A nhac to eenie a by Henri Barbusse 


The Nation 


a CXAII, No. 3181 thence Wednesday, June 23, 1926 
































o r 
Amorousness and Alcohol 
The Basis of the Fight for Prohibition 
by Mary Austin 


“Unchanging China” 


th One of a Series of Chinese Backgrounds 
and 

itp by Lewis S. Gannett 

in 


| 





: The Negro Artist 


oc! 
A Defense of Racial Art in America 
by Langston Hughes 





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4 


[ Vol. 122, No. 3) 


ii The Nation 


Independence Days 





BOOKS AND BOOKSELLERs 








RATIONAL LIVING 
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All Americans worthy the name will par- 
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Declaration of Independenc®-a document i. ee 
incomparable in its lucid and elgquent re- 
cital of the true principles of Fa Play as 
they apply to the functioning of govern- 


ment. e 


All honor to the fifty-six heroes who dared 
to sign this instrument, thus staking their 
all, that justice might prevail! 


for one year, due to the voyage o 
its editor, Dr. B. Liber, abroad. The 
editor has had to extend his stay in 
Europe. But soon after his return 
to New York, at the end of the sum. 
mer, the magazine will be published 
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Conte ‘nts 


ITORIAL I »ARAGRAPHS : 68) 
rORIALS: 
China’s Wars and Warriors.. ne AeA 
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HE UNIVERSE, INC. By Hendrik van Loon.... 627 
“NCHANGING CHINA.” By Lewis S. Gannett. GRR 
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YOROUSNESS AND ALCOHOL. By Mary Austin.. . 691 
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TEWBERRY WAS A PIKER according to Pennsy!- 

vania standards. Gifford Pinchot spent $195,000— 
smuch to run third in the recent Pennsylvania Republican 
rmary as Newberry spent in getting nominated in Michi- 
an six years ago. Vare, who won, spent more than half a 
lion dollars, and the Mellons and their friends spent 
wre than a million in their vain efforts to hoist the pious 


ir. Pepper into the Senate again. Washington is reported 


shocked at Mr. Vare’s vote-buying that the Senate ma) 
seat him if elected. But what of Mr. Pepper, who 


lready sits, and of Mr. Mellon, the Secretary of the Treas- 
ry, who helped finance his campaign? Are they more vir- 
tous because they spent more, and lost? And what of 
lr. Fisher, candidate for Governor, whom the Pittsburgh 
tachine counted in on the day after election, apparently by 
punting ballots in bulk instead of individually? Joseph 
. Grundy, chairman of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ 


‘sociation, who put up occasional checks for $18,000, 
1,000, or $80,000, whenever needed, was frank in ex- 


4ining his passion to elect Fisher governor. Fisher’s 


val, he feared, might repeal the tax on coal, which the 
Nsumers have to pay, and “that might mean getting the 
Xes out of the corporations,” which are now tax-exempt 


Pennsylvania. Hence Mr. Grundy’s readiness to dig into 


is bank roll. Will Mr. Fisher be allowed to run? Has 


CXXII NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 


926 No. 3181 





Penn ‘ Ivaniz , decency left, or does it like to be known 
as the corruptest State in America? And has America no 
sense of shame, permitting the chief bay man of t} vote 


buying gang to run its Treasury? 


- 
HE GREAT ‘ELECTION FRAUD,” sa; 


York Times, “is the primary itself.” And Mr 


the New 
Melon’s faithful Senator David Reed solemnly asserts that 
“Necessarily, in all propriety, the expenditures of vast 
sums were required because of the silly mechanism of 
primary elections that was thrust on us in a burst of ur 
considered reform twenty years ago. We have vot to yet 
back to the convention system.” The vast sums spent ir 
Pittsburgh were used to buy “watchers” —about one in 
every four voters was paid as a “watcher”’—at $10 a head 
for men and $5 for women (a new atrocity to excite the 
Woman’s Party). It is difficult to understand what the 
primary system has to do with this form of systematic 
corruption. People who put up hundreds of thousands of 
dollars to buy a primary will surely be as yenerous at a 
regular election, and people who can be bought in June are 
certainly for sale in November. The only apparent advan 
tage in the convention system is that it used to make it 
possible to buy nominations more cheaply, easily, and 
secretly. In the good old days of party conventions the 
bosses sat in their hotel rooms and made their deals with 
less likelihood of exposure by an inquisitive Senatorial 
committee. That, apparently, is what the Times and Sen 
ator David Reed want. The primary does not work per 
fectly, but it has its advantages—and these are precisely 
what make Mr. Mellon’s friends mad. It made Brookhart’ 
victory in Iowa possible, and it has repeatedly defeated 
machine candidates. On the whole, Pennsylvania's primary 
did not work so ill. Despite the Mellon-Grundy million 
Mr. Pepper was not elected. 


APANESE POLICE arrested three hundred Korean 

who dared demand independence during the funeral of 
their erstwhile emperor; the French are continuing their 
war of extermination against the Syrian patriots; England 
has bullied Zaghlul Pasha, despite his overwhelming victory 
at the polls, into refusing the premiership of the “independ 
ent” kingdom of Egypt; and the red-blooded Americans who 
want Uncle Sam to join in the game of sitting on Asia are 
demanding increased powers for General Wood, our exces 
sively military Governor General. Indeed, Representatir 
Theodore Bacon of New York is suggesting that the rich 
southern islands inhabited in part by the backward Moro 
be separated administratively from the rest of the Philip- 
pines. He says the Moros want American and resent Fili 
pino rule, but the recent killings occurred in Lanao, 
after General Wood had replaced a Filipino governor by an 
American. The joke is that the Moro Islands include 
the land which the rubber interests covet. Their 
people, for all their belligerent Moslem past, are the most 
backward in the islands, and Mr. Bacon’s talk of “self-de- 
termination” for them is an obnoxious attempt to repeat, 
in the name of America, the old imperialist game of con- 
quering by dividing. 








682 


) The Nation 


[ Vol. 122, No. 33: 








HE VISIT to this country of Louis Borno, President 

of Haiti by grace of the republic’s American con- 
querors, naturally raises the question, What for? Mr. 
Borno’s departure from Port au Prince was accompanied 
by a demonstration anything but friendly og the part of 
his fellow-citizens, many of whom think t ices of his 
visit may be to sell further rights in Haiti to American 
business or to create propaganda favorable to a continu- 
ance of our forcible occupation. Another disapproving 
crowd greeted Mr. Borno upon his arrival in New York, 
raising the question of his eligibility to the presidential 
office. So long as American business and bayonets are the 
actual rulers, it matters little what puppet is the nominal 
head of the government. More important than the academic 
controversy over Mr. Borno’s eligibility is the fact that he 
is virtually self-chosen—having been selected last spring by 
a Council of State which he had appointed—and that the 
whole governmental scheme rests upon a_ constitution 
which the United States forced upon Haiti in 1918. Our 
conquest of Haiti in the interest of American business, 
and the bitter resentment that has existed among the in- 
habitants ever since, is the point for us to keep in mind. 
It is an injustice that hurts us even more than it does 
helpless Haiti. 


nppempears CHAMORRO is not to be recognized by 
the United States as President of Nicaragua. That 
may be accepted as final by the announcement of the re- 
turn of the American Minister on an indefinite leave of 
absence. General Chamorro is friendly toward American 
business penetration in the republic, while the Liberals 
who last winter undertook an unsuccessful revolution 
against his dictatorship proclaim a belief in Nicaragua 
for the Nicaraguans. The Department of State is deserv- 
ing of credit, therefore, as William Hard suggested in The 
Nation of June 2, in that it is logically standing by its 
policy not to recognize a government set up by force in 
Central America, even if a friendly regime could be ob- 
tained in that way. Whether the policy itself is a sound 
one is another matter. The Nation believes that the old 
practice of international law, by which any established gov- 
ernment is recognized regardless of origin, is wiser and 
less provocative of meddling in other peoples’ affairs. Any- 
how, General Chamorro can hardly expect to last as Presi- 
dent without recognition from the United States. There 
is a prospect, now that hope of recognition is gone, that 
he may voluntarily step down and make way for a coalition 
covernment of a moderate and conciliatory sort. That is 
what Nicaragua thought it had set up in 1924. President 
Solorzano proved unequal to the job, but the plan is worth 
trying again. 


RAZIL HAS LEFT the League of Nations in a pique, 

I and Spain, too, is talking of desertion because she 
cannot have a permanent seat on the Council of the League. 
Poland, meanwhile, is too absorbed in her own troubles to 
repeat the claim which roused such a furore and whetted 
so many appetites in March. The path is now clear to 
enlarge the number of non-permanent seats on the Council, 
and to admit Germany, as a great Power, to the charmed 
England, France, Italy, and Japan are the 
permanent members. And thus the shabby 
under-cover affair which Briand and Austen Chamberlain 
‘y made secret agreements at Locarno comes 


nner circle 


others of 


egan when the 


to an anticlimactic end. It is true that the League is »,., 
weighted with European members, but Brazil’s claim :, 
seat for Latin America was not made after consulta: 
with her neighbors or in their name; it was just a cas. 
grab, like Poland’s and Spain’s. The League’s refusa) . 
accept her ultimatum does it honor. 


REMIER AVERESCU won his general election 

Rumania by a comfortable margin; he holds 10 
of 113 seats in the new Chamber. Considering the , 
that he controlled only five seats in the last parliame 
this is a handsome gain—and calls, perhaps, for a bit 
explaining. When Averescu was called to the premiers 
at the end of Bratianu’s term in office, it was gener) 
accepted that his job consisted in preventing the legitima 
opposition, the National Peasant Party, from getting ¢ 
trol of the government. He has succeeded magnificen: 
and if his opponents growl—even Bratianu, who was doy: 
less responsible for his appointment, is complaining 
oppressive tactics—it will probably be some time bef, 
their resentment grows to dangerous proportions. 


VERESCU’S PREELECTION METHODS 
the most part in the time-honored tradition 
Balkans. He made a hasty pact with certain leaders amo 
the non-Rumanian elements and put up a ticket deceptiy: 
indicating a love feast of heretofore conflicting nationalitie 
with Hungarian and Rumanian jingoes, Zionists a 
pogromists, alike represented. He prohibited the oppo 
tion parties from electioneering in the country districts; | 
gave orders to the gendarmerie to eject all dangerous opy 
sition candidates—particularly the more prominent leads 
of the Peasants’ Bloc—from their own election distric: 
According to the Bucharest daily Adeverul, the Captain 
Gendarmerie Sfetescu, of the Vlach’ka district, sent t 
circular order to the posts of his district: ‘Pedestrian a 
tators for non-governmental parties are to be arrested, ag 
tators in automobiles to be escorted by the chief of the 
and a detachment of his gendarmes beyond the local border 
Certain urban centers of opposition were put under a state 
siege. Averescu also invoked the Red Specter, starting a co 
spiracy trial in Klausenburg on May 5, against eighty-sev 
alleged Communist conspirators between the ages of fou 
teen and eighteen, the chief defendant, Kate Abrahan, bei 
a high-school girl sixteen years old. In the course of th 
orgy of preelection repression Averescu executed one orig 
nal coup: In Rumania soldiers under arms are deprived 
the vote. Averescu had the lists of “politically unreliatl 
citizens carefully scrutinized by his local henchmen, “ 
then called to the colors all “unreliable” males between *! 
ages of 24 and 42 for military exercises to last until * 

first week of June. 


were 4 


HE PASSAIC STRIKE, now in its twenty-second we 

continues to give America lessons in labor strate 
A striking plan suggested recently is the organization of 
vertical labor boycott against the leading woolen firms 
Passaic, such as Forstmann and Hoffmann’s, the («4 
Worsted and Spinning Company. and Botany Mills © 
solidated—for the big needle-trades unions to refuse 
make clothing from Passaic woolens. The vertical combi 
tion which brings under one management the production 
everything from flax to finished Fords has been hailed ! 


a great American achievement, yet a similar vertical 12° 








une 23, 1926] 





The Nation 


683 





cott would doubtless be attributed to Moscow. Mean- 
rile the Passaic United Front Committee is extending its 
‘tle-line with relief committees in all parts of the United 
L case ates. Textile unions outside the American Federation 
¢..... JN Labor have created a new national committee for organ- 
~ ‘ition work. The strikers are running four grocery stores 
‘their own in Passaic, each store having a manager and 
‘cht assistants who are all strikers. They have a ware- 
yse, a clothing store where strikers, after investigation, 


pg »» allotted second-hand clothing free, a corps of twenty 
Hien vestigators who check up on the expenditure of strike 
a bw gpief funds, and even a housing department which has 
miers ced about fifteen evicted families in new homes. All 
enersiame’s enterprises are manned by strikers. 
tb: HE NET OPERATING REVENUE of the Canadian 
ficent! National Railways for 1925 has recently been an- 
« douiggpounced as $32,264,000. This is $15,000,000 better than 
ning get 1924, and $66,000,000 better than for 1920 when, as a 
. hor.mecacy of practical bankruptcy in private hands, the 
' ‘HRsnadian Government was forced to take over this 20,000 
Jes of track and operate it somehow. Since 1922, operat- 
-" hg surpluses have been obtained. Coincident with this 
ews there came over our desk a recent bulletin of the 
~ amamaylor Society, which carried a speech by Sir Henry 
enth hornton, the chief executive of the Canadian National. 
ralitie ir Henry has joined with Daniel Willard, president of the 
4¢ gpaltimore and Ohio Railroad, in supporting the so-called 
os nion-management cooperative plan, whereby, in repair 
jes: qggeops, the Machinists Union and the railroad management 


wperate to increase production, decrease waste, promote 
loadoqmalety and sanitation, and steady the curve of employ- 
ent. Sir Henry gives unqualified approval to the plan, 
nd is assisting in its introduction throughout the great 


sr vstem which he controls. Meanwhile the same bulletin 
fan rries a speech by Bert Jewell, one of the union leaders 
‘ed. agqimarily concerned with the plan, and a paper by Otto S. 
the pgmpever the union’s engineer, who has been assisting with 


he technical direction of the plan, both on the B. and O. 
stategqeod on the Canadian National. Mr. Beyer states that since 
923 there have been no fewer than 2,180 joint meetings 
{ management and men on the B. and O. Over 14,000 
necific proposals—mostly technical—have been brought up 











»f fo 

n, beim these meetings, of which 11,300 have been adopted in 

of time shops. Here, moreover, is no tame dodo of a company 

eo or@metion, steered into sweetness and light by benevolent 
@@eudalists. Here is a free, powerful, international union, 


orking with the management of a great railroad, on the 
asis of a fair give and take. 


T SWORDS’ POINTS with Senator Wadsworth on al- 
most all issues, we none the less salute him as an 

nest, straightforward politician. No pussyfooting for 

d wein. When he takes a stand he is willing that everybody 
raterqmnould know it. He never made any bones of his opposi- 
in to woman suffrage and he does not now. In face of 
‘rms (termined prohibition opposition to his renomination, he 
o CeMle’s come out squarely, not for the modification of the Vol- 
is Comm'ead Act but for the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment 
fyse Meo the Constitution and the substitution therefor of the 
anadian system of government-controlled sale of liquor. 
‘tion Mat is the stand a brave and square politician ought to 
‘iled 1 ake if he does not believe in prohibition; it is throwing 
bwn a gage of battle worth taking up. We cannot go as 








































far as Mr. Frank Kent in deploring the mere possibility of 
the defeat of Senator Wadsworth because he ji 
man, has brains, and leads, for we should like to see the 
political policies he for defeated at turn. 
But it is so rare to find a politician of the Old Guard type 
standing four-square and risking unpopularity by frank 
avowal of a position which makes bitter attack-—and, in 


is a gentle- 


stands every 


this case, a rival candidacy—inevitable that we are glad 


to record our admiration. 


HOSE OF THE OLDER GENERATION 
day contribute new opinions on modern 
freshly amazed each summer. The 


regard vacation—once the Utopia 


who every 
youth must be 
young idea seems to 
of the light novel—as a 
time to exercise minds cramped for months by academic 
requirements. Opportunity to discuss problems ranging 
from personal religious beliefs to international] affairs will 
be offered at a multitude of conferences here and abroad, 
of which the New Student prints a comprehensive list in 
a supplement to its issue of May 26. Internatiamalism on 
a large scale centers at Geneva, where a student headquar- 
ters has been established at the sugyestion of Gilbert Mur 
ray. In an old stone house at Honfleur, Normandy, a con 
ference led by Norman Angell emphasizes intimacy of d 
cussion and limits its numbers to twenty-five or thirty. On 
this side of the Atlantic an enterprising student can spend 
his vacation working and thinking or playing and think 
ing in equally good though perhaps less varied company 
The National Student Forum has made over a barn in the 
Connecticut Berkshires into a home for a series of seven 
conferences. A camp at Oliverea in the Catskills of New 
York will be the scene of an experiment in self-expression. 
The students will lecture to one another instead of inviting 
expert members of the older generation. The Middle West 
has just concluded an all-inclusive three-day student con- 
ference at Kansas City. In various other cities the 
Y. M. C. A. and Y. W. C. A. will continue to conduct their 
industrial groups of students who desire to work. With a 
firm belief in the efficacy of experience The Nation offers 
again this year three prizes of $100, $50, and $25 each for 
three articles on the summer experiences of students in in- 
dustry. The articles should be not longer than 4,000 words, 
and should be submitted before November 1, 1926. 


ERE AND THERE TORIES still cry out: “Why give 

the workers more leisure? They don’t know what to 
do with it.” It would do these old fogies good—if they are 
honest—to visit the Workers Unity House at Forest Park, 
Pennsylvania. The International Ladies’ Garment Work- 
ers Union some years ago acquired a summer hotel in the 
woods. Year by year this magnificent site has been more 
and more adapted to the workers’ needs. On June 18 an- 
other season opened. There are quarters for children as 
well as adults. There is a program of lectures and music 
as well as of organized games. And always there is the 
beauty of woods and lake and sky. Last year nearly 4,000 
workers and their children spent their vacation in their 
own union’s summer home. The Pioneer Youth camps on 
which The Nation has often commented are other fine ex- 
amples of the interest the workers take through their own 
organization in enriching the hours when they can be away 
from the machine and the mechanized life. To Unity 
House, the Pioneer Youth camps, and all similar non-profit- 
making enterprises The Nation wishes the best of summers. 





The Nation 


[ Vol. 122, No. 33; 





China’s Wars 


HE most significant thing about the confused fighting 

and peace-making in China is its insignificance. What- 
ever the outcome, nothing important will have changed. 
The Nationalist armies of the “Christian general,” Feng 
Yu-hsiang, have been beaten, for the present, in the North; 
Wu Pei-fu and Chang Tso-lin are desultorily disputing over 
the spoils, and Sun Chuan-fong has seized the occasion to 
declare “independence” in the rich lower Yangtze Valley. 
All these Chinese generals are essentially bandits grown 
great; their armies are freebooters’ armies, loyal with a 
personal loyalty to a chief rather than to a principle or a 
group. When they conquer or disappear the change is but 
a shift of personalities. 

That any permanent solution of China’s troubles can 
come this summer or in any immediate future is unlikely. 
The causes lie too deep. China has moved too far into the 
twentieth century for any single despot to be able to unite 
her and rule her with an iron will. The well-meant efforts 
of various foreigners since the revolution to aid one strong 
man to dominate the country have only aggravated the im- 
mense difficulties of the situation. China is emerging from 
a patriarchal, stable, medieval civilization into the restless, 
changing torment of the new industrial world. Industrial- 
ism has touched her only here and there, but it has de- 
old equilibrium and upset the old balances. 
The only way out is forward, but 


stroyed the 
They cannot be restored. 
her chaos is likely to be greater before she emerges from 
the birth-throes of the new epoch. 

Where is the fighting in China? It is near the port 
cities and along the lines of the railways, where China’s 
native village economy has been upset. Instead of peace- 
fully producing only enough for the requirements of th 
local market, men along the railway lines have learned, in 
the Western manner, to specialize. They produce a surplus 
for an export market, and depend upon the railroads to 
bring from afar what they need to live. But the existence 
of a surplus, the existence of the railroads, is to the mili- 
turists a chance for robbery and gain. That they destroy 
the goose that lays the golden eggs means nothing to them; 
they will move elsewhere with their armies and rob other 
geese. The peasants who have been robbed of their means 
of existence are likely to turn to robbery, to form new local 
bandit bands which will in time be incorporated into so- 
called armies. So the process goes on. For the time it 
seems to produce only greater and greater chaos. Bui 
fundamentally it is revolutionizing China, breaking up the 
ancient stability of the local units, destroying that devotion 
to the past which was rooted in local customs, local bonds, 
and local divinities, and teaching the Chinese to work to- 
gether in masses. It is creating, in its slow, mysterious 
way, that national consciousness which China has hitherto 
lacked. 

