Week by Week
372 THE COMMONWEAL August I4, I929 such things. The tide has risen steadily against capital punishment, and the movement for prison reform has been endorsed by millions. It is widely...
...As matters stand, the United States is entitled to fifteen cruisers, Great Britain being just about that many ahead...
...And that is the best answer anyone could make...
...that owners be required to keep available in this country data on stability...
...Most of the moralists who rose to this question replied that the solution of social and political problems, even in so far as they envisage religion, may be attempted in "various fashions" none 374 THE COMMONWEAL August I4, I929 of which deserves unique approval as being "doctrinal...
...From London to Bristol danced the Honorable Kemp...
...Picture of a little boy riding over the planets, riding over the stars, riding over the moon, with his money in his handkerchief, his ticket in his blouse pocket, and nobody with him...
...and when he joins hands with his fellows, it may mean eventually something akin to a unification of investments...
...That there are difficulties ahead no one will deny, but the aid of the government has been pledged and it would seem that national economic policy favors an extension of the "production cycle" theory to the business of raising crops and beeves...
...If the questions were not entirely technical, it should be remembered that Mr...
...For instance, it is advised that ship's officers obtain data on how to effect pumping out of ballast tanks...
...MOREspecifically, Mr...
...One may add, however, that a profound respect for truth (even at the expense of oldfashioned double-barrel-shotgun propaganda habits) seems an excellent adjunct recipe...
...You may force him into a padded cell, you may deny him water and food...
...The thought suggests itself that, granted the modern attitude toward crime and its perpetrator, the most promising remedial agency is one that is hardly tried...
...ENDURANCE HEROES DLENTY of broken records these days testify to the continued virility of the race...
...Indeed we think it a good deal more remarkable that two men should have been willing to confine themselves within the cramped quarters of a plane for three weeks than that the plane should have been able to stay aloft that length of time...
...Kemp's nine-days' morris, now, has been held in affectionate memory by Englishmen for 3oo years...
...It will not make for a more civilized Virginia if we crystallize here a social order pyramided on a peasantry without hope...
...The week before it was delivered, every word of it was carefully edited by James Francis Burke, a Catholic, and counsel of the Republican National Committee...
...They add nothing to our store of knowledge...
...that special attention be paid to the water-tightness of hatchways...
...Ford...
...After all, machines are built without nerves and sensibilities...
...Without anybody with him...
...He is quite sure that she "likes him well enough," but notices that she kisses him hurriedly, when at all, and that she never worries when he is sick...
...If there were such a thing as a religious order devoted to the conduct of a prison, we should possess the only means for testing out theories that seems to be within reach...
...From Albany to Boston...
...Inferentially "the good of the party" was an end she placed above means which she herself questioned, and like a good politician she said what she was expected and urged to say...
...Decidedly Republican campaign leaders, who were so vociferous in denying their responsibility for Mrs...
...For more than a year it has been known, through factory tests, that barring accidents and bad judgment on the part of the pilots, airplanes could remain aloft the better part of a month...
...There is nothing wiser in the Epistles, and we propose it as a motto for every species of religious journalism...
...In truth of every sort we have been told to find our liberty...
...The press is truly our agency for the expression of public opinion...
...And except Father Feeney's final thought in the station: "Distances, distances were running through my mind...
...Of course Mr...
...The first hysterion the cal charges of cowardice and disobediVestris ence on the part of the Negro seamen and stokers have been declared falsem "There was no lack of order among the crew or any particular section of the crew...
...INTENTIONALLY or otherwise, the series of articles by Mrs...
...But until public opinion in England and America insists upon their recognition, and their incorporation in maritime law, the last word on that ill-fated ship will not have been written...
...and most of us begin to register some progress in the spiritual order not when we remind ourselves of what we have not done, but when we enumerate hte sores of which we have been healed...
...Or Mr...
...LASTyear Mr...
...For the space of a year or two we might even remember their names...
...and in a subsequent reply to complaints made by Commander Paul McNutt of the American Legion, Mr...
...It is not the Child...
...It pampers a group of writers who are both singularly vapid and grotesquely sentimental...
