the depths with lyric intensity. He gives it body in some
of his fantastic tales, where it is joined with those vague
mystic longings for the unreachable which accentuate the
earthly weakness and confinement of man. The hero of
Phantoms is overcome with sadness and aversion as he
views the whole terrestrial globe with its inhabitants
transitory, impotent, crushed by want, by sorrows, by dis
eases, fettered to a clod of contemptible earth, carrying on
an amusing struggle with the unchangeable and the in
evitable. It breaks out also under stress of personal dis
appointment and it becomes poignantly articulate in the
Prose Poems of his old age, in which the effort to sustain a
courageous heart in the face of an overwhelming sense of
loneliness and disillusionment is pathetically weak. This
melancholy sensibility gives the key to the novelist's ethical
outlook.
Contemplating men in their strivings with one another
and in their struggle with an inexorable destiny, Turgenev
arrives at the same ethical solution as Carlyle or George
Eliot. The great error of men, he often tells us, is that
they search for personal happiness when life offers neither
the right nor possibility of such happiness. In Russia one
was likely to feel this with greater power than elsewhere.
1 Constance Gamett's translation of Turgenev's novels and tales has just
been reissued by the Macmillan Company (IB vols.).
[Vol. 112, No. 2915
There human nature manifested itself with less of conscious

dignity, less confidence in its will, less mastery over cir
cumstance. The potential energies of life flickered out in
vain dreaming and fruitless aspiration or wasted away in
mean, degrading action. One of the characters speaks for
many in describing the bitterness of a life that has been
lived clumsily and vulgarly. On all hands one finds sickly
self-absorption, uneasy thought, impotent gesticulation.
What is lacking is simple self-forgetfulness, steadfast con
viction, faith in some impersonal idea which has the power
of uniting men, be it fatherland, science, liberty, or justice.
Instead of the individual self, society with its immutable
laws ought to be the corner-stone of existence. The lot of
man is not enjoyment but heavy toil, not self-indulgence
but renunciation, not the attainment of cherished ideas but
the fulfilment of duty. The sentence that completely ex
presses the noble sadness of Turgenev's moral creed is that
"not happiness but human dignity is the chief goal of life."
In an utterance which became famous in Russia, Turgenev
analyzed the weakness of character from which its society
suffered and at the same time created the symbol by which
that weakness has since then been identified. Incidentally
/ he has added a penetrating judgment on two great literary
creations, Hamlet and Don Quixote. In these two perennially
fascinating figures Turgenev finds the incarnation of the
two basic forces on which all life depends, the two funda
mental and antithetical qualities of human nature. In
Hamlet, Turgenev, like Goethe, sees the paralysis of a will
through too much reflection. But further than that he
views in Hamlet the spirit of analysis and egoism, the skeptic
perpetually concerned with the state of his own emotions
and relating everything to himself, the man who cannot
forget himself in the execution of a solemn duty nor give
himself up unreflectingly to love. Having no faith and no
love, persons like Hamlet are incapable of finding anything
or contriving anything. They may be delightful com
panions and leave agreeable traces of their personality, but
for society at large they are sterile and useless. Don
Quixote, on the other hand, is carried away by faith in an
idealnever mind that it is a comic delusionfor which
he is prepared to make the utmost sacrifice. He is without
a trace of egoism or self-interest, he never questions the
Tightness or righteousness of his course but knows his
mission in life and pursues it with unwavering singleness
of purpose. He is an enthusiast, the servant of an idea, a
genuine moral hero. There is no room here for the many
details with which the contrast between the two figures is
illuminated; what interests us is the opposition of the selfconscious, reflective, but egoistic and practically inert
Prince of Denmark to the simple-hearted and narrowminded but selfless and energetic champion of La Mancha.
The former is made to stand for the principle of selfpreservation, for the conservative force in society, while
the latter represents the creating, moving, progressive prin
ciple in life. One easily understands why Turgenev is
partial to Don Quixote even while he sympathizes with
Hamlet. Of tiny, futile replicas of Hamlet his country
knew, alas, too many, whereas what it needed was men with
sincerity and conviction like Don Quixote's, who were pre
pared to arm themselves and fight, leaving the consequences
to fate.
The Don Quixotes appear only occasionally in the novels,
and then in subordinate roles. They are the unbalanced,
fanatical revolutionists like Markelov and Ostrodumov in
May 18, 1921]
713
The Nation
"Virgin Soil," with their chimerical ideals and their illgrounded faiths, attaining dignity by the intensity and
completeness of their self-devotion. But the Hamlets meet
us at every turn. They emerge under every possible aspect,
in every condition of social existence, in every conceivable
situation. They are the men who consume their own vitals
and profit nobody; they are the "superfluous men." They
have the faculty of dreaming fine and lofty thoughts and
of expressing them eloquently, but they do not believe in
their own imaginings and are utterly without the will for
carrying them into action. Above all they are unstable,,
drifting as aimlessly as the "smoke" which Litvinov watches
from his moving train. What redeems them is a capacity
for suffering, the agonizing sense which at last overpowers^*
them of their failure and futility. They remind one or
Coleridge and his
Sense of past youth, and manhood come in vain,
And genius given and knowledge won in vain.
Such is Rudin, whose gifts and good intentions are dissi
pated in empty words and end in utter heartbreak. In a
crisis which calls for resolution these men betray their lack
of fiber ; they simply break down. While an enthusiast like
Markelov dies tragically at the hands of the peasants whom
he tries to liberate and never feels the bitterness of dis
illusionment, poor Nezhdanov is crushed, not because his
message is repulsed, but because he discovers that he does
not believe in his own mission; feeling himself stripped of
self-respect and spiritually empty, he becomes a pathetic
suicide. The hero of "A Nobleman's Nest," Lavretzky, also
bears in himself the seeds of this disease, but he has suffi
cient moral strength to survive an intense emotional crisis
and be purged. In him Turgenev shows the way of redemp
tion through forgetfulness of selfish aims and personal
happiness and absorption in beneficent activity, which in
Russia means practical work on the land for improving the
material lot of the peasant. The hero of "Smoke" ultimately
enters the same haven as Lavretzky.
But neither Litvinov nor Lavretzky satisfied their crea
tor's idea of the character needed to bring Russia into line
with modern civilization. Their natures are too precarious,
their survival depends on a large element of chance. A
somewhat different turn of the current and they might be
swept away into the sea of passion and drift to their ruin
like Sanin in "Spring Freshets." They are, in the end, souls
that have been saved. Looking around for a more reliable
base on which to build a structure, Turgenev came upon the
type of Solomin, whom he regarded as his principal char
acter in "Virgin Soil." Solomin is set apart from the Ham
lets in that he is a man with an ideal and without phrases.
In common with the Don Quixotes he possesses steadfast
ness of purpose; for the rest, he can distinguish very well
between giants and windmills. Sanity of vision and equilib
rium are, in fact, his most hopeful attributes. He is no
sudden healer of universal wounds, but a healthy, sensible,
splendid worker. His roots go down deep into the common
soil; he draws his life from the "strong, gray, monotoned
people of the masses" and his heart beats in unison with
them. What troubles a reader about this person is that he
is not alive. He is only a projection of the writer's ethical
and social conscience, a purely intellectual conception. It
is not so with Bazarov in "Fathers and Sons," who may be
looked upon as representing the negative aspect of the forces
that appear in Solomin. The forces are the same, but they
are seen actually at work. Here is a grim, pitiless, half-
savage nature, with a suggestion of enormous power, disregardful of common sentiments, riding rough-shod over
conventional values, a creature of merciless intelligence and
violent passions finding no work for his energies save that
of destruction. The portrait wounded the younger genera
tion; they thought that Turgenev was satirizing their
ideals. But the writer himself well knew that he had never
been truer to his artistic conscience than in drawing this
character. If there is an indictment conveyed in it, it is
an indictment against the state of affairs which provided
no wholesome outlet for the Bazarovs. Bazarov is the
truest and most significant creation of Turgenev's genius,
symbolizing by his tragic existence the melancholy stagna
tion of his period and conveying at the same time through
the impression of his demonic force a hope for the time
when the doors of his prison should be thrown open. Is it
not Bazarov who has been frightening orderly people in the
last few years? Is it not, perhaps, he who is creating the
conditions which will make it possible for the Solomins as
well as the Lavretzky's to perform the tasks which they have
at heart? We are now in a better position to perceive why
the tender-hearted but deeply->seeing poet sympathized with
this wild creature of his imagination, and against the abuse
of his erstwhile* admirers maintained the truth and reality
of his conception.
v_
The case of Bazarov is not the only one in which readers
have disagreed either with the writer or among themselves
in interpreting his characters. In the light of some of the
lyrical stories and of the lecture on Hamlet and Don Quixote,
it is not surprising that this should have happened. In
Turgenev's mind there was inherent a conflict between a
temperament which controlled his sympathies, and a moral
intelligence which dictated his judgments. He could not
help feeling for his weak Hamlets at the moment that he
condemned them, and he often failed to arouse the reader's
enthusiasm in behalf of those level-headed, industrious
persons in whom he might be able to see the salvation of
Russia but who, after all, awakened no personal response
in his own heart. What indeed could there be in common
between his poetically sensitive nature and the mere man of
action? That is why the Bulgarian Insarov in "On the
Eve" is so palpably a failure, as from a certain point of
view Solomin is also. Sincere artist though he was, Tur
genev could not in the Russia of his day conscientiously
avoid the social thesis, and his art at times paid the penalty.
In "Fathers and Sons" inspiration triumphed and resulted
in a character which fascinates us by his emotional as well
as his moral force, even though we do not approve of his
actions. Where Turgenev's spirit moved most congenially
and harmoniously was among his heroines, beings of fine
intelligence and ideal passion, capable of unlimited devotion
and far too pure and noble for the men they are matched
with. Only among the women of George Meredith can their
parallel be found. But that is another story.

Felix Mokley, an American student, frequently reviews
English affairs for The Nation.
Walter Nelles, formerly connected with the Civil Liber
ties Bureau, is a practicing attorney in New York.
Jacob Zeitlin, a Russian-American, is assistant professor
of English in the University of Illinois.
Lily Winner is a writer for various publications.
714
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No. 2915
they can return to Germany they are doing so, with their
modest savings which relatives have written will buy them
American Emigres
a two-family house.
Mr. and Mrs. R. (young couple with three children)
By LILY WINNER
Going back to Poland after ten years in America because
WHY has America the "melting-pot" failed to Ameri they do not want their children to grow up extravagant,
saucy, restless, and ungrateful. The American child is, in
canize? Why is Congress, in its hysterical weathertheir opinion, a child of few virtues and they want to keep
vane fashion, passing bills to restrict immigration when,
their own in the path they themselves trod: obedient, con
by casual inquiry, it could ascertain that the margin between
tented, and hardworking. They were both reared on farms
immigrants and emigrants, between arrivals of new people
and departure of old, is so slight as not to fill the hearts of 9 in western Poland and have saved enough money during the
employing capital with boundless joy? Certain it is that
war by their work in American factories to buy a little
farm where they will be independent for the rest of their
industry is driving against high wages, and doubly certain
it is that an unrestricted flow of immigrants will be the most ^ lives. If they had remained in America they would only have
"known hard work and disappointment with no future. It
powerful lever to force down the wages of the American
costs too much in America to live."
worker. Perhaps this knowledge is not confined to our
These histories are typical.
middle class and it may, partially, explain the exodus from
On the last night aboard ship before reaching our des
America of the thousands returning to Europe in the face
tination all the steerage passengers gathered in the diningof bolshevism, famine, and disease.
hall for a farewell celebration. There were songs and cheers
Traveling to Holland in the steerage of a large liner, I
for the friendships that had been made on the trip, for the
learned that the emigres from America are not leaving
officers and workers on the ship, for the brave captain who
these shores with the homesick song of a Byron in their
had brought us safely through our voyage, for the father
hearts. It is not "My adopted land, good-bye!" They are
lands, for Holland, for Poland, for Russia, for Bohemia,
going back in the face of revolution and possible hunger
for the ladies and childrencheers and laughter and na
because America has failed in the promise of her tradi
tions. Our country resents the "foreigner." It is not a land
tional hymnsand for America only one phrase, a phrase
of refuge, of homes and comfort, but a battlefield where
that brought tears to the eyes of most of them, the phrase
"Our sorrows in America."
the dollar is the prize and enough dollars buy return tickets
I felt exasperated. I turned to the well-dressed American
to Eastern and Western Europe, andfarms there. Has
it not deprived those who were ever strangers within its
who sat next to me, a native Hollander, who was returning
gates even of their mother tongue?
to his country to choose a wife because American girls were
It had rained all day, so that the only place the steerage
flighty and extravagant. "Surely," I exclaimed, "the least
they could do would be to sing the American national hymn
passengers had to sit about, unless they wished to go to
when they are singing every other hymn in the world. They
sleep in their crowded, rat-ridden bunks, was the diningare all going back to the lands of their birth with their
hall, and here I listened for hours to many strange stories
about America; stories of unfriendliness and prejudice, of
pockets lined with American gold. Are they without grati
tude for the country that helped them to their coming in
struggle and sorrow and disappointment. I will outline
briefly a few histories to give an idea why every ship going
dependence?"
to Europe is laden with American emigres.
He looked at me in silence for a moment. I could see
that he hesitated. Finally, however, he answered me with
Mr. and Mrs. J. and three childrenBoth worked in the
great cereal mills of a Western State ; had worked there for
a smile: "We are not in America, so I am not afraid to be
frank with you. I have become an American citizen and
four years prior to a strike two years ago. After the strike
I want you to believe that I love America. America has
neither of them could get employment because of the em
been good to me and I prefer her to any other country in the
ployers' blacklist. Came East with their family and secured
world. But the American people for the most part are a
work, the man in the shipyards and the woman as a domes
tic, and because of high war wages succeeded in saving
queer lot. They seem to think that the foreigner who comes
between them a thousand dollars. Five hundred of this
to America is the scum of the earth. As a matter of fact
they sent to a brother in Poland, who bought a large farm
most of the immigrants are men and women of the same
and house for them, and the family is now on its way to its
stamina as the pioneer settlers of America; the native
future home. Until the war these people, both working
American fails to appreciate the courage, the vision, and
most of the time, earned barely enough to get along with
the hardihood it requires for these people to uproot their
in the meanest circumstances.
lives and journey with their children and a few household
Mr. and Mrs. K. and four childrenOwned a small dairy
goods to a new country. They come to America full of
farm near New York, but never earned more than enough
faith, determined to work hard and to build a future for
to live on economically until the war, when a new cannedthemselves. America in her turn needs these people. She
milk plant was built near them. They too saved enough
has had placards all over Europe inviting the worker to her
during the four years of the war to buy a small farm in
mines and factories. American industries want cheap labor
Rumania. Glad to leave America where they had always
and carry on a continuous propaganda to persuade foreign
"to work so hard for only enough to eat and wear" and
labor to migrate to them. But America has nothing save
despite their twenty years' residence here were never ac
work to offer these people on their arrival; no friendly
cepted as anything but foreigners.
smile, no personal interest, no fellowship. On his arrival
Mr. and Mrs. H. (shoemaker) Lived for seventeen years
in America the worker is immediately faced with the old
in one room in the rear of a tiny, smelly shop and because
familiar battle for existence, a battle in which he neither
of the war found their neighbors so unfriendly that now
gives nor receives quarter. Because of America's great
May 18, 1921]
The Nation
715
resources he earns more and fares better than he could in

Europe; but he also works harder.
In the Driftway
"Here across the table you see a typical case. This man
THE Drifter-in-Search-of-Amusement is at times a pa
and his wife are returning to Bohemia for a visit to their
thetic figure. Having an exceedingly thin purse and
parents, taking with them their five small children. You
a taste for the movies which becomes jaded after one or
and I have frequently been obliged to leave the table in
sheer disgust at their table manners. They eat with their ;two trips a month, he is frequently thrown back on one of
the most unpretentious and inexpensive forms of entertain
fingers and behave like animals. The mother gives the baby
ment, involving, as it does, only a loss of shoe-leather. To
everything from cabbage to beer ; the children are cruel and
be explicit, the Drifter walks. The other day he paid a
vicious. Yet this man and his wife, working in America,
visit to his friend Mrs. Wolinsky, who queens it over one of
have many times during the past four years earned a
s
the
brass-shops under the elevated railway downtown on
monthly income of five hundred dollars. They have lived in
Allen
Street. He found her surrounded as usual by a thou
America twenty years. Why in all that time didn't Amer
sand
brass
candle-sticks and several hundred copper, brass,
ica civilize them? Why did she not raise their standard of
and
pewter
bowls and jugs and pitchers and pans of every
living, give them ideals? The war has made them richso
conceivable shape and degree of polish, ranging from a
rich that out of wages alone they have saved a small for
massive old tea-kettle big enough to hold a good-sized
tune that enables them to travel with the entire family to
baby, which Mrs. Wolinsky swears was used for her great
their native home and later return to America, and while
grandfather's
tea in Russia (this is, of course, as it may be) ,
they are in Bohemia they intend to buy a small farm for
to
a
tiny
mug
of ancient brass no bigger than a thimble.
their parents. But spiritually they are as poor as ever.
If you liken it to a thimble, by the way, it will be described
"You will hear people tell you that America cares noth
by Mrs. W. as the very mug whence her great-grandmother
ing for the foreigner except for the hard labor she can get
sipped her tea, using it as a thimble between times (which,
out of him at the lowest wages. This is true. Until Ameri
again,
the Drifter does not doubt except in his blacker and
canism is not only preached to these people, but practiced
more
skeptical
moods).
as well, you will see them saving their money and returning
#
#
to the lands they came from to end their days in ease."

ON
this
particular
day
Mrs.
Wolinsky
was entertaining
I looked about the room and saw half a dozen children
a
not
uncomely
young
woman
who
was
buying brass
coming toward me, and as they seemed to hesitate I smiled
candlesticks
with
almost
vulgar
abandon
and
listening
most
encouragingly. "We think we ought to sing the Star
eagerly,
it
seemed,
to
the
flood
of
discourse
that
was
di
Spangled Banner," one of them whispered shyly. "But
rected at her. The Drifter would not attempt to reproduce
we're not sure of the words. Will you help us sing it?"
in writing the inimitable and exquisite mixture of Yiddish,
Although I was born in America, I didn't know all the
Russian,
and New Yorkese, combined with a lisp, with which
words myself, so we sang the chorus only. There was a
Mrs.
Wolinsky
speaks. It is gentle, voluble, and gesticupolite patter of hands after we had finished.
latory, accompanied by a wide and generous smile and fre
quent pats on her listener's arm or shoulder. "Dear," she
was saying (although the Drifter was sure she had never
"The Case for the Miners"
laid eyes on the girl before) , "you ain't like some girls that
comes in here and act haughty and like they didn't like
By SIEGFRIED SASSOON
the Jewish people. Dear, I hope you come back soon with
Something goes wrong with my synthetic brain
a nice young fella and buy things for your house." At
When I defend the Strikers and explain
this moment her eyes lit on the Drifter and brightened with
My reasons for not blackguarding the Miners.
recognition. "See here," she said, to his extreme embar
"What do you know?" exclaim my fellow-diners
rassment, "how about him? You should get you a young
(Peeling their plovers' eggs or lifting glasses
fella like he is and come see me soon again!" The Drifter
Of mellowed Chateau Rentier from the table) ,
made his exit hastily and not with dignity.
"What do you know about the working classes?"
THE Drifter has received the following letter signed
I strive to hold my own ; but I'm unable
L. K.:
To state the case succinctly. Indistinctly
If
you
haven't drifted around Toronto recently, let me call
I mumble about World-Emancipation,
to
your
attention
some of the elevating propaganda on the
Standards of Living, Nationalization
billboards of that city, where the fight for the possession of
Of Industry; until they get me tangled
poor, repressed Ontario waxes hot:
In superficial details ; goad me on
THE TURKS ARE PROHIBITIONISTS. DO YOU
To unconvincing vagueness. When we've wrangled
WANT TO BE A TURK? THEN VOTE
From soup to savory, my temper's gone.
FOR PROHIBITION.
LENIN AND TROTZKY ARE PROHIBITIONISTS.
"Why should a miner earn six pounds a week?"
DO YOU WANT TO BE A BOLSHEVIK?
"Leisure! They'd only spend it in a bar!"
THEN VOTE FOR PROHIBITION.
"Standard of life! You'll never teach them Greek!"
Out on the billboards on the main street in clear day.
"Or make them more contented than they are!"
Honest. And do you know I kept watching the Canadians
That's how my port-flushed friends discuss the Strike.
walking by and reading themand on King Street nobody even
And that's the reason why I shout and splutter.
laughed. The signs of the opposition party are just as en
lightening.
And that's the reason why I'd almost like
To see them hawking matches in the gutter.
The Drifter
716
The Nation
Correspondence
The Railroad Problem
Sir: I have just received copy of The Nation of April 20
which contains my letter of March 29 concerning the general
railroad situation.
I regret to say that I read with some disappointment the com
ments that were made by the Editor of The Nation concerning
the subject matter of the letter above referred to. For instance,
while admitting that the railroads last year carried "the heaviest
traffic in their history," the Editor intimates that the mere fact
that the railroads called on the Interstate Commerce Commis
sion for its support in that connection, as provided by the EschCummins Act, would indicate a failure of the law. On the
contrary, what actually took place was the very best possible
test that could have been had of the efficacy of the law. Con
gress recognized that emergencies would, undoubtedly, arise
when the amount of business offered would be more than the
railroads could carry, and it gave to its agent, the Interstate
Commerce Commission, the right to. exercise very broad authority
under such circumstances, which it had never been permitted to
exercise before. In short, it authorized its agent, in times of
emergency, to direct the use and movement of all the cars and
engines of all the railroads, regardless of ownership, in such a
way as would best serve the requirements of the public for
transportation. Manifestly, the right to exercise such power
ought not and could not be granted to the individual companies
themselves, but must be exercised by a proper agency of Con
gress; in fact, by the Interstate Commerce Commission. I
must confess that I am quite unable to understand the Editor's
point of view as expressed in the paragraph to which I have
referred.
One other thing. The following words appear in the same
article :
"Apparently, Mr. Willard believes that so long as some
trains move, the law has been a success in regard to labor rela
tions. But does he really think that the labor problem on the
roads is in a fair way to settlement? If so, we earnestly sug
gest that he try to find out the temper of the men on his own
lines."
Replying to the above question, first, I certainly do believe
that the labor problem on the railroads is in a fair way to a
settlement; and second, I also believe that I understand the
temper generally of the men in the employ of the Baltimore &
Ohio Company, and in my opinion it is not such as the Editor's
comment would imply. However, if you care to go into the mat
ter further, and I hope you do, I suggest that you make in
quiries regarding the matter of the Honorable William J. Burke,
member of the present Congress, from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Mr. Burke for many years was a conductor in the service of the
Baltimore & Ohio Company. He is now the General Chairman,
elected by all of the conductors in the Baltimore & Ohio service.
He is also a member of Congress and is living in Washington
where he is easily accessible. I would be glad if you would in
quire of Mr. Burke concerning the temper, the loyalty, and the
general disposition of Baltimore & Ohio employees at the present
time as he understands the situation. I have not seen Mr.
Burke personally for more than a year, and I have had no cor
respondence with him in the meantime. I believe, however, that
he is in position to know and understand conditions on the Balti
more & Ohio Railroad, and I am quite willing to accept whatever
he may say in this connection. I earnestly hope you will en
deavor to get from Mr. Burke an expression of his views con
cerning the subject.
Of course, if the Editor of The Nation is definitely convinced,
as he says he is, of the "complete failure of the law" and is not
willing to consider anything that may be said in support of the
law by men who are actually engaged in trying to make it a
[Vol. 112, No. 2915
success, then it would seem hardly worth while to continue cor

