Week by Week
58 THE COMMONWEAL May 22, 1929 WEEK BY WEEK MR. OWEN D. YOUNG has worked hard to dispose of the reparations problem in a reasonable way. Two weeks ago the Allied and German figures...
...but the Socialists opposed it at every step for purely political reasons, and the Catholic forces were badly inoculated with inertia, royalistic visions and Anschluss dreams...
...W E HEARTILY endorse the suggestion, sponsored by the Gaelic American, that a Gaelic Room be established in the New York Public In Behalf Library...
...His plan was announced only in general outline, but so attractive has it appeared that experts have predicted a response which will make the proposed corporation the most powerful financial organization in the world...
...One sets the figure at 2,100 another at 2,200 tons...
...Legislatu pj *i°n involving appropriation is, indeed, to the tlouse supposed t0 originate with that body...
...Francis Keally's prediction of a future architecture which will have no windows...
...And either renders us somewhat more congenial than we would otherwise have been to Mr...
...This country, however, has always clung to two principles: first that it was collecting from Germany only enough to settle the claims of its nationals...
...Possibly Messrs...
...There is now an abundance of Catholic statistical publications...
...perhaps more capable, since it is more plausible...
...Prior to the war German students had homesteaded much of it, with the result that they were able to modify considerably previous impressions of the trend and development of earlier European civilization...
...second that the war debts are simply business obligations which cannot be lumped with reparations dependent upon the victory...
...YEARS ago some people, at least, took very seriously a number of suggestions regarding possible invasion by citizens from Mars...
...They mean a great deal in war and politics...
...Catholic leaders in particular have come to realize both the value of data and the difficulty of getting an adequate supply...
...Churchill promptly endorsed the Balfour note anew...
...A French critic makes the point a little harshly when he says that the Monsignor's fate is to live in a country where he has no intellectual rival...
...they have fallen "into the fatal error of assuming that the primary purpose of the prohibitory laws is the inhibition of the personal use of liquor...
...Comparisons would then be simple...
...The riches, influence and apof Gaelic peal of the Gaelic tradition have long Culture since become perfectly familiar to scholars...
...Now comes the Reverend Adolph Frenay, of Albertus Magnus College, to tell us that nothing less than the establishment of a general chancery office for ecclesiastical statistics will fill the present need...
...Ventilating machines will wash the outside atmosphere before it is sent within to feed the lungs of human beings, and lighting systems will distribute a light tenderer than the sun's equally throughout the interior...
...Perhaps the words "Berg Isel 1" were enough...
...Doubtless such cataclysms are exceedingly rare, though mankind seems to have conserved vague memories of some of them...
...Young's compromise accepts the Allied plan, with the difference that the average sum mentioned above has been scaled down to 2,050,000,000 marks...
...Photographs and surveys indicate, so we are told, that the heat and impact of this falling mass wrought havoc in a district a hundred miles square...
...In the failure of this we shall all of us bid posterity prepare for the migration of cosmopolitans to the little cities which Mr...
...This innocent attempt to advance learning and dispel intolerance suffers from the customary blight: it is certain, like its brethren among illuminating errors, to be found out in the end...
...The spirit of the strong and simple Hofer, the keeper of the Inn upon the Sand, is still alive, it seems, in those high and rocky places...
...John A. Ryan's article on prohibition has been as widely commented upon as anything ever written for The Commonweal, it The Dangers enjoys the virtually unique distinction of of Wide having been ferociously trounced in the Reading Senate by the Honorable J. Thomas Heflin...
...All in all, we think his suggestion a good one...
...You can bluff and bank on statistics...
...Who knows but that a room in the New York Library, which now attracts thousands of research workers from all parts of the country, might eventually spur on young Americans to devote their attention to Gaelic lore...
...What we want, says Father Frenay, is the right agency for accumulating and digesting the statistics themselves...
...lT IS pretty generally admitted that the view of mediaeval Europe which saw it simply as the forcingground of wars was more picturesque Paths to than precise...
...When we get down to human facts, the game naturally grows more exciting...
...We shall not suggest that this is what has ailed him all along...