...operatives...
...If there be a Catholic philosophy of the will which asserts that diseases of volition--madness left apart--cannot be healed, we have failed to learn of it...
...On the other hand, agricultural co6peration cannot be merely a form of collective bargaining over and August i4, i929 T H E C O M M O N W E A L 373 against a public with hostile interests...
...Stratton, probably, would have something to say about endowments, a subject particularly abhorrent to Mr...
...It is to be feared, however, that so good a book may lead to quite false impressions of recent Teutonic fiction...
...Outside of this small excitement, endurance flights are a dreary and vain business...
...Rethe Faithful cently Les Lettres, a bustling Paris review, conducted one having for its theme "la crise des 61ites...
...Wright is "without a theory...
...Of the nine causes contributing to the disaster, the most important were overloading, and the "tender" condition of the vessel...
...He has even heard about the Mother of God, but expresses the tentative conviction that "that's mostly confined to the larger cities...
...They had no records to break, and no businesses to promote, nothing to gain and everything to lose...
...But it recognizes that his position was made difficult by the orders which the Lamport and Holt Company had issued to all its masters...
...and not the less a sermon because it is cast in the form of something very different...
...There is work for an intelligent press to do in Virginia so long as we have the spectacle of a proud city like Staunton permitting its public library to perish for want of appropriations, but finding money in abundance for a new country club...
...We cannot find the counterpart of Kemp in marathon dancers who shuffle fifty miles around a room, or endurance fliers who circle above a landing field until they have covered a distance equal to the circumference of the earth, and are very well paid for doing it...
...But an order from the White House on July z 5 stopped work on three ships authorized by Congress...
...After considering, in case of mishap, the actual peril of his passengers, the Captain's instructions were "to judge whether he be justified in not fighting his own way to the port unaided...
...Thus equality would be achieved by time...
...Remarque is certainly the genuine article, and his novel is as sincerely an evocation of the Feldgrau point of view as Dorgeles's Croix de Bois was a four-square expression of the French mood in war...
...We have remembered him partly, it is true, because he wrote an entrancing account of the trip...
...Captain Carey, to the gratification of Master Mariners who have insisted from the first that he was being criticized unduly, has been largely exonerated...
...Co6perative movements have always resembled trades unions--that is, they have banded together groups raising the same product or serving the same public...
...He was As Mr...
...Kemp was gomg somewhereDthat was the fundamental purpose without which the fact that he danced a morris would be of no point or interest...
...Mabel Walker Willebrandt now current in the New York Times is someA Martyr what in the nature of an apologia pro to Party vita sua...
...When the farmer succeeds in getting better returns on his acreage, he will perforce be exacting a heavier toll from the consumer but will also be in the market for increased amounts of industrial products...
...376 T H E C O M M O N W E A L August I4, I929 THE physician who cannot heal himself, the lawyer who is sued for breach of promise, the pedagogue whose own olive-branches resist prunThe ing, the engineer whose own cellar fills Failure with watermthese are the best parallels of Philo which mere reality yields to the writer of detective stories who, when actually put to it, cannot detect...
...The participants would be going somewhere, and the winners would get somewhere...
...These reports embody the lessons of the Vestris...
...From Albany to London...
...The new plan, however, proposes something that is a cross between an industrial "merger" and the American Federation of Labor...
...There is Alain Gerbault, for instance, who quit his tennis to sail a thirty-five-ton boat around the world, and was five years at the job...
...And it is always a new wonder to us when men give proof that in this respect they may be as good as machines over a long period...
...Wright can turn philosopher and say, "These, at least, are my public...
...For instance, we talk about "responsibility" one way and act another...
...It is a curious fact that, in the interim, the relation between religion and crime seems to have got sadly tangled...
...Edison, embarrassed with an abunThe Crown dance of talent, or at least better Prince of satisfied with the results than he was Science with the group of college men whom he examined on another famous occasion, has decided to award four scholarships instead of one...
...But the point is that if he had danced on a ballroom floor he would have had no account to write...
