Week by Week
WEEK BY WEEK The Tardieu Cabinet THE highly precarious condition of the new French government under the premiership of M. Tardieu, unevenly balanced as it is among the many parties or blocs...
...We know, at all events, what will perish-the opinions, those of all the Jerome Coignards in his books...
...In the case of Mr...
...I wish they would give them back to their sisters...
...His great moment came when he was seventy-seven...
...There were times when his eagerness to operate through the medium of public opinion may have seemed wrong to the more intellectual and revolutionary among his countrymen...
...In politics he hewed to the line of Parnell, and say what you will, that has not been without its virtues...
...His brother, Prince George, the Earl of Harewood, Baron Gainford and Baron Holmpatrick have also been busy clicking the needles...
...Are we to call these men and the many others who have sought to soothe their nerves with purling, sissies...
...Social Action and the Government EVERYBODY realizes that the industrial welfare of the nation has been threatened by the unprecedented slump in financial confidence...
...Little boys and girls will not crowd about a mother's knee with demands for literary spinach even if the diet includes "Herodotus, Shakespeare, Edna St...
...It is only necessary to read the eulogies that have appeared in newspapers, religious as well as secular, of the work as apostle of tolerance and broader understanding of the late Archbishop Mathieu of Regina, to realize that Canadians, while adhering to their individual forms of religious belief and religious practice, have the utmost respect for those of others...
...If Dr...
...But it must be counted as an advantage, and not a negligible one, against the long tally of wrong-headedness and corruption which we are forced to chalk up after much of the realism of our time...
...The historian, however, must reckon more fully with the work of the theologian and chancelor who was, indeed, the "light of Paris," if he would understand the history of Europe in the fifteenth century...
...I believe that France, at the end of his days, regretted having had them, and in such quantities, if we may trust a few words recorded by M. Nicolas Segur...
...It makes no difference, according to Miss Field, that, whereas the old preference was for innocence vindicated and virtue rewarded, the new preference is for drabness, suffering and vice...
...But though it is not exactly new, this is a development of which Mr...
...American Catholics, in addition to the ordinary good-will which they possess for France, have a special reason for hoping that the Tardieu government will overcome its difficulties and advance the general cause of world stability which is so largely dependent upon the equilibrium and peace of France's internal affairs...
...It is difficult to explain how a nation which had been uncontrollably optimistic about its future should suddenly have become bottomlessly scared...
...The first is that the modern talk of "candor" and "intrepidity" has been incidentally useful to the forces of light...
...Specifically, wrist watches, though previously labeled effeminate, were masculinized by the war...
...But opinions...
...Father of the House of Commons WHEN T. P. O'Connor left Dublin to seek employment as a journalist in Fleet Street, he must have told himself that the route was old and well trodden...
...Not only, she finds, do "the purveyors of skimmed milk and saccharine" actually continue to address an undiminished audience...
...Science en Route to Maiden W E shall give an eye-witness's account next week of the happenings in Maiden cemetery, but meanwhile it will be well to remember that nothing in the Church's attitude toward the events at Father Powers's grave can be interpreted as a belief that miracles have been performed there...
...No other teacher stood so firmly for those eternal verities which the Church must expound to peoples and governments...
...Adults do not believe in fairies but they do believe in fairy tales, for themselves as well as for children...
...These determine not merely the prevalence of employment and good wages, but also the value of the properties in stocks and bonds which the average industrialized employee is accustomed to accept as the normal staples of ownership...
...1 HE government has not been satisfied, however, with an isolated measure...
...His remarks, he explained, were a challenge to those who "believe the biblical miracles cannot be explained scientifically...
...A further suggestion, originating with the Treasury Department, advocated an increase in projected public works in order that possible unemployment may be absorbed...
...By comparison with these giants, "Tay Pay" naturally seems humble, but his career had its own especial greatness...
...Anatole France had opinions, which is a scandal...
...interred liturgically ? The answer is, of course, clear from canon law, which declares emphatically that in cases where the act does not seem to have been deliberate, religious burial may follow, provided that the ordinary of the diocese extends permission and no scandal is given...
...He mastered the technique of modern journalism and adopted some of its attitude toward life...
...There is every reason to believe that the substructure is sound, that no perilous curtailment of activity is imminent, and that the disaster of the stock market has only temporarily drained the financial surplus...
