y. His conception of
poetry is that of the Jews: poetry is a message, and


iS6
August 23
THE DIAL
art is merely the instrument to make it heard. He
is a teacher, a preacher, a prophet, and his work
is compared to the Psalms, to Jeremiah, to the Song
of Songs, to the Book of Job. And yet Mr. Unter-
meyer assures us that Mr. Oppenheim's poetry is
American. Let us turn back to the preface, and
note the following remark: "Until recently our
paintings had filled endless galleries with placid ar-
rangements of Greek nudes, Italian skies, and French
theories." If it be bad for America to follow a
French theory in painting, why is it not bad to
follow a Semitic theory in poetry? Surely one is
bad as the other, and Mr. Oppenheim's poetry, far
from being the imposing native structure which Mr.
Untermeyer says it is, is merely academic balder-
dash. Further along we are offered this character-
istic sample of it:
Who buried Atlantis
And devoured Egypt?
Into what jaws has Athens gone?
Galley slave and Agamemnon, the great king, are
shoveled under,
And the girl who combed the hair of Helen is dust with
her golden mistress
Cities of great pride, with their multitudes,
Have gone down,
And spring that called out the boy Dante into the streets
of Florence,
Silent when Beatrice walked,
Opens wild roses in the ruins over the dead
The snows where Saga heroes fought
Melted with those warriors,
And the desert girls of Arabia are only an echo in our
brains.
The same great war; the same great urge; the same
birth and death
Are kisses sweeter than in Carthage,
Is failure more bitter than on the hill of Gethsemane,
Has death lost its sting since Rachel?
It is noteworthy that in all this long, verbose
catalogue of names Mr. Oppenheim does not men-
tion a single one that might in any way identify his
work or interests with America. Had he written
Montezuma instead of Agamemnon, or the Aztecs
instead of Egypt, we would at least have known
that he was aware of America's early existence.
But neither in these lines, nor in all the three
hundred and fifty pages of Mr. Untermeyer's book,
is there one word about the American Indian, or
about American Indian Poetry. A strange omis-
sion. . . .
Turn to the chapter on Miss Lowell. Here Mr.
Untermeyer exalts his subject's range, her diversity,
her temerity in experiment. We are told that she
is capable of writing in every form from strict met-
rical stanzas to "futuristic" verslibres, from vers-
libres to polyphonic prose, from polyphonic prose to
an interspersing of verslibres and polyphonic—a
style which Mr. Untermeyer does not dignify with
a title, but which should perhaps be called "poly-
versphonlibristic". Not a word here about the mis-
sion of the poet as a social reformer, of which we
hear so much in the chapters on Oppenheim, Gio-
vanitti, Wood, and even Vachel Lindsay. On the
contrary, we are told quietly that Miss Lowell is
content to be the poet, rather than the prophet.
Not a word here about the possible influence of Miss
Lowell's New England ancestry upon the spirit
of revolt latent in her poetry; though Robert Frost
who is far less characteristic of New England in
his personality than Miss Lowell, is highly praised
for having absorbed New England in his poetry.
Therefore, Robert Frost is an American poet be-
cause he writes of New England; Miss Lowell is
one also because she gives us scientific experiments
in form. Mr. Oppenheim is one also because he
holds the Jewish attitude toward art. There is
but one thing which can be said about such a
method of criticism. Mr. Untermeyer has omitted
to mention Sir William Watson as an American
poet, despite his sonnet on President Wilson; he
ignores Swinburne as an American poet, despite that
poet's attitude to Walt Whitman. If Mr. Unter-
meyer's errors of judgment are thus apparent at the
outset of his enterprise, what can be said on the
matter of his minor points, his detail, his style?
Nothing—or rather, everything. In such a welter
of absurdities one does not know where to begin.
Let us note, for instance, the space Mr. Untermeyer
gives to certain poets. Conrad Aiken, for instance,
is relegated to the minors, and is given seven and a
half pages of grudging admission and unmeasured
denunciation, including a severe examination of his
early verses—a proceeding Mr. Untermeyer wisely
omits in the case of Frost. And at the same time,
Mr. Untermeyer gives fifteen pages to an apologia
for John Hall Wheelock, in which that author's
later sins are forgiven for the sake of two or three
of his early poems. Or take another point, Mr.
Untermeyer's total lack of any sense of humor. For
instance, he solemnly discusses both Mr. Witter
Bynner and Mr. Bynner's alter ego, "Emmanuel
Morgan," the leader of the Spectrists, without mak-
ing the one remark that anyone would expect him
to make in the circumstances: that Mr. " Morgan"
was both amusing and readable, whereas Mr. Byn-
ner is not.
As for the English in which this book is written,
it is indescribable. Mr. Untermeyer is not content
with the vocabulary of Shakespeare and the structure
of Addison. He introduces new instruments into
the orchestra, and combines them in a new way.
But after all, this new art is fairly familiar to our
ears. We can hear its counterpart already in the
performances of any Jazz band.
John Gould Fletcher.


THE DIAL
\ FORTNIGHTLY
The Old Order and the New
In Europe the embryo League of Nations
threatens with starvation and tempts with food the
revolutionists who will not obey its mandates. In
Washington Mr. Wilson makes the acceptance of
the League a condition precedent to the lowering
of the cost of living. He promises to do a number
of things to solve the food problem, but assures the
people that even though he exerts himself to the
utmost the situation can not be relieved until the
Covenant is signed and the direction of the world is
formally handed over to the corporation formed at
Paris. It is disheartening but true that there are
still people in the United States who take Mr.
Wilson at his word. We might remind the credu-
lous that the promise about the packers has been
made by other presidents whose reputation for
obligations fulfilled was at least as good as Mr.
Wilson's. But up to date every attempt at reform
has left the packers and the other trustees of the
commonwealth as well placed as ever for continu-
ing their work of plunder. We would like
to submit further that Mr. Wilson's failure to carry
on business in the open with the diplomats of Europe
gives small promise that he will deal openly and
successfully with Mr. Armour, Mr. Morgan, Mr.
Schwab and Mr. Rockefeller. As for hoarding: if
there ever was a time in our history when hoarding
should have been prevented it was while the world
war was in progress. It was not prevented then
and it will not be prevented now. A feint in this
direction will- doubtless be made, but it is incon-
ceivable that either the President, Congress, the state
legislatures, or the courts will support the radical
and necessary remedy of confiscation and public sale.
That would be going the Bolsheviki and our own
I.W.W.'s one better, and making functionaries of
tie state liable to imprisonment or deportation.
Surely there is no one who, out of respect for the
President's " lofty principle," will take seriously his
program for the handling of the living-cost issue.
Some few may even recognize that the cost of living
•s very likely to fall of itself before long. If the
phenomenal decline in the rate of foreign exchange
serves to check exports and thereby to increase
domestic supply and to lower prices, Mr. Wilson
will be in a position to reap the credit. It will not
matter that by the sabotage of production and the
control of distribution the manufacturers and deal-
ers will be able in a short time to restore prices to
the level most profitable to them. For the public
the obvious fact will be that Mr. Wilson presented
the country with a program—and ipso facto prices
fell.
The Wadsworth Bill, the extreme stbi»
taken by our liberal administration, should disillu-
sion liberals everywhere. Drawn by the Generul
Staff, at the dictation of an alleged " pacifist " sec-
retary of war, the bill is a complete betrayal of
liberalism at a moment when scarcely another
important Government in the world dares take up
the issue of conscription. Its real objective is not
military training but a military establishment. This
it approaches deviously, seductively, behind the rela-
tively innocent-looking wedge of a three-months'
training period for youths of nineteen. Although
the newspaper reports are inadequate to disclose the
precise interrelation of the details of this proposal,
nobody who has had any army experience can be
deceived into thinking that three months of training
will accomplish more than the initiation and
enrollment of recruits. Either the two-year reserve
clause means a two-year liability to training in case
war should arise, or else the General Staff eon-
templates sending green boys into action as Jirst
replacements for regulars. Even Secretary Baker
claims for so short a period little more than that
it will "secure a careful stock-taking" of the
physical condition of our youth and that it is not
too brief to instill "habits of orderliness, coordina-
tion, and self-care "—that is, such habits ns salut-
ing, performing the manual of arms, and rolling
blankets. The physical effect of such drill is utmost
negligible. In short, the three-months clause is
sugar on the pill offered to hostile public opinion,
The proposal as a whole is unjust in that, besides
establishing inequality between the new conscripts
and the regulars they must serve with, it ullowi
them no pay above maintenance and live dollars
monthly "for incidentals," seems to prefer post
ponement of training to providing for their depend-
ents, and carries no recognition of conscientious
scruples. That it is "stripped of all vocational or
other educational features" clinches the fnct of its
militaristic intentions. The bill even subsidizes the
exemption and appeal boards with a provision for
ten dollars pay daily, so that we may enjoy the
European blessing of a professional sub-army of
procurers. And finally, by way of imperialist
overtone, it extends its benefits to ilawaiians and
Porto Ricans!
The military establishment that is the real objec-
tive of the Wadsworth Bill would multiply our
old standing army by five, and give us a peace foot-
ing of 510,000 enlisted men, a war nucleus of
1,250,000 men for quick mobilization (of whom
at least half would have had only three r"
>


i58
August 23
THE DIAL
training), a two-year reserve class of 1,200,000
more, and after that our full man-power resources
under the Selective Service Act, which the bill
would establish in immediate force whenever we
should declare war. Two and a half million
"soldiers" subject to call before we need invoke
the draft—an imperial picture! In peace times,
according to the Chief of Staff, this would cost us
some $900,000,000 annually. Lest that sum stagger
us a little in view of our war debts, our othei
taxes, and our present weather eye upon the high
cost of living, he added that only $94,066,500 of
it would be demanded by the three-months' train-
ing course itself, which could be purchased at
$144.75 per capita, the balance going into the peace-
time upkeep of the standing army. But observe,
whither you are led by the simple little proposal to
give an annual three-months outing to nineteen-year-
old boys!
Xhe announcement that the Military
Intelligence Service would be maintained for the
duration of the peace preceded by a few weeks the
plea for an expanded military establishment. It is by
the terms of these definite announcements of policy
that the vague promise of disarmament contained in
the Covenant must be gauged. Political exploita-
tion and military mastery proceed hand in hand
under the League: that institution is to bring not
peace but a sword. Jointly the armies of the League
will be used against the disaffected populations of
"backward," communist states; .separately they will
be used against the enemy at home—that is, the
underlying population. The Prussic State was weak
in verbal idealism. It made the supreme sacrifice
in order that its spirit, wrapped in the heavy armor
of pious aspiration, might conquer the governments
of the world. -
With Wilson playing an amiable Alex-
ander I to Glemenceau's Metternich, the first act
of the drama of counter-revolution has ended in a
brilliant triumph for the Holy Alliance. The his-
tory of the pacification of Hungary, now accom-
plished, is neither very long nor very difficult to
understand; and it illustrates very admirably the
manner in which bread and bullets may influence
the self-determination of a free people. In a speech
delivered in Paris towards the end of July, Herbert
C. Hoover, Food Dictator for the Allies, remarked
that officials of the Relief Commission were main-
taining and managing some eighteen separate gov-
ernments—eighteen well nourished centers of anti-
Bolshevism. A few days later (July 26), the Allies
offered to give Hungary a place in Mr. Hoover's
bread line on condition that the Soviet government
be overthrown. Unfortunately the attention of the
communist officials was centered for the time being
upon military operations against the most honest of
Mr enemies—the Roumanians. Meanwhile Cap-
tain Gregory, an American now functioning as chief
Allied bread baiter for central Europe, dangled be-
fore Budapest a most generous offer of food—to be
had at a price. The combined attack of Roumanian
arms and Allied intrigue was too much for Bela
Kun; on August 31 his government was overthrown.
The Associated Press dispatch that announced the
debacle at Budapest proudly pointed out that Cap-
tain Gregory should be " credited with a large share
in the hastening of Bela Kun's retirement." In
the face of a feeble and obviously insincere protest
from the Supreme Council at Paris, the Roumanian
army now overran Hungary, occupied the capital,
and created conditions that made easy the strangula-
tion of the new bourgeois-Socialist government,
the return of the emigres, and the complete work-
ing out of the counter-revolution. With the
Supreme Council still uttering stage thunders against
Roumania, Archduke Joseph, "the most popular
member of the Hapsburg family," dumped the ad
interim cabinet into the discard and became Regent
of Hungary. The sincerity of the Allied promises
to the first anti-communist government may be
judged from the fact that on the day of the Haps-
burg coup d'etat the members of Entente mission
conferred with the Archduke, reached " a full agree-
ment" with him on various matters, and ended by
delegating governmental authority to this new
Dictator.
1 HE NATURE OF AMERICAN ACTIVITIES IN
Hungary is easily understood when published facts
are once gathered together. Information relative
to counter-revolutionary operations in Finland and
Russia is not so easily obtainable; an interview pub-
lished in the Soumen Sosialidemokraatti, a Finnish
newspaper, may therefore be regarded as "a piece
of preciosity." The speakers are, first, a Finnish
newspaper reporter; second, Magnus Swenson,
sometime of Madison, Wisconsin, more recently
Inter-Allied Food Dictator for Scandinavia and
Finland. To quote:
"Is it true," I [the reporter] asked, "that our getting
foodstuffs depends to some extent on the political system
of our country."
"Yes. You know, of course, the wish of America that
your country should have a democratic system and that
the composition of the government should answer the party
divisions in the newly elected Diet. I know that condi-
tions here are not quite satisfactory as yet, but I am sure
that everything will be all right very soon. I feel sure
that the people of Finland under all circmstances are
able to take care of themselves. But we have another dan-
ger before us. America and the Entente powers regard the
Bolsheviki of Russia as enemies of mankind. The position
of your country would become very difficult, and your
relations to the Entente countries would perhaps become
impossible, if the Bolsheviki should get into power here."
"Do you believe that Finland would be permitted even
formally to make peace with the Russian Soviet Republic?"
"I am no politician and I cannot give you any definite
answer about that. Nevertheless, I believe, that the En-
tente powers would not approve of such a peace at this
time. In regard to the" food problem, which is the only
question within my jurisdiction, I believe it would not be


igig
*59
THE DIAL
as easy to arrange for food relief in case you would start
negotiations with the present Russian Government."
1 understand that this a very delicate point. . . .
The problem is by no means of a purely humantarian
character—the delivery of the Finnish people from star-
vation. Rather the object is to make Finland's policies com-
pletely dependent on the policy of the western imperialists,
and to compel the Finnish people to remain in a state
of war with the Russian Soviet Republic.
I
If any stimulus was needed to stiffen the
Bolshevist resistance to the attacks of the Allied
imperialist combine, the new developments in
Hungary have supplied this stimulus. Seen for
what it is, the Betrayal of Budapest will bring to
the Russian people, and to the enemies of imperial-
ism everywhere, not the valor of desperation but
courage confident of victory. At Budapest the
Allies showed their hand. What they would do
only too gladly by force alone, they are now com-
pelled to do in part by trickery. Diplomacy and
dollars still move at the command of governments
that can no longer trust their troops. The armies
of Western Europe and America are being called
home by the will of the people; but the work of
counter-revolution is being carried on, not now with
the people's manhood, but still with the people's
money. Has the time not come then to put to the
people of America a simple question: "You have
bought; the bonds of your government; you have
pledged generous aid to starving humanity in
Europe; but do you want your money used to
finance a food relief scheme that is doing the revolt-
ing work you will not let your army do?"
The press hails with joy the failure of the
proletariat in Europe to get action on Russia and
to get it by the direct method. If the facts in the
situation were followed with a desire to Unearth
the truth it is possible that a fair conclusion would
be that the direct action policy of the workers has
already accomplished as much to prevent the exten-
sion of intervention in Russian affairs as diplomacy
in Paris has accomplished in the defeat of Soviet
government. A final decision has not been reached
in England as to whether the workers will or will
not strike against the government's Russian policy.
The matter is to be referred to a trade union con-
gress. On July 31 it was reported from" London
that the Government was to proceed immediately
with the withdrawal of the British forces from
North Russia. Several days earlier Mr. Asquith
had been moved to say:
I regard with bewilderment and apprehension the part
this country is playing in Russia. The country wants a
clearer definition than it has yet been given of what are
our commitments, definite and prospective. I surely hope
that the attempt to commit us further in Russia will be
successfully resisted. The future government of Russia
is a matter to be settled by the Russian people and no one
else. The economic condition of the world and of our
country was never more menacing.
We hope that the trade unionists in casting their
vote will accept these remarks of Mr. Asquith as a
challenge to them to block the policy of the Coalition
Government, announced by Mr. Chamberlain, "to
continue economic aid and a powerful contribution
of munitions to Denikin." What these British
workers will still do in regard to Russia is an open
question. But what the Italian workers have
accomplished in forcing action upon their govern-
ment is a matter of history. All that was needed
there to bring the government to terms was the
adoption of a resolution to strike. We take this
opportunity to reprint the resolution of the Italian
seamen, as it has received scant notice. It is one
of the most striking proofs we have that there is in
Europe a labor group with international sympathies.
It runs: x
All the crews of Italian steamers are disposed to go to
prison or be sent to the bottom of the harbor with their
steamers rather than allow themselves to contribute to the
defeat of the Russian people's revolution. We are con-
vinced that such a defeat would mean the defeat of labor
everywhere. We invite all other labor organizations,
especially seamen, to boycott all steamers chartered by
international capitalism agaipst the Workers' International
which is now massing its Red vanguards on the battle-
fields of revolutionary Russia.
The war went too far—millions of men
and billions of dollars too far. The Supreme
Council admits it when it goes about rebuilding
what the war pulled down at such a heavy cost
in blood and treasure. A monopoly of ruling-class
privileges was the reward expected by the victors;
actually they have fallen heir to a revolution that
threatens the destruction of the very system of
privilege. It is the fear of this universal cataclysm
that sets the Supreme Council seeking allies among
its bitterest enemies of a year ago. With the defeat
of Germany the fears and animosities that so
recently divided Europe into two rival political sys-
tems lost most of their significance; since that time
the fear of the social revolution has tended more
and more to replace the old national and dynastic
rivalries. The Treaty is the product of the
nationalistic system that gave the conqueror the
right to grind his defeated rival into the dust. But
the counter-revolutionary activities of the Allied
pow-ers are of a different order; they belong not to
the war of nations but to the class struggle that
divides Europe horizontally and gives the lie to
nationalism at the very moment when the war has
brought it to the height of its development. Man-
nerheim oi Finland, Kolchak of Russia, and Joseph
of Austria have profited in turn by the new diplo-
macy that joins dollars and dynasties in the defense
of privilege. With these alliances of desperation
threatened by the rising tide of revolt, how long
will it be before the Supreme Council is compelled
to acknowledge that from the point of view of the
ruling class the war that started the revolution was
a mistake?


i6o
August 23
THE DIAL
Casual Comment
The war and its outcome have thrown the
world into a welter of political thought and action,
inevitably at the expense of interest in the creative
arts. Speculation has seized upon this fact; by
consequence each day adds a chapter to the discus-
sion of what-is-most-worth-while-anyhow. One of
these commentaries—a foundling .editorial sheltered
by a respectable weekly—finds good counsel in the
past. Look, says the writer, at the Revolutionary
Age of a hundred years ago. Where is Marat,
killed miserably in his bath, and Charlotte Corday,
silent now as her great bloodguilty victim. Where
is the giant Danton, and Robespierre, Highpriest
of Reason, burned in his own sacrificial fires.
Among them all there is no voice speaking in an
age that yet hears Schiller and Goethe, Bach, who
came before, and Chopin, who came after. These
men lived somewhat apart from the hot passions
of their time; and as they stood, so their work
stands today—" above the battle." Without deny-
ing the fact that individual achievement in the arts
is kindlier treated by the years than is any great
accomplishment in politics, we may yet dispute the
frequent corollary—that in the arts is all perma-
nence and perfection, in politics nothing but tempo-
ral futility. It is easy—and inane—to confuse the
everlasting with the ever visible. Art builds up,
toward the sun. A painting or a poem or a sym-
phony that achieves greatness at the same time
achieves individuality towering above temporal
horizons. The great works that follow after must
build anew for themselves; behind them stand
always the monuments of the Masters.
But the type of thought that organizes and moves
humanity in its daily tasks must build foundation-
wise, flat upon the earth. To move the masses of
men, thought must be not too lofty and individual-
istic, but simple and capable of being readily under-
stood by the common run of humanity. Among
prophets, one speaks too loftily, and has no audience
but oblivion; another turns to brutalities, leads the
mob, is trampled by the madness he sets loose; a
third talks simply of things that most men see the
good of, and perhaps arouses action a continent
wide. Oblivion takes them all—the dreamer, the
demagogue, the leader of men. It often takes the
last sooner than the others: reforms once achieved
become a commonplace; and the reformer, because
of the practical turn that made leadership possible,
too often turns conservator of what has been won;
the political revolutionist may be the bitterest enemy
of the communist, who nevertheless builds upon the
political foundations and eventually hides them alto-
gether from view. Thus in the group affairs of
humanity what is best done is soonest out of date.
The political past shows no long monumented corri-
dors of beauty. The present is the mob-trampled
foundation of the future. What was, is forgotten;
what is, is not enough; what is to be will hide the
-1 achievements of the present.
The way maps are used in current war-
books and histories is not calculated to increase
respect for the geographic disciplines. Their func-
tion is formal and decorative. They run concur-
rently with the text and now and again break into
the solid blackness of the printed page; but at best
their success is typographic rather than topographic,
artistic and not scientific. Even from the point of
view of simple draughtsmanship the mean specimen
is an affront to the one or two rules of cartography
which every writer who must handle geographic
data should be acquainted with. First, as to posi-
tion. It is unpardonable, in the eyes of most
geographers, to exhibit a section of territory with-
out noting its latitude and longitude; for it is by
these notations that any particular map may be re-
ferred to with convenience on any other map. Most
writers have a heavy score against them on this
count. The second requirement is intelligibility.
Von Humboldt, we believe, laid down the maxim
that a map should tell but a single story and do so
selectively, without confusing the reader's percep-
tions with a number of other considerations. Thus
if the author is depicting the lineup of the opposing
forces in an engagement involving the capture and
occupation of three towns and five villages, the best
practice is to show these critical centers alone, with-
out respect to the fifty other places which happen to
be set down on the official maps of the region.
Especially should this practice be followed when
the map deals with a short sector of conflict, and is
reduced to the scale of a half-inch equals two miles.
To copy the details of the full scale military map
is to court illegibility and marry confusion. A map
to be studied by an experienced student may be pretty
heavily studded with diverse kinds of data; but a
map that accompanies a text is meant to be read like
the text, and it is only by being drawn with a single
eye to the point to be illuminated that it can become
anything better than a decoratibn. Most authors
however flounder helplessly in the hands of some un-
interested map publisher or draughtsman, ignorant
of the possibilities they fail to exploit. What geo-
graphic training might give them, a glance at Mr.
H. J. Mackinders' Democratic Ideals and Reality
(Holt) would show. His rough but suggestive
maps are worth a whole atlas of more literal illus-
trations whose accuracy is no recompense for their
ineffectualness and sterility.
The trick of toying with an idea until it
suggests another, and then of toying with that until
it suggests a third, and so on indefinitely, is by no
means the exclusive possession of the after dinner
speaker. There are any number of essayists who let
this indolent device serve them as the basis of tech-
nique, enabling them' to be prolific as well as
leisurely, although we recall no more faithful ex-
ponent of it than F. W. Boreham, who lives in Aus-
tralia, and from that vantage spot strews his ideas
in fragrant bunches upon the face of the earth. Six


1919
161
THE DIAL
of these bunches have now been imported by the
Abingdon Press (New York), bearing titles as fol-
lows: The Golden Milestone, The Silver Shadow,
The Luggage of Life, Mountains in the Mist,
Mushrooms on the Moor, Faces in the Fire.
The boyish pastime of skipping stones across the
surface of a pond furnishes a true parallel for the
method of these sketches. Mr. Boreham may or
may not have indulged this sport in youth, but there
can be no question but that he has absorbed its tech-
nique to guide what he chooses to term a " truant
pen" through the mazes of "its inordinate gar-
rulity." The essays present themselves as exercises
in seeing how many orderly mental "skips" can be
secured from one throw across the placid pond of a
conventional mind. Remarkable results may be ob-
tained thus by simply drawing each sentence out of
the tail of its predecessor, after the manner of the
orator who counts upon interlocking anecdotes to
conceal a mental blank. Not infrequently the final
word of -a sentence may be made by the propeling
force of an entire new paragraph, and so by easy
stages an entire essay evolved.
As a natural corollary of his method, the author
revels in diversity. There is scarcely an imaginable
conventional theme which does not bob up on one or
another of the 1650 odd pages. "Have I written
on earthquakes, weddings, sermons, and similar vol-
canic disturbances? I think not," he remarks at
the beginning of one essay—and then hastens to re-
pair the omission. That, undoubtedly, is why there
are six of these volumes.
lOETRY WRITTEN DURING THE WAR IS TINGED
with the reflected light of the conflict even when it
is not wrapped in the martial colors. War's emo-
tional reactions linger like an afterglow when the
sun itself has departed. From Forward March
(Lane) to Rediscoveries (Cornhill) one runs the
martial gauntlet, now thwacked by the club of patri-
otism or again barbed by the spear of satire.
In Rediscoveries Richard D. Ware has the bear-
ing of the worldly and professional sarcast, and by
means of a sardonic inflection and the bizarre empha-
sis that the free verse arrangement can be made to
give, he makes a fairly sharp impression. The net
effect, however, is weakened by lack of originality
and a tendency toward safety in his choice of topics.
His targets are the too common butts of reprobation
—the suffragette, the pacifist, the Germans—cruci-
fied with platitudes. Such poetry is as weak as the
mood that provokes it.
Forward March by Angela Morgan testifies to a
liberated spirit. Her readiness knows few nega-
tions, no distinctions, never a doubt. The wells of
her facility are unsealed by such an embracing
confidence in the universe as is not everyday in
this time of limited capacities. She is more con-
vinced than anybody of God and the people, ser-
mons in stones, and good in everything recon-
structive.
In Mr. Hagedorn's Hymn of Free Peoples
Triumphant (Macniillan) the note of deliverance,
the depth, the panorama, the vibrations of solem-
nity, the profound assurance, the sense of menace,
the zeal, all recall Old Testament Hosannahs. Yet
despite these studious echoes and despite the greater
fact that it draws breath and is dramatic in its own
right, it is a closet hymn, to be read by the free
peoples and not chanted—perhaps the free peoples of
today do not know how to chant. This constructed
language could not be expected to have the wild
energy.that burst abroad in the days of Elijah; there
has been no such energy in modern times except per-
haps Carlyle's. The war itself could not unleash
that which the poet had not originally stored up.
The brevity, the qualities, the finish of War
Poems (Yale University Press) come unexpectedly
from a book of war verse. Their maturity is only
slightly involved in chauvinism and jingles. Their
preoccupations are inward and with the thought of
fortitude and losing, with the reverberations of war
in the heart, with the inevitable but never quite
trite reflections on mortality that war brings to
mind. They show several degrees of approach to
finality: they range in authorship from John Finley
to John Masefield and Robert Frost, whose Not
to Keep is the ranking piece of the volume. Prized
and studied simplicity of idiom and quiet maturity
of mood are the claims of this book to recommen-
dation.
Of a different mood, more close to the realism
of the fighting man, is En Repos and Elsewhere
Over There by Lansing Warren and Robert A.
Donaldson (Houghton Mifflin). Here the routine
of death and destruction is handled in a humorous
and soldierly manner—perhaps the only manner that
could bring a fighting man sane through war. In
general the humor is that of the jolly undertakers—
hut for the authors, as for the safe civilian, neither
routine nor good humor can be stretched to cover the
wide panorama of war seen at a distance. In the
words of the most aspiring phrase in the volume, the
struggle demands "an Iliad of the Western World."
If En Repos does not give us the desired Iliad, it is
yet a book worth looking casually into.
EDITORS
John Dewey
Martyn Johnson
Robert Morss Lovett
Helen Marot
Thorstein Veblen
Clarence Britten, Associate


162
August 23
THE DIAL
Communications
American Money and Kolchak.
Propaganda
Sir: While the Lusk Committee and various
"investigators" are excited to the point of hysteria
because certain groups friendly to the Soviet Gov-
ernment are spending money in this country for
the purpose of placing facts before the American
people, no one seems to have inquired as to the
enormous expenditures made by the Kolchak
propagandists.
Where has Mr. A. Sack of the Russian Infor-
mation Bureau obtained the money for his exten-
sive campaign of misinformation? Full-page ad-
vertisements have appeared in various newspapers,
and the Kolchak weekly, Struggling Russia, has
been published necessarily at great expense. Is it
true that the money being used in this propaganda
is a portion of that granted by the American Gov-
ernment to the Russian Government out of the
proceeds of the sale of war bonds?
In 1917 there was granted by the United States
to Russia- a credit of about $300,000,000. At the
time of Kerensky's fall about $135,000,000 of this
loan had been expended. What has become of the
remainder? Was it left in the hands of Mr.
Bakhmeteff, Kerenskj's Ambassador to the United
States? And is not the Russian Information
Bureau a branch of that Embassy and are not its
officials still on the Embassy pay-roll? If this be
the case, is not American money being used in
America for propaganda on behalf of the Kolchak
regime?
Boston, Mass.
R. P. Ross.
Indian Melodists and Mr. Untermeyer
Sir: There are several ways of reviewing books;
one may be captious, laudatory, or dispassionate.
The critic should at least be reasonably fair. Mr.
Untermeyer in his review of The Path on the Rain-
bow, the Book of Indian Poems (Boni & Live-
right), has made a rather serious indictment of its
editor, one which compels that individual to emerge
in self-defense from what the critic evidently con-
siders a purely nebulous state, and take up arms
in his own behalf.
The case against the book consists of the follow-
ing counts: that a so-called Indian croon alleged
to have been translated by Carl Sandburg is, in
reality, not Indian in origin at all; therefore, there
is a strong likelihood of other inclusions being of
questionable authenticity. To the first part of this
count I plead guilty, the designation "translation"
being a typographical error, resulting from the fact
that the Table of Contents was the only part of the
book which it was impossible for me to read in
proof. Since the poem was reprinted by permission
from Poetry Magazines where its authorship would
be known to readers of that magazine, my good faith
in the matter need not, I trust, be seriously ques-
tioned. An investigation of the sources of the
book will show that I have made every effort to dis-
tinguish between genuine literal translations and
those poems which I have grouped under the head
of Interpretations wherein the approach is through
a medium not Indian; and there is not one of
the aforesaid translators who is not an accepted
authority on ethnology.
To the second count, that it was unwise to in-
clude in the Interpretations the "sentimental jin-
gling" of the poems by Miss Johnson1 (Tekashion-
weke), it must be confessed that it was against the
judgment of the editor and only in deference to the
wishes of the publishers, who argued the great
popularity of that poet's works in Canada and else-
where that inclusion was made. The poems in
question show how far the Indian poet strays from
her own primitive tribal songs, when attempting the
White Man's mode. But then one must concede
something to one's publishers!
There remain the questions of footnotes and of
the value of some of the songs themselves. Mr.
Untermeyer seems to be bewildered by the absence
of notes to such a song as this:
Maple sugar
is the only thing
that satisfies me.
It is so unintelligible, inconsequential . . .
dressed in its absurd pretentious vers libre make-up!
But when Mrs. Austin explains the'primitive back-
ground, the thing at once becomes illuminating and
satisfying. "Ten thousand American boys in a
foreign land singing Home Sweet Home is a very
moving thing, and twice ten Indians at the ragged
end of Winter, when the food goes stale and their
very garments smell of wood smoke, singing their
maple sugar song might sing a great deal of poetry
into it—poetry of rising sap, clean snow water,
calling partridge, and the friendly click of brass
bowls and birch-bark sap buckets." Mr. Unter-
meyer would like to have all the poems similarly
bulwarked by picturesque explanatory matter.
You see, the real secret of the poetry of the above
song is, that the Indians are hungry, hungry for
maple sugar. To critics who have lost their primi-
tive gusto for maple sugar that sensation may well
be a riddle. Well, we might take another song:
Oh
Oh
Oh
I am thinking
I am thinking
I have found
my lover
I think it is so.
We might add the proper footnotes to it such as:
"This song represents the yearning of the Indian
maiden for her lover. Such songs are sung in the
evening when the herons are flying across the wild
rice. It was said that in the old davs all the love


1919
163
THE DIAL
songs were associated with a man's qualifications
to wed, this being determined by his success in war
or in the buffalo hunt. The method of courtship
was as follows:" and so forth. All this may make
Mr. Untermeyer happy and contented, but person-
ally I have cherished a passionate distaste for foot-
notes ever since that wretched academic period when,
for every line of poetry or drama read, one had to
plough through a jungle of notes at the bottom of
the page, or at the back of the book. It seemed
to me then that there was only one creature more
horrible and contemptible than the teacher who
sandbagged poetry, and that was the editor who
crucified it with unnecessary notes.
George W. Cronyn.
Oakland, California.
Imagism: Original and Aboriginal
Sir: Your clipping of Mr. Untermeyer's
answer to my criticism on his review of The Path
on the Rainbow (Boni & Liveright) seems to con-
done my again insisting that even in his defense of
himself Mr. Untermeyer betrays that tendency to
begin his thinking at Greenwich Village or there-
about, which seems to me at present the most re-
grettable tendency in American literary criticism.
Mr. Untermeyer speaks of the Indian verse as a
"crude reduction to Imagist verse form." What I
tried to say before and Mr. Untermeyer still misses,
is that Indian verse form is Imagism. It was
not "reduced" to that form, it was made that
way originally. In its original form the Maple
Sugar song reads exactly as it is written in the
Anthology. It is a three phrase song literally
translated by one of the most careful students of
Indian poetry, Frances Dinsmore. The Indian
words being longer, fill out the measure of the
rhythm, and in case the words do not quite fill out
the measure, the Indian poet, contrary to our mod-
ern use, does not add more words, but fills in the
measure with meaningless musical syllables.
Miss Dinsmore's translations are ethnic rather
than poetic. I do not happen to know the Chip-
pewa language in which the song was originally
written, but I do know the genius of Indian
languages in general. They are holophrastic, that
is to say, one word is actually made up of the es-
sential syllables of a whole descriptive phrase. For
example, there is an Algonquian word which an
ethnologist would translate accurately as Dawn.
But a poet would translate it no less accurately
and more adequately and more Indianly as " Hither-
whiteness-comes-walking." In the same manner the
worjl which Miss Dinsmore translates as maple
sugar, might actually have been something like this
"the sweet-white-downdripping-blood-of-the-maple-
tree" or "the-sweetness-which-I-draw-from-the-
maple-with-my-flint-knife."
Now my contention has been from the begin-
ning that unless Mr. Untermeyer knew something
of the genius of the aboriginal Indian language, un-
less he knew something of Imagism besides what it
looks like on paper, he had no right to review this
book. Certainly he had no right to condemn it
because it does not come within his notion of what
poetry is in New York today. I admit the errors
in editing the book, and particularly I admit my own
liability to err in a subject so broad and so little
studied, but I deny Mr. Untermeyer's right to ob-
ject to the inclusion of particular poems in the book
because they do not please him. Many Indian
poems are banal, many are " jinglingly sentimental"
as he describes Miss Johnson's Paddle Song, albeit
Miss Johnson is, I understand, the only contribut-
ing translator with Indian blood, and probably
closer than any of us to the genuine poetic values
of what she translates.
Mr. Untermeyer must forgive me if he, as the
more conspicuous figure, has drawn my fire. He
is not the only poet who has reviewed the book under
the impression that Imagism was invented in West
Twenty-Third Street and perfected in Chicago.
Santa Fe, N. M.
Mary Austin.
[Editor's Note: The Editors regret that press-
ure of space on this department compels them to
announce this discussion of Mr. Untermeyer's re-
view as closed.]
Contributors
Ben Legere began his career in the labor world
as a machinist. Later he became editor of a work-
man's paper, and wrote a play called Hunger.
During the period of the general strike he visited
Winnipeg and other Canadian cities.
Phillips Russell is a former newspaper editor
with metropolitan experience. He has written
extensively on labor problems.
Herbert Gerhard Bruncken is a contributor to
verse magazines and author of Our Lady of the
Night, and Other Poems (1915).
The other contributors to this issue have previ-
ously written for The Dial.
We are compelled to warn our
readers against the activities of fraudulent
solicitors who have been collecting money
for subscriptions to The Dial and neg-
lecting to make remissions to this office.
The Dial has no subscription solicitors
in any part of the country. Subscribers
should deal with this office direct, or with
well known and reputable agencies. We
shall deem it a favor if readers approached
by canvassers pretending to represent The
Dial will send us descriptions of such
persons.


164
August 23
THE DIAL
Notes on New Books
Samurai Trails. By Lucian Swift Kirtland.
300 pages. Doran.
It cannot be insisted too strongly that peace will
never be kept between two countries who do not un-
derstand each other. Agitators still talk of a war
between the United States and Japan. There is no
reason for anything so foolish or fatal, except ignor-
ance—ignorance of each other's methods of thinking
and living. The value of a man like Lafcadio Hearn
is immeasurable; such people pry beneath masks, ex-
plain the spiritual causes of customs, and expose the
fundamental soil of humanity, which is the only
ground on which a peaceful world can be established.
Civilization, after all, is nothing but the sympa-
thetic understanding of one's neighbor.
Lucian Swift Kirtland likes Japan because it is
human and full of meaning. The curious customs
he sees are an intellectual stimulus, a puzzle whose
solution concerns the world. He possesses that most
valuable accessory of common-sense, a sense of
humor—humor which transmutes an irritating inci-
dent into a thing to be remembered with pleasure.
He has the leisure and means to wander as he wishes,
the physical strength and the adaptive personality to
go where he wishes, and the taste for choosing places
worth knowing. In 1914, he and a companion de-
cided to wander about Japan. Later a Japanese
of the samurai caste joined them. The fourth mem-
ber of the party was a diabolical bicycle of native
make, that almost ranks with Stevenson's Modestine.
They wisely decided to avoid big cities, tourist
haunts, and railroads; and the route they eventually
selected was the abandoned trail upon which, be-
fore the upheaval of 1868, the samurai came from
Yiddo to Nakescendo—Nakescendo, whose beauty
was so cherished that its ancient adorers "did not
allow their artists to paint it, nor their poets to sing
of it to the world," and which consequently is now
unknown.
Still more valuable is his easy but concentrated
analysis of Japanese conventions and morals. Japan
is a land of tradition; the centuries have formalized
all life into system, just as their artists have forma-
lized the rhythms of waves or clouds and the pat-
terns of trees or rocks into unreal symbols. All
these things must be patiently explained to the Occi-
dent. Nitobe's Bushido and Okakura's Book of
Tea have done much; nevertheless there are ex-
tremely few Americans who could live in a Japan-
ese household for a day without breaking at least
half the rules of etiquette. The frightful matter
of Japanese nakedness (or should one write
"nudity?") has caused as much consternation as was
caused three centuries ago in our own land, when
the Jesuit priests tried to teach the American In-
dian what a shameful thing self-exposure was.
They succeeded so illy, that many were tempted into
the heresy that the Indian could not have inherited
the sin of Adam! The Japanese seem equally unim-
pressionable. Kirtland solves the question to his
satisfaction in a couple of pages, filled with respect
for the belief of others, and a knowledge of the
philosophy of clothes.
The Japanese know America pretty well; but we
have been far too self-concerned to make a similar
effort. Those who read this book will find it amus-
ing; but it is much more—it is a thoughtful and
sincere commentary on Japan, excellently told, a
bridge between two proud nations.
American Charities. By Amos G. Warner.
Revised by Mary Roberts Coolidge. 541 pages.
Crowell.
Amos Warner was in his day, a half a century
ago, almost as much of a pioneer as the lamented
Carleton Parker of our generation. The two men
had much in common in their connection with the
academic and industrial life of the Pacific coast, in
their important but unfinished work, and their un-
timely death. It is a happy thought that Carleton
Parker, a generation hence, may seem as old fash-
ioned as Amos Warner does today, even decked out
in shreds and patches of our contemporary costume.
Mrs. Coolidge, in attempting another revision of
"American Charities," has set herself a well nigh
impossible task. The world has moved too fast
and too far since the revision of this book in 1908
and is in too transitional a stage just now for this
hour to seem the one appointed for such a formula-
tion. The book is hardly of sufficient contemporary
interest for the general reader, but for the social
worker it is instructive and entertaining—and some-
what bewildering. To a reader capable of such
discriminations', these variations on the theme of
Warner appear to be written, as it were, in three
keys at once, if such a figure is permissible. First,
we distinguish the original basis of the Warner of
the early nineties, discoursing on Pauperism, Insti-
tutional Care, and Charity Organization Principles,
then the note of the revisor's interpolation of 1908,
harping on the then new and all important science
of Eugenics; finally the discordant tones so in-
harmonious with the old systematizations of the
developing sciences of Mental and Social Hygiene,
Health Insurance, and the Improvement of Indus-
trial Conditions. On the whole, the point of view
seems somewhat limited and the emphasis already
somewhat obsolete—on old and dreary problems of
institutional administration and pauperism, unillum-
inated by the interpretation of modern psychology
and psychiatry, with their emphasis on the indi-
vidual. One puts down this book with the sense
that admirable as were the motives of the revisor
in devotedly attempting to perpetuate the memory of
a pioneer in social work, the net result falls short
of justice to a man who was a progressive spirit in
his time and who if he had lived today would have
written a book radically different from anything
that can be made out of his work of a generation ago.


