Week by Week

...But Daudet's failure to understand this is no reason why a whole swarm of tepid mediocrities should be encouraged to buzz their private anathemas at him...

...There is something abnormal about it, of course, just as there used to be something terrible about the young heroine who refused to faint...

...It is also quite certain that his picture of order and prosperity in the Philippines is as nearly accurate as such panoramic snapshots usually are...

...Unfortunately, he was so convinced of a "plot" against his party that he staked all on dynamite...

...To this one might add that municipal and state taxes do require some kind of coordination...

...They assert, furthermore, and are of course supported by the historical facts, that the Washington government solemnly declared that the goal of its work in the islands was native independence...

...Most of the people who have latterly been flinging more or less unctuous bombs at his achievement are immature fanatics of a certain mental vagueness, who seldom fight clean because they seldom fight in the open...

...These understand the lure of publicity...

...Humphrey Ward was a contentious novelist, and her type of Catholic ministers, rather skilfully contrasted to advance her argument, is hardly in question...

...Though in some ways undoubtedly a fanatic, Daudet has an exceptionally comprehensive mind which he has crammed with realities as well as abstractions...

...it could seldom be envisaged by municipalities controlling their own affairs in a strictly private fashion...

...It is legitimately within the province of local politics and demonstrates little excepting Daudet's intelligent mastery of the art of criticizing republican rule...

...It does impose added responsibilities and burdens...

...If he is right, the drift away from the farms is the result of economic necessity rather than of less tangible social factors and has, as a matter of fact, not kept pace with the working out of economic law...

...A s MUNICIPAL equipment increases, the problem of financial control of city expenditures becomes more acute...

...Counsel for the city succeeded in revealing the fact that publicity expenditures for a higher fare have been chalked up as "operating expenses" and paid for as such out of the municipal treasury...

...There are persons (even numerous persons) who will stand out all night in the rain to get their names in the paper—or work their hands into a solid blister at some parish festival, for the sake of attaining to celebrity...

...They may make it...

...We wonder how long "hard economic forces" roughly and impersonally applied would take to straighten out the sort of overhead from which the Ivy Lees of industrialism reap their cash harvest...

...The whole adventure continues to make the world smile, primarily because that world sees no good reason why Daudet should have been imprisoned in the first place...

...This factor would be overwhelmingly in favor of the farms as against...

...V J N E learns from various sources that quite a bit of dismay and reproof has followed the appearance of Miss Margaret Anglin in the role of advocate of a popular cigarette...

...GENERAL LEONARD WOOD has always been an admirable army officer...

...But if it had become the deciding factor in our own case, there would have been no United States...

...Father Holt of Henry Esmond, the Jacobite priest who changes his clothes in every chapter, and whose love of intrigue leads him to prefer climbing in through a window when the door is a perfectly safe mode of entry: Father Mole "of Saint Acheul" in Vanity Fair (Thackeray's names are always inferential) who argues with the Bishop of Ealing for wicked Lord Steyne's edification, are rare figures of fun...

...Nevertheless—and this is an old thorn—the handling both now and later must be skilful...

...If land values were lowered and if the market for manufactured products were not artificially supported, men could work on farms so cheaply that machinery—even now an investment proportionately high in relation to land value— would lose a great part of its significance...

...But when the General declares, first, that the Filipinos demand independence without knowing what independence is, and, second, that their wish, if fulfilled, would seriously endanger their welfare, he seems to surrender to ancient and commonplace imperialistic temptations...

...Even the staid New York Times was fooled into accepting the comparison...

...Is municipal government really capable of rising to the occasion ? As THE product of an age whose effectiveness is watered by a vast amount of what terse and unmannerly commentators are satisfied to designate "bunk,' Mr...

...Nothing was ever more evident...

...Davis—a better and more eloquent one, in all truth, than those now being proposed by various contributors to southern newspapers...

...Machinery, in agriculture as well as in industry generally, tends to displace workers, and when workers are not needed they necessarily go elsewhere...

...One cannot get around the point either by declaring that autonomy imposes certain added responsibilities and burdens...

...He should have fought down the Gallicanism in his blood, should have realized that Charles Maurras the agnostic was not so good a guide to Catholic doctrine as Cardinal Andrieu...

...Untermeyer to name some of the services performed by him in return for an honorarium which rumor, we do not know how exactly, places at $50,000 a year, Mr.| Lee is reported to have answered that "he had educated the public to appreciate the substitution of turnstiles before their introduction by the Interborough...

...OF AN interest that transcends the occasion on which they were uttered are the observations of the Reverend Eric McFhinn, addressed recently to the Maynooth Union of Priests, on the position of the Catholic priest in literature...

