Week by Week
656 THE COMMONWEAL October 30, I929 to prove memorable. During years when party gov- ernment seemed the only possible way in which author- ity could be set up, various groups interested in...
...That devastating report on the Indian Administration by the Baltimore Institute of Government Research in 1928 revealed a system so inefficient and so unfair that it is almost a wonder the Indian has survived at all...
...THISheading does not herald a 25 percent dividend on an investment to which we had said farewell, a reduction in our gas and electric rates, There Is a or a set of free tickets to the Notre Santa Claus Dame-Army football game...
...The most notable instance to date is probably the formation of the Federal Farm Board, which is virtually an additional cabinet appointed to study a particularly complex and baffling situation...
...According to an article in the Herald Tribune, this provocative and graphic writer positively rejoices in his ignorance of stage techniqueuan ignorance to which the article attributes "his minimization of plot . . . and his creation of...
...Seriously, in spite of our diversion at the spectacle of two pedagogues invading Barrieland with heavy-footed tread, we confess to a certain uneasiness at all this...
...660 T H E COMMONWEAL October 30, 1929 m How does Dr...
...There is, accordingly, no reason why he should change his mind though that of Mr...
...There would seem to be no obstacle in the way of immediate intensive campaigns looking to the procurement of work for these Indians9 9. . There is no reason why the attitude toward the educated young Indian should be different from that toward the white boy who has finished school," and particularly "The opportunity must be made for him...
...Koch and of Mr...
...How can a juror retain the necessary judicial calm in the face of such flagrant emotional exhibitionism...
...Today we 658 THE COMMONWEAL October 3 ~ , 1929 are living," he declares, "in a state of complete anarchy in so far as thought about the universe and man is concerned...
...On the reservations, particularly in the Southwest, education and health have hardly been compatible so far...
...This organization had got into well-nigh scandalous doldrums, and the new administrators have already manifested vastly more than good-will...
...It now appears that modernity has triumphed over the Philosophy ancients in this respect, too...
...On the other hand, there is abundant opportunity for these states...
...It is even difficult to prevent actual traffic in girls, although some of the cruder forms of this practice have disappeared...
...THE current trend for special education in every conceivable field has met here and there with doubt and even opposition...
...But proceeding on the theory that a Republican President cannot veto a protective tariff, the House and then the Senate prepared the highest tariff rates in history...
...This action is commendable, revealing as it does a readiness to envisage the manifest difficulties which beset the English...
...We think that the Indian himself must feel that the glory of future citizenship is mild stuff...
...Ford was wrong More about shall not, however, keep us from now saying a few words on the subject of Women the weird and impredicable things occasionally done by womens' organizations...
...Something similar might be said regarding less prominent appointments...
...Apparently its object really is, as Secretary Wilbur says, "to bring clarity in a troubled field...
...Their teachers have been handicapped by an unstable system which has shifted them about before they have been able to get their bearings...
...It is much brighter than a cloud into which the sun has been folded up, and as I look at it I cannot find any height nor length nor breadth...
...A long period of parsimony has been damaging...
...IN DUE time we shall, no doubt, behold a veritable procession of Shearers...
...Will there continue to be if science takes him up in a really serious way...
...b) "There is more shopping around for better values and better bargains...
...Twenty-five years more of such bungling as has been going on, and there may be no Indian problem to speak of because there may be no Indians...
...La Guardia, who possesses a gift of fluent speech, is revealed as a man who has little else...
...In accord with the most vital currents of democratic thinking about problems of government, it is a less drastic and more practical remedy than a wholesale shifting of administrative burdens to the several states would be...
...October 3 ~ , 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 657 NOTHINGin this world looked more inexpressibly dead than American Socialism ten years ago...
...Whitney Warren, the American architect, in his resolve to engrave upon the front balustrade of Louvain's rebuilt library a legend announcing to the ages that this edifice was destroyed by German fury and rebuilt by American bounty...
...There are really two professors in the story...
...and Mr...
...WilProbing into liam Burgess, formerly a member of Pottery the Tariff Commission, who now represents a number of industries for varying fees...
