Week by Week
WEEK BY WEEK Mr. Hoover Addresses Congress THE PRESIDENT'S message supplied its Capitol audience with a fairly learned dissertation on the problems confronting federal authority. Interesting by...
...Hoover's own beliefs are set forth...
...Undoubtedly, as they think, considerable numbers of our tourists were deflected to Germany, which has studiously made itself more attractive to visitors every year...
...The career of this rugged and thoughtful New Englander has been analyzed appreciatively by Hannis Taylor and others...
...The blame for what has occurred must be laid to the door of incorrigible war lords, who have played with dynamite so long that their program is now just one chronic explosion...
...A very satisfactory way is surely to use the appeal of a significant personality...
...Is it so great as to make repudiation impossible...
...Much in his published writings reminds the American reader so vividly of Cardinal Gibbons that the Holy See's implicit endorsement of them is genuinely memorable...
...it should not be disillusioned...
...The specialist in his laboratory, proceeding with the scrupulous caution imposed by the discipline and tradition of his calling, is not, of course, chargeable with the spectacular interpretations of his labors made by writers whose object is to sell articles...
...Innocents Abroad IT IS reported that American travel in France fell off by 20 percent this year, and the French are very anxious to account for it...
...Thirty-five percent of this increase is accounted for by the expenses attached to free service for government departments, franked mail, and the air and ocean mail subsidies...
...improvement of certain Post-office Department methods...
...Whatever Dr...
...And they produce an effect which a first-rate scientist must regard with a mixture of contempt and consternation...
...But since a responsible addressee in China could not be found, matters rested until Soviet troops had reestablished operation of the disputed railway in a manner conforming with existing treaties...
...Important practical decisions are stalled in debate, and necessary business routine gets entangled in oratory...
...Energetic administration has come into its own...
...Here are just a few of the ideas: reduction in the cost of national defense...
...He has had a share in the direction of the Institut Catholique, which is the Catholic university of Paris, has long been a famous professor of moral theology, and is renowned as the master of a homiletic designed for the humble but proof against banality...
...The spot-light is no longer focused entirely upon discussion bred of political alignments...
...We BELIEVE that the choice testifies to the Papacy's wish to perpetuate the attitude of Cardinal Dubois, who was decidedly moderate in his views of questions involving political action...
...OF COURSE the categories of scientist and popular prophet are not always mutually exclusive...
...Postal Deficit IN THE report of the postal service for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1929, Postmaster General Brown discloses a deficit of $85,461,176 which is an approximate increase of fifty million dollars over that for the year preceding...
...During the war and the period of reconstruction immediately following it, Americans had been confined pretty well to their own hemisphere...
...Accurate statistics will not be available for several years, but when they are, it will probably be seen that American travel, in Europe fell off generally in 1929...
...International intervention might have accomplished something if it could have swung into effective action six months ago...
...Finally, Monsignor Verdier is a man well past sixty years of age, whose life has been given very largely to educational and scholarly pursuits...
...The message is replete with suggestions on this point...
...This happens repeatedly with letters whose destinations are some three or four hundred miles away...
...As for the third, his views are now those of his predecessors, who have (in popular parlance) tossed the buck of drought back to that public opinion which wrangles, defends and scorns Volsteadism with undim-inished vigor...
...History will probably tell us that the genius of Mr...
...Resistance is made to them, of course---the deprecations of a Millikan or an Eddington, the sound popularizations of a Jeans...
...Will the United States go ahead now and proceed to discuss the whole difficult question of China's status and rights...
...Monsignor Verdier has lived and acted in this same spirit...
...Regarding the first he remains well-nigh laconic...
...But this cannot be the whole story...
...Stimson's letter was not intended to be a critique of this procedure, but rather a declaration that the powers which had signed the pact were anxious to keep hostilities from developing to a point where the integrity of China might be endangered...
...Biologists See Him a Man of Superior Intellect, etc...
...Oscar Riddle, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, explicitly sponsored therein the statements that "Investigators . . . will probably both find and at least partially control, those factors or agencies which make one man a presidential possibility, another a great money-maker, another a great author and still another simply a day laborer...
