THE FORUM (continued 3)

Drawn to her irresistibly, he looked over her shoulder at the swaying book, eager to mark her special May devotion to Our Lady.—Would she be saying, “Hail, holy Queen, Mother of Grace,” or reiterating, “Morning Star, Pray for us; Health of the Weak, Pray for us; Comforter of the Afflicted——”? He bent his head to the black-marged page. She was tracing with tremulous finger, “Prayers for the Dead.”

A chill breath touched him and he drew back a little. For whom did her old eyes read the prayer? Eager to share her mourning, he gently laid hand on her bony shoulder, but she did not turn at his touch; only bent her head the lower over her book and let a little rising murmur escape her moving lips.

At her failure to respond, he shuddered with a sudden uncanny sense of remoteness. Then a terrible desolation seized him. “She’s not herself any more, that’s it; childish, and they never told me. I’m too late, then. She’ll never see me more. And I meant to come, always; God knows, I meant to come.”

Fearing to alarm the quiet figure with an outburst of the grief that choked him, he slipped out and sought the old bench under the hedge. Here the tranquillity of the little farm laid a soothing hand on him,—the sight of the speckledy hens pecking in the long grass; the white goats tethered at a safe distance from sheltered heaps of potatoes; a red cow, deep in the lush grass of the meadow, who swung her head threateningly at a decrepit setter that limped across her path. For a moment, looking at the old dog, he thought: “That’ll be Sojer; he’ll know me.” But at once, with newly swelling heart, he realized that many springs had

At the touch of his hand, the setter cowered away, shivering in every limb, his dark soft eyes full of anguished terror. When Christopher tried to speak reassuringly, the dog set up a sobbing whine, and, struggling to uncertain feet, hobbled for the house with his red-feathered tail between his legs.

On Christopher, as he stood there in the sunny morning, a chill dark descended, and he felt isolated beyond the farthest star. Foreboding shuddered through him, but he cried obstinately, “No, I’ll not accept it! It can’t have come to me yet.” But, in spite of his gallant refusal, he turned, like a child from the night, to his mother, as if that little, age-worn woman could soothe his terror as of old.

From the door, he saw her still seated on the hearth, which looked ominously black now and desolate. Her bent finger held the dread place in her book, and, with her right hand, she caressed the head of the old setter, who was crowding to her knees and whining woefully. For the first time, Christopher heard the broken quaver of her voice.

“Eh, Princie, what ails you, doggie?—Are you feeling it, too? There’s a power of terrible things about, the day. Waking up of me I mistrusted it sore, and now I’m certain sure, for three times the kettle’s after dancing on the hearth, and I’ve seen a tall shadow cast in the full sun.—’Tis our boy, Christy, I’m thinking. He’s gone. A young man yet, and I to be left sitting here alone. My grief! that I’ll never see the lad more.—Christy, Christy, the best son!—but there, every crow thinks her own bird the white one.—Whisht, Princie; be quiet, let you. I must be reading the prayers for my son.”

And standing there in the sunlit doorway, Christopher knew indeed that, by this time, it was, as she said, too late. He would never see her more, as men see one another. Yet no sudden terror, no dread of things unknown could wholly rob him of the consolation of her presence, and, even as he felt this dream-scene, too, relentlessly slip from him, he was able to savor the exquisite

FASHION AND FEMINISM

Nina Wilcox Putnam

Hitherto, dress reform has always proved a failure. And this is because dress reform has usually been only the effort of a few scattered individuals to force their personal taste upon the world. And while social consciousness is often awakened by the daring examples of such pioneers, all real social growth comes from a collective consciousness, which is born in a body of people, by reason of some economic or moral pressure which affects them all. When such a body begins to murmur of a reform, that reform is almost certain of accomplishment. And such a murmur, concerning dress, can be heard to-day among those women who are banded together by the fight they are making for freedom.

Dress seems, at first glance, to be one of the least important of the questions which modern women are taking up: but the smallest examination into its practical aspects reveals the fact that it affects all their other interests—not as a mere expression of vanity, but as a serious economic factor.

When we women first entered factories and workshops in numbers, we met unfair conditions on every side. This was particularly true of the garment trades, which were among the first to employ a great many women. And when we met this unfair treatment, women dreamed of legislating virtue into manufacturers. But it can’t be done! And now it is dawning upon the consciousness of a number of women that the way to reform clothing manufacturers, textile manufacturers, etc., the way to cut down insane speeding, overwork, underpay, is to change our insane conception of clothing—to strive to make it a normal, useful thing, instead of a hampering, exotic, extravagant thing, which works one group of women to death at a miserable wage, because a far smaller group of parasitic women wish to be arrayed like peacocks! Knowing this to be true, one naturally turns to the fundamental question, and asks—what is dress—what is fashion? And what, indeed, is dress? Is it simply a means of protection from cold? A concession to so-called modesty, a

Year after year, we are made to put the money we begrudge, that we can ill afford, money we would honestly rather put into other things; money, often, that we have not got, into that particular twist to skirt or coat or hat which will keep us as ridiculous-looking as our neighbor, while, at the same time, safe from his ridicule; in other words, to save ourselves the discomforts of being out of style. And yet, detesting fashion, as I think the majority of us do in our most secret hearts, we are often hypnotized by it to such an extent that free action is prevented.

If the number and character could be estimated of those people who have stayed away from entertainments for lack of a new gown, or dress suit, or some accessory thereof, almost every human being who has ever received an invitation would probably be included in the list. That people stay away from church for the same reason is traditional, and a favorite method of imprisonment has always been to take away formal clothing, and substitute loose garments. This trick has been successful in the instance of white slavery, for it is found that the girls are unwilling to go out into the street in the brilliant “parlor clothes” furnished to them.

So deeply rooted is this fear of being wrongly dressed, and so serious may its consequences become, that it is high time that an examination into the forces behind the accepted forms of fashions be made, and our slavish adherence, not only to fashion, but often to discomfort, be shown for what it is, a chimera which , and which gives a lot of more or less unscrupulous business men their opportunity.

Most people believe that fashion is a matter of our own free choice and approval; but this is not actually the case. For there is in existence to-day such a thorough understanding between the big combine of designers, department stores, wholesalers, manufacturers, textile-mill owners, etc., that our pocket-books are drained by them as systematically and coöperatively as though they belonged to a single corporation: and their profits actually and directly depend upon the extent to which they can play upon our hysterical fear of not being dressed “correctly.” Of course, the first principle of playing their game is to get control of fashion itself, to be able to swing the public taste by forcing constantly changing styles upon it: in other words, garments must not be permitted to continue in use until they wear out. Before a garment has come to a state of disuse, a radically new model must be presented which will make the old one look ridiculous by comparison. In the cheapest grades of manufactured garments, whose purchasers, it is safe to suppose, would keep a garment until it was worn out, by reason of poverty, the desired change is accomplished through the use of shoddy and inferior stuff.

The dress of the rich woman will be discarded at the slightest hint of a change in style, while its cheaper imitations, worn by the poor, are made of stuff deliberately calculated to last only for a season of three months! Needless to say, the fact is not advertised to the working-woman who spends her savings on a suit at a price varying from five to eighteen dollars!

But, to a certain extent, this scheme of constant changing has reacted against the manufacturers, especially those engaged in articles pertaining to dress, rather than the garment makers. These former are completely at the mercy of the most apparently insignificant change in fashion. As a natural result, there is a tremendous lot of bribery coming the way of the designer and the retailer. “Swing the fashion my way!” is the constant cry of those who make trimmings, such as buttons, braids, fringes, laces, etc., and it makes all the difference between success, and, sometimes, bankruptcy, to the manufacturer, whether or not

But while change of fashion leaves one or another trade high and dry in turn, lack of change is still more deadly, especially to the textile mills. For two years, 1911-12, women varied the making of their garments only very slightly. The textile mills lost thousands of dollars in consequence, and, at last, in the summer of 1912 began a campaign to alter conditions. Their methods were so flagrant that they would have been funny if they had not been so disgraceful. Everywhere they offered bribes to designers. “Draw full skirts,” they said; “draw pleated skirts, and draped gowns and draped waists; we want to sell our overstock!” The current fashion was taking only six or eight yards of material to a gown, and the obvious way of improving the matter was to establish a demand for gowns which would require fourteen to eighteen yards instead, or gowns which would require the more profitable full-width materials; above all, gowns which the old, straight styles could not be remodelled to imitate! The bribery was as well handled as political “favors,” and as to the result, behold the manner in which our women are swathed in mummy fashion to-day!