...but we do know that we have found the inscription quoted in this form, in all good faith, by every American newspaper in which we have read the story...
...More prosperity for industry means more prosperity for "the people...
...Children have been herded into schools far away from their homes, often in uncongenial climates...
...Last fall he pledged that there would be no general upward revision of the tariff...
...Interest in the proceedings centers around the fact that while Mr...
...The result of this, no doubt, is that "among the producers, competition was never keener than today...
...c) "Our people are becoming better judges of value and are demanding higher quality...
...WILBUR'S "WARDS" HE Lake Mohonk conference on Indian problems was notable chiefly for the memorandum submitted by the Secretary of the Interior...
...Wilbur as Secretary of the Interior, and with Mr...
...It may be conceded that Mr...
...Then she was also a genuinely remarkable student of nature, possessing not only that "feeling" for the stir of the cosmos which all romantics have sought to capture but also a knowledge of facts which was, for her time, most unusual...
...He is even more definitely established in opposition to the debenture than to the high tariff rates...
...They are not, of course, any worse than the things occasionally done by men's organizations...
...SOME weeks back we said a few words on the subject of Mr...
...The more active industry becomes, the greater should be its rewards...
...It may be, of course, that O'Casey's recent violent quarrel with the Abbey Theatre justifies a certain amount of suspicion that he is here talking a little "specially...
...MR...
...certainly it is the basis of the present administration's interest in and policy toward Indian affairs...
...MODERN woman might well be astonished by the career of Saint Hildegarde, abbess of Eibingen during the twelfth century, which has just been Saint commemorated by a festival in various Rhenish towns...
...MANYof our papers display a proper and genuine indignation at the way in which the Louvain inscription controversy has been settled, but German they have lent, nevertheless, an unconFury in scious enhancement to one very amusing Latin feature of the business...
...So we go forward to the utopia where we shall be hilariously shopping and producing, doing these things better than they were ever done before--everyonemall of us--scrambling around the lyric circle, gaining leisure to shop to stimulate production to increase prosperity to have more leisure...
...Finally, she was also a counselor to whom thousands of people came for advice, and whose assistance Pope and emperor were eager to obtain...
...With Mr...
...The British government, declares the former minister, must respect all the rights aad aspirations of all the peoples in Palestine...
...Warren caused to be published a photographic copy of the "German fury" inscription, the original of which, he said, the late Cardinal Mercier had himself written and handed to him when they conferred on the matter...
...startlingly vivid portraits...
...If he wishes to break all precedent and veto the bill, the country will understand that he is vetoing the debenture plan...
...state convention or the Housewives' League of the Republican-Fusion campaign...
...But it was not Mr...
...Thus her Physica contains the names of more than a thousand plants and animals, each of which is characterized with the aid of personal observation and popular tradition...
...No doubt many of them could well afford to utilize for their own tasks the same civic vitality which the President has so skilfully put to work...
...They are necessary if communities are to furnish enough hospitals for the sick poor, relief for the needy, care for neglected childrenDnecessary if the charities are to have a proper "control" over their work...
...Equally much must the philosophical summary of the sciences aim to establish one true opinion rather than a thousand contradictory opinions...
...656 THE COMMONWEAL October 30, I929 to prove memorable...
...Certainly his destiny has not before been at the disposal of men at once so sympathetic and so capable9 Habitually hungry, without control of his own tribal funds, deprived of his water rights, without a voice in selecting his children's place of education, it was high time that his friends appeared in official places...
...The same magazine quite legitimately concludes that, as it was probably no secret to Cardinal Mercier that "furor" is a masculine noun and "Teutonica" a feminine adjective, his authorship of these inflated and discord-perpetuating words may be disallowed on internal evidence alone...
...After ten years of schooling, Indian youths have been released ("released" is the word) to find that there is nothing on earth for them to do with themselves...
...We do not know whether this grammatical lapse will be embodied in imperishable marble on Louvain's facade...