...But even though no such goal were attained, the proposed room is worth having for its own sake, and as a testimonial to the background whence so many of our sovereign citizens have come...
...Golding writes about...
...Consequently the procedure of the House in its approach to the bill promises interesting developments, though the chances are that the issue will be settled by avoidance...
...The despatches state that the company advanced from Innsbruck garbed in the costumes of 120 years ago and brandishing flails, the immemorial weapons of embattled husbandry...
...But the most important fact about them is their scientific significance —the amount of truth they enable us to arrive at inductively, and the number of errors they help us to correct...
...An expedition led into Siberia by Professor Leonide Kulik has made a study of the damage caused by a group of meteors which struck the earth during 1908...
...Hostility to all these processes which are necessary to bring a glass of wine to the citizen's table was inevitable because "the traffic had become malum in se...
...The example of Columbia University, which has established Italian, French and German foundations, is certainly worthy of wide and spirited emulation...
...Unfortunately, however, Ireland itself has never been able to finance and conduct further research into this great domain...
...While this affords a clew to the sources whence the Alabaman Senator derives his information regarding the Catholic Church, it also absolves him from blame...
...In this field, at least, any conclusion drawn from the number of its prospectors is to be mistrusted...
...partly, it may as well be said, from a desire to paint the existence which was so largely controlled by the Church as a dark and bloody business...
...They were expressed in an attempt to define the real purpose of prohibition policy, a purpose which has confused many eminent minds, both in this and other lands...
...It must be confessed that little could be done to ward off so terrific a bombardment...
...It is by steps like these that we shall all find our way to the paths of peace...
...On the whole it looks like a good suggestion, which the Germans could accept as at least a temporary revision of the Dawes schedules...
...Yet everyone who has closely scrutinized congressional deliberations during the past ten years knows that while the Senate has been oratorical and dilatory the House has, in the main, quietly gone about its business and entrenched itself more solidly behind public respect...
...We predict that unless the country decides definitely to go bankrupt, Monsignor Seipel will be heard from again...
...With good stout bricks and impenetrable steel it will shelter our children from the impurities of air...
...Though he was undoubtedly honest in declaring that a desire to give himself entirely to the work of the priesthood, the great exChancelor has nevertheless borne his country clearly in mind...
...Many have indeed predicted that the preponderantly Republican Senate, which has proved so unresponsive to the whips of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover, will meet final discipline from the body that sits south of the Capitol rotunda...
...Years ago he developed the economic plan by which alone Austria might be financially and socially redeemed...
...mosphere of New York City...
...They in turn could popularize their findings and so enlarge academic horizons...
...With very genuine gratification we note the Christian Science Monitor among them...
...Now comes a far more serious inkling of potential disaster...
...They Experiment are taken from an address recently deClarified livered in New York by Dr...
...He clarifies the situation for us, at least, by explaining that "the real purpose of the Eighteenth Amendment and its enforcing statutes was the prohibition of the traffic in beverage intoxicants, including manufacture, sale, transportation and exportation...
...Most popular impressions of the world's end stress some such collision between stellar masses...
...The The first called for fifty-eight annual Reparations payments, the average sum of the first Quandary thirty-seven of which was to be 2,198000,000 marks...
...Keally or one of his colleagues at Columbia would predict, simply for our peace of mind, the contriving of some marvel which would suck every smallest grain of dirt from out the atmosphere and dump it at the precise point where the submarine Hudson plunges over the world's greatest cataract into an archaic sea...
...No sounder reading of history could be asked...
...John J. Raskob has assured the press that his dream of a combined investment Raskob and trust and insurance company to serve the Worker 'he ^orkmg.men °f this country by investing their savings in the equities of American industries will be realized as soon as finance assumes a more stable character than at present...
...1 HE fact that a sufficient number of young men and women continue to offer their services to education apparently is no indication of the Academic brightness of prospects in the teaching j profession...
...S. E. Nicholson, associate superintendent of the Anti-saloon League...
...1 HAT was a lucky movie producer who unsuspectingly tapped the dynamite which nature and tradition have secreted in the Tyrolean peasant...