That people should wear any clothing which is not exactly suited to their need and honest desires seems too ridiculous to be true, and yet that is exactly what most people do, usually without thinking of the matter. How many men really like to wear a stiff collar, or a dress suit? Or how many like to wear dark, thick suits in summer instead of a kind of glorified pajama? And women! How long will they continue to wear corsets?

Not for an instant is it suggested that people should cease to make themselves attractive in appearance, or that uniformity of dress ought to be adopted. On the contrary, a greater individuality is to be desired, but, above all, comfort and convenience. One should be able to wear what one pleases without coercion of any kind or the impertinence of criticism from some one whose tastes happen to differ. To one man a collar may be a comfort; to another it is an abomination. And there should be no rule, written or unwritten, which compels either to sacrifice his comfort and tastes to the other.

The true feminist recognizes that one woman may like to swathe herself in draperies, and the next may prefer the plainest, freest form of garment; and that one should be made to feel uncomfortable and ill-at-ease because big financial interests have approved one rather than the other, is an outrage upon the right to mental and physical liberty!

GERMOPHOBIA

Helen S. Gray

Several years ago Dr. Charles B. Reed of Chicago obtained considerable notoriety by the invention of a cat-trap or gibbet to be baited with catnip and operated in back yards. The accounts in the newspapers related that he had found four dangerous kinds of germs on a cat’s whiskers and was therefore urging the extermination of cats as a menace to health; that Dr. William McClure, of Wesley Hospital, was examining microscopically hairs from cats’ fur to ascertain how many different kinds of germs there were on it; and that the secretary of the Chicago Board of Health had issued a statement that cats are “extremely dangerous to humanity.” From Topeka came the report that six different kinds of deadly germs had been found on a cat’s fur and that the Board of Health had in consequence issued a mandate that Topeka cats must be sheared or killed! But why stop with shearing them? There are germs on their skins. And now public penholders in banks and post-offices are under suspicion; an investigation is being made by the Kansas Board of Health, The St. Louis Republic states, and individual penholders may have to be supplied. From time to time a health board official or some other doctor gives out a statement for publication condemning handshaking as a dangerous and reprehensible practice.

The hair of horses, cows, and dogs is full of germs, which they disseminate. Germs are everywhere. Why should cats’ whiskers be an exception to the rule? If Thomas and Tabby could retaliate and examine doctors’ whiskers, doubtless numerous virulent varieties of germs would be found there. Doctors are a menace to public health, for they disseminate germs. Therefore, exterminate the doctors! But perhaps, being doctors, they don’t carry germs. Their persons are sacred. Germs are afraid of them and keep at a respectful distance.

All the leading works on bacteriology admit that a person may have germs of diphtheria, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, pneumonia, or any other disease within his body without having any of

Among the four kinds of germs found on a cat’s whiskers, Dr. Reed mentions a germ “which causes a variety of infectious diseases, including kidney disease.” As if any one ever got kidney disease because he unwittingly swallowed some germs of the kind found in diseased kidneys, if he had not abused those organs by gross eating or gross drinking! But it relieves the individual of all responsibility for his condition to put the blame on germs and the cat. There is no personal stigma attached to such a cause; for it is commonly supposed that anybody is liable to be attacked by germs, that, like rain that falleth upon both the just and the unjust, germs attack both healthy persons as well as those whose bodies are saturated with auto-toxemia.

An inspection of the family dietary usually reveals the cause of a man’s untimely demise. But his death is piously attributed to an inscrutable visitation of Providence. His wife drapes herself in crêpe, observes all the conventions of grief, and overworks her lachrymose glands for a season. His friends pass resolutions of condolence, lamenting that their dear brother has been “called to his eternal rest,” a flattering implication that he had so overworked himself during his brief span of life that he needed an eternity of rest in which to recuperate, and was entitled to it as a reward. Whereas the only thing overworked was his digestive organs in disposing of his wife’s cooking.

If deadly germs are found on cats’ whiskers, what of it? It is as valuable a contribution to science to know how many and what kind of germs are to be found on cats’ whiskers as to know how many devils can be balanced on the point of a needle. Verily, a fool and his time are soon parted.

That a cat has germs on her fur and whiskers does not prove that she is a menace to health; but doctors are often a menace to life and health. Much of the surgery performed is unnecessary and frequently results in death. Vaccination and the administering of serums and antitoxins are frequently followed by

In some respects doctors are like cats. They caterwaul, and occasionally they purr. When a woman patient calls at a doctor’s office and he does not know just what is the matter with her or what to do to cure her, if he belongs to a certain type in the profession, he holds her hand and purrs and is so sympathetic that she leaves his office in a transport, walks on air, and goes home convinced that no one understands her case as well as he does. Or else he tells her how beautiful she looked on the operating table. After such a subtle appeal to her vanity she pays without demur his bill of $300 or $400.

He takes great care not to offend his patients by telling them unpleasant truths, but instead resorts to delicate flattery. If a woman comes to his office suffering from some ailment brought on chiefly by eating devitalized foods, he purrs softly while he determines the latitude and longitude of her pain and gently inquires if she has had a shock recently. She thinks hard for a moment and recalls that she has had, that the news of the death of a child of an intimate friend was broken to her abruptly. Yes, that must have been what caused her condition.

Lacking the ability to direct patients headed for perdition by reason of wrong living how to live so that they can regain their health while continuing their work where they are, he sometimes recommends a change of climate or that they take a rest. Change of scene or occupation usually affords some slight temporary alleviation that the patients regard as a cure.

When patients have a cold or the grippe, instead of making plain to them what laws of health they have violated and that their illness is a direct result, the doctor, it not infrequently happens, tells them that it is “going around.” Colds and grippe are consequently in the popular mind of mysterious origin, and

It is because the medical profession teaches people to look outside of themselves for the causes of their maladies that we see such spectacles as Caruso, obliged to break professional engagements that would have yielded him $100,000, ascribing his case of grippe to external influences. “I like everything in New York except its colds and grippe,” he is quoted as saying in an interview. “I think I can boast that I have had the most expensive case of grippe on record. It has cost me $100,000. The public says I am a great singer. I should be a greater man if I were a scientist who could drive grippe out of the country. See if you can’t drive it out of New York before I come back.”

Note the boast. As if ill-health and operations were something to be proud of! Instead of telling our acquaintances of our ailments in the expectation of getting their sympathy, we ought to be ashamed to be sick. They may understand what internal conditions colds, grippe, and other ailments presuppose, and have a feeling of repulsion toward us, not of sympathy.

The germ theory of disease is in great vogue at present with the regular—or allopathic, as it is sometimes called—school of medicine. Some of the leading physicians of other schools, however, predict that the day is not far distant when the contagiousness and infectiousness of disease through germs, vaccination, the injection of serums as preventives or cures, and the resorting to the use of medicines by deluded people as a substitute for correcting their habits of living, will be generally regarded as superstitions. When that day comes, we shall cease this Pharisaical self-righteous attitude, this dread and suspicion of others as germ-laden, and face the truth that we build our own diseases.

Even some of the regulars do not hold orthodox views; for instance, Dr. Charles Creighton, an eminent English physician. He has made a special study of epidemics and was engaged to write an article for the Encyclopædia Britannica on vaccination. At that time he was a believer in it, but changed his views when he investigated the subject. What he wrote was omitted from the American editions. “As a medical man,” he once declared, “I assert that vaccination is an insult to common sense; that

If germs are not the cause of disease, then what is? To this Dr. J. H. Tilden, of Denver, one of the most distinguished of those who do not accept the germ theory of disease as true, makes answer as follows. I quote excerpts taken here and there from his writings in A Stuffed Club Magazine on the subject of the causes and cure of disease, the germ theory, contagion and infection, and immunity.

“Disease is brought about by obstructions and inhibitions of vital processes…. The basis is chronic auto-intoxication from food poisoning. It is brought about by abusing the body in many ways … by living wrongly in whatever way…. Bad habits of living enervate—weaken—the body, and in consequence elimination is impaired…. The inability of the organism to rid itself of waste products brings on auto-toxemia. This systemic derangement is ready at all times to join with exciting causes to create anything from a pimple to a brain abscess and from a cold to consumption. Without this derangement, injuries and such contingent influences as are named exciting causes would fail to create disease. This is the constitutional derangement that is necessary before we can have such local manifestations as tonsillitis, pneumonia, and appendicitis…. Every disease is looked upon as an individuality; which is no more the truth than that words are made up of letters independent of the alphabet. As truly as that every word must go back to the alphabet for its letter elements, so must every disease go back to auto-toxemia for its initial elements…. There can be no independent organic action in health or disease.”

