Week by Week
WEEK BY WEEK COME naive persons appear to have imagined that ^the Versailles treaty would somehow render all Germans incapable of firing a hypothetical musket or throwing a hand grenade. ...
...It has the same imperturbable assurance of uniqueness and power as a patrician has of breeding...
...And all of this, moreover, is seasoned by a tradition...
...Like the kings and queens of the desert, they will ferret out a cocktail even at the risk of life and limb...
...But surely the principle is clear...
...The sole purpose of human paleontology is to shed light upon the embryogenesis of the human species...
...Finally, and chiefly, there is implied the argument so often heard, that men are of infinitely more worth than works of art, and that to occupy oneself with plans for salvaging the latter is a horrible and indecent denial of this truth...
...Indeed, the "spiced punch" more or less originated by Lenna Lowe Yost would probably not be bad at all under the right conditions...
...WE HAVE not read the so-called "Roerich pact" designed to protect works of art in case of another war...
...Among other laws frequently mentioned by the district attorneys as being subject to individual interpretation are such offenses as frauds of common law, disseminating birth control information, usury, laws establishing equal social rights for Negroes, the anti-gambling laws, statutes regulating the punishment of many sexual or moral offenses, in addition to an exceedingly long list of various minor regulations which illustrate the degree to which the prevalent mania for wholesale law-making on the part of national and state legislatures has proceeded...
...Pere de Chardin, however, believes it advisable to make the following observations: "More generally speaking, it is evident that the discovery of the Sinanthropus represents an important 'point' gained by those who seek to extend transformism to the human form...
...There still remain a few things for which money is not the measure of value, and the "winged words" of truth are to be numbered among them...
...It would not be a disgrace to humanity if some of them were converted to lemonade and even tomato juice...
...1 HE prohibition laws are far from being the only ones thus "nullified...
...It is, therefore, at first rather bewildering to come across such a title as Nullification: a Process of Government, in the pages of the Political Science Quarterly for September, attached to a highly important article by Professor Schuyler C. Wallace of Columbia University...
...Nevertheless time moves and with it the attitudes of men...
...Going to Baireuth may well be something of a venture even for the foremost of conductors, but those who know his extraordinary achievement are not uneasy...
...A characteristic of the first is their willingness to eat what is given them—a virtue from which the second depart occasionally, to the dismay of native and hunter...
...If what is precious and irreplaceable must be lost, why should not what is less precious at least be saved...
...Of those who answered at least 90 percent frankly admitted that it was a common practice for them to use their discretion in the enforcement or non-enforcement of particular laws, and that there were on the statute books many laws which they never enforced...
...it means an amalgam of all these, and dozens more, into a physical unity...
...At least disCorporals to may over t^ie leakiness of this hypoth.. t^ esis continues to provide topics for the Fore , ,. , . ,r .. , . " leading and excited articles in various European magazines...
...Men and women who really write from such a motive as animates this particular amateur need not fear the competition of professional writers, who far too often, through weariness or indifference or merely mercenary motives, are far less worthwhile, even as writers, than the straightforward, clear-thinking, honestly-speaking men and women who have no other motive than to promote the good as they see it...
...Such a writer is one whose name is familiar to readers throughout the country, Mr...
...The skull resembles in shape those of the Neanderthal man and the Pithecanthropus, but a more attentive analysis reveals the captivating fact that (to use the Jesuit's words) "the newly discovered Hominien inserts himself harmoniously between the Neanderthal and Pithecanthropus types...
...Aida revealed, within more limited bounds, the Latin affection for melody and form...
...Whole theses have been written about this contrast...
...Loving in a hot letter to the Times, is virtually inviting war...
...He tells us that the place where the relic was found, together with numerous other fossils, was undoubtedly a cave which served as a kind of habitation...
...New York is not merely a point in transit or a freak of architectural beauty...
...Surely these are strained and unfair conclusions...
...Tristan and Isolde was the expression of German individuality, subjective and profound...
...Everything they did was suspected of epigonistic vices, and so gradually they ferreted out new forms and objects for their work, caressing the traditions of polyphony as well as the newer aspirations of diatonic composition...
...Walter Winchell, who, it seems, writes gossip about Broadway celebrities, is paid $121,000 a year for his syndicate articles...
...Apparently suspecting that Mr...
...W E call attention to Mr...
...Winchell Written by people who obviously feel that 'hey must speak out, men and women who have been strongly moved by thoughts or opinions which it is not their professional duty to express, and which they are not paid for expressing— these letters possess a vitality and often an importance which many journalists and authors far too often do not command...
...If any sort of envisaging of war, or recognition of its actuality, is a condonation of it, we should destroy our field-ambulance hospitals and forbid Red Cross nurses to go into training...
