In Behalf of Union

...Io4 Poems...

...WHAT is most unfortunate about the development of this Doctrine is that nothing in the way of effective union between American countries has been estab-lished...

...It is impossible to continue through the addresses to which the convention listened...

...It is here that union and effort are so noticeably lacking now, even in cases where practical problems of great immediate impor- tance make their appearance...

...Against so long accumulated a tradi- tion of indifference many people--the officers of the federation among themmare willing to contend for some time...

...It almost seems as if the dream of Pierre du Bois and his great fourteenth-century book had come.true...

...These it aids with arms and money, adopting in the meantime a defiant attitude toward Washington...

...A number of speakers outlined some of the major interests of education, with particular reference to the arts and letters...

...WeU, we Catholics would be in a sorry pass just now in all phases of social and cultural r :tivity if that slogan had been obediently fol- lowed b3 those to whom it was directed...

...and in the general cultural background out of which all remedial agencies must be derived...

...The presen~ disturb-ances go back directly, however, to that urffortunate solution of the Madero-Huerta difficulty w' ich Presi- dent Wilson essayed in the interests of "co:,lstitution- alism...

...But though that be a noble and interesting dream, it can never wholly come true...

...Men at all times have acted upon the Aristotelian philosophy...

...Today the errors of fifty seasons are being harvested...

...Marie Gallagher xo 3 89 White Myrtles by a Deserted House (verse) 92 Louise Crenshaw Ray IO3 93 Communications...

...R. Dana Skinner, H. L.S...

...Finally it was proved by perhaps the most significant addresses delivered that the man in active, workaday life has many a good reason for getting into the thick of the intellectual fray and staying there...

...Aristotle marked the magnetic pole then, and he marks it now, and the needle of human thinking, no matter how much it may swing east, or west, or south, tends ever to return finally to the north...

...Volume V New York, Wednesday, December 1, 1926 Number 4 CO In Behalf of Union...

...Edward S. Dore--all the essential tasks...

...But they do not seem to realize that others are doing the same thing and that in union there is strength...

...This made the theory of revolution .9 lominant...

...It accepted the belief that Mexico and itp~neighbor countries could be industrialized...

...It is too much to expect that indi-viduals wiU forever groan and sweat under a load that the community ought to be carrying...

...The king re-mains sovereign of the Dominion, and will continue to be represented by a governor-general, but that official no longer will personate the British government...

...Fulton J. Sheen calls common sense...

...Some years ago, many conservative people were inveighing against the intrusion of woman into fields of action other than domestic...

...Were it not for outstanding exceptions, it would be absolutely accurate to say that reading, think- ing, and writing are done (particularly within Catho- lic circles) by alumnae...

...Senator Thomas J. Walsh, for his part, developed one of these problems...

...The Senator's reference was to the propaganda being circulated by Mexican consular officials in this country--a species of diatribe which not merely violates all rules of cour-tesy, but which also is an insult because of the estimate it places upon the inteUigence prevalent among "gringos...

...Such a record as that left by Elihu Root--who, inci-dentally, arranged the only treaty that has etrer meant much to the politicians of Nicaragua--is e:;:ceptional but salutary in remembrance...

...Perhaps one might profitably suggest, circumstances being what they are, that American men might very well learn from the feminine members of their fami- lies...

...Wood-lock himself declared) the average ideas of a genera- tion are always some distance behind those of the dominant intellectual leaders makes it imperative there should be a "middle group" of those interested, of those who transfer principle into comment or into the substance of creative writing...

...A student might suggest that it is bound up causatively with the passing of the tavern and of the old-fashioned club...

...How seriously this problem is regarded was made manifest at the very conference, which, in enlarging her sovereignty, also increased the duties and obligations of the Dominion--for much of...

...DAm~ SKmm BEaTRAM C. A. WIlqDLE Subscription Rates Ye.ar!y: $10.00 S'mgle Copies: ~0 WEEK BY WEEK T HE effect of United States note-writing upon ac-tive seditious elements in Central America will probably be approximately nothing...

...But progress of farm and of factory in Canada must be predicated upon the possession of man-power--and man-power is Canada's most pressing problem...

...What to do, is an interesting problem which we have no ambitions to solve...

