Wcek by Week
600 THE COMMONWEAL October I6, 1929 the rightness of the solution proposed in 1917 are banned, the time has come to ask why. What is the character of the propagandist forces which have so...
...What is the character of the propagandist forces which have so completely muzzled Washington that elected representatives will drink jovially in private but faint at the very mention of drink in public...
...Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, for instance, should result in applause, since the incident gave satisfaction to some people without harming anyone...
...SOME newspapers are again suggesting that the best proof which Great Britain could offer us of her friendship would be to surrender her naval Caribbean defenses in the West Indies...
...He must abide in the memory of his countrymen as one of several officials about whom it is almost literally true to say that they slaved themselves to death for a country abandoned in the hour of defeat by its one-time emperor...
...Indeed Bourdelle went quite far in his repudiation of the renaissance, which he asserted had "denationalized the French genius, expressed with so much originality in mediaeval art...
...Indeed, she was at this moment suing a Texas producer who had taken her from a successful vaudeville dance act on a large salary guarantee and then failed to make good...
...In several respects it is the plainest common sense, long so familiar to the central tradition of Christendom that it seems unbelievable that anybody could profess to having just hatched it out in profound meditation...
...Thus, in a manner characteristically modern, he welded observation and knowledge according to a formula which embodied firmly accepted principle...
...It is the little treatise on authority, and the little triumph of social optimism, that must engross our few remaining sentences...
...Opinion in their country has always held that armed strength is a unit--that the sum total of a nation's land and sea forces constitutes its real effectiveness against possible attack...
...It is only other people's authority that the Nation disallows---notably the old corporate authority "of the church, the home, the state...
...AS REMARKABLE an editorial as we have ever read is printed in the current issue of the Nation under the caption, Murder in a Maze...
...Such a development would have its considerable satisfactions for all of us--not alone those who are charges upon the county's hospitality...
...A book or magazine suppressed in Boston customarily enjoys increased sales, not only in the rest of the United States, but in Boston, too...
...A country bent on finding out the forces which have struggled to increase the fighting craft might well be a country interested in discerning whether a specific attempt to impose "morality" has itself been strictly moral...
...It is this: "We cannot build a prosperous citizenship on low wages...
...In both places they are wretchedly poor, in both they receive small return for labor, but on the farms, at least, they had a measure of independence...
...Herr Stresemann was the reason why the Deutsche Volkspartei existed...
...Good news was his announcement that the Committee will ask the clergy and the public to insist that agents present credentials bearing its seal of approval...
...MANIFESTLY influenced by old Greek and Assyrian art, he gave to many of his most ambitious works an archaic flavor which at times seems exotic...
...Here he was following the same urge to be "loyally French" which is noticeable in the music of Debussy...
...It was not, let us hastily explain, a technical idea...
...One cannot help feeling that Mr...
...With the prospect of the poorhouse deprived of its last horror, we should take gaily the various buffetings of fortune, look with a brighter eye upon our present circumstances, and with a good deal of serenity and cheer toward the future...
...the Future This, we think, is the attitude which all wards of the state might properly assume...
...But everyone seems to lose his sense of humor where Boston is concerned, except the censors...
...If the city slicker and the honest hayseed really have exchanged r61es, a quarter of the stories, half of the songs and practically all of the jokes of centuries will have to be rewritten...
...The technological speculations bound up with the rocket idea lend themselves to fanciful treatment, even though they are in essence specifically scientific...
...Or are they gentle Iambs whose candor is proof against the seductions of this world ? One good turn deserves another...
...It hardly deserves being analyzed in this way: "The cause of censorship is not psychic sickness but mental rigidity, a certain lack of plasticity and give and take, and a rather profound, and probably logical, distrust of life...
...October I6, I929 THE COMMONWEAL 6oi and in a country invariably ruled by a coalition government, he represented (in a sense originally implied by our own constitution) an industrialist group steadily interested in a practical point of view...