If drugs, serums, etc., do not cure disease, what does? Correcting whatever habits caused it; for instance, eating too much, bolting food, neglect of bathing, ventilation, and exercise, harboring worry, jealousy, or other destructive emotions, and living on a haphazard dietary of carelessly and ignorantly cooked foods. “Nature cures when there is any curing done, but nature

“Germs are in all bodies in health and in disease…. I do not recognize them as a primary or real cause of disease any more than drafts or any such so-called causes; at most germs can be only exciting causes…. They are innocent until made noxious by their environment. They are victims and partakers of it. They act upon it and are reacted upon by it. As they must be amenable to environmental law, the same as everything else, they necessarily change when their environment changes. Because of a change in their habitat, the germs that are native change from a non-toxic state into one of toxicity…. They are not something extraneous to the human organism, but are the products of lowered vitality in the individual, of lost resistance…. Microbes are toxic when the fluids of their habitat have become toxic—when the resistance of the body has fallen below the point at which the fluids maintain their chemico-physiological equilibrium and decomposition sets in; it is at this stage that germs multiply rapidly; they absorb the poison that is generating, and it is not strange that their products are poisonous, for the changed bodily fluids on which they feed are toxic…. My theory is that the toxicity of germs is due to being saturated with poisonous gases. The germs of typhoid fever, for example, are not poisonous until the patient is sufficiently broken down to cause the generation of toxic gases, after which all the fluids and solids of the body take on a septic state, poisoned by the absorbed gas…. Bacteria are not the cause of disease; wrong living, which puts the system into such a condition that the bacteria can readily multiply, is the real cause; the bacteria are simply necessary results…. Germs are scavengers. When an environment becomes crowded with them, it means that there is a great accumulation of waste in a state of decay…. They are normal to a certain limit in our bodies. If they become more numerous, common sense and reason would say that they must be a necessary factor in the process of elimination, or, if not a necessary factor, lost resistance has permitted them to multiply

To those who accept the germ theory, it seems that there must be specific germs to account for the different types of disease. The leaders among those who reject it are able to explain satisfactorily without it why all sick people do not have the same disease. They give as the reasons for variation geographical location, the domestic and local environment, the season of the year, atmospheric conditions (e. g., hot, humid weather favoring putrefaction both in the digestive tract and in animal and vegetable matter outside it), defective anatomism, congenital or acquired, injuries, age, occupation, temperament, food, habits, and mode of living.

“Immunization means that normal alkalinity of the fluids of the body exists…. Health is the only immunity against disease. If there is any state that man can be put into that will cause him to be less liable to come under disease-producing influences than full health, then law and order is not supreme and the world must be the victim of caprice, haphazard, and chance.”

“Epidemics and endemics feed upon the auto-toxemic and stop where there are none…. The belief of the medical profession that contagion and infection pass from one human being to another—from a sick man to a healthy man—is an old superstition unworthy of this age. Disease will not go from person to person, unless they are in a physical condition that renders them susceptible and unless environmental states favor decomposition—those of the household and the general atmosphere where the proper amount of oxygen is deficient. So-called contagious and infectious diseases are self-limited. If it were not for this self-limitation, the world would be depopulated every time an epidemic of a severe character succeeds in getting a start. But the medical profession believes that vaccination and antitoxin do what nature has been doing since the world began, namely, set a limit to the spread of disease.”

“Tuberculosis is a seed disease. The seed must come from a previous case,” Dr. J. N. McCormack, official itinerant lecturer of the American Medical Association and “mouthpiece of 80,000

I know a druggist’s family in which all of the six children had adenoids. Adenoids are not regarded as contagious, so far as I have ever heard. So contagion cannot be made the scapegoat in this instance. The children had adenoids because the mode of living was the same for all. In like manner, when several members of a family contract tuberculosis, diphtheria, or measles, do they not get the disease because they all lived in the same manner and were exposed to like influences, instead of through contagion or infection with germs? Disease is sometimes spread, however, through the contagion of fear and suggestion.

The opponents of vaccination and serum therapy deny that the use of vaccines and serums has served to check the spread of disease. They hold that epidemics are less prevalent and less virulent now than formerly because of improved sanitary conditions, such as drainage of the soil, municipal disposal of garbage, street cleaning, water and sewer systems, the consequent increased facilities for bathing and household cleanliness, etc.

A false theory of cause not only leads to a false theory of cure, but diverts attention from the real issue. For example, in the Middle Ages and later, in England people used to empty garbage and other refuse in the yards and streets, and in consequence

So long as people are led to believe that vaccines and serums are a safeguard, they do not seek others, but continue to live in filthy surroundings and to have injurious habits of living. In the mad chase after imaginary protection, real immunity is overlooked and lost sight of.

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

Richard Butler Glaenzer

THE AMERICAN FARMER AS A COÖPERATOR

E. E. Miller

When one speaks or hears of coöperation among farmers, it seems the natural thing to think first of Denmark or Ireland. These and other European countries have made so much greater progress in the business organization of farmers and farm life than America has, that it is almost inevitable that they should be held up to us as examples of what we might but do not accomplish. Various reasons are advanced for this American backwardness in what is unquestionably one of the great economic movements of our time. The American farmer’s individualism and dislike of restraint is often given as the reason. Professor G. Harold Powell goes so far as to say that “the investment of the farmer must be threatened by existing social and economic conditions before he can overcome his individualism sufficiently and can develop a fraternal spirit strong enough to pull with his neighbors in coöperative team work.” There is no doubt much truth in this, but I am inclined to think that lack of knowledge as to how to coöperate has been almost as much a hindering factor as has lack of desire to coöperate. The attempts at coöperation among farmers have been sufficiently numerous, if they had been successful, to have made coöperative effort in rural communities a familiar form of activity to us all. As it is, instances of really successful coöperative ventures among farmers, while rather impressive as an aggregate, amount to very little indeed compared with the vast volume of yet unorganized business carried on by them.

Europe seems to have had wiser leaders in the coöperative work, as well as more docile followers. The American passion for bigness has largely ruled both leaders and followers. Where the Old World peoples were content to begin with small organizations for a definite purpose and let these organizations grow and develop into powerful institutions, the farmers of America have thought in terms of a continent, tried to organize nationwide societies to transact every kind of business—and failed

The great trouble with farmers’ coöperative organizations in this country has been that they were too loosely organized and attempted to do too much. It is just beginning to dawn on the mind of the average farmer that a coöperative business must be conducted on the same general lines as an individual business and that he cannot secure the benefits of coöperation without giving up some of the privileges of individual action. He is learning, too, not to despise the day of small things.

The lesson has been learned by some, however, in the long years of struggle for fair prices and fair treatment by the commercial world, and here and there all over the country are to be found groups of farmers who have found out the principles of business coöperation and put them into action to their own decided profit. These organizations are interesting not only for what they have done, but also for what they teach.

Take the Southern Produce Company, of Norfolk, Virginia, for example. This association was organized in 1870 and now has 400 members. It handles most of the truck grown in the vicinity of Norfolk, handling for outsiders—at a fixed percentage—as well as for its own members. It not only sells the truck the members grow, but buys their seeds, fertilizers and other supplies. It has bought and equipped an experimental farm near Norfolk, turning it over to the State to run, and lately has erected a six-story office building in the city, building and lot costing $135,000. All this has been done without putting

Equally notable successes have been attained by the Hood River apple growers and the citrus fruit growers of California. The organization of these growers has not only resulted in better prices to the growers, but in a standard quality of goods and less fluctuation of prices in the retail markets. Since California growers learned to market their oranges and lemons through organization, there has been brought about a uniformity of distribution which “has resulted in a lower retail price to the consumer and gives a larger proportion of the retail price to the producer.” These very successful organizations have one definite purpose—to sell the fruit their members grow. They are organized on strictly business principles. Each member’s crop virtually belongs to the association, and is picked, graded, packed, and sold as the association directs. Details of cultivation and spraying which may affect the quality of the fruit are also looked after by the association, and the grower has no right to sell his fruit except through the association. In the case of the California Fruit Growers’ Exchange this right to the privilege of handling the crop is claimed in the first place by the Local Exchange against the grower, next by the District Exchange against the Local Exchange, and finally by the General Exchange against the District Exchange. It is an up-to-date business organization these men have; the grower belongs to a Local Exchange, the Locals form District Exchanges, and these, in turn, the General Exchange. Each is independent in matters that concern it only, but all must submit to the general voice in matters which may be of concern to all.