...The Universe, our London contemporary, constitutes our authority for the statement that several members of the new government are prominent leaders in Catholic as well as political circles...
...Or one even has principles, if one is capable of arriving at any...
...Walsh believes in all the biblical miracles, every Catholic will accept his challenge...
...Deplorable...
...The miracles of Our Lord, as recorded in the New Testament, were not confined to the healing of diseases to which distorted imaginations might have contributed...
...William T. Walsh, rector of a Protestant Episcopal church in New York City, is prompt in declaring that "Christ and His disciples developed a highly efficient technique of healing," and "employed methods which only recently have been adopted, and with success, in our more modern clinics...
...We believe that the government understands what has been happening and that it will exert every means that lies in its power to improve the outlook...
...S IT true that the amount of sentimentality in the world remains constant, and that it is only its form which changes...
...For opinions, according to the verdict of the sage of old, are the vanity of the human spirit...
...M. Seil-liere certainly left his audience with a clear impression of the moral courage of one who did not hesitate to address words of reproof to selfish princes and to clerics who had forgotten the meaning of their election...
...We even have the paradox that novelists outside the Church will sometimes heartily praise her, emboldened thereto by the fact that nowadays "one can say anything...
...All of which is true and in the manner of Marshal Foch, who is said to have regarded with curious disfavor all those soldiers who confessed to merely holding opinions...
...The best of these we have seen is the Baron Ernest Seilliere's address to the learned societies of France, in which the essential information was combined with apt comment...
...Let him overlook the wrist watches of his cops or else he may visit a station house one day and discover those burly gentlemen engaged in counting two and dropping one...
...And the way in which the federal government has shouldered this job is in itself a splendid bracer...
...But as it is, he is remembered as Pere La Victoire...
...We caution Mr...
...And yet it would be foolish not to realize that many aspects of the national situation-inability to find money with which to finance new undertakings, and failure to market commodities as satisfactorily as manufactured goods are sold, among others-have been genuinely threatening for a long time...
...Let Ariel, Titania, Fafner, the King of the Golden River, the water babies, Undine, the Snow Queen and a host of others testify...
...A sceptic who has opinions ? To what purpose ? In order to change them...
...Curiously enough, this item was juxtaposed in the news with a despatch from London which heralded knitting as a pastime for men...
...More generally speaking, one feels that greater leniency toward suicides is bound to follow the present tendency to excessive nervous strain...
...Thus Dr...
...Instead the imagination of a child, which should be stimulated at this stage if anything else should, will be balked by conjuring the image "A stands for adding machine, axle and algebra...
...But what scientist is going to accept the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the raising of Lazarus, the Resurrection or the Ascension, and reduce them to a scientific formula...
...Hoover prepared the ground for constructive leadership toward those social goals which previous conferences have, in a measure, outlined...
...Religious Good-Will in Canada IN THE Dundas Centre United Church of Toronto, the pastor, the Reverend E. M. Young, offered a fervent prayer for the recovery to full health and usefulness of the Right Reverend Michael F. Fallon, Bishop of the Catholic diocese of London, Ontario...
...that his fortune had taken some striking turns, ruinously in the Boulanger affair and the Panama scandals, happily in the Dreyfus case...
...It cannot be expected that merely bringing prominent business executives together under patriotic auspices will solve many vital problems...
...M. Louis Rollin, Minister of Mercantile Marine, is a vice-president of the Association of Catholic Youth, an organization which has trained many of the ablest Catholic public men in France...
...The great success of the Catholic Federation and the many other Catholic organizations has, as the Universe points out, marked the turning of the tide of public opinion against the further progress of the anti-clerical forces in France...
...Miss Marie Duggan of the College's Bureau of Education Service has pronounced the edict: "We must remove from the nursery and the kindergarten those utterly ridiculous fairy tales in which animals and birds are endowed with human qualities and talk like human beings...
...One has ideas...
...So generally had this change been felt that even when it seemed probable that M. Daladier, chief aide of M. Herriot during the latter's virulent but abortive attack upon the Church a few years ago, might form the new government, there was little trepidation among Catholics...
...But if the corporative importance of private endeavor can be made even a little more evident, mutually extended business and psychological credit will have a tonic effect...
...That this must be traced, at least in part, to a faulty economic psychology does not render it any less serious...
...It became so because he was an adventurer of the Rooseveltian character...