1919
165
THE DIAL
The Forgotten Man and Other Essays.
By W. G. Sumner. 557 pages. Yale Univer-
sity Press.
This is the last of four volumes in which Prof.
A. G. Keller has collected the essays of his late
colleague, William Graham Sumner. The present
volume gircs chiefly the earlier essays; but they are
marked with the vigorous realism which made Sum-
ner's books outstanding contributions to the litera-
ture of sociology in America. The title essay argues
that most schemes for social reform amount to noth-
ing more than putting into the pocket of a more or
less thriftless and shiftless person part of the earn-
ings of the inconspicuous person who shifts and
thrifts for himself; social betterment, Sumner urges,
will consist rather in the discouragement of in-
competence than in the protection of its exemplers.
The essay bears the stamp of its time (1883), when
it was more forgivable than it is now to base one's
economics on the supposition that every man is the
sole arbiter of his fate, and captain of his soul. An
article on The Philosophy of Strikes (1883) points
out how easily raises in wages can be nullified
through corporation control of prices. In general
the book is a valuable aid to old people who wish
to make as intelligent a defense as may be of the
devil-take-the-hindmost scheme of industry in the
United States of thirty years ago.
The Good Man and the Good. By Mary
Whiton Calkins. 210 pages. Macmillan.
A time like the present, when antagonistic polit-
ical and social ideals contend for mastery, offers an
unusual opportunity to the moral philosopher. And
Miss Calkins has written not only a timely and
stimulating book, but one which, despite its brev-
ity, serves to introduce the reader to its chief con-
cepts, problems, and rival theories of ethical discus-
sion. Her own view, although totally free from
sentimentalism, is expressive of strong social con-
sciousness, sympathy and imagination. And while
the discussion is conducted on an intellectual plane,
this is done without the sacrifice of clearness or com-
mon sense.
To the casual reader there are some things about
the book which invite irony: her illustrations for one
thing. Her young women are apt to play harps, her
young men to pull the stroke oar at college, her chil-
dren to play with Great Danes, her adults to work
on manuscripts, make a million dollars, or contribute
te campaign funds. There are golden mornings in
California, tramps in the Rockies, seasons at New-
port, trips abroad, surf bathing, operas, auto-trips,
and so on. In a word, its stage setting suggests op-
portunity, wealth, comfort—anything but squalor
and struggle or even the moral conflicts of men and
women as they come. One is tempted to change the
title of the book to Ethics for Ladies of Leisure.
To take such liberty, however, would not only be
ungracious but unfair. For despite this idiosyncrasy
of the author the book is a serious, straightforward
presentation of a well-considered ethical standpoint,
by a woman who has evidently experienced deeply,
read widely, and thought with power and unusual
freedom from bias. Moreover, the careful reader
soon discovers that Miss Calkins is aware of facing
concrete social problems, and is trying to face them;
and that her theory is elaborated with direct refer-
ence to questions agitating contemporary men and
women. Taken together with the excellent notes
appended to the body of the book, and the literature
there cited or referred to, the book is one of merit.
It will be of service to those who are anxious to
base their moral theory upon a knowledge of rele-
vant social and psychological fact. Although an ex-
pert in psychology and a trained scientist, Miss Cal-
kins finds it possible to vanquish the materialistic in-
terpretation of social phenomena and to establish
the superior claims of moral idealism. As a book
written for the serious general reader as well as for
the college student, and.as an incentive to thinking
on problems of personal conduct and social renova-
tion, it is well conceived and ably executed.
The Soul of Denmark. By Shaw Desmond.
277 pages. Scribner.
The neutral countries, just now, are escapes in
almost as romantic a sense as the middle ages or
the fictional principalities of novelists. We have a
curiosity as to what existence is outside the war.
The Soul of Denmark is a social critique of the
Danish nation. Politics, co-operative dairying,
system of high schools, fat, art, spiritual inertia, and
divorce are analyzed as so many manifestations of
the national temperament. The quantity and
variety of observations that Mr. Desmond has been
able to make and record in four years are a testi-
mony to his activity and alertness, and, if occasion-
ally in one's course through his pages one doubts
that so many emanations could be accurately probed
in so limited a time, it is a convincing portrait of
the Dane that emerges from the masses of detail.
Moreover, Mr. Desmond found a dramatic crisis
ready to hand in the war; so that there is the thrill of
the novel in the exhibition of the character of the
Dane under test circumstances. Critic and skeptic,
tolerant towards himself and others, inaccessible to
any disturbing emotion or supersensual enthusiasm,
he stands outside the war, uncomprehending, and
placidly reaping its chance harvest. Like so many
writers with a thesis to prove he assumes a special
vocabulary. "Three-dimensional," the sixth sense,
"to propogand "—he amply explains and illustrates
his phrases but quotation marks follow upon the
heels of capitals until one longs for a paragraph of
words used in an every-day manner. But these dis-
tracting mannerisms are only superficial. Mr.
Desmond's passion for Georg Brandes has not been
unavailing, and it is in a finely critical spirit that
he has made his appraisal of the Danish soul.


i66
August 23
THE DIAL
Social Work. By Richard C. Cabot. 188
pages. Houghton Mifflin.
Richard C. Cabot believes in social work. He
seems to believe in it as a constructive part in
progress. In the first he is right; so long as there
is a system of economic organization that turns out
people who lack opportunity, who, when any inter-
ruption occurs in the undeviating program of earn-
ing a living, lack funds for the barest necessities, we
must provide relief, whether publicly or privately.
He is right also in placing emphasis on the medical*
approach to social work—it is probably the only
approach that does not tend to fasten the insult of
charity and subservience on the beneficiary. He is
right in emphasizing the need for self-reliance and
information, rather than for alms and nostrums. He
is right in so far as social work is'ever right. But
social work is a symptom of a great wrong: it can
not, by and large, be constructive. It presupposes a
state of society in which large numbers of the popu-
lation will not be able to provide for themselves,
educationally, medically, economically. Modern in-
dustry forces the study and practise of social work
as a profession. Dr. Cabot dodges this issue. He
says, for instance, "Bad conditions of industry are
doubtless a factor in the production of tuberculosis,
but we must realize how many and important the
other factors are. The eight or ten hours a person
spends in industry is often a small factor in produc-
ing his ill health, compared to the fourteen or six-
teen hours he spends outside the industry." We
should like to ask Dr.~~Cabot why workers spend
their hours outside the factory in ways that are in-
jurious to health. Again in his discussion of the
moral poisoning of monotony he declines to meet the
facts half-way. He describes the sense of injustice
as "a sense that it is not right that somebody else,
whom the Lord did not make very different, has
so much more of money and opportunity and happi-
ness than the person himself has. It is altogether a
secondary question to discuss whether that is true or
not. I do not myself believe that the rich are any
happier than the poor. On the whole, I think the
evils of money are just as great as the evils of
poverty." "Can we do anything about it?" he
asks. "We can help people to see things differ-
ently." It is a pity that Dr. Cabot, a leader in the
study and practice of social work should have so
limited his horizon and his criticism to the immediate,
not the fundamental causes for the necessity of relief.
The See-Saw. By Sophie Kerr. 360 pages.
Doubleday, Page.
Here is an example of what may happen when the
writer of a novel manipulates the strings with too
much confidence. Miss Kerr is continually appear-
ing over the heads of her chief personages, beckon-
ing to the reader to share her own impregnable be-
lief in the adroitness of her handiwork. Whenever
she contrives a particularly smart speech to put into
the mouth of one of her characters, the other person
who chances to be involved in the dialogue is dele-
gated to put it in italics by repeating it. Thus the
philandering husband describes himself as "only
imperfectly domesticated," and evokes Miss Kerr's
approval in the mouth of the next speaker: "That's
a wonderful description of you, Harleth. I'd never
thought of you in just those words, but that's it,
exactly. You're very imperfectly domesticated."
After a time one begins to take exception to this
repeated throwing of a sop to sophistication, and to
suspect the author of sparring for cosmopolitan
smartness with a boarding-school reach. Especially
in such passages as this:
"What is it about Leila," she asked, "that attracts
men so much? She isn't clever—she isn't sweet. She
isn't, when you come right down to it, so wonderfully
good-looking. So far as I can see, she entirely lacks
what Barrie calls 'charm,' in the usual acceptance of
the word. What is it, Curt? Do you know?"
"Oh, yes, I know," said Curt, dryly. "I can tell you
in one word—provocation. Or, sex. I don't mean mat
she's feminine—I mean that she's female."
"Upon my word!" gasped Marcia. "Have you taken
to reading Dreiser novels, Curt?"
"I admit that I was coarse," returned Curt, calmly,
helping himself to salad, "but you asked me—and I an-
swered you according '0 the best of my belief and
opinion."
After this amazing calmness in the face of salad
and sex, we were quite prepared for the further
revelations of the intricate Leila, even unto her ulti-
matum, which runs: "It's simply not decent to
have no pearls."
American Civil Church Law. By Carl Zoll-
man. 473 pages. Studies in History, Economics
and Public Law. Vol. (LXXVII.) Columbia
University Press.
The title of the series does not very clearly fit
this work. It is neither history, economics, nor
public law. Unmistakably it is a book on private
dogmatic law. But since any somewhat complete
treatment of a subject in private law necessarily
must have in it something of history, a little, at
least suggestively, of economics, and cannot wholly
avoid some of the many phases of public law, we
may overlook a mere inconsistency of form; and
this is especially true when the author's labor can
be commended, as is the case here, and when he
cannot be held accountable beyond his own work
which is correctly enough entitled, or for the re-
strictive aims of a "faculty of political science of
some twenty years ago. Chapters dealing with Re-
ligious Liberty, Forms, Nature and Powers of Co-
operation, Church Constitutions, Schisms, Church
Decisions, Clergymen, Officers, Pew Rights, and
Cemetaries, sufficiently indicate the scope of treat-
ment. It is a typical lawbook with the usual ap-
apparatus of footnotes of cases without which a
practical lawbook in Anglo-American countries
(which do not know such a source of law as Doc-


1919
167
THE DIAL
The Remaking
of a Mind
By Henry de Man
The author of this book is—
A prominent young leader of the
Belgian Labor Party. He collaborated
with Liebknecht on the pamphlet on
Militarism for which the latter was
sentenced to four years' imprisonment.
With Liebknecht he founded the powerful
Socialist Young People's Federation and,
with Jaures, Haase, Liebknecht and
Muller, he strove until the last moment to
align international labor against the war.
His book is—
An interpretation of the New Socialism
and other issues of world reconstruction
in terms of the development of his own
ideas under pressure of his four years' war
experiences.
Published August 15. $1.75
Saint's Progress
By John Galsworthy
A very modern story of the challenge
of these times to the world of a middle-
aged English vicar.
"Unfalteringly in this book Galsworthy sees
beyond the moral gesture to the moral fact,"
says the Nation. "Hence he has written pages
not easily surpassed in their strong and earnest
veracity." "One stands wordless in the presence
of a great novel," says the Atlantic Monthly.
$1.60
Miss Fingal
By Mrs. W. K. Clifford
A psychic novel of the reincarnation
of personality.
''One of the best novels of the last few years,'' says
Wm. Lyon Phelps. "The most fascinating novel
of the entire season," says the Chicago News.
Sixth Printing. $1.50

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IRELAND'S
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By COMPTON MACKENZIE
Sylvia Scarlett, already known to Mr. Mackenzie's readers (and If
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i68
August 23
THE DIAL
trine) would be worthless. Naturally the author,
writing as he does primarily for lawyers and not
laymen, observes too closely at times the current
fashions. It is solemnly and punctiliously set down
that •" putting ' hat drops' in the dog of a worship-
per with intent to disturb the congregation by the
convulsions into which the animal is thrown" will
subject the offender to punishment under a "dis-
turbance of meeting" statute. A mere layman
would have guessed as much, but a lawyer must have
more certain information and the author gives just
such a case in the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.
The same chapter is full of similar legal bromides.
The canon that the obvious is not to be mentioned
is not the rule in the writing of lawbooks. Not all
of the chapters, however, exhibit the fault of string-
ing together a list of cases without analytical dis-
crimination which is the common vice of American
law textbooks. The chapter on Church Decisions,
for example, is a critical, and we believe a valuable,
commentary on the leading case of Watson v. Jones.
The chapter on Religious Liberty, also, is well
written and presents a readable, interesting, and
clear statement of the reaction of our system of
law to Christianity.
The Mulatto in the United States.
By Edward Byron Reuter. 417 pages.
Badger; Boston.
The book in hand purports to be "an attempt
to state one sociological problem arising when two
races, divergent as to culture and distinct as to
physical appearance, are brought into contact under
the conditions of modern life and produce a hybrid
offspring whose characteristic physical appearance
prevents them from passing as either the one or
the other." Beginning with the earliest inter-racial
intercourse in later primitive times, when no mixed
blood race seems to have existed, we are taken in a
survey of the Moriscoes, the Eurasians, the half,
bred Eskimos, the zambos, the metis, the mestizos,
and many other half-castes, as a preliminary to the
study of the American mulatto. An historical
study of the rise of this last type in the United
States shows that like other half-castes it is the
result of illicit relations between men of the
"superior" and women of the "inferior" race.
Aspiring in effect to an unattainable status with
the white race, the mulattto is admired by the
pure blacks because of his white blood, and he is
practically forced into the role of leader among his
darker fellows. This function of leader he is able
to fill as well as he does partly because of his close
contact with the whites. As a matter of fact most
eminent American Negroes have actually been
mulattoes. "The relative chances of a black child
and a mulatto child . . . attaining to a posi-
tion among the elite of the race are from thirty-
four to fifty, or perhaps a hundred times as great
in the case of the child of mixed blood." To sub-
stantiate this generalization direct inquiries were
made into the ancestry of 4,267 Negroes or
mulattoes who have at some time been men or
women of at least a certain degree of note. Whether
this cultural prominence of the mulatto is chiefly
the effect of an original superiority in his nature,
or whether it is because of his better opportunities
we do not know. Nor would the existing sociolog-
ical situation be much affected if we did know. The
mulattoes are, persistently, the property owners,
the business men, the agitators, the educated men,
and the spokesmen of their race. In ethnological
and social study they must be examined in such a
light; and it must be borne in mind that truths
which will apply to the mulattoes will not apply
to the pure Negroes. This summary is a poor
reflection of the fine scientific scholarship displayed
in this unique ethnological book—a book as charm-
ing in style and as well documented in fact as
Crawley's Mystic Rose.
The Near East from Within Anonymous.
256 pages. Funk and Wagnalls.
For this type of book, currently classified as his-
tory, there is little or nothing to be said. Put out
anonymously by a secret political agent, attached, as
the context proves, to the German Foreign Office,
it is as remarkable for its abysmal ignorance of all
the veritable forces at work in human life as it is
detestable for its flunkey-like attitude toward the
great and powerful, and its busy, self-important re-
tailing of the gossip which circulates in their ante-
chambers. In the decade before the outbreak of the
Great War this particular agent flitted like a bat
through the dusky air enveloping the courts of Con-
stantinople, Belgrade, Sofia, and the other Balkan
states, covertly entering into a note-book the echoes
and alarums which reached him with an eye to the
day when he might advantageously dispose of them
to the highest bidder. An unsystematic hodge-
podge, the book is a good illustration of the manner
in which an ignoble mind sees history, and shows
besides how history, taken on this level, is indistin-
guishable from that ugly monster which Virgil long
ago portrayed for us under the name of Rumor.
What is there new and remotely valuable in these
two hundred pages of gossip which a student, mak-
ing the serious, social-political approach to the Bal-
kan problem, is likely to have missed and may find
advisable to take into account in his coherent story
of human evolution? Nothing, absolutely nothing!
Let us convince ourselves once and for all and remain
satisfied that the fluctuating opinions of sovereigns
and leading politicians, at least in the impoverished
form in which they reveal themselves to the av-
erage official of what each nation euphemistically
calls its Intelligence Bureau, are historically negli-
gible. And if this be so, it logically follows that
that government which, determined to build its pol-
icy on the valid social, economic, and other contribu-


iqio
169
THE DIAL
Snell Smith
Journalist and Historian
is the author of
"America's Tomorrow"
Every patriotic American
who believes all peoples
ought to be free should
OWN a copy of this inspir-
ational treatise on national
and international politics.
Every library should list it,
because it expresses the
best judgment of this ex-
tremely able man as to
where America stands to-
day, and what steps she
will next be forced to take.
Speaking of
AMERICAS
TOMORROW
Major General Leonard Wood says:
"It covers a field practically as wide as
the world, and shows an immense
amount of hard thinking."
Hudson Maxim says: "It will do any
one good to read it. I know of no work
in which is so clearly discussed the
relation of America to the world and
the relation of the world to America."
"America's Tomorrow" should go
into the library of every executive,
every army man, every statesman,
every newspaper man, and every for-
ward-thinking man and woman in
the country.
Just Out
$2.00 NET
BRITTON PUBLISHING COMPANY
NEW YORK
THE
LITTLE
REVIEW
A MAGAZINE OF THE ARTS
making no compromise with the
public taste
THE LITTLE REVIEW is pub-
lishing the current work of
James Joyce, William Butler
Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra
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Richardson, May Sinclair, Ford .
Madox Hueffer, Jean de
Bosschere, William Carlos
Williams, Ben Hecht, Sherwood
Anderson, etc., in a cheap and
convenient format. You can
obtain this work in no other
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THE LITTLE REVIEW is not a chatty
journal giving mere publicity about the
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against the Vigilanti of Common Sense;
it gives him a chance to show his work
with that of his peers, ungarbled in
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Margaret Anderson - - Editor
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The magazine that is read by
those who write the others
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When writing to advertisers please mention The Dim..


170
August 23
THE DIAL
tory forces involved in the problems of national life,
first resolutely dispenses with the service of this
gentry, must obtain an enormous advantage over its
more shallow, nervous rivals, deflected from a delib-
erate course by every wind that blows.
A Short History of Rome, 44 B.C.—476
A.D. By Guglielmo Ferrero and Corrado
Barbagallo. 516 pages. Putnam.
The second volume of Ferrero and Barbagallo's
new History is a complete disappointment of the
hopes raised by their vivid story of the monarchy
and the republic. The authors indulge in a good
deal of awkward propaganda on behalf of limited
monarchy as a form of government; they have only
a sneer for the attempts of Stocism to preserve
liberty of conscience during the first century; and
they succeed in making the parallel growth of
anarchy and absolutism, which is the great phenom-
enon of the third and fourth centuries, perfectly
incomprehensible. The rise of Christianity, which
was of course mainly due to the despair of the state
felt by the lower classes, is given the most perfunc-
tory treatment. One serious question is suggested
by the appearance of such a book. Our schools and
colleges are flooded with "textbooks" which are
but little if at all superior to this composition of
Ferrero's. These textbooks narrate selected and
superficial events, but of the unbroken current of
human desire which underlies events they tell noth-
ing. The picture of the past which is thus inserted
into the mind of the ordinary student becomes a
ridiculous and dangerous falsehood. What shall
be done when professional historians spread the
illusion of knowledge and not the reality?
A History of Latin America. By William
Warren Sweet. 283 pages. The Abingdon
Press.
To present the history of the whole of Latin
America—Mexico, Central America, and South
America—from the time of the Spanish conquest
up to the present day, together with a brief state-
ment of conditions and problems, in a single volume
of convenient size, is a bold enterprise. It has been
fairly well accomplished by the Professor of History
at De Pauw University, in A History of Latin
America. The work is done conscientiously and the
book has real value for reference. The style is dry
in the extreme, although the matter in itself is
of almost romantic interest. There are1 many
typographical errors and misspellings, particularly
in personal names—a thing unfortunate where
sources for correction are little accessible. The
illustrations are few and of no artistic value, being
clumsily grouped reproductions of portraits too
different in style, age, and proportions to go well
on one plate, but maps and diagrams add to the
usefulness of the book.
Field and Stream. By John Burroughs. 337
pages. Houghton Mifflin.
This book exhibits a phenomenon in these days
most rare—a first class mind at peace with the
world, contemplating the seasonal processsion of
Nature and the placid circling of the stars. What
Burroughs says of Emerson he might have written
of himself: he goes into the woods "not to bring
home bird or botany lore, but to fetch the words
of the wood-god to men." The section of the vol-
ume devoted to field sketches opens " not so much
a notebook full of notes of birds and trees as
a heart warmed and refreshed by sympathetic inter-
course and contact with these primal forces." In
Study Notes, observations made afield come to fruit-
age in philosophy, confessedly uncodified, but set
out with a richness of feeling that is too often lack-
ing in philosophical writing. Appropriately enough
there are here discovered new paragraphs in ap-
preciation of Whitman, " the one cosmic poet, more
occupied with the orbs than any other and all other
poets." And likewise a question phrased in epic
language: "Are we ourselves anything more than
the tracks of the Eternal in the dust of the earth?"
La Jeunesse de Joubert. By Andre
Beaunier. 349 pages. Perrin et Cie., Paris.
The twofold interest of this study is that it
brings to light fresh material both about the youth
of Joubert and about his love affair, hitherto un-
known, with the wife of Restif de la Bretonne.
Thus the chaste and academic legend concerning the
moralist, promoted by Sainte-Beuve, Matthew
Arnold, and Mr. Babbitt, is in danger of being
overthrown. M. Beaunier insists that Joubert re-
mains primarily a sensitive and withdrawn "soul ";
but in his youth at least the soul seems to have
taken on quite a corporeal covering. Wej have
details concerning the influence of his mother, the
character of his early churchly education, his first
worldly period and his frequentations in Paris.
These included such men as Diderot, the light poet
Dorat, Fontanes as intimate friend and through him
the notorious Restif de la Bretonne. Scamp as he
was, Restif had a wife who was little better, and
one wonders what Joubert was. doing in that galley.
The rather scandalous and disillusioning story of
this triangle now appears as revealed in the fiction
of Restif himself, in which Joubert and Fontanes
figure, disguised by obvious anagrams. Restif,
sensualist and realist, shows up all parties pitilessly.
The construction of M. Beaunier's book is ram-
bling and episodic and devotes too much space to
third-rate characters only slightly connected with
Joubert. But it is written with subtlety and under-
standing and the main thesis of Joubert's ratheT
grimy "affair" is henceforth established—hardly
to his credit as a man, though it may have given him
material and penetration as a moraliste.


1919
171
THE DIAL
THE NEW SCHOOL
FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH
will open October first for the study of current
economic and governmental problems. The work
will be conducted by a group of well known writers
and teachers among whom are Gbaham Wallas
of London, Thobstein Veblen, James Habvey
Robinson, Wesley Claib Mitchell, John
Dewey, Dean Boscoe Pound, Thomas 8. Adams,
Harold J. Laski, Moissaye Oloin, Charles A.
Bears and Members of the Bureau of Municipal
Research, Robert Bbuebe and Members of the
Bureau of Industrial Research.
Courses will include lectures on Economic
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There will be late afternoon and evening lectures
and conferences to permit the attendance of those
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and small conferences for those equipped for special
research.
Registration will begin September twenty-second
Announcement will be sent npon application to
the school at
165-9 West Twenty-third Street New York City
FIFTY VOLUNTEERS
WANTED
to enlist as candidates for the
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in a campaign for a Reconstructed Church and
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America, and may be trained for efficient service
at the
MEADVILLE THEOLOGICAL
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Autumn Quarter begins Sept. 24. Summer
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sessions at the expense of the School at the Uni-
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Traveling fellowships providing for further study
at foreign universities available at graduation.
Apply to
Rev. F. C. Southworth, D.D., LL.D., President
Today's Short Stories
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An Informal Encyclopedia of Short Story
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By R. M. Neal
Pbof. Neal has taken twenty-two recent short
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Collective Bargaining
—or Control?
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•J there is no place in trade-union
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ticipation of labor in the control
of industry.
•J but the American Federation of
Labor has indorsed the Brother-
hood Railroad Plan.
($ does this mean that the old-line
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172
August 23
THE DIAL
Books of the Fortnight
The Cdst of Living: A Personal Reflection and Its Out-
come (132 pages; Box 282, Yale Station, New Haven,
Conn.), is a polemic against human providence,
which takes refuge, under the whip of fear and
uncertainty, in life insurance, safe investments, and
so forth, and a plea for a wholehearted acceptance
of divine Providence, in accordance with the injunc-
tion to take no thought for the morrow asking what
we shall eat and wherewithal we shall be clothed. A
book written with Tolstoyan simplicity and candor.
Review later.
Comparative Education, by H. W. Foght, A. H. Hope,
I. L. Kandel, VV. Russell, and Peter Sandiford (500
pages; Dutton), takes stock, with the aid of sta-
tistical tables, of the educational systems of the
United States, Germany, England, France, Canada
and Denmark. Review later,
Freedom of Speech in Wartime, by Zechariah Chafee,
Jr. (41 pages; Dunster House Bookshop; Cambridge,
Mass.), Number 1 of Dunster House Papers, is a
reprint from the Harvard Law Review of a preg-
nant criticism of the working of the Espionage Act
during wartime. The author concludes, after an
examination of numerous cases in point, that "in
our efforts to silence those who advocated peace
without victory we prevented at the very start that
vigorous threshing out of fundamentals which might
today have saved us from a victory without peace."
The Greater War, by George D. Herron (101 pages;
Kennerley), endeavors to show that the war is not
yet at an end and that a greater war between Ger-
manism and democracy "now spreads its vaster and
more fateful fields." An erratic book that leaves
the reader with a lingering curiosity as to whether
Mr. Herron did not actually found the National
Security League rather than the Rand School.
Germany's Moral Downfall, by Alexander W. Craw-
ford (217 pages; Abingdon Press), is another one
of those books which the presses continue to put
forth because they have not the power to overcome
the original impetus that the war gave these dis-
quisitions. It is time to restate Newton's law: Minds
at rest continue at rest, and minds in motion con-
tinue in motion, unless externally acted upon by the
publisher.
German Social Democracy During the War, by Edwyn
Bevan (280 pages; Dutton), puts together in a con-
secutive narrative the principal events which make
up the history of the German Social Democrat Party
from the outbreak of the Great War to November
1917.
Russia and Germany at Brest-Litovsk, by Judah L. Mag-
nes 193 pages; Rand School of Social Science),
does not claim to open secret sources for the first
time, or to close finally the controversy to
which this subject has given rise. Rather the author
sets for himself the task of arranging in chronological
order and linking together with notes of his own
writing the material on the Brest-Litovsk affair
which has already appeared in the press. Students
of Russian history will find ample use for this un-
pretentious compilation.
Germany's New War Against America, by Stanley Frost
(190 pages; Dutton), is symptomatic of the latest
psychosis developed by the New York Tribune and
Mr. A. Mitchell Palmer in reaction to a post-bellum
"menace." For Union League readers only!
Women and World Federation, by Florence Guertin Tut-
tle (250 pages; McBride), is a plea for women to
assume the initiative in creating an effective struc-
ture of lasting peace. It appears that Mr. William
H. Taft, in his introduction, confuses such a struc-
ture with the one destined to support the present
coalition of governments.
What America Did, by Florence Finch Kelly (343 pages;
Dutton), takes the reader forth on a kind of Cook's
tour glimpsing all the multifarious activities of Amer-
ica's war. A supplementary volume on What Amer-
ica Didn't is needed to complete the story.
Helping France, by Ruth Gaines (235 pages; Dutton),
presents an account of the activities of the American
Red Cross in France; the volume is illuminated with
reproductions of etchings and wood-cuts of French
villages and villagers.
Ireland's Fight for Freedom, by George Creel (199
pages; Harper), attempts to set forth the high lights
of Irish history. A book not to be compared with
Irvine's Carson or Hackett's Ireland.
Vestigia: Reminiscences of Peace and War, by Charles
a Court Repington (373 pages; Houghton Mifflin),
have the interest that adheres to a career that took
the author through the Second Afghan War, the Bur-
mese War, the Atbara Campaign, the Omdurman
Campaign, and the South African War. Readeri
must, however, wait for a second volume to learn
of the author's more sedentary, but not less exciting
adventures as military adviser to Tory newspaper-
dom.
Commemoration of the Centenary of the Birth of James
Russell Lowell, (88 pages; Scribner), records for
the American Academy of Arts and Letters—under
whose auspices the New York Centenary was held,
February 19-22, 1919—the addresses, poems, and
exercises of that occasion, made memorable by the
contributions of John Galsworthy, Alfred Noyes, and
Stephen Leacock, besides the American speakers.
Studies in the Elizabethan Drama, by Arthur Symons (261
pages; Dutton), adds'to the publishers' recent Sy-
mons volumes a collection that includes ten essayt
on Shakespearean plays, and essays on Massinger,
Day, and Middleton and Rowley. Penetrating criti-
cism here reinforces a scholarship devoid of pedantry.
Review later.
The Changing Drama: by Archibald Henderson (320
pages; Stewart & Kidd, Cincinnati), reprints a sur-
vey which, appearing just before the outbreak of the
War, received from the stage less substantiation of
its predictions than might have been the case had the
theater been permitted an uninterrupted develop-
ment. Whether the "new" drama will now pick
up where it (or roost of it) left off in 1914, remains
to be seen; but certainly no other discussion of the
"dramatic renaissance" unrolls before the interested
playgoer so broad or rich a panorama of the field.
Review later.
A Treasury of War Poetry: Second Series, edited by
George Herbert Clarke (361 pages; Houghton Mif-
flin), includes several hundred bad poems about the
war and a few that are good enough to redeem the
volume. Beyond the patriotic blurbs of the numer-
ous stay-at-homes rise the few clear voices of the
warrior poets themselves: Gilbert Frankau, Robert
Nichols, Siegfried Sassoon, Frederic Manning. These
men have written poems; the rest, literature. Re-
view later.


1919
l73
THE DIAL
LEO TOLSTOY'S
The Pathway of Life
(In Two Volumes). Translated by Archibald J. Wolfe
"THE PATHWAY OF LIFE" ia Tolstoy's posthu-
mous message to a war-torn suffering world. It Is
the Gospel of right living and right thinking and offers
the great philosopher's panacea against world wars
and misery, helping mankind to eradicate all those
false feelings, desires and doctrines, personal, social,
economic and religious, which are responsible for the
present plight of humanity. Price $2.00 each volume.
International Book Publishing Co.,
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174
August 23
THE DIAL
Dreams, and Gibes, by Edward Sapir (72 pages; Rich-
ard G. Badger; Boston), is seldom of the magic of
poetry, but often of such harsh, warped magic as a
poet these days can at best hope to wring from life.
These lines reveal a free, idealistic spirit whom the
world finds more than usual difficulty in hog-tying
and hamstringing. Many of' Mr. Sapir's shorter
pieces show a valuably suggestive turn of thought
—not quite poetically "turned." Excrescences, too,
are apt to be tacked on these tiny things, at their
endings. Of the longer poems, strangely enough,
two in more conventional forms, The Woman on the
, Bridge and The Water Nymph, come perhaps as
close as any to beauty as well as depth.
Ironies, by Donald Evans (75 pages; Nicholas L. Brown;
New York), is at first reading but another slightly
more conventional volume in the direct line of this
poet's Discords, Sonnets from the Patagonian, Two
Deaths in the Bronx, and Nine Poems from a Vale-
tudinarian—save for one far-surpassing new narra-
tive, At the Bar. In the Ironica section itself, among
the stilted self-imitative lyrics, Evan's insight into
unpleasantnesses is still present, but with what, on
second weighing, seems a surer aptness of philosophy
and phrases; at witness here, After a Two-Hour
Dinner, Without Benefit of Surgery, and Nature's
Cowardice.
Footsteps and Fantasies, by C. J. Druce (64 pages;
Longmans, Green), has a title which aptly mirrors
its content. Reality is echoed like a footstep in some
of the verses, while in others the mood and imagery
are fantastic. Mr. Druce writes with smooth lyric
vigor.
The Yale Book of Student Verse: 1910—1919, edited by
John W. Andrews, Stephen Vincent Benet, John
Chipraan Farrar, and Pierson Underwood (212
pages; Yale University Press), comprises the selected
work of twenty-five Yale poets of the last decade.
Sound and workmanlike verse with little radicalism;
Tennyson would have approved of it. The poems
by Stephen Vincent Benet are distinctly the best in
the volume. Most of his confreres write either as
adolescents or as cynical old men; he alone displays
the fine enthusiasm of youth. In compiling his last
college anthology, Mr. Schnittkind chose only one
poem from Yale. One wonders why, considering
that the work of these poets, in spite of their short-
comings, far excels the standard of The Poets of the
Future.
The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson(219 pages; Boni
& Liveright), should both prove the most valuable
recent addition to their Modern Library. The ex-
quisite lyrics of that tragically frustated spirit have
never been too accessible, nor his prose works suffi-
ciently known. This volume omits, unfortunately, the
prose decorations, but it reprints his characteristic
collection Dilemmas: Stories and Studies in Sentiment
(1895) and adds the Arthur Symons Memoir.
Sylvia and Michael, by Compton Mackenzie (323 pages;
Harper), says the author, "is really Book three of
Sylvia Scarlett." These " later adventures of Sylvia"
plunge her into the war, in the Rumanian theater,
and leave her sighing that everything comes to an
end. "Except one thing," says Michael Fane, about
to propose marriage and be accepted, "and that
sets all the rest going again." So we have probably
not yet done with these delightful puppets. Sylvia
Scarlett was reviewed in Scofield Thayer's essay on
Compton Mackenzie in The Dial for November 30,
1918; Sylvia and Michael will be reviewed shortly.
The Tnnnel: Pilgrimage IV, by Dorothy M. Richardson
(342 pages; Knopf), gives the reader, as in the
previous books, an intensely subjective portrait of
the heroine. But whereas her life had, in them, a
unity however artificial, its increased complexity
with Miriam's solitary independence in London
serves to enhance the difficulties of the author's
method. The impressions are not so sharp, are more
scattered, in short, are less often vividly realized.
The distinctively feminine quality of the author's
insight, however, seems intensified. Miss Richard-
son's work remains intrinsically interesting. Review
later.
Jinny the Carrier, by Israel Zangwill (607 pages; Mac-
mi Han), is a tale of rural life in Essex, which the
author describes as a "bland" novel, "to be read
in bed with a sore throat." There is plenty of broad
humor throughout, in the well individualized char-
acters with their crotchety notions of conduct and
religion, and Jinny is a joy, but the novel as a whole
is inordinately slow and long drawn out. Review
later.
The Passionate Pilgrim, by Samuel Merwin (403 pages;
Bobbs-Merrill), is an attempt to foist upon us as the
verisimilitude of genius a most unlikely figure of a
down-and-out novelist who becomes suddenly force-
ful enough to bludgeon his way back to the ranks
of the successful. The book is badly conceived, clut-
tered, and carelessly written.
Ramsey Milholland, by Booth Tarkington (218 pages;
Doubleday, Page), is a series of chapters out of the
life of an inarticulate wholesomely dull, exaggerat-
edly average American boy, whose later school days
are interrupted by war service over-seas. The key-
note is simplicity both of event and method, and the
performance of the volume is precisely adequate to its
promise.
The Young Visiters, by Daisy Ashford (105. pages;
Doran), was written by a romantic nine-year-old
—if Sir James M. Barrie in his whimsical preface
is not making game of his readers. It is a "novel"
of Victorian high life, and the quaintly pretentious
style and the engaging worldly wisdom of the little
author make it luscious reading.
The Man with the Lamp, by Janet Laing (313 pages;
Dutton), presents through the medium of a love
story the various attitudes of a scientist, the presi-
dent of a small town Women's Patriotic League, a
musician, and a spiritual young German, towards
Germany and the Germans. Though the plot inclines
toward the stupidly melodramatic, the author's treat-
ment of her hero, the German boy, is interestingly
sympathetic.
Isaacs, by Joseph Gee (317 pages; Lippincott), is an
episodic and somewhat superficial study of a London
Jew, in the mold of fiction. The humor seldom rises
above that which may be extracted from the narra-
tion of sharp practices in petty business.
Renee Mauperin.by E. and J. de Goncourt (234 pages;
Modern Library, Boni & Liveright), appears
translated in a popular edition, with Zola's Notice
included. First published in 1864, the vignette chap-
ters of this acute and sympathetic study of the con-
temporary French scene, with their depiction of the
complacencies of revolutionists turned prosperously
conservative and the rebellions of a sterling young
girl remain singularly modern. And the long record
of Renee's mortal illness belong to the art that is
timeless.