...WEEK BY WEEK URING the past weeks, calm and frenzy have mingled rather thoroughly in the discussion of Palestine unrest...
...Opposing him, Mr...
...One of the industries is the United States Pottery Association, which alleged that "a Mr...
...With a number of municipal problems fairly aching for discussion, he has dedicated his vocabulary to this or that alleged eccentricity in the conduct of Mayor Walker--and to such facts as that the price of bread is one cent higher in New York than in Philadelphia...
...They have repeatedly demonstrated that they may mislay these attributes, especially when they act in groups, but the demonstration never seems to take...
...The future, therefore, would seem to resolve itself into a business of teaching the sheik how to be affectionate...
...Scattergood as Commissioner and Assistant Commissioner of Indian Affairs, it has been generally predicted that things would look up for the Indian...
...The coupling of education with health here is significant...
...It is not hard to feel that our own national drama would be better if it crackled less effectively and fumbled more in the direction of the truth...
...Whether they like it or not, we repeat, from our last remarks on the subect, women will never cease to be thought of as women...
...The better shoppers we are, the keener are producers to please us...
...Prior to serving with the Tariff Commission he received $5,ooo a year from the Pottery Association...
...Conscious of the "holy spirit" which lived in a united and loyal Church, she could declare: "I see a light, which is not affixed to space...
...Langenbeck are expected to be altered...
...Tammany, jarred by a number of domestic squabbles, will have to choose soon between a revival and a vacation...
...The W.C.T.U...
...He has assembled commissions to deal with such varying issues as law enforcement and education...
...Several Jewish travelers, home from a tour of the near East, have criticized the Restless British administration with unreserved Palestine bitterness...
...On the other hand, the extent to which reasoned calm prevails among American Jews is evident from the fact that a congress, called with the approval of Rabbi Stephen Wise to discuss the Palestine situation, was countermanded...
...This year the Committee's report calls attention to several startling facts...
...It is a literal repetition of the assurance recently given the world by Dr...
...It is very hard to stamp out prostitution, despite the fact that mankind universally realizes the degradation of the unfortunate women involved...
...The idle adult Indians whom Secretary Wilbur speaks about are not uneducated tribesmen...
...The Housewives' League who published their "ten commandments for beguiling your husband's vote" caused the same mirth as if women had never till now been corporately undignified...
...The most interesting recent spokesman for this point of view is the Irish dramatist, Sean O'Casey...
...Ford's criticism of women...
...All this sounds much more hifalutin' than the suggestion of the prefect of police in Paris several years ago that automobile horns be pitched to a sweeter note, but is actually less so, since it does not tend toward the orchestration of a city's noises but the muffling of them...
...All who have lived in large cities, however, and know the havoc that noise can play with nerves, nerves with the digestion, and so on to the complete undoing of health will wish the New York commission success...
...But they express, with transcendant power, that "prophetic mission" of the Christian life which was so well understood during the middle-ages...
...delegates who reported that during the last year they had crushed 405 cigar stubs and 42,399 cigarette butts in their war on nicotine, elicited the same acrid amusement as if women had never publicly lost their sense of humor before...
...Last spring, against the advice of the old guard, he called this special session for no purpose other than to aid the farmers and such industries as were in distress...
...Happily the report was not without effect...
...Sadler, should be told that there is no Santa Claus, if its faith in its parents' veracity is to be preserved...
...It is not likely, of course, that Dr...
...Our continuing confidence that Mr...
...Called upon to study the function of the federal government in education, it has set out to gather facts as a substratum for theory rather than to impose a theory upon poorly understood and amateurishly correlated facts...
...Hoover might disapprove of it, but it was pretty certain that he would not dare to veto it...
...Of course they are not all the result of special initiation into the supernatural...
...According to Blackfriars, the English Dominican monthly, this copy ran: "Furore Teutonica diruta, dono Americano restituta...
...New York, for instance, is accustomed to appreciative co6peration between its governing forces and various private com...
...An article contributed by Winston Churchill to the American Hebrew is to the point here...
...It Special believes that the government could Census more effectively conduct such a census...
