Week by Week
WEEK BY WEEK T T IS impossible to conceive of a worthier or more •*¦ statesmanlike gesture than Governor Smith's proposal to establish better living conditions for his poorer fellow-citizens by...
...I would give everything I have and am, to have his faith.' " This little reminiscence is of great value: it gives a fresh impression of Spencer which ought to have weight with those upon whose shoulders scientificallybegdt agnosticism sits so very lightly...
...They are growing a little restive at the container clapped on their legitimate curiosity by big rich boys who never grew up...
...and there I sometimes met him...
...1 HE steady promotion of plans to supply the city of Brooklyn with a free college all its own has given interest to a very modern aspect of higher education...
...Bailey Burritt, president of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, does not mince his words in giving the Governor's scheme the support of his experience...
...He can discuss almost every question of interest to me, especially when I, at the close of my life, have come to see that so many of the things which I have previously taken for granted as proved by science, have become uncertain or have been disproved.' He added—'I fear your brother will not last long, and to me it has been a revelation to find a man with absolute faith...
...FATHER HUDSON'S Ave Maria has printed a letter from Cardinal Gasquet which is of such great interest that we offer no apology for reprinting it here: "Herbert Spencer's last years were passed in Brighton...
...Richmond of Union College, who so far as we know, has never applauded a winning team, analyzed the subject of coaches with fine logic and authoritativeness...
...Rupert Hughes in the course of an address to the Sons of the Revolution at Washington, seems at first sight a peculiarly inane affair, and proves once more with what a sprat as bait the whale of publicity will permit himself to be hooked and gaffed...
...Once again there stirs a resolve to create a true and effective aristocracy, to carry on the tradition of order, and to pursue unswervingly the race's cultural destinies...
...Most of us, whether in the public eye or not, have a pretty firmly conceived idea of what we would most like to see in our neighbors, and our reaction to a request to name it is more valuable in the insight it affords upon our own characters than in any it projects upon theirs...
...Tenements, "dingy, dark, and illventilated," large families living in a single room that lodgers may supplant their slender income, sick and healthy sharing one bed, workmen, unable to get their proper sleep owing to noise and overcrowding, "oldlaw tenements" with neither heat nor baths, and rents, even for these human warrens, forced up over 100 percent in six years...
...Luther Burbank finds tolerance our most encouraging trait, Mr...
...His faith was of a singularly simple and sunny order...
...All the lessons of history teach us that nothing so smooths the path of conquest as a vague message of idealism which associates the name of the coming conqueror with the promise of better things and a freer life...
...and it is still essential to observe, much more carefully than is usually the case, what maxims are in force on the continent...
...There are thousands of acres in comparatively central New York that, so far as their possibilities for decent human residence are concerned, have been lying fallow for twenty and thirty years...
...Unfortunately, what she has to say will never reach the numerous places where the original document has been read and marveled at as just another example of "those damn foreigners...
...In a word, it has taken fifteen keen minds to detect the sovereign misfortune under which he labors of being a human being...
...There is conviction in their very monotony, 1HERE are many material difficulties in the way of better housing for the poor wage-earner...
...One imagines the great general and patriot, who was, in all practical affairs of daily life, singularly human and level-headed, watching all the pother from the Valhalla of his attainment with a rather detached smile...
...WEEK BY WEEK T T IS impossible to conceive of a worthier or more •*¦ statesmanlike gesture than Governor Smith's proposal to establish better living conditions for his poorer fellow-citizens by furthering the construction of working-class flats and apartments...
...The balance is therefore very encouraging...
...But we doubt if any of the college presidents noticed a little item which appeared in an eastern newspaper: "Mr.------------is home with his parents from ------------College, where he is a stellar half-back...
...David Starr Jordan finds its lack our most discouraging one...
...Gasquet, used frequently to have visits from him, and now and then I had a chat with him...
...American scholars are alive to the fact that the history of their country is a very vivid and very complex affair, with all manner of implications, social, economic, and political, which may be traced to their sources without patriotism being endangered in the process...
...Many factors are in the background, not the least effective being the conviction that certain forms of degeneracy must be checked if the western world is to live...
...My brother was then dying, and he and Spencer often had long talks on philosophy, for my brother, though a medical man, was deeply read in metaphysics and theology...
...We ought to take them into account because, noting their similarity to numerous other groups throughout Europe, we must recognize in them a force making toward a different kind of civic consciousness^ than we have known during the past generation...