19*9
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Cost and Waste
THE DIAL
A FORTNIGHTLY #6$^*
Ml
VOL. LXVII NEW YORK NO. 798
SEPTEMBER 6, 1919
The High Cost of Waste . . ■ ,. . The Editors 179
The Economic Crux Lawrence K. Frank 180
The World's Challenge to the Church .... Mont Schuyler 184
Youth's Ending. Verse „ Maxwell Bodenheim 186
Can Real Wages be Raised? Oswald W. Knauth 187
The Literary Drug Traffic Helen R. Hull 190
Of Mediocrity and Its Excellences .... Walter L. Myers 193
The Economic Aftermath in Franceand England . . Robert Dell 195
Russia and International Economics . . . Gregory Zilboorg 198
A Ransom for Russia's Jews 201
The Old Order and the New , . 203
Casual Comment 207
COMMUNICATIONS: The League of Secret Police.—Heresy and Infallibility. 20Q
NOTES ON NEW BOOKS: Saint's Progress. — The Firebrand of Bolshevism. — Volleys 209
From a Non-Combatant.—After the Whirlwind.—Revolutionary Days.—The Prelude to
Bolshevism.—Trailing the Bolsheviki.—Modern Japan.—National Governments and the
World War.—The Mastery of the Far East.—The British in Capri, 1806-1808.—The
Pioneers of the Old South.—The League of Nations: The Principle and the Practice.—
Civilization.—The Next Step in Religion.—A Year in the Navy.
Books of the Fortnight 220
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THE DIAL
A FORTNIGHTLY
No
The High Cost of Waste
I o matter now before the American people is
of a more pressing character and significance than
the steeply mounting prices of those commodities
upon which life directly or indirectly depends. The
suggestions for meeting this problem which have
come out of Washington fail to take into account
the character of business and industry. The pre-
tentious attack upon profiteers is an avoidance of
the real issue, which is not the profits of the owner
but the excessive waste, social and economic, which
is inevitable when industrial equipment is primarily
operative, not to satisfy social needs but to produce
profits for the employer.
A scientific and competent survey would show
that unnecessary waste follows from:
1. The diversion of labor and resources to socially
useless or socially superfluous purposes.
2. Those practices of business competition which either
curtail output or, by duplication of equipment and con-
ciliation of effort, increase the labor and material cost of
the product.
3. The ignorance of actual social needs and the con-
sequent failure to adapt production to meet them.
We are certain that the final solution for
the difficulties of living encountered by the aver-
age citizen can be found only in a more intelligent
utilization of our productive capacity. The prac-
ticability of a tremendously increased production has,
been demonstrated, both in this country and else-
where, by the experiences of the Great War, and
there remains no question as to whether it is possible
mechanically, with the existing industrial equipment,
to make more than ample provision for the material
needs of every inhabitant of the United States.
We disagree with those who believe that the
necessary increase in production can be secured mere-
ly by increasing the output of the individual worker,
eren as we disagree with those who would bait the
taker of an excessive profit. For the inevitable
waste, which will follow this greater production of
socially useless or socially superfluous goods, will ef-
fectually cancel any increase in individual productiv-
ity. Nor should it be forgotten that it is psychologi-
cally impossible to induce labor to increase its pro-
duction per diem or per capita when it is becom-
ing obvious to everyone that forces are in opera-
tion which prevent a corresponding betterment
of the physical well-being of the efficient worker.
Furthermore waste results also from the ab-
sorption of values' through superfluous processes and
handlings, which lessen the actual amount of life-
sustaining goods that income will command, and
therefore diminish the effective demand for the essen-
tial industrial products. For if the average worker
is- unable to buy with his present high money wage
as much as he was able to buy with the lower money
wage which he received a few years ago, the cause
can only be that, at certain steps in the process which
brings food from the farms, clothing and shoes from
the fields and factories, and housing from the forests
and quarries, a portion of the values, far beyond
what might be considered necessary or reasonable,
has been absorbed in payment for useless exertion.
This leads to a diminution of the real purchasing
power of income, which in turn leads to deliberate
restrictions upon production.
And this process of absorbing values unnecessarily
is increasing continually. As the industrial system
develops it becomes more complex, more roundabout,
affording a growing number of opportunities for
non-productive middlemen to insert themselves be-
tween the producer and the consumer. In many
cases they who insert themselves do not add to the
life sustaining values of the goods which pass
through their hands, though they add to the price
at which the goods are sold, bringing about a total
which is excessive.
At the same time, of course, the improvements in
equipment and processes tend to offset, by cheaper
production, these inserted charges. In normal times
processes and methods improve perhaps faster than
the middlemen can take up the slack. In all likeli-
hood the worker has benefited by the industrial im-
provements of the past hundred years, but in years
such as those through which we have just passed,
the reverse is far nearer the truth. And since it is
legally impossible at the present time to disallow the
cost of these wasteful and useless practices, the
country's workers are in the way of starving because
our methods of sustaining life have become too high-
ly refined.
Another factor which artificially maintains pro-


i8o
September 6
THE DIAL
duction costs above the figure which would be, justi-
fied by the advanced state of industrial development
is the practice of selling labor saving machinery at
a price which bears no relation to the labor and
equipment cost of manufacture, but at a price which
is just below the saving in wages which the pur-
chaser will realize through its use.
And, finally, though this does not by any means
complete the full list, the general restriction of pro-
duction, such as we are now witnessing and which is
brought about by a general fear of over-production,
adds greatly to the cost at which goods can profitably
be sold. When production is restricted below the
possible maximum, there is added to the production-
cost of the actual product the overhead of the idle
equipment as well as the cost of the increased effort
to sell on a listless market. Furthermore, wages are
reduced or are kept down to the minimum during
this period, with the result that the purchasing
power of the community is restricted.
All this in spite of the fact that, as the industrial
arts develop, the cost of production, measured in
labor-energy and equipment-time units, constantly
decreases. Unchecked by our misunderstanding of
its nature, the industrial machinery already in exist-
ence would produce more than a sufficiency for every
one. Our present need is not to build new factories,
but to operate intelligently those already in exist-
ence; not to induce the army of industry to work
■ more hours per week, but to release it from the re-
strictions which divert its natural expenditures of
energy to socially useless purposes; not to penalize
the profiteer, but to insist that waste shall not be a
source of profit to anyone.
It is not hard to see that our industrial system is
not functioning for the purpose for which it is in-
tended, and that it is not producing at its full capac-
ity. In this is to be found the explanation of the
appalling predicament in which this country, in com-
mon with other civilized countries, now finds itself.
A complete and impartial investigation of the
actual costs of production in the principal American
industries must be made to determine the extent and
character of the wastes which have crept into the
process by which man must get from the earth those
things upon which life depends. As the Federal
Government will undertake neither a complete nor
an impartial investigation, we are urging that a
survey be made by experts who are scientifically
qualified and are independent of political and finan-
cial interests. _ _
The Editors.
The Economic Crux
A,
.lmost all of the programs for reconstruc-
tion and industrial relations recently issued by
non-labor organizations and individuals contain, in
some form, vigorous -denunciation of restriction of
output by the workers. That section of the pro-
gram recently adopted by referendum vote of the
Chamber of Commerce of the United States which *
deals with this topic may be taken as illustrative
of the non-labor approach to the subject. It states
the matter thus:
Efficient production in conjunction with adequate wages
is essential to successful industry. Arbitrary restriction
on output below reasonable standards is harmful to wage
earners, employers, and the public and should not be
permitted. Industry, efficiency, and initiative, wherever
found, should be encouraged and adequately rewarded,
while indolence and indifference should be condemned.
Such condemnations as this have been evoked by
the labor union regulations limiting the amount of
work or of production per worker and by the un-
official practises among the workers themselves of
deliberate curtailment of effort. The closing sen-
tence of the above quotation implies that such
restrictions are the concomitants of "indolence and
indifference." But such a simple and ready ex-
planation is open to serious questioning and is prob-
ably due to a failure to comprehend the real motives
behind the labor movement.
The major premise upon which restriction of
output is condemned is the proposition that only
increased production can insure any permanent and
general improvement in society. There are, of
course, many who believe that a more equitable
scheme of distribution would contribute more to
the well-being and development of society; but a
consideration of quantities available for distribu-
tion, whether of capital wealth qr of goods, must
lead any reasonable person to concede that increased
production is a prerequisite to such improvement,
whatever else may follow. Enough of the neces-
sary commodities there can never be because of the
growth of consumption, both qualitatively and
quantitatively: an increase, considered absolutely
and relatively to the population, in the production
of most commodities and services appears therefore
to be an indisputable need of a developing and im-
proving civilization.
s Why then should labor organizations practice
restriction of output? Or, setting aside restriction
of output during working hours, why should labor
organizations seek a progressive reduction of hours


1919
181
THE DIAL
of work, having obtained a sixty hour week, seeking
one of fifty-four, then of forty-eight, until now, in
many trades where a forty-four hour week is in
force, one of thirty-six hours is under discussion as
the next demand? To many persons, and par-
ticularly to employers, such a policy appears social
suicide; while they may assent to a decrease from
the demonstrably excessive hours of yesterday, they
can find in these continued demands for a shorter
working week solely a manifestation of "indolence
and indifference."
Yet, behind these demands for a progressive
reduction in hours of work, the literature on the
labor movement discloses a methodical and reasoned
program. In most industries the workers suffer
from the lack of continuous employment; in the
needle trades, for example, periods of intense
activity for a few months alternate with periods of
unemployment and consequent lack of wages. The
same situation is found in almost all competitive
enterprises. From coal and metal mining to food
preparation, in practically every form of produc-
tion, there is an alternation of expansion and con-
traction of production, a taking on and a turning
off of employees accordingly. To modify this sit-
uation, and by prolonging the period of production
to gain a greater continuity of employment, is the
frankly announced purpose of labor's demands for
a shorter and shorter working week. The reason-
ing behind this procedure may be briefly stated: if
the employer, operating on a fifty-four hour
schedule, can in six months produce enough to gain
a profit, then the adoption of a forty-four hour week
will prolong to eight months the period of produc-
tion necessary to gain an equivalent profit. The
corollary of this reads; if the employer can produce
enough in six months to gain a profit from one
hundred employees, then a moderate restriction of
output will force him to employ, say one hundred
and twenty-five, permitting twenty-five additional
workers to gain an income for six months.
It is believed that the foregoing is a fair statement
of the aims of labor as expressed in this advocacy
of shorter hours and restriction of output, apart
from the considerations of health and well-being in-
volved in their opposition to long hours. Thus it
appears that we can find a reasonable explanation
of labor's action, as a reaction against the industrial
processes from which it suffers; and in that explana-
tion we find labor seeking what indolence would
surely reject—continuous work instead of desultory,
unstable employment.
The program of the Chamber of Commerce of
the United States is not unconcerned with this ques-
tion of continuous employment:
Regularity and continuity of employment should be sought
to the fullest extent possible and constitute a responsibil-
ity resting alike upon employers, wage earners, and the
public.
The wage earners maintain that, in their restric-
tions of output and their demand for shorter hours,
their main object is continuous employment for all
workers, and that, lacking other resource, they are
forced to these means of obtaining that end. The
burden of responsibility, accordingly, is shifted to
the employers who, as quoted above, acknowledge
the desirability of continuous employment. In
placing partially on the workers the responsibility
for achieving that end, they should, in fairness,
acknowledge labor's manifest intent.
What then of the employers' position and the
means they adopt to discharge their share of the
responsibility? They will urge that, in accordance
with the fluctuations and the seasonal character of
demand, they are forced to curtail production; thus
they thrust the ultimate responsibility upon the
fickle public. The student of industrial conditions
will not ignore the seasonal influence upon the
demand for commodities nor its effect upon the pro-
duction of the supply. But an analysis that rests
with the statement that production is non-con-
tinuous and consequently desultory is surely no
analysis at all.
The period beginning with the signing of the
armistice gives an excellent field for the study of
curtailment of production. When the armistice
was signed the industries of the country were,
with the exception of those considered non-essen-
tial, at the peak of productivity. During the
war, consumers of practically all commodities were
unable to obtain adequate supplies because of war
requirements and the forced closing down of non-
essential industries. Accumulated stocks of com-
modities were almost entirely consumed during this
period. With the exception of the army and navy
almost all consumers were, at the signing of the
armistice, in need of goods for consumption or for
investment use. But, instead of finding produc-
tion in all lines rapidly increasing after the first
month or so of relaxation from the war strain, we
find that the whole range of industries outside of
those devoted to the production of the so-called
luxuries cut down on production and laid off em-
ployees in large numbers. The demand was ready
to express itself in orders which would tax the in-
dustrial capacity of the country, but the manufac-
turers and producers found the demand not forth-
coming at the prices they asked. These prices, ac-
cording to the producers' statements, were necessary
for the realization of profits at the rate they con-


l82
September 6
THE t>IAL
sidered essential to the proper conduct of their enter-
prises, and, in order to preserve that rate of profit,
they abstained from production, with a resultant loss
of employment to the workers. The reluctance of
the middlemen to place orders was merely a phase
of the price situation and was due to their fear of
being caught in the falling market.
One remarkable accompaniment of this post-
armistice situation, revealing the producer's posi-
tion, was the demand by producers for the "taking
off of the harness of governmental regulation in
order that the operation of the law of supply and de-
mand might be restored." At the same time the pro-
ducers of commodities of which the government
had a surplus demanded that this surplus be with-
held from the market, although the repeal of gov-
ernment control and the operation of the law of
supply and demand should logically have led to the
marketing of the surplus and the adjustment of
prices accordingly.
In refusing to produce unless an impoverished
society was ready to pay the price demanded, and
in persuading the government to refrain from
marketing its surplus stocks of goods at prices the
consumers were willing to pay, the producers of
the country were acting in accordance with ac-
cepted business policy. It is not the purpose of
this discussion to criticise the activities of any group
in society. So long as enterprise is freely encour-
aged and is rewarded by such profits as it may ob-
tain, present conditions are an inevitable result of
socially sanctioned efforts. The task of suggesting
modifications does not belong here, where the
primary object is to interpret and explain.
But, making due allowance for such unavoidable
situations as may be found, the conclusion is in-
escapable that, since the production of goods is
stimulated by the profit incentive and since profits
can be, and are, procured by curtailing the supply
and thereby enhancing the price of that which is
produced, the responsibility for voluntary curtail-
ment of production and for the consequent lack of
continuous employment rests upon the shoulders of
the employers. Even in the clothing trades the
seasonal demand is fostered by the producers and
distributors through changes in styles which make
for increased purchases at profitable prices.
The implications of this complex need exposition,
for here we find an apparently inescapable economic
crux: increased production per person and per unit
of plant is essential to the progressive well-being of
civilization, while the continuance of an economic
system in which unrestricted enterprise is per-
mitted and encouraged to seek profits involves
the curtailment of production whenever profits
■ threatened. At present the workers, who
suffer from this process, are complaining and seek-
ing a change. This question is then presented:
which is to suffer change or sacrifice—the existing
order of profit-making, or the progress of civiliza-
tion and its apparent concomitant, improvement in
the condition of labor. The crux seems unavoid-
able, for the maintenance of a capitalistic industrial
system in which unrestricted enterprise is en-
couraged to seek its own reward in profits makes
for curtailment of production whenever profit-
making is thereby benefitted.
This then is the major economic problem of to-
day: the solution of the conflict between the profit
incentive and the necessity for greater production.
On the one side we see the capitalist producer seek-
ing profits as high as obtainable under competitive
conditions and practising curtailment of production,
"capitalistic satotage," as Professor Veblen terms it,
to enhance the price of goods sufficiently to insure
such profits: on the other side we see labor advocat-
ing shorter hours and practising restriction of out-
put in an effort to force the prolongation of the
period of production and thereby to obtain con-
tinuous employment. Labor is also seeking, per-
haps unconsciously, to increase production by
increasing the sum total of yearly wages through
continuous employment, and consequently the pur-
chasing power which makes for production; for one
of the large factors in the variation of demand is
a loss of purchasing power that forces the wage
earners to lessen their purchases of food, clothing,
and so on, when their employment ceases.
The program of the revolutionary labor move-
ment aims at taking over the industry of the country
in order that the worker may enjoy continuous em-
ployment at "wages" which are not jeopardized
by the profit making technique, while production
will be increased accordingly.
The issue between capital and labor is joined and,
while the interests of both may be the same, as is
constantly reiterated, yet it appears that the further-
ance of those interests will require a readjustment
and modification of the present system of industrial
control.
To one seeking to discover the probable trend of
things it appears not unlikely that this readjustment
and modification may progress somewhat along the
following lines. The recent years have witnessed
a progressive extension of the class of public utilities
to include more and more varied types of enterprises
which the public, through the government, seeks to
control. The public utility is an organization ob-
ligated to render service (or to furnish commodities
such as water, gas, electric power) upon demand,
at rates fixed by the state and not fluctuating accord-
ing to market conditions, and therefore it may not


1919
183
THE DIAL
practice the profit making technique. Government
control is exercised over the "price" of the service
or commodity and over the scope and character of
the operations.
It cannot be doubted that control of business en-
terprises, either directly or through fixing of prices,
will form one of the major factors in politics and
government from now on. In economic discussions
public control assumes a larger part each year, and
the " price system," with values fixed or determined
by market forces, cannot long escape a critical
analysis which may prove destructive of much that
passes for economic theory. The "free play of
economic forces" and "the law of supply and de-
mand " upon close inspection appear to be the result-
ants of many individual efforts to control com-
modities and their prices, in order to obtain profits;
there are apparently few "economic" forces sus-
ceptible of differentiation from natural forces, apart
from these human efforts at control; the efforts of
many individuals seeking control give the appearance
of a force; and the concept of "enterprise," which
seems to arise and function spontaneously, gives the
appearance of freedom, all of which obscures the
essential fact that the effort of enterprise means
attempted control, partial or complete.
If economic "forces" are the aggregate of like
efforts at control, and are in effect control, then
necessarily the issue becomes one, not of economic
freedom versus economic control, but of choosing
which control society finds desirable or advan-
tageous—individual or social.
Society has found it desirable and advantageous
to restrict enterprise seeking to operate in the public
utility field; in many states a certificate of necessity
and convenience is required before a public utility
may be started. Should the investigation of the
possibilities of price fixing disclose that unrestricted
enterprise makes for higher prices and social costs
out of proportion to the gains involved, it is reason-
able to assume that enterprise in productive lines
will be controlled likewise. The fixing of prices
generally will necessitate the restriction of enterprise
to protect the existing producers working under
those prices, as in the case of public utilities; and,
as during the war, priority ratings will be required
to discriminate between would-be purchasers who
can no longer express their needs by bidding higher
than others. The experience of the government
price-fixers during the war suggests ideas about the
possible treatment of the inefficient or "marginal"
producers, those fosterlings of unrestricted enter-
prise, which are enlightening for the future.
Undoubtedly the price system and free enterprise
are to be subjected to much drubbing at the hands of
politics and economics, while the efforts of labor to
obtain self government in industry must bring about
a modification of industrial organizations and
processes. Whether the capitalistic system can sur-
vive the demise of the price system and free enter-
prise is an interesting speculation, but not relevant
here. As enterprise is restricted and prices merge
into rates, the form of industrial organization and
its operation will tend toward the public utility
order of regulated, fixed-return, non-competitive in-
stitutions, with the employees largely in control.
Curiously enough a modification of the profit
making technique may be effected through the ac-
counting procedure. Some of the engineers who
have been studying the problems of production and
costs have made perhaps the most suggestive and
far reaching contribution to this economic complex,
in stating that, if the entrepreneur chooses to keep
his plant idle because the market price for his
product is not profitable, then the cost of that ab-
stention from production (the accruing interest,
depreciation, maintenance, and the like during the
period of idleness) is net a part of the cost of pro-
duction for the consumer to pay in the purchase
price of the commodity, but rather is it a cost to be
deducted from the profits of the enterprise for the
sake of which it is incurred. In other words, the
overhead expenses of the idle plant are to be taken
out of the profits and not passed on to the consumer,
as though they were part of the production costs;
thereby the abstention from production is to be
penalized. When the full implication of this doc-
trine put forth by reputable engineers is understood
by economists and business men, the results will be
worth observing. The line-up of the engineers with
labor in seeking fuller utilization of the productive
capacities of society emphasizes the conflict of ideals
and aims which the reconstruction programs of the
employers and the demands of labor involve. The
intransigent attitude of many employers will prob-
ably intensify the conflict but can scarcely prevent
their ultimate defeat. The reported activity of the
bankers promises a new development, in that they
are said to be refusing financial aid to any producer
who is uncompromising toward labor; apparently
they prefer to concede a ^portion of capital's profits
and control, rather than, by forcing labor to greater
unity and stronger opposition, to further the revolu-
tionary labor movement. In view of the growth of
labor consciousness and unity, the historical record
of such conflicts in the past, and the position of labor
on the side of social progress, the outcome is almost
mathematically predictable.
Lawrence K. Fr/


184
September 6
THE DIAJ.
The World's Challenge to the Church
JTerhaps the casual observer of things sat
up, in a mild surprise when the first of the church
programs for industrial regeneration was published.
Then, as one denomination after another followed
this plunge Jnto unfathomed depths, his surprise
must have deepened—or perhaps it changed into
humor or cynicism. But there were a few who,
though long despairing of ever finding any vitality
in organized religion, still hoped for a dying hope,
and took courage from this promise of returning
life.
How deep ran the currents of belief and inten-
tion in these various programs could not be told.
In none of them was a promise of definite action
made, and there were strange ambiguities in all. It
remains to be seen whether the several church
organizations which, during the past months, have
raised hundreds of millions to evangelize the world,
to carry the " Message " to every people, and which
have announced that a reweaving of the industrial
fabric must be considered an integral part of any
evangelical program—it remains to be seen whether
these* organizations will look the situation straight
in the face. Have they really the necessary insight
and courage, combined with adequate leadership?
And will they use their funds and their frequently
remarkable equipment to attack the problem
scientifically?
Such an attitude will mean a definite break with
hallowed traditions. Still, the Church must have
realized by this time that the argument from Char-
ity and Brotherhood, advanced for nearly nineteen
hundred years, has proven ineffectual. The old
methods of exhortation and pleading cannot be
revamped, or merely given a new force. Simply
to strengthen the voice under the pressure of a raw
necessity, or to pitch it in a higher key, will stim-
ulate no fresh reaction.
But fortunately for the various churches and
those Christian organizations that desire to lend
their strength toward the rehabilitation of society,
there is another way of effecting a change in the
basis of social action and responsibility: they can
seek out the underlying facts of a system through
which society creates wealth for the few and pov-
erty for the many. If the Church were to secure
these facts and place them, with all their implica-
tions, before a puzzled world, the materials for a
new social structure would be at hand, .and would
be put together perhaps with the voluntary coop-
eration of those who now are the worst malingerers.
It is peculiarly significant—and fortunate, too—
that now, for the first time in history, the facts
upon which a new understanding of society might
be based are at hand. The events of the past few
years have forced into the public records a nearly
complete account of how and by jvhat means the
rich are made richer and the poor made poorer,
and of why and how the tremendous productivity
of modern machinery has not greatly improved the
lot of the common man.
And it is fortunate for the church organizations,
also, that the same stretch of time has discovered
men who are capable of handling these facts and
illustrating their significance. The economists and
engineers who compose this group have pushed their
researches further than mere tabulation, and have
been forced to the conclusion that it is the waste-
fulness of the commercial system, the ruthlessness
inseparable from business competition, that makes
real charity and brotherhood tantamount to busi-
ness and commercial suicide.
Science has played right into the hands of the
Church, but—will the Church seek out these scien-
tists and secure their help? Will the Church listen
to their accounts beyond the point where it is appar-
ent that the facts of industrial malversation will
cut like a knife through the straw house of our
society, so solid in appearance?
Time only can answer this question, and the
decision is, after all, in the hands, not of the Church
as an institution, but of individuals who are not
more than human. But these individuals who are
not more than human are the very ones who
announced the various industrial programs—not, it
is probable, for lack of something better to do, but
because the working time before chaos seemed to
be measurable in months rather than in years.
Let these churchmen look about them and
observe the character of the system that has bred
the unrest which is so greatly feared. They will
see some tens of thousands of industrial enterprises
within the bounds of the United States, and per-
haps as many hundreds of thousands of business
enterprises in the same area. They will see that
every one of these, with negligible exceptions, is
working at cross purposes with every other one.
And besides, every one of them is working in the
dark. It is part of the necessity of competition
that aims and plans be kept secret, and that cost be
counted only as a subtraction from the final (per-
sonal) gain. If a certain bit of strategy be deter-
mined upon in camera because it promises profits to
its inventor, its cost even to the inventor must not


1919
i*5
THE DIAL
be taken too seriously. Just as in the Great War
the decision of the German General Staff to employ
poison gas took very little if any account of the
equipment and labor-cost of preparation, or the
effect upon the morals of the home population.
Even the unescapable fact that England and France
could play at the same game was discounted in
view of the advantages of being the first in the field.
Then came tanks and tank-guns, and raids and
counter-raids by sea and air. Just as in today's
markets there are advertisements and counter adver-
tisements, sales campaigns and expensively attractive
packages, rebates and cross freights, credit restric-
tions and "bull" raids, publicity by packers and
the long run of devices intended to benefit or pro-
tect the interests of particular business men—all
of which cost the consumer somewhat more than
their full price while bringing him spmething less
than nothing. Business is very much like war, and
with not all the blood left out, at that.
In the recent war-to-end-war there were some on
both sides, in all probability, who made money, who
gained honor and glory. Perhaps there were some
who were morally strengthened, for conflict of any
sort brings out sleeping qualities of the human
character, it quickens into life attributes which are
admirable, it works to deprive the individual of
that insularity which breeds selfishness. Similarly,
the struggle of the market may produce some ben-
efits which might not appear were a purely coopera-
tive society to take the place of the recognized order.
But before voting to retain perpetual war and an
absolutely competitive market, we might set about
determining whether there has accrued through them
any net gain, in goods or godliness, which might be
set down as having benefited the common run of
men.
Perhaps after all, then, the dilemma that dis-
turbs the church organizations is: by what means
are we to retain the salutary struggle of industry,
but still do away with the devastation of the pres-
ent method of production and distribution? How
are we to retain competition, but place it on a higher
plane?
Fortunately there is a middle course, a course
peculiarly in keeping with the teachings and tradi-
tions of the Christian Church. The devotion and
sacrifices of its own missionaries have ample demon-
strated that the desire to give, not to get—the
Christian motive, in short—calls forth easily the
finest type of mind and spirit to fight and compete,
always for the opportunity to serve.
If the Church will take this lead, if it will act
on its own teachings, it will be on bed-rock. Not
even the most reactionary of its members would
dare openly to assail it for preaching that to serve
one's fellow men is the highest good; and that the
kingdom of heaven on earth will not come until all
effort, including that required in business and indus-
try, is turned to the service of society. The Church
may momentarily lose several million dollars
through the quiet defection of the reactionaries, but
the millions of new believers in a revitalized church
will be over-compensation.
And if the Church does decide to stand by its
own teachings, what then? How is it to make
clear to every one the idiocy of a system which dis-
torts life and makes a scrap of paper of the Gospels?
Can it be done by preachments? Can it be done
simply by making more evident thai which is
already evident, and has been evident for ages?
It does not seem possible. Preaching so far has
been imperceptibly effective. And the libraries are
full of statistics showing that so many millions of
men support families on $700 a year, when decency
cannot be reached with less than three times that
sum. There are tabulations without number which
tell of the injury and death of men who work in
the mines and about machinery, and whose lives
are a mixture of want and bitterness. There are
books without end devoted to the human necessity
of the dignity of labor, yet most of our manufac-
turers fight even "company unions" for fear that
labor might acquire a standing which would make
its voice heard in the community. There are many
organizations, furthermore, devoted to making a
hard life easier, but not one whose purpose it is to
make a hard life impossible. Is the Church to
carry on in industry as if we had never drained
swamps to prevent malaria, or built sewers, or puri-
fied our water supplies?
The Church must know, or it can find out, that
modern society has sources of knowledge and equip-
ment which would make it ridiculously easy to
supply every one with far more than the bare neces-
sities of a decent life. There is no difficulty in
demonstrating that a unit of human effort and skill
can produce today at least a hundred times as much
as was possible a hundred years ago. Still one
would not be far from the truth in maintaining that
the average man is not even ten times better off,
nor is he appreciably happier, than he was a cen-
tury ago. If the men at the head of the various
church movements do not know this, they might
find it out. There are men in their own churches
who do know.
Now since all this is fact, tested fact, it would
seem to furnish a sufficient cause for action. A
realization of at least part of it lies deep in the
minds of many others besides those churchmen who


i86
September 6
THE DIAL
so sincerely desire a radical change in the basis of
social action and responsibility. But its truth alone
will not make it adequate as ammunition in the
actual fight which the Church may have to wage.
The admittedly enormous productivity of the
machine industries is no more vital or active a fact
than the equal truth that men are underpaid, are
needlessly injured at their machines, and are denied
the dignity of their position as producers.
What the Church should have as ammunition is
the facts of why and how such a state of apparently
reckless disorganization exists. It must go deeper
than effects. It must seek out causes. The symp-
toms have been known for ages. What the Church
organizations need is an industrial pathologist, or
a doctor of social medicine. This is no job for
amateurs, nor for mere humanitarians. A desire
to revitalize the Church and a deep sympathy for
the downtrodden perhaps has furnished the stimulus
to action, and from the ranks of the desirous and
sympathetic may be drawn some whose powers as
orators and advocates will be in good place when
the facts have been collected and put in form. But
to entrust the work of research to men and women
in whom sensitiveness to conditions is more pro-
nounced than scientific attitude and training, is like
entrusting a surgical operation to the hands of the
merely sympathetic amateur.
After all, at this particular moment it is ignor-
ance rather than selfishness with which the Church
will have to contend. Those who benefit from
the present order, like those who most deeply
mourn the untoward results of things as they work
out, are not aware of the reason why there is not
enough for all. Those who mourn think in terms
of a greater softness on the part of those who bene-
fit and those who benefit fear lest a greater softness
will mean disaster for society as well as suffering
for their own.
Certainly the force with which the Church must
contend is, in the greater part, ignorance rather
than selfishness. If it were selfishness, if men were
basically selfish, at bottom untouched by the suffer-
ing of others, there would be less, decidedly less,
chance for success. But if, as seems most likely,
the reason for the state in which civilization finds
itself springs from the common ignorance as to
why the machine industries are so ineffectual a
weapon against a nearly implacable nature, all that
is needed is a better common understanding.
The imagination of the community would be
stirred by a plain demonstration of the potential
productivity of the machine industries, coupled with
an explanation of why human effort and skill show
such meager results in comfort and happiness for
the masses. As a nation we will disallow this stupid-
fight between business men, for we will see that it
is carried on at our expense, and that even the
victors in this guerilla warfare do not really benefit
in the end. The essential brutality of it all will
force us, in revolt, to seek another basis of life. Its
sheer senselessness would affect even the most hard-
ened believer in the state of things as they are.
The world, through a billion mouths, has issued
its challenge to the forces of civilization. The Chris-
tian Church has heard, and has accepted the chal-
lenge. A noble gesture, that of the churches and
their organizations. It meant a nearly complete
break with the past.
But will the churches see clearly the nature of
the fight? Will its leaders interpret the teaching*
of Christ in terms of this day—setting aside special
pleading in favor of scientific exposition? Will it
search out the facts and study them, or will it call
numberless conferences on the state of society and
then decide, on the basis of the weightiest advocacy,
to lend its support to this or that opinion and belief?
Will it prove its
Doctrine orthodox
By apostolic blows and knocks?
The churches alone can do this work. On the
success with which it is carried out will depend the
fate of our western civilization, the fate of Chris-
tendom—indeed, the permanence or extinction of
the Christian Church as an institution. For if we
are to believe the evidence of history, revolutions
of the conventionally bitter sort are scant respecters
of those institutions which held strength under
previous dispensations.
Mont Schuyler.
Youth's Ending
Only when youth flings his last kiss at us—
A mist-bud that dies upon our lips—
Only then do we plant the remembrance of his kiss
In our hearts, and sit before it a moment.
We play on a mist-mandolin that fades away:
We play to persuade the frail dwarf of our hearts
That he covers the sky, in a stride.
Maxwell Bodenheim.


1919
187
THE DIAL
Can Real Wages Be Raised?
It was one of the postulates of classic economists
that the masses of the people were doomed forever
to an income so small that they must always be
on the verge of starvation; and that if any increase
in their real income should perchance come to their
lot, it would immediately be taken up by an increase
in the population. In this way, they arrived at the
iron law of wages, which stated that wages must
always be just enough for a bare existence. Mod-
ern thought, especially among industrial workers,
proceeds on an entirely different assumption. It
views income as indefinitely expansible, and already
capable of supporting the great bulk of the popu-
lation in a degree of comfort undreamed of by
former generations. Apart from labor's demand for
a voice in the management of industry, it demands
an increased share in the fruits of production with
a view to obtaining for everyone at least an approxi-
mation of the comfort hitherto attained only by the
few. As one labor leader put it, when he was
asked by his employer what he was really after:
"What w-e want is to live more the way you do."
Putting aside entirely any question of innate jus-
tice involved in this new attitude, how far is it
capable of realization? Is the actual income of the
country sufficiently large to meet the demand for real
comfort on the part of practically all of its citizens?
Or must the great bulk of our citizens continue to
struggle along on the verge of starvation, owing to
an actual deficiency of the goods necessary to supply
any higher level of existence?
We have heard much of the increased produc-
tivity of industry, but until the war forced us to
make inventories of our strength and resources, we
have never viewed our problems in their national'
aspect. It has been one of the corollaries of our in-
dividualistic philosophy that our central thought has
turned on keeping open the door for private initia-
tive and personal attainment without delving too
deeply into the trend of national affairs. Our as-
sumption that each individual, if given a free
chance, would attain an economic status compatible
with his ability, had a broad foundation in fact and
experience during the days of free land on the
frontiers. But the change in our economic and so-
cial point of view whifh has slowly been growing
into our lives during the past twenty-five years has
been tremendously accentuated by the solidarity
brought about through the war. The basis of esti-
mates has become national; inventories of our man-
hood, our power to bear taxation, and our produc-
tive capacity, became necessary. From a vague con-
ception of our country as boundless in expanse and
wealth, we have become acutely conscious of our
limits. In many fields, we have fairly accurate
knowledge of these limits, and have tested our
power to increase them; in other fields we are still
groping. What are our limits in supplying comfort
to our citizens?
It is a misfortune that wealth and income are
susceptible to measurement only in terms of money;
for in this way, a false identity between them is
apt to becloud our understanding of the problems
involved. Moreover, money itself is not a final
measure, for with changes in prices, the yardstick
itself shrinks or grows. In recent years, we have
become accustomed to a progressive shrinkage.
This defect may in large measure be offset by use
of the index number of prices of the Bureau of
Labor Statistics, and checked up by similar compu-
tations. The national income, in addition, varies
on the whole as individual incomes vary; it is large
in periods of great industrial activity, and small
when, production is curtailed. The study of any
one year in consequence, especially if that be a year
of war, must be applied with great caution as a
guide for the future.
It is often said that a rise in wages is inevitably
taken up by a corresponding increase in prices, and
that all agitations for higher wages are hence use-
less. There is just enough truth in this assertion
to make it appear plausible, and yet the theory that
one offsets the other is not susceptible of deep prob-
ing. Changes in wages and prices are particular
changes, and while they affect and condition such
generalities as rates of wages and price levels, they
do not maintain a constant relationship. What a
rise in wages really implies, is an increase of eco-
nomic goods to the wage earners; and if these
goods exist in sufficiently large quantities to meet
an increased demand, a rise in prices will not result.
Given the existence of goods, it is possible that real
wages may increase.
The basis of all income studies is the estimate
rnade by Professor King of $30,500,000,000 in
1910. This figure has undergone keen scrutiny by
many critics, and may on the whole be accepted as
accurate. By applying a correction based on the
price level and the physical production, to this
amount, Dr. Anderson arrived at the amounts for
the national income in succeeding years:
1910 .
. .$30,500,000,000
1915 .
.. 3 5,400,000,000
1911 .
.. 29,600,000,000
1916 .
.. 49,200,000,000
1912 .
.. 33,800,000,000
1917 .
. . 68,600,000,000
1913 .
. . 34,500,000,000
1918 ..
. 73,400,000,000
1914 .
.. 32,600,000,000


i88
September 6
THE DIAL
The last figure is less convincing than the others,
since the basis, railway gross earnings, ceased to be a
correct standard, and thus rendered comparisons
difficult. That the facts are in the main cor-
rect, is confirmed by the estimate made by the
Bankers Trust Company for 1916 of $50,000,000,-
000 and that made by Dr. David Friday for 1917
of $65,500,000,000. If we accept the gross earn-
ings of railroads as a just measurement for the
physical production, and reduce the income of each
year to the 1918 price level and the 1918 popula-
tion, the average income for a period of eight years
is $72,250,000,000. This figure is therefore a
normal one with the exception of the price level
element, and may be used so long as all other figures
are based on the same level of prices.
Average
Railroad Estimated income
gross earnings Estimate income at 1910
using 1910 ot at 1910 price
Year. as basis. population, price level. level.
1910 100 92.3 30.5 $330.4
1911 99 93.9 30.2 321.6
1912 106.9 95.5 32.6 341.4
1913 112.5 97.1 34.2 352.2
1914 104.5 98.7 31.9 323.3
1915 110 100.4 33.6 334.6
1916 129 102.0 39.3 385.3
1917 137.2 103.6 41.8 403.4
Average at 1910 price level 349.0
The average income per person, $349, is equiva-
lent to $685, at the 1918 price level, or $72,250,-
000,000 for the total population of 105,500,000.
It compares so closely with Dr. Anderson's
figure for that year, and Dr. Friday's esti-
mate of above 70 billions, that it may be accepted
as the basis for further examination.
How is this sum divided? And by how much
does it exceed the minimum of existence and the
minimum of comfort? It is the surplus above these
amounts which is the bone of contention in any
discussion of the distribution of wealth, and which
labor has in mind when it, demands an increase in
wages, and a more equitable distribution of wealth.
It may be arrived at in either of two ways: first,
by estimating the minimum of existence, and sub-
tracting it from the total income of 72 billion dol-
lars; and second, by adding together the known sur-
pluses, and comparing the results.
The number of heads of families may be esti-
mated at 23,066,000. The investigations of the
United States Bureau of Labor Statistics and Dr.
Ogburn of the War Labor Board indicated that in
the summer of 1918 the minimum cost of existence
for a family of five was about $1380 per year; re-
ducing this to the basis of 4^2, $1250 probably
represents the minimum; and $29,000,000,000 may
therefore be taken as the smallest amount on which
the present population of the United States can
survive. At the same time, $1760 was found as the
minimum of comfort for life in a large eastern city.
Taking this figure for what it is worth, the na-
tional minimum on this basis would be about $40,-'
500,000,000. If these sums be substracted from
the estimated national income of 70 billions, then
there is a surplus of income roughly equal to
that necessary for existence. And even if the stand-
ard of minimum comfort were attained by every
one, there would still be a large surplus left,
amounting to some 30 billions.
The most recent complete figures we have for
incomes are those for 1916. In that year, the in-
comes which were reported above $3000 amounted
to $6,298,000,000; and corporate incomes amounted
to $8,766 millions. Subtracting the duplications
of $2136 millions leaves a total income of $12,828
million, to which should, be added a round $5
billion to represent the $2000-$3000 class, of
whom there were 2,400,000 in 1917 ,and which
were not reported in 1916. We had then in 1916 a
surplus income of about 18 billions about which
enough is known to make an estimate. Un-
doubtedly, it should be somewhat larger than this,
since all incomes are not reported, but the amount
is pure guesswork.
Expenses for government for 1916 were as follows:
Federal $1,048 million
State 505
City 1,043
County (estimated) 480
Total $3,076 million
On account of the enormously increased expenses
of the Federal Government, as well as the normal
increases of the local governments, we can look for
this item to be between 6 and 7 billions in the
future.
Putting together such data as we have, the normal
distribution of income at the 1918 price level, may
be surmised"to be something like the following:
Billion
dollars.
16 million families receiving the minimum of
subsistence 21
4 million families receiving between minimum
and $2,000 7
V/i million families receiving between $2,000
and $3,000 .. i
660,000 families receiving over $3,000 20
Government expenses 6
Unaccounted for 10
Total 70
During the war, savings were diverted to the
payment for Liberty bonds and other known items,
so that it is possible to check up these estimates.
War expenses amounted to $15,500,000,000; gov-
ernment loans to our allies to another $8,500,000,-
000, and in addition there was an annual trade bal-


igig
189
THE DIAL
ance of some 3 billions, making a total of about 16
billions per year. In addition, there were issued in-
dustrial and railroad securities amounting to nearly
$1,500,000,000 per year, state and local bonds of
about another half a billion, and agricultural sav-
ings which may be estimated at about three to four
billions. Since a large part of the latter was taken
up in Liberty loans, this should probably be re-
duced to 2 billions. The total known savings were
therefore in the neighborhood of 20 billions; and
enough is known of other items to make one sure
that this figure is a conservative one. In corrobora-
tion of this, it is interesting to note that Dr. Friday
estimates the surplus for 1918 at 22 billions.
We conclude, therefore, that the normal national
income at present is sufficiently large to permit of
a surplus above the lowest level of existence of at
least twenty billions; and we venture the guess
that it is somewhere between 25 and 30 billions.
That is to say, the surplus is between one-third and
one-half of the total income.
What guidance can be drawn from these facts
in regard to our future policy? Clearly the doc-
trine of subsistence wages cannot hold under any
such large surplus; nor can its modern counterpart
that any increase in wages must necessarily result in
a rise in prices which will leave the status quo where
it was before. Whatever fault there may be with
the economic order of today, it is not in the produc-
tion end, for the annual income is immense beyond
a former generation's wildest dreams. Improve-
ments can undoubtedly be made. The fact that our
production was maintained during 1917 and 1918,
with from two to four million men in the army sug-
gests that the unutilized forces of previous years
were considerable. The unemployment of our
workers or capital serves equally to reduce the na-
tional income when measured in terms of goods.
Competitive wastes in the coal mining, lumber, and
oil industries have been officially reported. A re-
duction of twenty per cent, of our manufacturing
output would go far towards wiping out the sur-
plus available for distribution. On the other hand,
a similar increase would greatly enlarge the sum.
Aside from an extension of public ownership and
cooperative production and distribution, the most
hopeful element in the maintenance of production
is the safeguarding of the spirit of enterprise upon
which the present economic order is founded. As
long as business men work for profit, they must
have reasonable assurance of such profits. Fear of
loss is as powerful a deterrent to production as the
hope of gain is a stimulant. An increased knowl-
edge of the facts, such as has been supplied by the
War Trade Board, is an essential factor in the
situation, and will do much to keep production at
the maximum. In certain industries, cooperation
is a safeguard against loss, and there are instances
in which combination under government control
serves to stimulate production.
But while profits are essential to maintain and
increase production, they fail of their purpose when
they are earned without accomplishing this result;
and they likewise fail when the profits are measur-
ably out of proportion to the social benefit gained.
It is the widespread feeling that such is the case at
present which is the basis of the outcry against
profiteering. A decade ago it had its counterpart
in the blind hatred for the trusts. That there is
a reality at the bottom of this sentiment is but too
clearly proven in the records of the Federal Trade
Commission; and at times it appears to nullify all
the benefits of the profit system, and lead those who
hope for improvement in despair into the ranks of
socialism. But despite the undoubted attractions
of their program, it must require an undaunted
courage to have the temerity to hope for an increased
production over that of which capitalism has given
proof. Only the most overwhelming proof could
justify a far-reaching change in our methods of pro-
duction in the face of the tremendous wealth which
capitalism annually brings forth.
It is in the distribution of income that the capi-
talistic regime has most signally failed. That a
country with so large a surplus should still leave
the vast majority of laborers on the verge of star-
vation must appear uncalled for, particularly in
view of the fact that during the war, with all its'
accompanying wastage, labor, on the whole was as
highly paid as at any previous time. The proposi-
tion that real wages must be reduced just at the mo-
ment when this wastage is ended must cause one to
pause and consider. It is said that future produc-
tion depends on the reinvestment of present savings,
and that the expenses of the war were paid by sacri-
ficing these savings. In the main, this is borne out
by the facts. Dr. Friday has shown that the issue
of new industrial securities, state and municipal
bonds, and corporate surplus all fell to about one-
half of their normal level. But the crux of the
matter is reached when it is asked to whom the
future production brought about by the investment
of savings would accrue. If it is still to leave-the
surplus in the hands of the 665,000 income tax
payers, while the twenty million remain in the
same hand-to-mouth condition, then the savings are
scarcely worth while. On the other hand, if a part
of the surplus were diverted to the 20 million
it would greatly increase their capacity to save. To
be concrete, one-half of the smallest estimate of our
surplus is $10,000,000,000, or an average of $500
for every family in the country; that is, su