...It made rfhe error --which has rather generally been the error of United States colonial practice--that the solution of 'the agra- rian problem could wait until reading and writing had been stuffed into everybody...

...We are listening with what is, however, considerably more a mood of scep- ticism than of hopefulness...

...Its convention achieved--under the direction of its able president, Mr...

...SHvsrm~ Jo~ F. McCoamcg, Business Manger Editorial Council T. LAWaASON Pdc, os JAMES J. W~a~SH C+.m~To~r ]. H. Hx~s 11...

...r I 3 IN BEHALF OF UNION N 'OVEMBER I4 marked the close of this year's convention of the National Catholic Alumni Fed- eration...

...But even Diogenes grew weary of carry- ing his lantern...

...December I, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 89 THE COMMONWEAL Published weekly and copyrighted 1925, in the United States by the Calvert Publishing Corporation, 25 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York City, N. Y. MICHAEL WILLIAMS, Editor Assistant Editors THOMAS WAt, S~t Iq'~.~r~ W.~at.X~ HmmY LoNc,+.s Stunt GEoRtmN...

...The possibilities of agricultural development in the Dominion--east as well as west-- are limitless...

...There are now places galore where one may get a bottle of beer by walking down a circle of steps...

...The Cardinal of Philadelphia represented the hierarchy, without whose sanction and active participation no con- certed action of American Catholic laymen will ever be possible...

...It is largely, we imagine, that men gen-erally lack anything like a common consciousness of things which must be done, and of the way in which they can be accomplished...

...The Catholic Church can well afford to be entirely indifferent to the puny efforts of Mexican iconoclasts to destroy her," he said, "because history affords abundant reason to believe that she will survive them as she has survived others...

...The Monroe Doctrine is both a tradition and a treadmill...

...The still very young alumni federation is one of the 88 THE COMMONWEAL December I, 1926 best proofs that we all may cherish ambitions for a collectively ambitious manhood...

...Here are associated women having a common interest in social welfare and political advancement...

...The People to a Queen...

...but there are few places where one can get an idea by any other process than sitting alone and waiting for it to arrive...

...THE COMMONWEAL A Weekly Rapieto d Literu~e, The Arts, and Publle AWaits...

...Mexico---Whither and Whence...

...Padraic Colum, Francis A. Ton98 dorf, Ernest Sutherland Bates, Fulton J. Sheen, Thomas Walsh, George D. 99 Meadows, Theodore Maynard, George M. A. Cain, Edwin Clark IO 7 IoI The Quiet Corner...

...We wish it the greatest successNfor the things it can do and for the things that it can see undone...

...Grace Hazard Conkling, Eleanor 94 Custis Shallcross, George Sterling, Clarence E. Flynn lO5 96 The Play...

...The present relations between Mexico and Nicaragua are only another symptom of an evil that is universally corrosive...

...John Keppler Seven Sins of "The Churches...

...John Dewey have a recipe for stopping murder in Mexico...

...In ancient Greece all the compass points of human thought were marked off once and for all...

...Henry S. Whitehead So Chaste a Thing Is Loneliness (verse...

...Thomas F. Woodlock, outlining the position of religious thought in the world today, found that the enemy had been entrenched in three main positions untenable nowmhigher criticism, scientific theory, and subjectivism...

...What will Canada make of her new powers...

...In many respects it seems the most impor-tant date in the history of active lay Catholic thought in America--thought, that is, which is not merely static but stimulating, which hopes to interest and con...

...We seem indeed to be in some- thing of that season of mental springtime which pre- vailed in Europe during the eleventh century when ~there was in bud the second great flowering of the human mind that has occurred in the history of the world...

...But now Mexico, appearing as a claimant to hegemony in its section of the Latin-American world, has virtually created an association of all revolutionary elements...

...To sug-gest by c mtrast where man's place is in the outstand- ing civic interests of the day has become something like a di y. We said, at the beginning of these re-marks, t~ at the trouble was "a lack of common con-sdousness...

...cannot conceive how such a flagrant disregard of the decency which ought to characterize the conduct of officials of a foreign government exercising their func- tions in our country can be condoned...

...It was good there should be, in this practical age, a discussion of the classics as the sources of our living language and habits of thought...

...Amanda Benjamin Hall Man and the Microscope...

