Week by Week
May 26, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL ...
...Perhaps the Knights of Columbus will find decency permits to the confines of the permissible, it it in their province to provide such...
...ence we know that the School transforms young women From the practical point of view, the results obtained from persons ignorant of even the rudiments of social by this voyage into the north are negligible...
...But it demands that it be, at least, "thick and though there is no doubt that "the institute serves the slab," thinned down by none of the compromises that men who roam the seven seas without regard to race, are the daily fare of life...
...But they are and madness-the last crowned, like Ophelia's, with discharging very unfaithfully their Hippocratic oath...
...blessedly deceived than in preserving the illusions of his wedding day until the dying day...
...This American, first to a sorely needed institutionalized endeavor...
...pleted another stage of its development when a new Perhaps the explanation of Johnson's-and all simigymnasium was dedicated under impressive circum- lar-illusions is simpler than it seems...
...Today, largely because of the efforts side, all the luridness and despair, but never, for a of the Seamen's Church Institute, New York is the moment, presents the other side of the picture-which most friendly port in the world...
...pears rather as the romantic servant of the imagination, offering a symbol of eager search through dark- THE one great need of the School is an endowment ness, and exemplifying the old illusion of bravery to adequate to perpetuate its work...
...And in order that this be so, it is by no means neces- A bill passed without any difficulty in the Imperial sary that they be numerically preponderant...
...and if he succeeds, Father added a benignant dignity...
...mental years financial assistance was supplied by the administrative committee of the National Catholic COMMANDER BYRD'S achievement likewise en- Welfare Conference, in the hope of calling into being courages speculative vision...
...And, whatever be the dracreed, or color...
...For Amundsen, of course, sociology, economics, and psychiatry, it affords abundthe trip had the lure of scientific adventure...
...We assume, however, that Mr...
...than is the first American aviator, Catholics of New York City think...
...and there ant opportunity for experience in the field of social probably came to him, for the third or fourth time in action...
...The defenses, which could not only have rest and entertainment, but also a civilized society has learned how to erect against where Catholic devotions would not be out of the way...
...of the Church as well as a prince, will be dismissed in many quarters as an "ex officio" pronouncement as LIVING in the greatest port in the world, they have something that the Cardinal simply "had to say...
...Nobody knew if a competent faculty could be estabTHE world of northern night still retains its mys- lished...
...judge the rising generation...
...Britain's problem actually in power possess over the vital points in the is the poverty into which its masses have been permitsocial armature, and the immense authority they ac- ted to drift, and the discovery that a general strike is quire, quite irrespective of their political merits or a sword of lath and tinfoil against it, leaves the dipopularity with the nation when such an accident as lemma with all its old urgency intact...
...There are none of the susmay take it for granted that a percentage, and not a pensions, the "returns," to use a French phrase, which small percentage, of these men are Catholics, who experience of the real notes, in the rectilinear workwould like to be able to go into a place where they ings-out of its evil providences...
...ever degree of inconvenience the rebels may inflict, Comment upon the successive exhibitions of bigotry its ultimate triumph is assured in advance...
...It is neither too late, nor too early, howreared seems to be, for its perpetuation, singularly at ever, to take account of certain outstanding facts that the mercy of a prosperity which the future cannot it has put in new and startling prominence and which no social prophet, when he takes sufficient heart to guarantee...
...The Griscom is well aware of how many other benefactions lover continued to be under the illusions of the wedof the same character might be chronicled...
...Many of these realism is that it is taking its revenge too thoroughly on the suppressions and inhibitions of a past generaroamers of the seven seas would like to stay at a home where their desire to go to Mass and attend tion for art not to suffer...
...Every resource in the times wonder whether we are not distorting the per- past fifty years has been strained to the uttermost to spective and setting up false standards by which to care for the immediate needs of new incomers...
...But we lay the hand of benediction on life's miserable things...
...and if, once veil of icy storms rushing over infinite waters white the years of training had ended, places for the graduwith cold...
...More ships and more seamen enter matic value of so arbitrary a presentation, there can the port of New York yearly than any other port in be no doubt that, even artistically, the Cardinal is dethe world...
...The time is ripe for America, for the two contiThe great name which you bear is the finest evidence nents of America, to make real and important conof this belief of mine, because the saintly Prince of tributions to the Church general...
...the extreme chances of fate, are excluded from its calculations...
...The Orangeman is "going native...
...One of the pres- that is hailed as wisdom by readers and audiences who ent season's outstanding successes ends with murder think with the superficies of their brains...
...It is far from is that, into that very mire, mud and dirt, the Lord our desire to take anything away from an appeal on Himself, the Saviour of mankind, is ready to walk to behalf of a service that is entirely worthy...