9°
September 6
THE DIAL
raise them to the minimum of comfort. In all prob-
ability, this would not all go to increasing the con-
sumption, although what part of it would be in-
vested there is no way of estimating. Even a
smaller sum would lift all families above the sub-
sistence level. There is a wide leeway for experi-
mentation without removing the stimulus for profit
from the more enterprising and capable, who may
be represented by the 665,000 taxpayers.
How can such a redistribution take place with-
out affecting the volume of production? That is
the real question to be solved, if the advantages of
the present social order are to be stabilized and
maintained against the possibility of revolution.
The ways in which not to do it are clearer than
the positive methods. It cannot be done through
the reduction of output which may result from low-
ering the speed of work; it cannot be done by
means of sabotage or a general strike; and it caiv
not be done by capitalistic or other combinations
which reduce the output in order to raise prices.
The first step to ensure the distribution of the sur-
plus is the continued creation of the surplus—and
this' means physical product.
Many intelligent suggestions are before the
public, and experiment is the order of the day. It
will probably be accomplished by pressure from
numerous sources—an increase of taxes on wealth
and inheritance, profit sharing, minimum wages,
shop committees, and unions. The object of this
analysis is to point out that the hope of a contented
social order has a solid basis of fact behind it, and
that the attempt to bring about the reality is cap-
able of success. „. ,_. _,
Oswald vV. Kvauth.
The Literary Drug Traffic
YVhy read stories? Why write them? Im-
portant they seem to be. A glance at the formidable
pages of advertising through which they straggle
might suggest that upon the short story hangs the
commercial welfare of the United States. The
reader starts the story—why he starts at all is a ques-
tion with interesting answers—and follows his
heroine for perhaps three pages with no obstacles
except an illustration to be detoured; as he nears
the point where the heroine first suspects the man
in the frock coat of being a Bolshevist in disguise,
cabalistic numbers send him plunging through the
magazine to find the story a thin trickle in a deep
canyon of advertising. Frequently the canyon is
so deep that the eye holds to the story with diffi-
culty; the scenery is more spectacular. Well, why
not? Business is important, and business pays more
for the advertisement than the editor pays for the
story. If the story itself were held of more import-
ance, no doubt some scheme of juxtaposition would
be evolved to make use of the reader's mood. A
story of a woman stranded on poverty by the death
of her husband might well wind between insurance
advertisements. The possibilities are infinite. This
however is a situation rather than an explanation.
Aside from this importance reflected upon short
stories by their commercial utility, a certain vica-
rious necessity shines upon them from the books
made out of them and about them. For at least
a quarter of a century there have been volumes on
how to write short stories. Recently another type
of volume has appeared, a sort of sport, bred from
those manuals and from magazine stories them-
selves, useful to run bv the side of the manuals.
Today's Short Stories Analyzed, by Robert Wilson
Neal (Oxford University Press), is a collection
of stories, non-critical except the implied criticism
in selection, with elaborate and conscientious
analysis of the technique of each story. Mr. Neal
prefaces the volume with this statement: "the
contes of today are, therefore they deserve appre-
ciation." Such a basis of judgment is pragmatic
rather than revealing. The Best Short Stories of
1918, Edward J. O'Brien's hardy annual (Small
Maynard), is definitely critical in its selection and
is free from the elaboration of technical signposts
put out in the first volume. Mr. O'Brien in his
preface announces that he has set himself " the task
of disengaging the essential human qualities in our
contemporary fiction which when chronicled con-
scientiously by our literary artists may be called
criticism of life." He says too that the poetry of
life seems to him of more spiritual value than its
prose. His volume, perhaps illustrating that prefer-
ence of his, should be called The Best Stories of
1918 As Seen Through Mr. O'Brien's Tempera-
ment.
I come back to the two questions: why write
stories? why read them? The answers to the sec-
ond query must signify more than any answer to
the first. They should perhaps include the answer
to the first. For unless story writing is a form of
self-indulgence and nothing more, the audience in
its reasons for reading short stories is a force crea-
ting those stories.
On the surface the answers are simple. I read
to be amused, to be entertained, to forget myself,
to while away an hour. What then is amusing,


1919
191
THE DIAL
self-obliterating? You might well wonder, if you
should select a half dozen magazines of wide cir-
culation, what in the selves of the millions of read-
ers submitted to temporary annihilation of the sort
provided. What poverty of existence permitted it-
self for an hour to be covered by such flimsy rags!
Is it in part the old story of the scullery maid flee-
ing from the greasy pots of her life into rose-hung
arbors where Lady Geraldine waits for her lord?
The reading public of America has largely escaped
the scullery stage in practical affairs of life at least.
At the risk of seeming to take with too great
seriousness the business of magazine fiction, I should
like to search for an answer to the query, Why
read stories? in certain considerations of the way
of life among ordinary folks. There are two great
•ends of life^—pleasure and reality. We start after
the first the minute we are born. We are forced
into some pursuit of the second soon after that
event. We find early enough that we have an easy
escape from a world where effort is necessary into
a soft land of phantasy. Are we dull in school?
What simpler than to prop up a geography and be-
hind it drift into a world where schools are for-
gotten and we are jolly pirates? Do our parents
misunderstand us? Easy enough to conquer them
in a death bed scene, where they gather, contrite
and grief shaken, around us. Are we clumsy or
homely? A day dream will invest us with the
graces of the ancient gods. All this with no effort,
with none of the bruising which would come from
an attempt to reach a hundredth of the same satis-
faction in everyday affairs. But when we climb
into maturity, when we have love affairs with real
people, when we have our living to make, we have
to shut ourselves sternly out of this pleasant land
of phantasying. If we don't, we find ourselves
finally tucked away in an asylum.
The average human being does come out of his
day dreams to make love, to tackle his job, to throw
himself against people, material things, conditions
in such a way that he effects changes which arc
pleasant to him. He finds that when he affects
reality as he wishes, he has after all the highest
kind of pleasure. The trouble is however that all
this is work—that he doesn't always succeed in his
attempts. He turns then to art in some form as a
substitute for his childhood's day dreaming. He
might take to drink for the same reason. He de-
sires enhancement of his own rather dull life. He
wishes his near horizons extended. He may wish
to meet interesting people, to travel to far places,
to encounter emotions outside the gamut of his own
experiences. The artist, as an individual highly
sensitized to values of life and capable of giving
form to these values, performs this function of
vicarious day dreaming. He is answering the de-
mand of the pleasure principle in man.
But if he is an artist, what he creates, while it
serves man's pleasure, has at the same time a bond-
age to reality. It interprets, vivifies, enhances, pro-
ducing in the man who sought it for his pleasure an
ability to make his pleasure find its roots in the
actual ends of life; removing him from lotus strewn
shores of infantile islands into the greater beauty
of finely developed maturity.
The "happy ending" is a demand so common
that it needs few words. Is it not again a quality
of day dreams that they must turn out well? Who
would wish for a vicarious day dream which failed
to follow this obvious design? For the happy end-
ing must be obvious; the hero does make enough
money to win the heroine; the heroine who has
fallen under suspicion—perhaps she was actually
caught opening a safe—is proven innocent of all
except the highest motives. We wish life to work
that way. It doesn't. We recede into the easy re-
gion of dreams where, as in the good old fairy tales,
things all come out as they should.
Is there any objection to raise against this sit-
uation, any objection, that is, which has a basis other
than a puritanic insistence upon reality? It may
be unfair or ridiculous to line up short stories un-
der any flag of art. The editors do demand a de-
gree of technical excellence; these day dreams must
have intricacy beyond the power of the lay imagina-
tion. Perhaps out of the neatly made plots comes
to the reader the sense of well-rounded, finished
life, a sense existence itself can rarely furnish. On
the whole, the implications seem to be that the world
is so unhappy a place that it becomes endurable
only through escape. Stories are then a means of
heartening humanity, and are thus to be praised in
degree as they provide the day dreams we can not
compass for ourselves. They are a mild hashish,
a literary dope with no evil results.
Note that you must admit two things: first, that
the world is unendurable, and second, that you can
find pleasure only in representations of it as you
thought it should be before you found out how it
was. Further, you assume that day dreams are not
habit forming drugs.
They might not be, if it were not for the tend-
ency they feed. Here is a tremendous force how-
ever, working constantly to ease life, not by adjust-
ment and competent handling, not by understand-
ing and mastery, but by slipping away, by retreat-
ing into soft, dark, warm places, by adolescent
make-believe. Indulgence in the whims of this
force carries one constantly backward, never for-
ward. And in the long run, unless one submits
entirely to this force and becomes the onl'~ -


192
September 6
THE DIAL
ful day dreamer, say of the dementia praecox type,
one grows constantly more wretched through the
contrast between an unmastered existence and this
rosy dream world.
Stories in themselves may not aggravate this
tendency to such a degree as to force us to consider
them with profound seriousness. Still, people read
them; look at the circulatipn figures of the success-
ful magazines. If these stories should partake of
the "quality of art, they would share its result. For
nowhere else perhaps, can there be so powerful a
combination of man's desire for pleasure and his
need for comprehension and reality. In fiction you
have the actual stuff of life, human beings, their
motives, their feelings, their struggles.
The editors do recognize this desire for dreams
fulfilled; they label it the great American weak-
ness, sentimentalism. As managers of periodicals
which must please readers in order to pay the edi-
tors' salaries, and in order to furnish advertisers
with a public, they may cater to that weakness as
willingly as an illicit vender of "coke" caters to
another weakness with the same source. Public
opinion has been trained to hold the business of
the drug vender dangerous. The business of run-
ning a magazine is still highly respectable; and the
editors, because their aim is frankly commercial and
their existence depends upon financial success,
escape behind this barrier of necessity. They " give
the people what they want." They aren't them-
selves guilty of writing the stories; they only sift
out from the manuscripts which pour into their
offices whatever seems their grist. Where then
does the responsibility rest? Are the writers of the
stories responsible?
That brings up the second query: why do people
write stories? During the last few years I have
put that query to several hundred people, some of
whom were writing stories which landed some-
where, some of whom were writing stories which
might someday be published, and others who were
finding out that writing was too much work. Their
answers fall into a few general divisions. One
woman to be sure wished to learn how to write
stories in order to narrate the life of her little
poodle, which had died. Most of the hundreds how-
ever had a wider impulse. Some of them are
women who wish more pocket money. They are
married, or they are only daughters; they don't
wish to break the custom of home life. They use
words; what easier than to learn their combinations
and sell them! Others, both men and women, are
dissatisfied with their occupations and see maga-
zines as an Arcadia to which they need only technic
as an "open sesame." Some are reforming spirits,
pager to learn how to sugar-coat their messages
to the world. Rarely is there a person, man or
woman, who possesses the curious urge toward ex-
pression in words which will not let him rest, who
must force into shape his experience of people, or
reshape imaginatively his own experience.
There is no doubt, under these surface reasons,
a deeper, less conscious drive toward self-expression
in some creative activity. Perhaps you find in
schools of sculpture or painting or music, students
who have only that vague drive without the peculiar
instinct toward expression in form or color or sound.
I think you find them there far less often than in
classes of short story writing. The medium in
which they must work seems more remote from
their ordinary life; some definite knack must lead
them into clay of paint. But who doesn't think,
secretly or openly, that he can write a story! A.
thing made of words about people; he uses words
all day long, and he has his own experiences as well
as those of his friends. There is too another op-
portunity for day dreaming here. In a story you
may work out life as you can't in reality. If your
day dream don't differ too widely from your neigh-
bor's, and you have industrious patience, you may
learn a craft of writing and sooner or later find
yourself part of the editors' grist.
And so there are classes in short story writing;
there are correspondence courses for people who find
the classes inaccessible; there are textbooks on how
to write; there are collections of stories dissected
for their mechanism. The purpose of these classes
and books is to teach the students how to break into
magazines. Those stories break in which please the
editors. The stories chosen by the editors are those
which will satisfy the public craving. The whole
business is thus reduced to something quite remote
from art; it becomes a traffic in soothing-syrups.
Occasionally even through this rigid circle bursts
a real story, one written because the author wished
to write it, had to write it—a story created and not
made. Whose is the fault that stories of this qual-
ity are rare? Not the editors; they are making
magazines to sell. Not the writers of stories, per-
haps; it is much easier to make a story than to create
one, and if a market exists for manufactured wares,
why not feed it? If there were a desire for stories
with vitality or humor or beauty or vision or com-
ment, there might be more of such stories. The
people who read are a creative force; the stories they
read are made in part by them. What can produce
in the reading public a recognition of the pleasure
in art as over against the retrogressive satisfaction in
day dreams? Such recognition is given a good
story after its appearance; it needs also to precede
the appearance as a demand.
Helen R. Hull.


igig
J93
THE DIAL
I
Of Mediocrity and Its Excellences
n these United States, among the thousands
who are manufacturing prose fiction, those who
may rightfully assert their mediocrity are all too
few. Yes, hordes there are who in their better
moments might well lament their failure to attain
that sturdy mediocrity to which they were mani-
festly ordained.
Now there is to be no denunciation here and no
naming of many names. When the stones have
been cast, one not uncommonly finds that his own
house has a little glass in its walls. Let us rather
for the moment consider impassively why so many
writers of prose fiction are not mediocre; and
thereby we shall come ever nearer to a discrimina-
tion between your false mediocrity and your true,
and to the analysis of the Simon-pure thing itself.
First of all it is to be noted that mediocrity is in
the middle register; hence on the nether reaches of
the scale one will find prose fiction that is beneath
mediocrity. According to tradition a certain
notable amount of it was produced in a college that
required its freshmen at the year's end to make a
short story. Inept, rebellious, wretched with loath-
ing, those freshmen, it is said, wrote stories which
blasted and slew- with the chill of absolute zero in
fictional merit. Have done with all such! We
deal with a better thing—true mediocrity.
Other prose fictions there are too that on the
scale of extrinsic merit will measure equal to medi-
ocrity, yet which may not with aptness be called
mediocre. The popular magazines subsist upon
them. At worst they are sometimes at their best
technically; that is, when the plot motive force is
love o' women—svelt creatures that are very mer-
maids for swimming and that have been given to
cast aside conventionality and its swathings. There
is workmanlike laying of words in some of those
descriptions. But that which denies these writings
excellence likewise, in a sense, denies them medi-
ocrity: there is no sound prompting back of them,
neither artistic incitement not to be paltered with,
nor wholesome prosaic conviction.
It may be that evil men have written these tales
with lip-licking satisfaction; it may be that God-
fearing men, fathers whose babes prattle, have
written them with disgust. No man may say. If
the fathers have written them, it is because prat-
ders come high and gasoline is as rubies. Let no
man do more than pity the father who must dwell
upon the rondures of the cold sea-maiden, upon the
vagaries of the girl who will investigate for her-
self, or the wife who unwives herself. His creations
are harmful, but there are more harmful things
under the stars. And he doubtless has many quite
harmless potboilers to his credit, potboilers as
beneficent as honest mediocrity.
Such potboilers, in truth, can only regretfully be
excluded from mediocrity; but they must be ex-
cluded. Average the potboiler may be, as senti-
mentally banal as heart could desire; but it is al-
ways artfully average. This distinction, finical as
it may seem, must be taken to heart. It has noth-
ing to do with externals; it will not solace the dis-
criminating reader who has fallen upon the Happy
Ending or Red Blood or the Noble-Hearted Crim-
inal or Heart Interest or Clean-Cut Heroes or Fine
Description. It is not a distinction that the critic
may make with certainty. But it is truth and has
to do with the well-being of those who write.
Simon-pure mediocrity then is the best work of
a mediocre man. While men remain a little below,
the angels, it is inevitable. It is not so excellent
as excellence; but what would you? It is not to
be wished away; it is not a bad habit that the world
of letters can lay aside by stern exercise of will.
The lamentable fact remains that all who will write
and who should write are not touched with genius.
Mediocrity should be fostered. That is, it should
be given its just due. It must be told that it is
mediocrity and it must be shown in just what par-
ticulars it is not excellence, but it must not be ut-
terly condemned. It must of course be campaigned
against; yet even so it may be fostered. The cam-
paigners must quite serenely know that mediocrity
may never be suppressed, and they need but one
slogan, one homely and platitudinous slogan: let
each man do his best.
The mediocrity sorely needs encouragement. His
is a grievous task, for, if he deserves the title, he
must ever be trying to stretch up to excellence
and by the same token never reaching it. This hope-
ful hopelessness is rare and much to be commended.
What if a man's novel or short story is a bit feeble
or maudlin or perfervid. He himself is the better
for the exercise of his talents, the clearer of thought,
the more eased of restrained emotion. In truth
it is his inalienable right to make fiction if he so
desire and by all odds the best thing he can do.
True mediocrity writes not entirely for fame or
emulation or gain. It writes because it is happy
when it is writing or has just written. What harm
if a man, especially a man with some trace of talent,
devise stories for himself? Indeed, what will serve
the purpose so well! Narrative is largely vicarious
experience; another man's story is twice removed,
your own but once


194
September 6
THE DIAL
If I am ugly, feeble, and timorous and shall never
be otherwise, why should I not to the best of my
modest ability write myself into a clean-cut hero?
I f I know the houses on my street and the view from
my trolley windows until I detest each atom of all
that I pass each day, why may I not gladden my
eyes with what I take to be Himalayan dawns, or
why should I not dare many strange and difficult
lands of Never Never? What if the select few
do read and run? Let them consort with heroes
to their own liking, and let them seek the magic
jasements that grant them wider, weirder vistas
of stranger and more lovely lands. Yes, let them
construct their own windows or, if none else will
suffice, create their own heroes.
And who knows but among those that have read
and run there may be some who have profited
withal. Mediocrity is part of the community of
letters. Though we reckon literary progress by
names—the Age of Dryden, the Age of Tennyson—
though we would not if we could, pore over the
forgotten works of little men, we should not be
utterly unaware that they ever wrote. Biographers
are fond of pointing out what one great man owes
another, but more rarely do they estimate what
the big man owes to the little man of his day—the
presentation of a great theme albeit inadequately,
the stimulation to set right erring popular opinion
or to voice that opinion as it should be, the very
incentive that comes from a consciousness of fellow-
workers, of companionship, however faltering, in a
high emprize. If all literature worth taking into
account were among the Hundred Bests, they them-
selves might perhaps not be so invaluable as they
are. »
Among the Hundred Bests there is mediocrity.
No man with the impressionable temperament of
genius is always sure of himself. Over-driven hob-
bies, too strong impulsion by the time-spirit, too much
exposure to the winds of doctrine, have brought
many a genius to mediocrity and worse. Prose
fiction particularly slants sharply toward it. Novels
are made of what usually is in outward form the
contemporaneous and the transient and are woefully
susceptible of being written with a purpose. More
than this, realistic prose fiction, except for the real-
istic prose romance, is the apotheosis of the com-
monplace. Of all the stubborn, treacherous ma-
terial with which the artist must struggle, none is
worse than the commonplace. It is at once the
bane and the glory of the novelist and short story
writer that to him is allotted this hard fight. Small
wonder that he wavers now and then.
There is cause for charitableness in this, but no
-ause for shamefacedness and deprecation. With-
out the twaddle in Dickens, the loquacity in Thack-
eray, the endless realism in Tolstoi, we should not
be so aware of the man behind the book. And the
books would be thereby less the projection of an
interpretation of life by one who knows whereof he
speaks. Faultless in execution, the books would be
the better for all time, but less comforting just now
to the critic who is not himself a compound of genius
unalloyed, and less potent for the out and out
mediocrity who himself writes fiction.
When all is said, however, the masterpieces of
fiction are for the few, the works of mediocrity for
the many. Of the millions of the Man in the Street
or of the Man on the Country Road, hundreds of
thousands there are who lead worthy lives with no
reading of fiction whatever. There are as many
more, equally valuable to the world, who read
fiction but not the masterpieces. Some of these
would read the masterpieces if their fathers before
them had done so or if some force beyond the family
circle had trained them to a liking for excellence.
But there are many readers whom no power of
man could have brought, even in the most pliant
days of youth, to know excellence when they see
it, much less to like it. Mediocre prose fiction is
for such.
If a man can not get satisfaction from Under
Western Eyes, it is well for him if he can get it
from V V's Eyes or even from Eyes of the World.
By all means let him try Under Western Eyes, but
do not declaim against him if it leave him cold and
weary and if he get a grateful warmth of the heart
from Eyes of the World. He may be a tired man
and unfitted by a life of commercial directness for
Conrad's oblique story-telling. Masterpieces, how-
ever familiar their diction, have a way of speaking
in strange or outworn tongues that many an intelli-
gent, hard-working man may never hope to com-
mand. Contemporary prose fiction however, talks
the language of the street and road for the very
month and day. And it can warm hearts, never
fear. For a little price the pages of magazine or
of novel can grant who knows what sustaining
examples of fortitude, wrhat pictures of gentility and
tenderness, what assuaging of the wanderlust, what
spacious atmosphere of great deeds for those who
are stifled with trivialities!
Honest mediocrity will respond to honest medi-
ocrity and will draw from it pleasure that is almost
delight and edification that is almost exaltation.
There are those for w7hom Harold Bell Wright and
E. P. Roe have done all that art can do.
Heaven grant that Messrs. Wright and Roe be
true mediocrities, and that there be much even truer
mediocrity in print. Enough of it there would be-


igu)
*95
THE DIAL
token the uncommercializing of our fiction and the
spread, er at least the preparation for the spread,
of that admirable thing unhappily called Culture.
Right culture is based on reverence for what is
artistically sincere, and it calls for ceaseless, sincere
productive effort. The man who tries| to produce
excellence and fails and knows that he fails sees in
it thereafter a value that he could not in any other
way have discovered.
We need the geniuses, and the wrorld and all
future generations need them; but it would be well
for us if we could at this moment boast of more,
many more, true fictional mediocrities. They more
surely than the geniuses would denote a soundness
in the commonality. True culture is not only ven-
erative but creative, and creative in the man of few
talents as in the man of many.
We might, it is true, spend our tears that literary
inferiority, like crime and thistles should ever have
come into the world, that verse fiction has not sur-
passed prose fiction in popularity, that there are
those who can never be deeply moved by the master-
pieces. Such tears are wept. We might insist that
all men read only the masterpieces, that none but
the masters write. There are those who do this.
They may be right, for the human race may be ulti-
mately perfectable. But quite as surely the world
may end next year, and in the meantime scant good
be done. If however, we are not tearfully or un-
compromisingly insistent, we may content ourselves
with the demand that each man do what he is
capable of for literary excellence, that at least he
be made aware of its existence; but we need not
scornfully wither, nay, we may even hearten with
commendation, the man who on Sunday afternoon
peruses in slippered ease the Post that purports to
appear on Saturday eve; and we may assert stoutly
and without equivocation that very fitly its pages
should set before him a sufficiency of honest and
thorough-going mediocrity. ,,T T ,„
666 Walter L. Myers.
The Economic Aftermath in France and England
A he situation in distracted Europe is no more
settled and seems likely to become even less so in
the near future. France celebrated the conclusion
of peace with Germany on July 14 and England
celebrated it on July 19, but the celebrations in
London, at any rate, quite lacked the spontaneity
and enthusiasm of November II, when relief that
the war was over found its natural expression.
Now nobody is inclined to rejoice, for everybody
feels that this peace is no peace, that it does not
fulfill the conditions of a lasting settlement. More-
over not only are there still wars going on in Cen-
tral and Eastern Europe, but every country is torn
by internal conflicts and civil war is looming on
the horizon.
In England the strike of the Yorkshire miners,
which has been going on for several weeks, is not
settled (July), and we are faced with the possibil-
ity of a far more important strike, which might
easily develop into something like a revolution.
The Parliamentary Committee of the Trade Union
Congress having taken no action on the resolution
of the Labor Party conference at Southport call-
ing for "direct action," the Triple Alliance lost
patience and decided by an overwhelming majority
to take a ballot of the Unions affiliated to it on
the question of a general strike against intervention
m Russia and Hungary either by the supply of men
or material, against the continuance of conscription,
and against the use of troops for strike-breaking.
The threat of the strike has already led to a Gov-
ernment decision to withdraw all British troops
from Russia, but the assistance in money and kind
to Denikin is to be continued and that the Trade
Unionists will not tolerate. The unions have
reversed their decision to carry through a refer-
endum of the membership and have decided to sub-
mit the question to a conference. Bye-elections
continue to show that the Government has com-
pletely lost the confidence of the country. The
last two were at Swansea in Wales and at Both-
well in Scotland. In Wales Mr. Lloyd George
still retains a good deal of his influence and the
ministerial Coalition held the Swansea seat, but by
a greatly reduced majority. At Bothwell, where
the Coalition candidate had a majority of 332 last
December, the Labor Party won the seat with a
majority of 7168. It is now clear that not a
single Coalition seat in Great Britain is really safe.
Mr. Winston Churchill is to a great extent respon-
sible for the unpopularity of the Government, which
he will certainly bring to ruin if he is not checked
or got rid of; he is a reckless and irresponsible fire-
brand. In the six bye-elections already held the
aggregate Coalition poll has decreased by 23,702
as compared with last December and the aggregate
poll of the Opposition candidates has increased by
J5>329. The polls have been even smaller than
they were in December—even at Bothwell only
69 per cent of the electors voted—although gteat


196
September 6
THE DIAL
numbers of soldiers have been demobilized since
the general election; this fact is without doubt a
symptom of indifference to parliamentary action
and of growing distrust of parliamentary methods.
The weakness and incompetence of the Labor Party
in the House of Commons is strengthening anti-
parliamentarism. •
In France the twenty-four-hour general strike ar-
ranged as a demonstration against intervention
in Russia and dear living was abandoned at the
last moment. The Executive Committee of the
General Confederation of Labor gave the defeat of
the Government in the Chamber on July 18 as the
reason for its climb-down, but in fact the abandon-
ment of the strike was due to the fear that it would
not be successful. Many French Trade Union-
ists—including some of the strongest advocates of
direct action—have always been averse to such
a general strike merely for the purpose of mak-
ing a demonstration; they hold, with reason, that
the results obtained are not adequate to the trouble
and loss occasioned. If they strike, they want to
strike to some practical purpose. Nevertheless the
abandonment of the strike at the eleventh hour is
a severe set-back to the General Confederation of
Labor and a triumph for M. Clemenceau, who had
threatened repressive measures. Its first result was
that the Chamber on July 22 rejected by a large
majority the identical resolution censuring the eco-
nomic policy of the Government which it had passed
on July 18 under the threat of the strike. Had
the strike been held and been successful, the
Clemenceau Ministry would probably by now have
been out of office. The bungling tactics of the
C. G. T. (General Confederation of Labor) have
given M. Clemenceau a new lease of life and he
is likely now to remain in office until after the gen-
eral election, which can hardly take place before
October. By way of showing his contempt for the
C.G.T., M. Clemenceau has now refused permis-
sion to the Italian delegates to the International
Trade Union Conference at Amsterdam to cross
France and they have been prevented from attend-
ing the conference, although they had passports from
their own Government. The collapse of the
C.G.T. has also had a serious repercussion in Italy,
where the general strike took place on July 21
according to arrangement and where the defection
of France is regarded as a slap in the face to Italian
Socialists and Trade Unionists, who were thus left
to strike alone.
At a special meeting of the National Confederal
Committee of the C.G.T., hastily summoned and
held on July 21 and 22, M. Jouhaux delivered a
long speech vindicating the action of the Executive,
which was approved by the Committee after a
lively discussion in the course of which the Execu-
tive was severely criticized. M. Jouhaux's speech
was mainly composed of empty rhetoric and vague
generalities and did not carry the matter much
further. The rank and file of French Trade Union-
ists have certainly reason to complain that the
Executive of the C.G.T. has let them down. It
should never have announced a general strike
unless it was sure to be able to carry it out and,
having announced it, it should have gone through
with it. The whole business is an example of
blundering and bad management which augurs ill
for the leadership of French Trade Unionism. One
of its worst resulfs will be a further diminution
of the confidence of Trade Unionists in their lead-
ers, which was already sadly impaired. One of the
gravest factors in the present Labor situation in
France is the lack of leadership. Some day or other
some sectional strike about a purely economic ques-
tion will suddenly develop into a general revolu-
tionary movement and, unless there are men ready
and able to take control of such a movement, the
consequences may be disastrous for Labor, for it
may end in nothing but futile violence and
bloody repression. One does not see at present
where such men are to be found; the events might,
of course, produce them, but the present leaders of
the C.G.T. are not likely to be among them. They
have not the confidence of the rank and file to a
sufficient extent to be able to direct them, and they
are likely, as I said in my last article, to be over-
whelmed. Never was the loss of Jaures so palpable
as now. Few leaders in history have had the con-
fidence of their followers so completely as he had.
He has no successor. The present leaders of the C.G.
T. seem to be over-prudent when courage is needed
and too hasty when the occasion demands prudence.
The Confederal Committee, however, took a course
on July 22 which was a new dsparture in French
Trade Union policy. By ninety-one votes agains:
sixteen, with eight abstentions, it adopted a resolu-
tion definitely declaring in favor of Free Trade—of
the suppression of customhouse barriers and the free
entry into France of raw materials and manufac-
tured goods from all countries. Until recently the
question of Free Trade and Protection had been
almost entirely neglected by French Socialists and
Trade Unionists, but the appalling cost of living
has forced it on their attention. During the war
law after law has been passed and decree after
decree has been issued to prevent profiteering, with-
out the smallest result; prices continued to rise
and are still rising. At Jast it dawned upon people
that one of the causes of high prices is the closing


1919
197
THE DIAL
of the frontiers to foreign products. Economic
questions, to which little attention was paid in
France before the war, have now become too
important to be ignored and the public has dis-
covered that England is now as ever the cheapest
country in Europe because England has Free Trade.
Although Mr. Lloyd George's Government is try-
ing to foist Protection upon us by a back-door and
prices here are higher than they ought to be in
consequence of restriction of imports, the cost of
living is less than half what it is in France and
wages are higher than in that country. This dis-
covery has led to a Free Trade movement among
the French urban populations, which has grown
very rapidly and is now formidable. It is further
strengthened by the growing conviction that uni-
versal Free Trade is one of the essential conditions
of permanent peace. The French Socialist papers
are now all in favor of Free Trade and one
bourgeois paper of the Left, L'Oeuvre, is making, a
vigorous campaign in favor of the suppression of
all import duties.
The opposition to Free Trade will come from
the agricultural population, which has been up to
now the spoiled child oi the Third Republic. Agri-
cultural profits are actually exempt from income tax
and agriculturists are even exempted from the pro-
visions of the laws against profiteering, which, to
be sure, are totally ineffective. The rural popula-
tion, although the .constant exodus from the coun-
try into the towns has greatly diminished it, is
still nearly half the population of France. Fear of
Free Trade on the part of the agriculturists is jus-
tified to the extent that, with their present obso-
lete methods, they would hardly be able to compete
in an open market. The whole system of French
agriculture needs drastic overhauling and some
modification of peasant proprietorship has become
urgently necessary. The peasant proprietor has
many great qualities, but he is intensely conserva-
tive and quite out of touch with modern methods;
moreover, even if he wished to use modern
machinery, he has not the capital to buy it. The
system of small isolated production has in fact
broken down and only complete and extensive coop-
eration can save French agriculture. The heavy
losses in the war have made the labor difficulty,
which was already becoming serious, acute. It
will not be possible to find sufficient labor to con-
tinue French agricultural production on the present
methods. A radical change is necessary in any case;
Free Trade would make it immediately necessary.
The attitude of the agricultural population in
this regard makes it difficult for any of the
bourgeois political parties to advocate Free Trade,
for their electors are now mainly drawn from the
rural districts. That is the reason why the elec-
toral manifesto of the Radical Party, which held
its national congress on July 26 and 27, is so weak
on the question of dear living. Being chiefly a
"country party," it dares not mention the first and
most essential remedy and is obliged to deal in
vague generalities. But it was more outspoken in
certain other regards. M. Mandel—his real name
is Rothschild—who is M. Clemenceau's Grand
Vizier and general factotum and who shares with
M. Loucheur the effective government of France,
had elaborated a beautiful scheme for combining
all the bourgeois parties, including Royalists and
reactionaries, against the Socialists at the coming
general election. The Royalists hailed the scheme
with enthusiasm; in the Action Francaise M.
Maurras declared that he and his friends would
accept any and every alliance against "Bolsheviks
and Caillautists." One of the objects of the pro-
posed coalition is reported to be the election of
M. Clemenceau to the Presidency of the Republic
next January in succession to M. Poincare, whose
term of office will then expire.
The proceedings at the Radical Congress, how-
ever, show that all bourgeois Republicans are not
prepared to fall in with M. Mandel's ingenious
arrangements. It also showed a sharp cleavage of
opinion between the rank and file of the party; and
the majority of the Radical deputies, who support
the Clemenceau Ministry. In spite of the opposi-
tion of M. Rene Renoult, chairman of the Radical
party in the Chamber, whom M. Clemenceau is
believed to have designated as his successor in the
Premiership, the Congress adopted by an over-
whelming majority a resolution formally instruct-
ing the Radical deputies to " exact " from the Gov-
ernment the immediate suppression of. martial law
and the censorship and to give their support only
to a Government "realizing the union of Repub-
licans," that is to say, to refuse it to the Govern-
ment of M. Clemenceau. It remains to be seen
whether the Radical deputies will fall into Jine;
if they do, the days of the Clemenceau Ministry
are numbered, but I am inclined to think that they
will not, or at any rate that a sufficient number
will continue to support the Government to keep
it in power until the general election. The Con-
gress also passed unanimously a second resolution
declaring its readiness "to facilitate the union of
all the parties of the Left"—a phrase which
includes the Socialists—and its decision to "repu-
diate any elected representative or candidate who
may consent to figure on the same list as those that
have incessantly combated the laical, democratic.