Fruit and truck crops seem to be especially adapted to coöperative marketing; or possibly the uncertainty of profit in their production and the big share of the final price absorbed by the middlemen have forced fruit and truck growers to coöperate to a greater extent than farmers in most other lines. At any rate there are quite a few successful coöperative associations among these growers. In Texas such an association does a business of $1,500,000 annually. The Grand Junction Fruit Growers’ Association, of Colorado, is another notable

These stories might be duplicated many times; and it is not too much to say that the fruit growers and truckers are rapidly coming to realize the benefits of coöperative organization. I do not believe it any wild prophecy to say that within a dozen years the trucker seeking a location will inquire into the marketing organization conducted by his fellow truckers just as he now inquires into the locality’s shipping facilities. And some time all the local coöperative organizations marketing perishable truck and fruit will unite to conduct a great central marketing exchange. Then the present-day scarcities of certain fruits and vegetables at one town, while in another these same products are decaying and going to waste, will be avoided.

Coming back from the things that may be to the things that are, it is worth while to note that in 1911 2,120 out of a total of 6,284 creameries in the United States were conducted on coöperative lines, and that of 3,846 cheese factories, 349 were coöperative. In Minnesota 608 out of 838 creameries were coöperative. In Wisconsin 347 creameries out of 1,000 and 244 cheese factories out of 1,784.

In these as in other lines of business coöperative associations are largely localized. A successful coöperative creamery in a locality helps to organize other creameries near it on a coöperative basis, and so on. Similarly, the successful coöperative rural stores of the country are largely grouped in Minnesota and Wisconsin, having spread from one or two unusually successful ventures in small towns. The coöperative grain elevators of the country are mostly located in Iowa, the Dakotas, Minnesota and Illinois, although Nebraska and Kansas have

In short, the coöperative spirit is like the little leaven which spreads and spreads until it leavens the whole lump.

It is not only that a successful coöperative enterprise leads to the establishment of similar enterprises in nearby communities. More notable and striking still is the fact that a successful coöperative enterprise in a rural community seems often to put new life into the whole community and to give the farmers entirely new conceptions of their own capacities and the possibilities of their vocation.

Take, for example, the story of Svea, Minnesota, as told by a recent visitor to that town—a visitor, by the way, who went to Svea simply to see how the farmers there were working together and what profits they had from so doing. I quote:

“In Svea they have established and operated thus far without one single failure, a coöperative creamery, a coöperative telephone company, a coöperative grain elevator, a coöperative stock-shipping association, a coöperative store, a coöperative insurance company, a coöperative bank (now forming). Moreover, they also have as a result of what we may term coöperative effort, a thoroughly equipped high school with agricultural and domestic science teaching, a consolidated church with a resident pastor, a school library and a State teaching library, neighborhood social meetings three times a month under church influences. They have made their neighborhood a reading neighborhood. Almost every farmer takes two to four farm papers and other reading matter in proportion.

“In other words, the Svea farmers have become ‘business men’ as surely as commercial men in the towns, and are doubling their profits as a result, while they are at the same time developing a high degree of culture and that satisfying social life, without which mere money is valueless, while also maintaining moral and spiritual influences which town life tends to destroy.”

The first enterprise was the creamery which was started in 1896. It paid so well that the coöperative telephone line came four years later; and, having once learned how much it helped

Take, as another example of how the coöperative leaven works, Catawba County, North Carolina. The farmers and other business men of this county decided some five years ago that they needed a county fair. They got together and had it—a fair with liberal prizes but without entrance or admission fees. Everything was free to all who came, and the authorities saw to it that there was nothing to injure or deceive anyone who came. The fakers and cheap side shows which are the big end of some fairs were not allowed to stop in Hickory where the fair was held. The fair was a success, and has been a success since. Last year the townspeople did not feel inclined to contribute to it, but the farmers had learned how to work with each other in the meanwhile and they went ahead and had a fair just the same, out in an oak grove surrounding a rural high school. Fifty horses and mules on exhibition, 50 pure-bred cattle and other exhibits to match. Those who have attended Southern fairs will

At first thought it may seem strange that the intellectual and moral progress of a rural community should be so quickened by business coöperation among the farmers, but a little thought will show why this must almost necessarily be so. It is beyond question that the lack of organization, of unity of purpose and concert of action, is as great a hindrance to rural progress and development as is the traditional conservatism and inertia of the individual farmer. The farmer has simply not learned how to use all the multitudinous committees and boards and sundry

The man who would improve social and moral conditions in the country districts can make no more effective start than to organize the farmers into coöperative business associations. The American farmer has, it seems to me, demonstrated himself an efficient and whole-hearted coöperator, when once he learns the trick and gets the habit.

And he is learning rapidly. Before me, as I write, are reports from various Southern States of coöperative tobacco and cotton warehouses, coöperative and semi-coöperative stores, produce-selling exchanges, fertilizer and supply buying associations, cotton marketing associations, coöperative buying of machinery and livestock, and so on. There is even an account of a coöperative church—a whole community uniting to make the church a social centre and a help to all. The work of rural organization, either for business purposes or for intellectual development and social improvement, has just begun; but it is something that a beginning has been made, and I, for one, am not yet willing to admit that the American farmer is inferior to the farmers of any other country in either common sense or neighborly feeling. Unless he is so deficient, he will become as good a coöperator as any of them, for both his business interests and his sense of neighborliness demand a new organization of country life to fit the new conditions of our time.

RELIGION IN THE MODERN NOVEL

Louise Maunsell Field

Of all the many accusations brought against our much abused young twentieth century, there is none more popular than that of materialism. For all its deficiencies, whether artistic, social or ethical, this parrot-cry furnishes a convenient explanation; but unfortunately for those who welcome such catch-phrases as a ready means of avoiding any necessity for trying to exercise their disused and rusty thinking apparatus, convenient and accurate are seldom—perhaps never—synonymous. If this age of ours really is what it has so frequently been called by capable judges, the Age of the Social Conscience, that fact is in itself ample disproof of materialism; for if conscience in its every manifestation be not spiritual, what is? True, we have done away with the old scorn of the body and of that generality once known as “the world,” but this is simply the natural result of an increased knowledge which has compelled an altered point of view, making such contempt appear rather childish. And because the new social conscience has developed so largely outside the orthodox church, it is not therefore any the less religious. Indeed, it is in very great measure the immediate cause of that re-awakened interest in what may for clearness’ sake be defined as strictly religious ideas which is now showing itself in so many ways and places, and especially in the modern novel.

That this new religious interest seldom takes a dogmatic form is probably one reason why the average reader has been and still is so slow to recognize it—of course we are in no way concerned here with those latter-day successors to the Elsie books which provide psychic water-gruel for the senile-minded of all ages—yet in the stirrings of a more or less vague discomfort he has become aware of those electric currents of spiritual unrest which are penetrating down even to the most respectable of the quarter-educated well-to-do. There is something more than a little pathetic in the way these latter welcome such an attempt to manipulate words, to stretch the ancient formulas and render The Inside of The Cup—a novel whose popularity was due at least as much to its discussion of religious as to its treatment of social problems. For there is no class in the community whose size, the multiplicity of books and opportunities for learning taken into consideration, is so astonishingly great as is that of the half and quarter educated well-to-do.

The best of those modern novels in which the present-day religious interest reveals itself in its most significant aspect often treat it shyly, almost timidly. For with the crumbling of the ancient cosmogony and its dependent beliefs the old cock-sure attitude became obsolete. The writer no longer says, “This is the truth; no decent or sensible person will deny it”; but instead: “This is my opinion—what experience has given me; take it for what it is or may be worth.” Very frequently it is only the consciousness of things spiritual which is clearly shown; their nature, with a deeper reverence than that of yore, is left indeterminate. Here and there appears an author whose belief is as detailed as that of Will Levington Comfort: usually, however, it is rather a reaching out, a sense of things unseen, the mental attitude one of obedience to Abt Vogler’s advice: “Consider, and bow the head.”