...They are the nerves of business, the stock-in-trade of the salesman...
...In an editorial printed on April 5, the Monitor analyzes the future hopes of the world, and quotes with approval the doctrine "that nations are in reality only large families," and its corollary "that nations and states are subject to the same rules of morality as govern the actions of individuals...
...instructors in senior high schools can adapt their budgets to incomes between $1,584 and $2,680...
...We express no preference...
...oINCE the times are not propitious for immediate action, Mr...
...The lesser is as capable of inspiring horror in the soul as the larger...
...and its pilgrimages, its truces, its arbitrations, its councils and canons, its very excommunications and interdicts, are still in the record to show how truly that morality was honored in the observance...
...Those who teach in junior high schools receive salaries varying from $1,399 m tne small cities to $2,348 in the metropoli...
...the second stopped short at the thirty-seven, and suggested that 1,650,000,000 marks would be a reasonable yearly contribution...
...Raskob has avowed his purpose to be altruistic...
...However it was, they fell upon the Twelfth Tyrolean Regiment, who were being French and Bavarian for the occasion, in a spirit so charged with ancestral memories that thirty-seven of the hapless regulars were wounded and a first-aid corps from Innsbruck came out (in the wake of the police) to take control...
...The editor in question had simply tried to show that Father Ryan's attitude toward prohibition uncovered the "very dangerous" conception of allegiance to the state which, in his opinion, characterizes all Catholic minds...
...APROPOS of the many comments which have been passed on Father Ryan's article, we set these words: "No statute has ever yet attempted to An make personal drinking a crime...
...Just how that finale will come, however, matters very little...
...oOME time has elapsed since the resignation of Monsignor Seipel from the government of Austria, and almost the only impressive news Eclipse in from that harassed country concerns » . the new premier's self-propelled typewriter...
...60 THE COMMONWEAL May 22, 1929 THOUGH Dr...
...He himself is the best guarantee of the integrity of this new enterprise...
...pressing...
...STATISTICS have an undeniable charm for us all...
...Nicholson, the critics of prohibition have failed to understand it...
...The need for it to be restored to an effective position today is...
...Even such relatively meaningless figures as the number of miles between one nebula and anGunning other make themselves attractive as for Facts ^^ ro^ trough consciousness...
...It is certainly encouraging that a man so immediately identified with big business as is Mr...
...Raskob should be concerned for improving the lot of the small wage-earner: specifically, for lifting him out of a present dilemma wherein he must choose between safe but low-yielding investments, and stocks which too often are swindles...
...Even when it is noted that the figures are somewhat deceptive in that they fail to consider that the average worker in this country receives his salary for a twelve-month year, whereas the teacher's year is one of nine, it cannot be concluded that our bright young people are pursuing academic careers from gross, mercenary motives...
...The situation at present is, therefore, most interesting...
...Unfortunately, as quotation after quotation rolled away into the cherry-blossomladen atmosphere of Washington, it became sadly apparent that the Senator is not a reader of our magazine...
...ivECENT estimates disagree as to the amount of dirt, including unconsumed coal, "appreciable quantities of poisonous carbon monoxide," What's an(i sulphur acids "strong enough to in the eat through linen," floating in the atAir...
...Meanwhile, in the interests of public enlightenment, Father Ryan has reprinted his article in pamphlet form...
...But out on the streets Manhattanites will still be martyr to those two million and some odd pounds of dirt...
...Perhaps the habiliments of a time gone by released emotions connected with warlike pictures on a thousand cottage walls...
...We salute the Monitor for its fine and disinterested editorial...
...and so if humanity had been assigned no goal of the spirit, its petty meanderings here below would be futile indeed...
...It has yielded steadily with the growth of what may be called the conception of integrated history, with its impartial and broadly distributed research...
...Nicholson will forgive us if in agreeing with him we also express our sacrificial regrets—"while the use of liquor has been affected by prohibition," this is merely "incidental to the purpose of the legislation...
...Cumulative studies in a dozen fields, economic, philosophical, sociological, legal, are uniting to widen out and fill in the picture that was once dominated by those fixed figures, the glittering knight and the suffering peasant, and to show that our ancestors had many occupations besides leaving their cabbage patches to spring to arms at the call of their feudal lords...