Chang Tso-lin, Wu Pei-fu, Sun Chuan-fong, Feng Yu- 
hsiang—the generals whose names appear in the newspapers 
—are survivals of an age that is past. Chang Tso-lin is a 
street gangster playing king; Wu is a scholar respected in 
China because he is personally honest and loyal to his 
friends, even if they be inefficient and dishonest; Sun is a 
clever product of a Japanese military school; Feng is a 
peasant leader who indiscriminately uses Russian muni- 


and Warriors 


tions and Christian texts as instruments of warfare 

of them speaks the language of the youth of China. : 
of them look back pathetically toward the golden past, spe. 
with the exaggerated modesty which only a Chinese 
adopt, and have confidence in none but themselves. W>; 
defeated they react, as Chinese do, by retiring to obscur' 
to gain new strength. Today Chang is supported mor. 
less openly by Japan, Wu and Sun less openly by Engler 
Feng by Soviet Russia. But none of them has any de 
tion to the Powers which support them, or any progr; 
Their ambition is for their personal gang to get contr 
Like the old sages of China, they believe that a good map 
always a good ruler, and, like all men, they believe they 
selves good. There is little hope for China politically uy 
they and their generation have bled one another to des 

Feng, youngest of the three, has come nearest to hy 
ing a program. His soldiers wear on their arms an inser; 
tion “Love the people! Do not molest the people! H¢ 
the people!” He has taxed his district into poverty, ! 
his soldiers have a reputation for paying for what th 
take. They are disciplined; they even build roads, wh 
is an occupation considered beneath his dignity by : 
average Chinese bandit. But Feng’s alliance with the hy 
sians, which is more geographical than ideological, has ¢ 
him the valuable sympathy of the British and American 
who in China, as elsewhere, permit hate to blind the 
vision. And with all his discipline and his principles Fer 
has never learned to share power. He is, like the rest, 
military despot, and when he retired his forces crumpl 
The new China will not be built by soldiers; it requir 
civilians. 

Away in the south of China, at Canton, is the m 
hopeful focal point in China today. There, where foreiy 
influence has been strongest and resentment of it keene: 
the Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang, acting through 
party dictatorship which closely resembles the Russian sy 
tem, has established something like civilian government, th 
only civilian island in the militarist sea which is Chin 
today. Canton’s present government may not survive. 
generals may become too ambitious; it may make 
alliances. Already its influence has spread over other pro 
inces, which may be its doom—Feng lost his significan 
when he began to make alliances with weaker men of weake 
principles. But the idea upon which Canton rests, t 
democratic nationalism of Dr. Sun, is likely, through ti 
or through some other agency, to spread. 

Foreigners can do little to help China in her agor) 
Fundamentally, her need is time—time for the new gener 
tion to grow into responsibility, time to adapt herself to th 
twentieth century. To expect peace and law and order fro 
a continent which is trying to compress a thousand yeat 
of history into ten is absurd. China will not uphold th 
letter of the treaties forced upon her in her weakness 
She is not likely for some vears to have a central gover 
ment capable of so doing. The outside world may stand ‘ 
its rights and check the speed of the revolution, thus dra¥ 
ing on itself the hatred of a perplexed and miserable peop 
—or it can seek to understand and sympathize. Le\ 
Gannett’s articles, beginning in this issue of The Nat 
are an attempt at such sympathetic understanding. 


ine 








ne 23, 1926] The 





Nation 685 








The Play Jury Functions 


AST week the New York Citizens’ Play Jury, which 
.s had apparently fallen into a state of innocuous desue- 
: je, suddenly came to life and announced the result of its 


+ .. piberations upon four plays. “Sex” and “The Shanghai 
16 ad sture’” were approved, a minor elimination was recom- 
_ wggended in “The Great Temptations,” and “The Bunk of 
beenrmeo” «Was said to be so objectionable that it should be 
asics sed. The Shuberts dutifully omitted the offensive few 
ae nutes from their entertainment, and the Actors’ Equity 
iy sociation, in accordance with its voluntary agreement, 
rogremered the actors out of “Bunk.” Mr. Ramsey Wallace, 


. Mpwever, one of the producers of the latter revue, obtained 
es. om Supreme Court Justice Aaron J. Levy an injunction 
re mporarily restraining the Actors’ Equity Association 
“ae om interfering, and the entertainment, after being pro- 
; ded with additional costuming, was resumed. Here for 


ae 
pres e moment the matter rests, Mr. Wallace maintaining 
inscrmeat he has been unfairly discriminated against while the 
:! y,qgeoponents of the Citizens’ Jury accuse him of attempting 
vy ® wreck the only institution which stands between the 
at Jew York stage and some more offensive form of censor- 
, whi? 

7 The Nation, as its readers know, looks with suspicion 
‘ee Ru pon any form of censorship, and it even doubts the wis- 
ras oe of those compromises which consist in accepting one 
ericargmee Out of fear of a worse; but it must in fairness be said 
d theqgpet both in theory and practice the play-jury scheme has 
s Fes far proved relatively inoffensive. It avoids the mon- 
rest gprous absurdity involved in making policemen the judges 

















art and morality, and it does not, like the English sys- 
m, repose arbitrary power in the hands of one person. 
oreover, its decisions have been for the most part liberal. 
st year it either wholly approved or caused to be only 
ightly modified three excellent plays whose fate in the 
yids of the police would have been, at best, doubtful. 


reenes 
ough punk” is the first production which it has ever tried to 
am pe. Yet the system has its disadvantages. In the first 


ace, € Separate jury is drawn for each play and, since 
hecency is undoubtedly a matter of unstable convention 
d personal taste, there is every reason to believe that 
le verdict in any given case would depend entirely upon 
le character of the jurors who happened to be drawn. In 
e second place, there hangs about the citizens’ jury 
heme the same pharisaical taint which is inseparable 
-s, tqgeem any form of censorship whatsoever. 

rh th It is sometimes said that the only problem involved is 
problem of finding decent and intelligent men for the 
le of censor, but the fact remains that no decent and 
telligent man could possibly be persuaded to devote him- 
to the! to the task for long. There is something essentially 
Yurd in drawing lines or in pointing out details, and 
afapnething essentially presumptuous in setting oneself up 
lq the Judge what another may be permitted to see, in expurgat- 
'¢ books and plays, or deciding what statues should, like 
me in Italy, be fitted with galvanized iron skirts. No right- 
.\dcqe'nded man can do it often without feeling himself de- 
dravqge2ded and ridiculous. Censors may be drawn from many 
neon messes, from the stupid, the humorless, the fanatical, and 
Lew#ae’ Prurient, hut they cannot be drawn for long from de- 

‘nt and intelligent men. 
Upon this fact any scheme of censorship is inevitably 








wrecked. In the case of a crisis, such as that which was 


precipitated last year, wise and honorable people such as 


have undoubtedly concerned themselves in the present 
movement may, either from a sense of public duty or 

order to obviate the danger of police stupidity, consent to 
judge plays from the standpoint of the moralist. The 


majority even of those who believe that a censorship is 
desirable will shrink from themselves performing the func- 
tion, just as the majority of prohibitionists still shrink 
from imitating General Butler or informing the 
about the activities of the home brewer who has a still in 
the cellar next door; and they will both refrain for the 
Same reason—because spying out indecencies, like telling 
tales, is naturally repugnant. Since the play jury has no 
legal standing, service upon it is bound to be voluntary, 
and it will become, in a short time, a body composed of 
those who find in its activities a congenial occupation. 

In its favor it might be argued that it is, in contrast 
to the English system, “democratic’’; but it is not 
opinion, democratic enough. There is 
democratic way to deal with spectacles concerning whose 
taste there is a difference of opinion: Let those who find 
them unobjectionable attend and let others stay away. 


police 


in our 


only one really 


Real Help for Real Farmers 


ORD comes from Washington that in consequence of 

the overwhelming Brookhart victory in Iowa’s Re 
publican senatorial primary election Congress must ‘do 
something” for the farmer before adjourning this summer 
After a few futile gestures and many windy words in the 
spring, Republican leaders had thought to shelve the issue 
once again, but fear of disaster in the congressional cam 
paign in the autumn is spurring them now to put together 
some piece of bric-a-brac the paint on which will not peel 
off until it has done its work of fooling the agricultural 
communities over the November election. 

Meanwhile an existing means of helping the farmer 
potentially the most important set up so far—has never 
been permitted to function as intended, but has become 
instead a roost for politicians. Under political control we 
have a farm-mortgage fund now amounting to more than 
a billion dollars, involving two thousand political offices, 
setting the farm-mortgage interest rate for the nation, 
and making more powerful certain men known to betray 
the trust they are administering. The Farm Loan System, 
owned outright by 300,000 farmers, established as a much- 
needed and valuable credit machine, was by law to be 
turned over to the stockholders practically as soon as set up. 
The Nation has already recounted the way amendments to 
the act were secured which robbed Farm Loan members of 
the right, inherent in the ownership of stock, to manage 
their property. It has described the secret fund set up 
in the Franklin National Bank, an account ordered closed 
by Secretary Mellon after a Senate inquiry. |The Politi- 
cians Betray the Farmer, by Gertrude Mathews Shelby, 
December 3, 1924. } 

The kernel of the Farm Loan System is the opportunity 
that it offers for any group of ten farmers to combine to 
obtain loans. The group has to indorse each individual 
loan and each borrower subscribes to stock in the land 
bank of his district. Each group is liable up to twice the 
value of its stock for losses of its own land bank, and every 






















































686 


The Nation 


[ Vol. 122, No. 3): 





bank is liable for the losses of any other. The money comes 
from public subscription to bonds backed by this unusually 
good security. The reform of the Farm Loan System, its 
restoration to the genuine source of rural cooperative credit 
that it was intended to be, is one of the few programs upon 
which apostles of the farmer in Congress of all shades of 
opinion might unite. Here is a constructive measure to 
which no honest man can object. 

Instead of such reform another link in the long chain 
of Farm Loan exploitation by politicians was forged by 
a congressional appropriation at this session increasing the 
already large overhead for the federal bureau by $230,000. 
A new division of appraisers and examiners was set up, 
with a chief at $12,000—tthe remuneration of the Secretary 
of the Treasury—and four assistants at $6,000 each. A 
Farm Loan expert asserts that several added examiners 
might perhaps have justified their existence at a total ex- 
pense of $30,000. Yet two years ago two members at 
$10,000 each, with eight-year terms, were added to the 
board itself. One immediately employed a $7,500 assistant. 
The Senate, looking askance, finally approved their appoint- 
ment because it was understood that these new members 
would perform expert tasks of the sort for which $230,000 
has now been voted. This unnecessary burden the system 
must carry is not the largest—merely the latest. Traveling 
expenses, necessarily large, are so high the board refuses 
to give figures. The whole system is padded with unneces- 
sary jobs. Unknown to stockholders and even to Congress, 
Charles E. Lobdell, when formerly a commissioner, con- 
trived two years ago to persuade the federal board to cre- 
ate a new position, that of fiscal agent, to sell the bonds 
which produce funds to lend. The twelve land-bank presi- 
dents voted him $25,000 a year. The same summer their 
own salaries were raised. 

Mr. Lobdell manages to retain his $25,000 job. But 
he does not—perhaps cannot—dispense with the syndicate 
which, he once testified, advised him concerning the 
amount of bonds to issue and the best time to float them. 
The syndicate is in a position to indicate what interest the 
bonds may carry; in a word, how much money the farmers 
are to have and what they should pay for it. It is highly 
significant that our farmers are obliged to pay a higher 
interest rate than is paid in foreign countries under sim- 
ilar schemes. Others provide funds at 2'5 or 345 per cent. 
Even our insurance companies lend at interest lower than 
the Farm Loan. Joint-stock banks, also supervised by the 
federal board, charging 5!» and 6 per cent, like “the farm- 
ers’ own system,” are not only able to compete but to take 
Farm Loan business away. 

The interest rate, meaning millions a year to farmers, 
should drop. Instead, Representative McFadden has pro- 
posed an amendment allowing the Farm Loan Board to 
increase it one-half of 1 per cent. Any increase in the Farm 
Loan rate would be slow death. Failure would be stamped 
upon the first federal move toward initiating economic 
liberty in this country. By the Farm Loan act freedom 
was actually granted to responsible men to pool their re- 
sources, to serve themselves at cost by applying the asso- 
ciation principle so valuable in insurance fields. Here 
might have begun—might still begin if a thorough reor- 
ganization takes place—a decentralization of credit which, 
extended to other industrial classes, might render Amer- 
degree independent of gigantic financial 


icans to some 


powers. 


Meyer London 


HERE was something immensely impressive ab 

tribute which the East Side of New York—no: 
the East Side but the labor and Socialist movement 
whole city—paid to Meyer London, the immigrant 
Russia who became one of the fathers of the modern 
ganization of needle-trade workers and one of the + 
Socialists who have sat in Congress. Mr. London died 
a Sunday after being struck by an automobile. He y 
buried on a Wednesday. During the long hours whi); 
body lay in state at the Forward Building an endless , 
cession of people passed in sorrow. Thousands mar 
behind his coffin through streets black with people. 
funeral services were not of a religious character, 
Mr. London’s honor the lamps outside one synagogu: 
lit and on the steps of another a rabbi chanted the prays 
for the dead as the hearse passed by. 

The tribute was to a man and not to an official pos 
tion. Mr. London no longer represented his East Sic 
trict in Congress. In recent years the party of which | 
was a leader has waned in political strength. At the tir 
of his death he was not even the principal attorney for: 
strongest of the unions which he had helped to build y 
But he was, as he had always been, a lovable human be’; 
with strong likes and dislikes, great enthusiasm, much 
tellectual ability, and a sincere passion for the rights 
the underdog. He might easily have become a rich n 
in his chosen profession, but money never appealed to hin 
More than once he sent back checks to labor unions 
cause, he said, they were too large. 

Of his political influence it is harder to speak. To ma: 
observers the funeral services brought other scenes to men 
ory. Rutgers Square, where massed thousands wept { 
Meyer London, in 1914 witnessed an extraordinary jubils 
in honor of his first election to Congress. Old orthod 
Jews danced and sang with the younger radical gener: 
tion. Meyer London had been elected; Utopia was nea 
One of the prominent workers in that campaign, now 


close political friend of Governor Smith’s, boasted that Tam 


many’s day was done. The years brought disillusionme: 
Meyer London was a capable Representative, loyal to ti 
conviction of what the difficult war years demanded, but } 
did not—perhaps could not—rise to heights of leadersh; 
No one Socialist Congressman from the East Side cou! 
ever bring the millennium. But he showed the citizen 
what they could do if they would stand together. 
tion of one Socialist Congressman did not portend 
downfall of Tammany Hall, but there can be no d 
whatever that Mr. London’s election and similar Socials 


successes were largely responsible for the more enlightene 


social and economic attitude of Tammany Hall under 
leadership of “Al” Smith. 
Perhaps Mr. London’s most lasting claim to fame 1 


prove to be the great role he played in the famous 1°! 
strike which established the garment workers as a reé 


power in industry and ended the days when the need 
trades were the classic example of human exploitat) 
which we call sweatshop labor. Whatever place history : 

assign him, the East Side’s sincere and spontaneous tribu' 


tality of influence for the personality and deeds of men w! 
dare to dream of a just and beautiful world. 





The elec 














e 23, 1926] 





The N 





Jation 








IN Gramercy Park I met my friend 
i Se Osholowitch Oshol, formerly a high 
sian official. He now washes dishes at 


» Uni on League Club. 




















“Did we merely suppress 
a paper that offended us? 
Of course not. We pad 
locked the whole plant. 





“We sent the 


reporters and_ the 
artists and the special writers and the 
book reviewers to Siberia for twelve 
years or more. 





He showed me an announcement of 
the suppression of the 


“What bungling,” 


“And the editors were condemned to 
twenty-four years in the lead mines across me,” 
Lake Baikal. 


That was the way.’ 


with him. 





“We burned all the books and all the copies 
of the paper found on the premises, together 
with the lists of subscribers and such minor 
clerical data. 


Mr. [Dads 


he shouted. 


The Universe, Inc. 
tiene. 3 





“Tu Russi 


to handle suct 


New Masses. 





“We put the printers behind the bars 
for six years, and 
those days was ¢ 


YN Th 
lin aNT “i 


a 


I said. “That was the 
way and it was highly successful. For 
example, look at the present conditic 
of the Imperia! fami———” 


‘Of course,” 









on 
“Pardon 
Pavel Osholowitch Oshol inter- 


That was the way, my boy. rupted, “but I hear the clock. strike. 
I hastened to agree My dishes await me.” And off he 
went. 
















The Nation 


[ Vol. 122, No. 3) fine 





‘Unchanging China’ 


$ 


By LEWIS S. GANNETT sels 


E Occidentals enter China at Shanghai, the greatest 
W of those hybrid Eurasian cities known as “treaty 
ports” and, in some eerie way, the most unpleasant city in 
the world. Here, in what was once a swamp outside the city 
walls, white men have built the greatest trading city of the 
East. The old Chinese town is only a local slum today; what 
men call Shanghai is the foreign city, the “International” 
(British) and French Settlements along the river front. 
Here, under European flags and protection, the business of 
China is done. 

It is a mighty city that the white men have built upon 
the banks of the Whangpoo. Broad paved streets; massive 
stone buildings, as gloomily vast and permanent as any in 
London’s City; clanging street cars, electric lights in imita- 
tion of Broadway; gas, running water, sewers, all the trap- 
pings of Western civilization that are so uncomfortably 
missing in most of China. Automobiles clog the streets; 
the telephone system works in English; the pretty river- 
front park is “reserved for the foreign community.” 
(Shanghai is politer today than when the sign read, “Chi- 
nese and dogs not allowed.”) For miles factory chimneys 
cloud the sky; here, as in the West, men work in droves of 
thousands. Here, if anywhere, the West seems to have 
made itself at home in the East. 

Yet ten minutes in this smoothly functioning city give 
one a panicky realization that it is neither Europe nor Asia, 
but something precariously balanced between them. Among 
the autos dodge swarms of ricksha coolies, clad in every 
imaginable combination of blue cotton rags, some barefoot, 
some straw-soled, many naked to the waist—all running, 
sweating, panting. There is almost no horse traffic. Men— 
and sometimes women—pull the carts. Watch them—each 
at his rope, six or eight to a cart, straining up the bridges 
over Soochow Creek, and you will realize the human mean- 
ing of the simple phrase, “Labor is cheap in China.” Nor 
is it white men who crowd the sidewalks. Oriental figures 

a few in ugly Western felt hats, coats and trousers, more 
in skull-caps and stately long silk robes—make up these 
sedate throngs. And at every bank, club, hotel, office-build- 
ing a huge black-bearded turbaned Sikh stands guard, ready 
to cuff out of the way any saucy yellow man. 

In Shanghai, as everywhere in China, one is impressed, 
and often oppressed, by the sense of the crowd. Here men 
teem; they swarm; the individual seems as insignificant as 
a single ant in an ant-hill. No one knows how many human 
beings live in Shanghai, for the native cities that cluster 
about the foreign settlements have never been adequately 
counted; but in the foreign cities alone there are a million 
and a half Chinese and only 40,000 foreigners, of whom 
more than half are of races ineligible to citizenship in the 
United States. The Chinese form 97 per cent of the popu- 
lation of the cities which white men govern; they pay 80 
per cent of the taxes; but they have no share in the city 
administration, their children cannot play in the city park, 
and if they want to send their sons to school they must pay 
for it themselves. The foreign clubs (the French Club is an 
exception) do not admit Chinese even as luncheon guests; 
the line between white and yellow is drawn as sharply as 































can change, has changed, is changing. There must be th 
sands of darting ricksha boys in Hangchow today; fiftee 
years ago the mandarins rode in sedan chairs and the m* H 
chants walked. One is no longer surprised to turn the ae 
ner from these handworkers’ shops and find, behind his cad. | 
white walls, a great modern silk factory, where thousani : 
of trousered Chinese girls work thirteen hours a day, #! 
earn, if they are very skilful, almost a quarter. 


opened to foreign trade. 
dozen wars and near-wars with the “foreign devils,” but qjPoung 
some miracle, which may have its root in the vigor of ' 
Cantonese character, it has maintained its Chinese soul 2° 
its Chinese rule. 
lanes and opening wide avenues; it razes temples and creat’ M 
schools; it has its own traffic police and a municipal sprin@gjm’* cc 
ling-eart; it even has a ten-story department store, hot 
and moving-picture palace on the Bund (built by a Chineqye © 


that between black and white in Georgia; and one end she 
understanding the bitter fear psychology of the + -fBpricu 
oligarchy which has built this city, is proud of it, and war: 0 


yellow men. One ends, too, by hating Shanghai; no o-dbey a 
foreigner or Chinese, can feel at ease there. ns | 
* * * * ¥ nd dc 


Life is warm and intimate in the narrow old street: 
Hangchow. In one shop open broadly to the lane a w} 
family, from seven to seventy years old, sociably weays 
baskets; another family saws wood with ancient Chin 
saws, and makes the product into furniture; in a third sh 
bronze bells are being cast; and across the street one fam! 
is making brooms, another idols, a third coffins. They }) addin 
so close that their lives are interwoven, as is their cony 
sation. No stranger passes but they all note him; no a “ 
dent but all share in the, distress and laughter. The hom dc 
are long—indeed, there is no respite except for fw 
and sleep—but there is little strain; work and play « 
intermingled. 