1 98
September 6
THE DIAL
and social Republic.” This is the end, so far as
the Radical party is concerned, of M. Mandel's
scheme; and the Radical party is at present the
largest political party in France, numbering about
one-third of the Chamber.
Public opinion has at last compelled M. Loucheur
to modify his economic policy. Most of the pro-
hibitions of imports have been withdrawn and the
proposed supplementary ad valorem duties have
been abandoned, but the existing import duties are
to be increased—in some cases trebled—so that
there is no immediate prospect of a fall in prices.
M. Loucheur has also been obliged to give way in
regard to the surplus material of the American
army, which the French Government has now
bought on terms very favorable to it. Previously
M. Loucheur had refused to buy any part of it
or to allow anybody else to buy it and had even
forbidden the American authorities to give any-
thing away. The press campaign, especially in
L'Oeuvre and L'Humanite, against M. Loucheur's
fondness for the profiteers is thus beginning to have
an effect. Mr. Henry Ford must have some credit
in the matter. It is probably known in America
that, when the Armistice was declared, a large
number of Ford motorcars bought by the French
Government were in the port of Bordeaux, where
they have since been left to rust to oblige the
French motorcar manufacturers. Mr. Ford of-
fered to pay the ad valorem import duty of 70
per cent on these cars and then sell them to the
French public at the price at which he had sold
them to the French Government when he had no
import duty to pay. Although this proposal would
have meant that the French Government recovered
the whole cost of the cars with 70 per cent of their
value in addition, M. Loucheur refused it and
M. Ford published the facts in the French press.
The Citroën company replied with an advertise-
ment telling the public not to bother itself about
foreign cars, for there would soon be plenty of
French cars on the market—a promise not yet ful-
filled. Mr. Ford retorted with full particulars
of M. Loucheur's interests in the Citroën company.
Robert DeLL.
-
Russia and International Economics
Surrºrise FROM MANY economic and indus-
trial troubles the world (even the world of indus-
trialists and financiers) seems to have forgotten what
is perhaps the main cause of this basic malaise. The
destruction of many values as a result of the war is
an unescapable fact and the restoration of sound in-
ternational economic conditions has been hindered
not only by the curtailment of production but by the
absence of Russia from the world market and its
economic interaction. -
From this point of view the present-day state of
affairs in Russia acquires more than a political, or
even a humanistic interest, it becomes a matter of
practical economic importance. Russia's industrial
strength is now lower than that of any other period.
During the years of the war her export was closed.
Many provisions remained unused, and are rotting
on the fields of Russia; and her unmeasurable raw
materials are out of the world market. This state
of affairs has produced fatal international complica-
tions with worldwide political implications.
The coal difficulties in England, the desperately
pessimistic speech of Floyd George, the labor unrest
in Italy and in France and even in the richest of
countries, in America, show irrefutably that without
the aid of Lenin and Communism the economic and
industrial organizations of the contemporary state
are half destroyed. And under such serious circum-
an object of relief is a quite mistaken one.
stances Russia, which is able to provide the world
with sufficient raw materials" to feed the mills and
factories of many industries, is eliminated. The
Russian cooperative societies have many times em-
phasized that trade and economic intercourse with
Russia is possible regardless of the political contro-
versies and governmental crises in that country.
While all kinds of economic organizations have been
destroyed throughout Russia, in Central Russia as
well as Siberia, the cooperative societies have alone
remained intact and have become powerful as never
before. There were several attempts from this
quarter to show to the Allies that neither from the
political nor from the economic point of view could
the blockade wisely be maintained. On February
20, 1919, a special memorandum was presented to
the English government by the representative of the
All-Russian Cooperative Union. It pointed out in
part:
The absence of exchange of goods is causing heavy
material losses to the commerce and industry of the whole
world. As a matter of fact, the notion that nothing is to
be had from Russia and that she can be treated only as
During the
last five years the absence of our export trade and ex-
change of goods within the country has brought about an
accumulation in the hands of the peasantry of huge re-
serves of raw material, grain, eggs . . . hides, flax, and
so forth. The raising of the blockade and the re-estab-
lishment of an exchange of commodities will bring on the
-


1919
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THE DIAL
market an enormous quantity of raw materials of which
the world stands in such great need at present.
The same memorandum states further that the
reopening of trade through the cooperatives is pos-
sible independently of the Soviet Government, be-
cause they are now the only agent of distribution
and are ready to complete it even under the control
of the representatives of the Allies, guaranteeing
that this distribution will be made among all the
population regardless of class. Moreover, the lift-
ing of the blockade and the opening of trade is bound
to restore the normal habits of the nation in economic
intercourse, which are now suppressed by the policy
of the Allies. No answer followed this memoran-
dum. The peace treaty is now signed and the fea-
tures of Europe, at least those of the next few years,
begin to be defined. The European countries, and
especially England, look for the Russian market.
And in this respect the economic policy of the Allies
toward Russia seems very shortsighted. England is
interested in the Russian market, but her interests
have peculiar commercial limitations. She fears the
power of the cooperatives, and has to weaken them
in order to colonize Russia. In my article in THE
DIAL for August 9, 1919, I mentioned an attempt
in England to organize a special supply company
akin to the East Indian Supply Company for a
monopolized exploitation of Russia.
Involving political controversies England finds
support in the representatives of former Russian
bankers and big business men who are interested
in salvaging their own investments—their capital
having been largely transferred from Russia to
English banks. Thus under the banner of
patriotism all kinds of Economic Leagues have been
organized, and these are closely in touch with the
British Government.
On the other hand, Russia cannot remain any
longer without exchange and manufactured articles.
It is evident that Germany is the next possibility.
Trying to make people afraid of “pro-German-
ism" the Allies as a matter of fact are only em-
phasizing their own creation. Both Germany and
Russia are driven to this rapprochement by the
arrangement of the European balance.
. In this respect the attitude of the United States
can hardly be understood; for two processes are
now in operation: 1. Pushing Russia into an al-
liance with Germany. 2. Eliminating America
from the Russian market. A significant fact was
pointed out to me by Mr. A. M. Orloff, Engineer-
agriculturist manager of the Odessa Credit Union,
and member of a cooperative union, mission that
lately visited Italy and England. Before the war
Russia received agricultural machinery only from
can influence.
America. After Brest-Litovsk some machinery was
received from Sweden through Germany. But it
was not satisfactory. With agricultural machinery
it is impossible to shoot or destroy. Nevertheless
America with the Allies does not allow it to be im-
ported into Russia. At the same time England,
which never had more than one or two big factories
producing for export has now about ten, and there
is reason to believe that the great munition fac-
tories were turned into agricultural machinery
works in order to get hold of the Russian market
as soon as possible and push out the former Ameri-
The political undertaking by Eng-
land of a military intervention is nothing else there-
fore than the realization of a program of economic
imperialism. On the other hand after the revolu-
tion Russia became a country of small landowner-
ship. A small landowner is not in a position to
purchase large machinery by himself, and conse-
quently the local cooperative society buys the equip-
ment and rents to the members. This explains the
fact that in South Russia for instance 75 per cent
of the rural population is participating in the co-
operative movement. The policy of destruction of
the cooperative societies is thus a policy in favor of
the big landowners and therefore in Siberia, for
instance, where influence of England is very strong,
Mr. Anatoly Gan in the Russian Economist for
May 5, 1919, assails the cooperative societies, and
the government of Kolchak is treating them very
badly as shown in my article for August 9. Even
their paper, Zaria, so often quoted even by
Struggling Russia, is now suppressed. More than
that, a strong spirit of enmity against America has
been cultivated and the same Anatoly Gan on one
hand, and the Siberian merchants on the other, are
all the time manifesting their sympathy with Eng-
land. A resolution against America was passed
at the conference of merchants of Vladivostok
(Golos Primoria. June 12-13, 1919). In the
meantime an international realignment is being per-
fected. On one side England, France, and the
United States; on the other Russia, Germany, and
Japan. Japan has already declared her unwilling-
ness to send troops to aid Kolchak, while support-
ing all the time Kalmikov and Semenov as pro-
Japanese rulers. An economic alliance of Russia
with Germany and an understanding if not an
alliance with Japan, after granting certain ad-
vantages in Manchuria and Siberia, would be
a tragic crown to the war to end war. Sup-
pressed and offended Germany, disintegrated Rus-
sia, aggressive Japan, will present a strong in-
centive to war in the near future, because
the thorough exploitation of Russia's rich possi-


200
September 6
THE DIAL
bilities will make up for the losses of the last five
years and for those exacted by the peace treaty.
England will not be able then (as she was during
the last war) to keep India safe or to blockade
Germany. Japan and Russia will open the way
for supplies, and can possibly threaten the in-
tegrity of the Indian Empire.
Great Britain's "agreement" with Persia will
hardly remove this danger. Thus the present
economic policy toward Russia carries first of all
the^bitter promise of a future war. These are, by
the way, the views expressed in the memorandum
presented to the State Department of the United
States on March 20 and on August 7, 1919, by the
Representative of the Russian Cooperative Societies,
A. M. Berkenheim. No official answer followed.
It has to be emphasized that Russia (the post-
revolutionary Russia from Kerensky to Lenin in-
clusive) was always opposed, to the domination of
European capital and inclined to welcome the pene-
tration of America in the Russian market, since
America is so far away that her capital and products
enter the field without any political or diplomatic
strings.
On March 20 Mr. Berkenheim wrote to the
State Department:
There is no financial risk involved in this transaction,
because the Cooperative Unions are ready to pay for all
the merchandise that will pass through their hands.
The Cooperative Union will distribute the supplies di-
rectly and only to the population, and if so desired will
carry on their work under the eyes of the American
representatives. It is confidently expected that in view of
unbearable economic stress it would not be difficult to
effect the necessary agreement and obtain requisite guar-
antees.
And on August 7 the Cooperatives declared
themselves ready to guarantee that no part of the
goods should be used for military purposes.
America's attitude could be to a certain degree
understood if these attempts to reopen the market
had not taken place. But otherwise, from the
point of view of America's own interest, her de-
pendence upon London and Paris is incomprehen-
sible, since the policy of the latter two centers
brings America only the loss of Russia as a market
and the opportunity to participate in a new war.
I have not touched upon the human side of
the question because it seems to me that a realistic
practical analysis is fundamental to an understand-
ing. But I cannot help calling attention to the
following fact of purely psychological character.
After the peace of Brest-Litovsk a great number
of German agents, military and civil, came to
Russia in order to buy the raw materials exhausted
Germany needed, especially fats, in which Russia
is very rich and from which explosives are derived.
The cooperative societies through their agent
bought throughout Russia the entire supply of fats,
so that Germany was unable to get a gramme of it.
It was an act of great importance in this war. But
what Russia did by herself against the Germany of
the Kaiser, with whom she was officially at peace,
Russia surrounded by the iron link of the Allies
will hardly do against the Germany of President
Ebert, when her faith in the Allies is lost. That is
why psychologically Russia is united in opposition
to foreign forces and new governments despite the
fact that many are discontented with the Soviet
Regime. I just received a message from an old
social worker, my colleague in the Ministry of
Labor under Kerensky, G. D. Krasinsky, describ-
ing the terrible conditions in Russia—starvation,
illness, and disaster—and criticising strongly the
Moscow Government. But he adds: "And
despite all—which is strange—we feel more and
more that the spirit of defense is growing in us."
This spirit makes Russia strong against Kolchak
and Denikin, but under the circumstances it will
bring about more international complications than
even the spread of Sovietism through half of Europe.
If England or France does not see the forest be-
cause of the trees—their purely egoistical aspira-
tions—why then does America not open her eyes?
In a memorandum, of August 6, 1919, we read:
>
1. Neither American financial nor trade circles have
taken any steps toward the establishment of even pre-
liminary requirements for the organization of permanent
commercial relations with Russia.
2. No advance has been made toward the execution of
the plan advocated by us during five months to foster
the economic life of Central Russia, by means of re-
storing the exchange of goods through cooperative chan-
nels.
3. Judging from the information in our hands at the
present time, representatives of German firms have ap-
peared in all Russian markets especially in Novorossiys
and Vladivostok, not to mention Central Russia, and are
offering in large quantities goods of German manufacture
upon the normal conditions of peace-time credit and the
pre-war basis of trade exchange. >
4. In the Far East a similar position is taken by Japan.
The conclusion is that the United States is losing Rus-
sian markets now and for all time, despite the particular
efforts of the Russian Cooperatives in the United States
to reorganize permanent commercial intercourse between
the two countries. The Russian Cooperatives themselves
are now faced with the necessity of approaching hereto-
fore boycotted German firms and agents and of taking
active steps toward resuming such commercial relations
with Germany as would make it possible to obtain and
transport into Russia supplies of goods, machinery and
manufactures of which the Russian population is in such
dire need.
Is it not time for America now, before all is lost,
to change her tactics? Whose interest is she ad-
vancing—Russia's? No. Her own?
Gregory Zilboorg.


igig
20I
THE DIAL
A Ransom for Russia's Jews
r or some time there have been rumors to the
effect* that the Kolchak agents in this country, hav-
ing failed to secure satisfactory financial backing for
the Omsk Government, have begun to work upon
the racial apprehensions of American Jewry. They
hoped thus to frighten certain philanthropic Jews
into financing Kolchak on the theory that by
helping establish a government "friendly" to the
Russian Jews they would eliminate the danger of
further pogroms. The correspondence printed below
proves that this campaign of misrepresentation is
actually in progress. The duplicity of Kolchak's
representatives is revealed by their use of Metro-
politan Platon to allay the doubts which arose in
Mr. Schiff's mind that all was not as represented.
The effrontery of .these agents in calling upon Met-
ropolitan Platon appears when it is remembered that
instead of the benign individual they represent him
to be, the Metropolitan's Russian record shows
that he is a personality of the old regime closely
identified with the dark forces of the Czar's govern-
ment, a member of the pogrom faction in the Duma,
a leader of pogromist Black Hundreds, and an active
anti-Semite!
July 7, 1919.
Dear Mr. Sack:
Reliable reports we got from Siberia state that condi-
tions, in the territory under the sway of the Omsk Gov<-
eminent, are most unsatisfactory—to use a mild expression
—as far as the Jews are concerned. I have myself seen
photographic reproductions of circular letters issued by a
committee which signs itself in the name of the Czar and
the Restoration of Autocracy, inciting the populace into
atrocities against the Jewish population, against whom,
it is stated, all kinds of cruelties—even murder—are
practiced, without the least interference, if any [thing]
with the connivance of the authorities.
As you represent the Omsk Government faction and
strong propaganda is being made by the Bureau under
your charge for Admiral Kolchak's cause, I deem it my
duty to write you in respect to the information that has
been imparted to me and which is beginning to arouse
American Jewry.
Trusting that you can see your way to do something ef-
fectual in transmitting a word of warning to your friends
in Siberia, whom you represent, against measures which
are sure to alienate the sympathy of the American people,
I am, with kind regards,
Yours faithfully,
(Signed) Jacob H. Schiff.
Evidently the Russian Information Bureau was
not abashed by this letter, but attempted rather to
"convert" the American Jewish leader. Here is'
a letter that testifies to the character of this attempt:
July 11, 1919.
Dear Mr. Sack:
Acknowledging receipt of your two letters, in reply to
my own of the 7th inst, I am extremely appreciative that
you have gone to the trouble of making so exhaustive an
answer, which I have read attentively.
I can well comprehend that the entire situation, which
you set forth so clearly in your letter, is not only most
difficult, but also very delicate and that judgment upon
reports that come from Siberia and Russia should not be
hasty.
We have already discussed here whether it would not
be well to send to Siberia a reliable independent investi-
gator, but we have already two men there—Dr. Rosenblatt
at Vladivostok, who represents the Joint Distribution
Committee, and Mr. Samuel Mason at Yokohama, who
represents there the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society. Mr.
Mason has variously been in Siberia; he is absolutely reli-
able and from both these representatives we have informa-
tion that the Jewish conditions are not as they should be,
even under the present critical situation in the districts
under the swa"y of the Omsk Government.
Mr. Louis Marshall, President of the American Jewish
Committee—whom you know—and Dr. Cyrus Adler,
Chairman of its Executive Committee, who have been in
attendance at the Peace Conference in Paris, have com-
pleted their very satisfactory work there and are expected
home in about two weeks. We deem it well to await the
return of these two gentlemen, in order to confer with
them and get their wise counsel as concerns the Siberian
situation and to decide whether, as you have been good
enough to suggest, it would be best to send another in-
vestigator.
We know you are at all times ready to give us your
valuable support and advice and upon this we shall rely
to a great extent.
Thanking you again for the explicitness with which you
have written me, I am, with kind assurances,
Faithfully yours,
(Signed) Jacob H. Schiff.
Doubtful of the success of his early attempts to
convert Mr. Schiff, the Director of the Russian
Information Bureau now used his last tool, the
Metropolitan Platon, Archbishop of Kherson and
Odessa, ancient servitor of the Czar. On July 21
the Director appeared in the character of secret
agent of the Russian Embassy and chief promoter
of Platon.
July 21, 1919.
Jacob H. Schiff, Esq.,
Kuhn, Loeb & Co.,
Pine and William Streets,
New York City.
Dear Mr. Schiff:
Thank you for your kind letter of the 18th inst. with
a copy of the letter from the City Editor of the New
York- Call enclosed. I return this letter herewith.
We have done our best that the statement by Metro-
politan Platon, correcting what the papers have presented
as his original statement, should be printed as fully and
widely as possible. I enclose herewith copies of the
statement as printed in the New York Times and in the
New York Herald. In addition to all the New York
papers, published in English, copies of the statement
were also sent to the Jewish Daily News, the Jewish
Morning Journal, the Jewish Daily Forwarts and the
Jewish Daily Day.
Mr. Oscar S. Strauss and myself have just visited
Metropolitan Platon, who was deeply touched by Mr.
Strauss's visit. We have spent there about an hour and
a half, and Mr. Strauss told me that he was delighted by
Metropolitan Platon and the views he expressed during
the conversation.


202
September 6
THE DIAL
The Joint Distribution Committee was kind enough to
send me their correspondence with Dr. Rosenblatt, which
I went through carefully. Significant among these docu-
ments is Dr. Rosenblatt's cable of May 7th, which as you
probably recall, reads:
"No. 4. Imminent danger. Pogroms Ekaterinbourg,
Omsk, Tomsk, Isabel and other places. Officials openly
foster anti-Semitic agitation. Claims of Jewish Bolshe-
vism and profiteering used as a deadly weapon. Frequent
posters 'Kill Jews.' Situation critical. Take prompt
action through Washington."
As you probably recall, Mr. Frank L. Polk added to
this cable:
"I have already warned the Omsk Government to be
on the lookout for any movement of this kind. Personally
I think their fears are unfounded."
I think that Mr. Polk was right. The danger which
Dr. Rosenblatt called "imminent," fortunately did not
result in anything deplorable. As Dr. Rosenblatt himself
wrote in a letter, dated May 22nd:
"The new settlers, who compose probably nine-tenths
of the Jewish population in the Far East and about
ninety-five per cent in Siberia proper, are afraid of their
own shadows and talk in whispers. Exaggerated, fan-
tastic and even absurd stories from town to town; or-
dinary robberies are reported as singled out instances in
a well-organized plan of action designated for the ex-
termination of all Jews."
I fully agree with Dr. Rosenblatt's further notice, in
the same letter, that "all this is merely symptomatic of
the real danger in which the Jews are compelled to live."
I spent on Friday several hours with Mr. J. C. Okou-
litch, a High Commissioner of the Omsk Government,
just arrived in this country. Mr. Okoulitch confirmed
that the reactionary elements in Siberia are active in their
anti-Semitic propaganda, and stated that if not for the
Government, terrible Jewish massacres would have hap-
pened in Siberia months ago. The Government is firm in
its policy of protecting the Jewish population, and if it
was incapable until now to stop all the signs of the anti-
Semitic propaganda, this is because the Government is
still not stable enough.
In conclusion I would sum up the situation as follows:
Four possibilities are open for Siberia and for Russia in
general: a government temporarily led by Admiral Kol-
chak; a Bolshevist government; a reactionary govern-
ment, definitely turning to the restoration of the Czar's
regime; and an absence of any government. Out of these
possibilities, a great part of Russia's democrats prefers
the Government led by Admiral Kolchak. At the same
time they greet the organization of support of Admiral
Kolchak's Government from abroad under guarantees
that he executed the democratic program which he pro-
claimed more than once in the most solemn way.
Very sincerely yours,
(Signed) A. Sack.
Thus, without any facts and without facing the
situation honestly, the Platon-Kolchak representa-
tive "believed" with Mr. Polk that the fears of
the American Jewry were " unfounded." The fact
is that Messrs. Polk, Sack, and Platon do not want
to know the truth or to let it be known. Their
irame is to frighten the Jewry by playing on their
racial apprehensions. In the following letter to his
chief, the Director of the Information Bureau
reports how he successfully decoyed four Jewish
leaders into the sanctum of Metropolitan Platon,
the old Black Hundred pogromist:
(Translation from the Russian)
July 29, 1919.
Michail Michailovich Karpovich,
Russian Embassy,
Washington, D. C.
Dear Michail Michailovich:
I want to let you know the details of the visit paid
yesterday by the Jewish Delegation to Metropolitan Pla-
ton. These details may prove of interest to Boris Alex-
androvich [Bakhmietiev, the "Russian Ambassador"]
and you.
The delegation was composed of Jacob Schiff, Oscar
Strauss, Louis Marshall and Rabbi Wise. The Metro-
politan appeared to have been very much pleased by the
visit, and received the guests in a very sincere and
friendly manner.
The conversation began with a pretty detailed state-
ment by the Metropolitan on the condition in Russia and
the necessity, from the point of view of the Russian State
interests and the interests of the Jewry, of helping act-
ively the Government of Admiral Kolchak.
Afterwards all the members of the delegation spoke
in turn, beginning with Mr. Schiff. 'I was present and
was glad to help the Metropolitan and the gentlemen by-
translating their speeches. All the members of the dele-
gation first assured the Metropolitan Platon that they
are strongly opposed to Bolshevism. They stated that
the great majority of the Jewry in the United States were,
like the majority of the Jews in Russia, fighting against
Bolshevism.
Rabbi Wise said that the policy of tolerance toward*
the Bolshevists was upheld by the Christian advisers of
President Wilson. As an example, he mentioned the
resignation of the five members of the American Peace
Delegation, who protested against the partial recognition
of Admiral Kolchak. All these people, with Mr. Bull:;
at the head, are Christians. On the other hand, the
American Jewry is entirely in sympathy with the idea
of the restoration of a United Democratic Russia and
are glad to help the Russian people as much as they can.
Marshall stated that in a few days there would be
called a meeting of thirty-five or forty of the most impor-
tant representatives of the American Jewry, and that a
report of the Jewish delegates at Paris would be pre-
sented there. A resolution on the Russian question is
also to be passed.
This resolution will be sent to Metropolitan Platon as
an expression of the state of mind of the American Jewry
concerning Russia.
The visit closed very satisfactorily and both sides were
apparently very well satisfied. The statement of the Jew-
ish Delegation was so sincerely friendly that it remains
for us to follow hot-foot in order as far as possible to
create from this state of mind something concrete for
Russia.
With sincere regards,
Shaking your hand,
<Signed) A. Sack.
Thus, through a member of the old czarist
pogrom organization, an attempt is being made to
take from the Jewish people »f America a ransom
for the lives of their Russian brothers, and by this
means to reestablish the Black Hundreds in Russia.
Although no pogroms are taking place under the
Bolsheviki, the Kolchak people are arousing
fears among the Jewry by asserting that only
by the triumph of Kolchak can pogroms be pre-
vented—using czarist men and czarist methods
to betray American Jewry and the Russian Revolu-
tion.


THE DIAL
A FORTNIGHTLY
The Old Order and the New
UpOX THE CONTINUED " UNWILLINGNESS OR IN-
abilitv of the Mexican Government to afford ade-
quate protection" to American citizens is condi-
tioned the " radical change" of policy with which
the United States has threatened Mexico. If any-
one really requires proof of the ivillingness of the
Carranza Government to protect the residents of
that country, native and foreign, against the dangers
of internal disorder—and foreign intervention—
this proof appears in the fair and frank reply of
that Government to our ill-tempered challenge. And
if Carranza's ability to maintain order falls short of
his good will, whose fault is it? When Washing-
ton recognized the Carranzist regime, the presump-
tion was that there Would be extended to the new
Administration such privileges as one friendly gov-
ernment may extend to another not yet fully es-
tablished. To the strengthening of Carranza's work
for law and order, we have contributed, besides
recognition, enough counter-revolutionary plots to
empty high official chairs and fill certain well-ap-
pointed cells if the offenders had ever been pros-
ecuted under the Espionage Act. Besides this, we
have refused to allow the free shipment of arms and
ammunition vitally necessary to the completion of
Carranza's work in Mexico. The embargo, which
is popularly supposed to effect only shipments in-
tended for the use of insurgents, has actually
operated to keep the Carranza Government from
shipping to Mexico 11,000,000 cartridges bought
and paid for three years ago and still stored in the
city of New York. Obviously, then, the recogni-
tion of Carranza has taken on the character of in-
sincerity familiar to the Wilsonian wjsh. The Ad-
ministration at Washington has helped, by formal
recognition and actual repudiation, to create a condi-
tion of affairs in Mexico which may now be made
an excuse for intervention. The oil interests need
not agitate openly for the invasion of Mexico. Let
them continue to subsidize disorder. Let them hor-
rify America with murder stories, and sway the
unstable Administration toward a further with-
drawal of support from the only power that can stop
these outrages, and increasing confusion, with inter-
vention as the logical remedy, becomes inevitable.
In the contest for mandataries over the
Near East there is only one reluctant participant.
Great Britain and France, Italy and Greece, are in-
tent on converting their .titles to spheres of influ-
ence, allotted as the spoils of war by secret treaty,
into mandataries issued for the benefit of civilization
by the League of Nations. The United States,
however, has remained aloof from this orgy of con-
version. Not until the most favorable positions had
been pre-empted was our government asked to ac-
cept a mandatary over the remaining areas, Armenia
and Constantinople. Had we the courage to make
a drastic conditional acceptance of this offer the
futility of secret treaty arrangements might be ex-
posed and our weak renunciation of Wilsonian prin-
ciples at the Peace Conference somewhat redeemed.
At present Asia Minor is divided into spheres of
influence and interest. In the mandataries these
spheres are in general confirmed, with certain
changes and extensions, and the principle of eco-
nomic rivalry and political cross purposes is per-
petuated. What could be done under the manda-
tary system to avert the exacerbating conflicts and
struggles and irritations which must necessarily
ensue? Only one plan suggests itself: to place Asia
Minor under the mandate of a single, disinterested
state, with the financial burden of administration
borne pro rata by the various members of the
League. Such a scheme would wipe out separate
spheres of national influence in favor of one large .
united sphere of human influence upon which the
scientific, educational, and technical resources of
Western Civilization might be steadily focussed.
Whatever the underlying population might think,
this would be a politically sane method of exploit-
ing undeveloped resources, overcoming minority dis-
criminations in the welter of tribes and national-
ities, and doing away with a battlefield of
contentious imperialisms. While Great Britain
dominates Persia and Mesopotamia, and the French
Syria, and Italy and Greece lesser regions, the as-
sumption of a partitive mandatary by the United
States would merely add another element to that
gross mixture of competitions, rivalries, jealousies,
and discriminations out of which a new war will
surely be released with explosive violence. By de-
manding complete control over Asia Minor, in
trusteeship for the world at large, the United States
would offer a practicable alternative to the present
imbecile policy of partition. Such a demand would
challenge the financial and military imperialism of
the Great Powers. It would present a clear-cut'
issue by means of which the validity of the League
of Nations' colonial system would either be dis-
proved or vindicated. Our government should
either make such a demand or withdraw from the
scene altogether. Otherwise our presence in Asia
Minor will mean nothing more than it did in Russia
and at Versailles: it will mean that we are willing


204
September 6
THE DIAL
to stabilize the status quo of imperialism «as we have
fixed the status quo of capitalism, and are ready to
bear the burden of this program without sharing the
benefit. It would be another evidence that -we are
incapable of realizing our American political ideals,
and that the result of our sublime efforts is simply
to idealize European Realpolitik.
r ROM THE EVIDENCE IN HAND IT SEEMS AT
least probable that the Allied ultimatum to Hun-
gary was the result rather than the cause of the
impotence of the late Hapsburg Government. With
no other source of information than the fragment-
ary published reports, it did not take the people of
this country two weeks (August 9-23) to discover
that the Archduke's government "came into ex-
istence not by the will of the people but by a coup
d'etat carried out by a small body of police under
the protection of a foreign army." These facts,
now self-righteously published abroad in the Allied
ultimatum, were known to the emissaries of the
Entente when, on the day of the coup d'etat, they
held a conference with the Archduke and delegated
governmental authority to him. They were known
at Paris when the policy of bluster against Rou-
mania was abandoned, and the army which fathered
the dictatorship was authorized to remain in Buda-
pest for the purpose of assisting disinterestedly in
■the establishment of a government sufficiently
stable to sign and execute the Allied peace terms.
Certainly, then, it was not any sudden revelation of
the Archduke's character and intentions that caused
the Allies to break definitely and finally with him.
Rather it may be supposed that considerations such
as these led to the new judgment of Paris: by foster-
ing a monarchist movement in Hungary, the Allies,
and France in particular, would put a considerable
strain upon their relations with the small states of
the cordon sanitaire—Poland, Czechoslovakia, and
Ukrainia—where Allied influence seems already to
be losing something of its potence; further, it ap-
peared likely that a monarchy in Hungary, propped
up by interventionist troops, would collapse under
the burden of executing the Allied terms when the
Roumanians were finally withdrawn; and finally
the mocking inconsistency of installing a Hapsburg
king to enforce an Allied peace promised to alienate
from the Supreme Council the hardly reducible
minimum of public support still retained by that
body. In view of these conditions, with the advice
of Mr. Hoover, the Council repudiated a dictator-
ship which had at first been complacently accepted by
the Entente mission. Does this mean then that the
Supreme Council has at last adopted a policy of non-
intervention in Hungary? When the Entente troops
are withdrawn, and food is offered without distinc-
tion to all the parties in Hungary, it will be time
enough to rejoice over an Allied change of heart.
The value of lesser alterations of policy is rather
emotional than practical.
JT AINSTAKINGLY PRICKED OUT UPON A MAP, TH-:
military frontier of Soviet Russia assumes the form
of a great triangle, with its apex at Onega on the
Arctic shore, the eastern extremity of its base-line
near the point where the Trans-Siberian Railway
crosses the Tobol River in Siberia, and the opposite
base-angle near Kiev in the Ukraine. On the north-
eastern side of this triangle, counter-revolutionary
operations were begun in the spring with the ob-
ject of affecting a juncture of British-North-Rus-
sian and Kolchak forces at Kotlas, half way be-
tween Archangel and Glazov. But as the British
never covered more than a minute fraction of the 700
miles to Glazov, and as Admiral Kolchak has now
been driven back to a line some 600 miles east of
that point, the northeastern frontier is, from the
military point of view, non-existent. On the other
two sides of the triangle three major operations are
in progress. Of least importance is the Petrograd
offensive, which has been launched repeatedly and
has failed as often, by reason of a multiplicity of
internal dissensions in the Baltic states, and also
because of a widespread fear of Kolchak's imperial-
istic policy toward peoples formerly within the Em-
pire. The movement now converging upon the
southwest angle of the triangle is of much greater
significance. Here the Poles and the Ukrainians
—lately at war with each other—and the forces
of General Denikin are cooperating in a move-
ment which has cut off the Soviet Republic
from the Black Sea and has won back most of the
Ukraine from the Red Armies. The third major
operation is that of the Soviet forces engaged in
driving the eastern point of the Great Russian tri-
angle more deeply into Siberia. In balancing these
last two movements against each other, two things
must be taken into consideration: the extent of the
territary involved, and the character of this territory.
Unquestionably Denikin, with the Poles and the
Ukrainians, has overrun a region more extensile
than that from which Kolchak has been expelled
by the Soviet forces. On the other hand, the ex-
pulsion of the Soviet troops from Ukrainia amounts
to the recapture of territory which they have held
intermittently as foreign armies of occupation since
the Ukrainian declaration of independence in Jan-
uary 1918. The reconstitution of the Ukranian
state will necessitate either the abandonment by
Denikin of a large area now controlled by him, or
a dispute between him and the Ukrainians which
would probably result in war. Another extensive
region controlled by Denikin is that populated by
the Don Cossacks, followers of Korniloff in the
revolt against Kerensky, never completely subject
to the Soviet rule. But within the area just won
by the central Russian forces there are no racial or
nationalistic boundaries to create dissension. By and
large, it appears that through the fortunes of war
a region torn by rival ambitions has been exchanged
for a region capable of being absorbed completely
and finally into the life of the Soviet Republic.


1919
20
THE DIAL
What would Alphonse Daudet have said
to the methods of the French military command in
the Rhineland? Shortly after the expropriation of
Alsace-Lorraine he wrote a pathetic sketch por-
traying the noble sorrow of a schoolmaster forced
by the ruthless Prussian administrators to give his
last lesson in French. A tender and heart-wringing
story it was; a reminder to that next generation of
Alsatians "who could not forget." It is time to
translate this masterpiece into German, and to
couple it with the reminder that stupidity and
cruelty are the marks of a military caste no matter
what its country of origin may be. "The teaching
of the French language will be obligatory in the
elementary schools beginning with the next opening
of classes." That is the text of the French com-
mand to the local authorities in the sector south of
Coblenz. This is the obvious opening of an at-
tempt to denationalize the Rhineland, and it follows
significantly on the heels of the ill-timed effort to
set up a subsidiary state. - The Quai d'Orsay does
not wish to court a second failure in establishing its
protectorate, and it has therefore set about to pre-
pare the ground prudently by making the Rhineland
French in spirit before it makes it French in polit-
ical fact. The only immediate obstacle in the way
of this program is the Rhineland Commission. But
the French influence in that commission is pre-
ponderant, and should it develop an opposition
to the reactionary, militarist program, it is
doubtful whether it could enforce it any better
than the Allied Supreme Council in the face of the
Roumanian occupation of Hungary. As for the
plebiscite in the Saar Valley at the end of fifteen
rears, the present conduct of the French military
command furnishes a basis for our worst suspicions.
The policy of deferred seizure is doubtless a refine-
ment upon the abrupt methods practiced by (the
Prussians; but it is only a refinement. As long as
the reactionary elements continue to exercise power
the end will remain the same.
At last the Red Terror has come to Ameri-
ca. It is running wild among the guardians of
Business as Usual; official, semi-official, and quasi-
official; courts, camps, and churches; legislative,
judiciary, and executive. It is true, the common
run of American humanity continue to be singularly
immune and apathetic, but the Terror is already
consuming the tissues of many substantial citizens
in a shockingly public manner. The Guardians of
the Vested Interests are panic-stricken, all and sev-
eral, certified and subsidiary and surreptitious. The
commercialized newspapers all see Red. So do the
official and quasi-official conspiracies, such as the
Lusk Commission, the Union League Club, the
Security League, and the Civic Federation, as well
as the Publicity Police, the Workday Politicians,
the Clerics of the Philistine Confession, and the
Wild Asses of the Devil generally.
Driven by their own Red fancy, these many
Guardians have been banding together to molest
such of their neighbors as do not see Red; and with
the aid or connivance of panic-stricken officials, the
conspirators have been going in for inquisitorir.l
raids, to find evidence of undue sanity among the
sober population. All persons who refuse to be
stampeded by the Red alarm are open to suspicion
—unless they are visibly identified with the Vested
Interests—and any person who falls under the sus-
picion of the official and quasi-official alarmists is,
in effect, assumed to be guilty of sedition. Acute
paranoia persecutoria is coming to be rated the chief
of the civic virtues.
Already the confederated paranoiacs have assem-
bled much curious evidence of undue sanity among
the vulgar. An extract from an exhibit of such
evidence—a letter presumed to show seditiously ex-
cessive sanity—is here reproduced:
. . . the thing that seems to excite the Chester authori-
ties mainly is that the second speaker at the meeting
pdvocated the pardon of all political prisoners, including
Eugene Debs. The District Attorney said that Mr. Debs
was a "stinking, flea-bitten, rotten skunk." ... I asked
him what the possible charge [against the defendants]
could be and he said that they would try to hold them
[64 men] for treason against the state. They seem to have
a law in Philadelphia establishing a state treason against
the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. He looked up the law
in my presence and read it and then agreed with me that
the law would not apply. Then he said that the next thing
they could hold them for would be the section of inciting
to riot. But it developed that that constituted only mis-
demeanor and that the utmost could be a fine not exceed-
ing $100. I asked him whether he thought $5,000 was the
right sort of bail. He said that the g d Poles and
Russians had money to burn. . . . Before I left Ches-
ter he told me that he thought that . . . any law-
yer who would act for these men would be a disgrace
in the community. ... I told him that the informa-
tion [in regard to the legal fee] had been sent in by a
Quaker and then I struck the wrong key. He then called
the Quakers all kinds of names, the main adjective being
"stinking."
Another letter reporting the hearings of this case
says:
The attorney from Philadelphia who acted as local
counsel challenged the Judge to point to one decision in
the courts of Pennsylvania under which the defendants
could be held, whereupon the Judge sarcastically re-
marked, "I am much afraid that your industry has not
been rewarded. If you will only look into a case decided
in the year 1787, about the time when the Constitution was
to be adopted, you will find a precedent under which I
can hold these defendants." This case, it developed, was
the famous liberty pole case. The Judge said that at the
time of the adoption of the Constitution "there were
some misguided individuals who under the leadership of
Thomas Jefferson protested against the Constitution be-
cause it gave the federal government too much power."
But the Judge mentioned that the fact that the Consti-
tution was afterwards adopted showed that these indi-
viduals were wrong and mistaken. During the protest
raised by these so-called "misled individuals" they
erected what was known then as liberty poles . .
A man wars arrested for being present at the erection
of such a liberty pole, although he did not take part
in it, and he was convicted by the local court in
Philadelphia; the Judge finished, "and that is the law


206
September 6
THE DIAL
in this state and it is a good law and I am going to hold
these defendants for unlawful assembly under five thou-
sand dollars bail for action of grand jury."
It is alleged by the terrorized Guardians that the
letters which are here quoted go to show that certain
persons have interested themselves in procuring
counsel for certain impecunious workmen of foreign
extraction who were to have been convicted out of
hand on a footless charge of rioting; all of which
is taken as presumptive evidence of a seditious de-
gree of sobriety. These particular exhibits may
perhaps lay bare the Red state of mind of the Guard-
ians in a more picturesque fashion than the common
run of these uncanny keepsakes of the demented
which they have been assembling in. the course of
these raids; but incredibly foolish as this particular
episode is, it is after all no more than a fair indica-
tion of the pitch to which official hysteria has already
risen. The volume of evidence of this character
assembled by the Red alarmists is already fantas-
tically large; and they are busily accumulating more
of the same kind, by fair means and foul.
I N VIEW OF THE UNEXAMPLED INQUISITORIAL
raids set afoot or connived at by panic-stricken of-
ficials, and in view of the consequent increasing in-
security of person and property, it should be worth
while to take stock of the situation and cast up an
account of these disquieting circumstances that are
driving the Guardians of the Vested Interests to
distraction and frightening the Administration into
a muddle of unreasoned violence and subterfuge.
Notoriously, an uneasy situation has arisen out of
the war, and more immediately out of the highly
remarkable Peace in which the ■yvar has been brought
to a provisional close. There is much at stake in
the way of vested rights, and the state of things is
precarious enough. These disquieting circumstances
which go to make up this uneasy situation all con-
verge to the general upshot that Bolshevism is a
menace to the Vested Interests of privilege and
property. The dread reality of this menace to the
Vested Interests is not to be denied or made light of.
The Vested Interests are doubtless riding for a fall.
But there is also nothing to be gained by over-state-
ment and extravagant alarm. Hysteria is neither
comfortable nor convincing.
The guardians of the Vested Interests in Amer-
ica are doubtless wise in taking all reasonable pre-
cautions; they are presumably right in their evident
belief that the continued rule of these Vested Inter-
ests is no longer so secure as they would like; but
the Guardians would doubtless be still wiser to con-
fine their efforts to reasonable precautions instead of
screaming Wolf! Wolf! when there is no wolf in
sight. But it is not easy to keep an even temper
when the blessed beatitudes of special privilege are
in a way to be compromised. The Guardians of
these blessed beatitudes have been swept off their
footing by the discovery that a division is beginning
to run between the Vested Interests and the under-
lying population, and that the Vested Interests are
presumably the weaker of the two parties. No one
is to blame for this rapidly maturing division of the
community into the kept classes on the one side and
the underlying population from whom their keep
is drawn on the other side. Nor should it surprise
or alarm anyone who is at all informed, or willing
to be informed, as to the run of facts in the world
of business and industry the past few years. It is
all an outcome of the dispassionate sweep of forces
which no man can withstand or deflect. Only the
Guardians of the kept classes have been unable to
see the matter in that light, because it is the whole
duty of these Guardians of the Old Order to en-
deavor by all means, fair or foul, to deflect the sweep
of events over which they have no control. Such a
change of base as is now coming in sight is in the
nature of a moral impossibility for the keepers of
the Old Order.
Meantime the experience of the war and after
has brought the Guardians to realize that the con-
tinued rule of these Vested Interests of privilege
and property runs at cross-purposes with the mate-
rial welfare of the underlying population, and to
realize also that the underlying population is be-
ginning to be aware of the same fact. But the
Guardians fail to realize that a very stubborn and
massive fabric of settled use and wont surrounds
and supports these vested rights of privilege and
property, and that the American population is very
stolid and submissive in everything that concerns its
inbred prejudices. It is known and is beginning to
be notorious that the Vested Interests of business
are driven by business considerations to waste, mis-
manage, and obstruct the country's productive in-
dustry-, unavoidably and unremittingly, and to divert
an ever-increasing share of the country's income to
their own profit; and the Guardians are no longer
able to avoid all knowledge of this notorious state
of things; and they have let these known facts drive
them to the hasty conclusion that so soon as the
population at large come to know the same facts
and to take stock of them, there must immediately
follow a headlong popular revolt and a sweeping
disallowance of all these obstructive vested rights
of privilege and property. The Guardians of the
Vested Interests are presumably right in believing
that the existing state of things in business and in-
dustry should logically lead to revolt and disposses-
sion so soon as the facts of the case are known; but
they overlook the main consideration, that any ef-
fectual movement of overturn will have to proceed
not on grounds of logic, but on grounds of senti-
ment and the strategic disposal of forces. Hence
their excessive alarm. Popular sentiment, as well
as the strategic disposal of forces, is still securely to
be counted on to uphold the established order of
vested rights and Business as Usual. The Guard-
ians have allowed the known facts of the case to un-
seat their common sense. Hence the pitiful spectacle
of official hysteria and the bedlamite conspiracies in
restraint of sobriety.