...Those who reply, state that it is always a municipal advantage to provide training in adequate measure for teachers and other public servants...
...the receipts were so much...
...The second might well be dealt with by such a graduated system of taxes as would encourage the erection of working-class flats on many city blocks now covered with dilapidated buildings that are only awaiting some spectacular rise in land values to be demolished...
...Suggestions for improvement have been showered upon players, students and alumni, so that there is an interesting job ahead for an experienced cataloguer...
...Miss Agnes Repplier notes "good-will" as our most salient characteristic, whereas in the same department of conduct, Mr...
...1 F Mr...
...The whole report was so stupid and tactless that it will no doubt be widely credited...
...It is a pleasure to note that a German woman has written to correct the error, off-setting with her testimony as a recent traveler to Oberammergau the absurdities in the despatch...
...Is it practicable to use the public taxes in supporting an institution for advanced cultural training...
...Such a man is apt to be disturbed and indignant when the intellectual curiosity of others threatens to supply what is missing...
...Gossip about Queen Elizabeth" has long been a synonym in England for futility...
...Of the first, it is only necessary to say that state governments are already content to conduct many of their services on a basis that takes no account of profits, and might well become the bankers and subsidizers of a service that can at least promise moderate ones...
...A great deal of the blame for the present unfortunate and perilous crisis must rest upon the intransigeance and bad temper displayed by the British in the mercantile colony when trouble first broke out...
...Under such circumstances, to complain that support is reaching the "forces of disorder and violence" through "the complacency and, in some cases by the openly expressed sympathy, of American public opinion," as is charged in the current number of the London English Review, is a wilful misrepresentation of the American attitude in a dubious and complex situation which can only come from the consciousness of having a bad case to defend...
...A recent incident happens to be more than relatively illuminating...
...The Belgian Catholic Young People's association sponsored an enquiry among the students of Louvain concerning the question—"Who among the writers of the past twenty-five years do you consider your masters...
...Perhaps there ought to be a syndicate for supplying outlying journals with criticism and correction of news-items...
...William Beebe, the explorer, can detect, "undoubtedly," selfishness and jealousy...
...Luckily the signs of the times indicate that the heyday of his control is nearing an end...
...Gossip about George Washington is not likely ever to disturb the inherent reputation of the man, than whom, to quote John Richard Green, the English historian, "no nobler figure ever stood in the forefront of a nation's history...
...Judged by this standard, it is to be feared few would stand up...
...It would perhaps be going too far to say that urban civilizations are to be judged by the type of accommodation they furnish for the less fortunate among their inhabitants...
...But the whole matter is so closely linked with practical circumstances that one cannot help feeling there was a certain obligation upon Professor Otis, who is a public servant and who knew the motives governing the college faculty decision, to refrain at this time from giving encouragement to the recalcitrant...
...The mere list of his printed work is portentous in its length and variety...
...Abstractly, the custom requiring the college to turn out en masse for a lesson in squad geometry seems dictatorial and a little ridiculous...
...and the "niggardly taxpayer" is heard growling mightily at the prospect of 'varsity campuses and learned professors to be saddled upon him...
...1T is good news that a native newspaper, under Catholic auspices, has been started in China to counteract Soviet influences, and that it will be followed by two more, one edited by a Chinese college professor...
...With other contributors, lawlessness and "too many laws" divide the honors pretty evenly...
...To threaten to become a test case between two schools of history who might be defined as the halo-hangers and the much-rakers is not a destiny that his magnificent career in peace and war ever deserved...
...1 HAT labor conditions were infamously bad in many of the factories, appears from statements incorporated in government blue-books published in London...
...One day I was waiting in the lower room to see Spencer, who was above with my brother...
...That hostility on the part of the strikers and unions was directed markedly at British and Japanese nationals can hardly have been the result of a definite policy or of intrigue by competitors...
...The best way to keep history from repeating its disasters, is to see to it that we do not repeat its mistakes...
...and it should mean something to those of the Household who are too often wont to forget that faith is a gift, the absence of which in any man must, in charity, not be angrily resented but accepted with a sympathetic heart...
...As a writer on the stage of the eighteenth century, very few, if any, surpassed him in erudition, and his work never fell below a very high level of fine and graceful writing...
...JVlEANTIME it must surely be to everyone's interest to see that a strong and autonomous China emerges from the embroilment, even if certain economic advantages enjoyed by privileged nations have to be scrapped in the process...
...My brother, Dr...