One suddenly becomes aware that this is the Mid 
Ages. The carved wood railings of the second stories; * 
richness of color and sound and smell (most of the cookir 
is done on the street, and the little restaurants send ou 
rich cargo of Oriental odors); the beautiful shop signs 
vertical strips of painted wood inscribed with gilded Chines 
characters—this must be very like the medieval back stree’ 
of those European cities which still preserve their proud 
squares to remind us of what guild life was before the dw 
of factories and efficiency. 

Through the narrow streets dodges an endless line ¢ 
ricksha boys, while the occupants strike little foot-bells : 
emphasize the musical shouts with which the boys warr 
their coming. It seems very ancient, very Oriental. A: 
then one learns that the first ricksha came to Hangch 
fifteen years ago, imported from Japan for an Americ: 
missionary, and that the ricksha itself is a missionary inve 
tion only fifty-odd years old. It dawns upon one that Chin 


have 
plac 
ad (a) 
eems. 
own | 
:Wh 


raines 


ant, 
ome 
n ar 
lestro 
evelo 
ng ho 


If ar 
ne Sc 
us ch 

% & * * ~ 0, h; 
Long before Shanghai Canton, far to the south, waggettra 
It has been the center of half HP *rist 


B Chr 
Weste 


It is proudly tearing down the narr 


hat tl 








sne 23, 1926] 


The Nation 





HY 





vendor born in Australia); but it has not succumbed 
‘he West. Stand, if you doubt it, at the South Gate of a 
ng and watch the long lines of coolies pa 
x, trembling from the tips of bamboo poles, great slopping 
the night’s human refuse 
h the Canton delta, the most densely populated region 
-he world, could never maintain its ancient and intensive 
‘culture. Or watch the life of the river. 
Ocean steamers come up to Canton, but anchor in mid- 
The sampans, bobbing on the water with their 
¢ and short oars, do the rest. Tens of thousands, per- 
ys hundreds of thousands, of sampans line the short 
»d dot the river for miles. People are born on them, live 
wir lives on them, die on them. The women pull at the 
srs with tiny babies on their backs; solemn-faced children 
-ear old sit like silent dolls watching their mothers row. 
yo- and three-year-olds scamper recklessly from boat to 
at: at four or five they help their mothers with the oars. 
me sampans carry passengers, others cabbages, pigs, silk, 
‘ndling-wood, offal, whatever comes to hand. They go 
nere destiny sends them, and tie up where night finds 
hem—fifteen- or twenty-deep against the river bank. River- 
bk do not need to go ashore for food; itinerant vendors ply 
heir wares in and out of the narrow fairways between the 
jes of sampans, selling cotton cloth, charcoal, bean-cake, 
. over the gunwales—the woman working the oars 
hile the man tinkles a bell and sings his wares. They drink 
ne filthy river water and deposit their refuse there—Arabs 
‘the waterway, they know no other home. 
For centuries they and their ancestors have lived thus 
have watched the first Western ships sail in, seen iron 
lace wood and steel iron, watched the coming of steam 
nd of oil fuel—and their lives go on unchanged. So it 
vems. But already a score of motor launches snort up and 
own the river, doing the work of several hundred sampans; 
: Whampoa, nine miles downstream, where the cadets were 
rained who cleared the province of hostile troops, modern 
eks are being built. Men on strike against British Hong- 
ng have dug a road to link Canton and Whampoa; and if 
ps come alongside and discharge directly what will be- 
me of the sampans? The city has an electric-lighting 
ant, and there are plans for supplying power looms to the 
me workers who spin silk on Honam Island, between Can- 
nand Whampoa. Already modern-minded Chinese have 
estroyed the independence of Honam’s silk industry and 
veloped an efficient modern sweatshop system of exploit- 
1g home workers. 

Honam Island is ruled by Lei Fook-lom, once a village 
ad boy, then a bandit, now a general. Lei Fook-lom cannot 
ead, but over the gate of the castle which he has built him- 
lf are two mottoes: “He studies gardening, forestry, and 

science of growing trees” and “He loves the sound of 
13 children and brothers reading books.” Lei Fook-lom, 
», has changed. He has begun paying over taxes to the 
entral government; he is building a hospital for Canton 
tristian College, on his island; and he has given the 
fungest son of his sixth concubine to be adopted by 


3 out, bear- 


els which contain without 


ream. 


t Christian missionary and brought up, he hopes, as a 


Vestern doctor. 
* * * x * 


Men and camels seem like midgets filing along beneath 


Ee colossal walls of Peking—walls so vast and powerful 


‘at the gates can still be shut to bar out an invading army. 
te red and gold doorways of the dusty gray lanes of the 


bold red walls and the smoldering fire of 


roofs of the F 


Tartar City; the 


the glazed tile orbidden City within; the 


yellows, the blues, the greens, the gleaming contrasts in the 
painted beams; the vast, perfect proportions of a metropolis 
laid out as a unit-—Peking has something of the grandeur 
of Rome, the glory of Greece, the charm of Paris, and is the 
Eternal City of China. 

So-called. But in reality Peking is no more eternal 
than Carthage or Ur. It is already half dead. It wv onl 
half a century ago that the “Old Buddha” built the marvel 
ous gardens known as the Summer Palace (to replace still 


Vandal) 


with the infinite rich 


more marvelous gardens sacked by the British and 
French, in the Second Opium War), 
ness of old China—the long painted gallery, the marble 
camel-back bridge, the strange piles of buildings that climb 
the mountainside. 
It is 


If you look for unchanging China, do not seek it in 


Yet the Summer Palace is already arch 
aeology. 
again. 
the magnificence of an empire that is 
the Chinese village. 

* * * * * 

In North China the drab villages, built of 
bricks, roofed with brown mud, sink colorlessly into t 
brown mud plain. You 
of them there are. Only a mile or two separates one cluster 
of houses from the next. But these villages have no shops; 
they buy and sell at the market-town, and it may be twents 
miles from one market-town to the next. 

The market-town of Kweichiu is only seven miles from 
Tungchow and the railroad, but the seven miles make a 
breach of centuries. You cross the Grand Canal on an 
ancient ferry propelled by three wild-looking ruffians with 
poles, and join the parade of overladen donkeys, rickets 
horse-carts, and warmly padded Chinese. The road is just 
a rut across fields of winter wheat, sometimes across noth 
ing but blown sand. It seems to stray and wander aim- 
lessly, finding its true course only in the villages, where the 
commerce of centuries has worn the roads deep beneath the 
level of the farmyards. For these villages, rebuilt every 
few years out of the eternal brown mud, have histories that 
antedate Charlemagne. 

Kweichiu is just one market-town among tens of thou- 
sands scattered over the continent that is China. It is big 
enough to hold two inns, where a Chinese traveler may lodge 
for about one cent a night; half a dozen herb drug-stores; a 
wine-shop; two blacksmiths, a draper, four rice merchants, 
a silversmith, a pewter-shop, a saddler, a salt-dealer, the 
inevitable vast pawnshop, and a “foreign-goods shop.” Prob- 
ably it has had most of these since the remote day in the 
Sung dynasty, a thousand years or so ago, when the town’s 
first mud wall was built. The “foreign-goods store” has 
only two foreign commodities—cotton thread, from Japan; 
wire nails, from America. “We used to make our own 
thread,” they will tell you; “but the foreign thread was so 
much cheaper that we stopped; now the price has risen, but 
we have forgotten how to make our own.” Tobacco and oil, 
universal in China, of course come from abroad. The cotton 
goods are of local weave. In the old days, the blacksmith 
remembers, the coal came down from the Western Hills by 
camel; now he uses Manchurian coal mined by the Japanese. 
The iron used to come from Huai-lu on the border of Shansi:; 
now it, too, is Japanese. Apart from that Kweichiu lives as 
it has lived for centuries—each of the mud-walled villages 
about it grows its own crops, makes its own products and 


a museum, a relic of a past that can never be 


gone forever-——-yo to 


brown mud 


do not realize at once how mar 




















































690 


The Nation 


[ Vol. 122, No. 33: 





} 


takes its goods to the market-town of Kweichiu, there to ex- 
change them for the products of another village. Civil war 
a hundred miles away hardly touches them. 

Coal and iron and cigarettes and kerosene have done 
little to disturb the minds of these villages. Yenshing, five 
miles away, boasts two village scholars, one so advanced that 
he has a daughter studying medicine in far-away America. 
He is the only man in his village who has ever sent a child 
away to study; his is the only family that does not bind its 
daughters’ feet; yet old Tang, scholar and head-man of a 
village twenty-five miles from Peking, knew not a thing of 
the “unequal treaties” that had fired the youth of the treaty 
ports, caused riots, and put China on the front pages of 
newspapers in cities ten thousand miles away. 

This is the first in a series of articles by Lewis S. 
Gannett, who has just returned from the Orient. The sec- 
ond article, A Nation of Anarchists, will appear next week.]} 


A Chinese Ruler Runs Away 
By RAYNA RAPHAELSON 


Peking, April i8 

ioe tale may now be told of the coup d’etat of April 

9 to 10 which made Tuan Chi-jui, so-called President 
of China, a refugee in the Legation Quarter and left his 
Government suspended in mid-air, while the foreign dig- 
nitaries stood about wondering where the Government was 
to which they were accredited. It is a tale of how an old 
man, ostensible head of a great empire, calmly left his 
palace, evaded a net of three thousand troops, and wended 
his way into the safe harborage of foreign territory in 
Peking’s Legation Quarter. 


We must go back to the year 1640. In that year a 
Ming prince, high in favor with the court and fabulously 
wealthy, built himself a palace that was to outdo the giories 
of all other princes in those final years of the Ming dynasty. 
Its walls were high and stretched a mile around his park. 
For four years this prince participated in the decadent 
pleasures of the dying regime. He was shrewd and politic, 
as well as gorgeous in his way of living, so that when the 
smash came and the Manchus overthrew the Mings in 1664 
he somehow saved his skin and rose to official position un- 
der the new rulers. But he participated in one court in- 
trigue too many and was finally forced to flee Peking. The 
avenging party in power razed his palace and stole his 
numerous concubines to replenish the imperial harems. 


From that day until the very recent year of 1918 the 
park of that astute—but not quite astute enough—Ming 
prince remained a ruined inclosure. Its trees grew, but its 
marbled walks cracked, its lacquered pagodas tumbled into 
the vines, and the foundations of its razed buildings, sur- 
rounding the innumerable courts, became one with the dust. 
a ruin—when in 1918 Tuan Chi-jui came to 
Peking to become premier. Tuan looked about for a site 
upon which to erect a home suitable to his wealth and new 
official station. He found the site of that ruined Ming 
palace, with its broken walks and towering trees, and chose 
it for his own. There he built one of the most spacious of 
all the great houses in Peking. 

A trusted follower of Tuan supervised the building 


So it was 



















operations, and while construction was going on note: 
ous hollow-sounding places where men were at wor 
said nothing, but thereafter kept an even more carefu 
upon the building. When the great place was fi 
Tuan’s lieutenant told him of the strange noises. Th: 
man, wise in the ancient ways of his country, cocked fy ¢} 
attentive ear. Together they removed the flooring in ¢; 
of the buildings over a hollow-sounding spot. Th 
cavated, and found, directly under the palace, a maz 
underground chambers and passage-ways leading far fr, ahlic 
the palace grounds. 


In the late afternoon of April 9, 1926, word 
brought to Tuan that unexplained troop movements wer urpri 
going forward throughout the East City. The old man: 
down his opium pipe and meditated. He knew ther 
been high feeling against him ever since the student s} 
ings of March 18, for which he was generally blamed. 
knew that the Nationalist army was desperate, with t 
“enemy” almost at the gates of the capital. He knew } 
own body-guard of 3,000 men (more than a thousand 
whom were quartered in his palace grounds) could not | ¥ y 
out against the 20,000 Nationalists inside the city. §S Lena 
came to a decision. the V 

He gave orders that there was to be no fighting. Wh -” 
ever came was to be admitted peaceably. Then he dismiss. fa 
his informer and disappeared into the palace. ng b 

The Kuominchun had completed their encircling m: slat fe 
neuver. The district was thoroughly covered. All ex 
streets and lanes were guarded. Then a select troop march 


woma 


an in 
to Tuan’s main gate. They entered, ostensibly to bring self { 
message from the local commander, General Lu Chungiogg.. th 
But Tuan was not to be found. hat 


Early in the evening of April 9 intimate friends oe 
Marshal Tuan Chi-jui were somewhat astonished to hag... 
the old man call upon them. They were still further og... 
tonished when, with true Chinese courtesy, they came 0 ial | 
into the entrance courts to greet him and found he ha ity 
come in a hired and none too clean ricksha instead of 1  ¢] 
his own big motor car. Quietly the old marshal told lary 


} 
3hHs 


the change in his political fortunes. Then he departeij .,, 
After he had called, thus, upon four or five of his in‘ a 
mates, he went to a refuge in the Legation Quarter. 
Next morning all Peking knew that Tuan’s regiy 
was ended, that the old man had somehow eluded the s 


villo 
man 


diers of the Nationalist army, and was safe under the pr se 
tection of foreign flags. re 

It seems an incredible story. But if it is remembered. . 
that three days after the deposition of the old marshal 2: But 
other change of fortunes took place on the kaleidoscopi we 
political screen of Peking, forcing the Nationalist army t ii 
leave the city; that after the army had gone the enormo , 
iron gates of this ancient city were closed behind them} . 
that today it is only those stout relics of a former agg... 
which make it possible for life to go on in the capital i am 
seeming peace—it may, then, seem a little less incredib on 
that in 1926 the nation’s head should evade a modern arnig ..., 
by calmly disappearing through a labyrinth of undergroungy 
tunnels built-in days when walls were more than a tem: a 
porary protection against invaders. cay 


Eight days after this quaint escape old Tuan was back 
in his great palace, issuing mandates, again for the momet' 
the ostensible ruler of China. 











sne 23, 1926] 





The Nation 








Amorousness 






and Alcohol 


By MARY AUSTIN 


F there is one premise which, more than another, has 
won, in the past decade, the general acceptance from 
hich social conclusions are derived, it is that wars seldom, 
f ever, Originate in the occasions that are most in the 
ublic mind. Nor are their origins likely to be in any way 
plated to what is being thought and felt about them while 
they are going on. This has come to be so generally be- 
‘eved in respect to conflicts of arms that it is the more 
uprising to find the protestants of a purely regulatory or 
soralistic struggle deriving origin from what is or is 
yssumed to be the immediate personal reaction of either 
ide. Thus we have prohibitionists convinced that they are 
proceeding along logical lines of social betterment in the 
face Of an opposition which never suspects that its own 
resistance is directed against anything but an infringement 
of essential personal liberty. 

While the Drys on the one hand are inferring that all 
sro-aleoholic propaganda is motivated by depraved appetite, 
the Wets on the other are obsessed by the persuasion that 
nack of the Volstead Act is the equally depraved operation 
of a diffused and morbid puritanism. But the writer, hav- 
ing been practically born and brought up on a temperance 
slatform, led about by her mother throughout her youn 
womanhood in the train of Frances Willard, and having, in 
in insatiable appetite for American experiences, given her- 
elf to all manner of causes—hopeful of others—has come 
‘0 the same conviction about the origin of social conflicts 
‘hat has been recently accepted of military wars. Not only 
‘0 all large-scale social movements have sources that are 
id from the majority of their adherents, and goals that 
nly the perspective of time reveals but this particular 
movement toward the elimination of alcohol from our so- 
ial life aims at a mark not only unsuspected by the major- 
ity but probably inadmissible. It has all the marks of one 
f those slowly evolving progressions that surge from un- 
slumbed depths of the social complex, giving rise to many 
subsidiary movements, not at the time realized as pertinent 
to the larger urge, and adding to their impetus many lesser 
vilows whose motivation appears wholly unrelated. All 
manner of minds are caught up in these social groundswells, 
formulating therefor, in man’s incurable passion for ra- 
‘ionalizing his convictions, many curious reasons. By and 
large, the subterranean push of such a long-time swing as 
‘he fight against alcoholic beverages turns out to be biologic. 
But if I mean anything more by the term than that the 
urge to prohibition is somehow concerned with the preserva- 
tion and continuity of the human race, I must mean that 
‘is an instinctive forward thrust of the life-force. 

No doubt in the tremendous social and biological activity 
stimulated by the opening up of the American continent, 
accentuated in the quarter century following the Civil War, 
many dormant and budding tendencies of the life-force were 
released, particularly, in our Midwestern valleys, that com- 
nlex of emotions and ideas which found expression in the 
sentimental idealization of what was always referred to in 


capital letters as the Home. 
Among generations of land-hungry European immi- 
grants, the traditional quarter section and the house upon 


it, as the Home, became the object of honorific devotion such 
as had Europeanly been paid to th 
Landed Estate. And in those days 
of the Home was corn whiskey. Nobody that I can recall ir 
the Illinois of that time, except the Germans, 
the regional home of Anheuser Busch, drank more than i! 
cidentally for pleasure or 
get drunk. And of all possible offenses 
prosperity a corn whiskey drunk is the 
In my recollection of these things it appears in the lin 
logical behavior for the desperate wives of drink-bedevi 
citizens of Ohio towns to have knelt together in the 
of small-town streets, in front of saloons, to pray. It 
also eminently American for the local police to have jai‘ 
the praying women and so set in motion the oscillati 
pro and con which eventuated in a constitutional amendment 
The movement so inaugurated had already taker 
cial form and high visibility in the early eighties, at which 
time I began to observe it; and by the pl 


Family, or to the 
the outstanding menace 
settled about 
refreshment. They drank 

against peace a 


most appalli: 


nineties 


exhibited characteristics which suggested derivatior 
deeper than the practical—and surely justified—pre 
against the saloon, deeper even than t} nost devastat 


“a 


personal experience of the “drink evil.” 

It was about the time the Volstead Act beyan to be of 
legal force that I heard—with the effect on my mind of 
a thunderclap—people in New York for whose opinion or 
other matters I had the greatest re “Well 
we don’t drink, where’s all the fun coming from?” “It’s 
going to destroy all the good feeling, all the geniality.” 

With the flash that accompanied the thunder I seemed 
to see the admitted failure of affective “good feeling” 
Western civilization as proceeding from a drugged ay 
ance of social reality. How could it be otherwise where 
geniality was rated a mere chemic reaction from our cups? 
Was our vaunted superiority, then, no more than the 
ward show of an alcoholically sustained form of obfusea 
tion? This sounded so much like the end of a long-fo! 
lowed clue that my mind reverted automatically alony it 
to what had been so definitely indicated as the trend of the 
“temperance movement” in 1890, the 
escape, not so much from whiskey drunkenness as from 
drink-induced unreality. For what else is the distinguish 
ing mark of our prideful modernity but continuous escape, 
whose high accent is a recent reaction 
tional reactions of war, from all artificially produced so- 
cial emotion? Never again, even with the foaming bumper 
of propaganda, shall our young men be gloriously drunk on 
war. As for political tipsiness, that went out with torch- 
light processions. Since 1914 in the United States even 
the campaign of moral reform has gone flat. Of the two 
remaining sources of human befuddlement, amorousness 
and alcohol, does not the fight against the second figure 
universally as the masked and indirect repudiation of the 
first? 

