Week by Week

...How is one to reconcile Machiavelli's undoubted respect for morality with his sanction of any means in diplomatic action...

...Tragedy came to O'Higgins, however, and it is well to believe that the Irish people will see the difference between the murder of a properly elected sovereign official, who was also a singularly upright man, and ordinary killings for the sake of settling private grievances...

...But in so far as the world's public opinion still has a conscience, it is eager to see him throw off the suspicion which has fallen upon his followers, if only to bring the day of complete Irish independence nearer than it is now...

...Such a vision of power seems to have overwhelmed Machiavelli, just as—in a different age—the first splendor of the Baconian doctrine bowled over men like Alexander Pope...

...A note of confidence, struck not merely by the outstanding addresses but also in the reports of those charged with the difficult task of organization or of particular departmental development, may be said to have found the proper soundingboard in Detroit's model Catholic school system...

...Upon what basis shall an agreement to limit their size and number be made...

...So long as public opinion everywhere insists that these general goals must remain in sight, attempts to regulate technical problems are not likely to go wholly astray, however ungrateful this endless discussion of tonnage and ballistics may be to prophets of peace...

...And when a layman goes still further, when he actually presumes to know that "Rome is on his side" and that, therefore...

...r OUR hundred years of reading Niccolo Machiavelli have not made his fundamental character easier to understand...

...Chesterton would call his "spurs...

...they must be great enough to follow him in frankness, in sympathy, and in intelligent appreciation of that Faith...

...Tilney was traveling in the wrong country...

...1 HERE is no doubting public generosity...

...It was always a pleasure to see him, though one had sometimes to forget a preliminary reading of the text...

...NEWS from Louisiana's flooded Acadia is distressing in the extreme...

...We hope to be able to present at some future time one or two of the significant addresses delivered before the convention...

...Relief as dispensed through the Red Cross has saved lives and kept up confidence, but it is really an open question whether the situation is not too vast and too complex for any single agency to handle with genuine effectiveness...

...We have all the respect in the world for the Red Cross, but very many people expect it to function automatically and are prone to forget that it needs constant assistance...

...Even better, however, would be a reminder from every pulpit that the benefactions which Christ urged on behalf of the needy are ours to make liberally now...

...Of course one grants there is plenty of room for brain improvement...

...Drew himself may be said to have remained faithful to that ideal...

...It may also be that Dr...

...DURING the first days of July, Detroit was the scene of two important Catholic conferences...

...Fertile cotton and sugar lands are still under water while the Mississippi slowly returns to its normal level...

...During the weeks when the river was pounding through shattered levees, the struggle against calamity bore an heroic aspect and all the country was anxious to help...

...The renaissance suddenly revived the idea of Rome magnificent and powerful, and the splendid development of architecture and painting was matched with a new manifestation of what the will can accomplish in the domain of government...

...C. F. Wills, of the Chicago Federated News, who also found himself in office when the meeting came to a close...

...The best evolutionist will, of course, spoil this picture by insisting that what can be predicted of man cannot be prophesied of animals—a most important point, to which we again draw their attention...

...They should be grateful for the lead he has given them...

...If the act can be traced to any prominent members of the Republican Party, it is to be hoped that this organization itself will take steps to see that full justice is done...

...During the mediaeval period, the Eternal City was hardly respected for what it had been physically in the past...

...Indeed, by virtue of the faculty of logic which now distinguishes man, it is permissible to arrive at the inference that all the animals are merely "retarded" and intermediate...

...As a matter of fact the Governor did precisely what Catholic custom recommends a man should do under circumstances like those which arose during the Marshall controversy...

...his pagan habits with his Christian death...

...if the development of the human brain is the cause of man's progress and the sole criterion of his personality— then there is no good reason why we can refuse to believe that the brain of the simian is also merely "an intermediate stage in the ultimate development of the master organ of life...

...O'Higgins was thinking, of course, about the tragic part which murder has always played in Celtic politics and imagined he could stamp it out once and for all by repression...

...The Commonweal endorses the Governor's record as chief executive of the state of New York, and believes that his knowledge of the needs and best aspirations of urban democracy renders him the one outstanding victor over the boss rule of the sort which now threatens to destroy good popular government in the United States...

...Nicholas Murray Butler, surrounded by London's most august citizens, was pronouncing genius "extinct," Columbia University's chief professor of neurology, having completed a comparative study of human brains, arose to declare that the cerebrum of man as he now is represents only "an intermediate stage in the ultimate development of the master organ of life...