In this as in so many other phases of our modern thought and experience H. G. Wells has succeeded in stating lucidly that of which the majority of people are but more or less dimly aware. It is indeed particularly interesting to note the growth of spiritual and religious interest in Mr. Wells. Decidedly materialistic in much of his earlier work, it is only when Marriage is reached that we find the hero, Trafford, deploring the fact that his wife and himself have won “no religion to give them”—i. e. their children—“no sense of a general purpose.” And, though foreshadowed in other stories, not until The Passionate Friends of last autumn does there come the description of a genuine religious experience, a description which is thoroughly characteristic of that sense of awe, of a greatness and power too vast to be expressed in faltering, merely human speech, which is often—it might be safe to say, always—the very crux of the religious

Detailed at greater or less length, it is this occasional awareness of communication with the Power outside and beyond “the world of sense” which is the shape in which religion is most likely to appear in the modern novel. Sometimes, as in John Ward, M. D., this awareness, usually touched upon lightly, almost furtively, is clearly and strongly emphasized, but very seldom, and then under a slightly different aspect. The destruction of the old formulas has resulted in an instinctive distrust of creeds, an instinctive shrinking from anything which bears even the least appearance of an attempt to make new ones. The situation portrayed in William Arkwright’s able, yet curiously uneven book, The Trend, wherein he shows his mystic, purely spiritual singer as escaping, horror-stricken, from an orthodox church service and denouncing it as an insult to God, is typical, though extreme. For the revolt against the materialism of Haeckel and his followers—not of Darwin and Huxley, who were not materialists and repudiated the name with the utmost vigor—has been accompanied by a revolt against the materialism in religion which rendered it vulnerable to the onslaughts of historical and scientific criticism. “We claim and we shall wrest from theology,” said John Tyndall, “the entire domain of cosmological theory.” The event has proved him a true prophet—and helped men to disentangle religion from theology.

The whole movement of the modern novel, indeed, has been toward a spiritualization which embodies within itself an essentially religious feeling; only this spiritualization not being of the monastic and ascetic kind which so long swayed the imaginations The Devil’s Garden is that wherein William Dale reviews the inner life which has been so turbulent, while the outer was so calm; The Debit Account has little to say of Jeffries’s career in the realm of finance but very much about his mental attitude toward himself and that “world without trifles” in which he lived; despite a charming heroine and an absorbing plot it is the influence of failure upon the character of Ralph Lingham which is the matter of supreme importance in When Love Flies out o’ the Window.

To call this confused mass of struggle and revolt and aspiration “religion” may seem to many persons unjust and perhaps even a trifle shocking; but that is because of the popular confounding of religions which are many with religion, which is one in essence, whether it be manifested under the Buddhistic form of quietism or the social service activities within and without the present-day church. Modern thought has made the old-time easy shifting of responsibility impossible, and the changed belief which this involves, enforcing the conviction that the world is to be saved and the Kingdom of God established on earth not by miraculous intervention but by the earnest labor in well-doing

In the modern novel as in the modern world religion has come to be more and more a matter of service and aspiration; less and less a matter of accordance with fixed rules and formulas. And upon this, as upon so many other aspects of life, the writer of to-day can express himself with a freedom which only a few years ago would have brought down torrents of wrath upon his head. What in our parents’ time would have been said of The Trend, for example, or even of A Man’s World?

Thus religion in the modern novel evinces itself principally in four distinct ways: in revolt against the worn-out, cramping traditions; in a broad humanitarianism which has increased sympathy and given a fresh and vivid and impelling meaning to the word duty; in a quickened spirituality that has removed punishment and reward from the hereafter and even from the world of matter to the living human soul; and in a reaching out, vaguely, gropingly, but never futilely, toward “the stillness,” “the Ultimate Force,” “the Unknown Power,” or whatever term men prefer to use in their desire to get away from the old anthropomorphic conceptions, and yet express their consciousness of the

GIOVANNITTI

Poet of the Wop

Kenneth Macgowan

There are probably a lot of technical errors in Giovannitti’s poems.[1] I didn’t notice. And perhaps that is one of the tests of great poetry,—not the faults that you can’t find because they’re not there, but the faults that will not be discovered. Something else absorbs you.

The significant thing is that here we have a new sort of poet with a new sort of song. And doubtless because of this song it will be many years before we see his greatness. For the song that he sings is not a pleasant song. It is the song of the people as he learned it in the Lawrence strike and hummed it over in the jails of Salem. He and his song are products of something that few Americans yet understand. We do not comprehend the labor problem of the unskilled, just as we do not comprehend the I. W. W. that has come out of it. A poet has arisen to explain.

Now the I. W. W. is no mere labor union; the A. F. of L. is enough. Giovannitti is no mere poet of labor; we have had plenty of such. He is not singing of labor alone. He is not prating of the dignity of work—you can’t find it in the situation the I. W. W. faces. He is no aristocrat of handiwork, like the A. F. of L. He sings the people behind the work—active or idle, skilled or not—“Plebs, Populace, People, Rabble, Mob, Proletariat.” He cries the awakening of that great mass of mankind that has always been typified as Labor because earning its bread in the sweat of its brow was its one common attribute—the primordial curse. He looks beyond work to emancipation:

Against him Giovannitti finds the world—the world even of his own kind, bound in the chains of the past. The police, the law, the Church, another age shackling this, he has met them all in Massachusetts, arrayed against even the first steps toward his industrial democracy. The business of his verse is to destroy. In The Cage—the prisoner’s pen in which he stood for murder—he deals with the mummy of authority. In The Walker he has painted the prison as no man, not even Wilde, has done. And the Church—even the Christ whom so many socialists are confessing that they may be numbered with the sheep—that also he denies. Christ, the heavy-laden carpenter, was still a man of peace. Giovannitti has his own sermon, “The Sermon on the Common”: “Blessed are the strong in freedom’s spirit; for theirs is the kingdom of the earth.”

Materialistic—like all these socialists? Giovannitti has his answer ready for you: “While happiness be not our goal, but simply the way to get there.”

Neither materialism nor happiness is likely to trouble the average American. What bothers him is “violence.” And there is no disguising the fact that violence is an essential part of the I. W. W. and its faith. Love is as great a part, of course; but hate must spring just as quickly from the cruelty of the world of the few as love from the brotherhood of the world of the many. Giovannitti and his friends want something and they want it badly. They are ready to take it peaceably: Giovannitti pictures the spirit of Helen Keller as the Christ of loving forgiveness—the only true Christ—offering peace to the grinder of the faces of the poor. But, if love and forgiveness fail, there is another savior waiting, and a violent savior:

Whatever its future, the I. W. W. has accomplished one tremendously big thing—a thing that sweeps away all twaddle over red flags and violence and sabotage. And that is the individual awakening of “illiterates” and “scum” to an original, personal conception of society and the realization of the dignity and the rights of their part in it. They have learned more than class-consciousness; they have learned consciousness of self. The I. W. W. is making the “wop” into a thinker. And that is what Giovannitti wrote in his Proem when he said of his own verses:

EMERSON

A Mystic Who Lives Again in His Journals[2]

Warren Barton Blake

Emerson has been “discovered” again—this time in the France that he tried hard and vainly to understand. It all began with the publication of a critical biography by Madame Dugard in 1907. I was in Paris then, and read it, and was most of all struck by the comically dressy effect, in translation, of the simple lines beginning:

In French, they correspond to an Emerson dressed in eighteenth century style, with wig and sword:

Yet the book is a good introduction to Emerson, and, since 1907, Madame Dugard and others have translated several volumes of essays for the French public. I wonder if they have won a reading—outside the university and professionally literary groups; I wonder if Frenchmen see far beyond what Robert G. Ingersoll called the “baked-bean side of his genius”? As the late Perpetual Secretary of the Immortals said, when the French Academy “crowned” the Dugard book:

“Emerson’s influence in America, like Ruskin’s in England, is a curious illustration of the need for an ideal which, at certain moments, the man of action, the Anglo-Saxon, feels. Such was the empire of contemplative monks over barbarian chiefs and of mystics over feudal armies. It was Emerson’s fortune to launch his ideas at a time when America was largely without them…. Emerson, knowing that the great danger of democracy is atrophy of the individual conscience, set himself

II

Eight years ago, when I read Mme. Dugard’s volume, I was youthful—with all of youth’s intolerance. It seemed no mere coincidence that Emerson’s father recorded his birth in his diary between a dry note on the “Election Sermon” and a report of a session of his literary club at Mr. Adams’s. Cheerful youth, not needing reassurance concerning the excellence of this world as an abiding place, is unlikely to set a high value on what contemporary reviewers, even in the American religious press, found to praise in Emerson’s essays: “Their lofty cheer, and spirit-stirring notes of courage and hope.” I certainly had no conception of Emerson’s influence upon my father’s generation—an influence so great that Carlyle called his friend a new era in our history; so great that when some clergymen complained that he was leading young men to hell, Father Taylor remarked: “It may be that Emerson is going to hell, but I am certain he will change the climate there, and emigration will set that way.” Then again, I had no sympathy with Emerson because it seemed to me, in spite of all the long words and imported transcendentalism—or, partly, on account of them—that he didn’t “get anywhere.” (I sometimes feel so still—but the charge is less damnatory. I do not wonder that Moncure Conway wrote of Emerson setting free in his heart—in his heart, notice—“a winged thought that sang a new song and soared—whither?”)