This is what is meant by the biologic urge of the so- 
cial groundswell on the surface of which the movement 
for the abolition of alcoholic beverages is carried. 


pect saving: 


c 


circuitous trend of 


against the emo 


It must 













































The Nation 


[ Vol. 122, No. 31 





with the steadily narrowing limit of supportable 
ation the reproductive obligation of sex lessens, its 
unabated emotional compulsions tend to assume the propor- 
tions of a terrible—if enslavement. Already this 
appears in the current saturation of our art and literature 
with aspects of the struggle to rid ourselves, by ration- 
alization, of this most ancient type of befuddlement. It 
uggested in the querulous resort of certain of our intel- 
ligentsia to Europe, where achievement is not yet cleared 
of the mingled odor of amorousness and alcohol with which 
for five thousand years it has been penetrated. Under com- 
petent social scrutiny the confused and increasingly unsat- 
isfactory handling of what are called sex problems is shown 
more and more to be involved with artificially induced extra- 
iological states of sex attraction. Inevitably with the 
hrinkage of the reproductive obligation these extra-biologic 
states will be found to be of diminishing interest and 
effectiveness. 

With our characteristically American sentimentality in 
respect to sex, it is natural that the instinctive urge to re- 
duce the emotional obfuscations of amorousness to some- 
thing like their biologic proportions would be indirect and 
more or less unacknowledged. The numerically popular suc- 
cess of the movement teward prohibition, though it draws 
a considerable quota of the experientially convinced, quite 
certaiuly draws other numbers motivated by the instinct to 
seek relief from urges that exceed their function, by de- 
stroying artificial excitements. And for at least five thou- 
sand years extra-biologic amorousness has been so identi- 
fied with alcohol that our popular phraseology scarcely takes 
account of one without the other. It is not inevitable that 
such general and instinctive movements as this one for the 
riddance of alcohol should be altogether wise in their pro- 
cedure or even widely intelligent. It is normal to all mass 
movement that the individual assent or resistance to any 
deep-seated urge should appear so variously motivated. 
There are no doubt numbers of the adherents of prohibition 
whose subconscious recompense is the satisfaction they take 
in the deprivations of other people; just as there are ardent 
protagonists who under the slogan of personal liberty are 
masking a love of drunkenness—alcoholic or amorous—for 
its own sake. Nor does it affect the essentials of the problem 
one way or another that much of the practical resistance 
he Volstead Act is mere adolescent protest against reg- 
unsocialized need of doing 


ecstatic 


to ft 
ulatory discipline, the as yet 


what we like because we like it. 


The 


( Nik of the most promising of the young Negro poets 
) aid to me once, “I want to be a poet—not a Negro 
poet,” meaning, I believe, “I want to write like a white 
poet’’; meaning subconsciously, “I would like to be a white 
poet’; meaning behind that, “I would like to be white.” 
And I was sorry the young man said that, for no great poet 
has ever been afraid of being himself. And I doubted then 
that, with his desire to run away spiritually from his race, 
this boy would ever be a great poet. But this is the moun- 
tain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America 

this urge within the race toward whiteness, the. desire 
to pour racial individuality into the mold of American 


we, 


The variety and incongruity of the reasons for 
against are only further evidences of the power of 
seated social urges to transcend all our logic and intel]; 

To any one who will take the pains to uncover the ea, 
phases of the prohibition movement, as revealed jp ; 
pamphlets, public pronouncements, and programs of ha 
time, it will be plain that its biologic derivation was the 
much more nearly conscious than it is now. This als: 
lows the law of the emergence of wars, the generatiy 
causes of which tend, as the reality of war approaches, ; 
disappear under a cloud of incidental emotionalism. Th, 
Frances Willard herself was perfectly clear as to the com. 
plete implication of all our hopes of social betterment in 
the removal of the one great source of moral and intd. 
lectual befudddlement, I think there can be no doubt. |, 
the effort to avoid or uproot whatever blurs the edge of 
reality—drink, or lust, or war, or moral enthusiasm—al] of 
which are more or less interchangeable as individual m. 
tivation, it is natural that drink should be the first to be 
objectively attacked. It presents a visible measure of eco 
nomic convenience as a hand-hold, and strategically under. 
mines the others. With the elimination of alcohol amor. 
ousness loses much of its enticement, and it is quite pos. 
sible that the waning popularity of war is partly owed ty 
its diminished opportunity for indulging the confluent ap- 
petites for drink and lust. That the effort to eliminate the 
first three occasions of emotional obfuscation should be the 
occasion of an accession of the last, most insidious intoxica- 
tion, is perhaps the worst thing that can be said of it. For 
any moral enthusiasm invariably gives rise to counter-en- 
thusiasms of immorality, against which the first frequently 
arrests itself, sometimes to the degree of temporary defeat 
As this appears to be the present state of the prohibition 
movement, falling over itself in a too rapid progress toward 
its goal, this would seem to be the moment for both sides 
to abate their mutual fury of attack in a mutual recogni- 
tion of the nature of the urge in which the movement 
takes its rise. It might prove in the end as doubtful an 
advantage to escape too soon as to hug too long, and on 
mistaken premises, a traditional release and incitement 
One feels certain that a completely rationalized society would 
waste no more time in argument, but assign drinking 
privileges in conformity with demonstrable inability to per- 
form a biologic function or achieve a preferred emotional 
release without it. But then ours is not, possibly never has 
had a genuine desire to be, a completely rationalized society. 


Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain 


By LANGSTON HUGHES 


standardization, and to‘be as little Negro and as much 
American as possible. 

But let us look at the immediate background of thi: 
young poet. His family is of what I suppose one wou. 
call the Negro middle class: people who are by no means 
rich yet never uncomfortable nor hungry—smug, contente¢. 
respectable folk, members of the Baptist church. The 
father goes to work every morning. He is a chief steward 
at a large white club. The mother sometimes does fancy 
sewing or supervises parties for the rich families of the 
town. The children go to a mixed school. In the home they 
read white papers and magazines. And the mother often 





‘ha 
ured 


soc 


have 


In th 
And 


an 


mat 
and 
tur 




































































amor- 
eC pos- 
ved to 
it ap- 
te the 
ye the 
OXica- 


For 


ne 28, 1926 | 


The Nation 


ONS 





nad. 


children are 


how well a 


+3 “Don’t be like niggers” when the 
| frequent phrase from the father is, 
‘te man does things.” And so the 
e unconsciously a symbol of all the 
the children beauty, morality, and money. 
“| want to be white” runs silently through their minds. 
s young poet’s home is, I believe, a fairly typical home 
‘the colored middle class. One sees 


‘Tf } 
“100K 
comes 
holds 


The whi Spel 


word white 


virtues. It 


immediate! 
Seult it would be for an artist born in such a home 
rest himself in interpreting the beauty of his own pcr 

He is never taught to see that beauty. He is taught 
ner not to see it, or if he does, to be ashamed of it when 
-js not according to Caucasian patterns. 

For racial culture the home of a self-styled “high 
ass’ Negro has nothing better to offer. Instead there wil 
‘haps be more aping of things white than in a less cul 
sed or less wealthy home. The father is perhaps a doc- 
r, lawyer, landowner, or politician. The mother may ix 
social worker, or a teacher, or she may do nothing ana 

have a Maid. Father is often dark but he usually 
arried the lightest woman he could find. The family at- 
end a fashionable church where few really colored faces 
re to be found. And they themselves draw a color line. 
In the North they go to white theaters and white movies. 
4nd in the South they have at least two cars and a house 
like white folks.” Nordic manners, Nordic faces, Nordic 
mir, Nordic art (if any), and an Episcopal heaven. A 
very high mountain indeed for the would-be racial artist 
climb in order to discover himself and his people. 

3ut then there are the low-down folks, the 

mmon element, and they are the majority—may the Lord 
e praised! The people who have their nip of gin on Sat- 
wday nights and are not too important to themselves or 
the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch 
the lazy world go round. They live on Seventh Street in 
Washington or State Street in Chicago and they do not 
particularly care whether they are like white folks or any- 
vody else. Their joy runs, bang! into Their 
religion soars to a shout. Work maybe a little today, rest 
i little tomorrow. Play awhile. Sing awhile. O, let’s 
lance! These common people are not afraid of spirituals, 
ss for a long time their more intellectual brethren were, 
nd jazz is their child. They furnish a wealth of coiorful, 
listinetive material for any artist because they still hold 
‘heir own individuality in the face of American standard- 
ations. And perhaps these common people wiil give to 
e world its truly great Negro artist, the cne who is not 
‘fraid to be himself. Whereas the better-class Negro would 
‘ell the artist what to do, the people at least let him alone 
when he does appear. And they are not ashamed of him— 
‘they know he exists at all. And they accept what beauty 
‘their own without question. 

Certainly there is, for the American Negro artist who 
an escape the restrictions the more advanced among his 
wn group would put upon him, a great field of unused 
material ready for his art. Without going outside his race, 
and even among the better classes with their “white” cul- 
ture and conscious American manners, but still Negro 
enough to be different, there is sufficient matter to furnish 
a black artist with a lifetime of creative work. And when 
he chooses to touch on the relations between Negroes and 
whites in this country with their innumerable overtones 
and undertones, surely, and especially for literature and the 
iran 1a, there is an inexaustible supply of themes at hand. 


has 


so-called 


ecstasy. 


To these the Nevro artist can give his racial individuality, 
his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous 
umor that so often, as in the Blues, becomes iron) augniter 
mixed with tear But let us look again at the mountal 

A promin t Neg? » clupbwoman in Philad ipnlia pa d 
eleven dollars to hear Raquel Meller sing Andalusian pop 
ilar songs. Kut she told me a few week fore she would 
not think of yoing to hear “that wom Clara Smith, a 
great black artist, sing Neyro folksong And many 
upper-class Ney church, even now, wou not dream 
employing 4 Spiritual in its service The drab melodic 
in white folks’ hymnbooks are much to be preferred We 
want to worship the Lord correctly and quis VV 
believe in ‘shouting.’ Let's be dull like the Nordi th 
say, in effect. 

The road for the serious black artist, then, w wo 


produce a racial art is most certainly rocky and the mou 

tain is high. Until recently he received almost no enecor 

agement for his work from either white or col peopl 
The fine novels of Chestnutt go out of print eithe 
race noticing their passing. The quaint charm and hum: 
of Dunbar’s dialect verse brought to him, in his day, lary: 

the same kind of encouragement one would give 

show freak (A colored man writing poetry! How 


a clown (How amusing!). 

The present vogue in things 
do as much harm as good for the budding colored arti 
has at least done this: it has brought him forcibly to the 
attention of his own people among whom for so long, 
the other race had noticed him beforehand, h a prophet 
with little honor. I understand that Char): Gilpin 
for years in Negro theaters without any *peciai 
from his own, but when Broadway gave him eight 
calls, Negroes, too, began to beat a tin pan in his 


i al4} ‘ 
Negro, although it 1 


unles 


acted 
acclaim 
curtain 
honor 
] know a young colored writer, a manual worker by day 
who had been writing well for the colored magazines for 
some years, but it was not until he recently broke into th: 
white publications and his first book was accepted by 
prominent New York publisher that the “‘best” Negroes i: 
his city took the trouble to discover that he lived ther: 
Then almost immediately they decided to give a 
dinner for him. But the society ladies were careful t 
whisper to his mother that perhaps she'd better not come 
They were not sure she would have an evening gown. 

The Negro artist works against an undertow of sharp 
criticism and misunderstanding from his own group ar 
unintentional bribes from the whites. “O, be respectall 
write about nice people, show how good we are,” say the 
Negroes. 


yrand 


“Be stereotyped, don’t go too far, don’t shatte 
our illusions about you, don’t amuse us 
will pay you,” say the whites. Both would have told Jean 
Toomer not to write “Cane.” The colored people did no‘ 
praise it. The white people did not buy it. Most of ¢ 
colored people who did read “Cane” hate it. They ar 
afraid of it. Although the critics gave it good review 
the public remained indifferent. Yet (excepting the work 
of DuBois) “Cane” contains the finest prose written by a 
Negro in America. And like the singing of Robeson, it j 
truly racial. 

But in spite of the Nordicized Negro intelligentsia and 


too seriously. We 


the desires of some white editors we have an honest Amer- 
ican Negro literature already with us. Now I await the 
rise of the Negro theater. Our folk music, having achieved 
world-wide fame, offers itself to the genius of the great in 





694 


The Nation 


[ Vol. 122, No. 5) 





dividual American Negro composer who is to come. And 
within the next decade I expect to see the work of a grow- 
ing school of colored artists who paint and model the beauty 
of dark faces and create with new technique the expres- 
sions of their own soul-world. And the Negro dancers 
who will dance like flame and the singers who will con- 
tinue to carry our songs to all who listen—they will be with 
greater numbers tomorrow. 
own poems are racial in theme and treat- 
I know. In many of them I 
try to grasp and hold some of the meanings and rhythms 
[ am sincere as I know how to be in these poems 
and yet after every reading I answer questions like these 
from my own people: Do you think Negroes should always 
I wish you wouldn’t read some of 
How do you find anything in- 
Why do you write 
What makes you 


us in even 
Most of 
ment, derived 


from the life 


of jazz. 


write about Negroes? 
your poems to white folks. 
teresting in a place like a cabaret? 
about black people? You aren’t black. 
do so many jazz poems? 

f the inherent expressions of 
eternal tom-tom beating in the 


gut jazz to me is one 
Negro life in America: the 
Negro soul—the 
white 
work; the tom-tom of joy 
Yet the Philadelphia clubwoman is ashamed to 


tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a 
world of subway 


ind laughter, and pain swallowed 


world, a trains, and work, work, 
in a smile. 
say that her race created it and she does not like me to write 
The old subeonscious “‘white is best” runs through 
her mind. study under white teachers, a life- 
time of white books, pictures, and papers, and white man- 
ners, morals, and Puritan standards made her dislike the 
spirituals. And now she turns up her nose at jazz and all 
its manifestations—likewise almost everything else dis- 
tinctly racial. She doesn’t care for the Winold Reiss por- 
traits of Negroes because they are “too Negro.” She does 
not want a true picture of herself from anybody. She wants 
to flatter her, to make the white world believe 


about it. 


Years of 


the artist 


that all Negroes are as smug and as near white in 

she wants to be. But, to my mind, it is the duty 
younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at al! f; 
outsiders, to change through the force of his art tha: 
whispering “I want to be white,” hidden in the aspir 

of his people, to ““‘Why should I want to be white? | 
Negro—and beautiful!” 

So I am ashamed for the black poet who says, “| 
to be a poet, not a Negro poet,” as though his own 
world were not as interesting as any other world. [| a 
ashamed, too, for the colored artist who runs fror 
painting of Negro faces to the painting of sunsets after t} 
manner of the academicians because he fears the 
un-whiteness of his own features. An artist must b 
to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also : 
be afraid to do what he might choose. 

Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing 
voice of Bessie Smith singing Blues penetrate the ¢! 
ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen anj 
perhaps understand. Let Paul Robeson singing Water Boy, 
and Rudolph Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem, 
and Jean Toomer holding the heart of Georgia in his hands 
and Aaron Douglas drawing strange black fantasies cayse 
the smug Negro middle class to turn from their whit 
respectable, ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer 
of their own beauty. We younger Negro artists who c: 
now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves 
without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are 
glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are 
beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and ith: 
tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. 
they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We 
build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how 
and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourse|, 

[In last week’s Nation Negro art was discussed from 
an opposing point of view by George S. Schuyler. ] 


The Color Question in South Africa 


By RUTH S. ALEXANDER 


|The color problem in South Africa has been made 
more acute by the policy of the present Government, which 
frankly favors repression of both the native and the In- 
dian inhabitants. The Government aims to diminish, ul- 
Indian population; it has pro- 
posed a which Indians 
may live, thus establishing virtual ghettoes; taking away 
land except in narrowly limited 


to eliminate, the 


timately 
measure restricting the areas in 
the right to buy or lease 
districts in Natal; and creating other limitations on the 
already living under heavy restrictions. | 
Cape Town, May 1 
N April 23, in a quiet and rather tense House, the 
( ) Minister of the Interior, Dr. Malan, announced that, 
owing to a formula which had been agreed upon between 
his own Government and that of India, the Asiatic bill 
would be postponed, pending a round-table conference to 
discuss the whole Asiatic problem in South Africa. The 
erux of that formula—oh, blessed word—is the sentence 
which states: 
The Government of the Union have impressed on the 
Government of India that public opinion in South Africa 


rights of people 


will not view with favor any settlement which does not 
hold out a reasonable prospect of safeguarding the main- 
tenance of Western standards of life by just and legitimate 
means. 


General Smuts, for the Opposition, gave the Govern- 
ment his rather lugubrious blessing, and the House agreed 
formally and unanimously to the postponement. The time 
and place of the conference have not yet been announced, 
but the oppressive bill, in any event, cannot come before 
Parliament until next year. 

On this result of their visit the Government of India 
deputation, consisting of Mr. Paddison, an Englishman; tw 
Indian members of the Council of State; and the Indian 
secretary of the deputation, Mr. Bajpai, have every reason 
to congratulate themselves. That their tact, their knowl 
edge, and their unfailing courtesy under conditions cal- 
culated to try that courtesy to the uttermost were important 
elements in bringing it about cannot be doubted. In view 
of the feeling in South Africa on what General Smu': 
called “this very great and difficult question,” the Gover- 
ment, in consenting to the round-table conference, has 


une 










































































\in- 
ate 


yern- 
rreed 
time 
need, 


‘fore 


A 


ane 23, 1926] 


The Nation 








a very marked concession and one which, one may 
ertain, was not yielded without some strenuous protest 
-m its own followers and some arguments of extraordi- 
sry persuasiveness from the deputation. What these lat- 
}-r may have been time will probably unfold. But the fact 
t compulsory repatriation of the South African Indians 
ss unthinkable, while the voluntary repatriation so much 
sired by the South African people would cease auto- 
atically from the moment a bill unacceptable to the In- 
an people was placed on the statute book, may have made 

; impression. So also may the equally vital and previ- 

y unrealized fact of the almost limitless market which 
.friendly India might afford for South African products, 

-tably for South African fruit. 

Whether that carefully worded formula will in the end 
ove sufficiently potent to exorcise the fears and the 
prejudices of white South Africa remains to be seen. The 

re fact of the prospective conference has undoubtedly 
‘ted the whole question on to a higher plane, but the whole 
nd of the present Government, both in speech and legis- 
tion, has been in the direction of a harsher and franker 
laration of white supremacy than any previous Govern- 
nt since Union has allowed itself, and there is little in- 
ation in the press or in the talk of the man in the street 
this policy is unwelcome. 

Meanwhile the plight of the Indians in the Transvaal 

| in Natal remains pitiable enough. Present restrictions 
ess heavily upon them, and the uncertainty of their 
ure shadows their days. A few of them have attained 
mfort, if not wealth, but most of them are poor and 
ithout facilities for education and self-improvement. They 
ve among people who almost universally dislike and dis- 
‘ust them, even while making use of them, and who will 
io nothing to help them to improve their conditions. They 
ack leadership, and have rather deteriorated than other- 
vise since Mr. Gandhi left them. On the other hand, for 
‘he bulk of them repatriation would take them away from 
“ome rather than return them to their own place. Many 
f them are South African born of the second or third 
rneration; and even those who are only domiciled here 
‘ave for the most part been overlong away from the self- 
ntained and caste-ridden atmosphere from which they 
ame. Pariahs in this country, they are likely to be out- 
asts in their motherland. To this pass have the joint 
xertions of India, South Africa, and England herself 
rought them that commerce might be served. 

But if the case of the South African Indian is piti- 
ile, that of the South African native is at once more 
jitiable and more ominous, a menace to himself and to 
South Africa as a whole. Here again, though with more 
asis, it is fear, fear akin to panic, that dictates the bulk 
f the speeches and of the legislation of which he is the 
ject. The Prime Minister himself, in a recent speech, 
irew attention to the fact that the whites were outnum- 
ered by the natives three to one, and added that the 
xroportion in numbers of the natives to the Europeans re- 
eived its true significance only when they realized the dif- 
ference between the two races. When they had done so 
‘hey would understand how important a fact this disparity 
in numbers was in influencing the solution of more than 
» problem. The feeling behind these words has sent the 
‘ecretary for Native Affairs and the Police Commissioner 
vutfoot to Parliament, to plead before a select committee 
‘necessity for a new Prevention of Disorders Bill which 





hall render persons held to have been vguiltv of sedition 
able to a penalty of £500 fine or five vears’ imprisonm nt, 
with or without hard labor, or to such imprisonment 
out the option of a fine. It is not even pretended that the 
object of this bill is other than to permit effectual ter- 


rorizing and silencing of certai: 


Yet of the swarming millions of natives it 1 handful 
indeed, which has sufficient education either 1 ecome liable 
to these drastic penalties or to lament the franchise which 
is denied them. Nor are the millio: ‘ely to ipy ther 
elves to any extent for some considerable time to me in 
any other business than that of keepiny alive And th 
is a matter which the fear and the race pre 
white man, coupled with a ind ignoriny of « 
are rendering more complicated not onl ear by year 
month by month. Last s¢ ma paternal Parliament 
posed a high protective duty on the cheapest native 


kets, on the plea that the ild manulactu 
country. 


