Week by Week

...Appearances sometimes lead us to believe that America rosters this feeling of contempt for social and civic environment more strongly than any other land...

...It can always drop over to Europe and proceed to admire that country which it most profoundly misunderstands...

...ANYBODY who has been encouraged by what The Spectator and other journals have affirmed regarding the fate of imperialism in China, may well take some instruction from the following reflections upon life on the Isle of Malta...

...Time was when a theme like this could hardly be dealt with dispassionately, or come trailing anything but clouds of historical nonsense...

...Francis Thompson, to whom a memorial plaque was erected recently in the city of his birth, seems to be gaining a constantly firmer hold on the American reading public...

...If, then, the report concludes that the old theory of a "criminal type" must be discarded, and that society must get ready to deal with delinquents as "individuals," it has the right to expect that public opinion will endorse it and act accordingly...

...We must not forget that this "denied right" is the chief issue at stake in Mexico at the present time...

...Today, Ireland is relatively free and confronts a new era of social development involving many difficult problems of economic and political readjustment...

...It is also a pleasure that Lord Acton's authority is appealed to frequently, especially in connection with the Council of Trent...

...You have heard of some physical suffering borne in my country...

...In regard to it, Americans of Irish descent, gloriously conscious as they are of an illustrious tradition, appear to have a twofold duty—to aid the development of Ireland by practical encouragement, and to keep alive, more resolutely than ever, the spiritual flame of which Saint Patrick is so splendid a symbol...

...EVERYBODY is familiar with the terms, "volts" and "voltage," and it may be assumed that most people are aware that they refer to the unit of electro-motive force, and that it gets its name from an abbreviation of that of Alessandro Volta, the discoverer of the electrical pile, which Arago said was the most wonderful instrument, not excepting the telescope or the steamengine, which had ever come from the hand of man...

...It may very well be true, as one correspondent cabled his paper, that 10,000 sturdy occidental troops could put everything that China terms military out of commission in a few hours...

...The two became fast friends...

...but it is brought to attention once again in connection with some correspondence of Rene Descartes, the great French thinker, which a young British scholar has just unearthed and published...

...The great French haters never stopped to think that their country possessed a delightfully varied imperial scene...

...Gone were the Trade Guilds, founded on brotherhood and the sonship of God, that made for good cheer and good work, and emphasized the essential nobility of craftsmanship...

...The activities of Sefior Elias are more than a mere breach of courtesy...

...The example of Napoleon and Fascism—not to mention a few names less foreign-sounding to a sensitive English ear—ought to convince anybody that something termed "self-determination" was all right when addressed to Central Europe, but all wrong in other geographical areas...

...Volta died in 1827, and this year is the centenary of his death...

...Volta was a Catholic of singular piety, in the latter part of his life not merely hearing Mass daily, but usually assisting at the recitation of the Office by the Canons of the Cathedral of Como...

...Preparations for its celebration are on foot in various scientific quarters...

...Even the most "liberal" of Americans cannot contend that discussion of the Mexican situation was curtailed in any way...

...Of the inmates housed within Sing Sing prison, 45 percent are youths under twenty-five years of age...

...This is, so far as we know, the only one of the poet's autograph lyrics to have come to this country...

...The great impediment is identification of Europe with commercial exploitation and paraded racial superiority...

...1 HE report on probation published by Mr...

...Fearing lest there might be any doubt as to his beliefs, he left behind him a long religious testament, in which he states that he has "always held, and hold now, the holy Catholic religion as the only true and infallible one, thanking without end the good God for having gifted me with such a faith...

...Thus there has been achieved a singularly helpful union of new practice with sacred tradition...

...If this be not a warning written on the wall, it would be difficult to conceive of what such a thing might be...

...Everything that could be said for Calles was pamphleted abroad and launched under official insignia...

...SIMULTANEOUS with the announcement by Premier Poincare of the intention of his government to pay $10,000,000 to the United States on June 15, as an instalment on the war debt, comes news of the completion by the customs commission of the Chamber of Deputies, of the new French tariff...

...507 WEEK BY WEEK WHILE rumors were abounding that the relations between the governments of the United States and Mexico might change critically at any moment, the general press did a very notable thing...

...This will have a very pronounced effect on American manufactured goods sold in France, which are estimated at a value of 2,000,000,000 francs a year...