...The treating symptoms as they arise and a disinclination first is the amazing protection which all governments to get at the root of the distemper...
...Most interesting, development of the physical as well as of the intelpossibly, is the constant indication of assistance re- lectual powers of the human personality...
...But what does seem to be true is that the theatregoing public revolts against the THE Mediaeval Academy of America offers satischastened happiness which life, in its own last acts, factory evidence of progress in the second number of so frequently offers...
...Today none of these quesand even a more beautiful image-of Amundsen's ship, tions needs an answer...
...Their reac- to the United States may very soon and very tantions are as varied as the minds of those who witness gibly prove to be a measure advantageous to the them...
...The gruel may be thick or is a rare mingling of diversified scholarship with orig6a THE COMMONWEAL May26, 192 inal thought and pointed phrase...
...Now, at reach the pole through the air in a manner long since the proper moment, representative officials of the imagined by Kipling, operated with the same despatch Council of Women have taken a direct interest in the and vigor which his countrymen have admired in such work and have organized a campaign in its behalf...
...and the directors, together with the The gesture of conquest-planting the flag-was in committee of xoo prominent citizens appointed to aid this instance merely figurative, but we all rejoice at the "drive," hope that it will be possible to announce its being done, feeling that the privilege came as a a real success at the sixth annual convention of the kind of right to a nation of pioneers...
...happened three weeks ago makes them the depositories for law and order...
...The last American might very well be he who, io...
...So long as these counterbalance the out a precarious livelihood by taking in one another's restless and unstable masses for whom change at any washing," the inhabitants of the six counties seem to cost is welcome, for just so long, it seems, will any be keeping what intellectual life is in them intact by nation be secure from violent economic subversion...
...Senator George no amount of misunderstanding by the outer world H. Moses, of New Hampshire, found the right words will drive him to relinquish his treasure...
...It would typical Englishman, Thomas Babington Macaulay be difficult to parallel such an instance of consideration `To ordinary spectators, the lady appeared to be a for scholars and the cause of scholarship, and there short, fat, coarse woman painted an inch thick, dressed are many besides the present writer who would wish in gaudy colors...
...Marasmus can kill no less surely the Calvert Publishing Corporation, 25 Vanderbilt Avenue, and not less fatally than apoplexy...
...Writing to ex- MR...
...ceived by scholars from men able to defray tie financial cost of manuscript explorations...
...undertaken...
...IN an appeal made on behalf of the Seamen's Church Balboa, "silent upon a peak in Darien," is no more Institute, words were used that should make the suggestive a figure...
...Modern men have been given a different ates could be obtained...
...That Johnson remained the bridegroom throughout life, reveals his THE Newman School, one of the most interesting essential nobility...
...Among the great the Church in whose presence these boys move daily forces which are beginning to make themselves felt in knew always, whether he was on the cricket field of that direction there are two of especial importance Eton, on the waters of the Isis at Oxford, climbing the Catholic University of America and the American among the hills of Capri, or even in the solemn pre- Catholic Foreign Missions Society of Maryknoll-oncincts of the Sistine, that there must be room for the the-Hudson-both of which are doing signal work...
...While the course of training includes a for a symbol of the human spirit braving the tenebrous substantial introduction into the modern sciences of regions of truth unknown...
...For them the JOHN F. MCCORMICK, Business Manager late strike will present itself, not so much as a victory, Editorial Council even inconclusive, for either side, as a warning, perT. LAWRASON RIGGS JAMES J. WALSH CARL7ON J. H. HAYES R DANA SKINNER haps the most dramatic and comprehensive a nation BERTRAM C. A. WIN= has ever received, to set its social house well in order Subscription Rates Yearly : $10.00 Single Copies : $0.20 while there is still time...
...tance, failed to thrill at the news or to ransack his knowledge of geography for a glimpse of the setting...
...After all, a stances to which the apostolic benediction of the Holy noble man wishes to wed nobility...
...A revolt in itself, it is conto their religious duties could be easily fulfilled...
...MacMechan speaks, as a poet would, the Atlantic through the courtesy of Mr...
...Man work into leaders whose energy, skill, and devotion could not live in that glacial air, and the instruments can be depended upon to bring that charity, upon of commercial engineering could never exploit the pos- which the Apostle set so high a value, into direct relasible treasured riches of arctic soil...
...May 26, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 5 WHEN this has been said, however, it is by no THE COMMONWEAL means certain that all has been said...
...ing its way through impediments of various sorts...
...These I T is quite possible that restriction of immigration are great and spectacular social events...