Emerson’s dependence upon intuitions and praises of them as the springs of action and organ of inspiration conferring wisdom upon man seemed the less respectable because I hadn’t read Bergson—who has made intuitions more than ever fashionable. Emerson lived in the spirit-world—a quite different place from any trodden by the student in Paris who is at home in the world of the Sorbonne and the Bibliothèque Nationale, and in the world of flesh-and-blood. To healthy youth, nothing is much more repugnant than the Wordsworthian ideal of wise passivity, while the notion of a Buddhistic Nirvana seems murderous of

Perhaps the scrappiness of Emerson is less distressing to the youthful mind, eternally and quite needlessly refreshed by the comedy of life on every side of it, than the Emersonian “trick of solitariness,” that he played as a Harvard undergraduate not less but perhaps rather more than as the Concord sage. When Madame Dugard’s book on Emerson was published in Paris, I sat down and wrote a critique—stored with Roussellian analogies, à la Irving Babbitt. I was full of Rousseau then, and I piled on sentences that I meant to be cruel and crushing—not of Professor Babbitt, or Jean-Jacques, or Madame Dugard, but of poor Emerson. I showed my article, unfinished, to a dear friend—wiser than I; and then tore it up. Here is a part of the letter I had from my friend commenting on the little essay:

“I find your point that Emerson, the preacher of individualism, was himself thin-blooded and barren of true personality, interesting: whether or not it is true. I never happened to find it put just so before, and should certainly never have thought of it. But I suppose, after all, a certain kind of individuality might be expressed by impersonality as well as by any other instrument. I’ve only glanced through the Dugard book, but the point of view seems to be the conventional one that Emerson expression, from an articulate, a stronger spirit? Isn’t optimism with many people a religious yearning rather than any truly temperamental attribute; a thing to be struggled for, and cherished, and reinforced from without? Whatever forces from within may have urged Emerson toward idealism and optimism, wasn’t he at least equally an idealist, and optimist, from conviction, or faith, or whatever else you call the semi-religious element? The Emersonian idealism is more, I am sure, than the natural overflow of a serenely poetic disposition—to which you try to reduce it. You must not forget that essay of his on Destiny—Destiny, man’s heroic, large-spirited friend, man’s bolster against Fate (discouraging and enervating personage!).

“I suppose that it is fair enough to complain that Emerson gives light without heat, but how many writers throw off much heat and little light—to say nothing of ‘darkness visible’…. Not many philosophers and poets and friends of ours yield us both forms of power. Perhaps the combination of the two—light and, well, at least warmth—is the most remarkable thing about Christ and his system.”

I feel less ashamed of my calfish distrust and dislike of Emerson now that I have read in President Eliot’s centenary essay on the great New Englander his confession that he too, “as a young man,” found the writings of Emerson “unattractive, and not seldom unintelligible, … speculative, and visionary.” It is only after one has suffered from living that one fully values Emerson—only as one is gradually educated himself, in experience’s school, that one appreciates his worth as a prophet of modern education; of the latter day social organization, its maladies and quacks and salves; of what Dr. Eliot calls “natural” rather than supernatural religion.

III

For this descendant of a line of Yankee ministers, there is no dividing line between the secular and the sacred. To Emerson, life is itself sacred; and the universe no less holy than the Ark of the Tabernacle—

“Christianity is wrongly conceived by all such as take it for a system of doctrines,” he wrote in his diary as a young man—thereby fortifying in some sort what Augustine Birrell was to say half a century later: “You cannot, however dogmatically inclined, construct a theology out of Emerson.” His stress was placed—as he was persuaded Christ’s was—upon moral truth; and at thirty he wrote: “I feel myself pledged, if health and opportunity be granted me, to demonstrate that all necessary truth is its own evidence.” Demonstrate? Emerson never did succeed in “demonstrating” very much. In Dr. Eliot’s words, here was no logician or reasoner, but “a poet who wrote chiefly in prose.” But his prose is certainly no less poetic than his poetry. The inspiration is in both cases moral; and, to paraphrase—

Yet Emerson was intolerant of cant about immortality. “I notice that as soon as writers broach this subject they begin to quote. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”[3]

Emerson demonstrates, after death, one meaning of immortality by living again in his “Journal”—the tenth volume of which has just come to my book-shelf. Some complain of prolixity, but to read this Journal is to find the measure of the man: and that is all the more cheering to the lazy reader in that Emerson is far from being immeasurable. He set down from day to day not only the record of events and personages who impressed him, but many stray thoughts and reflections. He swept into his Journal all the chips from his workshop, and stored there all the rough materials he meant to carve and fabricate and ornament. Workshop? The word is decidedly unpoetical, and perhaps inapt; for, as Madame Dugard points out, he made of his soul a lyre whose strings vibrated to all the winds of the spirit (his spirit, that is); and in his Journal he notes these passing vibrations in phrases where words like flow, flee, flux, fugitive, fugacious, current, stream, undulation, occur and recur. Undeniably he sometimes forced himself; he acknowledged that his talent, like the New England soil, is good only while he works it. “If I cease to task myself, I have no thoughts.” And adds: “This is a poor sterile Yankeeism. What I admire and love is the generous and spontaneous soil which flowers and fruits at all seasons.” Many of his memoranda he developed later in the essay form—a procedure suspected by his own contemporaries[4] —but I like the mere scraps. Very perfectly do they express the eagerly searching, earnestly austere man: reflecting all his sincerity and incompleteness just as the beautiful paragraphs they piled up as their sole monuments mirror the minds of Joubert in France and Amiel in Switzerland. There is no humbug here, though there are some few fallacies to reward those who read principally to prove, at the author’s expense, their own astuteness. Emerson fully realized—at fifty—what his deficiencies were; he called himself an intellectual chiffonier,

“One man sees the fact or object, and another sees the power of it; one the triangle, and the other the cone which is generated by the revolution of the triangle.”

He who has so often been reproached with aloofness looked at many common facts, and saw what we see there—and beyond. His first lesson of religion is that things seen are temporal, unseen things eternal; yet is the temporal much for the eternally-minded, who preserves the all-important sense of wonder. “Now that man was ready, the horse was brought,” he writes; and continues:

“The timeliness of this invention of the locomotive must be conceded. To us Americans it seems to have fallen as a political aid. We could not have held the vast North America together which now we engage to do. It was strange, too, that when it was time to build a road across to the Pacific, a railroad, a ship-road, a telegraph, and in short, a perfect communication in every manner for all nations,—’twas strange to see how it was secured. The good World-Soul understands us well.”

Nowise was Emerson a Ruskinian. To the railroad he says—“like the courageous Lord Mayor at his first hunting, when told the hare was coming: ‘Let it come in Heaven’s name, I am not afraid on’t.’” And this assurance is all the more welcome as one of the not too frequent flashes of his humor.

IV

While an author is often the worst-qualified critic of individual books or passages in his own work, he has almost always

“We are idealists whenever we prefer an idea to a sensation…. Character is more to us…. Religion makes us idealists.”

On another page, he writes:

“Malthus existed to say, Population outruns food: Owen existed to say, ‘Given the circumstance, the man’s given. I can educate a tiger’: Swedenborg, that inner and outer correspond: Fourier, that the destinies are proportioned to the attractions; Bentham, the greatest good of the greatest number. But what do you exist to say?”

It is no tragedy if this sower of good seed said no one thing, and only repeated many unequally wise counsels, and, by the wireless telegraph of sympathetic genius, spelled out the dots and dashes that, for the rest of us, unschooled in science, might have remained dots and dashes till the day of judgment. Emerson’s contemporaries greatly needed the man and his serene preaching—so undisturbed—while

To paraphrase Thureau-Dangan, Emerson’s was the empire of the contemplative monks over barbarian axe-men and sword-bearers. To-day, while the prosperous shudder at every murmur of social unrest, and the not-prosperous are drunk with heady wines; while society is, as in Emerson’s day, still “devoured by a secret melancholy,” disguised in a hundred forms of madness; while the nations still glare at one another from behind their breast-works, and the classes still war or hate (with ever deepening consciousness of class): while all these things are so, democracy’s “great dangers” may well remain the vulgarizing of the arts, contempt of contemplation, “the atrophy of the individual conscience.” Emerson somehow soothes this conscience without putting it to sleep. His courageous faith in Destiny, his cheering theory of compensations, his deathless hope, his healthy,

NOTE

The continuation of The World of H. G. Wells series, by Van Wyck Brooks, is postponed in consequence of the war.