...IT IS not surprising that in the South, where oratory is still regarded as the fine art, a jury should be exhorted to do its duty so that it may "in The the name of God and justice render a Appeal verdict that will be emblazoned across Emotional the sky of America as an eternal sign that justice has been done...
...Rhoades and Mr...
...For the more definitely a branch of investigation becomes a science, the fewer are the opinions which can be tolerated concerning it...
...What the Indian will pay attention to in the Secretary's message is the statement that "the principal immediate problem is to do substantial justice to the Indian children of today so that they may have adequate educational and health opportunities...
...In addition, he has profited even more by the puerile antics of the Republican standard-bearer...
...its purpose is to acquaint the Department of Health with what may be done immediately and in the future to alleviate the noise nuisance...
...William S. Sadler, of Chicago, should also be mentioned gratefully for having opened the controversy and set its key...
...They had the aid of close association in a corporation endeavor, on the basis of a corporately accepted tradition...
...Siegfried Behn holds that modern philosophy has been at a distinct disadvantage as compared with mediaeval thought precisely because the Scholastics were not isolated...
...At any rate, the thought suggests itself: could not the government profitably invite men of the character insisted upon by such groups to take a share in the nation's administrative business...
...Every five-year-old child, says Dr...
...But these male performances somehow do not strike the same nerve as do stories like the current ones about the W.C.T.U...
...Most of them have had their ten years in the government schools...
...For the moment there is enough to see in the case of Mr...
...The specific charge brought by Mr...
...Secretary Wilbur shows that he has thought about these problems, and that he is willing to go all the way toward ending them...
...NEW YORK CITY, appropriately enough, too, has a Noise Commission...
...Both states of mind are subversive of the true administration of justice...
...Wilbur's statement of a policy to place "the Indian and his property upon the normal basis of contributing citizenship" within twenty-five years that makes his message of special importance...
...The responsibility for making that opportunity rests with the government, which is his guardian...
...PRESIDENT HOOVER should be more pleased than displeased at the Senate's vote to attach the export debenture plan to the tariff bill...
...If they were hungry at home, at least they were amid familiar surroundings...
...Norman Thomas to win out in the present campaign, but he will undoubtedly poll a heavy vote and so gird his loins for future battle...
...She was first of all a mystic whose writings, particularly in the form given them by modern editors, bear the stamp of sacred authenticity...
...The American Philosophical Society, through Dr...
...He exists to fill stockings and drive reindeer, not to subserve some function of "dramatization...
...Aderholdt, the slain chief's, widow who, attired in mourning, sat wiping her eyes before the jury's box...
...In this case the appointees have triumphed over all purely political opposition and even a strong Senate protest...
...It is a fine tribute to the soundness of civic feeling that all such difficulties do not harden the urban conscience...
...Dercum has made the following quotation his slogan: "The world is too vast and too complex to be grasped by a single philosopher...
...Evidently Mr...
...others are purely civic in outlook...
...Scattergood...
...the tabulation of intensity geographically arranged...
...They have been as hungry at school as on the range, and unhappier...
...It includes, in addition to lawyers and engineers (indispensable to The Noise any commission) ear specialists and Commission neurologists...
...What it will accomplish no one can predict, since the experiment has never been made before...
...FORwhat is in many respects the most amazing pronouncement of the year, credit should go to the Bureau of Standards of the Department of Uses for Commerce...
...This advance is entirely due to his intelligence and civic probity...
...Hence the Arab ought to love the Jew...
...But the subject is especially interesting now because of the chance it affords to observe causative social influences at work...
...Francis X. Dercum, its president, has appealed for the support of "financial Alexanders" to the extent required by a plan to erect a $2,ooo,ooo home in Philadelphia...
...The plan is supported by Miss Grace Abbott, head of the Children's Bureau, and if it will accomplish a part of all that it promises, if it will enable the Community Councils to utilize more effectively the sums placed at their disposal every year, the $3o,ooo should be rapidly forthcoming...
