Week by Week
WEEK BY WEEK WITH the passing of the year there have ended also four seasons of pilgrimage which closely intertwined pontifical Rome and the ends of the earth. Fortunate throngs from our own...
...If the measure is accepted it will mean, of course, the domination of politics by a group of moneyed men...
...1 HE terrible truth about professors will out...
...A CURIOUS incident in the history of science is recalled by the death a few weeks ago of John Young Buchanan, F.R.S., at the age of eighty-one...
...We speak of a person showing 'distinction' in his character and conduct, meaning by 'distinction' not merely refinement but freedom from vulgarity and from affectation, so that he does not merge himself in the crowd, or in this or that lesser crowd, nor wear the artificial mask of character and conduct, but expresses in his way of life the best that is in himself...
...and this the Socialists would necessarily oppose if they could offer any plausible substitute...
...It is nearly always a confusion of moral standards and characteristics—a conflict between contending forces that may well, if wise counsel and protection does not surround them during the early formative stage, work incalculable harm to those who possess it as their unfortunate legacy...
...Towards the end of the eighteenth century the truncated garment, only too familiar, formed of two stiff portions fastened round the priest's waist by tapes, and which the author compares to the lower part of a cello-case, came into general use...
...MRS...
...Mencken contagious...
...They are seeking the same privileges which were so often topics for heated debate in the old Austro2OO THE COMMONWEAL December 30, 1925 Hungarian empire...
...1HIS truth has been stated frequently, but for the most part nobody has made a constructive suggestion for reflecting it in practice...
...But it also seems true to say that when the Holy Father looks back upon the months which have gone, he sees how much nearer to realization are some of the especial social purposes of Christendom...
...Assuredly the labors of the Holy See have contributed their part to this success, by means of concordats generously arrived at and charitable enterprises undertaken and continued...
...His colleagues on the expedition, so great was their veneration for Huxley, declined to believe in his discovery, but Huxley himself, the most candid of men, confessed his mistake at once—no very pleasant thing to do...
...Prince, the research officer of the Boston Psychical Society, was enabled by his tenacious memory to track down this portrait and has published the result in the current number of the Scientific American...
...This is sincerity...
...1 HE feeling in this country against the ugliness that has gradually overtaken ecclesiastical vestments, voiced by Mr...
...The ancient problem which Vienna attempted to solve has been neither removed nor remedied by the attempt to use political dynamite...
...MARY FRANCES KERN, who will direct the drive, an unwearied worker among the poor little derelicts in the Philippines, puts the case plainly enough when she tells us that "the American Filipino children are well worth saving...
...Generally of a highstrung nervous temperament, and rather emotional, their blood characteristics appear very prominently in their childhood and early youth . . . Their alertness of mind, energy, activity, and spirit of adventure are readily apparent—too much so for their own good when they are not controlled by those who understand them...
...I HROUGH his labors in a large part is due the beatification of the Jesuit Martyrs of North America which has recently taken place...
...Reverend Thomas J. Campbell was a force for unfaltering Catholicity, for the higher life of all Americans, for the finer and sounder things in philosophy and literature...
...Crowds greater than ever came to Compostella or Notre Dame, have hurried to the Eternal City which is the world's heart...
...Bathybius Haeckelii, for thus he had named the thing, disappeared forthwith from the catalogue of living creatures...
...The Catholic parties registered slight gains, but their progress is far from being what might reasonably be expected in a country once so closely identified with the Church and now so much in need of a firm stand on behalf of religion...
...Then the sides that once fell from the priest's arms in the noble folds familiar to students of iconography, were sacrificed to utility...
...Where so many persons have had a share in the achievement, it seems rather arbitrary to mention the names of individuals...
...It interferes with our comfort and it shocks us deeply...
...His policy with regard to Irish in the schools December 30, 1925 THE COMMONWEAL 201 has been approved by the Dail and will not be permitted to lapse...
...Buchanan refused to credit the observation and was finally successful in proving that the supposed living thing was really a jelly-like precipitate of sulphate of lime thrown down by the alcohol in which the specimens were preserved...
...Professor MacNeill is not only an Historian...
...1 HE desperate economic situation of France is the darkest entry on the balance-sheet of the year just ended...
...From the American point of view a donation like this is a fine testimonial of the national appreciation of values: there was good work to be done, and so fine shades of confessional and professional feeling were ignored in order to realize the ideal...
