Week by Week

...oTEADILY crumbling, the towers of Cologne's great cathedral must be repaired on an extensive scale if the structure is to be saved...

...b ROM the point of view of labor, the Conference's Bulletin says: "The Ward interests are an example of the anti-union attitude of many large American employers...

...1 HAT the automobile is doing its bit towards the extermination of the human race every unfortunate pedestrian knows from many a hair's-breadth escape...

...The comment in the Cathcart-Craven case by responsible organs of the press is so overwhelming and unanimous that little remains to be added to it...

...Lapp, these words have genuine authoritative value...

...Kelly puts it) "is unmitigated self-conceit...

...Whether it be the pathos inherent in the spectacle of a stricken leader of a dispersed people, or some element in his life that impels the recognition of sanctity, it is a fact that seldom has language of such authentic loftiness and eloquence saluted the passing of a great figure...

...The window commemorates him as uthe glorious defender of Catholic truth in Germany...

...Abbe Kieffer applied his science in most practical fashion by specializing on parasitic forms of insect life, and for his work in this field was elected a member of the Entomological Societies of France and Belgium...

...A. R. Orage, as set forth in the series of articles which The Commonweal is publishing, ought to prove a valuable stimulus to those who are trying to formulate an equitable economic program...

...It can make economies and undersell local recalcitrant competitors until they are forced to close their doors...

...Where other agencies do not exist, or where Catholic agencies do the work better, the public will naturally use the facilities afforded by Catholic welfare work...

...John A. Lapp, of the social action department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, in commenting upon a field survey of the diocese of Newark...

...But the dead also numbered three rabbits and two skunks...

...two striped spermophiles (a species of ground squirrel) one sparrow-hawk...

...Thus, in the case of hospitals, it is well to know that a large percentage of patients, often more than half, are not Catholics...

...If we must have "soul" with our staff of life, it should be remembered that three times a day it is legitimate to associate with a not too ethereal crust...

...The keeping of these live specimens in aquaria has been a difficult thing owing to the unfortunate habit that the creatures have of dying off under captivity...

...It is a truism that the man who is most merciless to himself is often markedly indulgent towards the failures of others...

...Sanctity, to such an elect soul, is something positive, quite apart from its diffusion among his fellows—something to be cultivated sedulously and personally—prayed for and striven for, as though the carelessness and slackness of the sinner imposed as their first duty the obligation on the saint of working overtime...

...An anthology of the sermons preached in American churches upon the dead Cardinal would make a volume of real literary merit...

...THE MONTH, therefore, went on to declare: "No Catholic economist has as yet discovered the cause of the production anomaly...

...The incorporation of his prejudices into the body of laws is his ultimate triumph...

...At all events, it is socially very unsafe...

...The Ward baking interests have already done this, and the new company is still more threatening...

...But it was left for a correspondent of our contemporary, Science, to make a serious study of what it is doing to animals...

...In the first 100 miles, over roads little used by motorists, no dead birds were counted...

...WEEK BY WEEK T NDUSTRIAL expansion reaped another crop of •*¦ headlines when the announcement of a gigantic food merger in which the Ward interests were to take a leading role brought first, a batch of charitable promises from Mr...

...1 O your Pharisee, on the contrary, it is the mass result that counts...

...Meanwhile, the social action department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference has enumerated a few of the possible economic results of a merger so vast in scope as the one proposed...

...But the deeper reason was the strength with which he drew from the vital springs of civilization, as that had saved his fathers and could halt again, in the modern time, the battalions of barbarism...

...In his journeyings to and fro, the observer had so frequently seen them lying dead along the roadside that this special trip was made to investigate the cause of the phenomenon...

...Practical conditions, veering rapidly, subject theoretical maxims to a severe test...

...By a rather singular coincidence, the centenary of a man who is honored in one of the cathedral windows—Joseph von Gorres— is the occasion for observing how much more widely his significance is realized than it ever was previously...

...Ward were really interested in the betterment of bread...

...Kelly took occasion to refer in no measured terms to the aridity and erastianism that has overtaken so many branches of religious confession, and to the repellant aspect of the letter when the spirit has been suffered to leak away...

...and the title was earned during years of stern conflict for religious liberty and tradition...

...In all truth we cannot be indifferent to any program which adduces reasonable corrective conclusions from the mass of existing industrial facts...

...JN OTABLE among many remarkable utterances was the sermon preached by Dr...

...And that no doubt might persist as to the application of his remarks, the rector of Saint George's A 4 4 1 February 24, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 425 ? asked his congregation to place for one moment the dead prince of the Church uwith his daily Mass, his visits to the Blessed Sacrament in his chapel, his nightly rosary, beside a Ku Klux Klan zealot, and look the two over...

...He is an inferior person...

...We do not maintain or accept the idea,11 he said, uthat Catholic charities should care for all the needs of Catholic people...

...The spirit is made evident over and over again in little ways—in a carelessness of appearances to which the Pharisee attaches immense importance—in a realization that all times to deliver the message of righteousness are not equally timely...

...OYPOCRISY is seldom a conscious attitude of mind...