...The French in particular have published some highly remarkable documents...
...Toscanini will assume charge of the Baireuth festival, thus assuring to the works of Richard Wagner the finest Toscanini contemporary art of interpretation, rea. r> • a call a great deal of musical history, at Baireuth t^-v j,.u u Lasting enmity appeared to have been sworn between the romantic German and the Italian schools of music...
...able than the other departments of the Hooper and papers and magazines perused by them...
...Attracted by the frequent appearance of his letters, the editor of that trade organ of the press, the Editor and Publisher, conducted an investigation concerning him, the results of which prove highly interesting...
...By an ironical contrast, the same issue of Editor and Publisher announces the interesting fact that a Mr...
...Those editors aiming at influencing public opinion who do not receive many and highly readable letters from their readers may well begin to doubt the value of their journals...
...This success may have certain deplorable c nsequences, even in so far as genuine science is concerned...
...But its point of view is evidently Saving an ol(J onC) and, One would say, cerWhat tainly a sound one...
...Toscanini has nowhere been more evident than in the interpretations of these German operas...
...I write to exert an influence and must have plenty of time to think and study...
...A Jesuit attached to the expedition, P. Teilhard de Chardin, furnishes a most valuable summary, contributed to a recent issue of La Revue des Questions Scientifiques...
...But neither in the case of man as a species nor in that of man as an individual do embryonic states permit definition of the value of the adult being...
...The fact is that the laws have been and are being nullified," he says, "and the practice of nullification by administrative officers, acting either on their own volition or under the pressure of local public opinion, is a widespread and seemingly accepted process of government...
...And though, as the New York World points out, they love it for a myriad reasons, it is the real test of its quality that it is the same thing they all love...
...Hooper's own explanation of his activities is also quoted by Editor and Publisher: "My only purpose is to do good to humanity...
...Professor Wallace summarizes the results of an investigation which he has conducted in an effort to ascertain the degree to which deliberate nullification has become a part of our governmental system...
...In taking excepWe Can tion to it, Mr...
...Interesting consequences follow, primarily the fact that a Hominien of the pre-Neanderthal type has been found in western China, and that he undoubtedly lived in the Pleistocene age...
...What relationship could have existed between him and the primitive men of Europe ? How did he get to China ? JN O ANSWER to these questions can, of course, be given...
...Any system of salvage or control, however partial—protection of countrysides, respect for non-combatants, a Truce of God, a Peace of God—is better than none...
...The Sinanthropus fortunately helps us to understand better the successive forms assumed by the human type in forming itself within the bosom of the rest of life...
...But try as the patriots might, military drill remained unpopular and pressure finally brought the period of training down to ten months...
...More, this preparation will fail of its specific object, since another war will reduce us to a state of barbarism in which artistic relics will have no usefulness or meaning...
...Now Andre Maginot, minister of war, has come out for the theory advanced by General von Seeckt, which is to the effect that a force of 100,000 paid volunteers constitutes the finest kind of modern martial nucleus and that the oldfashioned idea of universal service had been entombed along with the medical doctrines of Paracelsus...
...Whether the responsibility for non-enforcement of laws all of which according to the strict legal point of view possess equal validity, rests upon the grand jury, the petit jury or the prosecuting attorneys, seems to Professor Wallace relatively unimportant...
...Winchell told Editor and Publisher that he believes himself to be the highest paid newspaper columnist, but that expert on the subject throws a litttle cold water on his joy by doubting "if his income from writing exceeds that of Arthur Brisbane, Will Rogers, O. O. Mclntyre or Calvin Coolidge...
...Hence the nullification studied by him is not the individualistic and irresponsible practices of irate and thirsty citizens, but is the much more serious methods employed by duly constituted and sworn defenders of the legal code which is supposed to govern the country, either to ignore or minimize the application of that code...
...In any great calamity we save, not what we may wish to, but what we can...
...and a corresponding organic conception in the minds of the dwellers of all those cities and villages and neighborhoods that go to make up the super-city...
...Meanwhile the Latins slowly cast off their anti-Wagnerian prejudices, realizing that this great music must be taken as a matter of course, discriminatingly and yet wholeheartedly...
...IvEADERS of current journalism who are interested in ideas as well as entertainment, know that the correspondence columns are often more valuMessrs...
...JA.UMORS predicting that Mr...
...This does not mean merely the most money or the highest buildings or the best stores or the smartest society or the most varied and numerous theatres...
...Charles Hooper of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho...
...As for Mr...
...Preparing for war in this way, says Mr...
...Theirs is a sort of a new Franciscanism of the spirit...
...Hooper and his activities as a hint to Catholics...