...Lee went through the Untermeyer handling, he was host at a dinner given to Sir Josiah Stamp and heard a handpicked gathering of executives told by their cheery guest from overseas that in the British coal industry "hard economic forces will have to straighten things out...

...A majority of those present seemed to agree with Mr...

...It is a handsome opportunity and if skilfully handled might set an instructive example for other cities bothered with transit problems...

...THERE has been so much discussion of public utility activities recently that the New York investigations of what is happening between the city and its two great transit companies—the Interborough and the BrooklynManhattan Transit—have attracted wide attention...

...Before his arrest, defying the government in the name of the Camelots de Roi, he looked momentarily like his father's Tartarin...

...On the strength of the promise held out for this higher fare, stock in the Interborough was purchased in considerable quantities by the rival company and some of its officials...

...What matter if these leaders really needed ferreting out ? Why should the fact that they stir not a ripple of applause In the nation as a whole be considered for a moment...

...All this, however, does not condone the in famous weed...

...Davis because the 1924 nominating convention could not forget that Governor Smith is a Catholic, a wet and a New Yorker...

...Thackeray's priests seldom depart from the traditional and handy lay figure of the Jesuit as misconstrued in England...

...Because the Governor represents the power of an urban democracy to produce from within a leader who is at the same time an excellent executive, he has managed to gain the attention of everybody to whom such an achievement seems a solution of our present political evils...

...A WESTERN professor of agriculture has declared that "a fourth of the people now engaged on American farms could be removed without a noticeable decrease in total crop or livestock production...

...The last few years have seen repetitions of the proposal to give New York and Chicago the status of separate states, thus emancipating them from the control of more or less "outside" legislatures...

...Sheridan's Charles Surface was a good hand at spending, but the solid South is fully a match for him...

...Dickens generally refrained from including the Catholic priest in his miraculous portrait gallery, but his general references to the unfamiliar faith and its ministers seldom lack a certain awkward respect...

...After all, it is the essence of the Filipino claim that they were fighting for freedom and had nearly won it when the United States relieved Spain of an embarrassing situation and added a gift of $20,000,000...

...Much can be said for this point of view, but there are seasons for considering it specious...

...Lent D. Upson that state legislatures were so frequently "cornstalk clubs" that no reason existed for crediting them with ability to limit the indebtedness or the bonding power of a city...

...The whole question of the attitude toward priests of authors and novelists will never be put in its right perspective unless a sharp distinction be drawn between an age when one faith and one only held men's hearts, and a later epoch when the personal character of the ministry became a tactical point to be argued for or against in theological strife...

...After all is said and done, the good that a man does should not be interred with his bones while he is still alive...

...It could, theoretically at least, be supplied by the central state government...

...But how accomplish these things...

...Can it be possible that a Catholic actress, honored with the Laetare Medal, has stooped to the base degree indicated...

...Mrs...

...But there seems no reason that the educative process should stop when the public has become reconciled to a ten-cent lease of a strap and not go on until such acts of God as late summers, wet Fourths of July, early morning riveters and the block system of interurban travel are accepted with cheerful resignation...

...Obviously the tip to the city is this: buy all the available Interborough stock, close the corporation, and then proceed to raise the fare...

...The priest as known to English-speaking writers of the past ten decades, was, it must be remembered, a being invested with the mystery and furtiveness bequeathed by the past...

...In the first place, what guarantees the stability of labor is the amount it can get over and above a living wage...

...the industrial town were it not for the fact that land values have been inflated for purposes of speculation to such an extent that capital invested in them cannot bear fruit in an unrestricted market, and for the added fact that the farm worker must buy in a restricted industrial market...

...The "education" of the public into the acceptance of the inevitable is a field whose possibilities are illimitable...

...At present his fortitude under a number of bodily ills and his eagerness to continue in the service of the nation are receiving the respect they merit...

...Home rule" for cities, as regards local taxation and expenditure, would indeed seem desirable where there is good municipal and not altogether adequate state government...

...We profess to admire greatly those women who refrain from nicotine...

...The third characteristic is clearly, one may note, the only important one...

...i\S WE write, Leon Daudet—the steam calliope of I'Action Fran^aise—is still at liberty...

...When he and his friends had finished their little adventure, it was the government that looked ridiculous —a government which permits notorious laxity in the administration of justice, which is really victimized by a swarm of egoistic phrase-mongers, and which is willing to condone political murder for the sake of "human equality...

...It should have been so easy to see that I'Action Frangaise could never be a "Catholic party," however great its interest in certain French Catholic traditions might be...