...The presence in the Cabinet of the author of Phases of Irish History, and of the most authoritative studies of Celtic civilization that have been written, added much to the prestige of the Cosgrave government...
...1 HOUGH there is something in Mr...
...JtvECENT elections in Czecho-Slovakia indicate more fully than ever the persistent turbulence of political feeling in southeastern Europe...
...Coupled with the report that the indemnities received under the Dawes Plan will be separated entirely from the regular budget, it indicates an earnest desire on the part of French statesmen to save the situation, regardless of difficulties and hardships...
...It is a magnanimous gift from the American people, including as it does a multitude of small donations made by school children and their teachers, policemen and library workers...
...A wiser view, it seems to us, is to regard the aesthetic heritage bequeathed us by faith as a precious deposit, and not to be too proud to take a lesson from separated brethren, who, having re-discovered it, are embodying it in so many forms of grace and beauty...
...The thought of these poor children, inheritors through their blood of the active, enterprising spirit of the West, and condemned by their circumstances to peonage and immoral exploitation at an age when their little half-brothers and half-sisters in America are in the schoolroom, with all the attendant horrors which the report approved by General Wood tells us, is one that the American people should not suffer to remain upon their conscience a moment, once it has been brought to their attention...
...he may come to be looked upon as one of the most forward-looking spokesmen on the whole problem of political relations that Europe has had during and since the war-time...
...Some might even rise to suggest that early pensions would not be unwelcome, with possibly an opportunity to write, unimpeded, that wholly unnecessary book about Wordsworth...
...The attitude of the press toward the Locarno compacts has been openly pessimistic, the more thoughtful journals recognize in the agreements a great gain for Germany without any compensatory advantage for France...
...The lot of those who owe their existence to frailty and passion is always bitterly hard...
...His life was spent at the various churches and colleges in charge of his order, and toward the end of his life he devoted himself to history, writing largely on the subject of the early Indian missions of North America in which he was an expert...
...And yet it has really been the prestige and effort of Nicholas Murray Butler and Herbert Hoover which carried the undertaking to a successful end...
...xjlN extract from that statement will give an idea of what the Free State Minister of Education was working towards—" Civilization combines all these things—economic life, cultural life, political life, with religion superadded—everything in short that removes man from wildness—and it combines them into one life, as a plant or an animal combines the substances it draws from earth and air...
...From an American viewpoint, the industrialist idea seems the most encouraging news that has come from Paris since the appointment of M. Caillaux to the ministry...
...r EW Yuletide announcements were so satisfactory as the news that the task of raising $1,000,000 for the reconstruction of Louvain's historic library has been completed...
...At any rate, there is solace in that phrase about "the flat mediocrity of successive generations of adolescent students...
...The good it will accomplish cannot help being also a memorial to the close affiliation which sprang up between two nations, one small and harassed, the other distant and powerful, during the first hour of an immemorial catastrophe...
...I am acquainted with no more essentially sluggish, improvident, resourceless and time-wasting creature than the ordinary professor of forty...
...Possibly after a while we shall really do something about the home and about education, which in modern society will inevitably take the place of fireside training to a large extent...
...Even while a youthful students' association at Princeton was resolving to "cooperate" with the faculty...
...But it has always been difficult to wear the professorial title with comfort: it is too dignified for the smoking room, too unimpressive at the Bankers' Club, and too banal in the home circle...
...And one might add that education is not an immediate process—not the affair of one generation alone...
...nor anything more empty of adventure or hope than the future years of his career, daily to be occupied in matching his wits with the flat mediocrity of successive generations of adolescent students, and patiently waiting till the death of some better man, hardy and longlived, allows him to slip into a larger pair of old shoes...
...Father Campbell's fertile and facile pen was devoted to various historical uses...
...These two men, more than any others perhaps, have crystallized the desire of their fellow-citizens to participate in the rescue of European civilization from a ruin of which the broken arches of Louvain are pathetic and arresting symbols...
...History discloses a race between education and catastrophe...
...Does this foreshadow a movement to break up Czecho-Slovakia into still smaller republics...
...Or is this downright treason...
...The result of such a hapless chance has been noted again and again...
...Stuart P. Sherman invaded the precincts of Scribner's Magazine and turned state's evidence...
...The dove and the "family" have been blotted out but the remainder of the picture is unmistakable and the mothers of the cherubs are now, it must be supposed, reduced to the explanation that Murillo was a prophet...