This to people who earn as little as fif! 


even six shillings a month (roughly three, two, or one id 
a half dollars) is, as Professor MacMilla: f the W 
watersrand University has pointed out in fia 
series of articles, a “really cruel” tax. ‘This year 

“to encourage native development” is pro; 1. All 
natives are to contribute ten shillings per annum to 
“native development fund,” in addition to the uniform hut 
tax of twenty shillings. This will render the situation 
the poorer natives even worse than a steady decline in 
prosperity since 1913 has made it. Among the cau 

this decline, according to Professor MacMillan, are 


Natives’ Land Act of 1913, which checked the native 
power to acquire land to meet their increasing wants; the 
rise in prices during and after the Great War, to which 
the wages of the natives were never adequately adjusted; 
several years of little or no rainfall, ruining crops sown in 
a soil always more or less starved and in need of scientific 
treatment; and, since 1920, a drop in the price of catt! 
and of wool. The “boys” who work on the mines or in 
towns do, it is true, earn comparatively good wages, but 
most of their money is swallowed up in the relief of their 
families from the burden of debt that is the result of their 
poverty. When to conditions such as these are added the 
“civilized labor” policy of the present Government, and the 
Color Bar Bill,* which on May 7 is to come before a joint 
sitting of the upper and lower houses, and which will then 
almost certainly become law, it is not surprising that the 
Deputy Commissioner of Police should say publicly “that 
we shall have serious trouble with the natives before long.” 

Led by crudely educated men of their own race, men 
embittered, ill-balanced, and often extremely eyoistic, 
barred from avenues of employment long open to them, and 
from all hope, whatever their ability, of rising any higher 
in the scale of industrial work, it is like enough, as Gen 
eral Hertzog said at Malmesbury, that the frankly reb«! 
lious speeches of Kadalie and Professor Thaele are “goin 
to be an incentive toward the beginning of a movement 
among the natives in general to get into their posses: 
the most widely extended powers for having a say in 
control of the country.” 

General Hertzog’s proposals for the solution of th: 
native problem are not yet before the country, but th 








* After a debate lasting four days the bill was passed on May ! ‘a 
majority of 16. 









rr 
. 
we 


696 


e Nation 


[Vol. 122, 


No. 314) 





chances are that they will be as sincere, as well-inten- 
tioned, ard as vague as his many speeches on the subject. 
Of the temper in which they will be received by Parliament 
the country there can unhappily be little doubt. A 
panic of  self-preservation plus deeply rooted race 
prejudice is hardly the atmosphere in which wisdom, jus- 
tice can have its being. Nor is there 
feeling among the three parties in 
Sectional economic interest 


in the 


and by 
a 


even foresight 
any real difference i: 
the country on the question. 
may lead to a temporary difference of attitude, as 


or 


Color Bar Bill, where the South African Party, wh; 
identified largely with the Chamber of Mines, has op; 

a measure which will deprive the mines of a certain 

of cheap labor. And in a few constituencies in the (a, 
where a native franchise still exists, a gesture of humap. 
itarianism is at times in order. But the body of opinio; 
Parliament and out of it which is prepared to consider : 
native problem with detachment, constructive sympathy, , 
wisdom is appallingly small. The outlook for the next , 
eration of South Africans is gloomy indeed. 


A Liberal in Tennessee 


By JOHN T. MOUTOUX 


I’ is not likely that the Tennessee Supreme Court will 
pass on the Scopes case until after the fall elections, 
in which event a test of the sentiment of the voters of the 
State on the anti-evolution will be afforded in the 
Democratic primary in August. What will in effect be a 
referendum on the anti-evolution law is being made pos- 
sible in the race for the Democratic nomination for gov- 
ernor by two proponents and one opponent of the law. 

The present Governor, Austin Peay, who is running 
for a third term, and Hill McAlister, State treasurer under 
both of Peay’s administrations, favor retention of the act, 
while John Randolph Neal, ousted law professor of the 
University of Tennessee, who was largely responsible for 
the Scopes case, is running on a platform demanding repeal 
of the law. Neal was one of the defense attorneys in the 
famous trial at Dayton a year ago. Peay boasts that much 
of the credit for the law is due him for signing the act in 
the face of strong protests. McAlister goes him a step 
farther, claiming authorship of the bill, although this claim 
has been repudiated by George Washington Butler, the rep- 
resentative who introduced the bill in the legislature. As a 
matter of fact, Peay solemnly proclaimed when the storm 
over the Scopes case first burst that the whole affair was 
nonsense; he predicted that the trial would last less than 
half an hour. When things got hot he went to Michigan 
for a “rest” and did not come back until it was all over. 

Evolution is not the only issue of the campaign. In 
fact, Neal would have preferred that the Supreme Court 
dispose of the Scopes case before the primary in order to 
have eliminated evolution as an issue of the campaign. Not 
that he fears the consequences of his stand against the law, 
as the sentiment of the people would not be changed by the 
court decision; but he thinks other planks of his platform, 
of an economic nature, are of more importance. 

In the arid South, as in the Midwest, it is dangerous 
for a politician to attack the Anti-Saloon League, but Neal 
is doing it. He is urging that a referendum be taken on 
retention of the Eighteenth Amendment and he is advocat- 
ing modification of the State prohibition law, which makes 
possession of more than a gallon of intoxicating liquor a 
felony and prohibits the use of whiskey for even medicinal 
purposes. Neal recently sat in a State court and saw a 
mother with a child in her arms sentenced to three years 
in the penitentiary for part ownership of an automobile in 
which a small quantity of liquor was found. He deter- 
mined then to campaign for modification of the State law 
to make such a thing impossible in the future. In a recent 
letter to the president of the State Woman's Christian 
Temperance Union Neal served notice that he did not in- 


law 


tend to take orders from the Anti-Saloon League, whos 
methods he opposes. He believes that both the Wets an 
the Drys should welcome a referendum on the prohibitio; 
amendment so that the wish of the majority may 
ascertained. 

Throughout last fall and winter Neal fought the a. 
tempts of the usual water-power combine to grab all the 
available power-sites on the Tennessee River. The permits 
have not yet been granted, and only the other week 0. | 
Merrill, secretary of the Federal Power Commission, ; 
sured Neal that they would not be granted until after hel 
had had an opportunity to appear before the commission jp 
protest. Carrying his water-power fight into his campaig: 
Neal is urging the passage of a law which would permit th. 
State and municipalities to construct and operate hydro- 
electric plants and to build transmission lines. In recogn- 
tion of his efforts to prevent this Tennessee River wat: 
power steal Senator Norris of Nebraska named Nea 
member of the Muscle Shoals government-operation board 
Neal showed his appreciation of the compliment by help- 
ing Norris in his fight against the leasing of Muscle Shoals 
Recently he addressed the Alabama Federation of Labor « 
the subject, and before the meeting was over resolutions 
had been passed strongly opposing the lease to the affiliat: 
power companies. 

Among other reforms advocated by this liberal « 
date is abolition of the contract-lease system in the Sta 
penal institutions. The prisoners are leased to private 
companies. Neal thinks the system is bad 
Alabama system and in his platform terms it “the foulest 
blot on our State’s escutcheon.” The corporation-packed 
public-utility commission he would deprive of its power « 
fix rates for cities, restoring home rule to the cities and 
towns. He wants also to strengthen the workmen’s cor- 
pensation act and increase the amounis allowed for 
juries, and he advocates repeal of the blue laws—w 
require the closing of filling stations, soft-drink stands, a 
ice-cream parlors, and prohibit all forms of amusement 
Sunday. 

Middle-aged, with a thick head of hair just beginning 
to gray, Neal’s bushy eyebrows and square jaw commané 
attention in spite of his extreme carelessness of persona 
appearance. The largest landowner in the State, his in 
come from this estate has been sufficient for his simple 
tastes; although he has devoted most of his life to teach- 
ing law and in fighting for the under dog, he has never bee! 
interested in making money. For a dozen years he taught 
for practically no salary at the University of Tennesse 


™ 


In spite of this and of the fact that years ago, as a men 


as as tne 









































































sne 23, 1926] 


4 


The Nz 





ation b: 





rof the State Legislature, he introduced the bills which 
,ated the university and which provided for its 
spropriation from the State, he was dismissed along with 
x other professors three summers ago for protesting 
yinst the dismissal of Dr. Jesse W. Sprowls. Neal took 
; revenge by starting his own law school at Knoxville, 
nere the university is located, which is already almost as 
rge as the university law school. 

Probably Neal is the best-known man in Tennessee, 
od the best-liked. The farmers all like him for his simple 
stes and ways; most of the young lawyers over the State 

uld be willing to die for him, for during his dozen years 
; law professor at the University of Tennessee he was 
ore like a father than a teacher to his students, and even 
stside of his law classes he was the most popular of the 
;culty members; and all the liberals in the State—and 
nere is nO way of knowing how few or many there are 
i] vote for him because they know he is a liberal heart 
nd soul. 

It’s not possible to predict the outcome other than to 
wy that nobody expects Neal to win. Nevertheless it is an 
steresting experiment, for it is the first time in the his- 
ory of the State that a real liberal is running on a liberal 
jatform. 


annua, 


In the Driftway 


HE Drifter is a 100 per cent American; that is, he is 

a whole-souled admirer of any one who can extract a 
ilar out of another while giving only fifty cents—or less— 
,return. Therefore, the Drifter is an apostle of what in 
rodern business jargon is called salesmanship. Salesman- 
sip is the art of selling a person something he doesn’t 
reed—and possibly doesn’t even want—at twice what the 
ticle is worth even to one who needs it. Salesmanship is 
te foundation of modern business, the sine qua non of the 
wmpetitive system of industry. But though the word is 
nw, the art is old. Indeed there was far more salesman- 
hip in America a hundred years ago than there is today. 
There had to be because there was less money. The old- 
ashioned American horse trader—and at one time every 
imerican was a horse trader—was a better salesman than 
Florida’s late-lamented “binder boys” for the simple reason 
nat in a civilization where money was scarcer it took more 
raft to get it away from one’s neighbors. The richest 
wuntry on earth is the most gullible. So the Drifter is 
inclined to pooh-pooh a good deal of so-called modern sales- 
nanship; it’s too easy. Too many persons are like a young 
vusin of the Drifter who went to a neighbor and said: 
‘Mr. Whosis, Dad said to offer you $10 for your calf, but if 
rou wouldn’t take it to give you $15.” 


* * x ¥ 


hi there is one type of modern salesmanship of which 
the Drifter thinks too little has been said. It is that 
‘ype which induces persons to pay hard cash to see articles 
asembled as an “exhibition” which merchants are panting 
‘show them for nothing on the remotest chance of a sale. 
How is it that a supposedly sane man will pay a dollar or 
more to be elbowed about in an “automobile show” when 
aly of the dealers exhibiting would be delighted to send a 
ar to his door for a free demonstration? Is it the elbow- 
“” he pays for? The Drifter thought the limit in this 
rection had been reached with the annual “business show” 






in New York City—a d f adding machines, } 
harpeners, and rubber bands. Kut no. There has just beer 
held the National Hosiery and Underwear Exposition. In 
a country where every other shop-window is a hosiery and 
underwear exposition this extra spectacle would seem super 
fluous, but it appears that one most important piece of 
business was transacted. Out of 300 competitors th 
with the most beautiful ankle was selected. She is non 
other than the girl who three years ago won the ‘ankle and 
leg contest” at Bradl Beact Her measurements are 
ankle, 714 inches; calf, 12 inches; knee, 1314 inches; thigt 
20 inches. 
* * . . 


_— semper gloria mundi.” In years past standards of 
womanly beauty were set by liptors and painters 


Now they are regulated by the ladies’ hosiery and under 


wear manufacturers, or by the realtors of any mosquit 
infested beach that chooses to stage a bathing-beauty con 
petition. Our corset-makers long since tumbled the Ver 
of Milo off her perch and substituted as the standard 


feminine pulchritude a lady with less ample bosom and 1 
slender waist. The Drifter awaits 
standard ankle of the and 
models of which are to be cast so that any schoolgirl in the 
forty-eight States can go and grow likewise 

THE DeIFTER 


with interest the new 


hosiery- underwear-maker 


N 
Correspondence 


Reactionary Drys 


TO THE EDITOR OF THE NATION: 

Sir: The Dry voters of Pennsylvania will have presented 
to them for their votes for United States Senator this aut 
William S. Vare, Wet, disreputable, reactionary. Opposiny 
him will be William B. Wilson, Dry, respectable, and consider 4 
progressive by all who approve, overlook, or forgive his forn 
membership in an ultra-reactionary Cabinet. Which 
the votes of the great bulk of Drys? Very probably Vare 
Why? Because most Drys are reactionaries first. The heart; 
approval given by them to the disregard of the Bill of Right 
in enforcement of the Volstead Act 
that clear. Then again the average Pennsylvania Dry is a pro 
tectionist and will rather take chances with the 
than with a 1 per cent reduction of tariff duties 

Whatever support Wilson may get, aside from the thick 
and-thin Democratic vote, will come from the overwhelmingly 
Wet miners, the same element which gave bone-dry Governor 
Pinchot the bulk of his vote in the recent Republican primary 
Governor Pinchot was deserted by the Drys, who preferred the 
reactionary Pepper, backed by the reactionary and anti-prohi- 
bition Secretary Mellon. In order to win Wilson must convince 
his fellow-Drys that he is 

Baltimore, June 8 


will 


is alone enough to make 


Demon Rum 


a protectionist reactionary. 
SAMUEL DANZIGER 


The Movies Move 


To THE EpiTror oF THE NATION: 

Sir: Have you seen the motion picture called “The Volga 
Boatman”? The Bolshevik military leader marries a princess of 
the old regime. 
cencies 


No women are nationalized. 


The only inde 


committed against women are by the Czarist white 
forces. What a change since Norma Talmadge’s excruciat 


ingly anti-Bolshevik picture a few years since! 
Washington, June 4 set: 


| The Nation 


[ Vol. 122, No. 21: 





The Law and the British Strike 


To THE EDITOR OF THE NATION: 

Sir: Some very muddled accounts of the general strike 
must have been sent to America, judging from your comments 
in The Nation of May 26. 

You cannot understand why the strike was illegal. The 
miners did not strike; the railway men (the best-paid labor in 
, shipping men, printers, and others, without griev- 
They had con- 


mngiana 
in against their employers, struck illegally. 
tracts under which they were bound to give their employers a 
certain notice before leaving work. Their lightning strike was 
lation of those contracts, hence illegal. Under English 
- employers could obtain damages where there were any 
assets, on proof that they had suffered losses through breach of 
contract. 

\s for the miners, they were working under a temporary 
arrangement for the duration of the government subsidy. With 
the termination of the subsidy granted for nine months the 
arrangement ended automatically. The mine-owners posted 
notices of the terms they offered the men to continue work, as 
they had a legal right to do. The miners refused to accept these 
terms and discontinued work, as they had a legal right to do. 

You state five points on which you say the miners won. 
The first is a continuation of the subsidy. There has been no 
continuation for the reason that the mines have remained idle 
and there is nothing to subsidize. Baldwin promised a further 
subsidy of £3,000,000 if owners and miners would get together. 

That is all Baldwin has been able to promise because the 
owners would not agree to such terms as you specify. He could 
no more promise that there would be no reductions of wages, 
etc., than President Coolidge could promise the Negroes there 
would be no lynchings. 

What killed the strike was that the railway men and others 
called out from work suddenly by the Trade Union Council had 
no heart in the business. The sympathy of all classes through- 
out has seemed to be with the miners. 


London, May 80 R. L. Moore 


Trusts and Ultra-Trusts 


To Tne Epitor oF THE NATION: 

Sir: In your article Bigger and Better Mergers you state 
that trusts “have not the slightest notion of ever letting a 
penny of the savings which they make through lower unit costs 
get into the hands of the ultimate consumer.” Do you think 
trusts were organized as charitable institutions to be oper- 
ated for the benefit of the whole public? Certainly not. Your 
ery is against the system of production for profit, the essence 
of our acquisitive society. Stockholders want dividends, and 
woe to the corporation that does not pay them. This system 
existed long before trusts were formed and would be retained if 
every trust were abolished tomorrow. How many of your dear 
old private corporations were ever seized with a fit of benevo- 
lence in the days of cutthroat competition? 

“And, what is more,” you say, “if their control is suffi- 
ciently dominant, they may be able actually to increase prices.” 
Yes, they may; again, they may not. Internal elimination of 
waste and the additional security realized after the suppres- 
sion of competition are in themselves reasons why prices should 
not be increased. Oil, for instance, was cheaper after the or- 
ganization of the oil trust than before. You state that trusts 
“may pass in mere size the limit of low-cost operation.” They 
may, indeed, but that is exceptional. Trusts are formed because 
they pay and the overwhelming majority never lose. 

“Trusts,” you say, “tend to destroy initiative in the ranks 
of the great majority of their employees. They flatten life 
out for uncounted human beings.” Here you confuse trusts 
with large-scale production. As a matter of fact, large-scale 


production can be carried on by the lone corporation an; 
trust can exist without large-scale production. Upon the » 
labor has been treated as well by the trusts as by the lone »., 
poration. And what is more, labor prefers to deal with |a:, 
combinations of capital. Labor enjoys greater security; 
trusts than under scattered corporations engaged in 
scramble to survive the blessings of competition. 

Finally you turn to the government and find that ¢ 
“are forever meddling in politics, running up legislativ; 
alleys.” What of it? The industrial structure now tower 
the politica] structure. If this were a functional society 
would be publicly owned and self-governing. Hence reeoy 
to political government would be unnecessary. In fact, the» 
would be no place for the state at all. All the funct 
political government would become the functions of an ecor 
government made up of representatives, duly qualified e 
mists, accountants, and statisticians elected by the repr 
tives managing the various trusts, who, in turn, would be ele; 
by the workers. The workers in each trust would elect 
managers, and each group would be supreme in its sphere 

The general convention to be called to draw up this n 
economic constitution would, of course, have to appoint exper: 
to appraise the value of the property necessary to be purchas 
to accomplish this scheme. If the present stockholders refy; 
to accept the bonds issued for the property, then their proper: 
would be seized without compensation, until they repented 
Why not, indeed? The Yankee manufacturers and their 
tainers turned Virginia chattel slaves loose without compensy 
tion to their masters. And what is the difference betwe 
chattel slavery and wage slavery? Quite recently the px 
deprived distillers of the right to make booze—another precedent 

Mount Ida, Alexandria, Va., May 31 JOSEPH B. Day 


On the Color Line 


To THE EpiTor oF THE NATION: 

Sir: Mr. Pickens’s article Youth Attacks the Color Lir 
calls to mind how the pupils at the Ethical Culture Sch 
have been trained in the better attitudes toward the rac 
problem. One of the graduates of the school, Miss Maso 
who later distinguished herself at Fisk University, was twice 
elected president of her high-school class by the girls an 
boys both. 

On one occasion, another private school learned that 
player on the Ethical Culture baseball team was a colored 
boy, and declared that it would not play the game unless * 
were taken off. The matter was referred to the student coun 
cil, which thereupon voted not only that the boy was t 
remain on the team but that all engagements for any kind of 
game whatever with the school which had protested were t 
be canceled. 


Brooklyn, N. Y., June 3 HENRY NEUMANN 


Tolstoi’s Granddaughter 


TO THE EDITOR OF THE NATION: 

Sir: Excuse my liberty to write to ask you an advice t 
a private cause. Forgive also my poor English; I am Russian 

One of the two living daughters of Leo Tolstoi opene 
recently a boarding-house near Paris to support herself and he 
daughter Tatiana, the favorite granddaughter of Leo Tolst 
for whom he wrote many children’s stories. But the busines: 
maybe in beginning only, is very poor, the house almost empty 
and she has very hard time now. 