...By comparison, America has an equally diversified and conceivably more soothing resource...

...but here and there the human being gleams through, faithful to an immemorial type and yet strangely modern...

...A ribald fellow-senator consulted with a page and soon the terror of the College of Cardinals was swathed from head to foot in a portiere of cardinal red—more proof for Alabama of the dastardly designs of the British ambassador and Governor Smith's trickery...

...He had found himself up against a refractory Italianist class, and arrived at the conclusion (reinforced, no doubt, by sad experience) that British rule is almost too benevolent...

...The Maltese say," he explains, "they have a 'cultural affinity' with Italy, and a preference for the Italian language...

...No doubt, the greater leisure permitted by the contemporary American standard of living, stimulates the ambitions of the mind...

...It would postpone present wasteful schemes and pin .its faith to the immemorial fact that culture of the soul always means, in the end, radiance of physical achievement...

...It looks very much as though, while moving to strengthen French credit in America, the shrewd prime minister is planning for concessions in any future debt-funding agreement based on possible modifications of the new import duties...

...The Federal Bureau of Education reports a constantly increasing demand for appropriate facilities to carry on the business of culture among those beyond the "compulsory age...

...That these problems should encourage pessimism in a number of younger Irishmen is, perhaps, normal enough...

...Reports from Paris indicate that overtures may be expected in the near future, looking to the negotiation of a commercial treaty under the terms of which this country would receive most-favored-nation treatment...

...It is salutary to note, however, that Gary, Indiana, is a city comprised almost entirely of what is termed a "foreign" population...

...It took cognizance, almost for the first time, of the propaganda in which the resident Mexican consul-general has engaged—propaganda involving not merely the property rights now under discussion, but also the opposition of the Calles regime to religion...

...All of this does not mean, however, that the business of expansion is going to be any easier in China than it has been...

...that the Celtic citadel would, God willing, fly its own flag...

...They are quoted by the London News from the memoirs of an English professor whose subject was his native tongue...

...He declared that Sir Esme Howard, the ambassador from Great Britain, was an agent of the Roman Pontiff who had been sent here from England because that country had fallen under the domination of the Catholic Church...

...Now, it is doubtless the hope of the French cabinet that pressure will be brought to bear by the large American manufacturing firms whose business is hard hit by the new tariff, and that France will be in an excellent position, if negotiations on trade are begun, to demand special consideration on matters altogether foreign to treaties of commerce...

...The immense oriental domain, where western methods are not in the least fashionable, has a habit of dissolving capital and business acumen as one chemical agent dissolves another...

...People new to the opportunities afforded by this country appreciate them in a manner which makes the average native son look like a crusader for ignorance...

...Stretched on one of the leather-covered lounges in the rear of the chamber, he dreamed of the rewards of the just...

...W HILE one group of senators, in the closing hours of the Sixty-ninth Congress, sought to suspend successive filibusters long enough to pass the Deficiency bill, and others strove to get a vote on the Public Buildings bill, J. Thomas Heflin, of Alabama, pounded steadily away at the Pope...

...His mission was to connive with the Knights of Columbus and the Catholic clergy in America to force this country into war with Mexico...

...In New York it is the youth who recently graduated from the East Side that wears out the benches in the city's free educational institutions...

...On the roads of England were hundreds of vagrants whom no man would hire, and who had nowhere to lay their heads...

...Many of the young people in Gary are taking college subjects, showing clearly that if the right appeal is made, youth is anxious to secure an education...

...Of social conditions during the Elizabethan era, he avers: "The condition of the common people, miserable enough when Elizabeth ascended the throne, had considerably improved at her death, though it must have been a far happier thing to have been an English peasant or an English craftsman in the year 1500 than it was in the year 1600...

...Such an attendance is, according to the bureau, very necessary, because almost twice twelve million Americans need "elementary education...

...Kerensky is certain that the lesson is being learned and that real liberty will yet come to Russia...

...He believes that everything that would stimulate industry by giving greater individual opportunity, would at the same time weaken the hold of the Bolshevist leaders...

...The man has an abiding faith in democracy which neither his own expulsion nor the strange economic lapses of his countrymen can shake...

...The grim cohorts themselves appear to be helter-skelter, with extremely peculiar concepts of loyalty...

...they simply remained in Paris and grumblea crvently...