...One thing in its favor is that southern workers are much more hospitable toward the idea of organization than they were formerly...
...So near to home, we are all powerful, and if We should ever need the islands in the defense of the Panama Canal, we could take them without trouble...
...It is only through the latter, after all, October I6, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 603 that they can make a personal contact with the larger part of their public...
...One discerns the nature of his creative activity in an anecdote which many have enjoyed...
...Some Catholic magazines will deserve and receive much more respect when the principles which inform their pages are reflected in their business organizations, and the courtesy of their editors guides their solicitors...
...Nevertheless he was never an imitator and only occasionally an expressionist...
...According to Reverend Francis P. Le Buffe, S.J., chairman, "Perhaps the most encouraging feature is the realization on the part of Catholic publishers generally of what the Committee's work signifies for all in the field...
...Far from it...
...Psychiatrists will always find something wrong with the person who has done wrong...
...Addressing a Washington audience of Catholic women, Mr...
...Yes, I'm one of them, but you should never let us tell you what to do with these people...
...Gustav Stresemann was expected to retire from German public affairs at an early date, his sudden death nevertheless seriously afExponent of fects the political outlook of the Reich...
...WEEK BY WEEK R. RAMSAY MACDONALD has arrived and found a cordial welcome...
...He has something to say, and it is not the celebrated line...
...Along with the right of capital to protection goes the right of the laborer to protection plus the security of safety, of freedom to move and live and work in security, whether the moving and living and working are to the ends that you and I may wish or not...
...Then the trial is recounted, with indignant emphasis upon "the judge in his robes," "the jury of twelve men," and the endeavor of "the august state of New York" to establish premeditation...
...The fact was, however, that he had studied the folds in the kerchief which his attentive housemaid bound round her head...
...Critics declared that the coiffure of the Virgin in Bourdelle's famous statue was clearly copied from some Byzantine original...
...600 THE COMMONWEAL October I6, 1929 the rightness of the solution proposed in 1917 are banned, the time has come to ask why...
...and perhaps no modern sculpture is more faithful to architectural requirements than his famous bas reliefs at the theatre of the Champs-Elys&s or his Virgin and Child, which crowns One of the Vosges peaks...
...There are various philosophies of authority, including the negative philosophy of anarchy...
...This was no easy task in a country embittered by defeat and privation, easily startled by alleged new threats from the outside, anal torn between affection for an old r~gime and dissatisfaction with a new...
...He is a gentleman of old family...
...A young man and woman are bound no longer by fear of punishment here or hereafter and have not yet the necessary integrity themselves to make rules of conduct by which, in a society of individuals, they must live...
...should have less the atmosphere of a penal institution, and more the quality of a home...
...Of this sentiment the beneficiaries of the British Poor Laws seem to be aware, and we are glad they have asked for proof that it is not a hollow one...
...You and I may not care to be whizzed off toward the moon in Herr Fritz von Opel's "rocket plane," but apparently there are many appliOf[ for cants for ticketsEreturn or otherwise...
...Not an amusing scandal is that so many reputable journals should be sold by a shady, if high-powered technique, one point of which is to question the relig...
...The only people working for an honest living here are those that was born here...
...A truly modern attiThe Boston tude toward the proscription of an issue of Scribner's containing an instal...
...A NEW idea in religious teaching may safely be termed an experiment toward meeting the old request for more religion in the training of At the youth...
...Regarding the first a noted critic, M. Fosca, remarks that they "cling to the wall, and associate themselves organically with it...
...Dreams torment the conqueror...
...Though not himself an adept with the chisel, he conceived of all statuary as something to be developed out of basic stone...
...This should result in the elimination of one nuisance, and we hope that the Committee will find an equally effective way for getting rid of agents whose methods are questionable, however worthy their credentials may be...
...the linesman did not speak qua linesman...
...FAITH ON EASY TERMS T IS curiously typical of the nation's "spiritual condition" that the press notices of what was said on Sunday, September zg, should include remarks as disparate in character as those uttered by Mr...