Is there any possibility to let the American tourists kno 
about it? Her address is Mrs. T. L. Souchotina-Tolstoi, 236 
Avenue Victor Hugo, Clamart, Seine, France. 


Croton-on-Hudson, N. Y., June 8 K. N. ROSEN 















Books 








Ditty 
By ALLEN TATE 


moon will run all consciences to cover, 
is now the easy peer of day; 
‘tle boys no longer sight the plover 
Hyung on the sky, and cattle go 
Warily out in search of misty hay. 
‘ook to the grackle, the pretty eager swallow, 
rhe crow, and all the birds that sail 
With the smooth essential flow 
f time through men, who fail. 





for now the moon with friendless light carouses 
, hill and housetop, street and marketplace; 

Yen will plunge, mile after mile of men, 

To crush this lucent madness of the face— 
home and put their heads upon the pillow, 

Turn with whatever shift the darkness cleaves, 


Tuck in their eyes, and cover 
The flying dark with sleep like falling leaves. 





First Glance 

T is significant that “The Devil” (Harper: $2), now 

for the first time translated into English by the best 
f Tolstoi’s translators, Aylmer Maude, should have been 
written by Tolstoi during the same year that saw the pub- 
ation of “The Kreutzer Sonata.” For both novels deal 
with the problem—a terrible one for Tolstoi in that sixth 
decade of his life—of chastity in men, and both of them 
treat it tragically. As Mr. Maude makes clear in a preface, 
‘the present work is founded directly upon a critical inci- 
dent in the life of the author, who in 1880, when he was 
fifty-two, besought a tutor in his house at Yasnaya Polyana 
‘0 come with him on his daily walks about the estate and 
talk concerning a sexual temptation into which he had 
fallen. He confessed as they walked that he had found it 
pleasant to look upon Domna, the servants’ cook, and that 
he had even gone so far as to arrange a meeting with 
ter—which only by accident had been prevented. Both 
reflection and prayer having failed him, he had resorted 
‘0 confession; and Mr. Maude records that in the end this 
levice succeeded, though Tolstoi rendered his position still 
safer by removing Domna to another place. 

Ten years later “The Devil” was written. It was not 
published in Russia until after the author’s death, and 
until now it has remained unknown to readers of English. 
Its hundred pages are a valuable find, in my opinion, not 
merely because they strengthen our evidence as to Tolstoi’s 
absorbed concern with sex, or because they make an im- 
portant footnote to his biography, but also because they 
contain some of the best writing we have from this most 
convincing novelist in the world. In “The Devil,’ the 
title of which, by the way, is revealing of Tolstoi’s extreme 
antipathy toward woman in so far as she is by necessity 
a temptress, the hero, Eugene Irtenev, is just half as old 
a3 Tolstoi was at the time of the Domna incident; but he 
too is beset by the image of a tall, healthy peasant woman— 
Stepanida—and he too, as the attraction grows upon him 
even to the point of filling all his thoughts at the time 





when he wants to think only of his young wife, Liza, re 
sorts to brain. In his 
case, however, nothing avails; Stepanida is not sent away; 
either of them 
both. In 


other he 


confession in order to clear his 
Tolstoi wrote two endings, 
Mr. Maude prints 


himself, in the 


tragedy ensues. 
desperate enough, and 
of them Eugene 
Stepanida as she flaunts 


one 
shoots snoots 


her diabolical beauty in the thresh- 


ing-barn. 
Mr. Maude is eayer to convince his twent entur 
British readers that “The Devil” may still have merit 


though its theme be “obsolete.” He fears that “the un 
restraint of 
to be a norm wherefrom Tolstoi departs 
of “repression and That in itself is an 
amusing commentary life and literature 
I thought Mr. Maude should 


today” may too much seem to such 
Into Wel 
suppression.” 
upon Georgian 


it odder yet, however, that 


have attempted to justify the novel on the ground tha 
there have actually existed, and may conceivably ©» 
again, men capable of an _ interest continence The 
true materials for the justification lie in the book itself, 
which, written in the same decade with some of the r 


telling fiction ever composed by Toletoi, and therefore 
anybody (What Men Live By, Old Men, The Three 
Termits, How Much Land Does a Need), is brillian 
by any test that a calm critic could apply. 

same awful way in which Tolstoi at his best was alwa 
real—and in a way that the term “realism,” incidental] 
MARK VAN DOREN 


T WoO 
Man 


[+ j ‘ 
i IS real in 


cannot illuminate. 


Money Makes the Mare Go 


Waddil! Catchings 


Profits. By William Trufant Foster and 
Houghton Miffin Company. $4. 

TT’ HIS book elaborates somewhat farther the theory which it 

in their earlier “Money,” th 


authors announced work on 


theory that our present method of financing industry out of 
profits inevitably leads to insufficient consumer demand for 
finished goods, and so around the weary cycle of boom and 


depression and back again. It is really two books in one. The 
first half is far and away the best existing 
defense of the profit system, embodying as it does an un 
equaled body of statistical data admirably analyzed. The sec 
ond half is a savage criticism of that system; it constitutes the 
authors’ answer to their own initial “Why is it 
impossible for the people, as consumers, to acquire and enjoy 
all the commodities which, as producers, they are perfectly abl 
and willing to make?” Let us look at both halves 

To begin with, as our authors insistently point out, profits 
are the heart of present industrial life, just as mon t 
blood. The gradual weakening of the profit motive in 
industry after another is impracticable, and it would be disa 
trously silly to scrap it without discovering another mot 
equally effective. Such a substitute Messrs. Foster and ¢ 
believe cannot be found; so they are for finding out why 
animal behaves badly, and then reforming it, if possible, in 
stead of slaughtering it out of hand. This would to be 
good sense, provided the creature be not incorrigible, as the 


, 
explanation 


que tion: 


ve 
atcnings 


the 
seem 


socialists maintain. 

Now, profits and losses arise out of taking risks, and risks 
there must be, provided the consumer is to have freedom of 
choice as to what, when, and where he will buy. Our com- 
petitive system puts the risks on the business man, and pay 
him in profits. Even communism could eliminate the risks 
only at cost of robbing the consumer of his freedom of choice 
—and who recalls war rationing with pleasure? Risks, how 














































700 The Nation 


Aa 


[ Vol. 122, No. 315 





ever, and with them profits, may be reduced by the increase 
and diffusion of knowledge, as by better crop reporting, for 

, and by lessening fluctuations in the value of money. 

arize the argument in a series of successive chapter 
headings: “Buyers determine prices. Prices determine who 
gets the goods. Profits determine who produces the goods. 
Large profits are sometimes unavoidable.” Since the dollar 
votes of consumers, acting through profit-seeking business men, 
bring into existence and distribute the goods wanted, com- 
munism would do away with prices and profits only at cost of 
disfranchising consumers. 

But how does the machinery actually work? In the first 
place, profits are not always profits. Losses run into billions 
annually. In 1921 less than 45 per cent of the corporations of 
the country reported any net income, and even in the record 
year 1917 a full third of them had no taxable income. Total 
corporate profits, which were ten and a quarter billions in 
1917, were less than two-fifths of that amount in 1921. Profits 
among industries vary widely, running from 8.9 to 60.3 per 
cent on capital among 108 industries in 1917. Within the same 
industry there are enormous variations. One coal-mining com- 
pany made 13 per cent, another 329; one contractor had to con- 
tent himself with 3 per cent, while his fellow made 5,530 
per cent. The Steel Corporation made twenty-three millions 
in 1914, 271 millions two years later, and only thirty-five mil- 
lions in 1921. What bosh, then, to talk of a “normal rate of 
profits.”” Profits are, above all, fortuitous, capricious, uncertain. 

With these differences in profits, dividend and surplus dis- 
tributions vary widely from year to year, despite all attempts 
at steadying the former. One hundred ninety-one industrial 
corporations added 379 millions to surplus, for example, in 
1920, only to subtract the same amount next year. Corporate 
surplus received 1.5 per cent of the national income in 1914, 
and no less than 8.5 per cent in 1916, the percentage going to 
persons with incomes less than $2,000 falling in the same years 
from 56.3 to 47 per cent. Such fluctuations, in this case con- 
nected with changes in the value of money, mean wide varia- 
tions in the money available to consumers to buy goods. 

Here we approach the authors’ theory of the cycle. In 
their own words: “First, there is no possibility of attaining the 
economic aim upon which all are agreed unless consumers some- 
how obtain enough money, year in and year out, to buy the 
goods about as rapidly as they are produced; second, the pres- 
ent money and profit economy does not enable consumers long 
to obtain the required money; third, there is consequently no 
possibility of sustained economic progress, and extreme alter- 
nations of prosperity and depression are inevitable.” Con- 
sumer demand is bound to be short, because the expansion of 
industry is financed out of profits; as soon as the new capital 
facilities come into use, then, the value of goods produced must 
be greater than the amount of money passing into the hands 
of consumers, unless prices be reduced, which in turn will 
make business unprofitable and slow it down. In the words 
of the authors, “industry does not disburse to consumers money 
enough to buy the goods produced,” while “consumers, under 
the necessity of saving, cannot spend even as much money as 
they receive.” Now, at this critical point the cautious reader 
is likely to pause. It is true that the mathematical examples 
given, both hypothetical and actual, lend plausibility to the 
idea, and a considerable body of statistical evidence is at any 
rate “consistent with the theory that the chief cause of our 
failure to make substantial progress is the failure of the flow 
‘f money to consumers, in a period of increased productivity, 
to keep pace with the flow of goods.” No one familiar with 
the difference between illustration and proof, however, will 
consider the case proved, nor do the authors themselves make 


‘ 


any such claim. They separate themselves from the overpro- 
duction theorists, and from underconsumptionists like John A. 
Hobson, who find the source of inadequate consumer demand in 


bad distribution. In truth, the theory seems to have most in 


common with the esoteric and incomprehensible doctrine 
Major Douglas, from which it differs, however, at any 
being so stated that it is possible to extract meaning 

But even if the theory be rejected in toto, it is nevert! 
distinct service to theory to point out, as the author 
done in both their books, that trade in a money economy 
simply refined barter, and that the profit-seeking busin: 
acts differently from the way he would act if he were 
trading goods for goods, and acts with different results. \ 
Karl Marx emphasized the sacred formula M-C-M [Mor 
Commodity—Money] as against C-M-C, he was after al] 
cating a truth too much neglected by the economists, that : 
object of business is to make money, not goods. 

But just how to enable the business man to make money 
continually in order that he may find it possible conti ial) 
to make goods for us at top speed, as he would be only « 
happy to do, the authors unhappily do not tell us. So far 
one can make out, their theory would oblige them to look f 
a remedy somewhere in the process of financing. Apparently 
the government or some deus ex machina must each year issy 
additional money equal in amount to the total savings of th: 
community, and by some hocus-pocus must get it into the 
hands, not of producers, but of consumers. On what prin. 
ciple shall it be distributed? Perhaps to us all, in proportion 
to our last year’s expenditure—or shall it be on the basis of 
what we should like to spend next year? In the latter even: 
Messrs. Foster and Catchings will find themselves the 
popular of economic theorists. 

HENRY RAYMOND Mussty 


A Decent Traveler 


Sunlight in New Granada. By William McFee. Doubleday 

Page and Company. $3.50. 

HE dear brethren are at it again. From the land of Mexico 

come loud wails. The church is in danger. The oil-fields are 
in danger. President Calles is a despot who rules with the hel; 
of a small minority of wicked Bolshevists. At the same time 
the “really nice” little Mexican peons are rushing to the de- 
fense of the foreign concessionnaires and the Spanish ecclesias- 
tics, and all they need to gain a complete victory is just a few 
hundred thousand brave American soldiers. It is an old, 
story and it grows a little dreary. 

Meanwhile what sort of people are those Mexicans? What 
sort of country do they inhabit? I don’t know and [I sha! 
probably never find out. Unless Mr. McFee will cross the Ri 
Grande and tell me about it. Which brings me to the inner 
kernel of my little story. 

Of course I know full well that there is no dearth of books 
upon the present subject. Once upon a time I even went so 
far as to read a good many of them. I began with the series 
composed by one of our famous globe trotters, a man who 
has walked from Upernavik to Tierra del Fuego and from 
Peking to Novgorod. I studied his works and from them 
gathered the opinion that South America must be a dreadful 
place indeed. But that caused a serious inner conflict. For |! 
lived in Washington in those days and I was constantly meet 
ing South Americans. They seemed very decent people. A 
little darker of skin perhaps than our Nordic neighbors. But 
well read, simple of manners, hard workers, and with an in- 
credible devotion to their countless grandfathers, great-grand- 
uncles, aunts, nieces, servants, cousins, and foster-mothers 
And many of them were exceedingly intelligent. Indeed, th 
quickest and most brilliant mind I ever had the pleasure of 
meeting belonged to a man who hailed from that self-same 
land of Colombia of which McFee has written with suc! 
great charm. 

A little later it happened that I ran across the learned 
doctor who was just then “explaining” the South America! 








sne 23, 1926] 





The Nation 
















nle to their Northern neighbors. He was terrible. His 
snners would not have been conspicuously bad in the fore- 
of a Greek tramp, but I hate to think what my punc- 
1s Peruvian and Argentinian friends would have thought 
‘them. Not much, I fear. Well, this fellow who had the 
-aces Of a professional coal-heaver had spent the greater 
-art of his adult life carrying the gospel of his own American- 
m to the benighted heathen of the Andes. That he had not 
killed long before demonstrated a tenderness of heart 
- the part of those long-suffering foreigners which I for one 
t compelled to admire in no uncertain terms. 








tr + ‘ ° . ° 
ae My curiosity having been aroused by this encounter, I 
in for South American travelers. And 1 am sorry to 
. - that the investigation revealed a pretty unhappy state of 
it ] . . ° 
“YER stairs. Go-getters from the hinterland of Ohio and Methodist 
mniy ¥ i B Re ‘ : 
f. ~issionaries without a job seemed to make a specialty of 
ir e ° 
co ‘hile and Ecuador and the other republics. The result was 
‘OOK f 
These authors con- 


xactly what one would have expected. 
wmnlated Land und Leute from their own atrocious angle, 
and although they were unfit for the company of decent men 
n their native land, they greatly wondered that they were 
st wanted in countries where formal manners are the only 
rart of the constitution which is carefully observed. They 
nt even (in the meanest sense of that mean expression) by 
evaluating their personal mortification into general terms of 
ontempt and derision for their former hosts. 

The McFee book, therefore, was a most welcome surprise. 

pleasant and humorous soul visited other pleasant if less 
humorous folk and they liked each other. The next time 
«me puzzled newspaper editor looks for a worthy subject 
for his posthumous charity, I recommend a smallish sum which 
shall keep Mr. McFee traveling and writing steadily in the 
Southern Hemisphere for at least a dozen years. I shall 
miss an agreeable neighbor. But our glorious republic may 
e¢ saved another couple of wars. 

HENDRIK WILLEM VAN LOON 


Old and New 


of Rings. By Mary Butts. Albert and Charles Boni. 
$2.50. 

NE of the many discoveries we owe to English romanti- 

cism is the sentiment of place. Somehow it was revealed 

the early 1800’s that localities, like persons, have active and 
ensible souls. It is such an adumbration of locale that should 
nave formed the backbone of this very arresting novel by a 
writer of indubitable talent. As a matter of fact, there are 
two backbones—and the result is that we are faced with a 
museum curiosity, not an integrated work of art. 

The earlier and more powerful section of the book is de- 
oted to an evocation of the estate of Rings in England. From 
the arrogant lips of Anthony Ashe, master of Rings, we learn 
the fragmentary tale of the magic memories, the medieval 
orrors, the incantations that lie coiled and potent in the 
stony Druid circles which give the place its name. Ancestral 
witches, crucified sorcerers, hieroglyphic volumes, subtle care- 
takers who feed like vampires on the family tradition—the 
whole paraphernalia is effective in its way, the more so be- 
ause old Anthony is shadowy and gnomic and his little daugh- 
ter Van is another Ariel. There is little solidity of flesh and 
bone to intrude and dispel the atmosphere of place. Here 
Miss Butts’s touch is firm and sensitive. She achieves a sort 
f spiritualized Gothic romance which substitutes the cumu- 
lative force of eerie legend for Anne Radcliffe’s trap-doors 
and sanguinary nuns. If you are at all susceptible to the 
frisson here is un nouveau. But Van grows up, is exiled from 
the holy and enchanted Rings of her spirit, starves in London, 
ves in a garret, engages in artistic conversation, loves an 





4 
c 


artist-nihilist, and acts for the movies. She takes reality, 
lives a separate organic life which is but feebly ked to the 
magic on which her childhood was nurtured The realistic 
novelist steps upon the stage The latter part of the novel, 


in which Van returns to the home of her fathers, struggles 
with its enemies, finds a brother, and los i lover, is sheer 
mechanism. One perceives the synthesi I} nts show. 
The book as a whole collapses 

It is not to be denied that some very gn art a mpanies 
this fatal clash of material. Miss Butts understan he atter 
of words, she has fine insights, and there is rta rigs 
ousness in her style which makes one regret that it has be 
expen led on what is, after all, to the contemporar habit of 
thought, a decadent literary conventio: For when all is said 
and done, places cannot live for us today as they did for the 
excited imaginations of Scott and Pos \ platitude, but 
valuable one: this is a psychological ag: Mary Butts wou 
do well to ponder on the convincing exposition of th the 


contained in Virginia Woolf’s essay, Mr 


Brown. Character is fate, it has been said. Certainly it seer 
to be the fate of the modern nove! 

To an American particularly there is one other 
element in the book which seems anachronist We can ne 
longer be moved by the mystic tradition of famil The 


fungoidal mania that forces the Ashes to live as much and 


deeply in the memory of their ancestors as in the consciou 

of themselves hardly convinces us. The whole carefu b 

up system seems rickety and unsubstantial. One remember 

the devastating absurdity of that sentence in ID Oyde 

Stewart’s “The Crazy Fool”: “‘We were Southern: and 
proud... ,’ he added simply.” 


CLIFTON P. FAapIMaA? 


Helmholtz Continued 


Helmholtz’s Treatise on Physiological Optics. English Tra 
lation from the Third German Edition. Edited by Jame 
P. C. Southall. Volume II: The Sensations of 
Published by the Optical Society of America. 


J 3 ww) 


HE principles of physiological optics, like those of man 

other branches of physiology, are involved in every moment 
of our waking human life; but they have not been disseminated 
freely in the lay mind. Indeed they are none too firmly rooted 
in the minds of ophthalmologists, other eys 
specialists to whom the layman turns when the principles in 
question fail to operate for him to the best advantage. Ever 
scientific physicists and psychologists—and even certain physi 
ologists—have occasionally revealed 
regard. Some excuse for such a state of affairs may have 
existed hitherto in the fact that no authoritative treatise upon 
the subject was available in English. The excuse is now re 
moved by the Optical Society of America. 

When it was originally published, Helmholtz’s “Hand 
buch” created a science of vision and of the eye out of a previ 


oculists, and 


some ignorance in this 


ously chaotic mass of problems. The book rose so far above 
the scientific level of its times that it has not been surpassed ir 
the nearly seventy years which have elapsed since it 
There has been much progress but no new comprehensive and 
systematic discussion of the 
optics. The most important new advances in the field have 
been incorporated in successive German editions of Helmholtz’ 
work. The present translation is 
to English readers of a scientific classic: 


S inceptior 


whole domain of physiological 


more than a mere disclosure 
it 18 a scientific 
reference work of the highest value to those interested in the 
principles of vision. 

Volume II considers facts which for the most part would 
now be classed as psychological in character. The original 


chapters by Helmholtz treat the way in which the eye is stimu 






























































702 The Nation 


[Vol. 122, No. 31 





lated, the physical nature of simple and compound light and 
their relation to color, the intensity and time relationships 
of luminous sensation, variations in sensitivity, contrast, and 
various subjective phenomena. Appendices by Nagel consider 
changes in the retina due to light, adaptation, twilight vision, 
and the “duplicity theory.” An appendix by von Kries deals 
with normal and anomalous color systems and with theories 
of vision. An important new contribution is made by Chris- 
tine Ladd-Franklin under the title The Nature of Color 
This stresses the importance of the psychological 
standpoint for the analysis of color, and advocates the author’s 
It also incorporates the 


Sensations. 


well-known theory of color vision. 
valuable data concerning color mixture resulting from the 
researches of Kénig, included in the second edition of Helm- 
1oltz’s work but omitted from the third. A new bibliography 
of publications on vision between 1911 and 1924 is added by 
the American editor. 