respondence or discussion concerning the matter.
Baltimore, April 2S
Daniel Willard
Sir: Your issue of April 20 contains a letter from Mr. Daniel
Willard, president of the B. & 0. Railroad, replying to an
editorial which under the caption The Railroad Wreck con
tains the statement that "today the Esch-Cummins law is a
complete failure." Under Mr. Willard's letterwho ably dis
cusses causes for existing conditions to disprove your editorial's
assertionsis an editor's note which contains the following:
"We repeat that the failure of the law is complete. It was
based on an unsound theory, and even Mr. Warfield's associa
tion of security owners admits the failure. If this were not
the case Senator Cummins would not himself be demanding a
rigid inquiry into the whole railroad situation. Mr. Warfield
himself is proposing an incredibly complicated machinery
some fifty boardsto put efficiency into the railroad system."
It is not my purpose to enter into controversy in respect to
the Esch-Cummins Act. My reason for this communication is
solely to correct the statement made that "even Mr. Warfield's
association of security owners admits the failure." Permit me
to say that there has been no such "admission," nor is the
act considered a "failure."
Under the unprecedented curtailment of business and drop
in prices of commodities hauled by railroads owing to severe
after-war readjustments which have been taking place for some
time, and equally unprecedented, the Esch-Cummins Act could
notnor could any act dealing with rate levelsbe expected to
properly function. Questions involving rate levels are highly
technical. I will therefore not attempt in this communication to
deal with this subject.
The Esch-Cummins Act can hardly be held responsible for the
precipitate contraction of credits with the consequent crumbling
of commodity prices to a point where any freight rate would
seem disproportionate to the selling price obtained for the prod
ucts transported.
The exhaustion of general credit was manifest before the
increase in railroad rates. There had been a progressive decline
in the reserve ratio of the Federal Reserve banks from the peak
of August, 1917, caused by the expansion of bank credits of
over 80 per cent to below 40 per cent in the early part of 1920.
The increase in railroad rates did not take effect until Septem
ber, 1920, when the exhaustion of credit showed its effect on
commodity prices. The increase in rates cannot therefore be
held accountable for the contraction in business from which the
railroads have suffered acutely. There may be specific cases
but not so generally.
When presenting to Congress in 1919 certain suggestions in
respect to the Transportation Act, the Association of security
owners also made proposals to insure intensive economies in
railroad operation, car supply, etc. Their adoption would have
supplied the means to have largely taken up the slack now con
stituting railroad losses in revenue, and railroad rates could
have been reduced. The statement recently handed to Senator
Cummins, to which you refer, contained practically the same
provisions for economical railroad operation as were submitted
in 1919. We believed then that the provisions suggested were
necessary to round out the machinery essential to secure satis
factory results. The present situation demonstrates the sound
ness of the position then taken.
It will be conclusively shown in due course that our position
in this regard, which is now substantially what our position was
in 1919, is correct. Permit me to suggest, therefore, that you
should not assume that our action in recurring to our original
recommendation is an admission that the Transportation Act
is, as you say, a failure. Your designation of our original pro
posal in its present form as "incredibly complicated machinery"
is another assumption, as we hope to show in due time.
Baltimore, Md., April S8
S. Davies Warfield
The Nation
May 18, 1921]
Books
Clio: Maid of All Work
Studies in Statecraft. By Sir Geoffrey Butler. Cambridge Uni
versity Press.
Ireland in the European System. By James Hogan. Vol. I, 15001557. Longmans, Green and Company.
The Evolution of Revolution. By H. M. Hyndman. Boni and
Liveright.
"DERNARD SHAW'S epigram, "that we learn from history
*-* that no man ever learned anything from history," implies
that men have at least turned to Clio for instruction. Truer,
perhaps, to say that they have turned to her for corroboration
of their own theories; they have made her not so much a teacher
as a servant. From antiquity she has nursed our children with
her tales of wonder; she has made the bed of the nationalists
and the jingoes; she has cooked the pabulum for the economist
and sociologist; and she is expected to clean up the messes made
by cranks of all sorts.
Even if all this be admitted it must not be taken to cast any
slur upon the good faith of many of Clio's patrons who have
sought her less for her own sake than for the work she does.
Of the three honorably objective studies herewith reviewed,
that of Sir Geoffrey Butler is perhaps the most purely historic
in spirit. His plan is to find antecedents for the League of
Nations and in general for the present designs for world peace,
and the outcome of his lucubrations is anything but encourag
ing. Books of this sort have been fairly numerous of late, but
Sir Geoffrey has not been able to use the two most prominent
of them, Christian H. Lange's "History of Internationalism"
and J. Kvacala's biography of William Postell. The first essay
toward establishing world peace that Sir Geoffrey notices was
an interesting debate held at Rome in 1468 between Roderic
Bishop of Zamora and Bartholomew Platina, the famous his
torian of the papacy. While the former maintained the ad
vantages of war, and on surprisingly familiar ground, the latter
upheld the benefits of peace. The popes were fond of these
discussions; a few years later Julius II employed Erasmus to
draft arguments on both sides of the same thesis; and the
humanist was much chagrined when the Pope decided that the
argument for war, which he meant as a mere parody, was
better than that for peace, into which he put his whole soul.
The next plans for universal peace were French. William
Postell advocated both elective monarchy and a pax Gallicana,
resting on the might of French arms. Perhaps it was he who
suggested to Cruce and Sully the Grand Design for a world
federation of which so much has been made lately. It is now
thought that this plan, attributed by Sully to Henry IV, was
in reality excogitated by the minister himself long after the
death of his master. Its essence consisted of reducing the
European balance of power to an equilibrium, and it doubtless
got much of its attraction to France from the fact that it took
the form of an anti-Hapsburg league. Sully's statement that
he talked over the design with Elizabeth and James I has been
generally discredited, but a friendly letter from James to
Henry IV, dated 1597, recently published by the writer of this
review, shows that there were really negotiations for an alliance
between the two monarchs.
While Cork is engaged in a tragic and heroic struggle, mak
ing her the peer of Jerusalem and of La Rochelle and of Louvain, she produces important intellectual work. From her uni
versity George Boole half a century ago sent forth his famous
studies of mathematics and logic. And now, in Professor
James Hogan, she has found a historian of no small merit
With thoroughness he has studied the annals of his country,
with art and really wonderful fairness and calm he has set
forth the results of his researches in the endeavor to put Ire
land into its proper European relationships. Taking exception
to H. G. Wells's statement that "Ireland as a significant land
717
did not enter the stage of European history till the nineteenth
century," he labors to prove the international importance of
the western isle in the first half of the sixteenth century. The
policy of the Irish to resist the English conquest was made
harder at that time by two new factors in history, the Reforma
tion and the economic revolution. While differences of creed
added mutual animosity to the racial antagonism of the two
peoples, the new English merchant class began greedily to ex
ploit the subject land and to compress her commerce and in
dustry. This made Ireland the natural ally of England's ene
mies, Spain and France, and most people will be surprised to
learn how ever present were the Irish leaders at the courts of
Paris and Madrid. Indeed, wherever the intrigue was thickest
there were the sons of Erin. The last place in the world one
would expect to find them was Wittenberg, and yet the sources
show that just as Thomas Cromwell's agents were investing
that capital of Protestantism, in the years 1534-36, two Irish
men, John Duncan and Roderic Hector, were there to represent
the interests of their race.
Mr. Hyndman is first a Socialist and then a historian. One
may look to his account of the recent labor movement in which
he took part for some light and may value his shrewd observa
tions on the probable failure of the general strike, and on the
tyranny of the Bolsheviks, or his prophecy of a labor govern
ment in the near future in England. But it is hopeless to
look to his pages for any light on the past. Not only does he
use few and poor sources, but his bias is such against the
possessing class in history that he can hardly find a good word
to say for any famous character that ever lived. The result
is to give his style a sneering cynicism that outdoes the fol
lowers of Machiavelli. Guicciardini at least left the reader
uncertain whether Savonarola was a prophet or an astute im
postor, but Mr. Hyndman has no such doubts about Cromwell,
who is to him nothing but a self-seeking hypocrite and assassin
from the beginning to the end of his career. The humane
Cicero is taunted bitterly for "advocating diabolical cruelty to
slaves" and for various imaginary crimes such as strangling
Catiline in prison with his own hands. Brutus was a "ferocious
aristocratic usurer and hirer of cutthroats." History to Mr.
Hyndman is a Donnybrook Fairwhen he sees a head he
hits it.
Preserved Smith
The Seven Stories

The Golden Windmill and Other Stories. By Stacy Aumonier.
Original Sinners. By Henry W. Nevinson. B. W. Huebsch, Inc.
People. By Pierre Hamp. Authorized Translation by Jamea
Whitall. Harcourt, Brace and Company.
"rpHE Arabs have stated," Mr. Stacy Aumonier quotes ap* provingly, "that there are only seven stories in the
world." So dramatic critics of a well-known variety echo:
"There are only seven dramatic situations in the world." A
distinguished raconteur once reduced these situations to five:
They marry. He marries someone else. She marries someone
else. He dies. She dies. All these sayings leave out the fact
that there are significant varieties of human feeling and even
reasoning, that people submit, rebel, and even reach a point at
which they are, at least subjectively, a little more than pawns
upon the board of the conventional life of human society. In
a game there are only so many moves. And no one thinks of
extending the number of moves or breaking the rules of the
game, because no one is compelled to play. But participation in
life is compulsory. So soon, therefore, as people begin in any
true sense to reflect, they come into conflict with each other not
only in the course of the prescribed moves ; they come into con
flict with the rules themselves, with those who think themselves
the masters of the game, with pieties within them that cling to
the old calculable moves, with inner necessities that demand a
new set altogether. When that happens the seven traditional
718
The Nation
situations become seven thousand and the restricted game melts

into the boundless universe.
Mr. Stacy Aumonier sticks strictly to the game and to a tacit
recognition of all its rules. Hence nothing is left him except
violence of circumstance and arrangements of action into mere
tricious contrasts like the members of a false and labored an
tithesis. He plans very carefully for a jolt of surprise like a
chess-player planning far ahead a brilliant and unexpected
move. He exacts a weary admiration for his dexterity but suc
ceeds in telling us nothing that is new or true or vital. His old
amazing contact with the concrete earth is gone. His surfaces
are now of a pink silk smoothness. His art has become crafts
manship.
The philosophic mind and the creative imagination invent
their technical processes as they go along and invent them from
within. It is safe to assert that Mr. Henry W. Nevinson did
not concern himself greatly with the technique of the short
story. What came to him were sudden, deep perceptions, elec
tric flashes of insight into the soul of man and into the char
acter of civilization. Each built its own visible form. He can
be as ingenious as anyone. But his ingenuity, as in the story
Sitting at a Play, serves to illustrate an idea of great intricacy
and importance. A man's subjective vision gives him a sincere
and not ignoble justification for actions that the most flexible
external judgment cannot but condemn. Where does the truth lie?
The other stories are austerer in form even when there is a
touch of humor in the idea or the observations involved. They
are admirably calculated to discredit the common notion that art
has nothing to do with thought. In the deeper sense every fine
story, poem, play has at its core an idea or the illustration of
an idea which the author desires not only to communicate, but
to communicate persuasively. The presence of such an idea is
precisely what differentiates art from empty craftsmanship and
Mr. Nevinson's stories from this group of Mr. Aumonier's.
Thus Sly's Awakening deals with the old notion of life as a
dream, and Pongo's Illusion with the shameless cruelty of con
quest. The Act of Fear works out with quiet but superb forcefulness the corrupting and destructive consequences of inhuman
moral taboos. In Diocletian's Day is a timeless comment, richly
beautiful in imaginative execution, upon the enduring spiritual
imbecility of the State. Diocletian is no common politician ; he is
a gentleman, a man of peace, a lover of beauty. But tolerance
must stop somewhere. His stops at the Christians. "That
youth," he remarks, as the lions rip their victim's throat, "that
youth refused the military oath because his superstition com
manded its followers not to bind themselves by swearing nor to
resist evil. . . . These pitiful wretches enjoy the peace and
splendor of Rome but will not move a finger to protect or
extend either."
M. Pierre Hamp, a man of strong creative gifts who has
risen from the actual ranks of labor, repudiates, with a touch
of fierceness, art as it is commonly understood. He has seen
so much crude suffering that to create beauty for its own sake
seems to him an affront to mankind. Very well. But he is
eager to restrict the subject matter of literature and forgets
that the complications and sufferings of the strictly personal
life involve man's meaning and destiny quite as much, if indeed
not far more, than the problems and processes of labor, and that
the achievement of a freer and more humane existence by the
masses will only serve vastly to increase the numbers of those
who will be concerned with the subtleties he now condemns.
His own stories are far from artless, nor is their art conceivable
without the tradition of the modern French "conte" from
Maupassant on. He takes a sharply seen and tenaciously re
membered charactera working-girl, a pastry-cook, a skinflint
shop-keeper. He defines that character through very concrete
bits of action and passion and ends upon a note of bitter and
laconic irony. Thus he quietly shapes each story into an ac
cusation of the economic order which is the more devastating
because he has given his proletarians no fancied virtues and no
[Vol. 112, No. 2915
graces but those of their sheer humanness. His portraits are deepetched and memorable and an excellent translation keeps his
descriptions from being relaxed or blunted. But he is no Gorki.
He and his people have a Latin hardness and defmiteness.
There is no brooding, no inflowing of the universal, no hint of
any pain deeper than the lack of bread and light.
Notable New Books

Russia in the Eighties. By John F. Baddeley. Longmans, Green.
A special correspondent's recollections of sport and politics under the
old regime.
A Selection from the Poems of Giosud Carducci. Translated and
Annotated with a Biographical Introduction by Emily
A. Tribe. Longmans, Green.
A handsome introduction to this most admirable of Italy's nineteenthcentury poets.
Discipline and the Derelict. By Thomas Arkle Clark. Macmillan.
Kindly studies of the mental, moral, and spiritual processes of under
graduates as observed by an experienced dean of men.
Women in the Life of Balzac. By Juanita Helm Floyd. Holt.
A meticulous
without much
humor,
Balzac's
with
women,
includingstudy,
his "literary,M
"business
and ofsocial,"
and relations
"sentimental"
friends, and of the influence of women upon his work.
Histoire du Canada. Par F. X. Gameau. Revue et annotee par
Hector Garneau. Tome II. Cinquieme edition. Paris:
Felix Alcan.
A definitive edition of what is still the standard history of Canada
to about 1840, first published in 1845-1862. The first volume has already
appeared in a sixth edition. The revision, the work of the author's
grandson, comprises extensive footnotes and brief appendices which cor
rect or supplement the text and sweep the field of Canadian bibliography.
The Senate and Treaties, 1789-1817. By Ralston Hayden. Macmillan.
A detailed historical study of "the development of the treaty-making
functions of the United States Senate during their formative period."
The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries. By Herbert
Heaton. Oxford.
An erudite monograph of value to general readers interested in the
history of industry.
Early History of Singing. By W. J. Henderson. Longmans,
Green.
A clear and careful account of methods of singing from the beginning
of the Christian era to the time of Alessandro Scarlatti.
Japan and the California Problem. By T. Iyenaga and Kenoske
Sato. Putnam.
The Japanese problem usefully discussed from the point of view of
Japanese observers who have lived in the United States.
The Community Capitol. By M. Clyde Kelly. Pittsburgh: May
flower Press.
A study of the uses to which schoolhouses may be put in their com
munities and a plea for the development of wider uses.
Serbia and Europe. Edited by L. Marcovitch. Macmillan.
Numerous articles by Serbian publicists setting forth the Serbian po
sition and defending the Serbian policy during the war.
The Sonnets of Milton. With Introduction and Notes. By John
S. Smart. Glasgow: Maclehose, Jackson.
A useful edition with particularly extended commentary on soureaa
and characteristics.
Collected Poems. With Autobiographical and Critical Frag
ments. By Frederic W. H. Myers. Macmillan.
A complete collection of the very ordinary verses left by this famous
scholar and occultist.
Principles of Government Accounting and Reporting. By Fran
cis Oakey. Appleton.
An important volume in the series called Principles of Administration
and published by the Institute for Government Research. It analyzes
the forms of records kept and statements rendered in various States and
municipalities in the United States, and proposes other forms devised
by the author.
The Life and Times of Sir Alexander Tilloch GalU By Oscar
Douglas Skelton. Oxford.
The life of Gait against a background of Canadian politics.
The Jew and American Ideals. By John Spargo. Harper.
What the author calls "a defense of American ideals and institutions
against anti-Semitism; a plea for Christian civilization."
The Myth of the Jewish Menace in World Affairs. By Lucien
Wolf. Macmillan.
An admirable elucidation and refutation of the preposterous charges
based upon the "Protocols of the Elders of Zlon." Published at a very
low price, it deserves the widest circulation.
May 18, 1921]
The Nation
The Turnpikes of New England. By Frederic J. Wood. Mar

shall Jones.
An admirable piece of antiquarian and topographical work, undertaken
with enthusiasm, carried out with conscience, and printed and illustrated
with distinction.
Drama
Revivals
HP HE notion that every play presented must be a new play is
* confined to the American theater. The managers who do
not depend wholly on factory production are constantly in a hec
tic state. Blind and confused they continue to demand new
plays and forget that the most fertile periods of dramatic lit
erature could not have satisfied their needs. For a normal
season brings one hundred and fifty openings to New York.
Deduct one-thirda very liberal allowancefor musical come
dies, "revues," and miscellaneous entertainments, and there re
main one hundred productions distinctly dramatic in character.
The inevitable result is that the great majority of plays are lit
erally beneath contempt and find a quick way to deserved
oblivion.
One thing alone can cure this condition. It must be under
stood that sound drama is more permanent than millinery, that
a play worth presenting at all has not spent its life at the
end of its first "run." Thus all the Theater Guild successes,
except "Heartbreak House," have been revivals: "John Fergu
son," "Jane Clegg," "The Power of Darkness," "Liliom." Thus,
too, Mr. Arthur Hopkins succeeded with "Redemption" and Mr.
John D. Williams with "The Letter of the Law," and playgoers
traveled week after week to Grand Street to see Galsworthy's
"The Mob." Commercial managers, observing these facts super
ficially but without any insight into their true character, have
bethought them of reviving plays. But they have not revived
good plays, only plays that were once profitableHartley Manners's "Peg o' My Heart" and Edward Sheldon's "Romance."
These plays are precisely like millinery, dusty and grotesque as
last year's bonnets. Art alone has a freshness that does not
perish with the year. Such revivals reveal more glaringly the
poverty of our stage. They neither nourish the artistic sense of
our audiences nor do they help the alarming number of excel
lent actors and actresses who are kept in idleness by the lack of
appropriate parts. In those periods of idleness the artists of
our stage, quite like the managers, wander about with a vague
and pathetically trustful eagerness. When they come upon a
critic they look at him reproachfully because he does not hide a
new dramatic literature under his coat.
The critic cannot, unfortunately, produce dramatists to order.
But a moderate acquaintance with dramatic literature and the
ways of the theater in other countries often causes him to pon
der productions that would keep our stage busy in a truly civi
lized fashion for at least a season. He is shy about making his
suggestions. He knows so well how they will be met. And he is
weary of the old phrases because he is convinced that the public
taste is artificially kept at an abnormally low level, and because
he regards business reasons as no reasons at all. It is not neces
sary for managers to be rich or for "stars" to draw higher
salaries than a great surgeon or a great teacher. So, unwilling
to battle with a stupid and greedy world, he arranges for a
season on the theater of his own mind.
Mr. John Barrymore begins that season by playing Osvald
in "Ghosts." He then proceeds to play the leper prince in
Hauptmann's "Henry of Aue," the role for which all his experi
ments have been but as an unconscious preparation. Here he
is as beautiful as he pleases, as stricken as he pleases, and as
eloquent in the delivery of verse as he was in Richard III.
Next, Miss Grace George opens at The Playhouse as Millamant
in "The Way of the World." If Congreve proves too harsh and
brilliant, she changes to Lady Teazle in "The School for Scan
dal" and helps to revive the great tradition of British comedy
that is almost dead. She may fail, but she need not disappear.
719
For in this ideal season she plays not pinchbeck imitations of the
real thing, but that thing itself, which is "La Parisienne" by
Henri Becque.
At the same time Miss Ethel Barrymore plays "Candida,"
Miss Florence Reed "Iris," Miss Pauline Lord "The Second Mrs.
Tanqueray"not every revival need be a masterpieceand Miss
Emily Stevens first "Hedda Gabler" and then Rita Allmers in
"Little Eyolf," taking good care to have Miss Beryl Mercer cast
for the part of the old rat-wife, while around the corner there
is an "all-star" production of Jules Lemaitre's "The Pardon."
Richard Bennett is Georges, Miss Estelle Winwood, Suzanne;
and Miss Mary Nash, Therese. A softer and more poetical glow,
a deeper atmosphere, is needed. And so Miss Alice Brady
opens as Christine in Schnitzler's "Light o' Love" and Mr.
Arnold Daly and Mr. Joseph Schildkraut play, and play in
comparably, the father and son in Hauptmann's "Michael
Kramer."
The season goes on and Mr. Ben Ami appears as Hjalmar
Ekdahl in "The Wild Duck," with Miss Lord as Gina and Miss
Helen Hayes or Miss Genevieve Tobin as Hedvig; Mr. Leo
Ditrichstein plays General Siberan in Hervieu's "Know Thy
self"; and Mr. Whitford Kane gives us, in successive months,
ripe and whimsical performances of the "Bourgeois Gentilhomme," the village justice Adam in Kleist's "The Broken
Jug," and Wellwyn in Galsworthy's "The Pigeon."
Shakespeare is not forgotten in that annus mirabilis of the
critic's vision. Two of his plays, both with scenery by Mr.
Robert Edmond Jones in his second manner, not his third, run
from September to June. One is "The Merchant of Venice"
with Mr. Barney Bernard as Shylock, the other is "Othello"
with Mr. Charles Gilpin in the title role and Mr. George Arliss
as Iago. Finally there comes a crowning splendor. The great
est English tragedy since the seventeenth century has its Ameri
can premiere. Margaret Anglin plays Beatrice in Shelley's
"Cenci."
There are new plays by native dramatists in the critic's ideal
season. But good plays rather than many. No "Welcome
Stranger" while Henri Nathansen's "Behind Walls" has not
been seen nor Herman Heijerman's "Ghetto"; no "Challenge"
or "Poldekin" while Hartleben's "Hanna Jagert" is unknown.
There is a play by Susan Glaspell on Broadway and one by
Eugene O'Neill, and every authentic talent is given the chance
and the experience of a production. But the season never grows
dull. For if it threatens to do so, someone quickly produces
Strindberg's "Comrades" or Brieux's "The May-Beetles" or
Shaw's "You Never Can Tell" (with Mr. Grant Mitchell as the
dentist, of course) or even Elizabeth Baker's admirable and
half-forgotten "Chains."
Ludwig Lewisohn
Now Ready
"The Next War" By WILL IRWIN
Published by E. P. DUTTON A. CO.
Price, $1.50
A Timely Book
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by
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New York
International
Relations
The Russian- Polish Treaty