...He has made excursions into theology and philosophy more than once, and his successor, presumably, must have the qualities which will permit him to follow Mr...
...Eleven years old...
...But we have had notice recently of adventurers who belong to an order much nobler than this, and even more firmly grounded in antiquity...
...The court indulged in no overstatement in declaring these instructions to be "highly undesirable...
...August I4, 1929 T H E C O M M O N W E A L 375 Willebrandt as a martyr to her party is a novel picture indeed to her countrymen, who had been taught to regard her as a particular trial and tribulation to the Republican National Committee...
...If marathon dances were conducted between Quebec and Montreal, or up the slopes of the Matterhorn, we might all of us take an interest...
...On the other hand Mrs...
...THE court set up by the British Board of Trade to investigate the sinking of the Vestris has come to substantially the same conclusions as the Last Word American examiners...
...Cases may arise in which, for the sake of remedying a specific evil, ecclesiastical authority may exact obedience to a command...
...It is to be feared, however, that no wholly satisfactory answer to the question was reached...
...If the British feel that they can accept it, the prospects for disarmament progress are excellent...
...They are not adventurous...
...For "the inside of prohibition," her announced subject, has been to a remarkable extent for the past eight years, the figure of the former United States Assistant Attorney-General, and any justification of departmental workings must obviously be a justification of her own course...
...Faith starts, as Newman declared, with the sense of sin...
...They get nowhere...
...THE French are very fond of the "enquete,^" " which is a kind of round-robin sent by an editor to diverse persons asking for their opinion regardUnionizing ing a topic of alleged importance...
...But why is it not more widely noted that the life which Christ gives is also supremely, miraculously curative of the evil mind and heart...
...For though crime may be partly a disease, it is certainly not a physical disease...
...Louis I. Jaffe, editor of the Norfolk Virginia-Pilot, received a Pulitzer prize for an editorial of considerable merit...
...In all truth, our contemporary treatment of crime is a blend of modern theories and psychology with genuine, almost primitive fears and outmoded methods...
...Refueling in flight was the only problem...
...Good sportsmanship dictated" that she should allow the Committee to stand from under while she bore the avalanche of recriminations rolled down on her by Democrats and Republicans alike...
...No man practising a profession is infallible, not even an engineer...
...We wonder which member of Mr...
...THE extraordinary business of finding Mr...
...He is well cared for by the stepmother he is on his way to join...
...THE court's recommendations will open the eyes of landlubbers...
...More directly they are comparable to the marathon dances which were receiving, only a few years back, quite as much publicity...
...Ford...
...Yet how different their advice would be...
...Ah, well, when the tide of unkind comment widens to a sea, Mr...
...Who does not recall the barrels of ink and beakers of wrath which were devoted, half a century ago, to the question as to whether the classic writers are spiritually harmful...
...After reaching the West Indies, Herr Romer ran into the winter's worst hurricane and was lost...
...It was no great distance, perhaps...
...It is impossible, as Secretary Hyde declared in his address, "to merge 6,ooo,ooo farms," and nobody would dream of doing so...
...that all ocean-going ships be equipped with wireless and a competent operator...
...IN FRANCE most of the difficulty has a political cast...
...372 THE COMMONWEAL August I4, I929 such things...
...But infallible is precisely what Mr...
...The pending international conference on navies is now so much to the fore that the President Grooming evidently thought it best to lay his cards the Military flat and uncover the trump ace, which was nothing less than the mating of parity and reduction...
...and the spectacle of a great city like Norfolk boasting i2,5oo automobiles with an estimated outlay of $5,ooo for gasoline alone, but unable, after ten years of effort, to accumulate a beggarly $2o0,000 for the building of the first unit of a long-planned museum of art...
...But you cannot either destroy his conviction that these actions are unjust, or please the public conscience with reports about them...
...And Mr...
...The court finds fault with his attempt to lower boats on the weather side of the ship, and with his delay in calling for help...
...and the more it turns the whole of its attention from the instruments of the liberal and humane ideal to fix it on the mere mechanics of civilization, the more ground are the mind and soul of the people inevitably destined to lose...