...Approximately 10 percent of the attorneys answered the questionnaire, which Professor Wallace considers "a fair sampling" of the prevailing situation among the defenders of the law...
...It appears to be a fact that without pay or hope of earthly reward, he writes letters on current affairs and sends them to newspapers hither and yon, pays his own postage bills, supplies his own copy paper, and that this is his only mission in life...
...Z1.FTER having considered some of the recipes for "prohibition punches" devised and collected by Mrs...
...James M. Doran, whose husband was Substitutes formerly in charge of enforcing Volfor steadism, we are reminded of the difHappiness ference between the lions of the zoo and the lions of the desert...
...While many of these letter writers express themselves but seldom there are others who devote a large amount of energy to this valuable field of publicity...
...The spread of false and dangerous doctrines in our times calls for the disinterested services of men of my type to counteract these evil tendencies...
...New York is great because it is unquestionably a metropolis...
...But if we would appreciate, even scientifically, what a prodigious event in the history of the earth is represented by the apparition of thought, we must look elsewhere entirely...
...Traffic regulations are naturally prominent among the laws which are interpreted more or less arbitrarily, but the so-called blue laws of the various states are probably a close second...
...Nevertheless this rough estimate must be qualified to allow for the "series of cranial peculiarities which give the Sinanthropus an individuality all its own...
...NULLIFICATION is a word which, because of the obsessing importance that prohibition has lamentably assumed in the public mind, is now genLook- erally supposed to mean nothing other „ . than the efforts of the scofflaws to into Results break down the barriers forbidding the legal quenching of their thirst...
...The scientific solution of the human problem will not be achieved by the study of fossils but through a more attentive consideration of those properties and possibilities which enable us to see in the man of today the man of tomorrow...
...These concoctions of tea, lemon juice, soda water, berries in season and kumquats are certainly adequate for all those who consider them adequate...
...Perhaps the best thing would be, after all, to abolish the zoo and then watch all the animals flock toward it—as they were flocking in the good days of yore...
...Loving's final argument, it does cast a light on the fearful anomaly of armed conflict: but a lurid light, not the white light of truth...
...IT IS a harmless pleasure to add our mite of speculation to the expert opinions which Arnold, Constable and Company have elicited by New York* their question, What makes New York , - ,. ' great...
...But after the experience of a dozen years, it would seem that these wild persons can be enticed into no zoo, though all the berries of creation were squeezed into silver bowls of the most charming shape...
...Well, even so, the letter-writing apostles need not mind the contrast as to financial reward...
...Some of the very finest current speech about Wagner comes from the French, and the genius of Mr...
...The Commonweal is only one of many periodicals favored with his interesting comments...
...If the world could confine its fighting to areas like those taken for granted in the seventeenth century half the scare of war would automatically disappear...
...Whether a possible future war will grind its survivors into primitive atoms, we do not know...
...That there will be a lively discussion of these points and of many others raised by this first attempt to gain really scientific knowledge of so important a question cannot be doubted...
...But there is in it the nucleus of a possible departure from the levee en masse principle which had dominated Europe since the French Revolution...
...Many assertions smacking of an antiquated materialism have either been revived, or soon will be, in connection with the 'Man of Pekin.' It is appropriate to recall with insistence that no evidence drawn from paleontology can ever undermine the awesome grandeur of the present human entity...
...If we shift the stress from the Metropolis rektively unmeanmg adjective "great" to the definitely connotative noun "metropolis," we shall at least have located the inquiry in the proper field...
...People have come to it, and will come...
...It is one of the places of the world: sought, returned to, remembered...
...Recent German composers have been hard pressed to escape the influence of the Baireuth Titan...
...Whether or not the French will agree to endorse this change remains to be seen...
...A few years ago "he was an inconspicuous vaudeville hoofer whose salary some weeks was $25...
...Hooper was merely a propagandist, the Editor and Publisher "has been thoroughly shamed out of the notion...
...I do not raise the question of the wisdom of this policy, but leave that for others to discuss...
...The SinanthroMan Pus pekinensis, the official name given to a human skull found in the very lowest stratum attained by the excavators, has already been widely discussed...
...The results are unusually significant because of the fact that more than three thousand prosecuting attorneys throughout the United States were questioned by Professor Wallace...
...The results will be startling to those who have hitherto only vaguely recognized the extent to which this type of nullification has become a part of our social system...
...people have loved it, and will love...
...The unfortunate truth, however, is that those who covet something more alcoholic simply will not be fooled...
...DURING the course of excavations at Chou Kou Tien, near Pekin, certain human remains were unearthed which undoubtedly belong to Another the most important of recent paleonAncient tological discoveries...
...Pierre Loving, for instance, seems but to repeat a lofty and unrealistic fallacy...
Vol. 12 • September 1930 • No. 21