...We will go miles to see and hear reels of bizarre doings in the odd four corners of the world, but almost nothing could be less instructive, less exciting, or more criminally boresome than to watch Hiram Doofiddle at his desk in his sumptuous suite on the twenty-first floor of the Doofiddle Building, reading out of the corner of his eye from a manuscript propped behind a barricade of books...
...Of course the difficulty of collective repudiation is great...
...Recently a special article in so superior a newspaper as the New York Times gave an example...
...How impossible it is to govern through purely political mediums has long since been clear...
...then came the new prosperity and leisure and a desire to do something with it...
...It is the shaking out process which has begun...
...As a reward they acquire, through the official addresses and other mediums, unusual insight into the true relations between the state and the individual, and between civil and ecclesiastical authority...
...Superman Once More WHAT is the ethical obligation of scientists as a class toward those waterings-down and popularizations of scientific findings which are a chief feature of modern journalism...
...Sound has completed the dehumanization of the eminent...
...And it is only natural that it should have fallen off...
...To this last everyone assents...
...If it is mischievous for large numbers of the public to believe that they understand the esoteric refinements of modern research, when in reality they do nothing of the sort, then these articles are mischievous...
...Interesting by reason of the fulness with which the purposes of the administration are outlined, it is especially remarkable for the definiteness with which Mr...
...Thus the students of Webster College, a wide-awake Catholic institution for young women at Webster Groves, Missouri, observe Pelatiah Webster Day every year...
...But the applications continue to be made, all the same, based on his material and bolstered up by the authority of his name...
...It remains to wish Mr...
...But the article on which he put his imprimatur is headed: Science Pictures a Superman of Tomorrow...
...Reforms are advocated, but none of them is merely ideological and all have been carefully thought out...
...Will they underwrite, by silence, the blanket use of the term "biologists," which is certainly deliberately intended to imply that the contemporary masters in that field are behind his opinion...
...Some of these recommendations are judicious, but no proposal to relieve the situation can be comprehensive if it does not include a drastic curtailment of the scandalous abuse of the franking privilege...
...Of course such a theatre became inevitable with the arrival of the talkies, and the opportunity to reproduce the voices of the notable men and women whom we used to see regularly at the silent cinema, laying wreaths at the tomb of the unknown soldier, smashing very authentic looking bottles across the bows of ships, and what-not...
...Doubtless this involved something like a suspicion that Russia might not know just where to halt...
...With reference to l'Action Franchise, for instance, he remained very firm in upholding the interdict against Maurras, but he did not join those venomous attacks upon sorely tried royalists which were so utterly uncharitable that they did immeasurable spiritual harm...
...When on man himself is exercised the power which has already been used on animals, the mind of man will not only grow, it will find freedom...
...reorganization of the various federal departments, with especial attention to the mass of detail which now swamps the Interstate Commerce Commission...
...If Dr...
...But as it turns out, the least happy offerings of the talking news reels are the interviews which were expected to bring the great so close to their "invisible public...
...Since the time of the Concordat-and probably for centuries prior to that-there is no other instance of a simple priest's elevation to this central archbishopric...
...Moscow Replies SOVIET diction, if we may judge from the reply to Secretary of State Stimson's letter to Moscow in the interests of peace in China, is at least original...
...Hoover well in his application of the idea to the situation created by a disturbed and warring Haiti...
...Occasionally a scientist, a real expert, perhaps, in what can be done to guinea-pigs, will be found publicly supposing that the same things can be done to men at some unidentifiable point in future time, with the happiest results to society...
...It is all an excellent idea, which might profitably be adopted elsewhere...
...The Postmaster General has laid before Congress recommendations for legislation, including authority to charge fees for several services now given free...
...But these are individual efforts...
...One hopes that Monsignor Verdier will be at the helm of France during many years to come...
...Even more important, however, is his use of the well-chosen commission (or committee) to carry over into the work of government methods which have proved successful in the history of business and of our democracy generally...
...News Reels Only IN NEW YORK, where anything may be expected to happen, there has been opened a moving picture theatre to show news reels exclusively, thus giving reality to a dream we have long cherished in common (as the daily attendance indicates) with thousands of others...