...Governor Smith's orthodoxy is suspect, he comes perilously near losing what Mr...

...It is also quite legitimate to oppose the "wetness" of Governor Smith, as various Catholic publicists are now doing...

...If the brains of human and simian fossils testify to a common ancestry...

...As minister of justice, O'Higgins had obviously made serious mistakes in policy...

...Penniless" is a word which seems to describe almost every person in the little groups which are picking their way back home as fast as possible...

...It may even be that the Man o' Wars of a distant generation will insist upon being taken to the museum for a look at Rosa Bonheur's canvases in order that they may be fortified by a knowledge of what their glorious though benighted ancestors were like, and may return to the race-track comforted by the plaudits of doggish spectators, enabled, by the progress of evolution, to follow the drama of sport in the daily press...

...De Valera will suppose for a moment that he had any knowledge of the plot or would have spared himself to prevent it...

...By a curious coincidence his death was almost simultaneous with the anniversary of Shay's rebellion...

...One does not like to comment hastily upon his findings, prior to their analysis by other competent scientists...

...It needs to be stimulated and made effective, however, through an appealing organization...

...People carried off precious marbles to Normandy and England, and tore down whole streets for any reason or none...

...The annual meeting of the National Catholic Educational Association was exceptionally well attended and called forth much excellent comment...

...I F HE had been in the habit of going to the theatre, he might have realized that the unpopularity of Sean O'Casey's plays is due precisely to the circumstance that they tell the truth, mordantly, even bitterly, but squarely...

...What reason can there be, one wonders, for toiling hard to win the applause of posterity if our descendants will expand their brains so far as to make our most titanic efforts seem futile nursery exercises...

...The cautious glancer about will find many occasions upon which the comment of Robert Burns upon Commissary Goldie's brains will seem pertinent : "Lord, to account who dares Thee call, Or e'er dispute Thy pleasure, Else why within so thick a wall, Enclose so poor a treasure...

...Certainly one may believe that from President Coolidge in his sylvan retreat there should have come some word of appeal and comment that might have injected fervor into a public interest apparently flagging...

...We let the centenary pass on, summon to memory his doctrine that "use anything to win—^but win" is good political ethics, and shudder to think how frightful Italy must have been when such a man was permitted to write and carry on diplomatic manoeuvers...

...If that be true, imagine the glorious future when the steeds entered in the Kentucky Derby will gallop or trot with a consciousness that there was once a Marathon...

...After capital ships, which are not at present under discussion, the cruiser is the vessel upon which naval commanders place the greatest value...

...We feel that those who oppose his candidacy ought to meet him on this ground, if they are at all interested in civic welfare...

...During and afer the close of the war, Americans carried on a work of relief among the children of France and Belgium, the destitute of Germany and Austria, the starving crowds of Russia, which really seems to have stirred everybody and to have accomplished, by dint of generous cooperation, a task of rescue which otherwise would have baffled workers...

...As an interpreter of gentlemen—and every character he ever played soon turned into a gentleman—he carried on with a verve, a poise and a distinction which no one else rivaled...

...Fortunately enough, both the personal declaration of Sir Austen Chamberlain and the calling of a second plenary session brought to the fore once again the vitally important general purpose of the conference —to maintain the status quo established by the Washington treaty, to forestall lavish expenditure of public moneys in unlimited competitive building, and to go another step in the direction of real disarmament...

...Butler was merely noticing a temporary halt in the evolutionary proceedings—a kind of interregnum, as it were...

...A. QUIZZICAL person might derive a certain hot weather comfort from the circumstances that while Dr...

...In common with most other organs similar to it in character...

...but they did find Roman law and rewrite it into that admirable code which has governed the administration of ecclesiastical —and other—justice ever since...

...John Drew's last play revived the best traditions of the theatre in which he first earned public approval...

...Today, with the period of greatest danger past, public interest in Louisiana's welfare seems also to be waning...

...The best answer, perhaps, is that like so many other people of his time he had a very great deal of respect for power in itself...

...But it is quite as wrong to make Governor Smith's religion the crucial point inside the Church as out of it...

...Emerson must have been wrong when he supposed that the very fact that the work of people like Martial and Kepler had been preserved testified to their having minds "above the average...

...J. M. Larkin, assistant to the president of the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, talked excellently of company organization and welfare work, and was rewarded with election to the vice-presidency...

...Tilney overlooked one important aspect of the matter...

...But possibly the greatest reason why one hates so to think of his having gone is simply the value of his example...