...The final straw was probably the May 22, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 59 Vienna housing laws, which allow property owners less income than suffices to pay the taxes...
...Even confidence in "the future progress of the race" would, in all likelihood, be of no avail...
...Nevertheless it would be a mistake for them to allow, in whatever quarter, any disregard of constitutional stipulations while they are demanding such close adherence to all law enforcement...
...X HERE has been, in consequence, an increasing admiration for the specific ways in which this peace was promoted during the ages of faith...
...No doubt religion has as yet utilized them insufficiently...
...The Shade When he hired 3,000 of these simple of the mountaineers to help reproduce the Sandwirt battle of Berg Isel—that glory of their history in which Andreas Hofer led their great-grandfathers to victory against Napoleon's French and their Bavarian allies—this gentleman probably bargained for picturesqueness plus a lumpish and awe-struck conformity to the mechanical demands of the usual film fracas...
...Great Britain, however, is in the throes of a campaign and in no mood to afford the country a glimpse of a magnanimous party...
...And as he has proved before that his ability in these matters amounts to genius, so he has demonstrated that his sincerity is not to be questioned...
...We remember War that an Indiana farmer designed a shotbetween gun which he believed particularly effecWorlds tive against celestial infantry, and kept it within reach of his bed...
...But might it not be cheaper and just as serviceable to employ a competent statistical agency, acting under the behest of the hierarchy...
...Their median salaries range from $1,212 in cities of 2,500 to 5,000 population to $2,063 m cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants...
...This is a view," continues the editorial, "which during the last 400 years has suffered an eclipse so total that it has had little or no effect upon international affairs...
...This would obviate any open clash with the upper chamber, which is notoriously jealous of its prestige and resentful of any reprimand, either direct or implied...
...1 HE debenture provision in the Senate Farm Relief bill amounts, so many congressmen say, to a usurpation of rights constitutionally A Challenge invested in the House alone...
...It proceeded partly from p that ingenuous story-telling concern eace with the obvious and the immediately colorful which made nearly all former history a chronicle of conflicts...
...Somehow, the incident May 22, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 61 does not strike us as wholly ridiculous...
...Come it must...
...Our only hope is that Senator Heflin will be moved to follow this example and pamphletize his address...
...In the article of conformity, however, they departed from specifications quite completely...
...In a recent bulletin of the National Education Association we learn that 34 percent of the elementary school teachers of the country receive less than the $2,000 which is the average income of the 45,000,000 gainfully employed persons in the United States...
...Longworth, Tilson and their fellows do not feel that the time has come to fling down the gage of battle...
...It must suffice to relate that, in attacking Father Ryan's stand on Volsteadism, he was simply repeating excerpts selected and glued together heterogeneously by the editor of the National Methodist Press, who in turn relayed the material to the Christian Advocate...
...Of course—and Dr...
...From the outset, according to Dr...
...it did confess to one universal morality...
...and since this stipulates that Britain is to collect only what it owes to the United States, the result is that the opportunity to curtail collections has been passed along to the United States...
...Especially of late, since a veritable passion for peace has taken hold of humanity, have the earlier concept of universal brotherhood, the nobility of its affirmations and the reality of its charity, gained recruits...
...We are glad to know it, though we are neither a friend of the producer nor an enemy of the regiment who each, in such different ways, got more than they were looking for...
...Every failure to advance was attributed to him, and political separatists waxed anti-clerical...
...The world which the Reformation brought to a close did regard itself as one family, under one acknowledged Head...
...But what seems of more importance than this is that Mr...
...It ought to prove easy to read and quote from...
...Two weeks ago the Allied and German figures were separated by a great gulf...
...Instead of a reversion to the windowless homes of the cliff dwellers, we wish that Mr...
...If they were acquainted with battle and sudden death, they knew, too, the arts, the productivity, the slow, secure growth of the humaner traditions, which are possible only where peace is a fairly continuous external circumstance for the determining mass of men, and the indisputable norm in their minds...
Vol. 10 • May 1929 • No. 3