The utmost credit is due to the editor, Professor Southall, 
not only for the perfection of his task but for its accomplish- 
ment in any form. The translation of nearly two thousand 
pages of scientific text, with a maze of notes and references, 
is a stupendous task; and although the editor has had numer- 
ous assistants the responsibility for the unity and accuracy 
of the whole has been upon his hands alone. The Optical 
Society of America is also to be complimented for its creation 
of so fitting a memorial to a great scientist on the occasion 
of the one hundredth anniversary of his birth. 

L. T. TROLAND 


Elizabethan History 


Mr. Secretary Walsingham and the Policy of Queen Elizabeth. 
By Conyers Read. Harvard University Press. Three vol- 
umes. $20. 

A History of England from the Defeat of the Armada to the 
Death of Elizabeth, with an Account of English Institutions 
During the Later Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Cen- 

3y Edward P. Cheyney. Longmans, Green and 

Company. Vol. II. $6.50. 

D gperlugslnesge-enmiocbny in length and utterly unlike in view- 
point and objective, these two studies in Elizabethan his- 

tory have far more in common than even their juxtaposition for 

purposes of review would indicate. Together they embrace the 
last thirty-five years of Elizabeth’s reign, the former setting 
forth the career of one of her most distinguished ministers and 
the whole gamut of her foreign policy with which he was in- 
volved from 1568 to 1590, the latter displaying the England of 

Elizabeth in the seven years preceding her death in 1603. Both 

works are real contributions to historical knowledge. Thor- 

oughly informed, absolutely sound in workmanship, and ably 
written, they will stand for more than a generation. 

This life of Walsingham, “something more than a biogra- 
phy and something less than a history of Elizabethan policy,” 
is “an attempt to establish the position of the man in the public 
affairs of his times.” Three solid volumes have been devoted 
to the task. They embody the researches of years and are 
based upon a wealth of unprinted material from the English 
archives both public and private. No important phase or detail 
of the activities of Walsingham as agent or Councilor of the 
Relations with France, Scotland, the 


turies 


great Queen is neglected. 
Low Countries and Spain, the conflict of Catholic and Puritan 
at home and its ramifications abroad (the best chapter in the 
whole work), the execution of Mary Stuart, the war with Spain, 
the functions of a privy councilor, the parsimony of the Queen, 
English maritime enterprise in the last part of the sixteenth 
century, and, least important of all, the private life of Walsing- 
ham from the cradle to the grave—all are treated adequately, 
now separately and now collectively, but always with a clarity 


to which many of these topics have long been unaccust 
The apparatus of scholarship, never obtrusive, is every» 
evident in numerous excerpts from unpublished documents 
terpersed throughout the text, occasional appendices 
voluminous foot-notes. The bibliographical essay whic 
cludes the final volume is a model of what such things sh 
be. The illustrations, whether portraits or facsimiles of 
scripts, form an integral part of the work and add di 
to its value. 

There are no startling interpretations of Walsingham 
the affairs of his day. He still stands forth with Drake as : 
protagonist of militant English Protestantism and wit! 
cester as the unrelenting advocate of war with Spain. 
treated the Catholics merely as the traitors he deemed 
to be. He was no more desirous of the death of Mary Si 
than she of the death of Elizabeth. Walsingham had a 
for the unraveling of intrigue and plot and was well served 
by a much overpraised spy system, but his success was ; 
often dependent upon luck as upon science. He was no par!ig 
mentarian, but a staunch royalist, yet he rebuked James \I 
as a child with the same arguments which the Puritans late; 
directed against James I, grown to manhood. Walsingham wa; 
a zealous promoter of English exploration, although with , 
view more to wealth than to empire. An “archgrafter” in the 
eyes of posterity and certainly well-paid by his Queen albei; 
in devious ways, he died poor but solvent. Patient, devoted, 
and far-sighted, he seems to have thought only of the state: 
he had no life outside his official business. 

Walsingham may have been more Elizabethan than the 
Queen herself, but her personality dominates every pag 
permeates the whole work. Her attitude was consistently 
maddening combination of parsimony, vacillation, and doubt 
She was not really religious. She feared French expansior 
into the Low Countries more than she feared Spain. § 
would not dismiss her ministers and she would not sup; 
them. 
caprice in the Virgin Queen proved in the end to be ver 
subtle policy.” The tortuous nature of Elizabethan polic; 
will never be justified completely; it can hardly demand 
more impartial or a more masterly exposition. 

Professor Cheyney’s concluding volume more than fulfils 
the promise of its predecessor. There is still the same ha; 
combination of sound learning and charming style. As bef 
the work is based upon an extensive acquaintance with 
printed sources of information. This material has b 
thoroughly integrated and admirably set forth around a fe\ 
carefully chosen topics. There are no appendices; foot-note: 
contain merely citations of references. The _ bibliography 
promised in the earlier preface is not forthcoming. Ther 
a deplorable lack of all maps and diagrams. No attention h: 
been given to church organization or to intellectual factors. 

But the carping critic remains to praise. The chapter: 
devoted to the last four Elizabethan parliaments are beauti- 
fully done. The section on local government has no equa! at 
the moment. In both instances there is a clever fusion 
definition and discussion, with no lack of specific illustration, 
yet with constant stress upon the general and typical factor 
involved. The remainder of the book contains a realistic de- 
scription of economic and political conditions in 1596 and 
again at the end of the reign, graphic accounts of the Cadiz 
expedition of 1596 and of the usually neglected Armada of 
the same year, a discussion of foreign policy at the turn of 
the century, and a rather complete account of the fall of Essex. 
The last is a real achievement. The whole book overflows with 
clever characterizations, striking comparisons, and thought- 
provoking statements. It will take its place on the library 
shelf between Froude and Gardiner, not because of its chrono- 
logical limits but by right of its unmistakable merit. 

SIDNEY R. PACKARD 











23, 1926] 








The Nation 703 








mae, Books in Brief 
in the Revolution. By G. Lendtre. 
Noel Williams. Brentano’s. $4.50. 
To devote one’s time to examining historical buildings or, 
Shou ere the buildings have disappeared, maps, plans, and me- 
| rs which mention them; to search laboriously into the ulti- 
fate of this great man’s bathtub and that great woman's 
wk of hair; to delve into forgotten rubbish in museums and 
r rhives—all in order to prove, tradition to the contrary not- 
thstanding, that a certain room was never inhabited by 
jarie Antoinette, that the skull of Charlotte Corday never 
s buried, that Madame Lebas never loved St. Just, and a 
ymber of other trivia of a similar nature—requires, to be sure, 
commendable fund of patience, but also a tremendous lack 
fa sense of proportion. This shortcoming makes for the 
sthor’s patent inability to understand the spirit of the French 
evolution. One would get a better portrayal of Danton’s 
naracter from the poetical effusions of Lamartine, of Robes- 
rre’s politics from the venomous rhetoric of Carlyle, of 
farat’s significance from the complacent prejudices of Mich- 
lt. Indeed, except for a chance allusion now and then to 
4ulard, the present writer never goes for secondary informa- 
in beyond the so-called classical historians of the French 
Revolution; and so gullible is he in using the memoirs and 
ther primary sources that we are asked to believe that the 
rents of August 10, 1792, following the capture of the Tui- 
vries, were scenes of pillage and slaughter such as no sober 
bystander could have witnessed and remained alive and sane, 
that the September Massacres were possibly the work of “a 
ast and secret association whose members had chosen for their 
ject the destruction of the monarchy,” that the exact words 
f the conversation between Danton and his confessor Kéra- 
vnan are known—though we are assured that “never was the 
eret of that strange and solemn interview violated.” Despite 
the fact that there are some historical data in this volume that 
wre not readily to be found elsewhere, on the whole it is a bit of 
ensational sentimentalism. In general it may be said of it 
that exceptis excipiendis whatever in it is important is untrue 
‘“ ¢@iird whatever is true is unimportant. In extenuation it might 
zw pointed out that the original French edition was written 
wme years ago and that the author—a historian of reputation 
-is himself sometimes painfully apologetic. 


Translated by H 












‘“lor-Blindness. By Mary Collins. Harcourt, Brace and Com- 
een pany. $4.50. 
Lew However familiar it may be, the fact that to some eyes 
oles Bite world is reduced in its color-scheme is difficult to realize. 
Phy @¥Color is such an elementary experience, known only to and by 
ense, that no other source of knowledge of its vast role in 
has @imture and art is available. Your color world depends upon 
he minute structure of the retina with which you are born. 
ers ithe present volume is a convenient manual giving the facts in 
iti: @jxgard to the only common variety of the defect, the several 
at @§xethods of testing the degree and manner of the departure 


of @ifrom normal vision, and also an accurate study of about a 

oxen cases around which the: discussion of the theories of 
ors lor-blindness is centered. The position taken is critical and 
de- rrect; while color is defined by the length of light-waves, 
nd @§thich belong to physics, color itself is a phenomenon of sen- 
liz @xtion belonging to psychology. Physical theories have inter- 


of @fered with the free investigation of the findings which only the 
of @@°0r-blind can reveal; the variations are so many that each 
x, @gch subject seems almost to have a system of his own. The 
most common type is one in which the two ends of the spec- 
tum seem to present a neutral (gray) zone, along with an- 
ther such zone in the green region. The resulting confusions 
prevent the subject from seeing the ripe strawberries under 
their leaves and induce him to speak of a “reddish-green,”’ 
vhile grays may seem either reddish or greenish. The color- 


ry 








theories explain the result on an evolutionary basis, but are 
both conflicting and imperfect. The he reditary mystery, by 
which a mother who has normal color-vision carries a latent 
defect from the color-blindness of her father which appears 
in the color-blindness of her son, is impressive and shows that 
we are dealing with an objective, sex-limited (there are at 


least forty times as many color-blind men as women) factor 
In addition, the practical danger arising from ur ' 
defects compels a permanent 


problem 


interest In this a Vet j ver 


Drawings for the Theater. By Robert Edmond Jon Intro 
duction by Arthur Hopl Theater Arts, Inc 

Thirty-five drawings by one of the most imaginative of 
American stage designer 
Personality. By R. G. Gordo: The International Library of 

Psycholog Philosophy, and §S M Har 
court, Brace and Company. $4. 

A gallant attempt to bridge the gap which lies between our 
knowledge of the physiology of the nervous system and the 
theories of the new psychology. Starting with the old axiom 
“There is no psychosis without a neurosis,” the author en 


deavors to look at various fundamental mental processes both 
as they take place in the nerves and as they appear in the 
consciousness. While it must be admitted that the exact phy 
olegical basis of, for example, a “repression” is still far from 
clear, the book represents an admirable summary of knowledge 
upon the subject. The author devotes considerable attent 
the theory of “emergents” 
in terms of it. 


ion to 


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International Relations Section 





A Message from Barbusse 


HE unfavorable reception by certain American publi- 










cations, including The Nation, of “Chains,” the recent 


of Henri 
following 


novel Barbusse, caused the author to write the 
message addressed to The Free Spirits of 


America. It has not been printed elsewhere. 


I seize the occasion offered by the publication of the Ameri- 
can edition of my novel “Chains” to address to the free spirits 
of the United States, those who compose the advance guard of 
American thought, this statement of the point of view from 
which I undertook to build my epic drama of the crowd, its past 
and its future. 

My desire to enter into lively contact with the American 
public is one of long standing. I feel this desire not only 
because of my personal origin—my mother was Anglo-Saxon; 
not only because I am drawn to America by many deeply felt 
bonds of sympathy; it is also because America is today, in 
large measure, the arbiter of the world. 

If this is true, is it not important that America should 
have a clear awareness of this world, over which it acquires 
from year to year an increasing material supremacy? Yet I 
doubt that America has such an awareness. America fails, 
especially, I feel, to plumb accurately the depth and significance 
of the most powerful current which now agitates all the older 
countries of the world—the current of revolution. 

American opinion accepts too uncritically the myths and 
distortions with which constituted authority and its official 
apologists, ever at work, both with you and with us, travesty 
this vast and inevitable movement of the masses. That is why 
I offer this book, in which, using the methods of the student 
and the writer, I undertake to give historical and philosophical 
form to an idea which I believe to be new in the world. 

To be a revolutionist does not mean that one is consumed 
by a sick need of disturbing the existing order; that one must 
wave the red flag, threaten, and make excited demonstrations 
after the manner of the demagogue. Neither does it mean that 
one dreams vain dreams of unworthy vengeance and reprisal; 
nor that one pursues the Utopian will-o’-the-wisp of making the 
poor rich and the rich poor. To be a revolutionist as I con- 
ceive it is to claim for oneself a role far greater, more noble, 
and more intelligent. 

The task of the revolutionist is to bring to birth a society 
in which the interest of all will supersede the special interest 
f any individual or class. It is to attack our present system 
because it is both oppressive and unstable; it is to eliminate 
the struggle of the classes by eliminating the classes them- 
selves; it is to institute a world community based on the neces- 
sities of work and production. 

The revolutionist knows that this has never been done, in 
spite of superficial appearances, in spite of the hypocritical 
pretensions of our contemporary “democracies” and their lead- 
ers, notably those of France and England. 

As I delved into history seeking the materials for my 
present book I became convinced that the historical succession 
of social forms presents only slight differences, but profound 
resemblances. The differences are those of place, of manners, 
one might almost say of dress. But the underlying forms are 
alike. The slavery of antiquity, the serfdom of the Middle 
Ages, and the condition of the workers of today are but three 
forms of the same thing: the unequal struggle of the masses 
and the unfailing victory of privilege, supported by the con- 
stituted authorities. It is this which I have wished to reveal 
as the essential tragedy of all history. And there is this 
further modern corollary: Scientific and industrial progress 
has perfected the exploitation of men by men, this division of 


the world into robots and profiteers. If there has bee, 
intellectual and moral progress it has consisted in the ela 
tion of purely verbal systems with which to disguise, yp; 
the masques of liberalism and republicanism, the eterna] re 
mencements of this dreary cycle of exploitation. 1 

The revolutionist is the only true liberal, the only ¢,,@Mstior 
republican. He agrees with the avowed principles of the gre: Bo 
spokesman of democracy—equality, liberty, fraternity. Bd snif 
unlike them he wishes these principles to be not merely prof. ¢ 
claimed but applied. Furthermore, revolutionary logic sho * m 
plainly how indissolubly the abuses of our present system ;; esis 
linked; that we can end none of these abuses unless we om 
them all. aw 

The revolutionist desires the goal and grasps firmly +: pent 
means to the goal. Rejecting abstract formulas and solution@m™®!! 
he adheres consistently to pragmatic science. He is bogmepit2 
honest with himself and loyal to his principles. He links hip 
self with the great libertarian tradition for which the try 
innovators, the true apostles, have always sacrificed themselveii#rimi 

Unfortunately the libertarians of the past have worked i@Mfsithi: 
the unsubstantial and spectral domain of ideas; or they hay I 
not known how to achieve a reform sufficiently radical so th: 
the reviving forces of vested greed would not be able to devoug 
their gains and turn them to their own advantage. 

America, which is young, firm, strong, and clear-headed 
should perceive that the one need is to organize positively ;; 
the domain of facts one of these great ideas which recur agai; 
and again through the centuries of human aspiration. Th 
ideal will become the reality when and only when we have the 
audacity to march directly to the goal along the path of 
mon sense and essential morality. 

In the midst of our contemporary parody of a civilization 
which calls itself moral although it is utterly material; ami 
the thundering orchestra of our false republics, let America 
be grateful for those who are the true champions of the ration- 
alist spirit, and who are also the real upholders of the Christian 
ideal; who bring to their task today, in far greater degree than 
did the defeated saviors of the past whose struggles they re- 
sume, a knowledge of economic laws and a conqueror’s grasp of 
reality. En 


‘nooti 
Reput 


Josul 
neror 
Mr. ¢ 


ente 
relow 


Doorn and the German Conspirators § ... 


WIDESPREAD monarchist conspiracy, involving 4 

large number of parliamentarians, ex-cabinet min- 
isters, and high judicial and military dignitaries, a con-| 
spiracy aiming at the deposition of President Hindenburg, vis 
his replacement by an extreme monarchist, the dissolution @] og 
of the German National Assembly, the abolition of the 
Weimar Constitution, a nation-wide state of siege, and on 
the offhand execution of all eminent Republican leaders an 
was uncovered in April by the Prussian authorities. The ing 
strong monarchist elements within the Prussian admin- 
istration tried to keep the evidence secret, but rumors 
its definitely incriminating character and extensive im- 
plications leaked out. The pressure of public opinion de- 
manding publication of the main documents became TT 
irresistible, and the Official Prussian Press Service 
(Amtliche Preussische Pressedienst) had to publish, in thé w 
first week of May, the names of the chief conspirators ar 
their “program of initial action,” and part of the incrim- li] 
inating correspondence found at their dwellings and ( 
headquarters. 

The overthrow of the republic through an armed ris- 
ing of monarchist organizations was planned for Jun 








ders 


The 


ime 
vice 
+he 
ors 
im- 
and 


“ne 23, 1926] 


The Nation 








ne chiefs of the conspiracy were Dr. Neumann, Ex-Burgo- 
aster Of Lubeck, slated as Chancellor of the Empire; 
rivy Councilor Hugenberg, selected for Minister of 


nance; Dr. Wegener of Kreuth, Bavaria, a magnate of 


savy industry, prospective Minister of the Interior; Gen 

von Mohl, the conspirators’ choice for chief of the 
tional militia (Reichswehr) ; and finally, Dr. von Luning 
~ Bonn, to be made food dictator of the revolt. Their 
sanifesto, as published by the Prussian Official Press Serv- 
, contained twenty-nine paragraphs, providing for all 
‘e main contingencies of a victorious insurrection and de- 
reing, among other essentials, a complete suspension of 
wilroad traffic, the closing of the exchanges, the intern- 
rent of the Jews in concentration camps, confiscation of 
‘eir property, dissolution of all political organizations, 
pital punishment for strikers, and two modes of execution: 
ooting for “honorable” and hanging for “dishonorable” 
tepublicans, with an express inclusion of the “November 


fiminals,” meaning the organizers of the Republic in 1918, 


sithin the latter category. 

But the chief interest of these official Prussian dis- 
Josures centers in two letters, addressed to the Ex-Em- 
ror and his Empress at Doorn by one of the conspirators, 
Yr. Class, president of the Alldeutsche Verband (Pan-Ger- 
man Union). These letters point to Doorn as a directing 
enter of monarchist conspiracies. We reproduce them 
low. 


Berlin, December 15, 1925 
To His IMPERIAL AND ROYAL MAJESTY—MostT SERENE Em- 
PEROR AND KING—MoOsT GRACIOUS SOVEREIGN LorD! 

Your Majesty has been pleased to express to me, un- 
der date of December 9, your appreciation, and to transmit 
to me your portrait, with a gracious inscription. For this 
delightful souvenir I beg leave to submit my most cordial 
thanks. 

This manifestation of your Majesty’s good pleasure 
was all the more significant for myself and my friends, 
inasmuch as we see in it a proof that our labors for our 
Emperor and the Empire are conducted in the right spirit 
and with the right means. Your Majesty may rest assured 
that the loyalists gathered around me—whose number and 
resolution is growing with the increase of our national 
sufferings—are indefatigably at work, with the aim of a 
restoration of the House of Hohenzollern to renewed splen- 
lor and the liberation and purification of the Fatherland. 
Despite our present miserable plight we are certain of ulti- 
mate victory, because the very heaviness of our present 
afflictions has welded together all true-hearted Germans 
into a unique commonwealth of fighters, resolved to carry 
on in the service of our Sovereign and our people. If 
anything could strengthen the determination of our fight- 
ing fraternity and its assurance of victory, it was your 
Majesty’s gracious manifestation. 

I remain, worshipfully, your Majesty’s ever faithful 

CLASS 


jerlin, January 26, 1926 
To HER MAJESTY THE EMPRESS: 

Your Majesty’s gracious letter of January 9—for 
which my most sincere thanks—came to hand in time. I 
am deeply appreciative of the fact that your Majesty would 
like to have me confer with the Emperor in person, but I 
cannot conceal from myself the weighty considerations 
speaking against such a meeting. Permit me to suggest 
that the honor of an imperial invitation be graciously 
bestowed upon Prince Otto Salm-Horstmar, an old and de- 
pendable loyalist. The Prince belongs to our inner circle, 





















































is minutely informed about the state of our move 
and would assuredly feel proud of a chance to report 
the Sovereign in person 

It is perfectly plain to us that the prestige of the 
President [Hindenburg] depends upon his insight into the 
true needs of the realm, before it is too late, and his logical 
deduction of the requisite steps. It is pitiful to see how 
the Fieldmarsha) honors with his confidence a number 
of highly obnoxious individual It is generally admitted 
today that the Dawes treaties are not workable—yet the 


President perseveres in putting his confidence in their 
chief sponsor, Dr. Luther! God grant success to our efforts 
to enlighten him! 