THE Russian-Polish Treaty was signed by the represen
tatives of Russia, Poland, and the Ukraine at Riga,
March 18, 1921. It was ratified by the Russian Soviet
Government on March 22, and by the Polish Diet on
April 15. The most important articles of the treaty are
given in full below with proper indication of the nature of
the articles or parts of articles omitted.
Introduction
Poland on the one hand and Russia and the Ukraine on the
other hand, desirous of terminating as soon as possible the
war between them, and with the aim of concluding a final, last
ing, and honorable peace founded on a mutual understanding,
on the basis of the Agreement signed in Riga on October 12,
1920, concerning the preliminary conditions of peace, decided
to open peace negotiations, and to this end designated as their
plenipotentiaries :
The Goverment of the Republic of Poland: Messrs. John
Dombski, Stanislaw Kauzik, Edward Lechowicz, Henry Strasburger, and Leon Wasilewski.
The Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic in its own
name, and with the authorization of the Government of the
White-Russian Socialist Soviet Republic, and the Ukrainian
Socialist Soviet Republic: Messrs. Adolf Joffe, Jacob Hanecki,
Emanuel Quiring, Leonide Obolenski, and Alex Szumski.
The above-named plenipotentiaries assembled in Riga, and
after the exchange of their credentials, acknowledged as suffi
cient and drawn up in proper form, agreed to the following
decisions :
Article I
Termination of the State of War
Both contracting parties declare that the state of war be
tween them is ended.
Article II
Both contracting parties, conforming to the principle of the
right of nations to self-determination, recognize the indepen
dence of the Ukraine and White-Russia. . . .
[The greater part of Article II defines the eastern boundary
line between Poland on the one hand and the Ukraine and
White-Russia on the other.]
Each of the contracting parties undertakes the obligation to
withdraw, not later than fourteen days after the signing of the
present treaty, its military forces and its administration from
those localities which, in the present description of the frontier,
have been recognized as belonging to the other side. . . .
Article III
Territorial Rights
Russia and the Ukraine renounce all rights and pretensions
to territories situated to the west of the frontier determined in
Article II of the present treaty. Poland on her part renounces,
to the benefit of the Ukraine and White-Russia, all rights and
pretensions to territories situated to the east of this frontier.
Both contracting parties agree that in so far as the terri
tories situated to the west of the present frontier, determined
in Article II of the present treaty, include territories under dis
pute between Poland and Lithuania the question of the appertainance of these territories to the one or the other of theie
two states belongs exclusively to Poland and Lithuania.
Article IV
Former Appertainance to Russia
From the former appertainance of parts of the territories
of the Polish Republic to the former Russian Empire no obli
gations or burdens result for Poland in relation to Russia,
Section
except those foreseen by the present treaty. In an equal meas

ure, from the former common appertainance to the former
Russian Empire no mutual obligations and burdens result be
tween Poland, White-Russia, and the Ukraine, except those
foreseen by the present treaty.
Article V
Respect of Sovereignty
Both contracting parties guarantee to each other complete
respect of state sovereignty and abstinence from any inter
ference whatever in the interior affairs of the other party,
especially from agitation, propaganda, and all kinds of inter
vention, or from supporting the same.
Both contracting parties undertake the obligation not to
create and not to support organizations having for aim armed
combat with the other contracting party, either attacking its
territorial integrity or preparing the overthrow of its state or
social structure by violenceas well as organizations assum
ing the role of government of the other party or of a part of
its territory. Wherefore, the two contracting parties under
take the obligation not to allow the presence on their territories
of such organizations, their official representations and other
organs, to forbid the recruiting of soldiers, as well as the im
port to their territories and the transport through their terri
tories of armed forces, arms, ammunition, and all kinds of war
material destined for these organizations.
Article VI
Option
(1) All persons who have reached the age of 18 years and
who are on Polish territory at the moment of the ratification of
the present treaty, who on the 1st of August, 1914, were citizens
of the Russian Empire and are inscribed, or have the right to be
inscribed in the registers of the stable population of the former
Kingdom of Poland, or were inscribed in the town or rural com
munes, or in one of the social class organizations on territories
of the former Russian Empire forming part of Poland, have the
right to make known their desire on the subject of the option
of Russian or Ukrainian citizenship. From former citizens of
the former Russian Empire of other categories, who at the
moment of the ratification of the present treaty are on Polish
territory, such action is not required.
(2) Former citizens of the former Russian Empire who have
reached the age of 18 years, who at the moment of the ratifica
tion of the present treaty are on the territories of Russia or
the Ukraine, and are inscribed or have the right to be inscribed
in the registers of the stable population of the former Kingdom
of Poland, or were inscribed in town or rural communes, or in
one of the social class organizations on territories of the former
Russian Empire forming part of Poland, will be considered as
Polish citizens if, in the form of option foreseen in the present
Article, they express such desire.
Equally, persons who have reached the age of 18 years and
are on the territory of Russia or of the Ukraine, will be con
sidered as Polish citizens if, in the form of option foreseen in
the present Article, they express such a desire and prove that
they descend from participants in the struggle for the inde
pendence of Poland in the period from 1830 to 1865, or that they
are the descendants of persons who, no further than three gen
erations back, were permanently domiciled on the territory of
the former Republic of Poland, and prove that they themselves
by their activities, their use of the Polish language as their
usual language, and in the bringing-up of their offspring, have
plainly manifested attachment to Polish nationality. . . .
(4) The choice of the husband extends to the wife and the
children up to the age of 18 years, in so far as a different
understanding does not take place between husband and wife
on this subject. If husband and wife cannot agree, the wife
has the right of independent choice of citizenship; in this case
May 18, 1921]
The Nation
"My Chinese Marriage"

She was an American girldaughter of a family of modest means in a
middle-western college town. He was a Chineseeldest son of a family of
gentry for many centuries arbiters of the life of their ancestral town in the
pleasant hills of South China. They met at college, fell in love and married.
His family disowned him. They went to China to live but far away from
his peoplewhere he practised international law. Shortly came their chil
dren ; later followed reconciliation with his family.
And then this American girl, tremendously in love with her husband, faced
the ordeal of life as the daughter-in-law of his Chinese mother.
"M. T. F.", now a young widow, back again in her American home with her
three children, is writing the story of how it turned out. Her devotion to her
husbandher revelation of the inner life of a Chinese household, rarely open
to a foreignerher own vivid emotions as she lived the life of a Chinese
daughter-in-lawmake her story an outstanding human document.
Read the first instalment in the June
ASIA
The American MAGAZINE on the Orient
More than 60 IllustrationsArt Insert of 8 pages
A new Asiatic Continent is being1 born. All those
fabled lands are struggling out of the mists of cen
turies. The cries of camel drivers are still heard, but
across caravan routes and over mountain passes echo
the sounds of locomotives, motor cars, airships. And
yet the mystery of the East remains. Month by
month this renaissance is recorded in ASIA, the only
American magazine treating exclusively of the Orient,
through authoritative articles, fiction and beautiful
pictures.
CONTENTS OF THE JUNE "ASIA"
Long Shots from the Male- Shoes of Asia
kulaBush By Martin Johnson
By Roland Gorbdld
Moments that make your blood run Here's a man with a fascinating
cold and your spine creep ! Go hobby I Shoes from every Asiatic
ing after big game in the Jungle
1 Through this collection, from
has nothing: on going into the land
the rawhide sandal of a Jibbur
heart of cannibal-land after big herdsman
to the tiny embroidered
movies.
slipper of a Persian Princess, one
Java and A Story
can follow the development of
By L. Adams Beck races.
The Dutch have done their honest
best to make Java over according Taming the Yellow River
to the Holland mould. But, Java
By Charles K. Edmunds
belongs to the enchanted East and
R. Freeman wants to make
she stays there. L. Adams Beck theJohn
Yellow
River itself dig a new
has caught the beauty of this island channelfertilize
the millions of
country in the glittering net of his acres it flows throughbe
a friend
article.
to
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bringing
By J. O. P. Bland
Again the big question of how far flood, famine, pestilence and death.
we should impose our civilization On the Famine Front in
upon China in her adjustment to Shantung
By J. J. Heeren
modern ideals 1 Mr. Bland, reply
this short article by Mr.
ing to Professor John Dewey, be Road
and you will see what China
lieves that neither American nor Heeren
is doing, through Chinese and for
British institutions will "save" eign
organizations, not only to feed
China, but that new Chinese ideals millions
famine sufferers but to
and manners and systems will be prevent ofpestilence
from following
evolved by the Chi nese themselves
in accordance with the traditions on the heels of famine.
of the race.
Pilgrim-paths In the Lama
Up a Tree in The Jungle
Country By Will Thompson
By Charles Mayer Yellow
climbing up
After reading this final instalment Dokerla, cladthe pilgrims
holy mountain of
of Mayer's sensational experiences Tibet ; trees inscribed
with
prayers ;
in the jungle, you will be satisfied the distant chanting of the
Holy
for all time to limit your acquain Laws ; the bells of mountain Lama
tance with seladangB to a quiet
view of them stuffed in some mu series calling the faithful to even
ing benediction I
seum.
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Send the next five issues of ASIA, the American Magazine on the Orient,
beginning with the current number. I enclose $1.00.
Nation 6-21-21
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Canadian $1.20. Foreign $1.40.
THE
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NEW WORLD
"The interesting questions which are raised in regard

to capital and labor, and its illuminating discussion of
internationalism and pacifism, should be read by every
one who claims to be at all conversant with world prob
lems." (Bishop) Paul Jones.
"An extraordinarily nice thing to give one's obdurate
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A 32-page pamphlet in lighter vein. Price 25 cts.
THE ARBITRATOR
P. O. Box 42, Wall St. Station, New York City
=J. H,
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When Labor Rules
"The General Secretary of the British Na

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"The author states his views as to how labor
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his book is a valuable picture of the England
which, it may be, lies just over the horizon."
William L. Chenery in The Survey.
Just published$2.00, by mail, $2.10
722
The Nation
[Vol. 112, No.2915
the choice of the wife extends to the children brought up by her.

In case of the death of both parents the choice is adjourned
until the child attains the age of 18 years, and from that date
are reckoned all time periods determined in the present Article.
For others incapable of legal action the choice is made by a
will be withheld from the moment of the signing of the present
legal representative.
Article.
(6) The amnesty foreseen in the present Article extends to

all the above mentioned acts committed up to the moment of the
ratification of the present treaty.
The execution of death sentences for the acts above mentioned
[The remaining sections of Article VI deal with the manner

of effecting this new optional system.]
ARTICLE XI
Monuments and Archives
ARTICLE VII
National Rights
[Russia and the Ukraine agree to restore to Poland all war

trophies, libraries, collections of books, archaeological collec
tions, archives, works of art, relics, as well as all kinds of
(1) Russia and the Ukraine guarantee to persons of Polish

nationality who are in Russia, the Ukraine, and White-Russia,
on the principle of the equality of national rights, all rights
securing the free development of culture, language, and the
exercise of religious rites. Reciprocally, Poland guarantees to
persons of Russian, Ukrainian, and White-Russian nationality
moved from Poland by Russia since January 1, 1772, the cost

to be borne by the state making the restitution. A special
Mixed Commission is to be formed to execute the provisions
who are in Poland, all these rights.
of Article XI.]
collections and objects of historic, national, artistic, archaeologi

cal, scientific, or general cultural value which have been re
ARTICLE XII
ARTICLE VIII
State Property
Costs of the War
Both contracting parties reciprocally renounce the restitution

of the costs of the war, that is, state expenditure for the carry
ing on of war between them, as well as indemnity for war
losses, namely, for losses that were inflicted on them or their
citizens on the territory of war operations by military activities
and dispositions during the Polish-Russian-Ukrainian war.
ARTICLE IX
Repatriation
(1) The Agreement on repatriation concluded between Poland

on the one hand and Russia and the Ukraine on the other hand
in the execution of Article 7 of the Agreement on the prelimi

nary conditions of peace of October 12, 1920, signed in Riga
on February 24, 1921, remains in power. .
. .
[Article IX also provides for payment of the cost of mainte
nance of prisoners of war, and permits the exhumation and
Both contracting parties recognize that state property of

every kind on the territory of the one or the other of the con
tracting states, or subject to reevacuation to that state on the
basis of the present treaty, forms its indisputable property.
By state property is understood every kind of property, and
property rights, of the state itself, as well as of state institu
tions; property and property rights; of appanage, cabinets,
palaces, all kinds of property and property rights of the former
Russian Empire and members of the former imperial family,

and all kinds of property and property rights, donated by
former Russian emperors.
Both contracting parties renounce, reciprocally, all claims aris
ing from the division of state property, in so far as the present

treaty does not make a different decision.
ARTICLE XIII
Gold
exchange of the bodies of prisoners of war, soldiers, and offi

cers of one country buried in another.]
On the basis of the active participation of the territories of

the Republic of Poland in the economic life of the former Rus
ARTICLE X
Amnesty
(1) Each of the contracting parties guarantees to the citizens
of the other party complete amnesty for political crimes and
offenses.
By political crimes and offenses is understood acts directed

against the organization or the safety of the state, as well as
acts committed to the advantage of the other party.
(2) The amnesty extends also to acts pursued by administra

tive procedure or outside the courts, as well as to infractions of
sian Empire, recognized by the Agreement on the preliminary

conditions of peace of the 12th of October, 1920, Russia and
the Ukraine undertake the obligation to pay to Poland (30)
thirty million gold rubles in coin or ingots, not later than within
one year from the moment of the ratification of the present
treaty.
ARTICLE XIV
The Reevacuation of State Property
[Article XIV deals with the division of all state railways and
state river property.]
prescriptions obligatory for war prisoners and interned persons,

and in general citizens of the other party.
(3) The application of amnesty according to Points 1 and 2
of the present Article involves the obligation not to institute
new investigations, the annulment of pursuits already insti

tuted, and the non-execution of sentences already pronounced.
(4) The withholding of the execution of sentences does not
necessarily involve the setting at liberty; in the latter case,

however, the persons concerned should be immediately surren
dered to the authorities of their own state, together with all the
ARTICLE XV
Reevacuation of Private Property
(2) Both contracting parties undertake the obligation to

reciprocally reevacuate, at the desire of the Government of the
other party, based on the declaration of proprietors, the prop

erty of self-governing bodies, institutions, physical and legal
persons, on the territory of the other party, voluntarily or
forcibly evacuated after the 1st of October, 1915 [and from
the beginning of the World War up to the 1st of October, 1915].
documents.
If, however, a person should declare that he does not wish to
(8) All demands for the reevacuation of property should

be made to the Mixed Commission within the period of one
return to his country, or if the authorities of his country should

not agree to receive him, this person may be again deprived of
year from the day of the ratification of the present treaty;

after the lapse of this period, no demand will be accepted by
liberty.
the state making the restitution.
(5) Persons who are under accusation or being prosecuted,

against whom preliminary proceedings are being taken, or who
ARTICLE XVI
are on trial for common offenses, and also those undergoing

sentence for these offenses, will, at the demand of the state of
which they are citizens, be surrendered immediately, together
Capital and Funds

[Article XVI provides that the property of religious and
scientific organizations be dealt with in the same manner as
private property.]
with all the documents.
----T
-- --T:-T
------------
May 18, 1921]
The Nation
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official PEACE staMP
: Advocate of Peace
Menthly Official Organ American Peace Society
Founded 1828
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Thousands of investors own bonds bought at high levels.
Few grasp the full possibilities shrewd exchanges present.
. Edited where national and interna

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GEORGE PERRY MORRIS, Asst. Editor

FoR PEACE

Washington, D.C.
We have prepared a special letter giving a plan whereby

low-yielding bonds may be profitably exchanged into high
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The Nation
Article XVII
Legal Condition of Individual Citizens
(1) Russia and the Ukraine undertake the obligation to effect
the settlement of accounts with Poland with reference to Polish
investments, deposits, and securities of legal and physical per
sons, in Russian and Ukrainian state credit institutions, na
tionalized or liquidated, as well as in state institutions and
treasuries. . . .
[The conditions of the settlement with Poland are added.]
Article XVIII
Account-Settlement Commission
[Article XVIII creates a Mixed Account-Settlement Commis
sion for the carrying out of the conditions set forth in Article
XVII.]
Article XIX
Russian Debts
Russia and the Ukraine liberate Poland from responsibility
for debts and for all other kinds of obligation of the former
Russian Empire, including obligations proceeding from the issue
of paper money, treasury-bills, obligations, promissory notes,
serial issues, Russian treasury bonds, and from guaranties
accorded to all institutions and enterprises, as well as from
the guaranty debts of the same, etc.
Article XX
Compensation
Russia and the Ukraine undertake the obligation to accord
to Poland, her citizens, and legal persons, automatically, and
without any special agreement, on the basis of the principle of
the most favored nation, all the rights, privileges, and con
cessions accorded or to be accorded directly or indirectly by
them to any other state, its citizens, and legal persons, in the
domain of the restitution of property and compensation for
losses during the period of the revolution and civil war in
Russia and the Ukraine.
In the cases foreseen above, Russia and the Ukraine will
recognize the binding power not only of original documents
confirming the property rights of Polish physical and legal per
sons, but also those documents which will be issued by the Mixed
Commission foreseen in Articles XV and XVIII of the present
treaty.
Article XXI
Further Agreements
Both contracting parties undertake the obligation to begin,
not later than within six weeks from the day of the ratification
of the present treaty, negotiations on the question of a com
mercial agreement, and an agreement concerning the exchange
of goods on the basis of compensation (i.e., barter) ; also to
begin, as soon as possible, negotiations concerning the conclu
sion of a consular, post and telegraph, railway, sanitary and
veterinary convention, as well as a convention concerning the
improvement of navigation conditions on the Dnieper-Vistula
and the Dnieper-Dzwina waterways.
Article XXII
Transit of Goods
(1) Up to the time of the conclusion of the commercial
agreement and the railway convention, both contracting par
ties undertake the obligation to permit the transit of goods on
the following conditions:
The principles of the present Article should form the basis
of the future commercial agreement in the parts concerning
transit.
(2) Both contracting parties accord to each other, recipro
cally, the free transit of goods on all railways and waterways
open to transit.
The transport of transit goods will take place with the ob
servance of the prescriptions determined in each of the con
tracting states for traffic on railways and waterways, and take
[Vol. 112, No. 2915
into consideration transport facilities and the needs of interior