...Bishop Fallon is reported to have been very greatly affected when he learned of the incident, and to have caused a message of sincere thanks to be conveyed to the Protestant pastor and the members of his congregation...
...And her deliberation is markedly in contrast with those who, anticipating a new Lourdes or Saint Anne de Beaupre, are immediately active in demonstrating that cures so-called are explainable in terms of simple science, and that some day science will reach the point where the miracles of Christ will easily be duplicated by the wise men of a new age...
...No philosopher should attach any intrinsic significance to a gaudy necktie or a boyish bob...
...The Under-secretary for Hygiene, Dr...
...Though it has always been difficult to make sure that a man who dies by his own hand is guilty of a deliberate crime, the problem is now much more complex...
...in journalism and politics he was marked with the faults and the virtues of that type...
...This marked advance has been due principally to direct Catholic action-an organized and expressed determination not to be shut out either from the public life of the country or from just and fair treatment in religious life...
...The announcement that tax reductions would curtail somewhat the drain upon corporations meant, in essence, that the importance of direct taxation as a vital economic governing valve was recognized...
...It is sentimentality just the same: that is, it is emotional disproportion, a misrepresentation of the actual in favor of some scheme or formula of existence which the writer likes better...
...Has the Church modified the regulation which insisted that persons guilty of having taken their own lives are not to be...
...If this measure is actually voted and applied, the flexibility of our national financial control will have been proved...
...The Prince and Mr...
...But these can never profitably forget him and in the end-who knows?- they may discover that he was right...
...Beggans...
...As a journalist, he must be remembered as one of the most original and effective of all political columnists...
...I don't like to see cops wearing wrist watches," he said...
...Beggans 1 HOUGH externals play a part in our estimate of our fellow-men, the tailor's slogan, "Clothes make the man," certainly refers merely to appearance and not to character...
...Another Catholic leader in the Tardieu Cabinet is M. Georges Pernot, Minister of Public Works...
...American prosperity (granted there has been any such thing) depends ultimately upon the maintenance of corporation earnings...
...Who has learned enough about the origins of psychic disease to know positively when and whether an individual is unbalanced ? In view of these circumstances one may legitimately hold that Christianity must increase its effort to impress people with the terrible mistake suicide involves, rather than run the risk of making its final judgments unduly stern...
...Suicide and the Church INQUIRY regarding the Catholic burial accorded to Mr...
...In the current North American Review, Louise Maunsell Field investigates (rather tartly) our alleged modern freedom from the emotional cliche in literature, and decides that we have no basis on which to make the boast...
...We shall be greatly surprised if all this activity does not help to stabilize industry...
...Of what has happened since we spoke sufficiently last week...
...She should study the famous cartoon in the New Yorker depicting the rebellion against broccoli of the five-year-old, fed on spinach since infancy, and his words, "I say it's spinach and I say to hell with it...
...Goldsmith, Burke and Sheridan had made similar journeys and come as near the end of the rainbow as it is possible for man to arrive...
...TO ENUMERATE specifically: conspicuous among the new Cabinet members is M. Champetier de Ribes, the Under-secretary for Finance, who is one of the militant leaders of the Catholic Democratic movement...
...It is this aspect of the great man which is probably of the most importance to us now, when so many varieties of irrational and merely enthusiastic "mysticism" are making converts...
...WEEK BY WEEK The Tardieu Cabinet THE highly precarious condition of the new French government under the premiership of M. Tardieu, unevenly balanced as it is among the many parties or blocs through which French politics carries on its fluctuating course, is well understood by all students of international affairs...
...Riordan, a man consistently identified with Catholic interests, it seemed certain that suicide had been the result of mental aberration and that the circumstances warranted recognition of the normal Catholic convictions of the deceased...
...Gerson as a mystic was described as one who blended the attitude of prayer with a sound use of reason...
...The career of Clemenceau is one of the most astonishing of modern times...
...It is no longer necessary for Catholic politicians in France to be nonentities in Catholic movements and affairs...
...We hope Miss Duggan's other reasoning is not as faulty as her analogy...
...Oberkirch, and M. Robert Serot, Under-secretary for Agriculture, are also Catholics, conspicuous as such in the organization and direction of Catholic cultural and social movements...
...For in forming his Cabinet M. Tardieu has signalized the greatest advance made in recent years toward the lessening of conflict between the Catholics of France and the bitter anti-clericals who for so long held a dominant position in that country...
