Week by Week

...A SANE, just and readable analysis of the present "Communist menace" to our country appears in America above the signature of the Reverend How to Cure John LaFarge' S-J- Xt naturally does . not adopt the attitude of that section a Communist of the Hberal press wh;ch treats the danger as non-existent, and classes all those who fear it among capitalists and alarm-mongers...

...Sunday, and that, as Mr...

...On the other hand, as becomes the author of such sound historical romances as The Crisis, and Richard Carvel, he doubts that all changes in taste are necessarily progress...

...It is a pleasure for The Commonweal to remember gratefully, in this hour, the frequent interest in its work manifested by Archbishop Messmer, and his letters to the editors will remain among their treasured possessions...

...even the perversion of school children, "hateful as this evil is," can be countered "by proper influences within and without school hours...

...Speaking in Virginia, Mr...

...Hoover is preparing to deal with the situation unless nature affords substantial relief soon, and his experience in matters such as this ought to be of great value in alleviating distress...

...This declaration has been vigorously counter-attacked, though few have denied the bad effect on real estate of a banking policy which preferred call money loans to first mortgage advances...

...What would happen in the present emergency if there were no wheat surplus ? The only way out would be to purchase grain abroad—an expensive if not almost ruinous measure from the farmer's point of view...

...One change is probably as good as another, but the world becomes too much a slave of the present mode, forgetting there ever was another...

...Which was accordingly done...

...L/NE Henry Ford has been complimented so frequently upon the wages paid to his employees that investigators have been eager to put on n j .• their spectacles and see what it is all . ** . about...

...and its causes are a challenge not so much to the strong-arm squad as to the Christian and Catholic heart...

...The heaviest score against American Communism is its deliberate fomenting of trouble for labor...

...WEEK BY WEEK drought, which a week ago seemed a minor hiatus in the normal activity of the season, now threatens to become a major catastrophe...

...The South has watched cotton parch and wilt similarly, while in the districts which apparently have suffered most of all—Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, southern Ohio—conditions are so bad that actual famine impends, with an acute shortage of water adding to the general misery...

...the restriction to the collective state of the right to own property...

...This in spite of Sherlock the fact that his creator went off the Holmes's road into spiritistic hazelbrush and that Monument the downpour of mystery stories has grown so heavy that some can now be purchased for fifty cents (and it is not a bargain...

...Recognizing that "there is a certain trend in art today," and that "if I am not working along that particular line, my work is not considered of particular importance—at the moment, at least," he has occupied himself contentedly in this long interval with carpentry and painting...

...Watson occasionally alludes: "All Holmesand-Watson lovers must have brooded sadly on the titles of those untold tales...

...such speculation is too often sterile or mischievous...

...Nevertheless the drought constitutes an important criticism of Mr...

...NEWS that the Rev...

...word revolution...

...integral state paternalism, extending in the most absolute sense into the field of the family and of education...

...Edwin V. O'Hara has been named Bishop of Little Falls, Montana, will deeply please all those who have known and « j admired his great work in behalf of the Catholic rural population...

...Morley comments on the unpublished adventures to which Dr...

...Few communities in the United States have witnessed more violent clashes of ideals and ideas, Milwaukee being at once a Catholic stronghold, a centre of Lutheran energy, the haunt of liberalistic Germans and a turbulent melting pot...

...Seventy-nine of the families helped to support a church by giving an average sum of a dollar a month per family of 4.5 (which is religion at a pretty low price), and the "average person" went to the movies seven times a year...

...She is already clothed...

...But the citizens felt otherwise...

...He asks just how "dangerous" a Bolshevist must be considered to be, and answers his own query...

...The shocking affair of the Dutch steamship Friesland, which so nearly cost us both our lives,' the case of Wilson the notorious canary-trainer . . . the singular affair of the aluminum crutch, the Curious Experience of the Patterson Family in the Island of Uffa—these are some of the yarns we have had to do without...

...In the corn belt rain has been so scarce for two tttl xt months that estimators figure the crop R . „ will be at least 20 percent below normal, Kam b alls while losses in hay, grain and pasturage have generally been equally heavy...