...Whatever may be said of Captain Carey, he was much closer to the ethics of the sea than the shipowners who had ordered him, however delicately, to take a chance...
...All these stunts are as much a test of human patience, fortitude and compatibility as they are of the strength of machines...
...These are heroes...
...The norm of harmony is, fundamentally, plain ordinary Christian good-will...
...Germany, land of poets and scholars, has been favored with only a few novelists of the first rank...
...The farmer is a small capitalist...
...The talk is simple and the facts it unearths are simple, too...
...It is bruited on all sides that religion is the "eternal barrier against the social deluge," and one concedes that there is an element of rightness in the claim...
...Meanwhile, one waits interestedly to see if the Federal Farm Board will find it possible to devise any really adequate machinery for carrying out the proposed change...
...It is unhappily likely, therefore, that Mr...
...Willard Huntington Wright is just now opening derisive letters from many who do not know him personally, and listening to jeers from many who do...
...but it was a journey...
...Many people imagine that the fatherland is peopled by men and women of exceptional judgment and discriminating taste...
...No protectory would dream of interfering in his case...
...The ordinary organization of the Church makes no provision for it, and the prison chaplain is the solitary rival of a thousand influences over most of which he can exercise no control...
...These remarks are worthy in themselves, but may always be expected at a press convention, and are treated by the business managers to the same sort of hearing that hardened sinners bestow upon the Sunday sermon...
...Meanwhile, Mr...
...So deeply does Father Feeney drive in this casually encountered little tragedy that we read the exquisite paragraph in which he tells the child something about God's love for him with almost a prayer of relief...
...S. S. Van Dine's great detective, Philo Vance, has always been...
...A bank messenger was shot, a payroll stolen, a car full of thugs seen escaping, a battered hat left behind...
...His ability to succeed in this will always be considered as a matter of high recommendation for him as a master...
...It is widely felt that the criminal is less an offender than a slave to ingrained tendencies, and the evidence substantiating this feeling is impressive...
...So recondite is his knowledge, so powerful his ratiocination, that he has reconstructed the most baffling crimes and out-thought the most gifted criminals to be found anywhere on paper in our time...
...THE world-wide success of Erich Remarque's war novel has naturally focused more attention upon current German literature...
...That body is apparently far from corpulent already...
...He does not take his punishment as a rapscallion of I8oo took his...
...He'll see the point of it...
...Except, perhaps, the sad wonder in our own minds, renewed by the vividly familiar little figure Father Feeney has brought before us, as to what is to be done for those who are walled in by well-being from salvation...
...Willebrandt's statements at that unusually ticklish moment when she was making them, have, in the light of these very interesting current revelations of hers, a great amount of explaining to do...
...That is the rble, nevertheless, which she claims in regard to her notorious speech to Methodists in Ohio...
...I must write to Ripley...
...On the other hand, the degree to which it indubitably is a volitional offense demonstrates that, relatively at least, it is capable of spiritual treatment...
...If he makes it, it will be a world's record...
...LOVEand religion--these are all that has been left out of the scheme of life of Evans Ingram Towne, and all the other children like him...
...In the history of the world, very few men have known what to do with $I,OOO,OOO, or its equivalent...
...Both of these men could qualify as wise counselors...
...The citizen with a sense of responsibility for what the community accomplishes immediately joins the party of the oppressed...
...At least one man died of over-indignation, and several others might have traced their eventual apoplexies to this momentous debate...
...Jaffe advised his felloweditors to get rid of "self-imposed inhibitions" and, upon occasion, to use pens "dipped in vitriol...
...which are characterized, similarly, by a great expenditure of effort, and no adventure, no accomplishment...
...The tide has risen steadily against capital punishment, and the movement for prison reform has been endorsed by millions...
...Their motives are a secret between themselves and their own souls...
...He has been taught that Christmas Day is important, but knows, of course, that it isn't as important as the Fourth of July...
...Edison is not exclusively a mechanic...
...Hoover has busily and courageously professed disarmament...
...But since all of us are human beings, the dust which floats in the region between essentials and their practical realization is forever getting into our eyes...