...The Board of Censors there has been an invaluable aid to the publishing business in this country...
...Tennyson trusted that somehow good would be the final goal of ill, but as a truster, the Nation makes Tennyson look like an amateur...
...His wife, he said was "in the show business...
...MODERN French art has given rise to almost as much acrid debating as---to use a convenient example --has ebbed round the flexible tariff...
...A recent news bulletin issued by the Foreign Policy Association therefore properly raises a caution signal...
...He perceived that what he considered to be justice and enlightenment were often purchased at the cost of what he considered to be injustice and barbarity, but he did not therefore conclude that every instance of injustice and barbarity pointed inevitably to the victory of the forces of light...
...Why industry should have been desirable on those conditions is a question asked some time ago...
...Yet it is doubtful what advantages, real or theoDestiny retical, there could be for us in a disarmed Caribbean...
...Tradition of the purest sort is refleeted in his guiding phrase: "The spirit conceives in the material, the material surrenders to the spirit...
...not nothing"--which includes, naturally, the refraining from murder out of "fear of punishment here or hereafter...
...THE COMMONWEAL October z6, I929 Every considerable issue, social, psychological and political, finds it leading the doctrinaires in confident assertiveness...
...But at least they are doing something and not nothing...
...An art so thoroughly human may raise many questions but hardly deserves frightened accusations of decadence...
...The world knows this too well...
...Thus Dr...
...Bans ment of Mr...
...But all recent correspondence from the South indicates that the American Federation MONWEAL October I6, 1929 of Labor will have a hard struggle to get established there...
...It is the most potent means for discharging their 'group responsibility' by exercising the necessary vigilance in eradicating abuses and improving conditions so as to obtain the circulation without which Catholic periodicals cannot hope to progress...
...For it does not suffice that rocket propulsion seems to be, eventually at least, a safe and economical method of travel across the Channel or Lake Erie...
...The And if the work of Emile Antoine Successor Bourdelle, the sculptor whose death has of Rodin just been reported, be accepted as fairly representative, attention is directed to fundamental conceptions likely to remain topics for heated discussion...
...From the point of view of the author and publishers, it was rather a happy turn of attairs...
...It is through organization...
...He spoke as a born and bred Manhattanite, with that rather heavy touch of honesty and literalness which, let the hinterland sophisticate believe it or not, distinguishes all such...
...It might, this 01d-fashioned authority, have prevented the Peacox tragedy, but no matter...
...The hostility of southern manufacturers to organized labor has not, we are told, been decreased by recent events, although for a while the influence of the radical National Textile Workers' Union made it appear that the overtures of the United Textile Workers, attached to the American Federation of Labor would be welcomed...
...We confess to a certain envy of the delight that must be theirs in the excitement which they can stir up all over the United States...
...And they had more livable surroundings...
...He might have added that there is no possibility of developing a civilization where large numbers of men are required to work sixty or seventy hours every week in order to make a scanty living...
...Thomas F. Woodlock and Dr...
...and the fact that there are truths in all genuine religions was relatively familiar even to the Doctors of the Church...
...Hicks's plan that alienists for both the defense and the state examine the defendant jointly and agree on their findings or "be able to give the court a mighty good reason for disagreeing," has elements of common sense which are lacking in the present method...
...When the first rocket planes come tumbling from incredible heights, mankind will behold another vivid commentary upon its abiding inward unrest...
...And what is this "humanism...
...Meanwhile Dr...
...We need to remember the flurry caused by news of a "secret treaty" between England and France and to bear in mind what constructions may be put upon premature "harmony" pronouncements by public opinion on the continent...
...There is," a bulletin declares, "no attempt to reduce religious interpretation to a common level of agreement...
...In the Caribbean, for instance, there is the threat of raiders to be considered...