...Santa Claus is as hardy an entity as you are likely to meet in a day's march through the human mind, but we cannot see how he is to keep his blood and bounce if he is labeled and ticketed as a specimen in the psychological museum...
...As we make it out, women are expected to have certain fixed attributes...
...They are willing to work (all who really know the Indians testify to their efficiency as workers) but there has been no work for them to do...
...TIME was when, in the interests of philosophy, Buddha went out into the desert, Diogenes dwelt in a tub, Socrates abode with Xanthippe and Millions for Spinoza ground lenses...
...Yes, there is a Santa Claus--yet...
...Knight Dunlap, professor of experimental psychology at Johns Hopkins University...
...He must be swept off his feet by such a burlesque of the prosecutlon's summation of the case either into voting condemnation for the prisoners, or into a reactionary antipathy toward the man who has so far forgotten the dignity of the court and the law...
...It has not been resuscitated yet, but if the Leeway for present rate of progress continues, New York City at least may awake to find Socialism that it has elected a mayor who borrows his political label from Karl Marx...
...Koch, head of the ceramic division of the staff of the Tariff Commission," had done everything in his power to hamper American business and to aid importers...
...But, without taking sides in that quarrel, or extenuating the somewhat pretentious realism of certain passages in his plays, one must admit that this dramatist possesses great literary vitality, and his protest, even its lowest terms, must be seen as significant...
...Perhaps no figure in Hildegarde early mediaeval history combined so many kinds of greatness...
...The motto of any hopeful philosopher must now be patience, even though he realizes there is no room for such a maxim in genuine science...
...Burgess has not changed his mind...
...Hoover has faced that question optimistically, and his endeavor to answer it is earnest and significant...
...Sadler or anyone else know there is no such thing as Santa Claus...
...Jewish opinion felt that it was extremely unwise to use the occasion of Prime Minister MacDonald's visit to the United States as a pretext for unleashing a good deal of heated oratory...
...and of course the visiting smalltowner, bent on a lark, begins to feel rubicund and energetic about midnight...
...This building would house the valuable library of the Society, provide a publishing headquarters and afford a place of meeting...
...Today there are many such organizations, supported by funds voluntarily contributed, and often endowed with firstrate leaders...
...Langenbeck, was asked to resign because he had prepared a report stating that the hard porcelains of China and the Orient could not be replaced by similar American products...
...This is especially Too Much true in the department of drama- and fiction-writing, where a growing feeling Dramaturgy in defense of spontaneity and what used to be called inspiration has set itself against the acquisition of the slickness and competence which make the productions of our best schools so marketable and, generally speaking, so forgettable...
...some scientific measurements of principal city noises, together with specific recommendations as to their control or elimination...
...It is a small sum in comparison to the funds which it will help to control in our larger cities...
...Monsignor Ladeuze, the rector of Louvain University, had held out against the special condemnatory phrasing...
...In the course of a text on trade standardization, the Bureau's unLeisure named discussioneer explores the results of our "increased leisure," and his findings might be listed in this way: (a) "Our people are devoting more time and energy to careful and judicious expenditures...
...Now if the House allows the debenture plan to stay in the bill, as Senator Borah and others predict it will, the President's problem will be simplified...
...Charles J. Rhoads and Mr...
...Hoover ma...
...suggests that the Children's Bureau of the Department of Labor take it over, and that $3o,ooo be appropriated for the purpose...
...This accusation was denied, quite naturally, with gusto...
...To them the turmoil was an outbreak of lawlessness, which a simple exercise of police power might have prevented...
...To whom the Johns Hopkins savant addresses this rebuke: "Santa Claus is one of the most beautiful and probably the least harmful of childhood myths...
...Debentures For it provides him with a way of esand cape from a most embarrassing dilemMr...
...J. Henry Scattergood--to do the man-sized job of reconstructing the Indian Service...
...To it we probably owe the appointment of Mr...
...Proof against the perfidy of arson, it would also maintain a stolid calm during the heated debates which might conceivably reign in its assembly halls...