19*9
207
THE DIAL
Casual Comment
1 he New Movement in the Theater used
to be the talk of the studios and the literary mag-
azines. In fact it originated and grew and reached
its heyday and died in the studios and literary mag-
azines. The theater scarcely knew it. The profes-
sional dramatist and the professional actor laughed
at it; the professional manager vituperated it; the
playgoer ignored it. Literally the New Movement
never got anywhere. Certainly it never got beyond
scenery- Naturally one is tempted to ask why this
healthy impulse to thrust aside the quackeries and
insincerities of current theatricals proved so frus-
trate. Until lately the answer to this question took
refuge in a cynicism which affected to believe that
good things are sterile and shortlived and ineffec-
tual in direct proportion to their value to the
human race. But it is now possible to expose the
fallacy of this banal assumption. What was lacking
in the New Theater Movement was a willingness
to deal with the economic structure of the dram-
atic arts. It assumed that the economic stage was set
and that the respective parts in theatrical production
had been assigned for all time. The members of
the Actors' Equity Association have lately pro-
claimed the falsity of this assumption. In adjusting
what was relatively a petty question with the czars
of upper Broadway they found themselves in a
position that compelled them to utilize the whole
technique of industrial group action. They formed
an association. They formulated their collective
demands and sought as a corporate body to bargain
for their acceptance. Appearing in one of the most
personalized and individualized professions, these
actions implied a revolution in the actor's scheme of
life, but the bearing of economic principles upon
the New Movement in the Theater would not have
been evident had the actors succeeded forthwith in
making the businesslike adjustments upon which
they properly have insisted. In the course of a few
years the actors telescoped a century of trades-union
history, and at last when they decided to rent a
hall and run a benefit performance for themselves
and by themselves they reached a plane of industrial
practice upon which only a few venturous personnel
managers, economists, and guild socialists now
stand. They discovered that they acted with
greater creative vigor in the pursuit (as Mr. Ber-
trand Russell would say) of a universal end—
without any especial monetary reward—than they
acted in the old days when they jockeyed for a posi-
tion on Broadway and measured their success by
Broadway's fatal standard. Out of the mouth of
fools comes wisdom, and out of the experience of the
star comedian of the Follies came this perception.
It was a thrilling and astounding discovery no
doubt—the discovery that the money incentive had
never released the creative impulses and that the
attitude of being in business for one's health (at
which the mammonists sneer) is the only healthy
approach to one's business. Let us hope that the
members of the Actors' Equity Association will be
shrewd enough to follow the implications of their
discovery; for the hope of the dramatic arts rests
upon their ability to eliminate those Tired Business
Men of Broadway, the managers, who have erected
their own flaccid tastes and moral prejudices into
a criterion of public entertainment. Let the actors
band together with the dramatists, the scene paint-
ers, the stage hands, the electricians, the ushers, and
the other subsidiary crafts. Let them pledge their
joint talents and aptitudes as guarantee of their
capacity to attract audiences and thus justify the
extension of credit for new productions on the
part of bankers and business men. Let them take
a new pride in their guild, found their own schools
of acting, and give full play to all the creative
forces that pulse through the organization from
stagehand to star. The significant fight is not this
passing one against the managers' syndicate, with its
inevitable ending—to the victor belongs the spoil. In
the contest for money advantages the syndicate can,
by reason of interest and long training, more
than hold its own. The real engagement will
begin when the actors set out to become their
own producers, and when they seek to realize the
principle that to those who have the ability to
produce belong the instruments of production. In
this battle they will learn that victory brings with
it not booty but toil—and that the toil is superior
to the booty! With the lesson thus acquired the
New Theater Movement, rich in dramatic poten-
tialities, may resume its career with some prospect
of substantial success.
1 he debate concerning the relation of
Christianity and war does not date its beginning
from the outbreak of the European conflict, nor
have the last five years contributed much of value
to the discussion. True there have been of late
numerous efforts to extricate the Church from the
devilish dilemma in which it was placed by the
great war, but most of these efforts have been
neither more nor less successful than that of the
Rev. Dr. John Kilman in The War and Preaching
(Yale University Press) ; that is to say, they have
not been successful at all. If, as is so often said,
the Galilean Gospel is of so great simplicity that
its major truths are within the compass of a child's
understanding, expert pulling and hauling to stretch
a cover of Christian decency over the war seems
sadly out of place. The incongruity of this type
of apologetics appears plainly enough when Kilman
and Tolstoy are set against each other. In The
Pathway of Life (International Book Publishing
Company) Tolstoy asks:
Shall we understand the words of Christ admonishing us
to love those that hate us, our enemies, and forbidding
force of any description, just as they were spoken and
expressed, or as the teaching of meekness, humility, and
love, or as something still different?


208
September 6
THE DIAL
And this is the Russian sage's answer:
Without admitting that under no circumstances may man
use force on others, all the teachings of Christ are empty
words.
For the soothing of Christian consciences that can-
not accept this interpretation the sacrificial aspect
of death by battle has of late been much empha-
sized. But the whole business of the soldier is to
use force—to destroy the enemy; that he himself is
perhaps destroyed by opposing force is an unfortu-
nate accident which prohibits his accomplishing the
purpose for which he was sent into battle, but has
no bearing whatever upon the moral value of that
purpose. A soldier does not die for a cause; he
kills for it.
With the world at war, then, the "Christian"
can break with the State and go to jail; or he can
break with Christianity and go to war; or he can
take the easy and popular course and—with any
amount of professional assistance—make Christian-
ity over and take it to war with him. People who
feel that nothing can be right except it bear the
name of Christian found themselves forced to the
latter course if they were to support the war at all.
But in the confession that "the right" and "the
Christian" need not always be synonymous there
lies the alternative possibility of forceful action that
is at the same time honest action—of frankly un-
christian war that is nevertheless deemed necessary
and right under the conditions given. By and large,
would it not be better to confess that Christian doc-
trine is not universally and eternally applicable—
that it may at times be advisable to commit
unchristian acts—and that it is better to call such
acts unchristian than to warp Christianity to cover
them, thereby depriving humanity of the inspiration
of an idealistic system capable of full application
only in better times than these? x
■*■ HEY SAY THAT FREE VERSE IS AT ITS FREEST IN
England today; that the old forms are being
attacked and that the younger generation is finding
a hearing even in the conservative reviews. Little
confirmation has been given these rumors, however,
by the six volumes of verse most lately imported.
Two volumes in the group (Small Craft, and
Sailor Town; Doran) promise something more, and
indeed contain passages of no little strength. C.
Fox Smith is the author, a young lady who has been
hailed as a writer of genuine sailor chanteys, a sec-
ond Masefield. It is quite possible that her pub-
lishers are correct, and that she has acquired the
real sea swing. She does not, however, know
sailors; the British lads that man her craft are
quite as fabulous as the roast beef of old England.
Another woman who comes to us highly recom-
mended is May Doney, whose Way of Wonder
(Doran) carries an' introduction by Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch. She is a not-too-complex soul who
thinks the universe is simply wonderful and
expresses her adoration of the deity by a profusion
of capital letters. Dorothy L. Savers writes re-
ligious verse much better than Miss Doney. The
God of Catholic Tales (Oxford) is medieval and
warmly personal, the antithesis of Miss Doner's
conception. In these days no one gives him much
credence. Nevertheless he reads well, and the verse
of Catholic Tales, whether good or bad, always
achieves more freshness than one expects.
The one bit of vers libre to be found in these six
books managed to creep between the covers of
Father Noah (McBride). Geoffrey Whitworth—
who usually concerns himself with writing ballads
of polite suicide and painted ladies—found for his
title poem the amusing and fantastic idea that Noah,
by pulling out the bung of thesArk, could have put
an end to the human race. This concept hi. de-
velops in homely language, while achieving an
unobstructive Biblical meter. Altogether he has been
quite successful.
Thomas Thornely is a Cambridge don with a
small estate, some knowledge of the classics, and a
distaste for modern innovations. Late in middle
life, his facility for rhyming has led him to publish
his collected verse (Verses from Fen and Fell;
Cambridge University Press). He laments the old
days whimsically, and is enough affected by the war
to join the hue and cry after the Kaiser. The
Bolsheviki arrived too late to go to press, but one
hopes for a later volume.
With regret we announce the resignation
of John Dewey from the editorial board of The
Dial; Mr. Dewey's plans for an extended absence
in the Far East make it impossible for him to con-
tinue his editorial connection with the magazine.
With this issue Lewis Mumford and Geroid Robin-
son join the editorial staff; both these writers are
already well known to Dial readers through their
recent contributions. We also take pleasure in
announcing the appointment of Oswald W. Knauth
as Secretary-Treasurer of The Dial Publishing
Company.
EDITORS
Martyn Johnson
Robert Morss Lovett
Helen Marot
Thorstein Veblen
Associates
Clarence Britten
Lewis Mumford
Geroid Robinson
Secretary-Treasurer
Oswald W. Knauth


1919
209
THE DIAL
Communications
The League of Secret Police
Sir: A rather easy optimism has been expecting
that, with the end of the war, would come, too, the
end of the period of repression of freedom in the
warring soi-disant democracies. Similar expecta-
tions, I have not the least doubt, were held a hun-
dred years ago when Louis XIV was safely restored
to the throne of his fathers and Napoleonic militar-
ism "crushed."
But Waterloo was followed, not by the lifting,
but by the tightening of the grip of governments.
It was after the peace was made that there began
the period of the Six Acts in England, the White
Terror in France, the Carlsbad Decrees in Ger-
many, of the Holy Alliance all over Europe.
And today all the phenomena visible here in
England point to a similar attempt to rivet perma-
nently the shackles imposed on us "for the dura-
tion of the war." The same temptations are pres-
ent. There are ideals abroad threatening to the
powers that be. There is "Bolshevism" today as
there were Liberalism and Nationalism a century
ago. And there is now, as then, the same too-
natural loathing of men to part with the arbitrary
power they have once wielded. They are not show-
ing the slightest intention of parting with it. Our
mistress D. O. R. A. is to hold sway for " at least
another year" albeit she was supposed to die at
"the end of the war or as soon afterwards as possi-
ble." And she is to be supplemented during the
last year of her reign by her sister and destined suc-
cessor, T. O. P. A.—the Treaty of Peace Act-
under which " His Majesty may do such things as
appear to him necessary for carrying out the Treaty"
—a magnificent clause which evidently gives George
V, or in reality, of course, Mr. Lloyd George, legal
power to do anything he may please.
We then, in England, are clearly in for a pleas-
ant time. But what I particularly want you in
America to realize is that this is not a national but
an international problem: that, while each govern-
ment, British, French, German and, I presume,
American, will deal with its own Radicals, they will
do so, not in isolation, but in collaboration. We
are in fact up against an inter-governmental organi-
zation for the suppression of freedom; and its
methods are based upon those of the old Russian
Secret Service, whose methods the French police had
many opportunities of studying during the years
of their cooperation in the days of the Czarist
alliance. Three or four cases during the past month
have given us good warning that this is so, and have
given us some insight into the methods adopted.
The first is that of Robert Minor, which you
presumably know as well as I, for all that I saw the
whole affair as it developed in Paris. But let me
remind you of the essential facts: that Minor was
accused by the British Government of carrying on
"Bolshevik, propaganda"; that he was secretly
arrested, without warrant or charge, by the French
police, and handed over to the American military
authorities, who placed him in solitary confinement
at Coblenz, told him that he would probably be
shot, and were preparing to try him by court-mar-
tial. After a month's imprisonment, the case was
abandoned, it was " considered inadvisable to press
the charges at present" and Minor was set free.
But that was only_ because the authorities discov-
ered, to their intense chagrin, that they had stirred
up a hornet's nest, and that half the press of Eng-
land was a-buzz with the matter they had hoped to
carry through in comfortable secrecy.
"It is these confounded newspapermen," said a
high American officer just before they let Minor go,
"and it looks as though we shall lose our man after
all."
Very closely parallel to the Minor case—but this
time involving Great Britain and Germany instead
of Great Britain, America, and France—is the case
of Philips Price, the Berlin correspondent of the
London Daily Herald. Price was arrested in Ber-
lin, again without warrant and without charge, by
the German military. In reply to the protests of his
fellow-correspondents, Herr Noske, the Minister of
Defense and head of the reactionary party in the
Weimar Cabinet, stated that though Price was be-
ing kept in prison, the German government had no
particular interest in him, but that he was liable to
be handed over to the British at Cologne. And the
only allegations made against him in his examina-
tion in prison were that he had conducted anti-En-
tente propaganda while in Russia and that he was
about to go to the Ruhr Valley, which is close to the
British zone of occupation.
Again there was an uncomfortable amount of
publicity. Again when the case got well ventilated
and the protests began, Price was released by the
intervention of the German cjvil authorities. And
of course there were prompt—and quite unconvinc-
ing—denials that the British were in any way con-
cerned or that there had been any intention of
handing him over to them at Cologne.
Just at the same time as Price was seized, Emont,
rhe leader of the German Bank-Clerks' Union, was
also arrested on the charge of having been concerned
in the usual "Bolshevik propaganda" among the
British troops on the Rhine. He contrived to es-
cape from prison, after beinp told that he was to
be deported to Cologne for trial by the British mili-
tary authorities. Again the unexpected and unwel-
come publicity was followed by the usual denials.
So much for the three main cases—three cases in
which prominent men have been secretly arrested
without warrant or charge by international coopera-
tion between the secret services. But these do not
exhaust the evidence.
There is the case of Longuet and Frossard. They
were detained at Folkestone by the British police,
prevented from attending a British Labor Party
Conference, and sent back to France. Simultan-
eously Jouhaux and Dumoulin of the French C. G.


2 IO
September 6
THE DIAL
T. and d'Arragona of the Italian C. G. L., who
had already landed, were subjected to a ridiculous
cross-examination which aimed at showing that they
had come to England as bearers of German gold for
the suborning of British merchant-seamen. It was
a silly story; but the point is that it was based on
information sent by the Paris branch of the British
Secret Service, prompted by the French military,
who, after the manner of their predecessors in the
Dreyfus days, are willing to believe anything and to
do anything against a political opponent; and that
Mr. Winston Churchill and Mr. Shortt complac-
ently set the British police machine to work against
two distinguished guests at the behest of the French
royalist-militarist clique.
Then, there is the case of Mr. Nathan, the Brit-
ish secret service agent, who seems to be curiously
involved -in the doings of your famous Lusk-Steven-
son Committee. You probably know far more
about Mr. Nathan than I do. But the essen-
tial thing is that Mr. Nathan is an international
figure, that he is another piece of evidence of the
international work that is going on. And here,
quite by chance, is yet another at my hand—a short
news paragraph telling of the arrest on arrival at
Naples of several Italian "anarchists" on informa-
tion supplied by the American police. America and
Italy this time you see. It has many ramifications,
this network of reactionary intrigue. There is, I
have no doubt, much more evidence to come. But
it is fairly clear, is it not, what we are up against?
The League of Nations may be a still-born child;
but the League of Secret Police is an unpleasantly
vigorous brat. And if it is allowed to grow to full
maturity, it will be just about as dangerous a mon-
ster as ever vexed the patient earth.
We have got to cooperate in infanticide, then,
we on this side and you on that. And the best
monster-brat-killer, or at any rate scotcher, at our
service at the moment is certainly publicity. It
was publicity that saved Minor and Price; publicity
that forced Mr. Lloyd George to apologize to Lon-
guet. Publicity, I hope, will curb Mr. Nathan's
activities.
It will not do the trick entirely. That will only
be accomplished when you and we and the French
and the Germans and the rest of us have, each in
our own country, dealt faithfully with our present
military masters. But plenty of publicity will be a
great check on these new activities. Because there
is still a certain prejudice in this country against
cooperation with Noske and his friends; and there
is, I should imagine, a prejudice in the United States
against American citizens' being arrested at the be-
hest of Scotland Yard or the British War Office.
The Police International is painfully anxious to
hide its activities as far as possible from the eye
of the public. Clearly it is our job to give it that
fame which it deserves but does not desire.
W. N. Ewer.
St. Johns Woods, London.
Heresy and Infallibility
Sir: The following note from the Adjutant-
General's office at Washington (July 7) may have
more than a personal interest:
I am directed by the Secretary of War to acknowledge
the receipt of your letter dated June 13, 1919, con-
cerning Carl Haessler. This case has been brought to
the attention of the War Department many times and
both the details of Haessler's court-martial and the con-
dition of his family are thoroughly understood in the De-
partment. The Department has attempted to deal fairly
with all men who are sincere in their conscientious ob-
jections to- warfare. Haessler, however, has been
judged as not being one of this type, his objections being
against this war rather than all wars, due to the fact
that he considers it a capitalistic one. On that account
it seems impossible to grant him further clemency at the
present time.
Thus Carl Haessler, former Rhodes Scholar
and instructor in Philosophy at Illinois, lately re-
moved from Leavenworth to Alcatraz, is paying as
heavy a penalty for the long result of his political
and social thinking, and for the courage in times
of stress to regulate his conduct according to that
thinking, as the forger and the embezzler, the thief
and the thug and the white-slaver pay for their
vice and crime.
Query: if an,American citizen gets several years
behind the bars for believing this a capitalistic war,
what is to be the federal penalty for those other
American citizens who, having learned their politi-
cal philosophy from President Wilson, believe this
is a capitalistic peac'e?
Robert Wylie Weldon.
West of Chicago.
Contributors
Lawrence K. Frank, a statistician who during
the war was chief of the Industrial Section of the
War Industries Board, is the auhor of a book on
public utility accounting which will appear this fall.
Oswald W. Knauth was'Assistant Professor ot
Economics at Princeton University until the out-
break of the war. He holds the degree of Ph.D.
from Columbia, has written a number of magazine
articles on economic subjects, and is now Secretary-
Treasurer of The Dial Publishing Company.
Mont Schuyler, a civil engineer, was for a time
in charge of the Municipal Testing Laboratory at
St. Louis. He has served successively as assistant
editor of the Engineering News Record, examiner
for the War Labor Board, and member of the
Industrial Department of the Inter-Church World
Movement.
Helen Hull is a writer of short stories and an
instructor in English at Columbia University.
Walter L. Myers has recently been discharged
from the army, where he served as a Second Lieu-
tenant of Infantry, and has returned to his former
position as Assistant Professor of English at the
State University of Iowa. His short stories have
appeared in various magazines.


1919
211
THE DIAL
Notes on New Books
Saint's Progress. By John Galsworthy. 404
pages. Scribner.
In Saint's Progress Galsworthy has contented
himself with type-characters. The book lacks in
this respect the searching surety of The Freelands
and falls far short of The Man of Property. The
author's defense lies in his having intended, rather,
a study of the play of the forces of love and religion,
against the background of the war. In this method
it recalls The Dark Flower. In Saint's Progress
we have mirrored for our discernment a number of
indistinct but moving figures of mid-war days.
That of Edward Pierson, in Holy Orders twenty-
six years and not now knowing what he believes, is
central. Gently dogmatic, widowed after eight per-
fect years of marriage, he lives a life in which emo-
tionalism, thwarted and wistful, mingles indistin-
guishably with religious fervor. He clings in lonely
fashion to his church. His two daughters are slip-
ping, have slipped insensibly, from the leash of his
faith.
Gratiou. the elder, is a nurse at twenty and wed-
ded to a soldier-doctor of materialist views. She
has decided, in the face of the world war, that either
there is nc God, or, worse still, he is either a wicked
or a helpless God. She is resolved to look beyond
such a God for truth. "Some people search all
their lives, and die searching. Why shouldn't I?"
The younger daughter, who usurps the center of the
reader's interest, is Noel, eighteen. Here as else-
where in his work, Galsworthy does supremely well
what few of our moderns can do at all. He por-
trays the young girl at her loveliest, a creature of
intelligence, simplicity, and charm. Noel Pierson
enlists powerfully the reader's sympathy and under-
standing. In her own passionate revolt against
convention and the cruelty of death, in the terrific
tangle caused by her war baby, she arrays us on the
side of Youth, Youth in the forcing-house of war.
pitifully snatching what it can of sweetness before
life is crushed out.
"I shall have a son; Cyril won't quite have died.
And I don't want to be forgiven," she says to those
who refuse to permit her marriage to the dead boy
whom she had known only twenty-one days. But
^r effort to make the best of it, to rejoice in her
taby, is thwarted by the Godly Christians of her
lather's parish.
They don't even begin to believe,' says Noel,
'whatever they say or think. I hate them and some-
times I hate the Church; either it's hard and nar-
row, or else it's worldly.' She stopped at the ex-
pression on her father's face, the most strange look
°( Pain, and horror, as if an unspoken treachery of
ois own had been dragged forth for his inspection."
Noel's tragedy reveals tellingly the tremendous
disproportion of our emphasis on social sanction, on
mere legality in marriage and birth. But Noel, in
some sort, finds harbor. It is the figure of her
father which in the end remains before us, pathetic
and ineffectual, " tall, upright, and thin in his grey
parsonical suit on whose black kerseymere vest a lit-
tle gold cross dangled." His own daughters he can-
not reach or help, his congregation has rejected him
in highly unchristian fashion. And at the front
where he hopes at last to find opportunity for simple,
helpful comradeship, the dying Tommy who knows
himself going West can yet show a flicker of humor,
of ironic question, at Pierson's fervent "To God,
my dear son!" .
Through the lips of the Belgian refugee artist the
author has perhaps put his finger squarely on the
pathetic fallacy of clericalism. "Frankly, mon-
sieur, do you not feel that with every revelation of
your soul and feelings virtue goes out of you? And
I will tell you why, if you will not think it an of-
fense. In opening your hearts you feel that you lose
authority. You are officers and must never forget
that. Is it not so?"
The Firebrand of Bolshevism. By
Princess Catherine Radziwill. 293 pages.
Small, Maynard.
Volleys from a Non-Combatant. By
William Roscoe Thayer. 322 pages. Double-
day, Page.
After the Whirlwind. By Charles Edward
Russell. 317 pages. Doran.
Revolutionary Days. By Princess Can-
tacuzene. 411 pages. Small, Maynard.
Absolute truth, like Wordsworth's violet, is
shy. Especially in this avalanche of Russian prop-
aganda the reader must peer diligently under a
great many mossy stones before he can hope to find
any semblance of the actual facts involved. A
book of substantiated material presenting the Rus-
sian situation, building itself up through accurate
definitions of certain fundamentals to understand-
ing Bolsheviki and soviet, would be invaluable
aid. But it is not forthcoming. Everyone who
writes about Russia has a preconceived prejudice or
a desire to influence opinion or both. When the
truth is sought in a book like Princess Radziwill's
The, Firebrand of Bolshevism the task is particu-
larly discouraging, for her account is an unsuccess-
ful attempt to romanticize international intrigue,
and it results in a hopeless muddle of vague per-
sonalities and vaguer transactions. The one unmis-
takable point is that the author is loyal to the old
czarist regime and hates Bolshevism. Mr. Thayer
is frank about a similar hatred in his hysterical
volleys directed at the Russian revolutionists and
their allies, the Germans; and it was to prove,
surely, that he recognized the combined danger
when most Americans were waiting watchfully
that his volume is published, for certainly it can
have no other reason for publication. It is a col-
lection of heterogeneous essays which may have
been valuable at the time of original periodical
printing but are now unwelcome echoes of that


2 12
September 6
THE DIAL
war-hate we have placed, for the time at least,
behind us. Charles Edward Russell is less excit-
able. Where Mr. Thayer attacks Bolshevism as
a Rooseveltian nationalist and Princess Radziwill
attacks it as a czaristJoyalist, Mr. Russell espouses
the same cause as a good old-fashioned socialist.
All in all, it is a question whether or not the prop-
agandists are attaining their ends; for the fear of
Bolshevism by nations and individuals has grown
instead of shrunk. It reminds one of the psycho-
logical theory that a man is afraid because his hair
is standing on end, his teeth chattering, and his
heart pounding unnaturally. Princess Radziwill,
Mr. Thayer, and Mr. Russell are missionaries; but
Princess Cantacuzene, although she does hoe-a row
for the Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholaivitch, is
more interested in presenting a calm report of her
experiences during revolutionary days. As such it
can well serve as a source of historical material.
It is naively aristocratic. Her picture of the Rus-
sian nobility may show the heavy touch of sym-
pathy, but it is also illuminating. And her writ-
ing is refreshing; it is a relief to find an author
discussing the Russian situation who does not use
words so loosely, as do Princess Radziwill, Mr.
Thayer, and Mr. Russell, as to consider that Bol-
shevist, anarchist, and Jew are synonymous. The
difficulty with books of this type is that they are
partisan, and impossible of any degree of uni-
versality. They are a means, not an end. They
are propaganda, not literature, and hence have
little business with truth, which is, in them, even
more than half hidden from the eye.
i
The Prelude To Bolshevism. By A. F.
Kerensky. 312 pages. Dodd, Mead.
For a few months this young Jewish lawyer, A. F.
Kerensky, had the eyes of the world centered upon
him. Every word that he urged was reprinted in
thousands of newspapers. Every time that he was
ill millions of people held their breaths and won-
dered what would become of Russia. He had
helped to overthrow Czarism, he slept in the Czar's
bed, and he held the responsiblity for a democratic
Russian state. At the time many believed that vic-
tory or defeat in the great war hung by the slender
thread of Kerensky's ability to maintain the war
morale of his nation.
In this book, The Prelude to Bolshevism, he sub-
mits the theory that Bolshevism conquered in Russia
because of the Korniloff uprising, which so under-
mined the Kerensky government that the Reds had
no difficulty in accomplishing their coup d'etat of
November 7, 1917. He says: "An adventure of a
small group was transformed in the inflamed im-
agination of the masses to a conspiracy of the whole
of the bourgeoisie and of all the upper classes
against democracy and the working masses." This
spark of fear was blown by the Bolsheviki into the
flame of rebellion, and the successful Red revolt
followed.
The volume consists of a report of the investiga-
tion of Kerensky's part in the Korniloff incident be-
fore a Commission of Inquiry, edited by himself
with full use of the editorial prerogative. It is de-
tailed to a degree, and not squeamish about being
repetitious. Historians will consider it valuable as
a source of facts and opinions. But the casual
reader who has retained mental pictures of Keren-
sky the Russian dictator will be somewhat disap-
pointed. Kerensky is so eager to prove the guilt of
Korniloff that he depreciates in value himself.
There are no revelations here of" that personality
which commanded the attention of all nations, no
oratory, no brilliant statesmanship, no political
idealism that is new. This is the wordy legal docu-
ment of a man protecting his human reputation.
Trailing the Bolsheviki. By Carl W.
Ackerman. 308 pages. Scribner.
The determination of a group of Republican
senators to pare the Shantung situation to the core
brings attention to the alarming lack of current in-
formation on the Far East.' Japanese censorship,
as skilfully unsparing as that of the other Allies,
has carefully prevented accurate or complete data
from reaching the American press. Yet, although
even the most idealistic of the statesmen have for-
saken open covenants openly arrived at, the public
still rather emphatically demands cold facts upon
which to base opinion. And the cold facts from
the Far East have a chill all their own.
This volume by staff correspondent of the New
York Times, who graciously confesses to having
followed the serpentine trail of the Bolsheviki
through Russia, Germany, Seattle, Chicago, France,
Switzerland, Austria, Mexico, and Spain is timely
because it offers for examination some of the facts
concerning Allied and Japanese policies in Siberia.
Although nine-tenths of the book is devoted to the
theory that Bolshevism is a failure in Russia and
merely socialism outside of Russia the remaining
tenth, with its analysis of the Far East problem,
justifies the publication.
That is, the publication is justified for those who
did not know that Japan sent seventy thousand
troops into Siberia instead of a pledged seven thou-
sand, that Japanese agents, soldiers, merchants, in-
vestigators overran Siberia, that at one time no
caravan could go in or out of Manchuria, Mon-
golia, or Siberia without the consent of Japanese
guards, that Japan prevented an Allied manage-
ment of the Trans-Siberian railroad, or that the
militarists may at any time overthrow the "peace
party" now in control and make of Shantung an-
other cause for a world war. Ackerman's discus-
sion of the Russian political melee can be disregarded
without loss. He is essentially the journalist, to
whom the fate of the czar is immeasurably more
fascinating than the development of political forms
through experiments conducted in a nation of mil-
lions of souls. The romantic history of the Czecho-


1919
213
THE DIAL
Mare Nostrum
(Our Sea) BY VICENTE BLASCO IBANEZ
Author of "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"
The New York Sun in an enthusiastic review says:
"When you have come to the end of the last page you will say aloud (and no 'if about it) that
this is as great a book as the author's 'The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.' ... To all such
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Written since "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," and in important ways supplementing that
wonderful story, this bids fair to rival even that great novel in popularity.
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The Man with the Lamp
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An ingenious Btory, sparkling with dry humor and
with an underlying mystical strain which is most
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Silver and Gold
By DANE COOLIDGE
A genuine man's book, breezy, western, an absorb-
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The Crescent Moon
By CAPT. F. BRETT YOUNG
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It takes you straight into Africa . . . gives
you a pleasant, creepy feeling." Net, $1*75
The Betrayers
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A brilliant historical romance dealing with the ex-
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Little Houses
By GEORGE WODEN
A charmingly quaint atmosphere pervades this
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which Is warmly recommended to discriminating
readers. Net, $1.90
RECORDS WORTH KEEPING
What America Did
By FLORENCE FINCH KELLY
A Record of Achievement in the Prosecution of
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"In no other book up to date have the many
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Helping France
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A. story of the Red Cross in the Devastated Areas.
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The Hying Spy
By LIEUT. CAMILLO DE CARLO
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Notes ol a Camp Follower
By E. W. HORNUNG
A "Y" man's diary, a tale, and a picture all In
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Net, 92.00
Standing By
By ROBERT KEABLE
One of the most significant volumes produced by
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Germany's New War Against America By Stanley Frost
A reprint of the important articles in The Neiv York Tribune, in which Mr. Frost pointed out that
even during the war Germany was planning attacks upon the world's factories and markets. In this
invaluable book her plans for the future and the menace of her commercial aims and methods are re-
vealed in detail. With an Introduction by A. Mitchell Palmer. Attorney General of the U. S., and an
endorsement by Francis P. Garvan, Alien Property Custodian, which commend it strongly to all Ameri-
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P0STACE EXTRA. ORDER
OF YOUR BOOKSELLER OR
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681 FIFTH AVENUE
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\Vtt:n writing to adyerti»ra please mention Thi Dial.


- September 6
Slovak forces in Siberia interests him more than
the varying fortunes of the Kolchak government, of
which he seems to know more than he tells. He
has picked out features—news stories—and loosely
gathered them into a reminiscent volume which
must be very interesting to his friends.
MoDERN JAPAN. By Amos S. and Susane
W. Hershey. 382 pages. Bobbs-Merrill.
The impression which one gets from reading this
book, which is like a searchlight upon economic
conditions and many varied problems of life, in
Nippon, is that the Japanese are likely to die of self
conceit. Of this commodity, islanders have the
reputation, even to a proverb, of possessing an over-
plus. It is true that in all books on Japan, there
is an indefinable something that differentiates them
as written either by long residents or visitors. Pro-
fessor' Hershey, however, having written on the
diplomacy of the Russo-Japanese war, pierces below
the surface of things, and the woman's eyes see
reality, as well as romance. At Europe, in Korea,
as well as at home, Japan is on trial before the world
and this study, in white light, will help the judicial
reader to appraise rightly the civilization that claims .
equality with that of the leading nations. It may
be that standards of living, moral and economic,
may furnish better data for judgment than what
tourists seek for their amusement. One gets the
impression that the old plan of invoking the “em-
peror,” as a panacea is rapidly becoming impotent .
if not obsolescent.
NATIONAL Gover NMENTs AND THE WoRLD
WAR. By Frederick A. Ogg and Charles A.
Beard. 603 pages. Macmillan.
With the collaboration of Professor Ogg and
Mr. Beard in their new book, National Govern-
ments and the World War, we have another
announcement that America and the rest of the
world are no longer political strangers; and that
an appreciation of American political institutions
is dependent upon an understanding of the organ-
ization of governments other than our own. In
the present work the union of effort, as far as it
goes, is a happy one; for both authors view the
world of politics and government through essen-
tially American lenses. The result of their efforts
is a text book not long enough to become unpopu-
lar, but far too short to be a complete survey of the
subject. While Professor Ogg's exposition of the
development of constitutions and of the govern-
ments in some of the larger states engaged in the
war may explain, in part, the haggling of the peace
delegates; and Mr. Beard's elucidation of the
changes in government organization in America may
help us to restrain our impatience and withhold
our judgment on the work of the Peace Confer-
ence, neither of them brings forward any sugges-
tions for the solution of the particular problems
facing the various governments of the world.
Moreover, Professor Ogg, in his division of the
work, has limited his exposition to the governments
of Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Italy, Bel-
gium, and Great Britain and her colonies. Why
Russia was omitted is inconceivable, unless Mr.
Ogg would have us believe that his treatment of
one autocratic government sufficed for the pur-
poses of the book. If this was his viewpoint, the
omission becomes inexcusable, as the book is essen-
tially a text book, and the date of publication is
1919. The authors could have performed a more
satisfactory service for students of politics and gov-
ernment by bringing out new editions of their pre-
vious works and embodying therein all the recent
developments in experimental government. With
such a plan, their work could have withstood the
charge of superficiality.
THE MASTERY of THE FAR EAST: The
Story of Korea, and Japan's Rise to Supremacy
in the Far East. By Arthur Judson Brown.
671 pages. Scribner.
The characteristic note in this illuminating
volume is sympathy—with judicial impartiality.
An orthodox Presbyterian missionary secretary, who
is a stalwart in his belief of propaganda of the fun-
damentals of the Christian faith, talks about Con-
fucianists, Shintoists, and Buddhists, as if they were
men and brothers. Like the Revised Version, he
leaves out the word “heathen " and uses the term
“nations.” Two visits in recent years sufficed for
his impressions, but for a quarter of a century he
has disciplined himself to hear all sides and be a
judge of diverse opinions and claims.
Though in the language of old archery, he “claps
the clout,” in striking the exact moment for news
value, when Korea is in a state of uprising, this
book is the result of long preparation, and without
any sign of haste. In his view, Korea is the strategic
point in the Far East. He is a compiler in describing
history of people and civilization of the ancient
peninsula, now a province of Japan—and her Ire-
land. The Japanese may conquer these unarmed
people by force, but they can never bind the Korean
intellect. Concerning battles between the pen and
the sword, history has but one answer. Part Two
outlines the history for possession: China and Rus-
sia being the other two powers besides Japan that
coveted Naboth's vineyard. In Part Three the
horrors of Japanese imperialism—real, biting,
poisonous—are consciously, or otherwise, shown.
In Part Four, discussing the place and potency of
Christian Missions in the Far East, the author is
at his best. He has a statesmanlike grasp of the
whole situation. Yet on the whole, he justi-
fies the Japanese, and this without a trace of
partisanship. With them rests the mastery of
the Far East.