traffic.
(3) By free transit of goods both contracting parties under
stand that goods transported from Russia or the Ukraine, or to
Russia or the Ukraine through Poland, as well as from Poland
or to Poland through Russia or the Ukraine, will not be sub
ject to any transit duties or any other payments arising from
transit, whether these goods pass straight through the terri
tory of one of the contracting parties or are unloaded on the
way, stored for a time in warehouses, and reloaded for further
transport, on condition that these operations are carried out
in warehouses under the supervision of the customs authorities
of the country through which the goods are passing.
(4) Poland reserves to herself liberty in the regulation of
the conditions of transit for goods of German and Austrian
origin, imported from Germany and Austria through Poland
to Russia and the Ukraine.
The transit of arms, military equipment, and objects is
prohibited.
The restriction does not extend to objects which, although
military, are not intended for military purposes. For the
transit of such objects, the declaration that they will not be
used as military material will be demanded of the respective
Governments. . . .
(5) Goods from other states in transit through the territory
of one of the contracting parties while being imported to the
territory of the other party, will not be subject to other or
higher payments than those which might be levied on such
goods coming straight from their country of origin.
(6) Freights, tariffs, and other payments for the transport
of goods by transit, may not be higher than those which are
levied for the transport of such goods in interior communica
tion on the same line and in the same direction.
As long as freights, tariffs, and other payments are not levied
for the interior transport of goods in Russia and the Ukraine,
payments for the transport of goods by transit from Poland and
to Poland through Russia and the Ukraine may not be higher
than the payments determined for the transport of goods by
transit through the most favored country.
Article XXIII
Territorial Clause
Russia and the Ukraine declare that all obligations under
taken by them towards Poland, as well as the rights they have
acquired by the present treaty, apply to all the territories situ
ated to the east of the state frontier defined in Article II of the
present treaty, which territory formed part of the Russian
Empire, and by the conclusion of the present treaty are repre
sented by Russia and the Ukraine.
In particular, all the rights and obligations above denominated
extend to White-Russia, respectively to its citizens.
Article XXIV
Diplomatic Relations
Diplomatic relations between the contracting parties will be
inaugurated immediately after the ratification of the present
treaty.
Article XXVI*
Ratification
The present treaty is subject to ratification, and will come
into force from the moment of the exchange of the documents
of ratification, in so far as the treaty or its annexes do not con
tain other dispositions. . . .
In Faith Whereof the plenipotentiaries of both contracting
parties have signed m.p. the present treaty, and affixed thereto
their seals.
Done and signed in Riga, the eighteenth day of March, one
thousand nine hundred and twenty-one.
Note. In all copies of the treaty received In the United States to date
there was no Article XXV. Either the last article should have been num
bered XXV or an article was omitted in the copies. If it is later learned
that an article Is omitted from this text, corrections will be made
The Nation
FOUNDED 1866
Vol. CXII
Contents
725
EDITORIALS :
The Unconditional Surrender
728
What Is Americanism Anyway t
729
Municipal Reforma Suggestion
730
No War With England. VI. The Bearing of International Finance 731
The Poet and the World
782
THOSE BLACK TROOPS ON THE RHINEAND THE WHITE. By
Lewis S. Gannett
733
WOULD THE USE OF GOLD BRING DOWN THE COST OF LIVING?
By John Kane Mills
T88
IRELAND TODAYSIR HORACE PLUNKETT'S PLAN. By Sir
Horace Plunkett
7118
SILESIATHE NEW PLAGUE SPOT. By Dorothy Meirowsky
739
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVELISTS. V. JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER. By Carl Van Doren
741
743
CORRESPONDENCE
743
MARY MAGDALENE. By Leonora Speyer
744
BOOKS:
The Italian in America. By Arthur Warner
744
Shakespeare's Lost Years. By Samuel C. Chew
745
The Press and Politics In Japan. By William Elliot Griffis
745
The Peace Conference. By William MacDonald
746
War and Peace. By Mark Van Doren
747
The Kaiser vs. Bismarck. By Carl Becker
747
A Pyramid of Errors. By B. U. Burke
748
E. D. Morel. By W. E. B. Du Bois
749
Rebels
749
Books in Brief
749%
Notable New Books
749%
DRAMA:
Last Flights. By Ludwlg Lewisohn
760%
Memoir on the Political, Economic, and Financial Conditions Exist
ing in the Republic of Haiti under the American Occupation
by the Delegates to the United States of the Union Patriotinue
d'Halti
761
Associate Editors
LEWIS S. GANNETT
FREDA KIRCHWEY
ARTHUR WARNER
LUDWIG LEWISOHN
ERNEST H. GRUENING
CARL VAN DOREN
Managing Editor
Literary Editor
Contributing Editors
JOHN A. HOBSON
ANATOLE FRANCE
H. L. MENCKEN
FRIEDRICH WILHELM FOERSTER
ROBERT HERRICK
Mexico; to Canada, 36.60, and to foreign countries of the Postal Union, $6.00.
THE NATION, 20 Vesey Street. New York City. Cable Address: Nation, New
THE NATION takes pleasure in announcing the addi
tion to its contributing editors of a great citizen of
France whom it is surely not invidious partiality to call the
most eminent living man of lettersAnatole France.
"FN the eighth round between Lloyd George and Briand
1 the Englishman jabbed hard with his left and landed
heavily with his right. The blood came, but recovering him
self the Frenchman put an uppercut where it would do the
most good"it is thus that one is tempted to describe the
recent encounter between the two Prime Ministers. Both
men indubitably hit hard; no more amazing statement has
been made by a head of a government about an ally in many
years than Lloyd George's charging the French with bad
faith in the matter of Silesia. Almost equally astonishing
is Briand's countering with the assertion that Lloyd George
is talking falsely for political effect. It is unseemly, if you
please, and yet a matter for rejoicing; for if politicians
like these fall out honest men may come a little bit more into
the truth that should be their own. Mr. Lloyd George also
did not spare the Poles. He recalled that they had claimed
the taking of Vilna was an accidental outburst of feeling
and that the Polish "irregulars" have stayed there none
No. 2916
theless in defiance of the League of Nations, but he

asserted that the repetition of this "accident" in Silesia
bore entirely too much the aspect of a habit. Unquestion
ably the Polish Government has been aware of what was
going to happen and, although the dispatches are con
fused and contradictory, there are some which report that
French troops have been fighting with the Poles as well as
against them.
IT is of course quite too early to assume that there is
going to be a real break between the French and the
English. Undoubtedly both Premiers have talked somewhat
for effect and at this writing it looks as though they would
once more get together and find a modus vivendi. At the
same time, in view of the fact that there has been a tre
mendous change in public opinion in England about France
since 1918 and in France about England, there is a limit to
which statesmen may go in thus imputing motives to each
other. Indubitably Lloyd George is really frightened at the
situation just two years after the signing of the marvelous
Treaty of Versailles; he is certainly justified in believing
that if there is to be a new war in Europe the chances are
slim for civilization to survive there. He is but just, too, to
the Germans in saying that they ought to have the right to
defend that which is theirs, but they for once have shown
good judgment in refusing to take advantage of that state
ment to rush into Silesia and so court a French invasion of
the Ruhr. But at the rate their masters are going about
the Germans can afford to sit still and be patient. The
simple fact is that England wants Germany's trade and
France wants Germany's destruction. There is no reconcil
ing of these two policies under their present leaderships.
Never, never did a wicked treaty revenge itself so quickly
upon its authors.
IF the League of Nations actually carries out its scheme
for the economic reconstruction of Austria through
a practical receivership in the hands of a committee
of experts, it will almost have justified its existence. Pain
ful as it is for a nation to submit to outside dictation, even
of a helpful sort, Austria is in a state of economic despair
deep enough to make welcome any interference that brings
with it hope of survival. The readiness of the Austrian
Government to fall in with the plan of the League and to
offer guaranties of good faith should make the work of
the experts smooth if not easy. This committee will be
the virtual government of Austria. It will act as trustee
for the management of all Austrian assets on behalf of
present holders of liens and of the countries or institutions
furnishing new funds under the League scheme. It will
control the purposes to which Austria shall apply the pro
ceeds of loans and credits, and no external loans may be
obtained without the approval of the committee. In return
the committee will be shouldered with the responsibility
of saving Austriano small order. However successful
the League of Nations may be in this venture it must not
be allowed to consider the arrangement a final one. Aus
tria, shorn of its non-German territories, cannot stand alone.
726
The Nation
WE are happy to set forth elsewhere Sir Horace

Plunkett's program for Ireland today. A construc
tive plan is always welcome even if at all points it does
not in our judgment meet the situation. Since this article
was written the Irish elections have shown that the South
of Ireland is overwhelmingly committed to the Republican
ideaeven the dispatches from England admit that; there
is even prospect that the Sinn Feiners will make an astound
ing showing in Ulster. But whether that is or is not a cor
rect forecast there are encouraging rumors that Lloyd
George and De Valera are to come together. Peace stock
has undeniably risen because of developments which as yet
only the insiders know about. But while this is happening
there has been such a shocking recrudescence of outrage,
and killing, with Sinn Fein carrying the war into London
itself, as to prove how completely the British military has
failed in its task, and how utterly the Lloyd George policy
has collapsed. It is a profound shame to England that the
matter of a settlement is allowed to drag on a day at such
a cost. Meanwhile we hope our readers will not fail to note
that Sir Horace Plunkett, who has achieved such great
things for Ireland along economic lines and is everywhere
known as a fair and judicially minded man, does not hesi
tate to speak of the "Irish Republican army," and insist that
a majority of the Irish people will continue to fight just as
long as the present English policy continues.
THE new Postmaster-General has had some excellent
words to say about his determination that the censor
ship of the press shall stop. He insists that the Harding
Administration has no idea of imitating Mr. Wilson's
offenses in this connection. For that he deserves all possi
ble praise. But the good news does not yet seem to have
reached his subordinates. Thus, the Free Voice, the weekly
organ of the International Workers in the Amalgamated
Food Industries, has been declared non-mailable by the New
York City post office. Then Mr. Burleson's Solicitor, W. H.
Lamar, who was probably responsible for the worst deci
sions in Mr. Wilson's regime, is specially employed by Mr.
Hays to oppose the efforts of the New York Call to regain
its second-class mailing rights, instead of which Mr. Hays
ought to quash the whole proceeding and admit error. Mr.
Lamar is still contending that the Call was trying to upset
our Government during the war and was otherwise seditious
and treasonable. To this the Call naturally and effectively
replies by asking why it was that the editors of the paper
were never prosecuted by our ever-vigilant Department of
Justice. As we have said before, Mr. Lamar has one of the
finest Prussian minds ever seen in authority in America,
and Mr. Hays should lose no time in returning him to pri
vate life entirely.
GOVERNOR MILLER boasts that the New York Legis
lature of 1921 will be remembered for a long time
because of its good record. We wish that the same might
be said of him, but he has sadly offset the good he has done
by approving the new sedition bills. Although he has been
a judge, the Governor was anything but judicial at the
hearings before him on these bills, and they degenerated
into an attack upon the personality of those opposing.
Boiled down the Governor's memorandum of approval comes
to the fact that these bills reach the people whom Governor
Miller and those in power do not like. He obstinately
refuses to see that the weapons which he has forged for
school boards will not be used merely against open sedi-
[Vol. 112, No. 2916
tionists but against any reformers exercising their consti

tutional right to advocate peaceful alteration of the Gov
ernment of the United States if these teachers have in any
way incurred the ill will of those in authority over them.
It is not even clear that the bill requiring teachers to take
an oath of loyalty is legal, for it seems to conflict with a
constitutional provision that every public officer shall take
a prescribed oath and that "no other oath, declaration, or
test shall be required as a qualification for any office of
public trust." If the teacher is not a public official what
is he? As for the bill licensing private schools, it is avow
edly passed solely to get at schools which teach economic
doctrines those in power do not like. It is an utterly fool
ish and un-American thing to attempt to check and outlaw
ideas that are not yet accepted by the majority, and this
bill, too, is capable of great misuse even from Governor
Miller's point of view.
"T^VlSARM or bust"this is, according to Mr. William
1' Gibbs McAdoo, our only alternative. Franklin
Roosevelt, too, lately dictator of Haiti and Santo Domingo,
and urgent pleader for the largest, or "most adequate,"
navy in the world, is ready to disarm. Yet both of these
gentlemen while in the Wilson Administration were insist
ent that if we did not enter into the League of Nations we
must forever after be armed to the uttermost. Strange how
cooling is a bit of experience in private life, where one pays
and does not create tax bills! We heartily welcome these
conversions just as we rejoice in the change of heart of
many churchmen. Striking, too, is the enthusiasm of the
Woman's Party under Mrs. Catt and Miss Elizabeth Hauser,
chairman of the new special committee on disarmament.
They are throwing themselves into the cause with great
earnestness and determination. In Washington Senator
Borah continues to carry on his admirable fight for a small
army and a naval conference. The House has limited the
army to 150,000 men despite protests from Secretary Weeks
who asks for 175,000. Even that force is to cost us no less
than $332,000,000but then per man we have always had
the costliest army in the world. In the Senate the swollen
Navy bill is being strongly attacked by Senators Borah,
Norris, Kenyon, Heflin, and others. Congressman MondelL
the Republican floor leader, speaking in Philadelphia, has
declared that we have the greatest opportunity to disarm
ever offered to a people, adding these words:
As the condition of the world's affairs affords us this won
derful opportunity, it also lays upon us a great duty and respon
sibility. As we are the only nation that can logically and with
out embarrassment propose the limitation of armaments, it
becomes our bounden dutya duty we cannot dodge or escape
to do it, and to do it as quickly as we may when conditions
seem ripe for success.
ON May 11 the Rev. Dr. William T. Manning was conse
crated tenth Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New
York. "The procession was a most imposing one."
Apse, altar, architrave,
Chasuble, rochet, pyx, chimere,
Clerestory, nave,
Throne, mitre, incense, sheer
Surplices like snow,
Choir boys caroling like throstles:
It was not so
With Jesus and the twelve Apostles.
May 25, 1921]
The Nation
IT was entirely on the cards that Governor Dorsey would

get into trouble with his fellow-Georgians by telling the
truth about the ghastly conditions in his State. His pam
phlet, "The Negro in Georgia," which relates 135 cases of
peonage, unpunished lynching of innocent persons, of shame
less cruelty, and almost unbelievable brutality has called
down their wrath upon his head. A mass meeting of the
"Guardians of Liberty" to consider his impeachment has
been called in the following fashion:
Unless Mr. Dorsey is impeached every Georgian will be
particep8 criminis in his crime of blackening, while history
lasts, the character of the fairest mother man ever hadGeorgia.
No living man will stand by while a villain defiles his mother.
Georgiaour motheris being defiled before the world. And,
by the help of the eternal God, he shall answer for it.
GOVERNOR DORSEY'S offense was that he was both
honest and brave, and that his was the first construc
tive program offered by a Georgia public official to make
his State something other than the plague spot of our
American civilization. He proposes new State laws to
protect the Negroes and to check violence. If any one
doubts that Georgia's savagery is deep-seated let him send
for the report of "The Lynchings of May, 1918, in Brooks
and Lowndes Counties, Georgia," published in pamphlet
form by the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People, and read the account of the killing of Mary
Turner, an innocent woman in the eighth month of her
pregnancy, because she had said that if she knew who
were the lynchers of her husbandalso an innocent man
she would have warrants sworn out for them. It was only
when the murders of peons became wholesale that the whole
rotten fabric to which The Nation has called attention for
years was fully exposed. Now it becomes evident that the
dastards who commit these unspeakable crimes are not the
ones of whom- Georgia wishes to purge herself. The real
criminal is the man who faces the truth and thereby casts
aspersions on "the fair name of the sovereign State of
Georgia."
EVEN persons who can get 100 per cent on Mr. Edison's
questions may be at a loss to tell in what part of our
country dyes are grown to an extent that makes it neces
sary to include them in an "emergency tariff" to protect
American farmers. The action is easier to understand now
that Senator Moses of New Hampshire has told us that in
1920 the weak and impoverished infant dye industry dis
bursed over $104,000 for "legislative expenditures," main
taining "one of the most highly organized, best paid, and
arrogant lobbies that the Capitol has ever seen." About
$50,000 went in counsel fees, half and half to Joseph H.
Choate, Jr. and to a former Federal judge, while according
to last reports a further $21,000 was still owing to Mr.
Choate. What was done in return for these sums Senator
Moses describes thus:
Mr. Choate has spent no inconsiderable portion of his time
in roaming about the country addressing parlor meetings of
ladies in advocacy of national defense to be obtained by giving
his clients an absolute monopoly in the dyestuffs market of
America. What crimes are committed in the name of pre
paredness when a liberal fee is attached thereto!
An infant industry that cries to the extent of $104,000 a
year does not need the financial caresses of a maternallydisposed nation. It needs a spanking.
727
SECRETARY DENBY'S instantaneous characterization

of the charges contained in the Haitian Memoir as
"rot" refutes itself. Doubtless he had not even read the
Memoir ; otherwise he would have displayed more caution in
the face of so-well documented, so factual an indictment.
Moreover the Secretary of the Navy directly contravenes
the position taken by his chief, President Harding, during
the recent campaign. Mr. Denby is a former marine. Ap
parently he considers that the honor of the Marine Corp3
must be vindicated by an absolute denial that any marines
are in any way guilty of wrongdoing. This is a poor con
ception of his office. The men who commit atrocities are
the ones who "besmirch the uniform"not those who try
for the sake of the good name of the entire organization
and of the country to bring the offenders to book. Accord
ing to the Haitian press Mr. Denby spent just twenty-four
hours in Port-au-Prince and then left by automobile over
land for Santo Domingo. He declares that in many of the
villages visited he saw "arches and banners carrying the
legend Vive La Occupatione" [sic] . Possibly. But if so they
were written in marine French. Of course everyone knows
how happy the conquered always are under a foreign mili
tary occupation. Remember those happy Belgians!
NO impartial reader of the Haitian Memoir will doubt
the truth of its charges, especially in the face of the
obvious avoidance of them by the two whitewash inquiries
instituted by Secretary Daniels. We need an honest, fear
less, searching Congressional investigation to establish the
character not only of the military but of the civil adminis
tration in Haiti for the last six years, and of the real
causes which prompted the overthrow of Haitian sovereignty
an act fundamentally incompatible with every American
tradition. Such an inquiry would furnish the basis for
future American policy in the Caribbean. The Nation feels
certain that it would establish that we have no right what
ever in Haiti, that our aggression was wholly unjustified,
and that we owe the Haitian people as well as ourselves
restoration of the edifice we have shattered, besides retire
ment and reparation. Denials, whitewash, and propaganda
cannot obscure the fundamental issue. Haiti must not be
come either America's Belgium or America's Ireland.
THAT the world's greatest medical center is to be created
through a union of the College of Physicians and
Surgeons of Columbia University and the Presbyterian
Hospital, coupled with other great gifts, is gratifying and
important news. Despite the stupendous progress made in
medical science in the last two generationsfor modern
medicine dates virtually from the discoveries of Pasteur
and Listerit is still in its infancy. Great fields are still
unexplored, and much material, the product of forty years
of clinical observation and laboratory research, is as yet
little understood and remains to be clarified. Only by co
ordinating the various and now rapidly diverging special
ties in medicine is the fullest progress possible. New York
City, which affords the finest clinical material, is the logical
site. But the $15,000,000 necessary to complete this great
project, which will mean so much for the advancement of
mankind and the alleviation of human suffering, is pa
thetically small when one considers that it is but one-half
the cost of a modern dreadnought, built not to alleviate
suffering but to inflict it.
728
The Nation
WHEN President Hibben delivers an address in Ger

man to a visiting German notable it is safe to
assume that the war is practically over. Perhaps "First in,
first out" is the Pripceton motto. President Hibben had
declared war on Germany months before the United States
took up arms, and his present example in declaring peace
might well be followed by the Government. It may feel
sure that Princeton would not lightly come to terms with
the enemy.
IT is a pleasure to record another victory for the new
penology according to the gospel of normalcy. First we
had brother-in-law Votaw fresh from the missionary fields
of India, chosen by the President for Superintendent of
Federal Prisons. Now we are called upon to celebrate the
appointment of J. E. Dyche of Oklahoma as warden of the
Federal Penitentiary at Atlanta. The professional qualifi
cations of the new warden are set forth in a statement
given out by the Attorney General. He was campaign
manager for the late "Jake" Hamon, whose sad death at the
hands of Clara Smith we still mourn. But it was not because
of his knowledge of crime and criminals that the astute
Dyche was selected. The real reason is given by the At
torney General, as follows : "This appointment would smooth
out a serious factional fight among Oklahoma Republicans."
There is a lot of fiddle-faddle about criminology in the air
these days. There are theorists who talk about mental
tests and psychiatric examination and treatment of crimi
nals, and the recent congress of the American Prison As
sociation, made up largely of prison administrators, was
mainly devoted to the discussion of the scientific manage
ment of penal institutions. There is even a growing con
viction in the public mind that there is more than an acci
dental connection between crime waves and the stupid mis
management of our State and Federal prisons by the ordi
nary run of political incumbents. But how impertinent
all this is to the vital issue of smoothing out factional fights
among the Republicans of Oklahoma!
THE Belgian Government is calling a Second Interna
tional Conference of Child Welfare to meet in Brus
sels July 1S-21 of this year. Belgian experts realize that in
spite of the excellent work for child welfare which has been
carried on for a number of years, a huge task lies before
them in meeting the new conditions set in train by the
war. The experience of other nations is being sought to
ascertain what methods have yielded the best results in deal
ing with juvenile delinquents, with abnormal children, with
the health of mothers and children, with war orphans. On
the other hand, efforts made by the Belgian people to safe
guard the moral and physical health of children have placed
their country in the front rank of progressive States. The
generosity, efficiency, and skill displayed by the Belgians in
their relief work during the war can never be too highly
praised by American workers in Belgium, who declare that
without the splendid enthusiasm and unbounded devotion of
the Belgians themselves their own efforts would have been
in vain. A scientifically drawn picture such as will be pre
sented at this coming conference of the effects of war upon
the childhood of nations and of the measures taken to offset
them ought to prove rich in lessons of world-wide applica
tion. It is believed that many Americans will wish to at
tend. Information may be obtained from the chief of the
Children's Bureau of the Department of Labor.
[Vol. 112, No. 2916
The Unconditional Surrender

SO another great Allied victory has been won. The
German lies prostrate again. As unconditionally as
Lee at Appomattox he has delivered himself up once more
to his enemies with promises to observe in all respects a
treaty which its makers spit upon as they like and enforce
as they choose. He is to disarmas he should; he is to
try his war culpritsas he should have done a year ago;
and he promises to pay sums which no financier ever dared
mention in by-gone days. He has signed his name to a
document which the honest among his opponents know he
cannot live up to, which many economists declare is not
possible of execution. For that he will in due course prob
ably pay another price. It will be said of him that his was
only a Punic faith and a Punic troth; that the truth was
not and could not be in him.
Well, for the nonce this clears the skies. The fear has
passed that the Allies would do themselves their greatest
injury since the peace. European civilization has another
reprieve; the economic world has escaped another deadly
blow. The French nation has been saved another of the
missteps through which it is losing the profound sympathy
and admiration of mankind. But what now? Are we all
to breathe anew and dismiss the whole matter, or watch
with disdain the Germans at their Sisyphean tasks? If so
it is but a slim victory, indeedand so it would appear.
For the French army is to remain at its watch on the
Rhine, ready to pounce if a dollar is delayed or a man un
tried or a gun undelivered. The French imperialists, the
Parisian haute finance, plainly feel themselves balked of their
prey. It is the Ruhr they seek far more than indemnities,
and reparations less than the permanent crippling of a
skilled economic rival. For the sober moral sense of the
French people, and particularly for the sober moral sense
of the British nation, the opportunity is now afforded really
to take the Christian attitude toward an enemy who is un
deniably hard to deal with, is confused in his statements,
blundering in what passes for his statesmanship. The re
ported words of Lloyd George point the way. He is for the
immediate withdrawal of the troops that in March advanced
to the edge of the Ruhr, for the abolition of the senseless
new custom houses, for giving the Germans an actual chance
to show good faith.
It is as if the voice of Campbell-Bannerman spoke again.
Certainly, memories of what rich dividends England reaped
in 1914 because of her wise and generous policy to the
Boers in 1906 ought to point the road today. Lloyd George
aided Briand to have his way. Now is the time for him to
have his own desire, which must surely be to take the pistol
from the victim's forehead so that he may bend undis
turbed to his unheard-of tasks. For the United States the
new situation opens the way again. Was there ever such
an opportunity for world service? The whole world still
looks to America to lead toward a new and sound worldorder. Is there not understanding in State Department
or White House that no such opportunity for moral and
spiritual leadership ever knocked at a nation's door before?
Is there no program and no plan to be forthcoming? It
seems unthinkable, for at no time since the last shot was
fired has the way been so clear as in May, 1921, and there
is evidence in plenty that Europe would as eagerly welcome
our altruistic leadership today as in 1917.
The Nation
May 25, 1921]
729
What Is Americanism Anyway?