...Though this broom may conceivably sweep better while it is new, it responds so well to an energetic executive that one may view it with gratitude...
...The New Archbishop of Paris MONSIGNOR JEAN VERDIER, superior general of the Sulpicians, is the new cardinal archbishop of Paris...
...Such a desire to visit Europe as has seized Americans during the past seven or eight years cannot be kept at its peak because the special circumstances which combined to produce it cannot duplicate themselves...
...In short, the President appears to have adopted a policy of watchful waiting in so far as Senate and House are concerned, and to have contented himself with the broad principle that the economic needs of the country will sooner or later force such action as can be obtained...
...It is perhaps too much to expect that the cost of the mails will ever be balanced by income from them, but the country has a right to demand that everything be done to reduce such a staggering annual net loss...
...His numerous friends in the United States are honored by an appointment which they consider providential, and of course our own excellent Sulpicians have shared in this remarkable tribute to their community...
...The resultant rejoinder is, therefore, not without a certain almost satirical pertinence...
...The choice has been warmly approved everywhere, even though it happens to be, in several respects, without precedent...
...Hoover lay in his astute divination of these problems and necessities...
...A good percentage of the public has, through sorry experience, discovered that a letter bearing the air mail stamp is later in arriving than one that travels by ordinary mail...
...Realizing that the religious reconstruction of France depends upon thorough cultivation of the spiritual life, he never permitted his gaze to feast upon a romantic past but welcomed every generous decision of the modern spirit...
...Riddle's eminence in his own field may be, are his colleagues willing to let him broadcast under the authority of "science" on a matter of which science can know nothing...
...The novelty of vacationing abroad as cheaply as at home was sufficient in itself to send a good many of our people to Europe...
...Is any corporate corrective work possible that shall be more immediately active than the various scientific institutes can be, and that shall rebuke in the name of science a good many claims made in the name of science...
...How, for example, shall one teach young people the nature of American government, as distinguished from a thousand and one details of civic legislation or practice...
...Adventures in Patriotism THERE are so many things to learn nowadays that it is genuinely difficult to lay adequate stress upon matters of fundamental importance...
...The document is easier to get at, we think, if a line is drawn between the two categories of action which reveal themselves pretty clearly...
...Hence the problem defined in the foregoing paragraph asserts itself...
...In exchange for a formal reminder that the Kellogg pact obliged signatories to keep the peace, Stalin's government sent back a list of more or less opprobrious epithets and an explanation of the justice of the Russian position in Manchuria...
...On the second he speaks as an enlightened conservative, weary of crusades but eager for progress...
...We take it that Mr...
...And it may notbe entirely inapropos to determine if the air mail department cannot be put on a different and more remunerative basis...
...OUT if no President can govern politically unless supported by congressional majorities absolutely loyal to him, he can make the most of his executive position...
...We also believe that never before has a religious superior been singled out for the office...
...He says very little about the three major issues which have excited and ruffled Congress-the tariff, principles of foreign policy and prohibition...
...merging of the Pension and the Veterans' Bureaus...
...Seldom has an episcopal appointment been awaited with more interest, first of all because of the importance of the see and then because of the difficulties which continue to afflict the Church in France...
...Certainly the spirit in which he faced the problems of democratic government is reflected in several basic conceptions which the constitution embodies...
...Most important, perhaps, was the fact that the restriction of immigration forced steamship companies to create a tourist third class in order to fill their boats...
...The public has been educated to believe that the air mail is faster...
...Those confident social and prophetic applications of the theories of evolution, biochemistry and genetics which constantly adorn our magazines and newspapers would usually find no place in his dry and rigid exposition of the facts he is sure of...
...Hoover's resolve to capitalize this truth is evident...
...If half-truths, or truths gratuitously extended, debauch the popular mind, then these articles very often debauch the popular mind...
...But perhaps Webster College students are the only ones who recall his memory annually and so arrive at a deeper understanding of the program of government which he sponsored...
...Riddle merely professed to speak for himself, we should perhaps say no more than that his idea of human freedom is somewhat quaint...
Vol. 11 • December 1929 • No. 7