...He averred that he had started the brand-new "humanism" movement because of "a sense of dissatisfaction with existing religions, growing out of conscientious scruples at trying to twist texts and creeds to fit modern needs...
...For this reason Bourdelle, though an acute observer of nature, never hesitated to "deform" bodies when structural requirements rendered that action at once advisable and imperative...
...And it is so eager to be shut of this that it is evidently willing to dispense with the incidental good which flows from it...
...It came out during the course The of that courteous small talk by which Innocent these men always soothe and entertain City those whose premises they are forced to invade...
...And, said this linesman, "It serves him right...
...His power was based, therefore, upon success in effecting "possibilist" compromises between a nationalist Right and a radical Left...
...The concluding paragraph, after glancing back contemptuously once more at "authority --of the church, the home, the state," all of which "maintained themselves because the people they governed knew very little about the world"Efinds cheer in the reflection that such a transitory period is probably "inevitable in the education of a free people...
...We are too theoretical...
...That man should endeavor to remove the causes of injustice and suffering is hardly a novel ethical formula...
...Shearer veiled his defense of a "big navy program" does not differ in essentials from the legitimacy with which the Anti-saloon League has invested its conduct...
...We cannot build an efllcient labor force on extremely long hours...
...He has been worried over the ills which have accompanied the social and economic readustment, and he believes that the people of his state have suffered more than was necessary in the change from agriculture to industry...
...Are they made in the image of Mr...
...Stresemann's achievement coincides almost perfectly with his willingness to sacrifice himself...
...But how to get there and how to act upon arrival are puzzles which men will doubtless investigate at the cost of their lives, even as the mysteries of the Arctic and the wastes of the Soudan have been explored...
...There's altogether too many of these out-of-town false alarms think they can get away with anything in New York...
...The success of their petition would establish a precedent which might eventually have its influence in America...
...The University of Iowa has University established a school of religion, in of Iowa which Catholic, Protestant and Jewish professors offer instruction of the sort which each considers legitimate...
...Why, then, is this totally barred from consideration of the most weighty matter in the current catalogue of problems...
...The good-will that must be proved here is our own, especially since Englishmen have not forgotten what ex-Senator James Reed used to say about the British West Indies lying in the path of our "manifest destiny...
...WE HAVE been much taken with news from Scotland that the inmates of a workhouse in Lanarkshire have demanded that the authorities Facing provide them with a putting green...
...We refer to these declarations primarily because...
...and though a private donor bears the administrative expenses of the school, the several professors are supported by their own faiths...
...The psychiatrists are greatly responsible for the acceptance of temporary insanity as a non vult plea...
...He has been occupied with the really important problems of his administration in a way which suggests that his true characteristics are conscientiousness, energy and public spirit...
...604 THE COM | NORTH CAROLINA'S GOVERNOR N THE North there is a generally accepted portrait of any governor of North Carolina...
...But it is, to say the least, very odd that after a dozen years of "experiment," the force most genuinely responsible for the cbntinued virility of the Eighteenth Amendment is not public opinion, not a department of the government, not a share of the police forces, but a bureau which exists on the margin of all these and expresses the will of a definite group...
...Perhaps his reversion to more antique models may even be accounted for by his discernment of their kinship with the iconography of the middle-ages...
...And so it is not a question of whether Great Britain should give up her bases there, but whether we wish to guarantee the defense of the islands against aggression by others or by ourselves...
...but the Nation is no anarchist...
...It is to be hoped that he will...
...Acceptance of the naval quotas arrived at during the Washington conference therefore strengthened the French resolve to maintain a large standing army and to project the development of auxiliary craft...
...After all the legitimacy with which Mr...
...they are moving and not standing still...
...Charles Francis Potter...
...Potter was launching a "new religion," and finding that the hall in New York which he had secured for the occasion was too small to accommodate the crowd of curious, inquiring or merely trusting souls who had gathered for the occasion...
...Shearer, possessing threats which have all the pressure of realities...