Public distress is increasing. The Communists are 
preparing a coup; the government and the cowardly bour 


geoisie remain inactive. Confronted by such a situation, 
we are about to resort to patriotic self-help. Our proy 
agandistic efforts have succeeded beyond reasonable ex 
pectation. The inclosed documents will enlighten your 
Majesty about developments. I remain, in deepest devo 
tion, ete. CLAS 


Syria Appeals to the League 
HE text of this document, dated March 17, was pub 
lished in the Tribune d’Orient (Geneva) of April 12 
It is addressed to the Council of the League of Nation 
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN: 


Several times already we have addressed oursely to the 
League of Nations to draw its attention to the regime under 
which the unhappy population of Syria live We nave ind 


cated the spirit in which France applies the regime of the man 
date, transforming its obligation to give aid and counsel to the 
country into a veritable colonial enterprise. Severa] times we 
have protested against the regime of the mandate and have 
shown that our country aspires to independence and liberty 
with all its heart. 

Our appeals, alas! have not been heard and, as we foresaw, 
war has broken out in Syria. The people had come to the end 
of their patience and could no longer endure the vexations of all 
kinds to which they had been subjected for five year We 
have been suffering all the horrors of war for eight months 
The country marches to its ruin. 

It is in vain that our enemies seek the causes of the 
conflict in the feudal spirit or in the ambitions of various indi 
viduals of the Syrian world or even in the intrigues of certain 
Powers. The feudal regime disappeared from Syria long ago 
and from Djebel Druse more than thirty years ago, following a 


rebellion of the peasantry, as everybody knows. After that 
Turkey established complete equality between the sheiks and the 
peasants. 

The true cause of the war must be sought in the regime 
to which the country is subjected, under the false name of 


mandate, even though in 1916 the Syrian populations hoped 
for independence and liberty. They have witnessed a regime 
of extreme imperialism, which has taken from them their most 
elementary rights and prerogatives solemnly promised. Since 
that time numerous revolts have taken place and finally actual 
war has broken out. 

On several occasions we have requested that the League 
of Nations send a committee of investigation into Syria t 
study events, determine responsibility, and discover the wishe 
of the inhabitants. Our proposal contained nothing which 
might be considered an accusation against anyone. It would 
have the effect of bringing into the country a generous spirit 
of pacification and quiet. We do not understand why France, 
if it has a good conscience, is opposed to a committee of in 
quiry of the kind that acted in Mesopotamia. Only such as 












706 The Nation [ Vol. 122, No 





are in the wrong fear the intervention of an impartial body SOLO ONO TNL OF TNF OST 


charged above all to establish the truth. We shall never cease \ 
to call upon the officials of the League of Nations to appoint 
such a committee. . 

We are convinced that the investigators will be able only 
to record the most ardent desire on the part of the population 
for independence and liberty. 

Seeking pretexts for the maintenance of a foreign military 
regime in Syria, it has been alleged that a free Syria would 
shortly be the prey of its neighbor to the north. We must 
protest against this view of things. If Syria had its inde- 
pendence it could organize its national army which would be 
a guaranty of resistance against any invaders. On the other 
hand, as long as France exercises sovereign authority in Syria 
the organization of a national army will be retarded. A few 
mercenaries in the service of a foreign state would not be able 
to stop the invader, if at a given moment France were obliged 
to withdraw her troops from Syrian soil, on account of trouble 
in another part of the globe. A CENTURY OF COLONIAL 

We protest further against the fact that France and Tur- HISTORY [1660-1760] $4.00 
key are negotiating in the course of which Syrian soil is ‘ rol IIL) THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 
dealt with as a medium of exchange just as if it constituted 4 [1761-1789] $4.00 
part of the territory of the republic. Syria must have the right | 7 _ FEDERALISTS AND REPUBLI- 
to be a party to all agreements which concern it. \ | CANS [1789-1815] $4.00 

In all the documents which we have had the honor to sub- : _V. THe West [1815-1843] $4.50 
mit to the League of Nations, whether manifestos to the As- VL Tus W.’R FOR SOUTHERN 
sembly or memorials to the Committee on Mandates, we be- INDEPENDENCE $4.75 
lieve that we have given proof of the capacity of our country 
to govern itself. We deny energetically the statements which 
continue the pretense that Syria cannot govern itself, state- Each volume sold separately 
ments which can have no other purpose than serving French 
political interests. Our spirit of tolerance and humanity has ae THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
always been manifest, even in tragic moments as during the / 60 Fifth Avenue New York City 
bombardment of Damascus, when Moslems protected their x 1a) 
Christian brothers despite the provocations of the French au- W5eDWD TD AAD che CANAD che CD WD CWC 
thorities. You will find proofs of this in the testimony of the 
representatives of the foreign states, as well as in the inter- HOW DO YOU KNOW? 
national press whose representatives were present. We add a 
copy of the report of the Consular Corps of Damascus.* READ 

We appeal to the League of Nations, whose essential task Experimental Human 


| 
is the safeguarding of peace and the preservation of the peo- Psychology | Experience 





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WUCOS WH? 


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ples from the scourge of war. We place our trust in the 
Council to carry through an intervention which shall put an By Mary COoLiins 
end to the shedding of blood and to the systematic destruction and JAMES DREVER 
of a country confided to its protection. . 

Again, it is the duty of the League of Nations not to grant A clear and simple ac- of distinction between 
entire freedom to a great Power which holds its mandate from count of experimental blind reactions within 
the League and which abuses it to follow private ends con- methods and _ results, nature, and action which 
trary to the very spirit of the mandate. with a much needed dis- is free, significant, and 

We have the firm conviction that we represent the real cussion of mental tests. directed. 
wishes of the Syrian population. It is vain to reproach us $3.25 $2.00 
for the ardor of our convictions and the fervor which, under E. P. DUTTON & CO., 681 Sth Ave., New York 
polite forms, appears in our manifestos. 

Is it not permitted within the League of Nations for pa- 
triots whose country is enslaved to protest in the name of inde- accept 
pendence and liberty? Could we act otherwise than we have q Gut 
done when we saw the unhappy population of Syria terrorized, othing 
maltreated, and violated? The war on the side of the French mn 
has exhibited all the characteristics of a colonial expedition, ~ Non Depressant 
and we have seen women and children massacred by airplanes non Habit Forming 
and bombs. We have seen our villages and our cities destroyed, In Convenient 

sae ; Aluminum Boxes 
our legitimate rights trampled under foot. We cannot help 
; . At every drug store 

protesting. In doing so we are the advocates of an entire 


. , . 3 T. 
people, the mouthpiece of a whole nation. Nevertheless, despite 10 Sa cw > 


the sentiments we harbor, we have never ceased to wait with e 
patience and to present respectfully our memorials to the ALAOV 
Committee on Mandates. Several times we have proposed to 


France advantageous agreements with the desire to establish for HEAD CHE 
we have suppressed our true sentiments Jak , 


By ViscouNT HALDANE 


Deals with the new line 





























peace. Several times 





°*Pu ed in the International Relations Section for June 2. GENERAL DRUG cS... 94 N. Moore Street, New York 


When writing to advertisers, please mention The Nation 









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AAS 


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th ew ee 


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ne 23, 1926] 


The Nation 





707 





proposed an alliance with our oppressor which would have 
.,our lot to his. Such proposals have always been rejected. 

We are now convinced that as long as France has the 
strolling hand in Syria it is impossible that violence shall 
“3 They promise now, to be sure, to change the entire 
rit which has governed us till today; but we have little con- 
uence in their promises. In spite of M. de Jouvenel, the mili- 
yy has not hesitated to commit the same acts that we ex- 
rienced under the regime of General Sarrail and his predeces- 
s, The European consuls resident at Damascus know well 
rat happened several days ago in the Maidan quarter—un- 
rd-of atrocities. The notables of the city, Christians and 
ws included, have protested to the military governor, General 
udré, against these renewed atrocities. 

Whatever improvement in detail France may bring to its 
licy, Syria will always suffer. For us it is a matter of the 
ste of Syria and we work with this in mind. For France it is 
erely a matter of economic, political, and financial advantage. 
there is, then, no possibility of reconciling the French man- 
iste and national sovereignty. The way in which France has 
indertaken its task and continues it makes it impossible for 
r to be to us merely an organ of aid and counsel... . 

For the moment, knowing the difficulties which confront 
i, we have formulated a clear and precise demand to the 
‘suncil of the League of Nations: the immediate dispatch of an 
npartial committee of inquiry into Syria. 

We address this request to you with great confidence. We 
mow that it contains nothing presumptuous and that it is in 
eordance with the procedure of the great body charged to 
xtter, little by little, international relations and to assure the 
‘berty of the peoples. 

Accept, Mr. President and Gentlemen, the assurance of our 


vry highest esteem. 


The Delegates of the Syrio-Palestinian Congress and 
the Parties of Syrian Independence. 
IHSAN EL-DJABRI 
EMIR CHEKIB ARSLAN 





Contributors to This Issue 


HENDRIK W. VAN LOON has written and illustrated several 
books, the most recent of which is “Tolerance.” 

Lewis S. GANNETT, one of the associate editors of The 
Nation, has recently returned to this country after 
spending six months in the Far East. 

RAYNA RAPHAELSON is on the editorial staff of the People’s 
Tribune in Peking. 

Mary AusTIN is the author of “The American Rhythm” 
and many other volumes. 

LANGSTON HUGHEs is a well-known Negro poet, the author 
of “Weary Blues.” 

tuTH S. ALEXANDER is a writer who lives in Cape Town. 
She has long been a contributor to The Nation. 

JOHN T. Moutoux is a Washington correspondent. He 
reported the Scopes trial for the United Press and 

previously served on the staff of the Knoxville (Tenn.) 
News. 

HENRY RAYMOND Mussky is professor of economics at 
Wellesley College. 

CLIFTON P. FADIMAN teaches at the Ethical Culture School 
in New York City. 

.. T. TROLAND is a research engineer at present connected 
with the production of motion pictures in natural colors. 
He is also assistant professor of psychology at Harvard 
University and the author of “The Present Status of 
Visual Science.” 

SIDNEY R. PackarpD is professor of history at Smith 
College. 


no 











Babbitt gets himself transported 


to the 


Sinclair Lewis’s 


‘BETTER 


“Tl wis will 


great 


New Novel 


A 


Boston Transcript 


“Tr gets down 


“Man rrar 


Inquirer. 


tering real 
, 


nis pr 


n det 


than that, as 


Arrowsmith,” 


than the best of the thrillers."—Chicago Tribune 
add ther triumph to his cap lar 
to the truth of the north woods.”——-N. ¥. World 
will take the pole in summer fict hiladelp) 
66 ee ; 3 er 
Lewis in this book brings all the detailed und 
m that he brought to Gopher Pra 1 Zer 
picts it masterfully.”"—N. } un 
ee 
O F ALVERNA (the heroine) higher praise can hardly be giv 
a creation, she is worthy to set | le Leora 
N. Y. Times, 
At all bookstores, $2.00 
B e nd C 383 Madison Ave. 
race and Company *."""", 


Harcourt, 


Open spaces 








SIMON AND SCHUSTER— PuBLISHERS 
7 WEST 57th STREET, NEW YORK CITY 


a by book.critus, book crea- 
tors, book-sellers, and book -buyers as the 
long-awaited humaniszation of philosophy 


[SECOND LARGE PRINTING } 


THE STORY OF 
PHILOSOPHY 


by WILL DURANT 


q The lives and opinions of the major 
philosophers: — SOCRATES + PLATO - 
ARISTOTLE + BACON «+ SPINOZA « KANT: 
VOLTAIRE + LOCKE « SCHOPENHAUER - 
SPENCER + NIETZSCHE « BERGSON - 
CROCE- RUSSELL -SANTAYANA-+JAMES-« 
DEWEY. 


Q Octavo size, 577 pages, 21 full page 
illustrations, price $5.00 at all book 
and department stores. 


@ “Just what I've been hunting for for 44 years” 
—Henvrix Wittem Van Loon 


“Thoroughly scholarly.thoroughly useful humans 
and readable.” —Proressorn Joun Deway 


“I have needed this book for many years It is 
indeed @ story, the story of the Soaae being 
as thinker, the profoundest story that our race 
can tell... Full of wonder and delight” 
—Joun Macy 


q “I had no idea philosophy could be so readable 
; Will Durant is eperkiing, He writes os 
brilliantly as Sainte Beuve does in his portraits. 
He sees philosophy as the expression of # per- 
sonality The book 1s spiced with anecdote, well 
integrated in the tale * 

—Harny Hansen The New York World 








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NTRAP 

















































[ Vol. 122, N 


1 
0. 5] 





L\CATION PLACES ADULT CAMPS AND REAL ESTATE 








“‘What is so rare as a day in June?”’ | ‘CAMP TAMIMENT 
It’s a rare treat to spend the glorious June Days at | iy NOW OPEN 


SCHILDKRAUT'’S | | FOREST PARK, PA. For Adults 


Nature’s Wonder Spot in the Blue Mountains of Pennsy}. 
PINE TERRACE PARK HOTEL on-the-Hudson vania twenty miles from Delaware Water Gap. ” 


HIGHLAND FALLS, N. Y. All outdoor Sports. Fourteen splendid tennis courts. De. 
lightful bathing. Excellent Food. Dancing and entertain. 
ment in glorious hall on shore of lake. Beginning July 5 





A! -ACE of charm and distinction. Rustic beauty and 
i scenic splendor to delight the eye and thrill the soul. . : 
You revel in the luxury of superior hotel accommodations and daily lecture by eminent speakers. ; 
the outdoor-campers’ paradise. Cheerful hospitality and con- | Moderate Rates Make Early Reservations 
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mous Vegetarian Dishes—choice and variety to please the wy ot Ss 3094 PI Ss is} 
most fastidious. N. phone tuy. —_— ‘hone + troudsburg 7 
Sports and social diversion make the days and evenings 
so pleasant and happy that you just love to lengthen your 
vacation. Phone or write Highland Falls, N. Y. 125 F2. 


In the City enjoy the Health Food in our Restaurants : : 
400 ie he ) 4 Wass 28th St. | Delaware Cliff Lodge 


37 West 32nd St 221 W est 36th St. : An adult camp for 50 guests in the Mountains 
171 E. Broadway Main Office, 6 W. 28th St. of Northern New Jersey 


A SuGGESTION: Order copy of Schildkraut’s edition of the neu All Land and Water Sports, Concerts, Dances, Discussions on Inter 
books. “Diet and Health” and “Vegetarian Cook Book,” written in esting Topics, under the Direction of Competent Athletic 
Yiddish by Dr. A. Mishulow. They explain intimately how to prepare and Social Directors 


delicious vegetarian meals and how to promote the health and hap- 
piness of your family at home. Bessie Blumberg, Lodge Director 
Write for our Illustrated Literature 
1549 Morris Ave., Jerome 9616 Bronx, N. Y. 


' 
4a 




















Have you ever slept in 

A Silo, a Chicken House, a Wood Shed, a Tobacco Barn, ‘ 
1 Corn Crib or in a Milky Way (formerly a Cow Stable)— New York 1s a poor place 
ill of which have been modernized. to spend your week ends. 


r > g ff he ortunity to do so. y 
yn pe yy of I know many delightfui spots in Northern Westchester: 


or an extended visit. 7th Season. Rates $37.50 a week Some for sale, others for rent. 
and $7 a day. Illustrated literature on request. Real country, glorious views and excellent train service. 


Address: E. G. Ohmer, New Milford, Connecticut. Write MARGARET LANE, 
2% hours from New York. Telephone New Milford 440. | Croton-on-Hudson, N. Y., or Telephone Croton 400. 























ADULT C AMPS_ ADULT CAMPS FOR RENT 








SS ;OR SUMMER RENTING—in beautiful Cone 
: oe CAMP GREATER UTOPIA necticut hill country, 1000 feet above sea leve 
a me : rooms finished and unfinished, furnished and u: 
3d Year. A vacation around for grown-ups furnished in barns and _ outbuildings. BALL, 
LACKAWAXEN. PENN. R. F. D. 2, Torrington, Conn. 


Spend June in the Atop the Blue Mountains al 


LAKE ! Adirondacks All facilities for all sports LEASANT, sunny room, at reasonable 
TAVERN : Diversified entertainment—Excellent Cuisine rental in Kew Gardens. 20 minutes by 


All facilities for out- 


door sports Spee -ati L. I. R. R. Call Virginia 9986 J. 


; ; Special offer. Take your vacation now and save 
{lar y «Mellie Fare, New York money. Railroad fare free to patrons who come 
to Lake George, out for a two weeks’ stay between June 25th and 
round trip $12.28 July 17th. Send for Booklet, 11 West 37th Street, FOR SALE 

‘ Wa. J. PERLMAN, Dr. WILL DuRANT 
Rate per week, $30 > 


Managing Director ° Associate iate Director " 
Deposit, $10 < ‘OR SALE. Hundred-year-old stone 2-tory 


farmhouse, good condition, 7 large rooms and 


Accommodations limited to 125 
. , 7 Cc attic; barn suitable for garage; orchard; 9 acres: 
Make your reservations NOW.Direct to Tavern INDIAN HEAD AMP 25 minutes’ walk om sae road, 9 miles from 


Address: ECHO LAKE TAVERN, Warren sburg, N.Y. New Milford, Connecticut railroad station; $5,000: 
or Phone Wisconsin 3754-2165 $1,500 cash. Box 503, care The Nation. 


LENA BARISH MOE NUDELL| ECHO LS > LAKE 
ADULTS iy LAND AND 


Vv ACATION PLACES SAFE BEACH , WATER SPORTS OMAN with three-year-old daughter woul 
: Ph ow AS like room and board (for the summer) in 8 























ADIRONDACKS 

















SUMMER BOARD WANTED 











. m " , quiet place at the seashore, preferably in Sea Gate 
THE LLOY D, Bellport, ae 2 or along the Jersey Coast. House must be modern 
On Great South Bay Open June 23d WATCH FOR THE INDIAN SIGN Write full particulars, rates, number of guests ac- 
Gust, Goatees, Chamitus. PRIDE OF THE ADIRONDACK MTS. commodated. distance’ from ‘beach, ete., to G. 6 
. > ae 1910 Andrews Ave., New York City. 
Regular guests and week-end parties. P. O. Box 114, Warrensburg, N. Y. paves — 
$$ Se City Address: R. HELFANT, 885 Brook AVENUE 
Bronx, N. Y. MISCELLANEOUS 
PERSONALS Tel. Melrose 1821. Send for Booklet 
wisrioianisiadipratmaiase and Reservation Card NOW ener en. = : 
ONLY 100 GUE STS AC COMMODATED FOLDER PROPOSING COLONIZATION 


PIANO AND SINGING pre . ; sai among undeveloped natural resources in British 
— To WATE Columbia, along lines of Industrial Democracy. 
igo TRUCTION by a distinguished European with POSITIONS WANTED sent free by The Cooperative Club, Prince George. 


wift of teaching. I am aiding this gentle oy - ' a : B. C., Canada. 
; ‘ , ei : JOMAN 29 2 years law office stenocrapher- 
man to establish himself in this field here. He is a W secretary; also experience writing articles and 
recognized composer, concert pianist, and has P ablic speaking: also worked in editorial office; —"d 
taught professionals. High persona! endorsement ints satisfying job. Box 501, care The Natio m. AMERICAN TELEPHONE AND TELEGRAPH COMPAN 


from many prominent Americans. Pupils of all ARN ARD | B. a enmeainn pesnenaitte, poeew: a AND ASSOCIATED COMPANIES 
grades taken. Full hour lessons, $5.00. Com- background, two years law, will travel as secre- § @ BELL SYSTEM 
munications should be addressed to PIANIST, care tary, companion, reader or governess. Thoroughly 
1. F. Shapiro, 1836 Belmont Ave., Bronx, N. Y. accomplished in| French, violin and stenography. mA One Policy, One System, Universal Service 
: : : # Box 502, care The Nation. 



































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