...As it was, he could hang his story on the pleasures of the countryside, the conditions of the road, the customs of the villages through which he passed, the girls who came out from the fields to dance beside him for a mile or two, the landlords who entertained him at night, and the quality of the beef and ale that was everywhere set before him...
...No children's judge would cite any deficiency in his environment...
...But our editor went on to venture some comments upon the soul of Virginia which seem unusually lucid divinations of the new industrial South...
...The idea is to be considered an offer, a suggestion, rather than a program already established...
...but these are rare, and Pope Leo's demand for justice to labor is the best known among recent instances...
...From statements made by the candidates themselves, we judge that they made a better showing in the "general" examination than in the scientific...
...S. S. Van Dine...
...The maxim of Saint Paul--that there be unity in essential matters, freedom in realms that are open to inquiry, and charity always--abides, of course, as solidly as ever...
...For instance, to the question "If you were to inherit $I,OOO,OOO within the next year, what would you do with it...
...Precautions are urged which those of us who take a sea voyage only occasionally had supposed were adopted at least a century ago...
...History, indeed, tells us not a little of the magnificent limits to which saints went in their dealings with malefactors...
...That's a long journey...
...Condemn a man to prison, therefore, and you have locked up an individual who, though conscious of his evil deeds and moral outlawry, has nevertheless been bred in a certain tradition of justice...
...Jaffe...
...Now we go the whole way with the parole system, and then again we indulge in a veritable orgy of suppression...
...And though each represents a peculiarly ironic defeat, none is a sufficiently ironic parallel...
...From Albany to Paris...
...The simple truth," she writes, "is that over my written protest I was urged by the Republican National Committee in two telegrams (which now repose in my files) to make that speech...
...As a matter of fact, the "great reading public" there is probably less judicious than our own...
...Jaffe noticed the extant debate between those who believe that Dixie can "retain the distinctive graces of its traditional culture," and those who foresee an "inevitable capitulation to the gospel of American arrivism...
...Those are facts worthy of attention, certainly...
...All alone...
...IF THE idea propounded at Baton Rouge, Louisiana, can be effectively harnessed to reality, more than 2,ooo,ooo farmers and stock raisers Associated will stand shoulder to shoulder in the National Chamber of Agricultural CoFarmers, Inc...
...Hoover declared that common sense suggested that naval parity might be reached by agreement rather than by resigned competition...
...scious of the circumstance that here was writing by a group rather than writing done in the true spirit of Germany...
...Meanwhile, however, the President seems to have abandoned the notion, also made public, of reducing the size of the army...
...Several contributors to the "enquire" remarked that Christian democracy had been condemned even as royalism of the Action Fran~aise stamp had been condemned...
...that the assistance of consular authorities be invoked to observe and report the draughts of vessels sailing from foreign ports...
...But though the press must concede that the tide is running pretty stiffly against tradition, though it "must echo the cry for more industries" and all other things which make for industrial progress, the "great human objectives" must not be lost sight of...
...and often their work, peculiarly lyrical in quality, has won no great salvos of applause...
...How, then, is a method of partizan unification to be devised...
...Wright is, of course, the social and legal entity who encases Mr...
...Edison in these fields as well as in science...
...Jaf~e thereupon invited to address the Press Looks Association of his state, and gave them Around what was really a still better editorial...
...We notice an advertisement for an utterly mediocre book, recommended because "I85,ooo copies have been sold in Germany...
...that the lifeboat list for passengers and crew should be prepared before sailing...
...It cannot be stamped out by pills or surgery...
...and if they have been chosen at random from the show of life in the South, they may well be accepted as representative of the spiritual rhythm of the nation as a whole...
...and the margin of failure granted him in the nature of things may, if his star is baneful, cover his own case instead of the case of one of his clients...
...Since then we have learned nothing from an endurance flight...
...The resultant organization would be like nothing else in history...
...It is almost as essential to be orthodox in etiquette as in anything else...
...It was an adventure...
...Miiller wrecked his boat on rocks off the Carolina coast, but slived himself by swimming seven miles to an island...