...but our respectable realists, those chiefly responsible for what we have been instructed to consider our emancipation from earlier literary falsehoods are just as prone to render life according to a predetermined pattern as the very rose-water writers whom they are always congratulating themselves on excelling...
...Announcing that he would call a series of conferences with representatives of basic enterprises, Mr...
...John Beggans, of the Jersey City Police Department, must have been unaware...
...After this, the congregation united in singing a hymn of petition for one seriously ill...
...A Sceptic's Opinions IN VIEW of the fact that Anatole France is still regarded with much favor in America, the following terse comment by Jacques Bainville may not be uninteresting: "A literary journal asked not long ago, with more than one hint of doubt, what would remain of the author of Thais...
...The Mystical Chancelor FIVE hundred years having passed since the death of Jean Gerson, the greatest chancelor ever to have directed the University of Paris, numerous tributes have revived his memory and contributed, in a measure, to establish his importance...
...The Prince of Wales (an arbiter of men's styles if there ever was one) has knitted three scarves which are on display at Queen Mary's London Needlework Guild...
...Though these lofty terms are usually invoked to cover the mere process of selecting or composing facts according to models which are by now too drearily familiar, the tradition which they presuppose does make the occasional faithful recounting of a radiant or a challenging truth easier for the average writer, on the whole, than it used to be...
...This involved a loss of poetry and spiritual passion- O'Connor had in him nothing of the stuff of Pearse or Emmett-but rendered humor, comment and debate powerful weapons against prejudice and dishonesty...
...1 HIS is a just and sensible arraignment, but one's assent to it may be so sweeping as to exclude two considerations which deserve to be mentioned...
...James J. Riordan, a prominent banker who committed suicide in New York following the crash in stocks, has also been made of us...
...that he was the most picturesque of all anti-clericals...
...What Is Sentimentality...
...Clemenceau Passes Georges clemenceau, of whose last book we had occasion to write in these columns last week, is dead at the age of eighty-nine...
...If he had died at three score and ten, one could have said of him only that he was a rationalist of the sort most active and successful in France during the early years of the twentieth century...
...For now a new program, embodying modern theories of child psychology, is being completed at Teachers' College, Columbia University, and the elf, the gnome, the jinnee, the witch and all the folk of fairyland are banned...
...M. Tardieu himself has already publicly declared his opposition to those unjust and nationally injurious laws against the religious congregations which have been for so long a source of much of France's social instability...
...And he had them on every conceivable subject including the Spanish-American War in which he was feverishly interested...
...Just now, however, the task must be to restore sanity rather than to issue diagnoses...
...No one today denies the existence of neurological ailments which can be cured by a change in mental reactions...
...and even the casual reader of foreign news must be struck by the difficulties facing France because of the highly complex character of its peculiar system...
...The second consideration which might move one to suffer these writers, if not gladly, at least philosophically, cannot be better expressed than in Miss Field's own words: "If too much treacly sentimentality slathered over beauty and innocence, home and mother, has done much to make them all alike objects of derision to the truly up-to-date, is it too much to hope that the sentimentality now being lavished on the hideous and the abnormal will in due course of time produce a similar revulsion...
...that near the end he had come into the dignity of the Premiership, and that his three years' tenancy would be remembered among other things for the inauguration of quarrels which had no pleasant effect in France...
...Against Tinker Bell PETER PAN must replead the cause of Tinker Bell...
...This, of course, does not remotely justify the violations of taste and morals for which the school of "unflinching truth" is often responsible...
...Just as a child is conditioned at an early age to eat spinach and turnips and similar foods at which he might later balk, so he should be conditioned to appreciate good books, even though he may not realize until much later just how good his books are and why they are good...
...We hope that the address will be read by many who, in the very nature of things, were not able to listen to it in person...
...Her recognition of manifestations of this kind as divinely authentic has been in all ages notoriously slow...
...when through his Victory Cabinet he had the opportunity to put down the defeatists and inspire France with his own confidence and will to win...
...Vincent Millay and Nathalia Crane...
...Happily, the action of the Toronto Christians of a communion other than that of the sick Bishop was not considered as anything more than a reflection of the sentiment of the bulk of Protestants in Ontario and throughout Canada...
Vol. 11 • December 1929 • No. 5