...He will be missed because of the incomparable urbanity of his presence, the rich fulness of a singularly expressive voice, and the art by which he could make sophistication natural to us all...

...The proper test of a theatre is always the life it can place on the stage...

...When we find a Catholic editor saying, for instance, that the reply to Marshall ought to be disavowed because an Italian paper has termed it "dangerously liberal," and that Rome itself disapproved of that reply—because it hastened to declare that it was not interested in anybody's chances for the Presidency—we cannot but feel that venom and inconsistency have been oddly mingled by CathoHc drys...

...W E HAVE said more than once that, partisans like Senator Heflin and others to the contrary notwithstanding, Governor Smith's religion is not a matter at all affecting his presidential candidacy...

...An earnest supporter of the Eighteenth Amendment can certainly be a true American, and also an orthodox member of the Church...

...What of it...

...Organized labor was ably defended by Mr...

...his personal uprightness in office, which scorned anything similar to what we should now term "graft," with his deliberate grovelling at the feet of the Medici for the chance of getting a berth...

...In some counties, say those who are in a position to make accurate estimates, fully three-fourths of the productive soil still looks like a forbidding marsh...

...The character of the district, moreover, is such that a majority of the farmers, tenants with large families to support, have absolutely no funds upon which to draw for relief...

...United States, Japanese and British answers to these questions differed vitally, the Japanese occupying a middle ground which, however, was strangely enough not a compromise between the other two...

...Writing recently in Blackfriars, he said: "Catholics in the United States are to be congratulated upon the possession of so fearless and lucid an exponent of their Faith...

...United States preference for large cruisers which are comparatively independent of naval bases and British insistence upon many small cruisers serviceable in wiping out privateers cannot easily be reconciled...

...Frederick Kenkel, long since inured to the difficulties and importance of sound social reform...

...It is to be congratulated upon the leadership of Mr...

...Houses and even towns: are encrusted with mud and slime, in which the sun breeds miasmas...

...But obviously so confident a prophecy as his ought to be weighed carefully before it is accepted...

...Perhaps Dr...

...1 HERE is a certain dramatic pertinence in the fact that Mr...

...No characteristic of the Italian heyday is more marked than its tendency to be impressed by Roman greatness rather than Roman law...

...Similarly, the fifth annual meeting of the Catholic Conference on Industrial Problems was entirely a success, bringing together as it did important representatives from both employers' and workers' groups...

...Nobody who knows Mr...

...IT STRIKES us that Dr...

...He did not presume to settle points in theology, but frankly and humbly referred them to a priest and a student of the subject whose authority was recognized by his ecclesiastical superiors...

...And yet a flood is not a thing that strikes and lets go...

...Perhaps it was exposed to a setback from which man escaped by some good chance, and is now about to make a startling leap forward...

...Their pictures of "peaceless Ireland" contrast strangely with the historical ideal of Irishmen...

...I F GOVERNOR SMITH'S religion should not be the issue (and certainly it should not be) then it is quite as wrong to make a point of his "laxity"—if such it be—as it is for some Protestants to make a point of his creed...

...Two things in connection with the murder of Kevin O'Higgins, Vice-President of the Irish Free State, are, in a sense, worse than that murder itself: the fact that it will be regarded by the world at large as a political assassination, and the possible fact that it may have been one...

...This comment, we believe, contains not only a doctrinal opinion of some importance but also a bit of homily not altogether unnecessary...

...He illustrated in his person all the good things that hard work can help an actor to become...

...It is time to begin thinking that perhaps we have a similar situation in floodstricken Louisiana...

...Such a one is entitled to feel that a man as indulgent toward the pre-prohibition universe as the Governor of New York has proved himself to be must be kept out of the White House at all costs...

...Since this eminently orthodox procedure does not seem to have satisfied the critics In question, it may be well to quote Father Bede Jarrett's comment on the Reply to Marshall, with the remark that this learned Dominican is regarded, for more than theoretical reasons, as one of the greatest living authorities on Catholic social teaching...

...Trelawny of the Wells was an example of that odd blend of sentiment and satire, naturalness and artificiality, in which the best days of Augustin Daly took delight...

...Tonnage is merely a quantitative term, and quality is a most important consideration when cruisers are the topic...

...The Conference is manifestly gaining in vitality and importance...

...If he had studied the history of that uprising carefully, he would have noticed that it bore considerable similarity to the Irish disturbances he put down by grim force, and that the best proof of the young United States government's strength was its tact in pardoning the seditious Shay and his comrades...

...and there was never a moment when Drew as an actor was seriously near being dead...