...Bolshevism derives some of its present power from its novelty and its "salesmanship" and the rest from the injustice and confusion around it...

...Meanwhile it is obvious that under the paradoxical circumstances obtaining agriculture as a whole may profit by calamity...

...This is brought out in a fine tribute to Conan Doyle which Christopher Morley publishes in the current Saturday Review...

...It is reported that the husbands spent, on the whole, more for clothes than did their wives—a fact which ought to appeal to Mr...

...Arthur J. Morris asserted that a good share of the prevailing depression could be attributed to decreased instalment buying, caused by the diversion of funds into a speculative stock market...

...The normal household spent a third of its income for food, and about as much for rent and clothing combined...

...In the case of "such an inflammable issue as Bolshevism," it is imperative to confine ourselves to "reality here and now...

...It would also stress once again the salutary and humiliating fact that, like all human products, Sherlock is incomplete...

...For nearly twenty years he labored in the East as a pastor and professor of theology, going to Wisconsin as a bishop in 1892...

...1 HE practical question," he warns us, "is of proximate, immediate danger...

...1 HE national habit of buying bath tubs and davenports on the instalment plan has been satirized by foreigners, defended by august econp t^t, omists and recommended by the sales folk of innumerable corporations...

...Its You Can effect upon general business conditions has been appraised with similar diversity...

...Sunday had not objected to the Venus, she must be, by the severest existing standards, unobjectionable...

...Our main danger is not from radical tendencies, though admittedly subversive, but from the illusion of national superiority and well-being...

...Certainly such a standard of living would seem to many a European worker as little short of the life of Riley...

...At any rate, the report issued by one of the largest of instalment financing companies—the Commercial Investment Trust Corporation—seems to indicate that the slump in buying on time has been less pronounced than was supposed...

...1 HE home town of the Reverend Billy Sunday, a harmless midwestern hamlet, has made the news in a story which provokes our curiosity...

...And of the reality so carefully limited he has two things to say: while it does exist, its proportions are not so large nor its field so favorable as to be disquieting...

...It is, of course, unsafe to generalize, but this experience is a moderately good argument for the belief that the instalment plan is here to stay...

...Besides containing an excellent short history of letters, these tranquil and temperate words contain a really admirable wisdom...

...hence, theirs is largely the responsibility...

...the proletarianization of society...

...His Grace of Milwaukee beMessmer longed t0 the «pioneer generation" of well-educated European priests who accepted invitations to come to the then missionary country of the United States...

...A dozen years ago he was an author of very considerable ™. active reputation, based on a more than Wins on respectable achievement...

...The furthermost logical reaches, the possible ultimate sinister developments, of these doctrines, do not concern us...

...His house was wholly unequipped with those cerberi with which busy and prominent men defend themselves against intruders, and of course he went everywhere to supervise the abundance of new activities by means of which the Church was striving to leaven that section of the world...

...It comprises, we are reminded, "class warfare...

...Wheat will be fed to animals instead of corn...

...L/EATH, which came to Archbishop Sebastian G. Messmer at the advanced age of eighty-three, has recently called several prominent members A hW h °^ t^ie C-atliolic hierarchy in the Middle" West...

...This being the first time that a regular contributor to The Commonweal has become a member of the hierarchy we consider it something of a red-letter occasion...

...Though the Corporation did considerably less business, its net profit compares very well with earnings of the year previous, which indicates that the act of paying up was pretty generally accomplished...

...There is neither selfdepreciation nor wounded self-importance in his renouncement...

...He has displayed notable gifts of public and pastoral leadership...

...Yet he has relinquished both the kudos and the activity with well-bred calm...

...But it does liberalism a truer and more difficult service by setting an example of balanced, moderate treatment of the danger after accepting and defining it...

...The more obvious questions—as to whom you could get to plant poison ivy, or why a denizen of Chicago should be shocked at anything—pale beside the simple and sufficient and final query that suddenly leaps out from these facts: Why should anyone want to clothe the Venus de Milo...