E have received the following letter from the Super
War Department regarding the importance of the Declara
intendent of Schools of New York City:

May 3, 1921
tion to good Americans? It seems very hard. We refrain,

however, from demanding that Mr. Ettinger be taken in
hand by the War Department as an inciter to social unrest
and bolshevism, and proceed with our simple inquiry.
Perhaps the Navy Department will help us. Buried deep
in a metropolitan daily of May 11, another perplexing item
meets our eyes. It seems that a certain John C. Shurilla of
Pittsburgh was recently convicted of murder in the first
degree for shooting a certain John Sherga in the back and
robbing him. Having, according to the newspaper, com
municated to the Navy Department in 1917 a device which
was of use in combating the submarine menace, Shurilla,
or some one for him, applied for help to the Naval Consult
ing Board, and received the following letter from Rear
I am in receipt of your letter of April 29, concerning the

denial to the Rev. John Haynes Holmes of the opportunity of
speaking in our public schools because of his want of Ameri

canism, and in which you ask that I give a definition of exactly
what I interpret Americanism to mean.
Permit me to state that my conception of Americanism may
be found fully within the four corners of the Declaration of

Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the
Gettysburg Address.
I fully appreciate that the Reverend Dr. Holmes, who states

I hate the existing social idea, both national and international,
in all its basic, political, and economic phases as the acme of
injustice, oppression, and human wretchedness, must find it
very difficult to square his views with the political doctrines
therein set forth.
Admiral W. S. Brothers Smith:
Very truly yours,
We are very sorry to hear that you are in serious trouble,

WILLIAM L. ETTINGER
It is stimulating to learn that Mr. Ettinger approves of

the Declaration of Independence, especially in view of cer
but we have taken up your case with the Naval Consulting

Board of the United States. We will assist you all we can on
account of your assistance during the war. You are a true
tain doctrines which we happen to remember in it: such as
American citizen.
that whenever any form of government becomes destructive

of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness it is the right
of the people to alter or abolish it; and that when a long
Doubtless Admiral Smith sent this letter on his private

responsibility, but no one, so far as we know, has protested
against his conduct. Are murder and robbery sustained by
the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the
United States, and the Gettysburg Address? We cannot
find convincing evidence to that effect in the documents
train of abuses and usurpations

evinces a design
to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right,
it is their duty, to throw off such government.

Ettinger, it seems, is something of a revolutionist.
Mr.
But now comes to our attention an interesting book called
The Community Capitol (Mayflower Press) by the Hon.

M. Clyde Kelly, member of Congress from Pennsylvania, in
which there is a story we should be loath to believe had we
not been assured by Congressman Kelly that the story is
really true and had we not, alas, seen too many examples of
the same general sort in the past six or seven years. It
seems that early in 1920 Mr. Edward J. Ward, of the United
States Bureau of Education, gave a series of lectures in the
Franklin School in Washington for the benefit of community
workers, teachers, and others who might be interested. In
tending to use the Declaration of Independence as the basis
of his discourses, he asked that his hearers each bring with
them a printed copy of the document for reference. Mrs.
William Wolff Smith, wife of a major in the United States
Army, thought of asking the printing office at the Walter
Reed Hospital to furnish copies of the Declaration for
the lectures. The plan was placed before an officer of the
Surgeon General's Office and was approved, and the text
was sent to the printers. The copies, however, were not
delivered. Mrs. Smith went to inquire for them, and was
met at first with evasive replies.
At last the officer in charge told her that it had been officially
decided that it would be unwise to print the Declaration of
Independence by the War Department, because it would be an

act of discourtesy to our friends, the British, and also that in
the inflamed state of the public mind such a publication might
increase social unrest and a tendency to bolshevism. The
officer stated, without equivocation, that, for these reasons, the

copies of the Declaration of Independence would not be issued
from the printing office maintained by the War Department of
the United States Government.
How are simple inquirers for the truth about American

ism to square the differing views of Mr. Ettinger and the
themselves.
Or can it be, we wonder, that those great state papers

have been misrepresented to us? We have long cherished the
opinion that the Declaration was a mighty voice of freedom
sounding against our tyrannical governors, and that in hold
ing to it as an honorable charter of our political rights we
have the obligation to keep it fresh in our memories and to
see that we do not yield to the same tyranny in any new
guise whatever. But what if our War Department denies the

Declaration to us? We have long had the notion that the
Constitution of the United States, adopted after independ
ence had been achieved, has as one of its great functions the
task of preserving the fundamental liberties of the people
among which are the rights of free speech, free press, peace
able assembly, petition for redress of grievances, security
against unreasonable search and seizure, immunity from
cruel and unusual punishments. Yet we have lately seen
such violations of these constitutional guaranties as make
us wonder what, after all, the Constitution is really for if
the Department of Justice can dispense with it so ruthlessly
and so safely. And as to the Gettysburg Address, we re
member that it is a plea of surpassing and moving eloquence
for the living to carry on the great work of the devoted
dead. Is this work carried on by a War Department which
practices an outrageous obscurantism? Or by a Navy De
partment in which one of its admirals gaily condones mur
der? Or by a Department of Justice which smashes the
Constitution at will? What is Americanism anyway?
For our part, after a careful inquiry into the question we
have come out at the same door as that in we went:
We
hold that there is no worse Americanism than that which,

with one hand pointing vociferously at the great principles
of America, with the other violently undoes them. Such
Americanism is not, alas, limited solely to some radicals.
The Nation
730
Municipal
Reform A Suggestion
THERE is a striking resemblance between the political

situations in New York and Chicago. In both cities the
dominant machines are opposed by all the "good citizens";
in both the Mayors are distrusted, or hated, by all who
believe in good and efficient government. Yet both have
succeeded in maneuvering themselves into positions in which
they appear to be fighting the battle of the masses. It is
admitted that if the coming election were to be held next
month instead of next fall Mayor Hylan would have a
walk-over in New York, because he is ostensibly and
ostentatiously warring to keep the five-cent fare on the
transit lines, to defend the city from the traction magnates.
In Chicago Mayor Thompson has so intrenched himself
that the reformers are despairing. He not only has the
city in his grasp, he has reached out and largely dominates
the State Government. He entirely controls the Negro, the
German-American, and the Irish votersas well as other
groups. He has funded into a bond issue, by vote of a
referendum, the accumulated deficits due to reckless spend
ing, inefficient business methods, and politics in administra
tion. He is himself directed by a private citizen, as the
bosses of Tammany Hall have so often played the tune to
which their Mayors danced. What makes the situation more
annoying to the business and hundred-per-cent elements
which elsewhere are having their way with us, Mayor
Thompson has a national platform with many admirable
planks in it, such as the immediate withdrawal of our troops
from Germany, opposition to all overseas ventures, reduction
of armaments, and a return to our sound American policies
of the past. The wiseacres of Chicago are of the opinion
that Mr. Thompson himself believes but little of this. As
to that we have no information, but it is a fact beyond
question that those great sections of the people who did not
want to go into the war, who do not today believe that we
should have gone into it, and who realize how America's
avowedly high aims were defeated in the peace, regard
Mayor Thompson as their champion.
What to do to unseat him ? Mr. Victor S. Yarros, speak
ing for the most liberal and enlightened reformers in
Chicago, urges in The Survey a new fighting body to be
formed by an alliance of all the civic bodies. It seems, at
this distance, like a slim hope. In New York a new com
mittee of two hundred and fifty men and women has been
formed to prepare for next fall. It is perhaps the best
group ever called together if only because it contains fewer
"distinguished citizens" and fewer great captains of indus
try than similar bodies of the past. The wisdom of this is
perfectly clear. Under the leadership of prominent business
men the reform cause got a serious black eye in the last
election, and not only because its candidate, Mayor Mitchel,
was defeated. More than a million dollars was raised and
expended to carry the election, with the result that several
of the managers have been in trouble with the law. Some
of the money was wastedperhaps much. To broken-down
ministers, and "organizers" of all kinds, it was fairly ladled
out in a manner to have shocked the city had the dispensers
been of Tammany Hall. The memory of all this is no easy
burden for the new committee to carry. It is further handi
capped in that it has no outstanding leader to turn to. The
Committee must create its candidate, as it must, somehow
or other, escape from the false position into which Mayor
Hylan has placed the entire opposition. One tried civic

servant who has admirable executive qualities is unfortu
nately debarred by reason of a family alliance with one of
our foremost banking houses. In this field, too, we are
all but bankrupt of leadership.
This is so difficult a situation that one must admire the
courage of all who seek to grapple with it, particularly as
the old, old Republican assertion that their party is again
strong enough to go it alone, without fusion, is once more
widely heard. To advise or to suggest in such circum
stances calls for much temerity. But we have a question
in our minds we cannot hold back. For decades municipal
reform has suffered from being too aloof and too silkstockinged; it has been too often imposed from above by
those who profit most by our economic and social system.
That was the trouble with Mayor Mitchel's administration.
He would associate with the Vanderbilts, and he could not
make the people believe he was their mayor in any degree;
and this, together with his narrowly intolerant war attitude,
and his driving of police automobiles into street gatherings
to suppress free speech, led, despite his many splendid quali
ties, to his disastrous defeata defeat he did not merit on
his administrative record. Is it impossible to conceive of a
new deal? Of a reform movement with its beginnings
among the masses, one solidly identified with the sound
labor movement, not affiliated in any way with Wall Street
and multi-millionaires, yet breathing something of the
aspirations of the multitude? We are conscious that this
will sound both impractical and visionary. We are quite
aware that there are many precious rascals among the labor
organizations besides Brindell, now of Sing Sing. We are
familiar by personal experience with the fact that when it
comes to lining up groups of foreign-born citizens those
who come to the front are usually the gentry of the itching
palm.
Yet, somehow, we believe for once a reform movement
might be started among the humbler onesthe one hundred
and fifty thousand votes cast for Morris Hillquit, many nonSocialist among them, show that the plain people do rally
to a real and sincere man even if he is without a large cam
paign chest. We cannot think that the East Side or Har
lem are inarticulate; we cannot see, after many years of
close familiarity with reform movements, how either in
Boston, or Chicago, or New York, the election of a reform
mayor is to be anything but a sporadic fluke until reform
can be identified with the hopes of the plain people, until the
people are convinced that the anti-machine forces are not
marshaled by the dominant capitalistic powers, that those
forces really have unselfish humanitarian impulses, that they
are honestly opposed to special privilege, and that they are
led by leaders the plain people know and trust.
Some more of The Nation's preposterous, cranky quixot
ism? Well, not quite. Indeed, The Nation confesses lack
of originality. What it urges is merely what has been going
on in England where labor is going deeper into city and
borough councils and controlling more with each election.
Of course, the labor situation in England is vastly differ
ent from ours. There labor has gained a political experience
in all departments quite beyond our conception. But there
the change is coming from belowsteadily and surely.
The Nation
May 25, 1921]
No
War
With
VI. The Bearing of International Finance

A LARGE part of the foreign products which the United
Kingdom needs to support her population has been
obtained in lieu of interest on her investments abroad. She
could not, of course, continue long to receive many more
goods in imports than she sent out in exports without pay
ing for them. This payment has been partly made in the
service extended by her loans of capital. In 1914 British
foreign investments amounted to about twenty billion dol
lars. It is estimated that before the war the income on
these investments was about one billion a year. Probably
four-fifths of this income was reinvested abroad, and the
remaining two hundred million were received and consumed
at home. Foreign investment not only made a higher stand
ard of living possible for many inhabitants of the British
Isles than if they had had to live on what they themselves
produced, but it added to the economic and political power
of the Empire. The fact that London was the financial
capital of the world, that borrowers often had to go there
for credit with which to start new enterprises, had as much
to do with the prestige of Great Britain in international
politics as the large areas of red on the map and His
Majesty's fleets and armies.
Much of this money was invested in the United States.
The National Monetary Commission ten years ago estimated
that British subjects had invested in American securities
about three and a half billion dollarsmore than any other
nation, and more than half the foreign capital in this coun
try. Germany came next, with a billion, Holland held threequarters of a billion, and France half a billion. It was on
account of the annual interest accruing on this investment
that Great Britain was able to draw from us such large
quantities of cotton, grain, oil, meat, and other necessary
commodities, without exporting to us larger quantities of
manufactured products irt return. The war changed all this.
Our exports to Europe increased enormously even before we
entered hostilities, while our imports from Europe fell off.
By the end of 1917 we had, through our excess of exports,
liquidated our whole debt to Europe, and most of the Ameri
can securities formerly owned by the British had passed
into the hands of our citizens. Then the balance commenced
to pile up on our side. We advanced to the Allies credits
amounting to $9,710,000,000 in the form of government
loans. For a large part of these credits Great Britain
stood sponsor, reloaning in turn to her allies. After the
Government ceased extending credit, banks, corporations,
and private individuals took up the burden. According to
the estimate of Dr. B. M. Anderson, Jr., economist of the
Chase National Bank, by September, 1920, Europe owed an
unfunded debt of over three and a half billion dollars to
these private lenders, in addition to the government debts
and also in addition to the European securities held by
Americans. Nearly all this unfunded debt, consisting of
short-time loans, was incurred after the armistice. Here
also London acted as intermediary, accepting the direct
burden, and reloaning to Europe.
In the course of this process, Britain's net loss in foreign
investments has already reached at least five billion dollars,
or a quarter of her total holdings before the war. At the
same time the United States has increased her foreign hold
731
England
ings to such an extent that we are a creditor nation by at

least twelve billion dollars. The total of our foreign in
vestments therefore now approximates that of Great Britain.
We do not owe her a cent, while her obligations to us are
enormousat least three times as great as our debt to her
in 1914. The bulk of Britain's loans are in Europe, while
the bulk of ours are in Britain. There has been much
speculation as to whether Europe's war debt can ever be
made good. Great Britain is the only nation concerned
which has been able to balance its budget since the armis
tice, and the enormous expenditures of all the belligerents
for military and domestic purposes have gone on almost
unchecked, accompanied by insane inflation of currency.
On the books, France and Italy are bankrupt. France has
been depending on the German indemnity for recovery of
her financial balance. But if Mr. Keynes is anywhere near
right in his conclusions, she is certain to be disappointed.
Her efforts to recover seem to be only driving her deeper
into the morass. If she defaults, Great Britain will be the
sufferer to a far greater extent than the United States. For
France owes the majority of her debts to Great Britain,
and Great Britain owes them to us. It has been reported
that at the Peace Conference a British official suggested that
war debts be canceled all around, but that the United States
would not entertain the suggestion. There seems to be little
more readiness on the part of our Government to accept
such a proposition now than there was in 1918. If France
defaults, then, Great Britain will still have to pay us, and
in order to do so she will have to give up many more of her
investments in non-European countriesor the interest on
them, which amounts to the same thing. Her financial
power, and her ability to draw on foreign raw materials,
will have been further diminished.
Even if the indemnity problem is solved, however, Great
Britain's financial situation will be serious. She cannot
continue to support her present population without an excess
of imports over exports. During the war her so-called
"unfavorable" balance was, of course, abnormally large, and
has been considerably reduced, yet even in 1920 it amounted
to more than twice as much as in 1913. This involved a
further increase in her foreign indebtedness, and, conse
quently, a draft on her ability to import in the future.
Although she needs now a greater excess of imports than
in 1913, she has only the interest on three-quarters as much
foreign investment with which to pay for them. She must
therefore pay by reducing the amount of her reinvestments
abroad. Borrowers wanting capital must turn increasingly
to the United States, and the position of Great Britain will
decline yearly, while oursin the financial senseimproves.
In order to regain anything like her former strength, Great
Britain will have to adopt a number of policies. Merely to
pay her interest, she must in the long run increase her
exports of manufactures, particularly to the United States,
and substantially decrease the amount of food and raw
materials we have been sending her. She will have to
retain and enhance her position as a carrier of ocean com
merce. And she will have to redouble her efforts to seek
valuable concessions in undeveloped parts of the world,
whose products she may eventually sell at a good price.
She will also have to exercise strict economy in govern
mental expenditure.
732
The Nation
The present policies of the United States now tend to

block every one of these pathways. We raise a protective
tariff against Britain's manufactured products, while we
prepare to compete with her exporters in foreign markets.
We furnish government aid to our merchant marine, to
enable it to take the place of British shipping. British
holdings in undeveloped oil-fields, in view of the approach
ing exhaustion of American oil, will give her one great item
of advantage, but we are carrying on a diplomatic warfare
against her policy in this regard. And to cap the climax,
we cause her enormous governmental expense by naval
competition. The financial results of the war therefore
operate to roughen every point of friction between Great
Britain and the United States.
Doubtless we shall not succeed, since we have become a
creditor nation, in maintaining our great "favorable"
balance of trade, or in preventing the growth of an "un
favorable" balance. Efforts to close our doors to British
imports cannot wholly avail, and the ambitious attempts
now being made to gain more foreign markets through
export corporations and large banking aggregations will
hardly, under the circumstances, drive British and Euro
pean manufacturers from markets which they formerly held.
Any growth of our export trade will, in all likelihood, be ac
companied by a still larger growth in the volume of foreign
trade as a whole. Consequently, we shall hear much of
foreign "dumping," of the competition of "cheap foreign
labor," of unfair trade practices on the part of foreign
firms, etc., etc. The economic nationalism which our Gov
ernment seems resolved to practice, coming to the help of
American business in this event, will be more obnoxious
than ever to our trade rivals. If, on the other hand, we
should somehow succeed in our attempts to maintain a large
merchant marine, to approximate our former favorable
trade balance, and to gain a larger share of foreign con
cessions, we should do so only at the cost of increasing the
indebtedness of Great Britain to us. Her foreign invest
ments, in that event, would necessarily shrink steadily, and
she would eventually be driven into a corner.
The Poet and the World

WE do not banish poets from the Republic but try to
make them over into the image of Congressmen.
This is no conscious process and involves no acknowledged
hostility to the arts. Only academic departments of Eng
lish on the one hand and authors' leagues and guilds on the
other have tended to put literature on an efficiency basis
with a view to high and readily marketable production.
The whole ideal is a businesslike one, and since it has the
subtle but strong support of a universal public opinion
the poet cuts his hair, trims his temper, and substitutes
alien warnings for the monitions of his own soul. He does
not resist very powerfully because the process commonly
gets hold of him in youth. And the pathos of youth, for all
its intermittent arrogances, is that it has not built up a
philosophy to sustain and justify its impulses and is there
fore timid and easily subdued. By the time poets have
reached the years of discretionoften a name for ungen
erous prudence and tragic self-betrayalthey are con
tented, as Emerson memorably pointed out long ago, "with
a civil and conformed manner of living and to write poems
from the fancy and at a safe distance from their own ex
[Vol. 112, No. 2916
perience." They are cut to fit the world they came to help.
We knew a poet once whose noble rage no penury could
repress and the genial current of whose soul no disapproba
tion could freeze. He was of the pure stock of the New
England Brahmins, but he could never endure to ape the
frosty gentility that engages confidence and insures pre
ferment. On the campus of famous universities he walked
with ragged hat and flying coat and all the fires of passion
and poetry in his speaking eyes and eloquent gestures.
His fellows recognized his genius and his learning. Yet
they felt a little shy in the society of one so obviously ex
plosive and untamed. His teachers granted his great quali
ties a little grudgingly or a little pityingly. We live in a
practical world, they seemed always to be saying, and what
is a high passion in the darkness of an unpolished boot or
an immortal sonnet if it springs from an abstraction that
makes for rudeness? Our poet's fate did not fail to pursue
him as the years went on. A shaggy yet slim impressiveness replaced the wildness of his youth. But he never
learned to be dapper in appearance or in mind. His intel
lectual vision and his enormous sensitiveness divided him
more and more from the general opinions of the respec
tably cultivated on public and private matters. He has re
sisted to this day. But he has not gone unscathed. Some
thing of spontaneity, something of clarity, something of
rhythmic energy have been taken from him by a touch of
patronage here, a stupid misjudgment there, the smugness
of the efficient, the insulting gravity of the righteous in their
own esteem. He has never been able to inhabit freely a
native world of his spirit, and his later verses, magnificent
as they are in their ruggedness and driving power, have a
touch of violence and of turbidness due to the stress of an
inner resistance which he should never have been forced to
exert.
Facts and reflections like these gain a ready assent among
intelligent people. But let the concrete example appear and
they grow deprecatory at once. Is it, after all, they ask,
necessary to be so wild and passionate and heedless? How
are we to know that the fellow is a poet and not a poseur?
That question is always the last. It is also the most odious.
Let us be content not to know. Better that ten thousand
poseurs should have their little fling and fun than that one
Shelley, or one far less than Shelley, should be wounded
or restrained or silenced. Can we not be liberated from
this spirit of miserable thrift? "No doubt there are gifted
people in your Latin Quarter," says a respectable and not
unlettered lady, "but most of them there are merely queer
and probably immoral." She forgets that such groups have
always surrounded and sustained, nourished and eased, the
"children of the fire" who can find comfort and inspiration
neither at an engineers' club nor in a drawing-room, neither
in the Elks' Hall nor in a grocery. We are not so chary
of human material when an island is to be annexed or an
oil-field to be exploited. Let us be content to gain a little
less than the whole world for our profits and our brand of
manners and opinions, and save the freshness and the vigor
of the incomparable soul. Let us admit the noble madness
of poets and allow for it. Our verse will be less cool and
humble and diluted and more simple, sensuous, and passion
ate. Nor will such verse or the poets who produce it for
the groups that surround these poets be without effect on
our general life. We stand in bitter need of a glow, how
ever faint, of the Dionysian, the unsubdued. The universe,
as William James finely said, is wild as a hawk's wing.
May 25, 1921]
Those
The Nation
Black Troops on the
733
RhineAnd the White
By LEWIS S. GANNETT
Mainz, April 2
THERE are still black troops on the Rhine. Coal-black,
and thousands of themat Speyer, at Kaiserslautern,
at Ludwigshafen, and in other cities. Official denials are
either cunningly deceptive statements of fact, ignorant mis
statements, or deliberate lies. And on the whole, the Negro
troops are behaving exceedingly well, and the population has
little to complain of their presence. The circumstances of
their presence have been outrageously exaggerated.
I have just been through part of the Rhenish territory
occupied by the French troops. I talked with mayors,
police officials, hotel-keepers, labor leaders, common workingmen. Because of the frequently arbitrary habits of the
French military authorities, habits which may be accentu
ated in May, I shall avoid giving names in quoting these
people. In many cases they talked to me only after I gave
them such a promise.
There are three classes of colored troops on the Rhine
today, Malagasies from Madagascar, Moroccans, and Annamites. The tall, black Senegalese who were formerly there
were withdrawn last summer. It is to their withdrawal that
officials refer when they say that the blacks have been with
drawn. The Annamites are a mild lot of south Chinese
troops. The Moroccans, under their red fezes, are a strange
assortment of desert typestall, bronzed, bearded Arabs;
handsome Semitic faces, faces clearly showing an admix
ture of Negro blood; others wholly African, with the dark
skin, crinkly hair, and characteristic features of the race.
North Africa in its time has seen many peoples come and
go. The Germans call the Moroccans all "Neger," but the
word is applicable only if one uses the word Negro in the
absurdly broad sense current in the United States, as mean
ing anyone with a trace of Negro blood. The Malagasies
are said to have a strain of yellow or brown blood mixed
with the dominant black. I saw some in whose faces the
Mongolian blood was obvious, but one could study long the
faces of most without suspecting that they were aught but
pure black. They are, indubitably, black troops.
There are three battalions of Malagasies at Kaisers
lautern, as many at Landau, seven or eight hundred at
Ludwigshafen, where they guard the Mannheim end of the
Rhine Bridge and inspect the passes of drivers and bicy
clists; some 300 Malagasies are at Speyer, where one of
them stands guard before the old Kaiserdom. There are
Annamites at Kaiserslautern, Landau, and Mainz; Moroc
cans at Neustadt, Zweibrticken, Worms, and Mainz. I am
told that there are also black troops at Trier, and in the
principal cities of the Rhinelands which I did not visitat
Diez, Bingen, Wiesbaden, Kostheim, etc.
From Munich a propaganda center spreads poisonous
stories of a "black terror on the Rhine" throughout Ger
many and into America. Its accounts have been grossly
and wickedly exaggerated. German officials told me that
this propaganda was a commercial enterprise conducted
for profit. There is another and very different center with
offices in Mannheim and Heidelberg, aided by the Bavarian,
Hessian, and Prussian state governmentsthe three states
part of whose territory is occupied by the French. This
center collects sworn police reports of misdeeds by the oc
cupying troops, and gives them out for publicity purposes;

