Week by Week

...If similar bills had been passed a few years ago we should not now be in such a quandary, nor so dependent upon a change of weather to get us out of it...

...but the publishers' reader has read it as one manuscript in a pile of manuscripts...

...Big business, he says, both is and is not for prohibition...

...1 HE observations with which he supports this sweeping statement have a very convincing range...

...Nor is even this number distinctly uniform in taste or judgment...

...The Market Picks Up W ITH commodity prices at their lowest average in many years, production falling off and the whole business situation at present in sad contrast to a year ago, the stock market continues to confound early spring predictions of reaction, and in a week which developed the heaviest volume of bearish activity for the current year, even managed to strike a new high average...

...A very different thing...

...We think personally that editors in the Catholic domain can be compared for industry only with the ant and for swallowing with Coue or Pollyanna...

...The first is the effectiveness of boy guidance and the value of religious education...

...By guesswork...

...Throughout life Pissaro was something like a rural patriarch, living with his large family in small villages in which he watched the scenes of man and nature with a discerning eye...

...His best canvases reflect the genial nobleness of his personality, which could clarify reality and (to borrow a phrase from finance) liquidate its frozen assets...

...Thus there is a kind of routine which he must pace out to the end, not in the manner of a genius but very like a waiter, studying the expression on the feasting faces and incidentally keeping an anxious eye on the kitchen...

...The present treatise therefore avoids extensive discussion of this phase of the subject and turns instead to the task of setting forth the means by which the essential facts can be obtained...

...Being, first of all, for itself, it is forced to recognize two things: "Partial prohibition is beneficial to it...

...That the public still prefers, however, to think of rusticity in terms of Arcady is evident and demonstrable from the history of art...

...It is, he says, a heart-felt and all but universal conviction "that prohibition must not be allowed to interfere with trade...

...An amusing and mischievously documented article in the current Harper's Magazine, Booze and Business, by Jesse Rainsford Sprague, reconciles the points of view of pro- and anti-magnates, and retains, as it were, the best features of both...

...Boise, Senator Borah's home city, is also celebrated for a recent wide-open business convention...

...Many observers are encouraged to believe that the public will soon return to the market in strength, so that whatever the summer may bring to the farmer and the unemployed city man, it will be a profitable one for Wall Street...

...Both have been extended greatly during the period under consideration, and lack of them at the time when the older generation was maturing may be responsible for some of our crime wave...

...They may be wrong (who would say that they are ever right...

...Holmes really wishes to understand the religious potency of the Twenty-third Psalm, let him read it again...

...And then-history is history...

...If not this is bound to be a most unpleasant summer, and one is almost afraid to think of the consequences...

...Thereby, it would seem, we have got back farther into the era of American origins than ever before...

...No one pretends that the customary seasonal pick-up will be sufficient to take care of the three to six millions who are now without employment...

...One exhibit, for instance, is a Pennsylvania town of 4,000, built about a factory, where an open bar lures customers from competing factories near by, while the police and the town's dry dignitaries resolutely look the other way...

...All illustrate a boundless devotion to the Eighteenth Amendment unless and except as it interferes with trade...

...The astringent realism of Courbet is familiar only to comparatively few...

...After all, the existence of such a thing as the verdict of posterity is not to be denied...

...Swin-nerton...

...Father Cuevas, stating that "at first glance, any expert archaeologist would refer the pre-Cortesian part of the Codex to the middle of the fifteenth century," adds his reasons for concurring in this view...

...It is a sentimental phrase vaguely suggesting sheep...

...While the list of mature offenders grew longer and longer during the eleven years for which figures are available, the array of youths hailed into the Chicago boys' court dwindled from 7,500 in 1915 to 5,409 in 1925...

...Too frequently this essential part of the literary mechanism is either ignored or scorned...

...The matter does not depend upon this or that corporation president, who may be in favor of law enforcement...

...The publishers' reader-most secretive, most helpful or awe-inspiring, often most self-effacing, of men-is the subject of a paper written for the current Publishers' Weekly by Frank Swinnerton...

...The second conclusion is that a series of circumstances more or less coincident with the war must have led to increase of adult crime...

...The long view toward the future is more assuring...

...To date, adds Mr...

...He rewords the idea more intelligibly: "The Lord is my automobile's low gear to help me in climbing hard hills...

...Nor has Mr...

...The Lord is sunlight in my room bringing me the health of ultra-violet rays...

...As it is the twenty-four questions which the census taker invites us all to answer give him no uneasiness...

...This year the French are observing the centenary of a great painter, also long neglected excepting by amateurs, who found the middle ground-the most substantial and dependable of all-between poetry and hard fact...

...If prices continue to advance for a few weeks, and corporation reports for the spring quarter show anything better than expected, the lid will probably be off, and half the nation will again be hanging asthmatically above the ticker tape...

...The result is often, for the best of us, dis-ctouraging in the sense that people one had hoped to please with something refuse to like either the company or the fare...