...There is such a thing as family discipline, and such another thing as social discipline...
...Those who would build the America of tomorrow ought to do it broadly by working for a kind of training which will correlate the forces that make for mastery of self and the observance of eternal law...
...It is only natural that the confidence in existing political institutions should ebb...
...Born in New York City in 1848, he attended the public schools and graduated at Saint Francis Xavier's College and immediately afterward entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus, where he was soon to be regarded as one of its staunchest members...
...As a Minister of Education he introduced the Irish language into the primary schools, and started the process by which teachers of Irish youth begin to have some knowledge of the language and the culture of Ireland...
...These parties, which secured a full third of the seats in the new legislature, demand separate administration for the racial minorities they represent...
...The note which has been struck is the true note...
...The case is made far harder when miscegenation—the mingling of two life-streams that aeons of years separate and that have practically nothing in .common save common humanity —complicates the problem...
...Instinctive reactions in crises are the results of training and discipline...
...The history of this stately vestment is a sorry story of bad taste and carelessness...
...A school of thought will always exist who regard attention paid to ecclesiastical detail, far less to archaeology, as time wasted on nonessentials and typical of the ritualistic mind outside the Church...
...Huxley, after microscopic examination, declared it to be a primitive organism covering the bottom of the sea and in fact the lowest form of life so far discovered...
...He rendered into English verse with rare fidelity all the hymns contained in the Roman liturgy, and at the time of his death he was engaged upon a life of the late Cardinal Farley which was to be a sort of history of the archdiocese of New York for the last fifty years...
...Fortunate throngs from our own land drew near to the tombs of the Caesars, the palaces of the living Church, the blessed monuments of Christian victory and martyrdom...
...Sherman is merely essaying an academic version of Virgil's choicest reflection...
...It is at least a remarkable coincidence when representative men from every rank and profession are nearly unanimous in attributing the spread of, crime to impaired home life...
...The year has therefore borne benediction to the members of the Catholic family, now more conscious of their immortal unity...
...and France has witnessed the somersaulting of a half-dozen attempts to form a ministry, the sudden growth of a determined Fascist movement, a frightened clamor for the reestablishment of TUnion Sacree, and even an appeal to M. Clemenceau from the most influential journal at Lille to return to power since "your juniors have quit and the young have lost their ideals...
...PROFESSOR MacNEILL'S resignation from the Executive Council of the Irish Free State will be felt as a severe loss...
...What is needed is a strong federation of independent peoples—a concentric republic modeled upon the scope of the Hapsburg realm...
...Luckily signs of a change are apparent, not only in Europe but in this country as well...
...Has not the time now come for active cooperation between members of all Christian creeds towards complete readjustment of educational work...
...A forceful preacher and a holy man whose eyes were ever constant upon that eternity to which he has entered trustfully, is the impression his noble life has left on all who knew, loved, and revered him in his long career of service...
...First went the graceful hood, or capuchon...
...It might almost be said that their lives are poisoned at the source, and that the very conditions of their salvation differ from those of children born in wedlock...
...He was the last surviving member of the celebrated band of scientific observers who formed the personnel of the Challenger Expedition (which lasted from December, 1872 to May, 1876) and whose labors contributed so much to the scientific knowledge of the world...
...There may well be differences of opinion concerning the value of his criticism of prohibition and of "penitentiary sentimentalism...
...Although Louvain has already abundantly proved its usefulness as a seat of learning, the fresh aid will help it toward new glory and service...
...The idealistic arguments which supported the formation of Czecho-Slovakia will be just as cogent in behalf of its disruption...
...1 HE effort of the American Guardian Association of Manila, an organization endorsed by leaders in all the churches including the Cardinal-Archbishops of Boston and New York, to start a nation-wide drive for $2,000,000, to be expended in rescuing and caring for Filipino children of mixed blood, is one that comes as a challenge to national righteousness and justice...
...In many of our larger churches, notably in the Paulist church in New York, the vestments worn by celebrant and assistant leave little to be desired...
...D UT some real hope seems to lie in the rather extraordinary offer of leading industrialists to finance the government by mortgaging their businesses...
...It turns out that the so-called apostle is really the figure of the Father Eternal in a picture which many of our readers have doubtless seen on visits to London, since it hangs in no less frequented a spot than the National Gallery and is the well known Holy Family of Murillo...