CORRESPONDENCE

The War

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

Dear Sir,—The war and the new problems created by it are engrossing the attention of the entire British nation. Outwardly the life of London goes on pretty much as usual. Under the surface there is a tremendous lot of fermentation and premonition. It seems certain that the war will be accompanied or followed by a social readjustment on a scale hitherto undreamed of—and this readjustment will be entirely in a democratic and socialistic direction.

That a great financial crisis is due one can hardly doubt. So far the weaker elements in the commercial and industrial world have been carried along by artificial support, but that cannot go on indefinitely. Whether the moratorium be extended or not, the crash must come sooner or later. People are realizing this, and it has already caused a tremendous awakening. In the end it will mean additional surrenders on the part of the wealthy classes. The Kaiser has solved not only the Ulster and suffrage questions, as some one said the other day, but the whole question of social reorganization. What would have had to be taken under ordinary circumstances will now be given. This may seem an optimistic view of the whole thing, and may prove unwarranted at this point or that, but on the whole I think it will be found absolutely correct. A spirit of self-sacrifice is in the air, and I think the German war machine will prove possessed of just enough initial impetus to prevent that spirit from petering out without tangible manifestation. The more the Germans win to begin with, the longer the war becomes protracted, the more thoroughly will the spirit for which their ruling class stands be killed in the end.

Just how the financial precariousness of the European situation will affect America no one can hope to foretell with any certainty. It is possible that the distress of one continent will bring a “boom” to the other. But I doubt it. I believe that we shall have to suffer with the rest of the Western World, and if that proves so, it means that we shall have an outbreak of internal strife hardly less serious than the external strife on this side of the water. We are indeed—turn wherever we may—on the threshold of grave and portentous events, and may the Spirit of Life grant us all strength and patience and faith to live through them. There is a great darkness ahead of us—an ordeal of fire for the whole civilized portion of mankind—but beyond it awaits us the long, sunlit day of world-wide peace.

Edwin Björkman

London

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

Dear Sir,—I have just read your September editorial on War. How powerfully and terribly you write on the subject. I hope it may be read everywhere.

George Burman Foster

Chicago

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

Dear Sir,—I am an old man. I watch with pain, almost with incredulity, the spectacle that Europe presents to the world. I see England fighting “lest the lights of freedom go out throughout the world.” I see Germany fighting lest God and civilization be obliterated by barbarians. I see France fighting for her honor, her freedom, her existence. I see everywhere murder, and misunderstanding. So I write to you to thank you for the attitude you have taken: the big attitude. It will be remembered. It will have effects that, when you are old, as I am to-day, will bring you contentment. You have fought a better fight than any of the commanders in the field.

Senex

Cincinnati

“Piety”

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

Dear Sir,—Your correspondent “Twentieth Century” who writes under the above heading in the August Forum is surely in a bad temper. His letter is good evidence in favor of the theory that our beliefs are determined by our wishes. He objects strongly to the doctrines propounded in the tract he mentions, particularly to the use of the word “damned,” and, if he had the power, would stop the publication of such objectionable matter.

The only reason he gives for this is that he dislikes it very much and won’t have Christianity of that brand at any price.

Now why is he so hot about it? Why does he use such epithets as “stupid,” “disgusting,” “criminal lunatics,” etc.? If these doctrines are false, no one will be hurt by them—it may even be that some will be restrained from evil deeds by the teaching. On the other hand, if they are true, and no one can demonstrate their untruth, he and all those who despise the warning may find themselves in sorry case. Anyway Christians will try to get on without him and may be encouraged to know that the faith is still able to arouse such violent opposition.

J. P. Dunlop

Berkeley, California

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

Dear Sir,—Thank you for sending me the proof of Mr. Dunlop’s letter. Mr. Dunlop has evidently rigid convictions which no discussion could modify. He may justly retort that I myself have convictions which I am unwilling to modify. But that would not be true. I am willing to modify any and every conviction that I have, if new evidence and new advances in knowledge make it clear that I have been partly or wholly at fault. But Mr. Dunlop clings fast to what he considers the faith of his fathers, though the thinking world has long discarded the idea of a God of Love who is supposed to punish his children for their faults in this life by consigning them to the flames of hell, in which they will suffer eternally the agonizing torments of fire. It is impossible to reason with the well-meaning and sincere, but utterly ignorant, people who are capable of believing such absurdities.

I am glad that “Christians will try to get on without me.” I shall certainly succeed in getting on without the so-called Christianity which teaches that morality must depend essentially upon the fear of hell, not upon the love of God; and I will cheerfully take the risk of being punished for refusing to believe that God is in reality a fiend.

Mr. Dunlop assumes that I was in a bad temper when I wrote my previous letter. A certain sæva indignatio against lies and hypocrisy, wilful or unwilful, is entirely justified. Was Christ himself icily cold when he swept the money-changers and brawlers from the Temple? Did he speak in measured academic platitudes?

Mr. Dunlop does not realize that he believes what he believes merely because he has never used his brain, never investigated or tried to distinguish between the essential truth and the inevitable accretions of falsehood and folly. If he had been born in pagan times, he would probably have remained a pagan. In one age or country he would have sacrificed to Moloch: in another he would have worshipped Bacchus. But, of course, he cannot understand this.

I used the epithets “stupid,” “disgusting,” etc., because they seemed to me the most appropriate in connection with such a travesty of reason and religion as the tract referred to presented. And Mr. Dunlop is quite wrong when he says that “if these doctrines are false, no one will be hurt by them.” Generations of men, women and children have been hurt by them; hampered and cramped and narrowed by them; prevented from living their full, free lives, and driven from the comprehension and sustaining power of Christ’s Christianity by such grotesque inventions of little minds, striving to measure their God by their own paltry standards.

As I said before, it is time that the narrow-minded reactionaries should be taught that they are not the pillars of the true Church and the pillars of

Twentieth Century

New York

American Industrial Independence

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

Dear Sir,—The peril of dependence on foreign nations for production and over-sea transportation is demonstrated in the European war of 1914 as never before.

The loss of human life in this war will be appalling, the resulting sacrifice of the fruits of the labor of generations inestimable, and the loss of capital will be enormous.

We must use our best judgment to prevent these disastrous conditions from weakening our industrial capacity. This is the time when we should think and think hard about conserving and developing industrial independence.

We have issued the following announcement:

“To American Producers: Please report to us any article or articles (raw material or finished product) of use in agriculture, mining or manufacture in the United States, for the supply of which we are dependent upon any foreign country.”

We shall take up every article thus reported, investigate the possibility of successful production at home, and urge upon Americans the desirability of such changes in our existing tariff system as shall create new industries in every line where we are now partly or wholly dependent on foreign countries.

A. D. Juilliard Chairman, Executive Committee, The American Protective Tariff League.

New York

Eugenics in Wisconsin

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

Dear Sir,—As supplementary to your editorial on Eugenic Tests, which appeared in the August issue of The Forum, I am submitting herewith my editorial on the general subject, which appeared in The Milwaukee recently. As, of course, you know, Wisconsin, at the last session of its legislature, placed on its statute books a law requiring certain examinations and tests to be made before the intending groom could secure a license to marry. The law provoked widespread discussion and far from general approval. It was thought, in some quarters, to be too drastic to be capable of full and complete compliance. However, it is still on our statute books, and while some of its most drastic provisions, like the laboratory tests, are not being insisted upon, the belief is general that the law is doing some good along new and, heretofore, untried lines. It gives notice that something beside matrimonial misery must be a condition precedent to the marriage relation.

However, your editorial suggestion that popular education rather than drastic legal enactments should be employed to secure a reasonable standard of health preceding marriage, is undoubtedly sound and should lead to what ought be the much-desired condition. Legislation, here as elsewhere, is not the panacea of all the matrimonial ills of which we know. But silence is an inexcusable crime in the premises.

Duane Mowry

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

The Fourth Dimension

[TO THE EDITOR OF THE FORUM]

Dear Sir,—With due deference to your valued journal, the article of Claude Bragdon, Learning to Think in Terms of Spaces, in your August number, is essentially illogical. The writer thus introduces his subject: “A point, moving in an unchanging direction, traces out a line; a line, moving in a direction at right angles to its length, traces out a plane; a plane, moving in a direction at right angles to its two dimensions, traces out a solid. Should a solid move in a direction at right angles to its every dimension, it would trace out, in four dimensional space, a hypersolid.”