...PRESIDENT LOWELL was probably the first to see that during the period immediately following the war, American representatives were wholly unaware of a general European movement toward the "right...
...The Layman's Day would be hard to surpass as a manual of practical devotion for the laity, and his Fifty Years of Catholic Life and Social Practice is a handbook no historian of the nineteenth century can afford to neglect...
...It points, moreover, to the success of the College of the City of New York, which ministers to an enormous throng with the aid of a really illustrious faculty...
...Such a thing might succeed were it not for the fact that many an editor would have to double the size of his issue...
...The plaidoyer looks upon such remarks as those directed by Carlyle at the academic business of his own Edinburgh as wholly unsuited to a more modern and progressive time...
...He was also, until fairly recent years, a busy barrister at the Dublin courts, and, as though all this were not enough, found time for sculpture of such a competent order that monuments from his hand to Boswell, Johnson, and Cardinal Manning, stand in public places...
...1 HE world is so thoroughly inoculated with fiction that it creeps out in the most unexpected places...
...He told us he could get a hundred clippings to match...
...When he came down, he said to me—'That man is the most wonderful man I have known...
...1 HE story of the conditions, insanitary, physically and spiritually, under which too many of the poor live in large cities, is a twice-told tale, but it does no harm to have it obtruded on our complacency once more...
...Those are naive indeed who believe that Russia abdicated its racial ambitions at the time it subverted its social order, and that a new Muscovite empire, harder, more coherent and more dangerous from its very outlawry by the rest of Europe, may not be one of the unpleasant surprises the future holds in store...
...and, finally, that culture is always an inestimable civic advantage...
...In Percy Fitzgerald a great Catholic gentleman passes from our midst...
...We really are most interested in seeing how long our alma maters are going to float the biggest bluff in academic history...
...Should Governor Smith quit his term as State Executive for private life (or, as very many of his fellow citizens hope, for still higher honors) bequeathing us even the beginnings of a system for equitable housing, he will leave a memorial more lasting than "marble or the gilded monuments of princes...
...and practically nobody spoke in favor of the great among the "liberals...
...Such do the reports of the Association show...
...Rupert Hughes, and repeated more reasonably by others who have taken part in the discussion, against the tendency of a certain class of mind to resent anything that disturbs its preconceived ideas of greatness...
...The financial burden of the schools is already very heavy...
...In every country there is a certain type of patriot whose devotion to the great figures in his nation's past seems to take the form of not wanting to know anything about them beyond the label that posterity has affixed...
...Fitzgerald, who was born in County Louth in 1834, and who was a classmate at Stonyhurst of the naturalist, Waterton, was a man of many activities, although in the words of the elder Ward he might have described his preferences as "dramatic and dogmatic...
...It is always some Napoleon who reaps the harvest of some Convention, and the promise to strike the shackles off a people is often the prelude to a command to lay down their arms...
...Nothing would be more likely to make a favorable impression upon the trustees...
...1 HE storm in a teacup that has been provoked by the suggestion that the father of his country shared some of the minor frailties of his day and generation, made by Mr...
...Another is the change in the character of downtown New York, which is slowly replacing the resident by the migratory element...
...1 HIS same college has been at grips with a problem...
...A certain number of anecdotes and poems have found lodgment in his mind during its receptive stage, without arousing any desire to know more...
...that the principle underlying city colleges is no different from that which is basic to state universities...
...There was a division of opinion among students and professors as to the advisability of compulsory military 312 THE COMMONWEAL January 27, 1926 training...
...Free speech is invested with some nobility and usefulness, but it is occasionally likely to become a nuisance—as Doctor Johnson pointed out in the case of the purely theoretical woman who always talked about the Arian heresy...
...It is in great part due to his ubiquitous presence upon boards of education that the partiality to which The Commonweal referred two weeks ago, in commenting upon the founding of Maryland, has been allowed to create a positive hiatus in the fabric of American history as taught in schools...
...But it is true that to the eye of the philosopher, imposing office buildings, zoned apartments in the wealthier sectors that lift their crests to the sky, and all the rest of the power and the glory and pomp and circumstance of great capitals, lose their impressiveness and become only so many more of the social sarcasms of the time when they are shouldered by mean and insanitary dwellings wherein men who build the palaces of commerce and serve their intricacies, are forced to live, move, and have their being...
...We wondered a little at the singular indifference of this hero to professors and credits until we showed the item to a friendly sports-writer...
...This is the most cheering piece of news that has come from the Far East for a good while...