it is in close association with the Rhenish Women's League,
which has issued a summary of such affidavits concerning
attacks by colored troops upon German women and boys.
I believe these affidavits to be true statements of fact, as
did the correspondent of the New York World whose article
on the Black Troops on the Rhine, largely based upon the
affidavits, was omitted from the World's series of articles
on the Rhinelands. People do not readily invent such un
pleasant stories about themselves, and sign their names
and addresses to them under oath; and if they did, they
would elaborate more vivid tales than these ungarnished
reports. There are several score such cases of assault or
attempted assault recorded in the police files. I saw the
originals of some of these reports; I was offered, but de
clined, the opportunity of talking with some of the victims.
But, after examination of these reports, and after prolonged
and confidential discussion with the mayors and police in
spectors of several Rhineland cities, I am convinced that
there is no such thing as a "Black Horror" on the Rhine.
In the early days of the Occupation, when war passions
were hotter and discipline laxer, and when the Senegalese,
a proud and powerful race, were present, conditions were,
doubtless, worse than they are today. The occupation, by
Senegalese troops in the spring of 1920, of the Goethehaus
in FrankfurtGoethe's former home, now a museum
was, undoubtedly, intended as a deliberate and gross insult
to German culture, and was, of course, in fact a shame to
French civilization. The Senegalese were withdrawn in
June and July, 1920. Today, while the police reports showed
at least five attempted assaults by Moroccan troops upon
white women and boys or young men in the six weeks be
fore my visit, I could learn of only one such case recorded
against the black Malagasies. Such figures are not far
above the normal proportion for any population of nearly
100,000 young males living in enforced celibacy. It is true
that some women when attacked refrain, for obvious rea
sons of personal shame and modesty, from reporting the
fact to the police; it is also true that because of the propa
ganda about the black troops attempted assaults are prob
ably more fully reported than would be the case under
ordinary circumstances. I do not believe that the presence
of black troops adds materially to the unpleasantness in
volved in any military occupation.
The enforced erection of brothels for the use of the troops
of occupation has probably reduced the number of cases of
assault. In most of the Rhine cities the German municipal
authorities have been compelled to establish brothels. This
was particularly resented in the Bavarian Palatinate where
public houses had hitherto been rigorously prohibited. Ger
man families had to be evacuated on short notice to make
room for the brothels, which stand beside houses where
other German families still have to live. I saw little chil
dren playing on the very steps of such bawdy-houses. This
is revolting, but after all such sights are possible even in
American cities, and they are an almost universal circum
stance of military occupation, not peculiar to the black
troops. The towns near the American zone occupied by the
French have brothels which are said to be largely patron
734
The Nation
ized by Americans, just as in Brest, to avoid worse diffi

culties, the French are reported to have established separate
brothels for the American black and white troops. In Ger
many, the same brothels are patronized by French black
and white troops without quarrel; they are also open to
German civilians who, however, pay twice the military fee.
The German police have to establish fixed price schedules,
regulate hours of labor for the women, and provide for
regular medical inspection. I saw such schedules. Despite
their care and the existence of brothels, however, there has
been a large increase in the reported cases of venereal dis
easein Ludwigshafen, for instance, more than 100 per cent
for which the Germans hold the occupying troops re
sponsible, the blacks no more than the whites. The number
of such cases among young girls of 14, 15, and 16 is
exceptionally high. The pay of the occupation troops,
small as it is, in French or American money, is dispropor
tionately large when converted into marks, and, in the pres
ent period of unemployment the temptation for a German
girl is very great. It is sufficient to walk through the
Stadtgarten at Ludwigshafen or along the river at Mainz
on a summery evening and to see how many benches are
occupied by young German girls and French soldiers of
all colors to realize how easily such relationships may begin.
Economic pressure, the need and lure of money, the uni
versal mystery and romance of man and girl, all play their
roles in the drama on the Rhine; if there is racial inter
mixture it is due almost wholly to these factors, and, in a
negligible degree, to acts of violence.
Stories are current of marriages between black soldiers
and German girls. Such have probably occurred, but I
could trace no cases. One German girl in the Palatinate
wanted to marry a Malagasy, the father of her baby, and
was ready to go to Madagascar to live, but her parents re
fused to permit her.
That the Germans resent the presence of colored troops
is of course true. In part it is due to the extraordinary
philosophical pride in race and race-Kultur current among
nationalist Germans; in large part, however, it is a natural
resentment at having as overlords men who are in fact much
closer to primitive tribalism. When a Ludwigshafener is
stopped at the Mannheim Bridge by a fully armed black
African and made to show his papers ; when a proud citizen
of an old imperial free city is ordered by a gesture of a
sturdy son of Madagascar to pass in front of, not behind,
him, which means walking out into the gutter, he feels
bitterly about it. He may work himself up into a philo
sophical rage. One mayor said to me: "The French say
we are bodies, uncivilized, barbarians. Good. They are
the bearers of culture. Good. Ach, but so far as we can
see the only culture they bring us is venereal disease and
the black troops."
The police inspector of the same city put matters in a
way which I believe was more profoundly true. "The col
ored troops make no trouble for us," he said. "They do not
know why they are here; they merely obey orders. They
are not arrogant; they have no pride in militarism; they
have no special dislike or scorn of us as Germans, and they
treat us exactly as they would treat French, or English, or
American civilians. When there is military arrogance to
complain of it is rather the white troops, who are conscious
of themselves as French and of us as Germans, who con
sciously consider us an inferior people, and sometimes make
it evident in their bearing."
[Vol. 112, No. 2916
Probably the most unpleasant fashion in which this mili

tary arrogance makes itself felt is in the requisition of
dwellings for French officers. The housing shortage is
severe on the Rhine, as everywhere where building has
been in abeyance during all the war years, and some of the
mayors are at their wits' ends when they receive orders
from the French military authorities to provide so and so
many dwellings of so and so many rooms, often upon less
than a week's notice. One city of 21,000 population, with
900 "wohnungsuchende" families registered in its muni
cipal housing office, has had to provide accommodations for
98 officers and their families. One old man of 86 years had
to be evacuated from his lifelong home on less than a week's
notice because an officer wanted his house. Ludwigshafen
has had to supply 122 family dwellings, besides rooms, one
or two together, for 180 bachelor officers, and has turned
over as well several factories and two schoolhouses for the
troops. In this city, which never had a military barracks
before the war to end war, the Germans are now building,
upon orders, fourteen or fifteen big permanent brick and
stone barracks, equipped to house some two thousand men.
Ludwigshafen, also upon requisition, is building forty
handsome new sandstone apartments and equipping them
with furniture, dishes, carpets, silver, and bedding for
officers. The French expect the Occupation to last at least
fifteen years, and are compelling the Germans to build ac
cordingly. Mainz, a crowded city of 110,000 inhabitants,
where the French General Staff has its headquarters, has
had to supply 269 apartments with a total of 1,337 rooms,
as well as 2,382 single furnished rooms, for officers, besides
offices, barracks, and three schoolhouses. Mainz has also
been ordered to build 275 apartments. In one city which
has several families living six in a room, a bachelor French
officer has requisitioned a seven-room apartment for him
self. In another city the trade-union Vereinshaus has been
requisitioned and is used as a barracks for black troops.
These are the acts of white officers ; they give better ground
for resentment, and cause deeper hatred on the Rhine, than
does the over-propaganded presence of black troops.
A military occupation is never pretty. There is some
thing degrading in the possession of such unnatural power
as military occupation puts into the hands of officers. When
to that unnatural power is added the resentment and hate
engendered in France by four years of cruel war upon her
territory it is easy to understand excesses which it is im
possible to excuse. But let this be clearly understood: it is
impossible to study at first hand, without prejudice, the
Negro occupation, and believe that the presence of black
troops constitute a constant terror and a horror to the
Germans. The fact of military occupation by troops of any
color would be a constant irritation. But the crime in the
case of the black troops is a crime rather against the black
troops themselves than against the Germans. They are
virtually slaves, conscripted by sheer force, and forced like
slaves to military service in a cause in which they have no
interest and which they do not understand, in a climate to
which they are not accustomed or adapted. It is a curious
thing to look at that strange medley of yellow, black, and
brown troops, and to wonder what they think of their ser
vice on the Rhine. The indictment against the French use
of colored troops is not for what is being done to the Ger
mans but for what is being done to the colored people
themselves. The whole world may some day reap the harvest
which French militarism is sowing in its colored colonies.
May 25, 1921]
Would the
The Nation
Use of Gold
of
735
Bring Down the Cost
Living?
By JOHN KANE MILLS

AT the Republican National Convention at Chicago Pro
fessor Irving Fisher, accompanied by former Repre
sentative Fowler, both of them economists and authorities
on finance, appeared before the platform committee and
urged a plank calling for the repeal of the Federal Reserve
Act. At San Francisco other economists urged upon the
Democratic National Committee a plank defending the act.
It makes no difference that neither recommendation was
acted upon, the essential fact being that our fundamental
banking law is under fire, and it is seldom that where there
is intelligent criticism there is not also a solid ground for
complaint.
What are the grounds for complaint? What are the un
derground mutterings which may at any time burst forth
in some concerted movement which might bring down the
whole financial structure? Twenty years ago, the conserva
tive father of a family invested a thousand dollars in the
gilt-edged bond of one of the country's biggest railroads.
He protected himself with all the foresight which was at his
command. He was content with a low interest return and
made sure that the property represented by the bond was
worth double or treble the amount of the mortgage. He
saw to it that his money was to be repaid in gold coin of the
standard weight and fineness. It was to be his nest egg. It
represented the value of a thousand bushels of wheat, of ten
thousand pounds of sugar.
The inflation year of 1920 arrived and the railroad re
deemed its bond. It paid him one thousand dollars, but the
purchasing power of his money had been reduced. His capi
tal now represented but three hundred and fifty bushels of
wheat or five thousand pounds of sugar. Somehow and in
some way, half his money had been lost despite all his pre
cautions. How? He had known all along that he was tak
ing a certain chance. Even though the stock of money re
mained constant, yet the amount of commodities in the
world might and did vary from time to time within narrow
limits. He expected a 5 or a 10 or a 15 per cent variation.
That was the joker in the deck of cards. But when he
cashed in at the end of twenty years, he was faced with an
adverse variation of 50 and 60 per cent. Was there a second
joker in the deck or had the game been changed without his
consent to stud poker with deuces wild?
He studied the situation. There was about the same
amount of commodities in the world and there was about
the same amount of gold. If anything, the stock of com
modities had increased faster than had the stock of gold,
which should have made his gold more valuable and com
modities cheaper. But, instead, the reverse had come about.
Something had happened to his gold and it took very little
investigation to find that it had been watered and diluted
with Federal Reserve notes. Week after week, instead of
a government note issue backed by 100 per cent gold, he read
that the ratio of gold to notes was 42, 48, 54 per cent.
He went to his banker and discussed the matter. He
argued that if somebody, the Federal Reserve Board he took
it to be, had the power and authority to issue two paper
dollars for one gold dollar, he should be given the same priv
ilege. It was explained to him that the excess of paper

dollars over gold was represented by commodities already in
existence but which were in transit to the ultimate con
sumer. "So my gold dollar is being used to keep a lot of
middlemen in business who have not adequate capital with
which to finance their enterprises." The banker objected to
his way of putting it. He emphasized that merchants were
entitled to banking accommodation and that the Federal Re
serve Act simply made it easier for them to get money with
which to finance the production, movement, and sale of com
modities.
But the former bondholder would not be put off the track.
He objected to merchants and middlemen. He considered
that this class was a leech on society, that they contributed
nothing to production, and that the services that they did
render were recompensed out of all proportion. He did
not want his money to be used to help them in business to
his own detriment as a consumer. He conceived the idea
that were he to exchange his Federal Reserve notes for gold,
he would, by withdrawing the gold from the bank, automat
ically curtail the issue of Federal Reserve notes by double
that amount and thereby and by that much enhance the
value of the remaining money and thus make the commodi
ties less valuable and through the stress of money shortage
force the goods on the market so much sooner.
He decided to exchange his reserve notes for gold and
asked the banker to do it for him. The banker protested.
It wasn't done nowadays. Nobody withdrew gold from the
banks. Gold was so hard to carry and so inconvenient. Be
sides they would have to open the vault to get it out. "Do
I get gold for these funny pieces of paper or do I not?" de
manded the visitor, commencing to lose his temper. "Of
course you can get it," replied the banker. "But if you do
demand it, I will have to ask you to take away your
account. It is not patriotic to withdraw gold from the
banks !"
This incident is told at length to bring out two points,
(1) that there is a propaganda on foot among bankers to
keep gold out of circulation, and (2) that were gold in gen
eral use, Federal Reserve notes would either have to be re
tired or the reserves would fall below the legal limit.
Let us, therefore, consider what effect, if any, the greater
use of gold in daily transactions would have on the cost of
living. Would prices continue to recede? Would money be
lost? Who would get hurt?
In this connection the opening words of Caesar come
to mind. "Omnis Gallia divisa est in partes tres."
So> is America! There seems to be a trinity in all
conditions. Society is divided into three parts: the rich,
the middle classes, and the poor. So is business in that it
consists of the capitalist, the producer, and the ultimate
consumer. And each of the above can be further subdivided
into units of three. Capital seeks investment in stocks,
bonds, and real estate. Production consists of raw materials,
labor, and transportation. The ultimate consumer either has
an income from investment, works for a salary, or labors
for a weekly wage. Labor is made up of unionists, non
736
The Nation
unionists, and the unemployed. Transportation is the prob

lem of loading, moving, and unloading.
And all these classes, divisions, and sub-divisions seem to
be equally balanced. Where numbers are lacking, essentiality
makes up. If all money were invested in bonds, real estate
development and manufacturing enterprises would suffer.
The labor and transportation items in production are worth
less without the raw materials. The income of a consumer
would be non-existent were it not for the salaried workers
and wage earners. In recommending, therefore, any funda
mental change in existing conditions, in order that such a
change be beneficial to society as a whole, at least two of any
three factors in any trinity must benefit, but not to the
extent of so injuring the third factor as to bring the whole
house of cards to the ground.
It is not the purpose of this article to recommend any
definite line of action. Its object is to point out possibilities
that may have escaped the attention of the man in the street.
We will therefore begin with the money that is carried
around in everyone's pockets. It seems ridiculous, but it is
doubtful whether one man out of ten knows the difference
between the various kinds of money that he uses in his daily
transactions. It is therefore worth while to outline briefly
the worth and limitations of the different tokens of cur
rency.
Foremost in understandable value come the gold and silver
certificates. These are equivalent tokens for the two metals
and are only issued at parity. Their script informs the
holder that there have been deposited in the Treasury of
the United States so many gold or silver dollars. They were
issued merely for convenience and there is no possible com
bination of events which could keep them from being worth
one hundred cents on the dollar in metal. Of the gold cer
tificates, the once familiar yellow-backs, few are now seen.
They have been turned into the Treasury and the gold
taken out and this gold then used as a base on which to issue
Federal Reserve notes.
Next in importance come the United States notes which
are just what they say they arethe notes of the United
States Government. They represent the civil war inflation
and have never been redeemed. Their issue, however, is lim
ited to some 300 million dollars, which is a mere bagatelle
compared to the three billions of Federal Reserve notes now
outstanding. They represent the running accommodation
that the country gives to the Government.
Another variety of paper money, well known to old timers
and still often seen in circulation, is the national bank note.
These are the direct obligations of the issuing bank, secured
by gold and by the old-time United States bonds. There are
also Treasury notes of 1890of small importance.
We now come to the huge issues of paper money which
have taken the place of the old-time gold and silver certifi
cates. They are of two kinds, the Federal Reserve bank
note and the Federal Reserve note. The bank note is issued
by any one of the Federal Reserve banks. It is secured by
United States certificates of indebtedness or United States
one-year gold notes. They are not good for payment of
interest to the Government nor for duties on imports. The
note, however, and it is the Federal Reserve note that is
most under criticism, is based on an entirely different prin
ciple. X produces some goods and sells them to Y. X wishes
to be paid so he induces Y to sign an acceptance which he
takes to his banker Z. Z instead of advancing the bank's
funds against these goods, takes the acceptance to the Fed
[Vol. 112, No. 2916
eral Reserve bank where he cashes it, receiving in exchange

Federal Reserve notes. When the acceptance becomes due,
Y pays the acceptance, which money is in turn passed on to
Z and thus to the Federal Reserve bank, which then releases
the acceptance and destroys the Federal Reserve notes which
it had issued against it. The commercial transaction be
tween X and Y has been financed by the public's money and
not by the bank's money. Z the banker has lent the money
to X at a high rate of interest, or where this exceeds the
legal rate, at the legal rate plus a commission and has bor
rowed it from the Federal Reserve Bank, i.e., the public, at
a low rate. The banker has made money, X the producer
has been promptly paid for his production, and Y the mid
dleman has had the business financed for sixty days during
which time he can seek his market and sell at a favorable
price. The only people who suffer are the ultimate consumers
who have provided the money and now have to pay for their
generosity through increased prices.
To understand how this legislation came to be passed, the
intention of Congress at the time of the passage of the Fed
eral Reserve Act in 1913 must be studied. The act was
designed not to make banking accommodation more plentiful
but to be a sheet anchor to windward in time of panic. When
business confidence in a country is shaken, the natural in
stinct is to hoard all metallic currency. This has been the
cause of all panics in the past, especially those of 1893 and
1907. The result of this hoarding is that currency disap
pears from circulation to such an extent that bank checks
and temporary certificates issued by the local clearing house
associations have had to be resorted to. To provide a cur
rency at these times and to obviate the necessity of such
makeshifts, it was proposed and enacted that the Federal
Reserve Bank be authorized to issue notes based on actual
commodity transactions. It was expected that in addition
to being secured by commodities these notes would also
have a backing of 100 per cent of gold, but as an added
measure of flexibility in times of stress the bank was author
ized to allow its gold reserve against these notes to sink if
necessary as low as 40 per cent and in times of extreme
emergency the Governors of the Federal Reserve System
were allowed to dispense with the gold reserve altogether.
The result is known. Although we have had no panic, the
number of Federal Reserve notes in circulation has steadily
increased until their gold cover is dangerously near
the authorized legal limit. Instead of being reserved
for an emergency currency only to be used for a short
period in time of stress, the resources and facilities of
the Federal Reserve Banks have been used in ordinary com
mercial transactions with the result that credit has been
made easy to obtain and has increased vastly in volume.
Gold amounts to less than two billions, Federal Reserve notes
exceed three billions of dollars. Where the commodities of
the United States were and are worth two billions gold, they
are now equivalent to three billions paper. It takes three
of these paper dollars to buy two dollars' worth of goods.
Is there a remedy and what would be the result of putting
it into effect? How would it react on the trinities of busi
ness? It seems obvious that if the gold was taken out of
the banks, the reserve ratio of gold to notes would fall, re
sulting either in a cancelation of millions of notes or in
reserves falling below the legal limit. It is doubtful if the
latter possibility would be allowed to occur. Public opinion
would rebel and all confidence in our currency might be
shattered.
The Nation
May 25, 1921]
737
In the face of resistance from bankers and individual
aried man, and the daily wage earner? The first class that
threats of forcing the withdrawal of accounts, how is the

gold to be gotten out of the banks? The actual experience of
a noted New York economist will be cited. This gentleman
took a twenty dollar Federal Reserve bank note issued by
the New York Federal Reserve Bank, payable, as they all
are, to bearer on demand. He went to the New York Federal
Reserve Bank and asked for the cashier. The guard whom
would be seriously hit would be those who are now depend

ing on bank accommodation with which to carry on their
business. These can be labeled under the heading of mid
dlemen. The getting of gold out of the banks and into gen
eral circulation would automatically check the issuance of
he accosted did not know whether or not the bank had a
cashier, but inquiry revealed the fact that one existed on the
fifth floor. He found the gentleman with difficulty and pre
sented the bank note and asked for cash.
The cashier was
surprised. He stated that it was a most extraordinary pro

ceeding. Apparently no one had ever done such a thing
before. He asked the economist to identify himself, which
request was refused, the economist stating that he was the
bearer mentioned on the face of the note.
The cashier
Reserve notes.
The Reserve banks would be forced to fur
ther curtail credits, with the result that many commodities

now resisting deflation would be forced to accept a cash
market with a resulting break of prices. As prices dropped
so would eventually the cost of production as new goods
would be forced to meet the competition of existing stocks.
This will reduce wages, but wage earners could afford to
receive less as the cost of living would still further come
down due to an appreciation of the value of the currency.