...Nor does anybody know who gave the mysterious order over the telephone which, purporting to come from the Ministry, induced the prison-keeper to send his famous guest off home in a taxicab...

...It had Mr...

...One remembers rather vividly the old priest of Saint Gudule, who laid so cool and sympathetic a hand upon the tortured temperament of the homesick and soul-sick little teacher in Villette, that her Protestant consciousness took alarm from his very humanity...

...All this has nothing to do with those maxims of political philosophy which the Church very properly demanded ought not to be recommended to young men in France as "Catholic...

...Ivy Ledbetter Lee, public service counsel of the Interborough Rapid Transit, comes pretty near being Exhibit A. Asked by the insistent Mr...

...During the past few weeks, this South has been growing conscious (in print) of the admirable candidates it could present for presidential nomination...

...Unfortunately, nations seldom think of economic problems in anything excepting economic terms until it is too late...

...that these people, engaged in professions, often need advertising...

...Taking a survey of the Englishspeaking novelists most familiar as modern classics, it can be admitted that a certain respect or restraint has generally prevented any such lying or partial pictures as disfigure continental fiction...

...This purchase was not unethical, but in view of the failure of Interborough stock to pay any dividends during eight years, it really looks pretty much as if the purchasers hoped to buy in a down-and-out market and sell on a wave of prosperity created by city politics and finances...

...Some slight indication of the line to be followed was given a year or so ago by President Hedley himself, who had the happy inspiration of telling the commuting public that conditions on his line, if unfavorable to reading, were peculiarly propitious to concentrated thought...

...The value of farm life to the average working-man is so obvious that if it were ever realized, government would hasten to safeguard and promote it...

...Naturally, modern literature, especially in English, preempts Father McFhinn's attention, though he has a word to say for the frankness, not always friendly, with which the ordained ministers of the Church are handled by such European Catholic geniuses as Dante or Manzoni...

...but they would really be still morei admirable if they remembered that their virtue gains in charm from being strictly dissociated from wrath about others...

...But smoke a cigarette...

...We note that later in the day upon which Mr...

...It is rather remarkable, and we believe a detailed inquiry would bear out the fact, that malignant and acrid criticism of priests is likelier to be found in continental fiction of the meaner sort than among those who have felt the need of walking warily upon unfamiliar ground...

...and that the cigarette in question is kind enough to subsidize one for heralding it abroad...

...A problem so complex must, however, be solved on the basis of adequate statistical data, which have not as yet been formulated...

...But in doing so they will at the same time renounce the opportunity to give their party a reason for existence...

...But does this relation prevail ? Professor Reed, of the University of Michigan, professe4 doubt discreetly by saying that the smaller cities would inevitably find difficulty in getting expert budgeting...

...The recent session of the Commonwealth Conference, at Iowa City, Iowa, was taken up largely with detailed discussions of many aspects of this question...

...It will take the efforts of many Catholic novelists in England and America to take the anchylosis of penal days from his human values, and to set him in the true place as a humanizing agent in an arid world which Mr...

...and it would seem that certain Democrats are going in for it with a thoroughness resembling that which the older English comedy satirized so pertinently...

...Edgar Lee Masters has most incisively identified in his unforgettable epitaph upon Father MoUoy of Spoon River...

...FAR more noticeable, indeed, than the) occasional uncharity of our novelists, generally traceable to suppressed bigotry, are the tributes to human worth and kindness which experience has forced upon the writer's artistic conscience...

...But there is little malignancy in the drawing...

...Going over the list of its business men and industrial organizers, it sees in them the stuff of the old "Virginian dynasty" and proudly wonders why it should refrain from telling the nation as much...

...It would be queer, surely, if everybody had been talking of independence all this time without knowing what the topic of conversation really was...

...And yet, at bottom, neither natural law nor Church teaching has ever given the slightest indication that feminine friendliness for a Lucky Strike is burdened with evil...

...We shall register only mild surprise at seeing it extended...

...History even makes clear that Democracy had just such a standard-bearer in Mr...

...The man's attempt to revive that Rabelaisian power which is latent in the Gallic soul proved destructive of a good many shams, even if it sometimes shocked a host of the righteous...

...It may be said in extenuation of the hideous offense that the Laetare Medal, designed to honor signal Catholic achievement made by a good Catholic, is expressly reserved for lay people...

...To a lesser extent, the establishment of financially "free" cities has been advocated throughout the country...

...But whatever else Daudet may be, he is certainly not from Tarascon...

...DAUDET went very wrong trying to wage a pitched battle against ecclesiastical opposition...

...We fear, however, that the reserve energies of the South are ready to sacrifice this in order to make their point about the Catholic and, to a lesser extent, the anti-prohibitionist...