...1 O say all this, however, is not to deny that there is some justice in the protest, voiced rather tactlessly and out of season, by Mr...
...His modest fortune of $150,000 is bequeathed "in toto" to religious purposes, and the touching proviso is added that some of the Masses for which money is provided shall be said "by priests in the poorer parts of France...
...As a result of the Times questionnaire, the average American stands convicted of being a courageous, cowardly, generous, selfish, alert, inert, idealistic and materialistic, tolerant and intolerant being—who grasps and misses opportunity, applies and misapplies his energies, and makes and breaks far too many laws...
...and no doubt the unanimity of the teaching body in favoring drill and doughboys was due to certain social and racial characteristics peculiar to the student body...
...This probably accounts for the stupid press despatch concerning the Oberammergau players, represented as unanimously disillusioned by their tour of America...
...Whatever the merits of the dispute between the foreign business interests and the labor element, it would be nothing less than a calamity were the steady infiltration of Bolshevism through political cliques and camorras to meet with no resistance from the angle of intelligent patriotism, and were the entire question left under the suspicion held by unenlightened native opinion of being a mere clash between exploiter and exploited...
...When the report was assembled, those in charge were not a little astounded...
...It is largely owing to his mental inertness that the record of America, 300 years after the settlement at 314 THE COMMONWEAL January 27, 1926 Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, is still being written piecemeal, and that no such authoritative history as, for instance, Taine's Origins of Contemporary France yet stands to the credit of American scholarship...
...and the "prexie" of Dartmouth, famous in football, brought down the house when he said that he could avoid the subject of Dartmouth athletics because they spoke for themselves...
...Though there is a lot of room between these two points of view, it has all been crammed to bursting with remarks straight from the inner office...
...One is the concentration of enterprise and capital on the more expensive type of building and the difficulty of securing it for those which do not offer the same ratio of profit...
...These withered and sterile symbols he insists shall be offered as a complete historical ration to more enquiring minds...
...These enquiries rarely produce any illumination of very high candlepower...
...1 HE questionnaire which the New York Times has had the enterprise to send out to fifteen representative men and women writers and publicists, upon what they consider the most promising and least redeeming trait in the American character, has had some mildly inJanuary 27, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL teresting results...
...In all human probability, it was so with the great Mahomedan invasion of the sixth and seventh centuries...
...One man's meat is another man's poison, and as might have been expected, the pluses and minuses in the table with which the Times sums up the replies to its circular letter, roughly cancel one another...
...The imaginative writer even supplied the idea of an address which Anton Lang had memorized for the benefit of President Coolidge and had been prevented from delivering by the silent sternness of the White House atmosphere...
...We are scanning the horizon for an honest president who will say—"Gentlemen, the amount we expended this year on football was so much...
...1 HE season's oratory on the subject of pigskins included numerous addresses by college presidents, in variegated colors and styles...
...Edgar Lee Masters's analysis detects freedom only in free verse, and an assault upon it in every other department of human life "at home and abroad...
...These young people apparently had made a wholesale surrender to certain ideas of disciplined reform, which their elders —and leaders—regard critically and often with illwill...
...We know that it was so with the wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries...
...Having wrenchecl his knee in the game with------------, he feels it would not be worth while going to school until next fall, when he can get back into the game...
...and most of us would sponsor the views of Professor William Bradley Otis, who came to blows with the National Security League for having affirmed that military training ought to be optional...
...W ITH the death of Percy Fitzgerald, the historian and critic, at the very advanced age of ninety-one, a link to the past, of particular interest to Catholics, is broken...
...This failure to be abreast of the dominant intellectual and political movement vitiated a great deal of our best effort...
...Van Loon, with racial caution, pauses only to notice a dislike of "bunk" on the part of thousands, balanced by a susceptibility to it on the part of millions...
...Many cannot control their itch to invent...
...The foreign element in China, according to despatches from Shanghai sent by that very alert observer, Thomas F. Millard, "realize that it is no longer possible to resist or to oppose the new Chinese nationalism...
...Red" Grange has been sighed over, pitied and denounced...
...A full majority of the votes had been cast for M. Charles Mauras, the intellectual spokesman of the French Royalists, while the next largest number was cast for the very conservative Paul Bourget...
...What was more unusual, nobody selected a Belgian writer...
...It seems to have been felt that a form of preparedness might convey the lesson that there are certain American things worth defending...
Vol. 3 • January 1926 • No. 12