...Meanwhile, the succeeds, again and again, in being improbable...
...By making it merely a synonym for the darker ones...
...From personal experiwidely heralded, are of secondary importance here...
...what are really the crudest of devices...
...But done extraordinarily little for the Catholic seamen they reecho so much that sober thinkers in all departments of criticism are saying and thinking as to dewho come ashore here for a night, or two nights, or serve a less cavalier reception...
...We morse-seems to elude it...
...The School has replied to all the Norge, lost in the silence of frigid mists and climb- of them through a record of achievement which, to ing over a realm unseen before...
...is of little advantage...
...and we believe that it may be taken as a . . . Goethe once said: `Whom God deceives is depledge of much else to be accomplished by American ceived of his own weal.' Could a man be more industry in the service of traditional civilization...
...It cerning itself too exclusively with minds and hearts that are in revolt...
...J. Pierpont with examples : "How the world regarded Dr...
...breathing in the sour air of one another's prejudices...
...surgeons who claim it as their category may gain a Many plays of a gloom and tragedy quite unrelieved, reputation for "courage" and for the disillusionment have won its favor in recent years...
...The contrast with the Free State, where no disabilities of any sort press upon "THE social mission of charity" is expressed pracProtestants, even in districts where they form an in- tically, for Catholics in the United States, in the proconsiderable minority, speaks for itself...
...The sheer need of carrying on the complicated economic structure is so imperative, ULSTER must be a pleasant province for the civilthat a threat to it will always find all the stable and ized man to live in I Like the famous inhabitants of static elements in a nation ranged upon the side of the Falkland Islands, who were reported to be "eking the status quo...
...NO subsequent developments will overpower the imWEEK BY WEEK pression the world has received that behind the impressive and orderly facade of British administration, J NSOFAR as the front page in the press registers there exist two irreconcilable elements pledged to a American consciousness, the great strike in Britain stubborn resistance whenever their interests clash, and is by now a dead issue, and comment up it becomes an that the imposing imperial structure which prosperity anti-climax...
...Amundsen ap- tion with modern life...
...and public comment upon them, as found in Church in America by affording a much needed breaththe newspapers, runs so largely into the terms of our ing spell in which to coordinate and consolidate adage, such as numbers, money, and fashion, that I some- vances in certain activities...
...to say upon the occasion...
...and obscurantism, offered by the Northern Irish gov6o THE COMMONWEAL May 26, 1926 ernment whenever an opportunity is given it to justify huddled above the waving plumes of his craft, lookthe political indulgence or weakness which allowed it ing down upon the mysterious zenith of the earth and to contract itself out of the general Irish settlement, greeting its stark emptiness with a shout of joy...
...What many gram of the Social Service School, Washington, D. C. prophesied when the protection that imperial control This endeavor to train young women for the difficult gave Catholics in Ulster was withdrawn, has not been tasks of human reclamation began, of course, by groplong in happening...
...In its anxiety to steer as closely as provided...
...The crying fault of a week-sailors, firemen, stewards, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Irish, German...
...Nations die all Published weekly and copyrighted 1925, in the United States by manner of deaths...
...To Johnson, however . . . to express their grateful appreciation of so signal an his Titty, as he called her, was the most beautiful, act of generosity...
...Its cry seems to be : "A whole Speculum, its official quarterly pronunciamento...
...Twenty-five years ago," says the appeal, fining the point at which realism departs from reality "this port was known as the worst for the treatment when he complains that realism "portrays, on the one given to seamen...
...JohnMorgan, who personally assumed responsibility for son's wedded devotion is admirably expressed by that it and deposited it in his New York library...
...No doubt there New York City, N. Y. are many in England today, including a large proportion of the "young men in plus-fours" of whom our press correspondents seemed unable to rid their vision, who share the confidence of that slick and sinister figure, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and interim editor of the egregious British Gazette...
...The great, quivering those who have been permitted to examine it, seems bulk of the air-vessel, obedient to the will and imagina- one of the great glories of organized religion in tive reason of those who guided it, might almost serve America...
...The function that duty and will is true that there is a Catholic Sailors' Home near power play in the hour of temptation, seems to be be,the docks ; it is small, and the accommodation and yond the compass of its art, and it evades them by entertainment that it is able to provide is scanty...
...In its desire Many of the Catholic seamen who go into it and who to avoid anything like anti-climax (as though antiappreciate the service it gives, have often asked why climax were not pretty nearly the norm of life) it often New York-or Boston, for that matter-has not resorts to a banality in tragedy as bad-that is, as bad been able to provide an institute for Catholic seamen artistically-as the most contrived of old-fashioned comparable to the splendid institute that Montreal has happy endings...