...Probably the diagnosis is correct, and the suggestion that motorists should throw their fragments on the far edges of the road is excellent...

...The "pitch" of eulogy, if one may be permitted a musical term, is too often forced, and its phrasing has a fatal facility for falling into the banal and stereotyped...

...But there is an especial point of interest in connection with the essay, which is that its author is a nun in that very well known centre of education, Notre Dame College at Dowanhill, Glasgow...

...We are quite content to await the decision which will grow out of the report to be made by the Federal Trade Commission...

...More often than not it is the result of an incapacity to think straight and to rid a moral issue of the associations (fortunate or unfortunate) that accrue to it by accident...

...Catholics feel a definite responsibility for whatever is essential to spiritual protection, but in matters fundamentally material in character, they are sworn to the idea of cooperation with their fellowcitizens...

...Sister Monica Taylor, a doctor of science of the University of Glasgow (an institution by no means lavish in the bestowal of such degrees) is the greatest living authority on the protozoan inhabitants of aquaria and their management, and not only the author of this article but also an exhibitor of her methods at the Royal Society...

...So many and so trivial are the grounds upon which it is granted in various states, that the moral stigma which surrounds it in England has gradually ceased to exist here...

...Industrial idleness is perhaps more general in Great Britain than elsewhere, but everybody knows that it remains an abiding substratum of even so unusual a situation as American prosperity as we experience it today...

...He who had been a hampered, almost a persecuted, editor, answered the Bavarian king's invitation and came to teach at the University of Munich...

...In the interests of consistency it is a 424 THE COMMONWEAL February 24, 1926 pity that they have to be exercised at the expense of alien sinners...

...So long as the vague and loosely interpreted regulations upon immigration remain in force, it is likely that we will be edified from time to time by these spectacular opportunities of letting the world know just what people we prefer to entertain within our gates...

...In addition to the duties of his professorship, the dead priest devoted a long life (he was born in 1857) to entomological studies, which gained him a reputation, not only in France, but in Germany and the English-speaking countries...

...By suggestion, by propaganda, and, when necessary, by waking forgotten laws from their dusty sleep, it is his determination to impose upon an entire nation the outward mold of conformity, heedless of the rebellion that may lurk beneath it or the disrepute that falls upon righteousness when the police-court is made its minister...

...It must be confessed that the proposed "corporation with a soul" gave assurance of being more deeply interested in spiritual uplift than in the material welfare of its environment...

...There must have been many who felt that his training was so imperfect and his methods so unacademic that the atmosphere would lay bare his faults rather than develop his gifts...

...Most people, too, knowthat the ponds and the more sluggish streams contain a quantity of living creatures which can be studied with a very modestly powered microscope or even with a powerful single lens...

...and often a slogan of reform adopted by those whose in* tentions are the very best turns out to be, after all, only a slogan...

...Everybody has seen the ordinary aquarium and many have kept one if only for the accommodation of gold fish...

...Well, we should, perhaps, view the future with more confidence if we were sure that Mr...

...Apart from the investigations conducted by him in the colonies, however, which he made it a point of patriotism not to refuse, the dead priest could not be prevailed upon to leave his college, from which many recruits have passed to the foreign mission field...

...The point was taken up by Dr...

...A rather notable exception is to be found in the many tributes paid in America by men of all religious professions to the late Cardinal Mercier...

...Saluting in the dead prelate one who "has sweetened the religious air" of the world, for a time at least, Dr...

...Thus in America, it is idle to deny that a certain reputability has come to invest divorce in the worldly mind, which has nothing whatever to do with a feeling that we are "not as other men"—or women...

...1 HE really heavy sinners escape in the multitude of the irrationaj...

...In the remaining 120 miles over roads widely used, twenty-one dead were picked up...

...The new way of dealing with the problem outlined in this article is too technical to be described in these columns...

...Kelly noted that the dead Cardinal, though himself a water-drinker and ascetic in diet, always offered wine to his guests...

...Their clumsy feet, made for tree climbing, do not allow them to side-step as other birds can, and the end comes swiftly...

...Coming as they do from a man so familiar with social methods as Dr...

...Kelly, "that some parts of the Christian church have in practice abandoned the effort towards spirituality and content themselves with a mere practical earthly substitute for sanctity...

...Yet in view of the disturbances caused by unemployment, and the danger of international turbulence due to the struggle for markets, we cannot afford to neglect any means to industrial peace...

...But though Gorres fought journalistically for what he believed were sound patriotic and spiritual ideals, the really tremendous and vital thing about him was his power to grow—to escape the mere revolutionary impulses of his youth and learn the art of constructive thinking...

...It has been a common experience for a teacher of biology to go to his tank for a supply of amoebae and to find none where he had left a flock...

...Are they not attempting to carry on work already entrusted to the state...

...The London Month, commenting upon a series of magazine articles setting forth a "Catholic alternative to capitalism," expressed its disappointment at not having found *'any profound diagnosis of the present system of production for profit merely and of the financial control of industry, which results in unemployment for both workers and machinery in a world which is clamoring for goods...

...One consideration, however, commented on liberally in England, is worth a passing word...