Now this may pass current in blackboard geometry, but does not hold good in the abstract. The physical point is indeed extended to represent the line, and the physical line, to represent the plane, etc. But these concrete objects are not to be conceived as true geometrical figures, which are not movable, for motion presupposes sensuous experience. Only matter is movable. The true geometrical line is not the extension of the point, nor is the cube formed by the extension of the plane. When a point “moves” it is no longer a point, and when a cube “moves” it becomes annihilated.

“Student,” in a letter upon the same subject, speaks of a division of a cube into smaller cubes. But when a part of a geometrical figure is conceived the first figure is of necessity annihilated.

Mr. Bragdon, after expatiating upon the vastness of the firmament, The Methods of Mathematics, in which is cited as an instance of the undue importance of logical demonstration the controversy on the theory of parallels. The eleventh axiom of Euclid “asserts that two parallel lines inclining toward each other if produced far enough must meet,—a truth which is supposed to be too complicated to pass as self-evident and thus requires a demonstration…. It is quite arbitrary where we draw the line between what is directly certain and what has first to be demonstrated.” (The italics are mine.)

I believe with Schopenhauer, who quotes Descartes and Sir W. Hamilton in support of his contention, that the science of mathematics has no cultural value. Far from affording “a new way of looking at the world,” as Mr. Bragdon tries to convince us, “its only direct use is that it can accustom restless and unsteady minds to fix their attention.” That such mental concentration may be woefully misdirected is instanced in the cases of Swedenborg and Madame Blavatsky, reference to whom by Mr. Bragdon is alone sufficient to cause a sniff of suspicion.

Indeed your author himself, while evidently well versed in bookish mathematics, has been unable to free his mind of its limitations. Upon a basis of phrases devoid of significance he builds his extravagantly mystical speculation, which dissolves in the light of reason, “into air, thin air.”

Philip J. Dorety, M. D.

Trenton, N. J.

EDITORIAL NOTES

Soldiers of All Nations

It is difficult to realize that while this note is being written, men are dying, every moment: not in the fulness of time, for the glory of God and their own rest; but unduly and by wanton violence, in the prime of manhood, with the whole making and purpose of their lives incomplete and unrenewable. They lie in strange places, and must sleep, not uncompanioned, but uncoffined and without memorial: mere broken bits of life-stuff, shattered from the resemblance of humanity by machines that must be fed with the food that women travail for, and pray for, and, losing, break their hearts. Well, may they sleep soundly, these soldiers of all nations who will march no more to music, nor answer the reveille at dawn! God be gracious to them, gallant men all, if graciousness be needed where they have gone now!

Paying the Cost

If the death of warriors were war’s only penalty, men perhaps might be forgiven for their battles, since heroes are made known by them. But the world has gone to school again, to learn the lesson that is enforced with cannons; and it knows the whole cost of war, and is paying it, and will continue to pay it for many a year. In this country, we have not contributed much, so far: only a hundred millions officially, and who shall say how many millions unofficially, in disorganized industry? But they have paid a large sum in Belgium, where the prices are plainly marked; they have paid in France (it is an ill winter that follows unreaped and rotting harvests); they have paid in Austria; and the bill for the other countries is being added up.

Christianity and Civilization

But it is not true that Christianity has broken down, or that civilization has broken down, as some have said in the first flush of their indignation and sorrow. Civilization and Christianity

Rebuilding

We are living, and some of us are dying, in strange, wonderful, terrible days. There is no room for pessimism or for bravado. Barbarism is showing us what deeds it can produce. We must answer with deeds.

Let no man who has held high rank in the Government of any country think now that he has done well or deserves acclamations. So far as his vision led him, he may have tried to do his duty, with foresight, devotion, faithfulness. Yet he has failed. The Government which cannot save its country from war has failed, whatever its other achievements. The new ideas, the new hopes, have not been fully comprehended. And so suspicion and enmity have been allowed to grow steadily, and the thought of war has been constantly in men’s minds, as the inevitable end to which the world was drifting.

The thought of war should have been as impossible as the thought of murder. The press of all nations, instead of pandering to misunderstanding and animosities, should have educated the people, day by day and year by year, until the curse of nationalism was lifted from the world.

For nationalism has been a curse, and will remain a curse, so long as devotion to one country can involve enmity to any other. We are brothers in one boat, as we pass from the unknown to the unknown. Let us learn to understand each other.

Benedict XV

The election of Cardinal della Chiesa was certainly unexpected, and it may be hoped that this element of surprise will XV could remove many of the mountains that stand in the way of the direct line for the Twentieth Century, Limited. Mountains may be picturesque: but, in the wrong place, they are merely a nuisance.

Uncensored

The press has not had an easy task in attempting to gratify the natural desire of the public for dramatic details of the war operations. But even after making the fullest allowances for all difficulties, whether due to the censorship, to broken communications, or to the indiscretions of partisans, one can scarcely congratulate the newspaper world as a whole upon its achievements. In New York, for instance, there have been two or three papers which have maintained reasonable standards; but most of the papers have published and republished so-called news of a kind that should never have found public record. Why should any journal waste time in announcing, in large type, that “the Servians

“Civilized Warfare”

Some one, somewhere, appears to be laboring under a rather serious mistake, or we should not have been exposed so frequently during the last few weeks to the phrase “civilized warfare.” There is no such thing, of course, as civilized warfare. All war is necessarily barbaric in its methods, and ludicrous in its assumption of semi-decency. When nations go out, in the name of God, to mangle and destroy their fellow-creatures, they are reverting to the primitive profession of murder. The glory of war is the glory of murder, however it may be embellished by infantile brains.

We have heard much of atrocities and “uncivilized” outrages. Probably most of the stories are utterly false: but even if they were true, they would only be in full accord with the whole purpose, methods, and disgrace of war.

Let us realize, very clearly, that war is necessarily and always murderous and barbaric, and let us abandon the pretence that we are shocked at the annihilation of towns, the rape of women, the slaughter of children, the desolation of once-prosperous communities. These are the trimmings of war. If we order the feast, let us pay for it; but let us, in the name of all decency, give up the pretence that we are either civilized or Christianized.

Saintless Petrograd

The official change from St. Petersburg to Petrograd removes the intrusive saint from the Russian capital. The city

Now that the Ice has been broken, such cities as Florence, for example, may begin to assert their right to be known, even in the Anglo-Saxon world, by their real and native names.

Thumbs Down

In his clever, whimsical and symbolistic play, Androcles and the Lion, Mr. George Bernard Shaw has fallen—or a zealous proof-reader has made it appear that he has fallen—into the usual error of “thumbs down,” as the death signal.

It is strange that this mistake should be so widely prevalent, and should even be repeated by the Encyclopædia Britannica. But the error, like ’round for round and laid for lay, will no doubt pass steadily through the years.

However, anyone who has not yet read Mr. Shaw’s little play should do so at once, paying special attention to Ferrovius.

The Earl of Whisky

The oddities of childhood are rarely understood completely, even in these days of ingenious educational devices. The child lives and moves and has his being in his own world. He may emerge at moments, he may seem to understand or be understood by the great confederation of blundering adults: but he must go back as soon as possible to the realm of his real allegiance, where fact and fancy, dreams, doubts and discoveries are so cunningly intermingled.

Why do we forget our own childhood, and turn deaf ears and unseeing eyes to the sounds and sights that once we should have comprehended so easily? The world of flame, the glory of color, the music in the winds and the darkness, the actuality of romance, the strange limits and restrictions of knowledge! Can you remember when the earth stretched twelve miles out, beyond doubt, and perhaps a little further? Or the immense

Yet we have long had Sir Loin, and scarcely remember the cause of that famous knighting; and now we have our copper kings, beef barons, pork princes, and what not. Perhaps we are not so remote from the whimsicalities of childhood as we have imagined, after all.

Jaded Appetites

A recent advertisement of a well-known New York restaurant announced: “Whether it is in luncheon, dinner or supper, you will find in our menu of delicious cold specialties, ready for your selection at our buffet in the main dining room, creations to tempt the most jaded of appetites.”

It is comforting to know that the grossly overfed man or woman need not starve. When the appetite fails through constant indulgence, it can be tempted to new excesses by these “delicious cold specialties,” and so enough nourishment may be secured to preserve life.

It is indeed a pitiable spectacle to see the forlorn victim of piggishness sadly regarding a menu that can no longer entice him to abuse his stomach. Let him now take heart and visit the restaurant that has learnt how to “tempt the most jaded of appetites.”

It is a noble work that this restaurant is doing; one well worthy of our civilization.

But who will tempt the unjaded appetites of the slum-dwellers?