-
(#
à - - - ---
( ſ sº
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SOCIOLOGY AND RELIGION
Social Evolution and the Development of Religion
By CARL K. Mahon EY
Introduction by W. J. Thompson
Preachers must, of course, shake hands and smile
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By CHARLEs Edward Locke
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GERMANY'S MORAL DOWN FALL
The Tragedy of Academic Materialism
By Alexander W. CRAwford
The war is over. On with the war ! Many
of the world's achievements have already been
sacrificed to the moloch of Kultur and its per-
fidious offspring, and the end is not yet. The
military victory of the Allies has ended one phase
of the World War, but the complete intellectual
and moral victory is yet to be won. The menace
of materialism, with its denial of morality and its
worship of brute force, still hangs over the world
and threatens its higher life. The task of the
next generation is to uproot this cult of materialism
that has insinuated itself.into so many channels of
national activity.
12mo. Cloth. Net, $1.00 postpaid.
New York THE ABINGDON PRESS CINCINNATI
Chicago BOSTON Pittsburgh DeTRoIT
Kansas CITY SAN FRANCISCO PORTLAND, ORE.
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2 I 6
September 6
THE DIAL
The British in Capri, 1806-1808. By Sir
Lees Knowles. 330 pages. Lane.
The historian owes at least a word of thanks to
anyone who will go to the trouble and expense of
putting into print anything in the nature of his-
torical material which is not otherwise readily
accessible. So much is due to Sir Lees Knowles
for this collection throwing light upon the occupa-
tion of Capri by the British during the wars against
Napoleon. It is true that his collection does not
even pretend to be exhaustive. Perhaps it is too
much to expect that in the midst of a world war
he should have undertaken to exploit the state
archives in London or in Paris. At any rate he
has not done so, though he does include one val-
uable anonymous journal of the British attack
upon Capri in 1806 from a manuscript in the Brit-
ish Museum. For the most part he has contented
himself with material already in print without
much attempt to deal with it in a critical spirit.
In the case of the anonymous journal for instance,
he takes no pains either to discover its author 01
to test its accuracy. Still if anyone is curious to
know about the details of a tenth-rate military
operation of ephemeral significance Sir Lees
Knowles has furnished much excellent matter to
that end.
The Pioneers of the Old South. By Mary
Johnston. 251 pages. Yale University Press.
The name of Mary Johnston on the title page
of this fifth volume of The Chronicles of America
Series, is the guaranty of a very readable book; but
any criticism that goes beyond the manner in which
the story is told must note grave deficiencies in the
work as a piece of historical writing. Miss John-
ston, after the manner of the novelist, selects her
material, expands or contracts her narrative, retains
or dismisses her characters with the artist's preoc-
cupation with vividness and plot, rather than with
the historian's devotion to the search for adequate
causes in an apparently unmotivated continuity of
events. Incidents which give a large opportunity
for the dramatic use of personalities like John Smith,
Somers, Bacon, Spottwood, the author dwells on at
length, while she neglects the political and social
conditions in England out of which the emigration
grew as well as the political and economic institu-
tions which the settlers built up in their new home.
One can see no trace of Bruce or Beer or Osgood in
Miss Johnston's work. A book need not be dull to be
scholarly, but certainly, more than cleverness of
narrative is needed to redeem a book from the re-
proach of superficiality.
The editor comes gallantly to his author's rescue,
now and then, with a footnote interpreting her in-
difference to scientific scholarship as the reluctance
of mind delicately poised between conflicting
theories to commit itself. He also supplies a brief
appendix on the Navigation Laws, which the author
neglects. This shoring up of the narrative with
critical timber is a poor witness to the solidity of its
foundation. In addition to this the work is poorly
proportioned. Although it is supposed to cover
the history of all the Southern colonies from their
foundation down to the middle of the 18th century,
it is practically a history of Virginia under the
Stuart Kings. Maryland has less than forty of the
two hundred and fifty-one pages, and the Carolina;
and Georgia are dismissed with the meager chap-
ters of thirteen and twelve pages respectively, ad
finem. The author dwells so long on the pic-
turesque incidents in the colonial history of Virginia
that she often has to dispose of considerable periods
of time and events of great importance in a few
ejaculatory sentences that sound like stage directions.
The League of Nations: The Principle
and the Practice. Edited by Stephen Pierce
Duggan. 370 pages. Atlantic Monthly Press:
Boston.
The Covenant of the League of Nations is dis-
cussed from every conceivable angle in this sym-
posium of expert opinion. The historical back-
ground of the idea is set forth by Carlton J. H.
Hayes; Joseph H. Cotton and Dwight W. Morrow
describe the various instances of international co-
operation during the war; past experiments in in-
ternational administration -are outlined by Francis
B. Sayre; and Glenn Frank discusses the economic
implications of the League. Freedom of the seas,
disarmament, the international protection of labor,
the Monroe Doctrine, all the controversial issues
which have been raised in connection with the
Covenant are treated in considerable detail. On the
whole, the various collaborators agree pretty closely
in their conclusions. They believe that, while no
power is willing to surrender any traditional.attri-
butes of sovereignty to a superstate, the time has
come when effective international control can be
exercised over war and the causes which lead to war.
So far as the Covenant itself is concerned they admit
that it is not ideal, but plead that it is the only
alternative to the state of international anarchy
which was primarily responsible for the war. They
lay stress upon its provisions for arbitration and for
the compulsory publication of treaties. They con-
tend that these stipulations will do much to elimi-
nate secret diplomacy and to prevent wars from
springing up in the heat of the moment. They make
out a reasonably strong and plausible case for the
League as against the old system with its inevitable
accompaniment of aggressive nationalism and crush-
ing competitive armaments. However, there are
certain stubborn and unmistakable facts which tend
to invalidate many of the theoretical conclusions of
the book. In the first place, the political sins of
the Peacy Treaty, as expressed in the decisions re-
garding the Saar, West Prussia, the Tyrol, German
Bohemia, and Shantung, constitute a grave objection


1919
217
THE DIAL

Shall the "Open Door" of China be kept open?
SHANTUNG!
Yesterday, just one of a million of places in
this world! To-day—the focus of the world's
attention and the stumbling block for the League
of Nations _as it stands.
Is it the sudden flare of a day?
Behind Shantung is the great big question of
policy in Asia. You cannot understand Shan-
tung unless you understand what is back of it.
You may read the facts, China's indictment of
Japan, Japan's defense and the philosophy back
of these things interpreted by experts in the
September issue of
ASIA
The American MAGAZINE on the Orient
This magazine is the authority for information on Eastern questions. It will give you
a cogent background for understanding the Eastern problems which will flame into big
newspaper headlines apparently without cause.
ASIA, richly illustrated, is the only general
magazine published in the United States treating
exclusively of Oriental matters.
Popular opinion is for a League of Nations as a
step forward in settling international quarrels.
ASIA is for the League of Nations as a profound
advance in civilization.
But—there is one tremendous new obligation
the League of Nations puts upon the American
people and that is that we who have been un-
trammelled by the centuries of outworn tradi-
tion that have held Europe back, must see that
the League is not made merely a cloak for the
same old unscrupulous diplomacy which was
the very root of war.
Only can America do this if you, the maker of
American public opinion, Inform yourself about
the great Orient which Is the hotbed of interna-
tional trouble in the future. China's affairs are
our affairs—Japan's interests affect our Interests
—Near Eastern matters have become our respon-
sibility. No longer can we stand aloof.
ASIA brings the Orient to you. Not dry-as
dust discussion, but through vivid articles con-
tributed by authorities telling the story of funda-
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graphs and reproductions of paintings. Each
issue contains an average of ten articles and is
profusely illustrated with from fifty to sixty re-
productions.
Special Introductory Offer — Five Months for $1.00
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To show you the richness and wonder of the
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year, a saving of $1.20. Through this special offer
you will receive five current issues commencing
with the September number. This is a big double
number containing, besides the regular features,
a seventy-page section devoted to a discusslpn. by
experts, on every phase of the Shantung question.
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218
September 6
THE DIAL
to an institution which, in its present form, seems
designed to uphold a rigid status quo. Moreover
the course of recent events in Hungary demonstrates
quite clearly that the League, at the present time,
is quite incapable even of preserving the status quo,
against the aggressive designs of a small state which
is not easily blockaded and which enj'03'ci thi* secret
sympathy of one or more of the great powers. The
collaborators of Dr. Duggan's book have given an
excellent exposition of the machinery of the League
of Nations. They have suggested a number of
possible improvements in this machinery. But it
should always be remembered that the best con-
ceivable machinery for international cooperation and
conciliation will never function effectively unless
the strong nations which are chiefly responsible for
its operation are willing to apply it honestly and
fearlessly, regardless of their own special selfish
interests.
Civilization. By Ellen N. La Motte. 267
pages. Doran.
There is a very definite effect attained in these
short stories—an effect derived from the rigorous
exclusion of all non-essentials and from an undeviat-
ing fidelity to mood. Miss La Motte understands
the value of tone, and these brief tales—some of
them scarcely more than sketches—have a simplicity
of style that is so adroit as to conceal the art which
makes it possible. Her pen weaves pictures which
have the grace of a single bud in a vase; there is
proportion rather than profusion. In her handling
of words, she has an odd knack of doubling back
over significant sentences, repeating them with but
the slightest variation and yet with no sense of mere
monotony. She is sparing of quotation marks, and
the descriptive and narrative passages are seldom
broken by dialogue. The material of these tales is
chiefly the physical and spiritual contacts of the
white man with the older, elemental civilization of
the East. Through her ability to suggest more than
she puts into words, she is enabled to compress what
might easily assume of the dimensions of a long story
into the limits of a sketch. Miss La Motte is intent
upon those subtle transformations of character and
those inner revolts which sprang from the interming-
ling of antagonistic races, and her skill in impres-
sionistic narrative gives these tales a significance
which lifts them above the rut of contemporary short
fiction.
The Next Step in Religion: An Essay
Towards the Coming Renaissance. By Roy
Wood Sellars. 228 pages. Macmillan.
"The center of gravity of religion has been
openly changing for some time now from super-
naturalism to what may best be .called humanistic
naturalism." Dr. Sellars traces, in a flowing con-
ciliatory style, the past and present of this process:
finds the origins of supernaturalism in the impotence
of primitive man—nature being worshiped where
she cannot be controlled; and attributes the decay of
supernaturalism to the development of man's knowl-
edge and power. Nature is like any other feminine
—not worshiped once she has been known. Along
with this theological debacle has gone a domestica-
tion of ideals: Heaven has become Utopia, to be
sought no longer by prayers to God but by tele-
grams to the President. Religion is to mean devo-
tion to goodness, beauty, truth; " selfish luxury will
be scorned, property subordinated to welfare, eco-
nomic fear lessened to the utmost, knowledge unen-
viously exalted, and art called into service." This
capacity of man to feel devotion is the noble element
in the beast; for nourishing it religion may some
day have her crimes forgotten. Morality alone—
the restriction of self-seeking within social bounds—
will not suffice; it must be touched with devotion.
Religion is morality on fire; "loyalty to the values
of life." All this is well said, and almost too good
to be true, coming out of a university. Perhaps
men will continue to base their religious beliefs on
desire rather than on fact; perhaps our fitful flicker-
ing egos will still reach out for immortality, and
will find some "new thought" in which to escape
the cut and glare of truth. At all events it is a
pleasant discussion—a cheering relief from free
trade with high tariffs, open diplomacy behind
closed doors, and Peace Conferences without peace.
A Year in the Navy. By Joseph Husband.
180 pages. Houghton Mifflin.
This is a description of a wonderful Platonic
navy, administered by guardians and philosophers.
It will seem to most late members of that establish-
ment like News from Nowhere. Some particular
ship or station, one some particular day, might, God
willing, function like the Great Lakes Station that
the author has selectively described with painstaking
cheerfulness. But such days and such stations are
still few and far between. Sick Bays where an ap-
plication to be put on the Binnacle List is not re-
prehended as a crime, ship's cooks whose meals are
invariably " distinctly good," and petty officers that
delight only in harmless bullying—shades of New-
port! where do these exist? Life in the navy under
the terms of the new two-year enlistment is in the
main good enough for a youth not to be depicted as
a miraculous practise of the perfections. On the sea
one encounters foul weather as well as fair, and the
navy itself has the quality of its native element A
boy of spirit can face both extremes without quak-
ing: what makes his cruise difficult is the doldrums.
Why not tell something of the seamier side of naval
life, a side which lingers in the new navy, and which
dominated the old? Happy the recruit who learns
on his first hitch that that hardships, brutalities, and
disappointments are godsends, to the extent that they
take the edge of monotony.


1919
219
THE DIAL
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220
September 6
THE DIAL
Books of the Fortnight
The Remaking of a Mind, by Henry de Man (289
pages; Scribner), recapitulates the issues that the
younger generation has left behind and endeavors
to evaluate the current movements for world recon-
struction with the aid of the light furnished by the
war. The author is a young Belgian who partici-
pated equally in the labor struggle and the war
struggle, and who is qualified by study and resi-
dence in half a dozen countries to present the views
of the International Man. Review later.
Addresses in America: 1919, by John Galsworthy (109
pages; Scribner), is a fragmentary collection of the
author's thoughts which hardly does justice to him
as an essayist. One finds in Mr. Galsworthy's plea
for certain social advances a curious lack of pro-
portion which permits him to couple the abolition of
smoke with the reduction of working hours and the
rescue of educational forces from the grip of vested
interests.
Russia's Ruin, by E. H. Wilcox (316 pages; Scribner),
repeats well-known, old facts about Russia, presented
to the reader in a rather one-sided manner. The
author has been an observer of Russia for several
years and has assimilated the political mind of the
"moderate rights," who in the forces of revolution
were driven almost to extreme right wing. The Russian
Revolution is not explained by this book. It illustrates
rather the psychology of those groups who have lost
their influence, and portrays that ideology which takes
refuge in moribund principles.
The Far East Unveiled,by Frederic Coleman (304 pages;
Houghton Mifflin), is "an inner history of events in
Japan and China in the year 1916"; as such it
may serve as an introduction to the study of an
Oriental relationship that becomes each day of more
interest to America.
Standing By, by Robert Keable (271 pages; Dutton),
is made up, so the sub-title says, of "war-time reflec-
tions in France and Flanders"; examination shows
that these reflections are caught up in a murky mir-
ror where one would be content enough to leave them.
Select Cases Before the King's Council, edited by I. S.
Leadam and J. F. Baldwin (156 pages; Harvard
University Press), is Vol. XXXVI of the Selden So-
ciety's Publications, devoted to reprints of significant
source cases in early English law.
The Sober World, by Randolph Wellford Smith (291
pages; Marshall Jones), is an altogether timely, quite
readable, and undeniably entertaining recital of the
march toward prohibition. The writer blames na-
tional unpreparedness on Congressional drinking,
asserts that Bolshevism had its birth in the saloon,
and declares that at times "drink has nearly eaten
away the very heart of the British Empire." His
indictment is couched in such lurid terms that the
Rev. Billy Sunday could use it verbatim. Drink is
dead, and Mr. Smith heaps abuse on its grave.
Christian Americanization, by Charles Alvin Brooks
(162 pages; Missionary Education Movement, New
York), discusses the problem of Americanization in
terms of militant Christianity. The author defines
Americanization as the achievement of national unity
for world service upon the plane of our highest
ideals; but he fails to see the danger of this terri-
torial unity, fostered chiefly for military purposes,
to those world-wide cooperations which all men of
good will must work to promote.
Thrift and Conservation: How to Teach It, by Arthur
Henry Chamberlain and James Franklin Chamberlain
(272 pages; Lippincott, Philadelphia), essays to pro-
vide the teacher with suggestions and data on the
subject of national and personal economy. A bibli-
ography at the end of some of the more important
chapters repairs to some extent the sketchiness of the
authors' treatment.
Daniel De Leon: The Man and His Work, A Symposium
(186 pages; National Executive Committee, Socialist
Labor Party), recounts the career of this extraordi-
narily interesting man from the time that he left his
lectureship in International Law at Columbia through
the period that led to his final recognition by Lenin
as the greatest mind devoted to Socialism since Marx.
De Leon awakened intense animosity and intense ad-
miration, and the present work has the partisan bias
of his colleagues and intimates.
The Years of the Shadow, by Katharine Tynan (343
pages; Houghton Mifflin), gives the recent literary
and political gossip of North Ireland with the inimi-
table brilliance of a clever Irish woman. The chap-
ters having to do with the Rebellion are especially
noteworthy. Review later.
Contact with the Other World: The Latest Evidence as
to Communication with the Dead, by James H. Hyslop
(493 pages, illustrated; Century), summarizes recent
data having to do with psychic research. Of value
to those who require something other than emotional
excitement in considering the problem of spirit
communication.
The Hill of Vision, by Frederick Bligh (134 pages;
Marshall Jones), possesses exceptional interest for
those seeking a symbolic content for the war just
closed. The volume consists of prophesies and inter-
pretations obtained by means of automatic writing
through the same agency as those recorded in The
Gate of Remembrance, which led to the discovery
of the Chapel of King Edgar at Glastonbury. There
is an introduction by Ralph Adams Cram.
How the Bible Grew, by Frank G. Lewis (224 pages;
University of Chicago Press), popularizes and dig-
nifies a cultural study of the Bible as literature in
tracing the story of its growth from sources embedded
within the book itself. He traces it out as one
might explore a river—from its full, broad stream
back and back till the brooks and springs differentiate
themselves. He really succeeds in putting into a
simple style the romance of the development of the
Bible from the Song of Deborah to the American
Revised Version. This book will ably contribute
its part to the colossal modern task of dissipating the
unreal atmosphere which has made difficult a sen-
sible view of the book of books.
I
The Bengali Book of English Verse, selected by Theo-
dore Douglas Dunn (119 pages; Longmans, Green),
contains poems in English by seventeen Bengali
writers, a foreword by Tagore, and the editor's intro-
duction, which seems to offer the collection as an
evidence of the success of English education in India.
If that was his purpose, he should have spared his
pains, for the verses representing a century of effort
are merely exercises, more or less crude, in outworn
Western modes. The two or three exceptions that
have an authentic charm are the work of poets who
were educated in Western capitals.
Verses Wise and Otherwise, by M. Nightingale (63
pages; Longmans, Green), is a slender volume,
chiefly of nature poems. Simple themes are simply
treated; there are no lofty flights.


igig
22 I
THE DIAL
LEO TOLSTOY'S
The Pathway of Life
(In Two Volumes). Translated by Archibald J. Wolfe
"THE PATHWAY OF LIFE" is Tolstoy's posthu-
mous message to a war-torn suffering1 world. It Is
the Gospel of right living and right thinking and offers
the great philosopher's panacea against world wars
and misery, helping mankind to eradicate all those
false feelings, desires and doctrines, personal, social,
economic and religious, which are responsible for the
present plight of humanity. Price tt.QQ each volume.
International Book Publishing Co.,
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II. "Principles of Social Reconstruction." An
attempt to meet with specific answers, and
with regard to the several elements in our
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(1) What is the ideal goal? (2) What
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222
September 6
THE DIAL
A List of Eighty-seven Poets (IS pages; Syracuse Pub-
lic Library, N. Y.), collects bibliographical data and
snips samples from the works of a list of American
poets whose verses have appeared between 1900 and
1919. The catalogue is so far an improvement over
that of the Poetry Society that Lowell, Oppenheim,
Neihardt, Masters are represented—but Aiken is in-
explicably absent.
Old Masters and New, by Robert Lynd (249 pages;
Scribner), does for this young Englishman's contem-
poraries and ancestors what Hazliti's essays did a
century ago, and in a manner whose likeness does
not carry with it the stigma of inferiority. Review
later.'
Percolator Papers, by Ellwood Hendrick (259 pages;
Harper), is a collection of scholarly, benedictory es-
says on various themes, reprints from magazines and
from the official bulletin of the Chemists' Club. Mr.
Hendrick sees life amiably, tranquilly; his pen be-
tokens a mind as neat—and as untrammeled—as a
clipped hedge.
The Moon and Sixpence, by W. Somerset Maugham
(314 pages; Doran), is probably the most important
novel of recent years. It is the story of a man in
whom the artistic impulse quickened at middle age,
sweeping him into the chaos of creative realization
and personal oblivion. The story is told with acrid
beauty and satiric penetration into the remoter re-
gions of human consciousness. Review later.
The Pale Horse, by "Ropshin" (B. V. Savinkov; 180
pages; Knopf), gives the author of What Never
Happened the opportunity to "liquidate" his faith
in the creative energy of the revolutionary democ-
racy. Review later.
Mare Nostrum, by Vicente Blasco Ibanez (518 pages;
Dutton), a companion volume to The Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse, and better known in Europe, em-
ploys the Mediterranean, with its rich Latin asso-
ciations, as background for the contemporary war
plot. Review later.
Mummery, by Gilbert Cannan (280 pages; Doran), will
disappoint readers familiar with the author's earlier
work. This is a story of personal relationships be-
tween an artist (Gordon Craig?) and his actress
wife. Determined to catch the romantic atmosphere
of "Bohemia," Mr. Cannan introduces all the busi-
ness of the theater, London attics, book-shops, and
studios. He fails to catch the spontaneous mood of
Soho, quite as he fails to penetrate the psychology
of personal relationships. The story just misses
throughout.
The Street of Adventure, by Philip Gibbs (437 pages;
Dutton), brings to the American reader a novel
which has long been the modern English classic of
Fleet Street. It is an essentially human story written
with the clear vision and power which placed the
author far ahead of all other war correspondents.
Rezanov, by Gertrude Atherton (254 pages; Boni k
Liveright), published in 1906 and a recent addition
to The Modern Library, reminds us that Mrs. Ather-
ton has not yet given up the literature that this
charming, though somewhat amateurish, "historical
idyll" seemed to promise so strongly; in fact, that
its effect is even now visible beneath the enthusiastic
assurance of William Marion Reedy's introduction
to this reprint.
Heritage, by V. Sackville West (320 pages; Doran), is a
promising novel by a new author who handles a
complex problem in a vital way. There is atmos-
phere as well as action, and although at times Mr.
West sees his subject through slightly befogged
lenses, he has fashioned an interesting study.
The Promises of Alice, by Margaret Deland (131 pages;
Harper), is a parsonic romance, in which the char-
acters are more orthodox than real.
The Girl in the Mirror, by Elizabeth Jordan (297 pages;
Century), is very light fiction in which the author
takes up some of the plot strands which she dropped
in Wings of Youth. There is mystery in it, but mys-
tery of the purely artificial, staged sort, patterned
upon Seven Keys to Baldpate.
The Lady of the Crossing, by Frederick Niven (317
pages; Doran), is a western novel without gun-play.
In Chapter I of Part III, the author calls it a "sunny-
book," and the fact that he is aware of it is a
sufficient characterization of the contents.
Silver and Cold, by Dane Coolidge (260 pages; Dut-
ton), is a western novel which steers a careful course
over a tried channel. It concerns itself with love,
villainy, and the fulfillment of a prophecy—three
elements adroitly blended, and made to serve at the
groundwork for considerable action.
The Branding Iron, by Katharine Newlin Burt (310
pages; Houghton Mifflin), is a romance crammed
with action and elementary passion—a story quite a*
engagingly incredible as it is undeniably entertain-
ing. It is written with skill, and with a quickening
vigor that grips the attention. Perhaps the most
deadly criticism which can be aimed at it is em-
bodied in Rex Beach's endorsement on the jacket,
when he says that it will make a great movie.
When the World Shook, by H. Rider Haggard (407
pages, Longmans, Green), has for its locus in quo
an uncharted South Sea island, under the spell of
whose mystery the survivors of a shipwreck are har-
ried through a series of fantastic experiences to the
climactic discovery of the incarnation of the recently
lost wife of one of them in a native girl. This
latest product of a prolific pen has a conscientious
consistency.
Mr. Standfast, by John Buchan (374 pages; Doran),
brings once more on the stage Dick Hannay and Peter
Pienaar, of Greenmantle and of The Thirty-nine
Steps. A war novel, it leads the reader through spy
adventures in England to the battlefields of France,
where (on the last page) Peter dies, and receives a
Bunyan epitaph.
After Thirty, by Julian Street (273 pages; Century), is
adroit philandering fiction, not to be taken seriously.
Even the most agile churning of skimmed emotions
becomes tiresome, if one is really looking for butter.
Burned Bridges, by Bertrand W. Sinclair (308 pages;
Little, Brown), opens in the Canadian Northwest and
shifts to the coast. The author is rather more cer-
tain in his geography than in his psychology.
The Owner of the Lazy D, by William Patterson White
(324 pages; Little, Brown), is a Western tale in
which a "not too distant" rifle cracks in the second
paragraph, and thereby sets the example for all en-
suing thrills.


1919
223
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224
September 6
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The Plumb Plan in the Arsenals
THE DIAL
A FORTNIGHTLY
VOL. L£VII NEW YORK NO 799
Ttjli
mr SEPTEMBER 20, 1919
Fall Educational Number
Industrial Education in the Arsenals 231
Civilization and Culture Edward Sapir '233"
Responsibility for Leadership .... Frederick John Teggart 237
The Scholar Too Late Maxwell Anderson 239
Li T'ai Po. Verse Amy Lowell 241
Organization of Teachers in the United States Benjamin Glassberg 242
The Place of the Community in the School . . Lewis Murhford 244
At Perneb's Tomb. Verse Leonora Speyer 246
American History Anglicized .... Hendrik fVillem Van Loon 247
Fashions in Conspiracy Percy H. Boynton 248
The Mood of the Morning After .... Emma Heller Schumm 250
Nietzsche—Without Prejudice H. M. Kallen 251
When Good Fellows Get Together Robert L. Duffus 253
A Friend to His Enemy. Verse Morris Gilbert 254
The Old Order and the New 255
Casual Comment 258
COMMUNICATIONS: The Struggle of Struggling Russia.—An Open Letter on Mexico.— 260
Reconstructing the Classics.
NOTES ON NEW BOOKS: French Educational Ideals of Today.—The English Elementary 262
School.—Comparative Education.—Letters to Teachers.—Problems of the Secondary
Teacher.—New Schools for Old.—The Colleges in War Time and After. Mental
Hygiene of Childhood.—The Child's Unconscious Mind.—Applied Eugenics.—The Star-
ling.—Oxford Poetry, 1918.—The Nemesis of Mediocrity.—The Great Thousand Years
and Ten Years After.—The Sins of the Fathers.—Saul.—Museum Ideals of Purpose and
Method.—The History of England and Normandy.—The Five Republics of Central
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Church.—Elements of Constructive Philosophy.—Second Marriage.
Books of the Fortnight 272
A Selected Educational List 2<7g
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2 26
September 20%
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MODERN GERMANY
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228
September 20
THE DIAL
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ipi9 THE DIAL 229
The strongest magazine contents of the month, in
The
YALE REVIEW
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FOR OCTOBER, 1919
THE WORLD SOCIAL UNREST By H. G. Moulton
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avoid disaster.
PEACE, FROM A CRACKER BARREL By Henry Noble MacCracken
The President of Vassar in a brilliant little study of the Paris conferences.
THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS FROM THE INSIDE By Charles Seymour
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DEATH AND THE SPIRIT WORLD By Sir Oliver Lodge
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MAKING A FRIEND FOR FRANCE By Firmin Roz
The well-known French novelist in an interpretation of his country to Americans.
MOROCCAN HAREMS AND CEREMONIES By Edith Wharton
AMERICAN COLLEGES AND LITERATURE By Frederick E. Pierce
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230 9 THE DIAL September 20
May Sinclair's New Novel
(Just Published—Third Printing Ready Today)
MARY OLIVIER: A LIFE
By the Author of " The Divine Fire," " The Tree of Heaven," etc., etc.
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"One of the most notable histories of the year"
THE GERMAN EMPIRE 1867-1914
AND THE UNITY MOVEMENT
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THE DIAL
A FORTNIGHTLY
Industrial Education in the Arsenals
i
t is peculiarly fortunate at this critical state
in the rehabilitation of our economic system that the
workers employed in the large government manu-
facturing arsenals and the managements of these
arsenals have at last discovered a fact which, it
seems, they never quite realized before. They have
come to see that in these plants a true identity of
interest exists between the managing group and the
working group which has in it possibilities for ele-
vating and perfecting industrial processes and organ-
izated relationships. Indeed, we seem at last to
be on our way towards developing an example in the
technique of conducting industry which holds out a
real promise.
The realization of the true alignment of interest
between the management and the arsenal workers
seems to have been in process of clarification approxi-
mately since the entrance of America into the
great war. Throughout the emergency, especially
at Rock Island Arsenal, the largest of the five,
occasional attempts were made to bring about
closer cooperation between the supervising agents
and the workers. In some of the shops, mainly
under the inspiration of patriotism, exceptional re-
sults in production were secured. The employees,
through self-selected committees, participated ac-
tively in the determination of working conditions,
wages, and, most important of all, matters vitally
affecting shop and method improvement. Thus in
isolated cases, which however were none the less
confidence-breeding, it was demonstrated that there
were untouched resources, could they but be enlisted
in the manufacturing and administrative processes
of the arsenals, which would result in great benefits.
There is nothing so truly significant about all this
as the fact that the full import of these latent
possibilities was most clearly seen and understood by
the employees themselves. Previous to the Armis-
tice, when the necessity for production of munitions
of war was paramount, they took the initiative and
proposed ways and means for increasing output.
This is illustrated, among other things, by their
memorandum to the Secretary of War, in which
they stated:
As a result of this (the existence of distrust, the speed-
ing up of production to their detriment, the cutting of
piece work prices, etc.) the men found that their only
recourse was to place a deliberate limit on production;
thus the aforementioned resourcefulness, ingeniousness
and ability of the men, instead of being directed into con-
structive channels for the purpose of improving produc-
tion, were diverted into methods for limiting production.
Their experience had taught them that when their in-
ventive ability was used constructively it would count
against them because it reduced their earnings or resulted
sooner or later in discharges or layoffs of their number.
The normal progress in the purpose for which the shop
existed was consistently retarded or limited.
When the United States entered the war and it became
very apparent that maximum production was of the great-
est importance, the men in the Leather Shop voluntarily
agreed to take off the limits which they had placed on
productivity, providing, however, that piece work prices
were not reduced without their consent. They felt con-
strained to insist upon this feature since not only had
their past experience taught them that they stood a serious
chance of having their earnings cut, but also that they
might have to put up with such subterfuges as changes
in operation for the purpose of providing arguments to
the management to back up their insistence for reducing
prices.
After the Armistice was signed and the demands
for war necessities declined, the thing of importance
to the workers became the stability of their posi-
tions. They quickly saw that work must be secured
from other sources than the Army if they were not
to be laid off in droves to become part of the growing
numbers of unemployed. They appealed to the Sec-
retary of War, and in their appeal pointed out that
the arsenals might legitimately be utilized for manu-
facturing equipment for all departments of the gov-
ernment as well as for the Army. Further, they
pointed out that it would be desirable and necessary
from the point of view of real success in this new
venture for them to participate in the functioning
of the central agency and the local organizations
which would be responsible for securing and turn-
ing out work. This program was adopted and has
since May of this year been in the process of active
development.
The surprising and important thing that has
come to the fore in the experience so far gained lias
been the rapidity of the rise in the sense of responsi-
bility of the workers towards the entire enterprise.
At bottom their interests, of course, are economic;
but for the first time, in the truest sense of the
term, have they come to see that their economic
interests do not stop with concern for wages and


232
September 20
THE DIAL
working conditions. They realize that by the estab-
lishment of the new relationship between themselves
and the supervision, they of necessity become re-
sponsible for everything that goes on in these plants.
Nor is even this, as far as they are concerned, final;
for at last they have found the trail towards eco-
nomic freedom and they begin to see a future which
holds out the promise of a most happy environment,
one in which they as human beings may find at last
a genuine opportunity for true self-expression.
Sooner or later, to the fullest extent possible, the
premium for all activities in these government indus-
tries will be placed upon the individual and collec-
tive resourcefulness of the workers. There are no
prior liens in the form of interest, profits, and rents.
They feel either consciously or unconsciously that
they are not serving in an exploiting enterprise, and
that in the end, when all who are engaged therein
have been completely won away from the heritages
of the old system for conducting industry, the indi-
vidual and united efforts of all the employees, both
managers and workers, will achieve results far sur-
passing anything permanently possible under other
circumstances.
That the earnestness and comprehension of these
workers towards the ideals herein set forth are not
in the least exaggerated is attested by the follow-
ing taken from their recently published statement
to the Secretary of War concerning the entire sub-
ject:
It has been gratifying to us to note, many times, that.
the necessity on the part of the men for economical pro-
duction is well understood. For instance, at Watervliet
Arsenal recently during the noon-day rallies which were
being held the appeals of the speakers who were from
the workers, were for efficiency. At Watertown some
of the men stated that, in the interest of the workers their
abilities were limited when it came to functioning on
employees' committees, handling grievances, etc.; for they
said that that was not their forte. They did not feel able
to confront the management in sufficiently forceful ways
while prosecuting cases of such a nature. But they said
they clearly saw their opportunity in the chances which
now existed for functioning on production committees.
Their abilities, they felt, lay in that direction and they
most enthusiastically welcomed the circumstances which
promised them these new opportunities for self expression.
At Frankford and Rock Island instances have occurred
where the employees have "gotten after" individuals
who have not been doing as well as they might A strik-
ing incidence of the splendid spirit of cooperation which
automatically develops when the employees are given an
incentive and a chance for self expression, recently oc-
curred at the Frankford Arsenal. The Office Department
was in the market for a large order for dials for regis-
tered mail locks, for which they had previously paid
$45.00 per thousand. Frankford Arsenal submitted an
estimate for $38.00 per thousand, so when the Committee
on Estimates informed the employees that they had figured
very closely in order that this work could be secured for
them, the employees were very eager to express their ap-
tciation of this new condition and volunteered to work
during lunch hour if necessary to live up to their Commit-
tee's judgment as to the direct costs.
And further:
It is our conviction, more now than ever before, that
before long the opportunity will be ripe for us to secure
outside talent in the form of competent management en-
gineers and production experts to advise us as workers
what we can do to help improve things, what the man-
agement can do, and finally what we and the management
can do jointly. We are not unaware of our limitations
in this respect, and, when the time comes, we hope
sincerely that you and the Chief of Ordnance will gladly
extend to us the opportunity to have our technical ex-
perts cooperate with the Arsenal management and their
experts for the purpose of doing everything possible to
warrant the fullest utilization of the arsenals as centers
of production. The time will be ripe for this as soon as
the basic spirit of cooperation and mutual confidence all
through the arsenal organizations has been created.
Such candid recognition of their responsibility as
well as their present-day limitations, together with
their anxiety for making good in every, respect con-
ceivable to them, can come only from a group in
society that has not had its ideals distorted by class
privilege, and that, in consequence, is quick to re-
spond to the best that human beings are capable of
—service to their fellows.
Perhaps above all else it is gratifying to note in
this initial step towards true industrial democracy
that the collective appeal for improved production
does not seem to be on a basis of a share in profits
or bonuses or indeed anything which smatters of
capitalistic ideals. The simple desire for the perma-
nency of their positions is the motive which is actu-
ating these ■ workers. Upon this foundation, as
swiftly as is consistent with genuine progress, they
intend to build a temple of true emancipation from
present-day industrial slavery.
And the manner in which they are going about
this is exactly as it should be. The temple- is being
built firmly and naturally. The conditions under
which these employees have been working, measured
by the standard of industry today, are relatively far
advanced. The arsenals—located as they are along
beautiful rivers, in the hearts of thriving cities, or
in delightful country districts, their buildings placed
in well-kept parks with shady lawns and pathways,
with the picturesque homes of many of the employees
nearby—certainly do not present the pictures pre-
sented by the great majority of our factories—
depressing, unwholesome piles with their miserably
squalid associations and surroundings. The workers
enjoy a forty-four hour week, a yearly leave of
absence of thirty days with pay, injury compensa-
tion, medical attention, local cooperative enterprises,
and other things commonly considered advantages.
The standards of employment are well defined and
understood, thanks to the Civil Service. It is but


1919
233
THE DIAL
natural therefore that these workers, employed in an
atmosphere in which strife and contention do not
exist, should turn their minds and activities into
channels of constructive enterprise.
How healthy this development has been is revealed
by the nature of its growth. The workers, while
contending for maximum utilization of these plants,
insisted that this maximum utilization (in which the
public as a whole is deeply concerned, for the
arsenals have been provided out of public funds)
be achieved only when it is guaranteed that they
shall participate to the fullest extent possible, indi-
vidually and collectively, in the functioning of their
institutions. They propose to demonstrate to every-
one's satisfaction their fitness so to participate and
function, and they propose to assume responsibility
only as fast as it is proven that they can success-
fully control it. Certainly no exception can be taken
to a program as constructive and well defined as this.
The War Department's opening up of these
manufacturing arsenals to industrial democracy will
certainly be watched with intense interest. And
both because they are engaged in an industrial field
not circumscribed by the limitations and encumbered
with the obstacles of private enterprise, and because
it is the pioneer experiment in this country in true
industrial democracy, we have here, in view of the
growing articulateness of, labor, a most important
phenomenon in process of development. So far there
seems to be no question about the good results se-
cured. The measure of success which has followed
is undoubtedly due to the wise policy which has
permitted the introduction of demscracy in these
arsenals to proceed spontaneously and normally from
the workers. In this way, and only in this way,
can progress become true, wholesome, and thorough.
Will the lessons which this experiment teaches be
heeded by the Post Office Department, the Navy
Department, and the Railroad Administration ? Will
Congress and the President see its true significance
with respect to the serious problems now confront-
ing the country in connection with the final disposi-
tion of the steam railways, the government-con-
trolled ship yards? Will the public as a result
comprehend and develop confidence in the programs
for the democratization of our key industries as
proposed and urged by labor?
Civilization and Culture
I
T would be idle to praise or blame any fun-
damental condition of our civilization, say its pre-
vailingly industrial basis, to praise or blame any
strand in the warp and woof of its genius. These
conditions and these strands must be accepted as
basic. They are slowly modifiable, of course, like
everything else in the history of man, but radical
modification of fundamentals does not seem neces-
sary for the production of a genuine culture, how-
ever much readjustment of their relations may be.
In other words, a "genuine" culture is perfectly
conceivable in any type or stage of civilization and
in the mold of any national genius. It can be con-
ceived as easily in terms of a Mohammedan poly-
gamous society or of an American Indian "prim-
itive" non-agricultural society as in those of our
familiar Occidental societies. On the other hand,
what may by contrast be called "spurious " cultures
are just as easily conceivable in conditions of general
advanced enlightenment as in those of relative
ignorance and squalor.
The " genuine " culture is not of necessity either
"high" or "low "; it is merely inherently har-
monious, balanced, self-satisfactory. It is the expres-
sion of a richly varied and yet somehow unified and
consistent attitude towards life, an attitude that sees
the significance of any one element of civilization in
relation to all others. It is, ideally speaking, a cul-
ture in which nothing is spiritually meaningless, in
which no important part of the general functioning
brings with it a sense of frustration, of misdirected,
or, better, unsympathetic effort. It is not a spiritual
hybrid of contradictory patches, of water-tight com-
partments of consciousness that carefully avoid* par-
ticipation in a harmonious synthesis. If the culture
necessitates slavery, it frankly admits it; if it abhors
slavery, it feels its way to an economic adjust-
ment that obviates the necessity for slavery. It
does not make a great show in its ethical ideals of
an uncompromising opposition to slavery, only sur-
reptitiously to introduce what amounts to a slave
system into certain portions of its industrial mechan-
ism. Or, if it builds itself magnificent houses of
worship, it is because of the necessity it feels to
symbolize in beautiful stone a religious impulse that
is deep and vital; if it is ready to discard institu-
tionalized religion, it is prepared also to dispense
with the homes of institutionalized religion. It
does not look sheepish when a direct appeal is made
to its religious consciousness and then make amends
by furtively donating a few dollars towards the
maintenance of an African mission. Nor does it


234
September 20
THE DIAL
carefully instruct its children in what if knows to
be of no use nor vitality either to them or in its Own
mature life. Nor does it tolerate a thousand other
spiritual maladjustments such as are potent enough
in our American life of today to those who care to
see. It would be too much to say that even the
purest examples of a genuine culture that the world
has known have been free of spiritual discords, of
the dry rot oi social habit, devitalized. But the
great cultures, those that we instinctively feel, to v
have been healthy spiritual organisms, such as the
Athenian culture of the Age of Pericles and, to a
less extent, the English culture of Elizabethan days,
have at least tended to such harmony.
It should be clearly understood that this ideal of a
genuine culture has no necessary connection with
what we are pleased to call efficiency. A society
may be admirably efficient in the sense that all its
activities are carefully planned with reference to
ends of maximum utility to the society as a whole,
it may tolerate no lost motion, yet it may well be a
very inferior organism indeed as a culture-bearer.
It is not enough that the ends of activities be socially
satisfactory, that each member of the community feel
in some dim way that he is doing his bit towards
the attainment of a social benefit. This is all very
well as far as it goes, but a genuine culture refuses
to consider the individual as a mere cog in a wheel,
as an entity whose sole raison d'etre lies in his sub-
servience to a collective purpose that he is not con-
scious of or that has only a remote relevancy to his
interests and strivings. The major activities of the
individual must directly satisfy his own creative and
emotional impulses, must always be something more
than means to an end. The great cultural fallacy
of industrialism, as developed up to the present time,
is that in harnessing machines to our uses it has not
known how to avoid the harnessing of the majority
of mankind to its machines. The telephone girl
who, for economic reasons, lends her capacities, dur-
ing the greater part of the living day, to the manipu-
lation of a technical routine that has an eventually
high efficiency value but that answers to no spiritual
needs of her own is really an appalling sacrifice to
civilization. As a solution of the problem of culture
she is necessarily a dismal failure—the more dismal
the greater her natural endowment. As with the
telephone girl, so, it is to be feared, with the great
majority of us, slave-stokers to fires that burn for
demons that we would destroy, were it not that
they appear in the guise of our highest benefactors.
The American Indian that solves the economic prob-
lem with salmon-spear and rabbit-snare is, if you
like, operating on a relatively low level of civiliza-
tion, but he represents to my mind an incomparably
higher solution than our telephone girl, or, indeed,
than most of us, of the questions that culture has to
ask of economics. There is here no question pri-
marily of immediate utility, of the effective directness
of economic effort, nor of any sentimentalizing re-
grets as to the passing of the " natural man." The
Indian's salmon-spearing is a culturally higher type
of activity than that of the telephone girl or mill
hand simply because there is normally no sense of
spiritual frustration during its prosecution, no feel-
ing of subservience to tyrannous yet largely inchoate
demands, further because it works in naturally and
smoothly with all the rest of the Indian's activities
instead of standing out as a desert patch of merely
economic effort in th/ whole of life.
We have already seen that there is no necessary
correlation between the development of civilization
and the relative genuineness of the culture which
forms its spiritual essence. This requires a word of
further explanation. By the development of civiliza-
tion is here meant the ever increasing degree of
sophistication of our society and of our individual
lives. " This progressive sophistication is the inevi-
table cumulative result of the sifting processes of
social experience, of the ever increasing complications
of our innumerable types of organization, most of all
of our steadily growing knowledge of our natural
environment and, as a consequence, our practical
mastery, for economic ends, of the resources that
nature at once grants us and hides from us. It is
chiefly the cumulative force of this sophistication_
that gives us the sense of what we call "progress."
Perched on the heights of an office building twenty
or more stories taller than our fathers ever dreamed
of, we feel that we are getting up in the world.
Hurling our bodies through space with an ever
accelerating velocity, we feel that we are getting
on in the world. Under sophistication I include not
merely intellectual and technical advance, but most
of the tendencies that make for a cleaner and
healthier and, to a large extent, more humanitarian
existence. Our growing sophistication, our ever
increasing solicitude to obey the dictates of common
sense, make these tendencies imperative. It would
be sheer obscurantism to wish to stay their progress.
But there can be no stranger illusion—and it is an
illusion w-e nearly all suffer from—that because the
tools of life are today more specialized and refined
than ever before, it necessarily follows that we are
in like degrees attaining to a profounder harmony of
life, to a deeper and more satisfying culture. It is
as though we believed that an elaborate mathemati-
cal computation that involved figures of seven and
eight digits could not but result in a like figure.
Yet we know that 1,000,000 multiplied by zero
gives us zero quite as effectively as one multiplied
by zero. The truth is that sophistication, which is