...and to arrive at the conviction that all civic life is near perfection only when it is founded upon the abiding ambitions of the soul...

...His facts are derived from a drive of 220 miles through the state of Iowa, in August, and the net bag, not of his car, but of others which had passed before it on the road, consisted, first, of thirty chickens...

...JdUT what was really remarkable was the extraordinary number of red-headed woodpeckers which had been killed...

...Their growth has meant the growth of non-union labor in the baking trade, and their new venture will probably have the same effect on a larger scale...

...Henry E. Kelly, rector of the Episcopal church of Saint George, of Bridgeport, Connecticut, on the Sunday following the receipt of the sad news from Malines...

...1 ANEGYRICS and eulogies upon the recently dead do not, as a rule, assay a very high percentage of thought or suggestion...

...That alone is not surprising, for of all creatures, the hen is the most foolish, and no one can have driven or been driven many miles in the country without having seen and heard a frightened, squawking fowl committing hara-kiri...

...As the company becomes organized," we are told, "it will run many small businesses to the wall or push them to the edge of bankruptcy...

...Shibboleths trip from his tongue and a sour suspicion of all who differ from him racially or religiously limits his charity to a point where sounding brass and tinkling cymbal invest his message...

...nor indeed have we as yet seen any exhaustive appreciation by Catholic critics of the diagnosis made by Major Douglas and his school, and the remedy they propose under the name of 'Social Credit.' During the ten years in which that remedy has been urged, no serious attempt has been made, if we except some notes in the Irish Theological Quarterly a long while ago, to explore its possibilities and see whether it harmonizes with Catholic principles...

...to discard narrow nationalistic tenets for a wider and more statesmanlike concept of the European scene...

...So great is the interest which her methods have aroused that she has been invited to attend the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science next summer, to give a public demonstration of them...

...1 HE intellectual Odyssey of Mr...

...There is something in the suggestion made by the New York World, that in order to show our perfect reciprocity in the matter, American consuls should refuse to vise the passports of prominent home-bred offenders against a moral code which the majority of our plain citizens still respect...

...Several missions in Africa were confided to him by the French government...

...and secondly, an angry senatorial investigation of a supposed trust...

...It is a sober fact," said Dr...

...In a word, he is drill-sergeant where he might be inspiring leader...

...But he towered above all the circumstance of routine, and laid the foundations of what was the first genuine Catholic renaissance in Germany...

...The success was due in some measure to his genius, his tireless study, his personal magnetism...

...His favored ally is the strong arm of the law...

...Orage, while exceptionally interesting, should be exceptionally valuable as well...

...He declared that the term "social welfare" is wider than the scope which Catholic charities set for themselves, and that the public community agencies work, and should work, without any thought of religious distinctions...

...1 HE age-old association of Holy Orders with science is once more interestingly recalled by the death of Abbe Jean-Jacques Kieffer, a professor at the college of Saint Augustin, at Bitsche, near Metz...

...The volume of lip service to his ideals, however reluctantly it is rendered, is his measure of achievement...

...JjY a particularly stupid interpretation of a dubiously phrased law, the powers that control immigration at the port of New York have again treated America and the world at large to one of those exhibitions of pharisaism which are earning our country a reputation altogether undeserved, for self-righteousness and insincerity...

...We hold rather that there are community responsibilities in which Catholics take their part as members of the community...

...O OCIAL workers often listen to the reproach that, as the result of too much organization, their efforts overlap and result in the futility which is always present where too many fingers have meddled with the pie...

...When failure to support, the loosely construed "desertion," or even sheer incompatibility of temperament are made the pretext for dissolving the matrimonial bond, it is hardly worth anyone's while to go behind the fagade and point out the moral canker such things conceal...

...What, for instance, is the real function of religious charities...

...and the first-hand information supplied by Mr...

...It seemed to predict the grant of important sums to hospitals and research institutes, in the approved method of modern magnanimity...

...It is when the publicity with which dirty domestic linen is washed abroad, and the notoriety that comes from the social position of the parties concerned, render the polite fiction impossible, that we are treated to such an atavistic exhibition of offended virtue as the Labor Department is now offering us...

...His assumption of spiritual authority over those he condemns (it is thus Dr...

...Honors, including a special prize by the Institute of France, poured upon him during the last days of his life, and he was, over and over again, invited to take important university chairs of science...

...Then the monopoly can proceed to take all that the traffic will bear...

...x\N article in the current number of our contemporary, Discovery, on micro-aquaria, should interest quite a number of people...

...On the face of it, it is somewhat incongruous that the country which is the world's banner-bearer in divorce statistics should be the one to attach the harsh term "moral turpitude" to principals in a divorce action abroad, and should exclude them from its territory with every evidence of righteous indignation...

...The stomachs of the dead contained bits of food which were undoubtedly fragments thrown from cars on the road and picked up by the woodpeckers—fearless creatures which will stay feeding till the last moment...

...one cow-bird and one garter snake— a mixed bag and a curious one...

...W HAT we are watching for the brief and reluctant moments during which we permit ourselves the comparison, is a distinction, amounting almost to that philosophical contradiction, an antinomy, between two conceptions of virtue...