...With the genuine article scarce, and its price up, "the large corporation can afford to spend the necessary money to entertain its customers, when such entertainment would be beyond the means of its smaller competitor...

...The method outlined seems eminently helpful and reliable...

...A phenomenon as complete and as massively integrated as this cannot be called just hypocrisy...

...It is actually thinking double...

...Camille Pissaro AN ERA which has revived the regional novel ought to be introduced as well to the almost forgotten maxims of the Abbe Roux...

...The Lord is my Shepherd' tells us practically nothing about God...

...He has backed, not a certified winner, but his own judgment...

...The rate per 10,000 inhabitants has declined similarly...

...Fortunately the details of his work do not permit him to dramatize himself...

...One notable example is the investigation, by the United States Children's Bureau, of juvenile crime in Chicago...

...Any formula arrived at is, therefore, certain to be limited in its appeal...

...It forms the topic of an interesting paper contributed by the Reverend Mariano Cuevas, S.J., to the latest volume of Catholic Historical Records and Studies...

...It deals, as he does not seem to have noticed, with the relation of two identities, One the conscious Lover and Cherisher, the other the consciously loved and cherished...

...Jesse Holmes, the representative of Quakerism at Columbia University's recent symposium on religion, was misquoted in the press, he represented Quakerism with a very curious suggestion indeed...

...One great industrial name clashed against another with the impact and inconclusiveness of the irresistible force meeting the immovable body...

...Statistics are being compiled and feasible deductions arrived at...

...Apparently the only persons in Boise who knew nothing about it were Senator Borah and the local chief of police...

...What these circumstances were nobody can, at present, divine with dependable accuracy...

...Briefly they propose a system of national and state bureaus to provide continuous statistics on unemployment, and machinery to stabilize employment by watching for periods of depression and timing the construction of public works accordingly...

...The questions which he asks of Jones are the same as those he asks of Smith...

...When he has found this same relation in the new fields which he indicates, we give him leave to rewrite the Psalm...

...Entire prohibition is not...

...Their only difference is that some are even more entertaining than others...

...There are hundreds of disconsolate authors who would like to know and who have already reached advance unfavorable verdicts...

...Unless he be one of those fortunate creatures who can bid for names with the help of an unrestricted checking-account, he must first set the table as he thinks best and then offer such fare as he can scrape together and the gods will provide...

...Sprague goes on piling up instances collected at random from the whole country...

...Were it otherwise, the census taker would tremble at thought of the terrible will for knowledge which drives him out upon this errand, and to which he must make account...

...A brief foreword declares: "Criminal justice administrators and others engaged in the prevention and suppression of crime have for many years expressed regret upon the absence of reliable information concerning crime and criminals...

...We can look at one another without emotion: one is an official badge, the other is a street address, neither for the time are anything human, and that is well...

...How does he do this...

...The idea of filling in the enormous void of modern religion by rewriting the Twenty-third Psalm has its charms, but we suggest, nevertheless, that that great pastoral exultation be left intact...

...What it needs, as a whole, is a medical instead of a moral diagnosis...

...He likes to have them come that way...

...In other words, he must find first of all a formula, and, secondly, a balanced ration...

...There are Christians here and there who still know what a sheep is, and can even understand the ministrations of a shepherd...

...It depends upon business conventions, district managers remote from headquarters, far-flung star salesmen: these depend on good mixing, conviviality, pleasing the customer more than the opposition pleases him...

...We read that this "five-century-old" document is a transcript made "directly from contemporary life by eye-witness historians...

...Discouragement is said, however, to be salutary in so far as it makes one work harder and swallow lozenges of borrowed cheerfulness...

...They do not lead him to an awareness of his ultimate responsibilities, nor us to the consequences of error multiplied...

...WEEK BY WEEK Help for the Jobless ABOUT the only encouragement to a man out of a job these days is that summer is not far away, and if he can hang to life for another month he may find it less miserable later on...

...It is to be hoped that what he says will be drawn to the attention of countless fledgling writers in all parts of the country...

...Sprague who, as a writer on business subjects, is widely in touch with business personages) found an inordinate number among even bone-dry corporation presidents who oppose the practice...

...It is strange that an art which now seems inexpressibly fine should have been so little appreciated during many years that the master lived in poverty and subject to the contempt of his more successful-if now almost completely forgotten-rivals...

...IT IS well in this connection to note that the International Association of Chiefs of Police has prepared a manual on Uniform Crime Reporting which, though intended primarily for the police should influence a lot of glib current talk about criminology...

...Book Detectives WHO decides what is to be published...

...In all probability they would have done no such thing...

...We should all be unhappy at census time, in sympathy for him...

...Some other name must be found for it...

...Camille Pissaro, born a hundred years ago, was one of the chief creators of the impressionistic manner, the impetus to which he and other French artists derived from a trip to England and a study of Constable...

...is derived from the experience of somebody else...

...Youth Improves IF THE present rate of progress continues, we shall eventually be in a position to know something about crime...