...But possibly we should not place too much faith in descriptions of company houses written by labor-minded reporters from the North...
...So far there has been devised only one means for insuring labor that sort of protection...
...MacDonald's statement that Great Britain will not arm against the United States applies to those islands as well as to cruisers, and likewise his complementary statement that Great Britain's defenses must be kept in line with the ambitions of other powers...
...At present all talk of further co6peration toward disarmament might very easily be blocked if Paris refused to discuss naval parity for its own sake...
...Even in the ecstasies of the Larger Hope, he clung to loglc--the authority of which has evidently been jettisoned, along with other valueless authorities, by the Nation...
...Bourdelle reflects, to begin with, the prevalent insistence upon honesty in the use of materials...
...What we want is freedom in which ideas and opinions may be advanced, and a tolerance which will permit the advancing of ideas and opinions regardless of whether they are in tune with your own thought or mine...
...The natural result is that we hear from multitudinous 'Christian pulpits,' high and low, a demand that outworn creeds shall be replaced by creeds which accord with 'modern knowledge,' or by no creeds at all...
...Paris statesmen are obliged, whether they so desire or not, to treat the problem of security as incomparably important...
...It concludes with these ringing words: "Meanwhile we have young men and women, and often older ones, wandering around in a kind of maze of things to do, of places to go...
...Say, you'd be surprised...
...The quotation is from the recent writings of Professor Rogers of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has been celebrated heretofore as an amusing fellow...
...And here, where we do things on a bigger scale, not a putting green should be expected, but a nine-hole courseweighteen being rather too much for aged legs...
...Tennyson, at any rate, was never carried to the point of reading the major premise of evolutionary optimism backward...
...But Dr...
...It is a matter of suffident congratulation, we think, that he should have spoken now, no doubt to the deep amazement and most utter deep disgust of the Gastonia Gazette...
...A NEW idea is a new idea, and we are indebted to the linesman who recently repaired our telephone for this one...
...First we have a description of the mean and pitiful tragedy of the heartless girl and the brainless boy, leading up to the murder...
...The statement that the workers in the mills are better off now than they were on their mountain farms will not bear examination...
...IN so brief a space we cannot do anything like justice to this bewildering pronouncement...
...One must believe he is absolutely sincere in the endeavor to remove causes of dissension between Great Britain and the United States, so that much profit A Caution may be expected from the visit...
...People like the principals of that tragedy will some day, presumably by dissipating their carefully accumulated moral heritage, gain "the necessary integrity to make rules of conduct by which they must live...
...He is casually interested in books and in outdoor recreations...
...it is up to them to prevent this plea from becoming, as it threatens to be, an omnibus in which all murderers hope to escape full legal punishment for their crimes...
...Woodlock declared: "The notion that religion has been discredited and displaced by science has infiltrated the popular mind from top to bottom...
...John MacNab should, with a view to his own eventual success, decide whether the .American people can reasonably be expected to obey a law in the reasonableness of which they do not believe and regarding the paternity of which they have no doubts...
...We have now evidence that the portrait is not a speaking likeness of the present governor, O. Max Gardner...
...It is increasingly said that asylums for the poor and friendless should be equipped for comfort, even for pleasure...
...But what a blow at immemorial tradition l There's one born every minute in New Yorkmso might run the paraphrase of one of our most sapient generalizations --and two in Keokuk and Snake Bite to take him...
...We believe that when once set in effective operation the plan will do very much to wither the roots of intolerant misunderstanding, and to awaken a deeper respect for religion in the district which the University serves...
...THOUGHDr...
...There is satiety rather than satisfaction in the practical...
...Last year the work of the Geneva Conference came to an abrupt stop...
...AT THE recent meeting of the Circulation Vigilance Committee of the Catholic Press Association, it was declared that the clergy, the press and Selling the the public are beginning to co6perate Catholic with the Committee in a most gratifyPress ing way...
...Thus example has served to prove the feasibility of the new German democracy, even as it helped to persuade alien nations out of intransigent attitudes toward their former foe...