...Perhaps most of all I deplore that we never were told 'the story of the politician, the lighthouse, and the trained cormorant.' In this allusion we surely find Watson in a deliberately pawky vein.—We hoped against hope for some of these stories...

...It further appears that a lady visitor from Chicago was so shocked by it that she planted, or caused to be planted, poison ivy at its base...

...StartShould Be ing from scratch) Father O'Hara rapidly became one of the nation's important sociologists and blended careful study of major problems with wide scrutiny of actual conditions...

...Indeed the decrease in gross volume of business is charged almost entirely to the poor market for automobiles...

...The most exacting diagnosis is in Detroit tnat recentiy undertaken by the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics which took a cross-section of one hundred families and watched them spend their seven dollars a day...

...Theirs is the social program, the ethical teaching, to cure the disease...

...WINSTON CHURCHILL has been publicly meditating on the writing trade...

...The danger of physical violence and attacks on our institutions is not great...

...It Strange appears that a statue of the Venus de Adventure Milo, the gift of some well-wisher or of Venus moneyed citizen, stands there in a public square...

...I get more fun this way," he says...

...This conclusion has been endorsed by various banking and financial reviews on the basis of available reports...

...To respect one's own work, and yet to lay up an adze and a palette against the time when one's vogue must pass, is success in any writer short of supreme genius...

...Eric Gill...

...He disposes of his later, disappointing novels very frankly: "I realize now that I have no deep interest in sociology...

...militant atheism...

...Ford is said to be planning a similar wage scale...

...Having thus begun, with a definition which is common property, Father LaFarge straightway rivets the attention by adding a supplementary definition of his own...

...IF BUSINESS were better and we ourselves had less of it, nothing should deter us from erecting a memorial to Sherlock Holmes...

...They pointed out that they had a natural and autochthonous moral mentor in Mr...

...Let Catholics look to it, then...

...Legge's acreage reduction policy...

...Everybody takes the newspaper, very few have a telephone, and most fathers—eightyseven out of the hundred—carry life insurance...

...MR...

...having only the melancholy assurance that the documents were safely on file in that famous dispatch box in the vaults of Cox's Bank at Charing Cross...

...The discoveries will be followed with great interest abroad, where Mr...

...and in the matter of mockery at religion, many of our home-grown performers do a more deadly work than Soviet organs...

...we can never have them now...

...Nevertheless, measured in terms of American prosperity over a period of years, it really isn't an achievement particularly worth crowing over...

...he was also a the Wise careful and devoted workman, who "used to take two or three years writing a book," and who got genuine delight from the exercise of his craft...

...The definition of the "Bolshevist ideology" is familiar enough, but valuable as a concrete beginning...

...The memorial should help to remind criminals that their clues can be discovered, and do at least as much for the philosophy of intuition as either a clever woman or Henri Bergson...

...And though it is a long way to Little Falls and hard, pioneer work is ahead of any bishop stationed there, one thinks that the new episcopal dignity brings both initiative and incentive...

...But even as an old man the Archbishop never lost his grip on current actualities ; and his ability to be both a careful scholar and a democratic citizen perfectly exemplified what Wisconsin liked to suppose was its conception of the "good life...

...and this, says Father LaFarge, coming to his point, is due "not to Communism's intrinsic strength, but directly to lack of enlightened Christian principle in our American attitude toward labor...

...and while this must necessarily mean added meat and milk costs (the two largest items in the citydweller's food budget), it may stabilize a market tottering under excess loads of all kinds of grain...

...In several respects the picture drawn is most interesting...

...During more than a quarter century he was one of the great leaders of a metropolis which rapidly went through all the stages of change from a quite pastoral, old-fashionedly European town to a seething industrial city...

...More than half were buying something or other on the instalment plan, and about a third already possessed radios...

...The vine—secured from attack, presumably, by its own untouchable malignancy—was to grow upward and provide the statue with what one of the news stories called "green pajamas...

...and they ordered the fire department to hose off the veiling vine...