...After all, that is the moral in the parable of the illustrious Pharisee and the outlaw Publican...
...If the criminal is actually the menace and the scourge he appears to be, ought not the Christian effort to be orientated in his regard less with an idea of general prevention, much of which duplicates itself, and more in the sense of salvage and redemption...
...The antithesis beneficial-harmful is often injected into discussions where the more primary right-wrong is alone in place...
...Willebrandt as a writer is likely to create more consternation in Republican inner circles than she did as a speaker...
...Then it is time to get off the train, and that is all...
...It will not make for a happier Virginia if we build here an industrial order founded on pauper wages," says Mr...
...It is written, in fact, as a scenario for the gentleman who collects the truth-is-stranger-thanfiction incidents for the New York Evening Post...
...Edison's board of judges was best pleased by the answer ? Dr...
...and doubtless it would also help to give us unity and brotherly affection...
...Yet in our time we hear chiefly of the Church as a "preventive of crime...
...Stratton, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
...Nor can we forget Franz Romer and Paul Mtiller, the two Germans who separately rowed across the Atlantic Ocean within the past year...
...Evans Ingram Towne is not at all an obvious candidate for pity...
...and if the system continued to operate, the whole naval equipment of both countries would attain twin-like proportions by downward descent rather than upward evolution...
...less moving because it is guiltless of facile optimism and does not draw us on to an immediate confident solution...
...Six months ago the Question Mark demonstrated its solution...
...In fine, he has everything an eleven-year-old boy can want, except love and religion...
...It would seem that the hope is to delay the American cruiser-building program long enough to enable the British to drop vessels which will have grown obsolete...
...The Reverend Leonard Feeney, S.J., recalls, for this gentleman's hypothetical benefit, a recent train journey between Albany and Boston, and the little boy he talked to en route--"Evans Ingram Towne, eleven years old, his travel money folded in his handkerchief, his ticket in his blouse pocket, and a nervous little grin on his face...
...WEEK BY WEEK URING the past weeks, Mr...
...During recent How years we have read the Manns and Many Feuchtwangers of the new Reich, conSold...
...He'll put it in one of his 'believeit-or-not' cartoons...
...IN THE current issue of America there is to be found as moving a sermon on the beauty and desperate helplessness of childhood as has ever Is It Well been broadcast by a welfare league or with the sounded from a pulpit...
...A few weeks ago almost every city in the country had its endurance plane in the air, and pilots who failed to stay up at least a week had no chance of mention in the newspapers...
...The pilots have simply been doing what everyone has known could be done...
...Wright has failed, in his capacity as Honorary Police Commissioner of Bradley Beach, to identify and trace the perpetrators of a quite ordinary murder in his territory...
...Under existing circumstances, however, this treatment cannot be effectively given...
...From Albany to Paradise...
...All this may usefully be borne in mind, lest we submissively accept from Berlin what we have already begun to discourage and discountenance among ourselves...
...Edison's successor is over with, for the present at least, and Mr...
...Similarly, it will be recalled, the American investigators recommended that all sea connections be located so as to permit inspection and repair while at sea...
...There is work for an independent press in a commonwealth which has added in a single biennium $2oo,ooo,ooo worth of new industries, but which still numbers more than seventy thousand native adult white people who can neither read nor write, and a population of Negro illiterates several times larger...
...most replied that they would seek wise counsel...
...After all, the pragmatists are probably the most violent and insistent dogmatists of all--excepting only in those realms where dogma is truly essential...
...Jaffe traced a program concerned with actual details and gave his writing brethren several clear targets to aim at...
...and since the review is Catholic, the argument gradually boiled itself down to a question which may be phrased as, "How can people who profess the same faith unite rather than fight ?" Many interesting things were said, and we were particularly impressed with an admirably frank statement by the Abb6 Jacques Leclerq, to whom it seemed that many things people are cutting one another's throats over belong to very ancient history...
...New endurance flights are like the six-day bicycle races, only, since they lack the stimulus of immediate competition, somewhat less thrilling...
Vol. 10 • August 1929 • No. 15