...J\ RECENT number of a spiritualistic journal gives to the public a reproduction of what is claimed to be a spirit photograph, declared by Sir Conan Doyle to be "the most remarkable spirit photograph that he has ever seen"—and well may he say it...
...The work of peace has made progress: wars have been averted, treaties of vast consequence have been signed, mutual obligations have been assumed in a better spirit...
...Every professor, even under forty, will relish its Johnsonian ring and sincerity...
...This was a kind of slime which Huxley found in most of the bottles of specimens sent to him for identification by the expedition...
...Since the opening of the twentieth century, no single year has been so busy with constructive effort on behalf of what is best in European civilization...
...Peter Moran in a letter which The Commonweal published last week, coincides with a very strong movement in France towards a restoration of their original forms to the vestments worn by the celebrant 202 THE COMMONWEAL December 30, 1925 at the altar...
...When he stated that the great question for Europe was not the question of national independence but of national inter-dependence, he made what is perhaps one of the major contributions to political philosophy, and when he showed that our ideas of sovereignty are a heritage from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and not at all the conceptions of any advanced thought, he started us thinking afresh about these very intimidating ideas...
...And yet, when the average citizen is honest, he knows that he should dearly like to be a learned dean, if only for a day, and come to the classroom with last year's notes carefully dusted, and armed with an authoritative smile...
...Sir Conan is right—it is a remarkable spirit photograph...
...Is the mood of Mr...
...Possibly Dr...
...and for an era of better understanding, more disinterested cooperation, and deeper realization of the unity of the human family...
...Our modern crusade is fought not with arms but against arms—against the devastating mechanization of life which uproots and kills...
...The point was not actually stressed by Father Edmund A. Walsh, professor in Georgetown University, but it was suggested by the fact that he laid the fruits of his own sociological investigation before his audience...
...Austrian observers profess to see an explanation in the lack of harmony between Catholic leaders, and in the lingering mood of reaction from the Hapsburg monarchy...
...It purports to be a picture of the Apostle, Saint John, and circling him are four cherubs each of which has been recognized by a mother as the portrait of her dead child...
...Billings's remarks that "every man has a perfect right to his opinion, provided it agrees with ours," public symposia like that recently conducted by the National Republican Club do bring out contrasted points of view which a looker-on will find instructive...
...But the most interesting aspect of the elections was the growing power shown by separatist nationalistic groups, particularly German and Slovak...
...The Chamber is weighing the proposal which promises to stabilize the franc, create a sinking fund for the payment of the debts, and safeguard the Bank of France...
...Nations, like persons, have their peculiar genius, character, and temperament, and to express these in their civilization is for them sincerity and distinction—it is being true to themselves...
...The decay began with the seventeenth century, when heavily embroidered stuffs began to replace the beautiful silks and linens whose pattern was woven in the texture...
...His statement about Irish education which the Irish Statesman has been publishing in recent issues can be read with profit by educationalists on this side...
...In a learned article published by the current number of l'Almanach Catholique, which has just reached this office, the changes, all for the worse, which have come upon the chasuble are studied, and a plea made for a reversion to older and more dignified types...
...even while the intellectual throng at New York's City College was tilting with its oppressors anent the question of military drill, Dr...
...but it is impossible to question the truth of the following words—"Crime dwells in the mind...
...As people we do not like crime...
...ardent soul, an able toiler in the vineyard, a distinguished Jesuit and gentleman passed to his reward on December 14...
...There are no accidents in the moral life...
...When the club heard Reverend Henry Howard, of Australia, declare that the Catholic Church alone has given proper educational care to children, it listened to a truth stated by an outsider who realizes that a system of public instruction can serve morality only when its content is positively religious and not merely negatively neutral...
...When the financial credit of a great and victorious nation sinks to the level of a second-rate, bankrupt power, there is meagre relief for its citizens in the remembrance of blood-soaked fields and gloriously ruined towns...
...If events force an affirmative reply to this question, the irony which underlies the extreme developments of the idea of self-determination will become apparent...
...Buchanan may certainly be looked upon as one of the founders of modern oceanography, and the incident we mention is connected with Huxley and the Bathybius discovery...
...against the maintenance of selfish and poisonous nationalistic policies...
...But it has long since become quite clear that theoretic visions of autonomy will never promote the welfare of southeastern Europe...
Vol. 3 • December 1925 • No. 8