...As between doing the conventional thing, and submitting to a measure which defeats him on two important points, the choice should not be hard...
...Meanwhile one cannot but think that the mere presence of this vitality is an effective proof of America's will to carry on...
...But the Jews have not interfered with any of the legitimate rights and aspirations of the Arabs, being really the harbingers of new wealth and beneficence to the country...
...Thomas has subjected them to a critique genuinely masterly and incisive...
...THAT public welfare institutions and agencies are slow to furnish figures to a private social service census is the experience of the Association of For a Community Chests and Councils...
...The President has virtually drafted two Philadelphlans--Mr...
...When Aristotle comes again, it will be in the form of collective intelligence, the sustained thinking of many minds driving toward a common goal...
...Who would speak of 'sovereign opinion' in the field of mathematics, or consider such a thing wholly sane ? The goal of all real science must unquestionably be to countenance only the truth and to dismiss all idle claims to originality...
...Burgess, as representative, was to the effect that Koch played into the hands of a personal friend, who is a New York distributor of Japanese chinaware...
...WHY not...
...In each instance men of unusual ability have not hesitated to respond, and usually the nation has enthusiastically approved the step...
...Trachoma and tuberculosis have gone with the A B C's...
...TWELVE O'CLOCK SHARP HE extent to which any large city is its own moral boss must remain unknowable...
...Equally promising work has been started by the National Advisory Committee on Education, the members of which are experienced and prominent teachers...
...What counts is a satisfactory answer to his present needs...
...Nobody expects Mr...
...During years when party government seemed the only possible way in which authority could be set up, various groups interested in social problems, or in the whole matter of democratic life, came to have a very beneficent effectiveness...
...mittees which mount guard for one reason or another...
...Among these last the Committee of Fourteen occupies an honored place, not only because it has been at work during twenty-five years, but also because its concern is with a particularly malignant form of social vice...
...This prophecy has already impressed many, and the New York Times reports that M. Raymond Poincar6 has sent a cheque...
...Dercum's projected institution will reveal much affinity with mediaeval institutions...
...The number of arraignments for prostitution in the Separate Court for Women...
...Rhoades and Mr...
...La Guardia has put in a powerful bid for the wise-cracker championship...
...It may be that the Farm Board is not everything which might legitimately be desired, but at least "senile routine" has been side-stepped...
...The demands of an alert public, made intelligent by leisure, keep the country's industry on its toes...
...October 3o, I929 THE COMMONWEAL 659 More leisure makes us better shoppers...
...Some are definitely affiliated with religion...
...The Belgian courts have sustained Mr...
...Among other things the Department requests of it "a complete classification of noises...
...since leaving the Commission he has received $7,5oo a year from the same source...
...We believe that such executive action, if it can be continued over a period of years, will constitute the best possible answer to legitimate criticism of the federal bureaucracy...
...But surprise turns to disgust and indignation when one reads that this same speaker, prosecuting the Gastonia strike slaying trial, "emphasized his plea by lying down on the floor of the court to illustrate some of the testimony, kneeling and praying before the jury, and holding the hand of Mrs...
...It is eminently desirable that Saint Hildegarde should be widely known to our time, in which the position of woman is so acridly disputed...
...More prosperity makes possible more leisure...
...The figures wanted are on dependent families, child delinquency, old age care, public health services and so forth...
...Its recent performances do not enkindle enthusiasm even in its journalistic supporters...
...A certain type of pep meeting for salesmen or alumni, an escapading business men's convention, or congress of psychologists can set a rare standard of absurdity...
...They have been forced into a "civilized" way of living, but no help has been offered them to continue in that way of living...
...Burgess was with the Tariff Commission another expert, Mr...
...On his own statements he is committed to principles directly opposed to the Smoot-Hawley tariff...
...But the fact remains--and it is far from pleasant for us personally to admit it--that light on city government in America's largest town seems the monopoly of Socialist torch-bearers...
...Successive migrations of work hunters, put on the move by changing industrial conditions, strain housing and police facilities to the utmost...
Vol. 10 • October 1929 • No. 26