...The students, chosen from among the best of his career, the thought that he was accomplishing, in college graduates, see poverty and social disease at a tired and very learned age, the same thing that men first hand: they learn to wrestle with error and deof his blood had done when Leif Ericson captained a spondency, and they take it upon themselves to solve Viking crew...
...There loaf, or no bread at all...
...Ruskin has remarked that there is no surer symptom of national decline than contentment with forecast the future afresh, can ignore nor evade...
...The struc- Parliament, which tardily removes some of the disture which modern society has reared is by now so abilities that have weighed upon Catholics since the much weightier and more powerful than those who days of Titus Oates, has just been rejected by the unbuilt it, the living "city" (to use the old patristic lovely and forbidding body sitting at Belfast which term) so insignificant beside the dead and insensitive was whelped by the Mother of Parliaments four years machine, that all any government in any social crisis ago, and which seems to bring to its sessions the politineed ask is for sufficient hands to operate it, and what- cal wisdom of an exalted cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan...
...In ever ding day, till the lady died in her sixty-fourth year.' so many places the imitation of Maecenas is generously I pity the reader who can laugh at that passage...
...ReSeamen's Church Institute has nightly been turning pentance, especially-even in its hapless form of reaway hundreds of men for whom it has no room...
...graceful, and accomplished of her sex...
...During its experia world of disillusioned men...
...if the right kind of women could be found for teries, which an antique poet might have visioned in a a work that is burdensome and sacrificial...
...The Church that May 26, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 61 it is connected with is, of course, Protestant-al- bitter...
...ARCHIBALD MACMECHAN, widely beplain his conclusions concerning the date of Geoffrey loved as a charming essayist, contributes to a recent of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, Mr...
...the end of June...
...Realism in its essence Catholic Actors' Guild on realism in art and its failure is nothing but a method of presenting life's realities, to be real, will strike a responsive chord in many minds and everything that is real has a right to its considerawhose preoccupations are far from being religious tion...
...The mechanical trappings, even the individual problems as these are presented in infinite "proof of the commercial value of aeronautics" so variety among the destitute...
...should like Catholics, and the Catholics of New York especially, to examine their social consciences in the OF course, such words, uttered by one who is a priest light of the work of the Seamen's Church Institute...
...No wonderment of this Though these brought with them the great religious sort comes upon me here ; for I realize that the foundations, their needs frequently meant a disadvanfounders of this school had in their minds an ideal tage to those who had already found their place in which they are constantly developing and in which the our growing community and whose needs were not correct proportion of those things which enter into altogether the same...
...With him, they see, in the collapse of a spasmodic movement of revolt under the weight of public opinion, only a "surrender" which may well be made the jumping-off MICHAEL WILLIAMS, Editor ground for new and unheard-of measures of social disAssistant Editors cipline...
...It will be a National Council of Catholic Women, to be held in sorry day on which we lose all our relish of the fron- Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during the week of October tiers...
...But these are not the best minds nor the minds THOMAS WALSH HELEN WALKER HENRY LONGAN STUART GEORGE N. SnusrER whose opinions thoughtful well-wishers to Britain in this country would be proud to share...
...number of the Dalhousie Review a defense of marital Alton Griscom pays the following well-deserved trib- love...
...It might be better, of course, to say that it is ute : "Lord Harlech, of Brogyntyn, Oswestry, Shrop- really a toast to a thing that has never been vanshire, was so exceedingly kind and generous as to lend quished-a memorial to what, regardless of the holhis manuscript, a very rare one never before described, low wit of Anita Loos and her ilk, is the eternal conto me for examination and collation, sending it across queror...
...The superstition that the public demands a and cruder side of human nature, our bepuffed social happy ending to its dramatic fare is old, but untenable...
...typical lives as that of Roosevelt and in such legends The plan calls for raising a fund of $6oo,00o before as those which surround Stuart and Daniel Boone...
...that he was always blind to the patof modern Catholic educational foundations, com- ent faults of his wife is a compliment to womanhood...
...An undertaking so worthy of support will appeal reading of a sturdy venture across the barriers of dis- to many as a splendid opportunity for generosity...
...We can quote only a little of much that deserves quotation : "The feverishness with which intercollegiate and interscholastic sports THE MISSIONARY AND MAN are pursued is one of the stigmata of our age...
...And as a result, the contemporary stage is THE words of Cardinal Hayes in his address to the growing less and less civilized...
...the training of boyhood is to be constantly maintained...
...flowers and bridal veil...
Vol. 4 • May 1926 • No. 3