Reduced wages would buy more than large wages are buy
ing now.
Unemployment might continue while the lower
wished to consult an officer of the bank, but the visitor

objected, saying forcibly that his adversary was the cashier
level of prices was being reached, but in the end things
of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and that he
per cent metallic currency instead of on 50 per cent inflated
wished to be paid the face value of the note, he being the
paper tokens.
To the salaried man, it would seem as if the millennium
bearer mentioned in the note.
It was evident that no gold was available at the great

Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Finally, however, the
economist was given a gold certificate and thus compromis

ing he departed, and to carry his experiment to the end
walked over to the Sub-Treasury" in order to cash his gold
certificate, secretly expecting that he would encounter
further difficulty before he actually got the metal. In this
he was disappointed. He entered the government building
and found a counter behind which was a sleepy clerk read
ing a paper. He presented his gold certificate and asked
for gold. The clerk looked at the yellow-back carelessly, put
it with other bills in his cage, and reaching down behind
the counter produced a twenty dollar gold piece which he
would be better in that values would be based on a 100
were at hand. Salaries have not generally been raised in

anywhere near the proportions that have either wages or the
cost of living. It is extremely doubtful if they would be
reduced. As long as a corporation is operating, office work
must continue and the volume of business has little to do
with the size of the office force. Some inconvenience would
doubtless be caused to the capitalist and to the investor in

under-capitalized ventures, but for this class the man in
the street has little sympathy.
From the above, it will be seen that the public has the
matter in its own hands. If deflation of the currency is
desired, all that is needed is to demand gold and refuse Fed
tossed over to his visitor as if it were the veriest matter of
eral Reserve notes. Labor could force a reduction in prices

overnight by demanding gold instead of notes in the weekly
Course.
pay envelope. This may be the only honest public-spirited
At last there was gold. Provided a holder was willing to

take the trouble, he could get gold for his notes; and that he
later gave the twenty dollars away, mistaking it in his pocket
for a fifty cent piece, has no bearing on the matter save to
emphasize that notes which are instantly redeemable in gold
are a far safer and more convenient form of money than
metallic currency. As a result of this adventure and the
word-to-mouth advertising that it received, scores of people
went down to the Federal Reserve Bank and exchanged notes
for gold until the bank officials, realizing that a rumor might
get started that gold was unobtainable, installed a regular
cashiers cage and constantly keep a pile of gold on hand.
thing to do even though, in the ensuing crash of profiteering

prices, a number of individuals may get hurt, for we main
tain not only that we are on a gold basis but that there
exists in America and in America only a free market for
gold. If this is the case, let the public see it, feel it, and use
it, but do not let the profiteers lock it up and issue double
the quantity of paper tokens for it for their own ends and
against the interests of the ultimate consumer.
No one need be afraid of the threat of the banker men
tioned in the first part of this article. If a bank refuses a

customer gold or if a banker even hints that in demanding
gold a customer's account is no longer desired, all that is
necessary is to state that you will publish the fact in a paid
advertisement in the local paper, a threat which will bring
any banker to his senses. If you want it, you are entitled
to gold and you can get it by asking for it.
The effect of a general demand for gold and a refusal to
accept the Federal Reserve 48-cent printing press notes must
now be considered. Who would suffer? Or would anyone
suffer? Would it affect the producer, the middleman, or the
consumer? What would happen to the capitalist, the sal
1 The Sub-Treasury has since been merged with the Federal Reserve Bank.
LEWIS S. GANNETT, one of The Nations editors, is making

a first-hand study of various phases of European polit
ical and economic life.
JOHN KANE MILLS is a writer on economics and an au
thority on international finance.
SIR HORACE PLUNKETT is one of the best known of living

Irishmen. He was for many years a member of Par
liament from Dublin County; he was the chairman of
the Irish Convention 1917-18, and is the author of vari
ous treatises on Irish affairs.
DOROTHY MEIRows KY is an American journalist who re

cently spent two months in Silesia as the guest of the
Polish and German Plebiscite Commission.
738
The Nation
Ireland Today Sir
Horace
[Vol. 112, No. 2916
Plunkett's
Plan
By HORACE PLUNKETT
I HAVE been invited to explain to American readers the
latest means adopted by moderate IrishmenIrishmen,
that is, to whom the policy of Mr. Lloyd George is abhor
rent and the doctrine of Mr. De Valera seems in one matter
impracticablethe latest means adopted by them to induce
and enable the Government to put an end to an Irish situ
ation which is cruelly disastrous to Ireland, utterly dis
creditable to Britain, and productive of lasting mutual
hatred between the two peoples.
Over six hundred men, women, and children have been
killed since the beginning of the year in conflicts between
the Irish Republicans and the forces of the Crown. Nearly
as many more have been wounded. The wanton destruc
tion of property and the complete dislocation of the coun
try's commerce and industry continue. This is a state of
things which at any previous period would have led to the
downfall of the Government at Westminster. For what
ever reason, the party now in power is allowed to persist in
a policy which no Irishman believes can possibly succeed
a policy which, in six counties of Ireland, will set up a gov
ernment hateful to one-third of their population, while in
the other twenty-six counties it will be regarded as adding
the injury of partition to the insult of alien government,
and will remove the Anglo-Irish conflict further than ever
from a settlement.
The supreme tragedy of this Irish situation lies in the
fact that a certain and proclaimed remedy has lain ready
to the hands of the Government all through these dark
months. Two years ago the Irish Dominion League was
founded ; it is not yet too late to bring peace and friendship
between the two countries by the solution it advocates.
With the agreement and assistance of Irishmen represent
ing many shades of political opinion I have brought for
ward in their name a new plan for enabling the Lloyd
George administration, once and for all, if their avowed
desire for a peaceful settlement is sincere, to show that it
is so by their actions or, by their refusal, to close our ears
entirely to their unsupported protestations of good-will.
The plan is embodied in a Memorial to the Prime Minister
which advocates a new approach to an Irish settlement as
an alternative to the continuance of this heartrending con
flict until a military decision is reached in a ruined coun
try. It proposes that the Ulster Unionists should be asked
(without abandoning the powers and privileges assured to
them under the Government of Ireland Act, 1920) to join
with their fellow-countrymen in an All-Ireland Conference
for the sake of keeping Ireland contentedly in the British
commonwealth, and that those entitled to speak for the ma
jority of the Irish people should be asked to abandon seces
sion for the sake of Irish unity. The main assumptions on
which the scheme is based are:
1. That the Government's policy has not only, as the
Prime Minister now admits, failed tragically, but that there
is no prospect whatsoever of any turn of its disastrous
tide. The spirit of resistance and the actual number of
active participants in the armed conflict are increasing,
notwithstanding the terrible suffering inflicted upon the
Irish Republican Army and the communities in sympathy.
2. The majority of Irish people are determined to adhere
to the Republican demand and to support those fighting

for it as long as the Government adheres to its attempt to
impose upon Ireland by force a constitution which the ma
jority of its people will not accept.
3. If such a settlement as Mr. Asquith and the Liberals
have already approved were firmly offered and accompanied
by a truce while it was being submitted to a representative
assembly of the Irish peoplewith amnesty should a set
tlement be reachedan immense majority in Southern Ire
land would accept the offer.
4. Northern Ireland would ultimately, if not at once,
come into the settlement, because fiscal autonomy in South
ern Ireland (which would be an essential of a settlement)
would involve a tariff wall round the six counties, to the
utter destruction of their economic life.
5. No issue to the conflict other than a military decision
is possible unless the Government takes the initiative and
brings about negotiations between Southern and Northern
Ireland upon a possibly acceptable basis of settlement.
These assumptions are sound and the scheme is properly
based upon them. Writing for Englishmen I might give
good reasons for believing that the proposed change in the
British Government's attitude would enormously improve
its moral position in Britain as well as Britain's prestige
abroad. Writing for Americans I will restrict myself to
the change the adoption of the scheme would make in the
situation here in Ireland.
The Government is committed to holding the elections
under the act over the whole of Ireland. In the six coun
ties it will lead to the setting up of a parliament in which
only one party will be represented. The institution will be
a mere replica of the Ulster Provisional Government which
was ready to be set up in 1914. I believe those in Sir Ed
ward Carson's confidence, who subsequently had an Irish
policy formulated in their exclusive interest, were de
termined to use their control over the Parliament and the
Government with exemplary moderation, if not generosity,
toward the minority in their area, and so justify them
selves before the world. Whatever their intentions they
are now completely disillusioned upon the working out of
the policy. The Northern Government will have the fierce
hostility of an unrepresented minority, who will have the
sympathy and not a little cooperation of practically the
whole of Southern Ireland. For business reasons the Ulstermen never liked partition, many of them to my certain
knowledge thinking it impracticable but relying upon the
bargaining value of their own Parliament for setting up
an All-Ireland Government favorable to themselves. In the
backs of the minds of these peoplein the fronts of their
minds there is still the hatred stirred up in the days of the
Covenantthey will be glad of another opportunity to ne
gotiate; a conference established in the manner outlined in
our Memorial will give it to them. They would not, how
ever, touch the scheme unless requested to do so by their
English supporters in the Government.
In the South of Ireland the forthcoming elections will
obviously be a wanton farce, making England ridiculous
before the world, if held as now ordered. The proceeding
will not merely be farcical, it will be mischievous in a way
May 25, 1921]
739
The Nation
which few, even here in Ireland, appreciate. Sinn Fein

will return probably over 90 per cent of the members, whose
only qualification will be that they can be trusted to demand
a republic and never to darken the door of the Parliament
to which they are elected. Yet these men will stand before
the world as the authorized spokesmen for the democracy
of Ireland for the next few years. Even Sinn Fein will not
put forward the men in whose political capacity they be
lieve, for the simple reason that having M.P. after their
names marks them for Black and Tan attention. If, on
the other hand, the members elected are to sit in a con
stituent conference or assembly, not only will the best Sinn
Feiners stand but men of moderate views would be wel
comed by Sinn Fein as a necessary minority in a really rep
resentative Irish gathering.
The greatest difficulty was to save the Government's face,
and on this point our scheme meets, as no previous scheme
has met, the actual political necessities of Mr. Lloyd George's
Government. These are the two points we are pressing
him to consider for his own salvation:
(a) If the Southern Elections are held only for a Par
liament which won't meet, a body of extremists will be
installed for the next two or three years as the authorized
spokesmen of the Irish democracy in any negotiations be
tween Britain and Ireland or between the Southern and
Northern Irelands created by the act of 1920. If the elec
tions are also for a constituent assembly I am convinced a
good sprinkling of first-rate men representing all views
would be returned. In the former case no settlement would
be possible till after another election, or a military deci
sion; in the latter case a settlement would at worst only be
postponed, (b) The scheme saves the Government's face
with its rank and file who will give it credit for any settle
ment which comes out of the elections under the act.
But it is not enough to point the way through Irish
difficulties as often by their manner and means as by their
policy and intentions have British Governments outraged
the feelings of my fellow-countrymen. There are difficul
ties in Ireland which are beyond the horizon of Westmin
ster. We have, therefore, after long and careful considera
tion, devised a procedure calculated to minimize these diffi
culties, and we set out in order the steps required to give
a fair trial to the plan we propose.
1. The Prime Minister to state in Parliament that the
Government accepts in principle the status of a self-gov
erning dominion for Ireland on the terms above indicated,
provided that those authorized to speak for the majority of
the Irish people and for the Ulster Unionists respectively
agree to meet in an assembly representative of the whole of
Ireland and discuss a settlement upon that basis.
2. If both Irish parties are ready to meet for such a
discussionand this can easily be ascertainedthe Govern
ment to facilitate the meeting of the present elected repre
sentatives from Southern Ireland so that they can appoint
delegates to confer with the Government upon a cessation
of hostilities and such other preliminary arrangements as
may be necessary to make it possible for the subsequent
negotiations to proceed.
3. The forthcoming elections to take place on the under
standing that the members returned for the whole of Ire
land will immediately thereafter meet as a constituent as
sembly, without necessarily taking their seats in either
Parliament.
4. Parliament meanwhile to pass a bill authorizing the
constituent assembly to frame a constitution for Ireland

in accordance with the powers and limitations of full domin
ion status. At the first meeting of this assembly negotia
tions to be opened with the Government in regard to de
fense and foreign relations.
5. The members representing the six counties of North
ern Ireland may, at any time during the deliberations of
the constituent assembly, declare by a majority that they
decide to set up a Parliament and Government for their
area as provided in the act of 1920, and in the event of such
decision the members from Southern Ireland may either
adopt or reject the dominion status for their 26 counties.
6. If a Parliament of Northern Ireland is thus estab
lished, it shall have power at any time to unite with the
Southern Ireland Dominion on any terms which may be
mutually agreed.
Such is the plan thought out by a body of Irishmen who
passionately long for the freedom of their country in order
that its people may be able not only to develop their own
human and material resources, which they alone under
stand, but also to take their place in the family of nations
to which they belong. Given this opportunity they will be,
for the first time in 700 years, not perhaps friends of the
British Government for a while, but of the British people.
Silesia The
New
Plague Spot
By DOROTHY MEIROWSKY
IN the course of an expedition across Upper Silesia before
the plebiscite, in an attempt to reconcile the wildly con
flicting reports that drifted through to America, I landed
in Oppeln. With Kattowitz it was then, as now, the focal
center of all manner of trouble; natural enough, when one
stops to remember it as the seat of nearly all the com
missions, plebiscite committees, and propaganda centers,
both Polish and German. And in Oppeln I interviewed
Count von Moltke, nephew of the late field marshal.
He was then one of the leaders of the Verband Heimattreuer Oberschlesierliterally, the Society of Upper Silesians Loyal to the Homelandthe organization conducting
the most active and far-reaching propaganda for Germany.
I wanted his opinion on the results of the forthcoming
plebiscite. His experience and observations ought, I judged,
be one of the straws that would show how the wind might
be expected to blow. He is the languid, very blond, preternaturally tall and thin type that young English officers
in crack regiments areon the stage. And all his languor
was in his reply. "It is very unimportant. What does it
matter if the plebiscite is 100 per cent for Germany? They
won't allow Germany to keep Upper Silesiaif they can
manage." "They?" I asked. "Who? And how can they
prevent it?" "Oh, Poland, France; France especially.
Nothing can be easier ! The Germans are entirely disarmed
now; the peace terms saw to that. If the plebiscite does not
go to suit them, a few thousand Poles smuggled across the
border would become patriotic Upper Silesians, burning to
be united with Mother Poland. Korfanty would be delighted
to manage that, I think." The languor was undisturbed
and no more wisdom seemed to be imminent. I bowed my
self out and discounted the major part of the prophecy.
That afternoon, Korfanty granted an interview to a num
ber of journalists of both sexes and every possible nation
740
The Nation
ality, a Japanese and a correspondent from Uruguay among

them. He had just come to Oppeln from Kattowitz, I think,
and we were told we might have a few minutes of his time.
We found him Germanic rather than Polish in outline and
coloring, but restless, devouringly hungry, avid, a man who
would not let himself come to peace. It was said every
where that he was playing for a great stakeUpper Silesia
as an independent province, only nominally tributary to
Poland, and himself as the commanding general, the gov
ernor, or whatever the exigencies of the moment might dic
tate that he call himself. We exchanged desultory compli
ments and a few formal commonplaces. They seemed curi
ously out of place before his lean restlessnesslike telling
a sullen panther it was a nice morning. Then the corre
spondent from Uruguay (he was leaving for Dresden next
morning, with a securely visaed passport in his breast
pocket, so he could afford to be reckless) brought up the
charges, repeatedly made by the Germans, that at Korfanty's
instigation and with his aid bands of armed thugs swept
periodically across the Polish border, raided and burned
German towns, murdered inhabitants suspected of being too
zealously German, and escaped back to Poland, with no
effort to detain them. He mentioned specifically the village
of Anhalt, which most of us had seen within the week. A
conflagration had behaved there in so erratic a manner that
only the houses of German inhabitants had burned down.
Those belonging to Poles had been left startlingly intact.
The sullen panther became a raging one. "I see, ladies
and gentlemen, you have been talking to the German propa
gandists here. I have not the time nor the inclination to
answer their lies. They are all lies, I assure you."
Some one suggested that we interview General Le Rond,
commanding the French troops policing Upper Silesia and
newly returned from an official visit to Paris, presumably
to receive instructions with reference to the forthcoming
plebiscite. He was almost disappointingly easy to "see."
The Korfanty interview had irritated us and we could
have welcomed a row with a sentry or an attache or some
thing of that sort to brighten us up a bit. Monsieur le
General was magnificently urbane andmagnificently non
committal. Never before had I so appreciated the advan
tages of being born a Frenchman. No one could have
said less, and said it so pleasingly. Again the corre
spondent from Uruguay came forward and attempted to
crack the surface of that glossy urbanity. His French was
equal to the occasion. "We are informed, M. le General,
that your troop3 are behaving with entire lack of neu
trality, that the Polish inhabitants are permitted to retain
their arms, and have even been furnished with them by
French officers, while the Germans have, of course, been
entirely disarmed."
Not a breath on the glossy surface of that politeness.
"Anything else, monsieur?"
"We are told, M. le General, that the Polish border is in
sufficiently guarded, so that Polish bands sweep into Upper
Silesia, burn towns, murder Germans, and return. And
when the German authorities complain, the French make no
effort to capture or even to follow the outlaws."
A moment's reflection. Then, with utmost courtesy: "I
can only answer that the ladies and gentlemen have been
deplorably misled. It is of a sadness! But they are free
to go everywhere. If they will observe for themselves . . ."
A resolute soul in the party pointed out that we were not
free to go everywhere, that our passports were both limited
[Vol. 112, No. 2916
in time and in area, and that inquisitive souls had been

gently but implacably put on the trains that went out of
whatever part of Upper Silesia they had happened to be
tray their inquisitiveness.
Again that most deferential air. "I regret most pro
foundly. If the estimable correspondents will take up the
matter with the Passport Bureau . . ."
The Edinburgh man came to the attack, with execrable
French but divine courage: "The Germans say they are im
prisoned and severely punished for the slightest offense,
and everything is permitted the Poles; that they are not
even permitted to strike back when attacked by a Pole,
whereas your soldiers even help the Poles in their attacks."
At last the crack in that incredibly smooth surface. The
General frowned, pushed out an impatient arma glass
paperweight pushed over the edge of the desk crashed to
pieces on the stone floor. "Strike one," whispered a youth
ful and irreverent American free lance in my ear.
"Ladies and gentlemen," said the General, a shade less
deferentially, a good many shades more firmly, "when I
go abroad, the Poles salute me respectfully. They make
way for my automobile. They salute my officers. The Ger
mans look the other way, they pretend they do not see the
French officers that they may not salute them. Their
vehicles obstruct my automobile. They are sullen; they
do not answer when they are questioned. They are in
subordinate. This cannot be tolerated. It will not be tol
erated." He rose and bowed ; the interview was ended.
The uprising in Upper Silesia that bids fair to give
Europe a brand new war and even to drive a wedge between
the Allies is the direct result of their stupid and muddling
policy. I am entirely willing to grant that the natural
sympathies of the French troops of occupation were with
the Poles. But if those sympathies were to outweigh tie
determination to hold the plebiscite honestly and to abide
by its resultwhy hold it at all. Instead, France, given
a free hand in Upper Silesia by Englandperhaps through
carelessness, perhaps in exchange for concessions else
wheregave Poland an equally free hand, before, during,
and after the plebiscite. And now for years, possibly gen
erations, is created a new plague spot, a new political vol
cano! For the game has been dirty as well as stupid.
Poland made almost incredible efforts to play on the
ignorance and the superstition of the Poles in Upper
Silesia. I have a newspaper in my possession, written in
Polish and published in Kattowitz. Its leading article is
by a Polish priest, setting forth with much detail that the
Holy Virgin was really born in Czenstochowa (a Polish
town containing a holy shrine) , that she speaks and under
stands only Polish, that everyone must pray to her in
Polish, and vote for Poland in the plebiscite.
All this may or may not come under the head of legiti
mate propaganda. But every unprejudiced observer who
has been in Upper Silesia since last summer will testify to
the villages burned by Polish marauders ; to men and women
killed; in other cases, taken across the border, tortured,
and sent back as a warning to others who might be too
German. And these things could not have happened with
out French connivance.
To help toward the restoration of a lasting peace in
Europe withdrawal of French troops from Upper Silesia
to be replaced by other Allied soldiers is needed; an im
mediate suppression of the Korfanty uprising, strict guard
of the Polish border, and an adherence to the plebiscite.
May 25, 1921]
The Nation
Contemporary
American
741
Novelists
By CARL VAN DOREN

V. JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER
JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER employs his creative strat
egy over the precarious terrain of the decorative
arts, some of his work lying on each side of the dim line
which separates the most consummate artifice of which the
hands of talent are capable from the essential art which
springs naturally from the instincts of genius. On the side
of artifice, certainly, lie several of the shorter stories in
"Gold and Iron" and "The Happy End," for which, he
declares, his grocer is as responsible as any one; and on
the side of art, no less certainly, lie at least "Java Head,"
in which artifice, though apparent now and then, repeat
edly surrenders the field to an art which is admirably au
thentic, and "Linda Condon," perhaps the most beautiful
American novel since Hawthorne and Henry James. Stand
ing thus in a middle ground between art and artifice, Mr.
Hergesheimer stands also in a middle ground between the
unrelieved realism of the newer school of American fiction
and the genteel moralism of the older. "I had been spared,"
he says with regard to moralism, "the dreary and imperti
nent duty of improving the world; the whole discharge of
my responsibility was contained in the imperative obligation
to see with relative truth, to put down the colors and scents
and emotions of existence." And with regard to realism:
"If I could put on paper an apple tree rosy with blossom,
someone else might discuss the economy of the apples."
Mr. Hergesheimer does not, of course, merely blunder
into beauty; his methods are far from being accidental;
by deliberate aims and principles he holds himself close to
the regions of the decorative. He likes the rococo and the
Victorian, ornament without any obvious utility, grace
without any busy function. He refuses to feel confident
that the passing of elegant privilege need be a benefit:
"A maze of clipped box, old emerald sod, represented a
timeless striving for superiority, for, at least, the illusion
of triumph over the littorals of slime; and their destruc
tion in waves of hysteria, sentimentality, and envy was
immeasurably disastrous." For himself he clings sturdily,
ardently, to loveliness wherever he finds itpreferring,
however, its richer, its elaborated forms. To borrow an
antithesis remarked by a brilliant critic in the work of
Amy Lowell, Mr. Hergesheimer seems at times as much
concerned with the stuffs as with the stuff of life. His
landscapes, his interiors, his costumes he sets forth with a
profusion of exquisite details which gives his texture the
semblance of brocadealways gorgeous but now and then
a little stiff with its splendors of silk and gold. An admitted
personal inclination to "the extremes of luxury" struggles
in Mr. Hergesheimer with an artistic passion for "words
as disarmingly simple as the leaves of springas simple
and as lovely in pure colorabout the common experience
of life and death"; and more than anything else this con
flict explains the presence in all but his finest work of occa
sional heavy elements which weight it down and the presence
in his most popular narratives of a constant lift of beauty
and lucidity which will not let them sag into the average.
One comes tolerably close to the secret of Mr. Hergesheimer's career by perceiving that, with an admirable style
of which he is both conscious andvery properly-proud,

he has looked luxuriously through the world for subjects
which his style will fit. Particularly has he emancipated
himself from the bondage to nook and corner which long
hampered the local color school. The small inland towns
of "The Lay Anthony," the blue Virginia valleys of "Moun
tain Blood," the evolving Pennsylvania iron districts of
"The Three Black Pennys," the antique Salem of "Java
Head," the fashionable hotels and houses of "Linda Con
don," the scattered exotic localities of the short stories
in all these Mr. Hergesheimer is at home with the cool
insouciance of genius, at home as he could not be without
an erudition founded in the keenest observation and re
search. At the same time, he has not satisfied himself
with the cluttered catalogues of some types of naturalism.
"The individuality of places and hours absorbed me . . .
the perception of the inanimate moods of place. . . . Cer
tainly houses and night and hills were often more vivid
to me than the people in or out of them." He has loved the
scenes wherein his events are transacted; he has brooded
over their moods, their significances. Neither pantheistic,
however, nor very speculative, Mr. Hergesheimer does not
endow places with a half-divine, a half-daemonic sentience;
instead he works more nearly in the fashion of his master
Turgenev, or of Flaubert, scrutinizing the surfaces of land
scapes and cities and human habitations until they grad
ually reveal whatfor the particular observeris the es
sence of their charm or horror, and come, obedient to the
evoking imagination, into the picture.
Substantial as Mr. Hergesheimer makes his scene by a
masterful handling of locality, he goes still further, adds
still another dimension, by his equally masterful handling
of the past as an element in his microcosm. "There was at
least this to be said for what I had, in writing, laid back
in point of timeno one had charged me with an historical
novel," he boasts. Readers in general hardly notice how
large a use of history appears in, for instance, "The Three
Black Pennys" and "Java Head." The one goes as far
back as to colonial Pennsylvania for the beginning of its
chronicle, and the other as far as to Salem in the days of
the first clipper ship; and yet by no paraphernalia of
languid airs or archaic idioms or strutting heroics does
either of the novels fall into the orthodox historical tradi
tion. They have the vivid, multiplied detail of a contem
porary record. And this is the more notable for the reason
that the characters in each of them stand against the back
ground of a highly technical professionthat of iron-mak
ing through three generations, that of shipping under sail
to all the quarters of the earth. The wharves of Mr.
Hergesheimer's Salem, the furnaces of his Myrtle Forge,
are thick with accurate, pungent, delightful facts. If he
has explored the past in a deliberate hunt for picturesque
images of actuality with which to incrust his narrative,
and has at timesparticularly in "The Three Black Pennys"
given it an exaggerated patina, nevertheless he has re
fused to yield himself to the mere spell of the past and
has regularly subdued its "colors and scents and emo
tions" to his own purposes. His materials may be rococo,
but not his use of them. The conflict between his personal
742
The Nation
preference for luxury and his artistic passion for aus

terity shows itself in his methods with history: though
the historical periods which interest him are bounded, one
may say, by the minuet and the music-box, he permits
the least possible contagion of prettiness to invade his
plots. They are fresh and passionate, simple and real,
however elaborate their trappings. With the fullest intel
lectual sophistication, Mr. Hergesheimer has artistically the
courage of naivete. He subtracts nothing from the common
realities of human character when he displays it in some
past age, but preserves it intact. The charming erudition
of his surfaces is added to reality, not substituted for it.
Without question the particular triumph of these novels
is the women who appear in them. Decorative art in fiction
has rarely gone farther than with Taou Yuen, the marvelous
Manchu woman brought home from Shanghai to Salem as
wife of a Yankee skipper in "Java Head." She may be taken
as focus and symbol of Mr. Hergesheimer's luxurious incli
nations. By her bewildering complexity of costume, by her
intricate ceremonial observances, by the impenetrability of
her outward demeanor, she belongs rather to art than to life
an Oriental Galatea radiantly adorned but not wholly
metamorphosed from her native marble. Only at intervals
does some glimpse or other come of the tender flesh shut up
in her magnificent garments or of the tender spirit schooled
by flawless, immemorial discipline to an absolute decorum.
That such glimpses come just preserves her from appearing
a mere figure of tapestry, a fine mechanical toy. The Salem
which before her arrival seems quaintly formal enough im
mediately thereafter seems by contrast raw and new, and
her beauty glitters like a precious gem in some plain man's
house. Much the same effect, on a less vivid scale, is pro
duced in "The Three Black Pennys" by the presence on the
Pennsylvania frontierit is almost thatof Ludowika Winscombe, who has always lived at Court and who brings new
fragrances, new dainty rites, into the forest; and in "Moun
tain Blood" by the presence among the Appalachian high
lands of that ivory, icy meretrix Meta Beggs who plans to
drive the best possible bargain for her virgin favors. Meta
carries the decorative traits of Mr. Hergesheimer's women
to the point at which they suggest the marionette too much ;
by his methods, of course, he habitually runs the risk of
leaving the flesh and blood out of his women. He leaves out,
at least, with no fluttering compunctions, any special concern
for the simpler biological aspects of the sex: "It was not
what the woman had in common with a rabbit that was im
portant, but her difference. On one hand that difference was
moral, but on the other aesthetic; and I had been absorbed
by the latter." "I couldn't get it into my head that loveli
ness, which had a trick of staying in the mind at points of
death when all service was forgotten, was rightly considered
to be of less importance than the sweat of some kitchen
drudge."
Such robust doctrine is a long way from the customary
sentimentalism of novelists about maids, wives, mothers,
and widows. Indeed, Mr. Hergesheimer, like Poe before
him, inclines very definitely toward beauty rather than
toward humanity, where distinctions may be drawn between
them. In Linda Condon, however, his most remarkable cre
ation, he has brought humanity and beauty together in an
intimate fusion. Less exotic than Taou Yuen, Linda, with
her straight black bang and her extravagant simplicity of
taste, is no less exquisite. And like Taou Yuen she affords
Mr. Hergesheimer the opportunity he most desires"to
[Vol. 112, No. 2916
realize that sharp sense of beauty which came from a firm,

delicate consciousness of certain high pretensions, valors,
maintained in the face of imminent destruction. .
In that category none was sharper than the charm of a
woman, soon to perish, in a vanity of array as momentary
and iridescent as a May-fly." It is as the poet musing upon
the fleet passage of beauty rather than as the satirist
mocking at the vanity of human wishes that Mr. Herges
heimer traces the career of Linda Condon,; but both poet
and satirist meet in his masterpiece. A woman as lovely
as a lyric, she is almost as insensible as a steel blade or a
bright star. The true marvel is that beauty so cold can
provoke such conflagrations. Grantedand certain subtle
women decline to grant itthat Linda with her shining
emptiness could have kindled the passion she kindles in
the story, what must be the blackness of her discovery that
when her beauty goes she will have left none of the gene
rous affection which, had she herself given it through life,
she might by this time have earned in quantities sufficient
to endow and compensate her for old age! Mr. Hergeshei
mer does not soften the blow when it comeshe even adds
to her agony the clear consciousness that she cannot feel
her plight as more passionate natures might. But he allows
her, at the last, a little intimation of immortality. From
her unresponding beauty, she sees, her sculptor lover has
caught a madness eventually sublimated to a Platonic vision
which, partially forgetful of her as an individual, has made
him and his works great. Without, in the common way,
modeling her at all, he has snared the essence of her spirit
and has set itas such mortal things goeverlastingly in
bronze.
If Mr. Hergesheimer offers Linda in the end only the
hard comfort of a perception come at largely through her
intellect, still as far as the art of his novel is concerned he
has immensely gained by his refusal to make any trivial
concession to natural weaknesses. His latest conclusion is
his best. "The Lay Anthony" ends in accident, "Mountain
Blood" in melodrama; "The Three Black Pennys," more
successful than its predecessors, fades out like the Penny
line; "Java Head" turns sharply away from its central
theme, almost as if "Hamlet" should concern itself during
a final scene with Horatio's personal perplexities. Now the
conclusions of a novelist are on the whole the test of his
judgment and his honesty; and it promises much for fiction
that Mr. Hergesheimer has advanced so steadily in this
respect through his seven books. He has advanced, too, in
his use of decoration, which reached its most sumptuous
in "Java Head" and which in "Linda Condon" happily
began to show a more austere control. The question which
criticism asks is whether Mr. Hergesheimer has not gone
as far as a practitioner of the decorative arts can go, and
whether he ought not, during the remainder of the eminent
career which awaits him, work rather in the direction
marked by "Linda Condon" than in that marked by "Java
Head." The rumor that his friends advise him to become
a "period novelist" must disquiet his admirerseven those
among them who cannot think him likely to act upon advice
so dangerous to his art. Doubtless he could go on and write
another "Salammbo," but he does not need to : he has already
written "Java Head." When a novelist has reached the
limits of decoration, there still stretches out before him the
endless roadwhich Mr. Hergesheimer has given evidence
that he can travelof the interpretation and elucidation
of human character and its devious fortunes in the world.
The Nation
May 25, 1921]
In
the Driftway
EVIDENTLY the General Assembly of Connecticut can

not take a joke. As readers of the newspapers know,
the fight in that State between the daylight savers and
the daylight wasters has been lively, but so far as legislation
goes, the latter have won, the bill to set the clocks ahead
during the summer having been defeated. Not so in prac
tice. Hartford and various other cities decided to adopt day
light saving by "common consent"one of the best ways ever
devised for accomplishing anything. In this they were quite
within their rights, but the legislators became irritable
when they saw all the townsmen of Hartford running out to
lunch while by the clocks of the State House it was still only
11 a. m. The legislators had heard the word "revolution"
misapplied so much that it was the first term that came to
their lips, and forthwith they began to use it in describing
the coup d'etat of the daylight savers. They talked about
revoking the charters of the "revolting" cities, and finally a
worthy descendant of the Wooden Nutmeg introduced a bill
into the General Assembly providing that no community
should be entitled to State money if its clocks did not keep
Eastern standard time. "Time is money," but in Connect
icut only Eastern standard time is moneyfrom the legis
lature. Is this what is meant by a Conn, game?
*
*
*
*
THEY order those things better in Monticello, New York.
There they know how to take, and enjoy, a joke. The
Court House clock, in obedience to a county edict, ticks off
Eastern standard time. The Town Hall clock strikes day
light saving time by direction of a village ordinance. One
newspaper is for the old time and the other for the new.
Some men are trying to report for work by the late and quit
by the early time. Nobody is fussing so long as he has a
good time.
The Drifter
Correspondence
Historical Analogies
Sir: April 19, the anniversary of Lexington and Concord,
I read on the bronze tablet on the green in front of the meeting
house at Concord as follows:
The first Provincial Congress of delegates from the towns of
Massachusetts was called by conventions of the people to meet at
Concord on the 11th day of October, 1774.
The delegates assembled here in the meeting house on that day
and organized with John Hancock as president and Benjamin
Lincoln as secretary.
Called together to maintain the rights of the people, this Con
gress assumed the government of the Province and by its measures
prepared the way for the War of the Revolution.
Remembering that the Royal Governor still sat in Boston,
that General Gage's troops still represented the authority of
England, and that the Province, nevertheless, calmly recognized
and accepted the new rebel government, the resemblance to
a certain phase of the present situation in Ireland would
seem sufficient even for Professor Andrews.
That same night I read in the Boston Transcript Mr. Lloyd
George's irritating attempt to justify the British Government's
treatment of the Irish rebellion by calling it a "secession" and
comparing it to the Southern Secession of 1861. Admitting
the limitations of historical analogy, and that circumstances
alter cases for controversial purposes, we may at least be per
743
mitted to remember that the Southern States entered the Union

voluntarily in factnot by an Act of Union in which Cath
olics and the poor (a majority) could not vote; that they
were not a different nation of different blood and different cul
ture; that they had not been conquered and held in subjugation
by force in the face of continuous rebellion for seven hundred
years; and that the Southern Secession would never have oc
curred but for the institution of slavery.
Yet, if we are to agree with Mr. Lloyd George that the Irish
affair, too, is a schism in one of the two great branches of
the English-speaking race, let us observe that one of the most
important points of comparison is lacking; namely, that in the
present instance the other branch is not brazenly, blatantly,
boastfully (and profitably), and if not officially at least with
the open conniving and permission of the Government, sup
porting the rebels even to the point that the Ambassador of
the one must write to the Prime Minister of the other, as
Adams wrote to Earl Russell: "It would be superfluous in me
to point out to your lordship that this is war."
Newton, Massachusetts, April 26
Prescott Warren
Teaching the Young Idea How to Gas
Sir: I have just finished reading your article, Our Aggres
sive Foreign Policy, in the current issue of The Nation, and I
think it is one of the truest estimates of the tendency in our
country today. This aggressiveness is not confined to the Fed
eral Government, but certain large munition interests are pro
moting the spirit of war in a more subtle way.
Last Saturday I received a package through the mail under
cover of an envelope of the Boy Scouts of America. The pack
age contained a copy of Edwin E. Slosson's "Creative Chem
istry," a copy of an address Shall America Remain the Only
Important Country at the Mercy of the German Chemists? and
a 70-page booklet on "The Chemical Foundation, Incorporated."
About a week before this came I had a letter from The Chem
ical Foundation, describing the importance of chemistry in war
and urging me to use the books which they were sending to
interest my troop of Boy Scouts in chemistry, with special
emphasis upon the fact that the next war would be won by
the nation with the greatest chemistry. I refuse to preach war
to my Scouts, and I think the good of the Scout movement is
being prostituted to a mighty low aim when the hundreds of
thousands of boys in it are imposed upon by permission in this
way. I understand the book is to be sent to all Scoutmasters
in New York; I am not sure about elsewhere.
The Chemical Foundation, 81 Fulton Street, New York City,
was organized to take over the patents of German chemists in
this country at the suggestion of Mr. Palmer, recently United
States Attorney General. The Alien Property Custodian sold
to the Foundation "substantially all of the Gern.'an dye and
chemical patents, seized by him." In your fight against mili
tary preparedness I think you ought to give some attention to
the Foundation.
New York, May U
R. Clyde White
Originality Rather than Safety
Sir: The following passage taken from "The Letters of Wil
liam James" (vol. I, p. 302) might properly be submitted to
the consideration of the presidents and boards of trustees of
Gopher Prairie and all other colleges: "His [William James's]
conviction in respect to all academic appointments was that
youth and originality should be sought rather than 'safety';
that the way to organize a strong philosophical department
was to get men of different schools into its faculty, and
that they should expound dissimilar rather than harmonious
points of view and doctrines."
Pasadena, April 9
A. B.
The Nation
744
Mary Magdalene
By LEONORA SPEYER
I think that Mary Magdalene
Was just a woman who went to dine,
And her jewels covered her empty heart
And her gown was the color of wine.
Sat by a stranger with shining head.
"Haven't we met somewhere?" she asked,
"Magdalene! Mary!" he said.
Fell at his feet and called his name;
Sat at his feet and wept her woe
And rose up clean of shame.
Nobody knew but' Magdalene,
Mary, the woman who went to dine;
Nobody saw how he broke the bread
And poured for her peace the wine.
This is the story of Magdalene
It isn't the tale the Apostles tell,
But I know the woman it happened to,
I know the woman well.
Books
The Italian in America
The Italian Contribution to American Democracy. By John H.
Mariano. Boston: The Christopher Publishing House.
DURING the first fifteen years of the present century there
was a flow of books on immigration, comparable in quan
tity and variety to the alien stream itself. Then came the
European War. It virtually stopped immigration, and thus
interest in it. We forgot that we had an "immigration prob
lem." Now, with a renewal of the westward human current,
the subject is again to the front; but we are approaching it
in a different way. Instead of studying immigration, we are
concerned mainly with what we are pleased to call Americani
zation. With some writers the term is only an affectation
an artificial seeking to meet a demand. With others it is the
recognition of a changed condition. Not only has the war made
us more introspective in regard to the elements and character
of our nationality, but we have reached a point where we can
begin to examine the "newer immigration" not merely in a
detached wayas we would a new arrival at the zoobut as it
affects and is affected by America. What is called the "newer
immigration" began about thirty years ago. It represented,
roughly, a change from the people of northern to those of
southern Europefrom Germans, Scandinavians, English, and
Irish to Italians, Jews from eastern Europe, Poles, Slovaks,
Slovenians, Magyars, and other races. Owing to barriers of
speech and custom, most of this "newer immigration" remained
as foreign and aloof in America as if it had stayed at home.
"We will have to wait for the children to grow up," we said.
"They will be good Americans."
Well, during the interlude of the war the children have been
growing upsome of them are grown. What kind of Ameri
cans are they? What is the country gaining or losing by their
presence? What have they gained or lost in America?
These questions Mr. Mariano seeks to answer with respect
to the Italians by a study of the second generation of that race
[Vol. 112, No. 2916
in New York City. From various figures he estimates that in

a total population of 5,748,629 persons in 1917 the Italians num
bered 730,842, about equally divided between those born abroad
and those of American nativity. For the purposes of his in
quiry he regards Italian-born children who reached America
before they were fourteen years old as in the same group as
the native-born. On this account he adds 10 per cent of the
Italian-born population to the number of the American-born,
which gives him 406,805 persons whom he classifies as "Ameri
cans of Italian extraction." The children have been growing
up, did one say? Yes, but the second generation is still over
whelmingly in the early, formative years. Forty-seven per
cent of the second generation in New York City are not more
than ten years of age and 81 per cent are not more than twenty.
Only 1 per cent are over forty. Italians of all classifications
constitute only 12 per cent of the city's population, but the
second generation forms 30 per cent of the school-going popu
lation.
Mr. Mariano has assembled a quantity of valuable material
on occupations, health, crime, thrift, standard of living, mate
rial progress, mental traits, education, organizations, culture,
and other topics bearing on the development of the second gen
eration. His facts are not always clearly stated, and at times
he loses the critical sense, as when he gives six lines to Dr.
Antonio Stella, eminent as physician, citizen, and Italian, but
devotes two pages to a eulogy of James E. March, whose career
as politician and padrone represents just that kind of success
that is least worthy of emulation by the second generation of
his race. On the whole, though, Mr. Mariano attacks his sub
ject with intelligence, and writes in a tone commendably free
from jingoism or self-sufficiency in regard to Americanization.
Wisely, perhaps, he does not attempt to define either "Ameri
canism" or "Democracy," but he rules out a good many ob
jectionable conceptions. He quotes Grace Abbott of the Federal
Children's Bureau in condemnation of those who "consider our
institutions more important than the ends these institutions
were created to serve"; he deprecates the talk of the necessity
of bringing our immigrant peoples up to the standard of the
cultures prevalent among the older generations. "In effect
this was to set up a type as already existing that represents
the last word in things American," he comments. "One got
the impression that the ultimate American could be seen walking
the streets."
Likewise Mr. Mariano rejects the fol-de-rol of "race superi
ority," which the war has done so much to revive, basing his
position on the best modern science. He finds "high variability"
to be an outstanding feature of the mental life of Italians, but
says of the second generation that "from the standpoint of race
no significant differences exist between these and other indi
vi

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This is a reproduction of a library book that was digitized

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POLITICS, LITERATURE, SCIENCE

FROM JANUARY 1, 1921, TO JUNE 30, 1921

THE NATION, Inc.

STREET, NEw York, N.Y.

JANUARY 1, 1921, TO JUNE 30, 1921

and Germany; Dft

Caddan, John Joseph :

Bigotry not one-sided. C. P. Sweeney; Cr. 17

Contemporary American novelists. C. Van

New educationIts trend and purpose. E.

President Lowell on needs of education . . S

Famines. See ChinaFamines.

Intellectual life. See Name of country sub

Thought control in Japan. J. B. Wood ;

Political and religious refugees cannot come

Kaiser vs. Bismarck. Suppressed letters by the

Slaughter of the Jews in the Ukraine in 1919.

NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 5, 1921

Social Democratic party organization, Legien, like Gompers,

worth of property has been de^trojted-by arson in Liver

[Vol. 112, No. 2896

the inhabitants of our own Southern State, where law and

every Diamond Bill Democratic saloon-keeper boss, there is

pay $11 a ton, with a personal commission of fifty cents, at

[Vol. 112, No. 2896

The Friendless Nations

things Japanese; Australia is drawing the yellow color line

THE NATION, some time ago, called attention to a dis

the circulation of unfounded rumor by members of the fac

Destruction and Creation

[Vol. 112, No. 2896

vicious, or killed as possessed of a demon, or worshiped as

Ending the Intellectual Blockade

among them Cardinal Gibbons, Frank A. Vanderlip, David

IF, as it is reported dimly, the war in Ireland has reached

[Vol. 112, No. 2896

By CHARLES GRANT MILLER

press of the whole country. The point of view taken in the

ditions in the mills were made when visiting correspon

questions at issuehours, pay, working conditions, lack of

case meriting a hearing; and even then there was no re

[Vol. 112, No. 2896

petition in full. No other Pittsburgh paper saw news in

be the explosion of a stick of dynamite under the porch not

This article was a marked exception to the general rule in

The Farmers and Congress

[Vol. 112, No. 2896

the needs of industry rather than agriculture. When the

ceipts for their grain and cotton, the transaction to be

with the value of farm products and so long as every farmer

his shelves stock which does not sell. Any manufacturer

[Vol. 112, No. 2896

the desire to produce, as the terms under which production

Solving Housing in England

District Council will probably be the model for many others.

Contributors to This Issue

[Vol. 112, No. 2896

A New German Liberal Monthly

To the Editor op The Nation:

Honorable Mention for Jersey City

Mr. Collins in Reply

paigns of ignorant incitement to violence against men and