...There is no variety or vagary of thinking today that cannot be referred to one of these points...

...in the care of younger America, especially where that is governed by orphanage or apprentice conditions...

...We shall not discuss the bulk of the work done...

...But the government of the United States cannot afford to ignore them...

...It may throw its hat into the air, but it wiU put its hands back into its pockets...

...There is here something more than a distinction in terms of self.government...

...But the mere fact that there was a con- siderable bulk suggests something as peculiar as it is importantmthe growing tendency to cede what might be termed the whole territory of the mind by men to women...

...It is based upon those natural, spontaneous, primitive, infallible judgments of the human reason which Dr...

...Years ago, when our envoys sailed into revolution-ridden countries about which they knew practically nothing, and sup- ported factions.which they guessed were progressive, there might have been an opportunity to lay the bases of agreements which would have preserved the peace and advanced the prestige of Washington...

...IO6 Books...

...Burges Johnson NTENTS 87 Princess and Peddler...

...This, then, was a statement of the contemporary re- surgence of the Christian mind, in whose victory all of us may share...

...BY the new charter of the British empire, adopted by the Imperial Conference, Canada is given status of absolute equality with Great Britain...

...As individuals they often scrutinize anxiously the data of civilization as apart from the data of business or pro- fessional life...

...Their attention to matters of importance is almost extravagantly specialized...

...The neo-scholastic school is the one school of philosophic thought which today displays real vitality...

...Bertram C. A. Windle Does College Train the Citizen...

...The needle has swung north again, and subjectivism is clearly on the wane...

...For what, after all, could Washington do ? Nothing short of a complete sanitation of Mexico would remove the causes of the social disease...

...For this situation the federation hopes to be a remedy...

...Petition to the Queen of Roumania...

...Dom Jarret speaks thus of him: "A believer in education and in the widespread develop- ment of international thought, and in the power latent in womanhood to influence and reconstruct society, he wished to place the brutal world of his day, with its crusades in little and in great, with its huge dreams and violences, with its already dowdy chivalry and knightly graces, in a new atmosphere of polite and gracious learning...

...there is a difference which must be discernible to all Americans who realize how dosely the future of their neighbor to the north is linked with that of the United States...

...And it is a pleasure to say that similar organizations exist in many places and are uniformly energetic...

...and the old slogan, "Woman's place is in the home," which is true enough if unders~:ood rightly, was used as an argument upon many rid culous occasions...

...Per-haps people like Mr...

...Our country occupies the quaint position of an outsider who can be held responsible for the family squabbles...

...the potentialities for industrial expansion scarcely can be previsioned...

...federate that growing crowd of men who are given a certain stamp of intellectual leadership by years of col- lege training...

...If one considers, for instance, the achievement of such organizations as the National Council of Catholic Women in New York City (whose third annual meeting is to be held, by the way, on December 6) the point becomes very clear...

...It might have been possible, for instance, to accept the leadership of Costa Rica in Central America, and with this as a foundation, to begin some- thing like a federation of the varied republics...

...That communism attended with a peculiarly conscienceless attitude toward the responsibilities of government, is rampant everywhere south of the Rio Grande, is a political fact which might long since have been taken for granted...

...Mr...

...That error has created an impoverished Porto Rico, where every :slump in business means a starving populace, and a Philippine situation characterized by oratorical hot-air and a stupid debate about independence which makes us all look foolish...

...But the fact that (as Mr...

...What is the reason for the comparative inertia of the male...

...Perhaps a lucid answer might be expected of those who, dwelling in the security of the United States, fancy that the con-servative sodal doctrine of the Catholic Church has been an obstade to Mexican "social progress...

...One thinks with regret of the brighter moments and the other hours that could have been used to advantage...

...They are to be gathered and published in a bulletin to be issued by the federation...

...And perhaps there is no better index to the existing necessity for the organization itself than to say that getting people to read the bulletin and to visualize from it the effort that has been made is a formidable task...

...The inertia which has become so rooted a habit accepts good news with a cheerful curtsy, but it is not infected by the good news...

...But in spite of everything, the trouble in Nicaragua and Guatemala must be faced and, if possible, settled...

...Concerning the last he said finally: "If there is one thing clearly evident in the world of thought today, it is that Aristotle and Saint Thomas are coming into their own...