...To those who have written of new opportunities which enable the worker to go to the opera, he makes answer that there is really nothing new in this...

...It is true there has been some, but this is as nothing to the suffering of those who are denied the right to worship God in the way to which they are accustomed...

...If," he wrote in one place, "certain Indians have refused to become Christians on the ground that they were afraid to go to the Spanish paradise, I am even more reasonable in wishing that religion can give me the hope of dwelling, after this life, with citizens of those countries which I much prefer to my own...

...but one is a little astonished to see that pessimism assume spiritual forms wholly alien to the deep, abiding religious genius of the race...

...But the explanation is probably that we have not more of the "noble modern isolation of soul," but more ability.to create a disturbance...

...IN DISCUSSING, with remarkable restraint and admirable logic, the present situation in Russia, Alexander Feodorovitch Kerensky, who recently arrived in New York, made one remark which many Americans might ponder to advantage...

...The bureau has completed its work under the personal direction of Cardinal Hayes, and with the assistance of priests thoroughly familiar with urban conditions...

...The circles of history are erratic, but they are nevertheless round...

...It was from Luther, even more than from Machiavelli, that the Tudors conceived the idea of the divine right of kings which they bequeathed to the Stuarts to their undoing...

...Our poetic temperaments are forever stamping their feet over the grossness of the neighborhood and shouting for Timbuctoo...

...Hitherto, Washington has not shown any great anxiety to enter into conversations regarding commercial agreements, as the fear has been ever present that excuse would be given for opening up new avenues leading inevitably to discussion of the debt settlement...

...The children of the elite are tuning in on Paul Whiteman...

...In the first place, it is almost the first endeavor to formulate a clear study of the possible points of contact between religion and those social or psychological circumstances which foster crime...

...Having once more saved the country, Senator Heflin slept...

...but if they were only that, they would have merited reproof long since...

...and with it is connected an interesting history...

...Dark says that "Puritanism was at once to increase the irreligion of the mass of the people, by teaching that religion was intimately associated with gloom and hypocrisy, and to destroy the new and short-lived idea of kingship that was unknown in England before the Reformation...

...Youths from sixteen to twenty-five years constituted 46 percent of the persons convicted in the courts of record in New York State for the year ending October 31, 1925...

...We admit the first, and respect the second...

...OUT of the turmoil in China comes the indication that the people of Confucius are, on the whole, really very calm...

...Edwin J. Cooley, embodying as it does the results of investigations carried on during two years by the Catholic Charities Probation Bureau, of New York City, is sure to have a permanent value...

...If all districts of the country secured proportionately as large an attendance as does Gary, we would have an evening school attendance of over 12,000,000...

...Mexico must not die...

...At Pantasaph, the Capuchin monastery in Wales to which Thompson retired toward the close of his life for a lengthy stay, he met Father Anselm, who later on was consecrated Archbishop of Simla, India...

...The destructive volatility of Europe is not in them...

...Gone were the monks and the monasteries with their almost endless beneficence...

...Imperialism is not the remedy for the social ills of China itself nor for the troubles of foreigners in the East...

...We note that Saint Lawrence College, a Wisconsin foundation, and the oldest educational institution conducted by the Capuchin order in the United States, has been given the original manuscript of Thompson's Franciscus Christificatus...

...When sweat-shops are being operated, it will take more than a policy of little bread and occasional circuses to make those who are being sweated believe the reiterated declaration that they are free and equal to anyone else...

...It was he who presented the manuscript to his American Capuchin friends...

...Sidney Dark's recently published little monograph on Queen Elizabeth (George H. Doran Company...

...Volta was one of a brilliant group of Catholics whose names are now imperishably associated with the science of electricity—Galvani, Ampere, Coulomb, and Ohm...

...It was he who, with the aid of grace, transmuted a rich and reflective civilization into Christian culture at a moment when the fate of Europe depended upon the buttress of the Celtic soul...

...To this possible development, neither the Chinese people themselves, nor the spirit of the missionaries, is a barrier...

...From a strictly Catholic point of view, however, it is probably well that they were not interfered with...

...and it soon dies...

...If the West were wise, it would see in Catholic Christianity the means which can some day make the Chinese a great creative people, bound by firm tenets of government—a people in whose hands investment would be secure and effort would thrive...