...America's Oldest Book MANY newspapers have commented on the Codex Saville, recently acquired by the Heye Foundation of New York City and thought to be America's oldest book...

...But there is a yet more fundamental objection...

...After all, he reads manuscripts, too, by the hundreds...

...He saw that man absorbs quite as much cruelty and hardness as poetry from nature...

...That is a compliment which an editor might well long to transfer to himself...

...Though every detail of information it supplies has been found elsewhere by investigators, the Codex will aid in settling disputes about the dates of Mexican rulers prior to 1468 and other matters...

...the graph of melancholy (the American temperament is now discovered as melancholic, probably the result of our desire for perfection) would show a jagged peak...

...But if, with the help of special construction programs which many cities and states are now undertaking, unemployment can be reduced by half or more, we may be able to stagger out of a very ugly situation, and the country will be satisfied that things are not too terribly out of order...

...It has been years since the United States has uneasily anticipated so critical a period as the next month or six weeks...

...This shows that "less than 12 percent of the total arrests for males in any year are arrests of boys sixteen to twenty years of age...

...Catholics who read are not so many in number, at best...

...I say, by his unique variety of genius...

...Though he is interested in quality products as a matter of course, he knows that the essential thing is to induce his guests to eat and to declare him a satisfactory host...

...Jesse and David UNLESS Dr...

...Senator Wagner's unemployment bills have been favorably reported to the Senate Commerce Committee, and it is as certain as anything can be in Washington that their passage, so long delayed, will come very soon...

...The accepted explanation is that when low money rates and the expectation of continued low money rates are in conjunction with anticipation of better times for business, stock prices ought logically to rise whatever current 'business conditions might be...

...This French priest, whose life was spent among peasants, is certainly one of the most incisive, if sometimes the least roseate, of observant minds...

...But the book itself is a presage of betterment and, in its modest way, a cause for sociological rejoicing...

...These data must not be taken to indicate any great variety of things, but they do point to a few interesting conclusions...

...While taking testimony from the wet and metropolitan areas, they are not confined to them...

...Most religion nowadays," runs his speech...

...Booze and Business" 1 HE recent hearing before the House Judiciary Committee left a confusion in millions of minds as to whether big business approves of prohibition or not...

...Nothing is easier to dogmatize about, and nothing is more difficult to know, than the processes of the slow advancement of humanity toward consciously chronicled civilization...

...One of Ours, an up-state potentate, toasts local prosperity in the native applejack that is promoting it, and passes solemnly to politics: "Jimmy Wads-worth needed to be taught that no man can be against prohibition and get the votes of the God-fearing people of New York state I" And so Mr...

...They have read it as a success...

...Sprague, no one has complained to Senator Walsh about it...

...how that shadow would overcast his mind as he goes through the streets...

...there are lovers of poetry who feel that not even modern religious leaders have a title to rewrite the classics...

...Who can doubt that, inside the Catholic domain, the task is particularly hard and humble...

...Naturally those origins, like the whole early history of the race, remain a mystery...

...Some members of the general public, having read a book, are ready to assert that they would have advised publication of it," says Mr...

...he is bored, and pays only a mechanical attention to the answer within which, so brief and so objective, lie the omens of changes too profound to be taken by our feeble imaginations...

...yet it is not unlikely that if the public is not already strongly in this market (and a fall in bank deposits may indicate that it is) the spectacle of advancing prices and the temptation to gamble with money which costs only 4 percent may soon make it forget all the resolutions which it so darkly swore about six months ago...

...He ought to be a more exciting figure than the soldier or the airplane pilot, being more novel than the one, coming of a tradition older than the other...

...Sprague is even approximately right, the country is not pretending...

...If Mr...

...Study revealed few "hardened criminals" among the youngsters brought to trial...

...If one may judge by the book, this task is not easy...

...If Dr...

...Millet keeps his vogue, sentimental though his canvases not infrequently are...

...DUT, in all sober truth, the editor is not really like a publishers' reader...

...Another is a city in Montana where the prohibitionist president of a large department store has been forced to open a free bar to keep "his most profitable cattlemen and ranch-owning customers" from straying to rivals with a better understanding of the needs of heads of families whose women-folk are shopping...

...The Lord is my dynamo to charge my run-down batteries...

...The Lord is my antiseptic in times of dangerous epidemics...

...And what can that possibly mean to us of the city and the twentieth century...

...and this depends to a greater and greater extent upon liquor...

...The Census Taker IT IS strange that the census taker, who counts heads, goes from door to door in the name of the government, and appears only once in ten or twenty years should not occupy a more salient place among us...

...There are reasons -lack of equipment, reluctance to "give the town a black eye," inability to fix upon unfirm crime definitions -why advance has been slow...

...Even more worthy of note is the steady decrease in the number of offenses...

...there is nothing to break the rhythm of his work...

...When they do it gives him much greater opportunity for a really discriminating choice and, incidentally, the chance for a more varied and appetizing menu...