1919
235
THE DIAL
what we ordinarily mean by the progress of civiliza-
tion, is, in the long run, a merely quantitative con-
cept that defines the external conditions for the
growth or decay of culture. We are right to have
faith in the progress of civilization. We are wrong
to assume that the maintenance or even advance of
culture is a function of such progress. A reading
of the facts of ethnology and culture history proves
plainly that maxima of culture have been frequently
reached in low levels of sophistication, very sorry
minima in some of the highest. Civilization, as a'
whole, moves on; culture comes and goes.
Every profound change in the flow of civilization,
particularly in its economic bases, tends to bring
about an unsettling and readjustment of culture
values. Old culture forms, habitual types of re-
action, tend to persist through the forces of inertia. •
The maladjustment of these habitual reactions to
their new civilizational environment brings with it a
measure, sometimes acute, of spiritual disharmony,
which the more sensitive individuals feel eventually
as a fundamental lack of culture. Sometimes the
maladjustment corrects itself with great rapidity, at
other times it may persist for generations, as in the
case of America, where a chronic state of cultural'
maladjustment has for so long a period reduced much
of our higher life to sterile externality. It is easier,
generally speaking, for a genuine culture to subsist
on a lower level of civilization: the differentiation
of individuals as regards their social and economic
functions is so much less than in higher levels that
there is far less danger of the reduction of the indi-
vidual to an unintelligible splinter of the social
trunk. How to reap the undeniable benefits of
great differentiation of functions without at the
same time losing sight of the individual as a nucleus
of live cultural values is the great and difficult prob-
lem of any rapidly complicating civilization. We
are far from having solved it in America. Indeed,
it may be doubted whether more than an insignifi-
cant minority are. aware of the very existence of the
problem. Yet the present world-wide labor unrest
has as one of its deepest roots some sort of dim per-
ception of the cultural fallacy of the present form
of industrialism. For this reason it should be wel-
comed. A civilization that has attained to such
ethical consciousness as we now possess and yet is,
for the most part, based on helotry is hardly worth
saving.
It is perhaps the sensitive ethnologist who has
studied an aboriginal civilization at first hand that
is most impressed by the frequent vitality of culture
in less sophisticated levels. He cannot but admire
the well-rounded life of the average participant in,
let us say, the civilization of a typical American
Indian tribe; the firmness with which every part of
that life—economic, social, religious, and esthetic—
is bound together into a significant whole in respect
to which he is far from a passive pawn; above all,
the molding, oftentimes definitely creative, role that
he plays in the mechanism of his culture. When
the political integrity of his tribe is destroyed by
contact with the whites, and the old cultural values
cease to have the atmosphere needed for their con-
tinued vitality, the Indian is apt to find himself in
a state of bewildered vacuity. Even if, as not in-
frequently happens, he succeeds in making a fairly
satisfactory compromise with his new environment,
in making what his well-meaning patronizers con-
sider great progress towards enlightenment, towards
civilization, he is apt to retain an uneasy sense of
the loss of some great but ill-defined good, some
state of mind which he would be hard put to it to
define but which gave him a courage and joy that
latter-day prosperity never qurte seems to have re-
gained for him. What has- happened is that he has
slipped out of the warm embrace of a culture into
the cold air of a fragmentary existence. What is
sad about the passing of the Indian is not the deple-
tion of his numbers by disease nor even the contempt
that is too often meted out to him in his life on the
reservation; it is the fading away of a series of cul-
tures, built out of the materials of a low order of
sophistication, but genuine.
We have no right to demand of the higher levels
of sophistication that they preserve to the individual
his manifold functioning, but we may well ask
whether, as a surrogate, the individual may not
reasonably demand an intensification in cultural
value, a spiritual heightening, of such functions as
are left him. Failing this, he must be frankly ad-
mitted to have, in a cultural sense, not progressed but
retrograded. The limitation in functioning works
chiefly in the economic sphere. It is therefore im-
perative, if the individual is to preserve his value as
a cultured being, that he recoup himself out of the
non-economic, the non-utilitarian spheres—social,
religious, scientific, esthetic. This idea of compensa-
tion brings to view an important issue, that of the
immediate and the remoter ends of human effort.
As a mere organism, man's only function is to
exist; in other words, to keep himself alive and to
propagate his kind. Hence the procuring of food,
clothing, and shelter for himself and those dependent
on him constitutes the immediate end of his effort.
There are civilizations, like that of the Eskimo, in
which by far the greater part of man's energy is
consumed in the satisfaction of these immediate
ends. There are practically no civilizations,
however, in which at least some of the available
energy is not set free for the remoter ends, though,
as a rule, these remoter ends are by a process of


236
September 20
THE DIAL
rationalization made to seem to contribute to the
immediate ones. (A magical ritual, for instance,
which, psychologically considered, seems to liberate
and give form to powerful emotional and esthetic
elements of our nature, is nearly always put in har-
ness to some humdrum utilitarian end—the catching
of rabbits or the curing of chicken pox.) As a
ia.tter of fact, there are very few of even the
litive" civilizations that do not consume an
ledingly large share of their energies in the pur-
suit of the remoter ends, though it remains true that
these remoter ends are nearly always functionally or
pseudo-functionally interwoven with the immediate
ends. Art for art's sake may be a psychological fact
on these less sophisticated levels; it is certainly not
a cultural fact.
On our own level of civilization the remoter ends
tend to split off altogether from the immediate ones
and to assume the form of a spiritual escape or refuge
from the pursuit of the latter. The separation of
the two classes of ends is never absolute nor can it
ever be; it is enough to note the presence of a
powerful drift of the two away from each other.
It is easy to demonstrate this drift by examples
taken out of our daily experience. Thus, while
in most primitive civilizations the dance is apt
to be a ritual activity at least ostensibly associ-
ated with purposes of an economic nature, it is
with us a merely and self-consciously pleasurable
activity that not only splits off from the sphere of
the pursuit of immediate ends but even tends to
assume a position of hostility to that sphere. In a
primitive civilization a great chief dances as a mat-
ter of course, oftentimes as a matter of exercising
a peculiarly honored privilege. With us the captain
of industry either refuses to dance at all or does so
as a half-contemptuous concession to the vagaries of
social custom. On the other hand, the artist of a
Ballet Russe has sublimated the dance to an exquisite
instrument of self-expression, has succeeded in pro-
viding himself with an adequate or even more than
adequate cultural recompense for his loss of mastery
in the realm, of direct ends. " The captain of indus-
try is one of the comparatively small class of indi-
viduals that has inherited, in vastly complicated
form, something of the feeling of control over the
attainment of direct ends that belongs by cultural
right to primitive man; the ballet dancer has saved
and intensified for himself the feeling of spontaneous
participation and creativeness in the world of indi-
rect ends that also belong by cultural right to prim-
itive man. Each has saved part of the wreckage of
a submerged culture for himself.
The psychology of direct and indirect ends under-
goes a gradual modification, only partly consum-
mated as yet, in the higher levels of civilization.
The immediate ends continue to exercise the same
tyrannical sway in the ordering of our lives, but as
our spiritual selves become enriched and develop
a more and more inordinate craving for subtler
forms of experience, there develops also an attitude
of impatience with the solution of the more imme-
diate problems of life. In other words, the imme-
diate ends cease to be felt as chief ends a id gradually
become necessary means, but only means, towards
the attainment of the more remote ends. These
remoter ends, in turn, so far from being looked
upon as purely incidental activities that result from
the spilling over of an energy concentrated almost
entirely on the pursuit of the immediate ends, be-
come the chief ends of life. This change of attitude
is implied in the statement that the art, science, re-
ligion of a higher civilization best express its "spirit"
or culture. The transformation of ends thus briefly
outlined is far from an accomplished fact; it is
rather an obscure drift in the history of values, an
expression of the volition of the more sensitive par-
ticipants in our culture. Certain temperaments feel
themselves impelled far along the drift, others lag
behind. The captains of industry are the virtuosos
among the laggards.
The transformation of ends is of the greatest cul-
tural importance, because it acts as a powerful force
for the preservation of culture in levels in which a
fragmentary economic functioning of the individual
is inevitable. So long as the individual retains a
sense of control over the major goods of life he is
able to take his place in the cultural patrimony of
his people. Now that the major goods of life have
shifted so largely from the realm of immediate to
that of remote ends, it becomes a cultural necessity
for all who would not be looked upon as disinherited
to share in the pursuit of these remoter ends. V No
harmony and depth of life, no culture, is possible
when activity is well-nigh circumscribed by the
sphere of immediate ends and when functioning
within that sphere is so fragmentary as to have no
inherent intelligibility or interest. Right here is
the grimmest joke of our present American civiliza-
tion. The vast majority of us, deprived of any but
an insignificant and culturally abortive share in the
satisfaction of the immediate wants of mankind, are
further deprived of both opportunity and stimula-
tion to share in the production of non-utilitarian
values. Part of the time we are dray-horses; the
rest of the time, if such time is vouchsafed us, we
are listless consumers of goods that have received
no least impress of our own personality. In other
words, our spiritual selves go hungry, for the most
part, pretty much all of the time.
Edward Sapd*.


igig
237
THE DIAL
J
The Responsibility for Leadership
ust now a man from Alabama was saying to me:
After this America will lead the world. We have
turned the scales in the war. We have raised
money. We have made an army. We have built ships.
We have gone after the world's commerce. We
have given other countries great ideas. The world
looks to us, and we are going to come through." At
this a Kansan became eloquent on the " mission " of
the United States: "We are going to show these
peoples how they ought to govern themselves. We'll
step in and start them right if they don't seem to
get the idea. We'll send some of our boys into Rus-
sia, or Austria, or Mexico, if necessary, for it's up
to us to see that the mess these people have made
for themselves is straightened out." Something of
this sort, in endless variety, crops up today in every-
body's mind. The world looks to America, and we
are conscious of it; a cataclysm has awakened us to
the existence of the rest of the world, and, in the
enthusiasm of our discovery, we should like to set
everything right through the exercise of American
leadership.
Actually, there is one great obstacle to such a
program, and that is our own ignorance. We arc
one and all eager to see the prestige which the
United States possesses at this moment extended
into the future, but we do not stop to consider what
this involves. No small proportion of the Amer-
ican people believes today that we should " go into"
Mexico with some millions of soldiers and "estab-
lish order." The average man's conception of lead-
ership is personal domination, and ordering others
around. It requires a distinct effort on his part to
realize that the principle of "self-determination,"
of growth through the exercise of individual re-
sponsibility, must apply equally to persons and polit-
ical groups. It requires a still greater effort for
him to understand that the only leadership which
can possibly promote human advancement is a lead-
ership in knowledge and ideas. Leadership based
upon force and physical power cannot permanently
be maintained; leadership in knowledge cannot be
overthrown through the vicissitudes of battle.
Greece, conquered, led captive imperial Rome. If,
then, we would exercise leadership in the world,
this must be intellectual leadership; if we would
play a leading role in shaping the destinies of other
human aggregations, we must accept the obligation
of preparing ourselves for the part we express our
willingness to play.
The kind of preparedness, then, which American
leadership in the world demands is knowledge. If
we are to enter into relations with other peoples—
Lithuanians, Ruthenians, Ukrainians, Vlachs, Slov-
enes, Albanians—we must know everything ♦pos-
sible about them, about the conditions under
which they live, and about the countries which
they inhabit. If we are to lend a hand in re-
making the world for them, we must understand
their ambitions, their customs, and their ideas.
If we are to advise them, and to pass judg-
ment upon their efforts towards democracy, we
must know how they have been governed. It
is not a simple matter to find out how men are
governed or govern themselves. How do we govern
ourselves? "By the Constitution," you may say.
Well, Latin-American republics have taken over
our constitution without getting a government like
ours. There is more in any government than ap-
pears in its formal documents; to comprehend it you
must endeavor to grasp the spirit in which the gov-
ernment is carried on.
To be effective, leadership must be based on
knowledge. If we as a people are to play a suc-
cessful part in the new world of the future, we must
be prepared, we must have knowledge. And this
knowledge, this preparedness, must be individual.
There is no country, no nation, apart from the
actual living men and women of which it is com-
posed. There is no knowledge in a country except
what has been acquired by individuals. The re-
sponsibility of our country is a responsibility which
must be accepted by each separate person within it.
We believe in democracy, but do we take it to
heart that the very essence of democracy consists in
the power of the average man to decide great ques-
tions by his vote? Think of it. You accept Presi-
dent Wilson as one of the greatest of men; you
know he has devoted his life to the study of political
problems, and yet, as a voter, you will pass judg-
ment, without hesitation, and without putting your-
self to great inconvenience, upon the merits of any
recommendation he may put forward.' This is
democracy, and, without study, we decide questions
that may affect the welfare of the world. This is
democracy, but if it is to endure we must each face
the responsibility for the exercise of this great power.
Let us be fair with our own aspirations, let us be
fair with the faith of those in other countries who
have been inspired with the idea of America—democ-
racy is on trial, and it will fail if the individual
citizen shirks his responsibility.
That the citizen may lenow, knowledge must be
available. At the present moment, knowledge is
not available in this country to anything like the
same extent that it is in Germany. We have been


238
September 20
THE DIAL
fighting Germany with German books. The Journal
of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, last Sep-
tember, pointed out that, as a war measure, we must
reprint here, and in German, Beilstein's handbook
of organic chemistry! In Germany knowledge in
every field is made available in the form of syste-
matic handbooks which contain the results of all
the special researches of scholars throughout the
world. Here we have no such highly developed aids
to leadership.
Confronted with a certain superiority in learning
on the part of the Germans, we have taken, since
the war, altogether too much comfort from the idea
that Germans are not original, that the epoch-
making discoveries in science have all come from
Allied countries. Granted that Germany has been
deficient in genius of the highest order, let us grasp
the fact that, once started, the new lines of work
(like the dye industry) have owed their orderly and
systematic development to the German capacity for
taking pains. Before we condemn the Germans for
appropriating other men's ideas, for being mere hack-
workers in science and scholarship, let us remember
that they have made the world their debtor for the
systematic presentation of available knowledge. The
fact is that, for the German who desires to know,
knowledge is available in his own language to an
extent undreamed of in other countries, and the
special sources from which our university teachers
draw are the common wells accessible to all the
German people.
The American man, occupied in making his own
contribution to the common welfare, cannot leave
manufacturing or selling to organize special fields of
learning. But the community maintains a body of
men whose everyday work is thesystematization of
knowledge, and the community has a right to expect
the university professor to make knowledge avail-
able in any form required by the American people.
That this has not been done already is to be ex-
plained by the fact that the work of universities is
not developed in immediate contact with life; the
subjects of instruction, like the college campus, are
ordinarily remote from the stress of active existence.
The time has come, however, when our institutions
of higher learning must reconsider the nature of the
service they are rendering to the people who main-
tain them.
Up to the present, colleges have limited their
efforts to the instruction of " college students." The
instruction offered has been stereotyped and formal;
the subjects taught have been the crystallized prod-
ucts of an outworn tradition. Meanwhile, the men
and women for whom this lifeless instruction is pro-
vided, have discovered for themselves that the value
of their four years lies, not in what the professor
offers, but in the associations with other students
which they establish for the future. "Graduation,"
the completion of a course, is regarded not as a
sign of proficiency in learning but as a necessity
for establishing an unquestioned identity with the
group.
In contrast with this old regime, the point of
view we must grasp is that the university is the only
agency we have in our democracy for the enlarge-
ment and dissemination of knowledge. In the
United States we have no leisure class which culti-
vates learning as its object in life. Our leisure class
consists mainly of women over forty, and they have
not yet begun to devote themselves to scholarship.
It is true that university authorities have laid great
stress upon "original research" and "productive
scholarship." It is true that investigation has been
held up as the highest aim of the professor's career,
and that presidents, in annual reports, have printed
unnumbered and forgotten lists of the "original
contributions" of college faculties. All this is a
recognition of the fact that the search for new
knowledge is essential both for the individual and
the world, and the idea that this search should be
emphasized in universities, though introduced from
Germany, is radically sound. With us, however,
the results obtained have been undistinguished and
often trivial, for here "publication" has been set
up as the road to promotion and higher pay, and
on this account exaggerated weight has been laid
upon productions essentially unimportant and im-
mature. The trouble is that all judgments in regard
to university work have been based upon the narrow
criteria of university life, and without thought to the
larger public which the university is called upon to
serve.
In the new world before us the function of the
university can no longer be confined to the instruc-
tion of a limited body of students. The future of
democracy requires that the university should assume
the obligation for the intellectual leadership of the
country at large. The university teacher is occu-
pied in systematizing knowledge for presentation to
college classes, he must now undertake to systema-
tize it for the use of men and women in the open
world. This democracy of ours requires that the
means of knowledge must be at the disposition of
all the people, and American leadership turns upon
the ability of the American professor to emerge
from his seclusion to discover the intellectual needs
of his fellows, and to provide for them.
But the service which the university professor is
called upon to render in the interests of American
leadership does not end here. The war has shown
that the world is ruled by ideas. Ideas, it has been
discovered, are instruments by which men are


igig
2 39
THE DIAL
moved, by which upheavals are accomplished. Fol-
lowing Germany, every country has, in the course
of the last four years, set up a ministry of propa-
ganda. The German means for influencing ideas
have, however, been carried far beyond the distri-
bution of obviously one-sided literature and the sub-
sidizing of newspapers. In the field of science and
scholarship, at least, Germany's intellectual propa-
ganda has been based upon the conception of
rendering vital and necessary service to the world.
The German has understood, as few others, the
importance of making himself indispensable. So he
has created a vast apparatus of scholarship, a set of
tools for intellectual workers, upon which students
everywhere are forced to rely. As a result the
American scholar and scientist is dependent upon
German organization of knowledge, and is inevit-
ably led to accept German orientation of his scien-
tific ideas. We are thus faced by the strange situa-
tion that, whereas the effectiveness of American
industry and the alertness of American soldiers have
triumphed over German military power, American
scholarship and teaching continue to be dominated
by German system and ideas. There can be but
one response to this condition of affairs: American
thought and scientific interest must be freed from
German intellectual tradition, and set upon the way
of its own intellectual growth. Concretely, this
means that we who have hitherto been inconspicuous
in the world of scholarship must contest an ac-
knowledged German leadership in every field of
scientific endeavor. In a very real sense, therefore,
the prestige of America is now in the hands of its
university men.
The events of the last four years have opened the
eyes of men to immeasurable possibilities. An old
world has passed away, the new one to follow has
not yet taken form; We face one of those great
opportunities in the world's history when all things'
seem possible, when advances of bewildering magni-
tude seem assured, when man appears for a golden
moment in a creative role. Very shortly the heavy
hand of the accustomed will have once more fixed
our ways, and the world will have become crystal-
lized for another epoch. At this moment the oppor-
tunity exists for an American leadership of the
world, if we may grasp it. There can, however,
be no such leadership without an independent and
effective intellectual life. Without this we might
exercise the power of Rome, and still remain under
the tutelage of some modern Greece. Is it necessary
to ask the question? Is Germany, defeated, to be
our Greece?
Frederick John Teggart.
The Scholar Too Late
If you are familiar with the erudite and unin-
teresting in literature you will know that Professor
Maurice has no rival as an authority in Restoration
drama. The knowledge of this may prejudice you
against him unduly. I know of no other lecturer
so perennially, though perhaps also none more
ephemerally entertaining. He is hardly more than
forty-five—spare, erect, and gravely boyish. His
bearing in the lecture room is instinct with grace
and courtesy. He speaks with a flashing, pointed
ease, each sentence like a stiletto stroke in the sun-
light. As in the days when we made a cult of him
he holds his crowded classes with whimsical spells,
deft of voice and word. He has refined on the
methods I remember. There was a time when he
was slightly melodramatic; when he was not above
affecting a barely perceptible quaver in the voice
over pathetic passages, when the oratorical pause was
in daily requisition after periods delicately evolved.
But he has shed crudities with his youth, and cap-
tures the willing ear with the more subtle charms
of a rich careful cadence. He is more nearly himself
before his audience, and his self is calculatingly at-
tractive. The strength of his appeal seems to have
been dependent mainly on the sparkling quality of
his mind. The sparkle remains, but behind it there
is a perceptible and quite real shadow. His swift
easy gestures and cultured merriment over the things
of literary yesterdays have the tragic meaning of a
gay harlequin before a tall sable curtain. The cur-
tain is a perspective of saddened years. He plays for
this effect, of course, but it is not all mere excellent
acting. He sees himself as a potential hero defeated
by -relentless destiny. It is strange that the maidens
who throng to hear him never guess themselves the
figurative mill-stone about his neck, never apply per-
sonally the resentment and discontent with his lot
so implicit under his charming surface in this later
style and mood. He loathes lecturing. He loathes
theses and philology. These things he tolerates, he
will tell you in private with open bitterness, to
make a living. What he would really like would be
to write great poetry and great plays. I think he
knows now in a subconscious fashion that he could
never have done these things had he had infinite
leisure. But he must excuse himself somehow. He
puts the odium on a life of drudgery, and mourns in
secret, meanwhile transmuting his unhappiness, in
public, into an indispensable popularity. It is still
the vogue for freshman girls to fall in love with


240
September 20
THE DIAL
him. The flowing tie, the suave melancholy of a
Hamlet efficiently banished—these and a handsome
face make him the great drawing card of the Eng-
lish department.
Ten years ago he had gathered about him a little
band of university students who tried to write and
who were—for those days—radicals. Eight or ten of
us would sit about his fireplace once a month or so,
smoking in Tennysonian attitudes into the night,
and discussing Socialism or Fitzgerald s plays from
the Spanish. Later we would draw out manuscripts
in turn, reading them aloud in self-conscious voices,
writhing under criticism as is the way of mortals.
On rare occasions one of us would achieve publica-
tion, thereafter sitting in flushed dignity to hear the
envious plaudits of our fellows. Them we could
discount in private, but Maurice's word was law to
us in esthetics. It was his custom to wait until the
others had spoken before he made his brief pointed
comment—always a bit malicious, always convin-
cingly just. It made up a great part of our respect
for him that he had published early and had three
volumes of verse to his credit. Sometimes, not
often, his work was printed in The Century or Scrib-
ner's. Then he would expand a bit, and hint of
marvelous things he hoped to do, opening vistas of
other cities and great personages he had known.
Perhaps we all distrusted his optimism somewhat,
but we saw the literary world through him, and it
was hard to judge.
There were days following a flood of rejection
slips when he would advert bitterly to his standing
in the University. Because he believed in literature,
and not only in its dry bones, because he chose to
write of his own times rather than for the Journal
of Modern Philology, other men were promoted
over his head. He would say ruefully though with
playfulness that it would pay any young idealistic
instructor to put his scruples in his pocket and write
a dull paper or two. Once, when asked to take a
place on a philological program to fill a sudden
vacancy, he evolved over night a novel and" startling
theory concerning the rhythms of Beowulf which
made the doctors thoughtful. He chuckled over this
feat, and brought the essay out for our delectation,
treating the episode as a mad prank, a sort of prac-
tical joke on the pundits. They had told him it was
one of the best papers ever listed in their series.
And he admitted that it probably was. He named
over a fanciful list of subjects that had occurred to
him for similar treatment—Styles of Beards in
Chaucer, A Shadwell Concordance, The Use of
Poisons in Webster's Dramas. "You think I'm
joking," he said suddenly, turning on us, " but there
isn't one of those ideas that wouldn't get across."
In this same year he .published two papers: in the
Modern Language Review on The Authenticity of
Accepted Anglo-Saxon Word-Root Derivations.
They were received with something as nearly ap-
proaching acclaim as the academic world has ever
shown.
But all this was forgotten in the delirious unbe-
lievable days that followed the acceptance of one
of his earlier plays, The King Can Do No Wrong,
by a Broadway producer. Here was not only great
glory in the offing, but great wealth. Our excite
ment brought us together oftener than usual, and
we discussed gravely what we had heard of royalties.
Maurice read the play to us, stopping often for com-
ment or suggestion; words were changed, and deli-
cate distinctions of phrase discussed. Even then
and to our uninitiated circle the construction seemed
a bit weak, though none of us had the courage to
say so. And the dialogue in spots was unbelievably
clever. The play ran an actual two weeks. In the
blaze of this success our misgivings withered and
our admiration flared up afresh. But the play seems
to have rather baffled those who attended it. There
was no very discoverable theme for one thing, and in
place of plot an ingeniously piled shaky structure of
dramatic tricks, capped with dazzling repartee. For
a few days we exchanged press notices, but this soon
became a gloomy business to be avoided. One critic
referred to the play as reminiscent of the young
Moliere. This was at once its greatest compliment
and a fairly accurate estimate.
Just how heavy a blow the failure was to him we
never knew. I remember that he came very quietly
into the room that evening, reading a manuscript in-
tently, flushed, intoxicated with a new enthusiasm.
It was an effective entrance whether planned or in-
stinctive. We waited a moment before he looked
up. He was quieter than usual, but incandescent.
We chatted as was our custom, meanwhile conscious
as himself of some glowing secret that transformed
himV When the reading began he brought out three
poems in free verse written in a seven-fold heat the
afternoon before we came. He was confident he
had struck a new vein. For some years he had at-
tacked free verse with sharp irony. It was a sub-
ject that gave scope to his brilliant invective. And
now he had deserted with startling suddenness to
the opposition. The poems, daring in subject and
phrase, compact of accurate observation, were unde-
niably good. They were published somewhere in
series, and made something of a stir, though he seems
never to have done so well again. Meanwhile his
plans were magnificent enough, and we were caught
up with his elation. He dropped the whole subject
of dramatics without explanations and went over to


1919
241
THE DIAL
poetry, digging out his ancient files of manuscript,
and planning a volume. We followed his lead un-
questioningly, put away our one-act, plays, and
began to do lyrics once more.
But when our group left the University he was
slowly going over to the enemy. He had failed at
the thing he believed in, living literature; and he had
made several magnificent successes without effort in
philological criticism. In the intervening years he
has faced squarely about. He has taken the little
worked subject of Restoration drama as his province,
and set his keen mind to clearing it of doubt. There
can be no question that his work is exceptionally well
done. There is in this country no scholar who can
vie with him as an authority on Wycherley or Dry-
den. His massive comparative analysis of the texts
of All for Love and Antony and Cleopatra ranks
with the work of the best European scholars. The
intellect that worked so uncertainly at creative effort
has functioned in research with uncanny surety and
insight. The work of Furness is irritatingly muddy
beside Maurice's crystal exposition. But he has not
got the coveted full professorship. This is the sym-
bol and the reality of his disappointment. When he
gave himself up to the ideals of German scholarship
the country was definitely for the first time turning
from them. He has made himself at great pains
master of an outworn technique. His concession
was made too late. The gods have rejected his un-
willing, tardy sacrifice. It is still as a lecturer to
undergraduates that he holds his place and makes
himself invaluable. To be sure he is the one man
who cannot see clearly his own situation nor under-
stand the inevitable forces that array themselves
against his new-found, hard-won position. In the
evenings, in all free hours, he works at a steadily
growing and monumental masterpiece of old school
commentary, his Restoration Dictionary, and in the
mornings he faces as in his youth the flooding, wear-
ing tides of uninformed humanity; with every year
quieter, sadder, more subtly ironical—idolized, hero-
worshiped, and with no escape.
Maxwell Anderson.
Li T'ai Po
So, Master, the wine gave you something,
I suppose,
I think I see you,
Your silks all disarranged,
Lolling in a green-marble pavilion,
Ogling the concubines of the Emperor's Court
Who pass the door
In yellow coats, and white jade ear-drops,
Their hair pleated in folds like the hundred
clouds.
I watch you,
Hiccoughing poetry between drinks,
Sinking as the sun sinks,
Sleeping for twenty-four hours,
While they peek at you,
Giggling,
Through the open door.
You found something in the wine,
I imagine,
Since you could not leave it,
Even when, after years of wandering,
You sat in the boat with one sail,
Traveling down the zigzag rivers
On your way back to Court.
You had a dream,
I conjecture.
You saw something under the willow-lights
of the water
Which swept you to dizziness,
So that you toppled over the edge of the boat,
And gasped, and became your dream.
Twelve hundred years
Or thereabouts.
Did the wine do it?
I would sit in the purple moonlight
And drink three hundred cups,
If I believed it.
Three hundred full cups,
After your excellent fashion,
While in front of me
The river-dazzle ran before the moon,
And the light flaws of the evening wind
Scattered the notes of nightingales
Loosely among the kuai trees.
They erected a temple to you:
"Great Doctor,
Prince of Poetry,
Immortal man who loved drink."
I detest wine,
And I have no desire for the temple,
Which under the circumstances
Is fortunate.
But I would sacrifice even sobriety
If, when I was thoroughly drunk,
I could see what you saw
Under the willow-clouded water,
The day you died.
Amy Lowell.


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September 20
THE DIAL
The Organization of Teachers in the United States
Ahe World War has changed many of our old
conceptions. We take for granted many things that
would have been considered impossible five years ago.
A strike of actors or policemen is accepted with a
degree of equanimity that seems almost startling.
Firemen and government employees are organizing
and affiliating with organized labor as if it were
quite the common thing. And most remarkable of
all is the fact that even teachers are acquiring the
knowledge of group-consciousness.
Slow and painful has been the progress of the
teacher toward a realization that his salvation lies
in joining together with his fellows for the protec-
tion of his economic status. And still more slowly
has come the realization of the part he must "play
in the protection of the interests of the children and
the schools against grasping politicians-and vested
interests anxious to maintain control of the schools
to prevent "insidious" theories from finding their
way through their sacred portals.
With few exceptions, teachers are still grouped
in associations, supposedly for cultural purposes and
for the. advancement of the profession. The basis
of organization is generally the position of the
teacher in the educational scheme of things. There
are associations of kindergarten teachers, of elemen-
tary, upper elementary, or high school teachers. Or
the subject taught may form the basis, as for example
associations of biology teachers, or history teachers,
and so forth. The number of associations in a
single city is generally large. In New York City
there are at present more than fifty. Above all these
is the National Education Association, to which all
teachers of whatever grade are eligible. At its an-
nual conventions, held at the beginning of the sum-
mer vacation, all teachers are expected to flock to
receive the message of the leaders of the teaching
profession, of government, and business. Innumer-
able speakers will dilate upon the glories of the
teachers' mission, various " experts " will discuss the
many phases of the teachers' work, and the much
harrassed teacher will derive therefrom as much
comfort as he can.
The various teachers' associations have in common
the complete divorce between the teacher and his
economic problems, which the steady increase in the
cost of living is tending to break down. The Na-
tional Education Association has lately taken a very
decided interest in the poor salaries paid to teachers.
Teachers' associations are generally led by a prin-
cipal or superintendent, to provide a dignified fore-
ground for their activities. This arrangement also
helps to discourage teachers from giving their atten-
tion to anything more serious than organizing pic-
nics or outings, or arranging courses of study for
that "self-improvement" of the teachers, which
really means obeying the principals' orders. In fair-
ness it must be stated that until very lately teachers
were quite satisfied with their inferior position, and
objected very strongly to any effort to improve it.
They accepted an arrangement whereby everything
was determined for them, including salary, hours,
and other conditions. They were satisfied to be
rated every six months by their "superiors," to be
bullied and scolded by their principals; to be told
what to think, what to teach, and what to read, or
not to read. As long as teachers' associations con-
fined themselves to the consideration of such harm-
less pastimes as the study of pedagogic methods and
scrupulously abstained from critical discussion of
social and economic problems, and as long as they
maintained a superior aloofness from the everyday
problems of the world about them, their associations
were regarded with benevolent interest and approval
—when they were not entirely ignored.
Such an attitude on the part of the authorities
and the teachers could have but one result, namely
to keep our schools in a state of complete stagna-
ton. Everywhere we find that initiative was dis-
couraged and even punished; ideas were penalized;
slavish following of routine was rewarded. Through
their power to "hire and fire" educational author-
ities were able to prevent the growth of any serious
opposition among the ranks of those who attempted
to raise the status of the teacher.
The utter failure of the school system to solve the
problems confronting it has been so obvious that
widespread demands in the last ten years have been
made in many parts of the country for an investiga-
tion. A series of surveys were instituted in a great
number of cities, which produced excellent reports,
but which resulted in very little practical benefit.
Professor McMurray, of the Hanus Investigating
Committee, came near to putting his finger on the
sore spot, when he pointed out that one of the be-
setting sins of the school system was the general
lack of initiative among the teachers, and the results
that follow from this condition.
But it was the teachers of Chicago that first came
to the realization that conditions needed improve-
ment, and that this improvement must come through
their united efforts and not through the benevolent
acts of friendly officials. Nineteen years ago the
maximum salary in Chicago was $825 a year, or $16


igig
243
THE DIAL
a week, attained after eleven years of service. Exas-
perated by the meanness and trickery of a city which
pleaded that an empty treasury made an increase
impossible, they determined to show the city where
it could get the money.
A quiet investigation quickly brought to light the
fact that several large and powerful corporations had
systematically evaded the payment of their taxes. In
spite of the refusal of the city authorities to aid
them, the teachers succeeded in forcing these delin-
quent corporations to disgorge about $600,000 a
year in taxes, after a vigorous legal battle.' When
the victory of the teachers was certain, the city
calmly proceeded to raise the salaries not of the
teachers but of the policemen.
It was then that the teachers felt the need of a
strong union; and upon the invitation of the Chi-
cago Federation of Labor, then as now led by those
militant leaders, Fitzpatrick and Olander, they de-
termined to affiliate with organized labor in order to
secure the support which they needed and which they
could get from no other source. As a result of this
aid, the maximum salaries have since been increased
from $825 a year to $1,800. In addition to this,
the teachers, through their affiliation with labor,
have learned to understand labor's problems. They
aided in the strikes of the pressmen and newsboys,
the garment workers, and coal miners. They fought
hard for woman suffrage. Ella Flagg Young had
their untiring support in her fight to free the public
schools from politicians and text-book companies.
The efforts of the Illinois Manufacturers' Associa-
tion to separate the children of the workers from the
children of the rich, by relegating the poor into the
manual schools and reserving the academic schools
for the rich, was quickly exposed by the teachers.
They also fought for the use of the public schools
as social centers.
It was not until May 1914, that the teachers
of Cleveland organized the second teachers' union.
It had a very short life, however. The Superin-
tendent of Schools regarded a union with great dis-
favor and at once discharged six of the leaders, all
of them excellent teachers of long experience. Al-
though an injunction had been secured to prevent
such action, the upper courts sustained the right of
the Superintendent to discharge the union leaders.
The next successful effort was made in New York.
In March 1916, one thousand teachers organized
the Teachers' Union of New York. Following this,
within a few months, unions were organized in
Gary, Ind.; Scranton, Pa., and Washington, D. C.
In May 1916, these unions together with the three
in Chicago formally launched the American Federa-
tion of Teachers, affiliated with the American Fed-
eration of Labor, and adopted the American Teacher
as its official organ.
The American Federation of Teachers, commonly
known as the A. F. of T., was not formed merely
for the protection of the economic interests of the
teachers, important as that is. Its motto—Democ-
racy in Education: Education for Democracy—best
sums up what it stands for. It aims, in other words,
to transform the present subordinate and subservient
position which the teacher occupies into that of a
sharer in the great work of education. It demands
first of all permanency of tenure, based on meri-
torious service, and not upon the whim of a School
Board. It demands further that teachers be granted
a direct share in the management of the school, in
the formulation of courses of study, in the selection
of principals, and in the determination of school
policies. It demands representation for teachers on
boards of education, and teachers' trial courts. That
the teacher is at present sadly unprepared to assume
such functions is readily admitted. Long years of
serfdom have tended to unfit the teacher to play the
part which he should of right play. But just as the
organized railroad workers are insisting that the
only democratic solution of railroad problems is
to entrust them to those who are best acquainted
with the industry, so the A. F. of T. insists that the
only way to maintain a democratic school system is
to manage it democratically, and not autocratically
as at present. It demands that teachers be entrusted
with this power and responsibility not only because
it would help to develop a new type of teacher, but
also because it would bring to bear upon the prob-
lems of the school all the teacher's varied experience.
The work of teachers' unions has met with
determined opposition on the part of school boards,
who fear the growth of group-consciousness or
group-power among teachers lest it threaten the ex-
isting control of the schools, so satisfactory to the
powers that be. The Chicago union in particular
had aroused the unrelenting opposition of the pow-
erful corporations. In June 1916, thirty-eight of
the officers and active members of the Union were
discharged, although all had been rated " excellent"
or "very good." In spite of the fact that public
opinion was on the side of the teacher, the corpora-
tion-dominated Board of Education received the
support of the Supreme Court of Illinois, which
decided, on appeal, that the Board could discharge
a teacher "because she is married, or unmarried;
is, or is not a member of a trades union, or whether
no reason is given." A year later a truce was
patched up between the Board and the union, where-
by the discharged teachers were reappointed on con-


244
September 20
THE DIAL
dition that the Federation end its affiliation with
Labor and be dissolved.
The New York Union has been under constant
attack since its very inception. Taking advantage
of the war hysteria, the School Board, through
vague charges'of lukewarm loyalty, was able to dis-
charge some of the active union teachers. The cli-
max in this policy of union-baiting came in April
1919, when, following a Free Speech meeting held
by the Union, the Board prohibited the Union from
holding any more meetings in the schools. It also
decided to investigate the "life, loyalty and activi-
ties " of every member of the Union. Its effort to
carry out this inquisition was balked by the re-
fusal of the officers to answer any questions about
their activities, because they mistrusted the proceed-
ings, and because all the Central Labor Union
bodies, representing a half -million organized work-
ers, rallied enthusiastically to the support of the
teachers. That a new spirit had entered the teach-
ing body is evident from the fact that over three
hundred Union members signed a statement that
if the officers were guilty, they were equally guilty;
and that if the officers were to be punished, they
must be punished also. Similar persecution of a
teacher in Washington, D. C, resulted in so vig-
orous a counter-attack upon the Board on the part
of the organized teachers and workers that the Board
was glad to allay the discontent it had aroused by
granting the teachers the right to form a school coun-
cil which must be consulted by the Board in all
matters of policy".
In spite of opposition the A. F. of T. has grown
from 3,000 members in September 1918, to over
10,000 in June 1919, with 103 branches in almost
as many cities. ' The effort to place the profession
upon a self-respecting basis will not down. For
teachers have learned that unless they are entrusted
with a vital share in the work of managing the
schools, there is no hope for the schools—or the
profession.
Benjamin Glassberg.
R
The Place of the Community in t