...Nevertheless, the professor called attention to the lustre which once again surrounds Malta as a bone of contention between great powers...

...A highly-placed British official, in my time, actually learned Italian in order not to grate on the Italophile ear...

...It must not lose the Church...

...The wellbeing and wealth of the people and the existence of the Bolshevist dictatorship are things which cannot exist together," he declares...

...If there is one thing that is proved by the present conditions of trade and labor under Soviet rule, he says, it is that governmental control of industry never can be successful...

...Senator Walter E. Edge, of New Jersey, a Republican, seized the opportunity to pay a tribute to the New York governor...

...Today it is essential that his work, maimed for centuries, should be made whole once again—that Ireland, jewel in the ring of the history of the human soul, should bloom again in all its lustre so that faith may be seen and reverenced on all the shores of the world...

...Secondly, the investigators have all been men trained in the technique of social service and familiar with the light which modern science has thrown upon mental and neural processes...

...Reports from Gary, Indiana, are said to indicate "that 16 2/3 percent of the entire adult population is attending afternoon or evening classes...

...If this is the plan of French politicians, the situation is remarkable, in that Germany, the nation to fight whom the war debts were incurred, is the one which, operating under a temporary accord with France by which it has minimum schedule tariffs on hundreds of articles, is the country which benefits most by the tariff that is such a blow to American trade in France...

...It is likely enough that few know what the varied armies are fighting about, and that still fewer care upon whose banners victory is to perch...

...We have always felt that his scholarship, as firmly impartial as Lingard's, would some day have a great effect even upon popular conceptions of history...

...THE steadily ascendant curve of education is now reaching the nation's adult population, and bids fair to initiate thousands of people long since weaned from school into the mysteries of "special courses," and "night sessions...

...How curious that it should have traveled from quiet England to distant India, and then back again to the United States 1 Perhaps Americans generally, remote as they are from the intense faith of the poet, are destined to come into contact with his mysticism in much the same way...

...ONE is glad to see a great many things well said in Mr...

...Malta, once seized by Napoleon because of its strategical position in the Mediterranean, would serve Italy well as a naval base...

...it is a system which was followed in minor degree under the czars—a system which, in giving a feeling of satisfaction, is psychologically attractive but fundamentally false...

...Figures compiled by the United States Bureau of Census bring out the alarming fact that the arrests, convictions, and commitments in the prisons of the country reach their maximum in the age group of twenty-one to twenty-four...

...The effect has undoubtedly been to bring more and more people into agreement with these words from a sermon delivered by Bishop Pascal Diaz, the exiled spokesman for the Mexican hierarchy, in New York City: "Remove the soul of a nation and it becomes stodgy, dull, without hope...

...Fancy the idea of a "highly-placed" official, in this bustling day and age, actually learning the language of the people over whose affairs he exercises dominion...

...Christianity is: and who knows but that in years to come, native religious orders, a native priesthood and hierarchy, may develop a Catholic life as remarkable for mystical sanctity and social beneficence as were the middleages in Europe...

...and we doubt if there is a man now living who could supply more succinct personal information about the author of The Hound of Heaven than this missionary archbishop...

...Napoleon would have given the Italophile ear a sound French box, just as the Fascist Italians are doing to the Germanophile ear in the Tyrol...

...We need not consider it impossible that contemporary delving into oriental philosophies, involving though it does a retreat from European tradition, may in the end bring many around to a reverent examination of that doctrine which Francis Thompson interpreted so beautifully in English...

...Primarily, these letters of long ago deal with Descartes as a great mathematician...

...1 HE loneliness of prophets is proverbial...

...and Senator King, of Utah, a Democrat, defended Sir Esme as "a man of the highest attainments, fine intelligence, and honor as a diplomat...

...That is what one must term sound old-fashioned doctrine...

...THE observance of Saint Patrick's day does not lose lustre as the great sacrificial aspects of Irish history grow more remote...

...It was, during many years, a "feast of the oppressed," celebrated in this country and in other free lands as a kind of solemn promise that wrongs, centuries old, would some day be righted...

...Cooley pays especial attention to the role of youth in crime, and quotes some alarming figures: "The majority of the most spectacular crimes bruited in the public press have been committed by mere youths...

...He also issued a solemn warning that "it would be exceedingly dangerous to make Smith, a Catholic, President of the United States, with the Mexican situation what it is...