...But there is no denyifig the fact that the fruits of this policy may depend, in the immediate future, upon minor political incidents requiring firm and intelligent diplomacy...
...Financial support and "appropriate publicity" have been freely given...
...By running the gamut of irresponsibi!ity and negation, they will eventually become responsible and affirmative...
...ious sincerity of anyone who hesitates to sign on the dotted line...
...To arouse French suspicion now would mean injecting an element of serious mistrust into the coming disarmament conference...
...The result greatly justifies renewed confidence in public opinion...
...It is not the sort of thing anyone could imagine or make up...
...We admit that a nation which decides to adopt prohibition is also a nation which is entitled to get prohibition...
...If a ship could reach the stratosphere and there proceed merrily on its way, resistance would be minimized with an incalculable increase in speed and motive energy...
...Potter apparently sees no way of salvaging these truths excepting through proclamations that the supernatural does not exist, that sin and salvation are matters of no importance and that humanity is its own chief end...
...Each afternoon, from five to six, he sits on the shady side of his veranda, and considers the affairs of state...
...But no part of this question can have a bearing on Great Britain's friendship for ourselves...
...Edward Everett Hicks, Brooklyn psychiatrist, after Psychiatrists suggesting to the Crime Commission of New York State the appointment of a board to examine alienists, goes on to warn the Commissioners to "never let a psychiatrist tell you what to do with a delinquent or a criminal...
...For example, the Nation's quarrel with "the august state of New York" because it followed the usual criminal procedure (incidentally, in spite of the judge's robes and the number of the jury, it reached a sane and humane seconddegree verdict) is too obscure to be more than glanced at...
...At the Light same time it is essential to avoid the semblance of anything like an AngloAmerican entente...
...A board of trustees representing the various faiths in the state exercise general supervision over the enterprise...
...It is regrettable as well as amusing that the Moon so much excess imagination should have been enkindled by aircraft...
...Needless to say, Iowa Catholics and their bishops have endorsed the plan heartily, so that the Reverend J. Elliot Ross, newly appointed to the school, begins his work under the best possible auspices...
...To some it may appear that part of the recent troubles might have been averted, or at least modified, if the governor had spoken out so frankly a year ago...
...On the contrary, the aim is to teach religion in the fullest and terms in which each individual or group conceives it...
...Thinking It deals with the recent Peacox murder in a Maze trial, and draws certain moral and philosophical deductions therefrom...
...This year the same tasks there confronted are being taken up with renewed hope, precisely because citizens everywhere are being made to see the issue at stake and the nature of the groups concerned with it...
...the New The six years during which he served Germany as Foreign Minister sufficed to lay the foundations of a newly Europeanized Germany, anxious to secure the good-will of neighboring peoples and determined to abandon all schemes of unprofitable reaction...
...One of the attractions which the South deliberately offered industry was the chance for cheap labor...
...Whenever a problem of importance is brought to his attention, he shrugs his shoulders, picks up his palm-leaf fan, puts his feet on the rail, and turns to his neighbor, the governor of South Carolina, with a reminder...
...WE DO not understand why the work of the Board of Censors in Boston should excite such extended and solemn comment...
...This is so startling that we incline to believe it...
...So RARELY does a member of a professional group attack the ability of that profession that when it does happen the criticism must carry considPsyching erable weight...
...Paragraph three ventures a diagnosis: "The old authorities and traditions are gone...
...Certainly Dr...
...For they are "at least doing something" (if it is only committing murder...
...Ultimately we desire nothing more fervently than escape from our successes...
...Few murder trials today fail to involve the testimony of alienists which represents that the prisoner at the bar was both sane and insane at the time of the crime...
...Although the governor has had nothing to say about unions directly, he must favor organization and collective bargaining if he means anything by these words: "What we want is orderly, restrained struggle for change...
Vol. 10 • October 1929 • No. 24
