Week by Week
WEEK BY WEEK the fourteenth time in the history of the United States and for the first time in thirty-six years, the Senate has refused to give its consent to a nomination to a justiceship in...
...Occasion lately permitting, Mr...
...It will be stern and teach discipline...
...Longworth has just read Mr...
...But half a loaf is better than a loaf half-baked—which latter might very well serve as Mr...
...Recent English sovereigns have all been liked by their people...
...many more accredited works of masters, or supposedly ancient pieces of furniture and decorative art, are certainly of dubious vintage...
...But it is, after all, the village, the community which comes to life on this stage...
...Alger and Mr...
...Owen J. Roberts of Pennsylvania will undoubtedly be a far worthier successor to Mr...
...Logically they are, psychologically they are not...
...The Senate rejected the nomination...
...Modern society is neither apathetic nor brutal...
...and Mr...
...As the consciousness of these and kindred reforms spread through society, an opposing conviction took shape to the effect that, in Mr...
...It is not even particularly what I wanted...
...WEEK BY WEEK the fourteenth time in the history of the United States and for the first time in thirty-six years, the Senate has refused to give its consent to a nomination to a justiceship in the Supreme Court, The that of Judge John J. Parker...
...Yet in England everyone admires the King for laying a small wager...
...As to the first, they are at one in wishing to see the power of the parole system increased and its method developed, to save both men and money to society...
...Huxley's sharpness is of the kind that may cut itself...
...and we must not be ashamed of finding ourselves, if necessary, on the side of the cultivated and the clever...
...A reflective person cannot help wondering why, if such perfect copies can be made, they are not wholly as valuable in every sense as originals...
...But this time two persons were actually killed and a number injured, a far bloodier performance than usual...
...Perhaps it would be possible to interpret much of the modern history of England in terms of a spirit of moderate betting...
...Only it seems a little hard that if some representative should think of a counter-epithet to the immortal "sons of wild jackasses" of Senator Moses (who happens to be a close associate of Mr...
...There seems to be an insistent and mysterious demand in the human soul for genuineness in its relics of great men...
...In retroFourteenth spect the situation seems to have been Rejection this: national Republican leaders felt that a southern Republican nomination to the court was politically advisable, in order to consolidate Mr...
...What he got was Mr...
...Here was a chance for the liberal senators, many of whom opposed Mr...
...others feel that its implied comment on Mr...
...With them he is fain to be content...
...Longworth's latest blow in the Curtis-GannLongworth row over social precedence...
...There is a deep, indeed a mystical, satisfaction in the inspection of some object which an admired, sometimes merely a dead, person or persons inspected and, presumably, valued...
...Bates and Mr...
...1 HE recent discovery in Paris that a grandson of Jean Charles Millet, aided by a painter named Paul Cazeau, have been for years doing an ^rt extensive business in forged paintings, P . has again called attention to the old ° question of the worth of genuineness in artistic works...
...It is amusing to consider what an outcry there would be if it were publicly announced that President Hoover had even moderately backed a horse in the Kentucky Derby...
...Though not everyone has come away from the little Bavarian hamlet pleased Pilgrims to either with the production or his own Oberam- experience, the play remains overwhelmmergau ingly popular in the best sense...
...Perhaps the most important part of this essentially modern conception of a king's duty is the expression, in his public actions, of the characteristics most typical of his people...
...In the words of Tertullian the assemblage could say: "We have been here only a day, yet we fill the camps, the ranks, the palaces, the senate, the forum...
...After all bottles and barrels still have a variety of legal uses...
...Judge Parker is certainly not of ideal Supreme Court timber...
...Alger's article...
...that of even these cramped and reeking cells there were too few by 1,000 for New York's prison population last year...
...This is certainly not the first instance of perfect forgery...
...But common sense makes it obvious that intent for his wares to be containers of alcoholic beverages would be very difficult to prove against a bottle merchant or cooper...
...This season more people than ever will come to see the play, because the amphitheatre has been enlarged and the number of accomodations increased...
...KlNG GEORGE V recently celebrated the twentieth anniversary of his accession to the British throne amid what were unquestionably the sincere exKine George Press'ons °f j°y and congratulation of p. „ substantially the whole British population...
...Conservatives, Liberals, Socialists, Republicans, and all the rest...
...Meanwhile that old Liberal warhorse and exgrain merchant, the Count of Romanones, is keeping amazingly quiet...
...Curtis—surprisingly few take its magnanimity at its face value...
...Again She has just been through such a crisis...
...Thus the Senate has administered its rebuke, Mr...
...Longworth has countered with a 1,200word manifesto to the effect that, Senate or no Senate, the House is committed to a courtesy and decorum that will forever (or during his Speakership, anyway) keep it from verbal rudeness toward any senator...
...Our feeling is that they are ready enough...
...Our gamblers are numerically few and are heavy bettors...
...It is hard to mobilize for a vast public reform, and that has been, and is, a chief difficulty...
...Gradually the old parties are lining up again...
...Simultaneously Mass and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament were being celebrated in the cathedral at Tunis, in the churches of the vicinity and May 21, 1930 THE COMMONWEAL Bottles and Kegs aboard the ships which had brought pilgrims from all over the world...
...Longworth's alleged disappointment at not being the boss of the Senate himself...
...in a word, that the Intellectuals should "be slaughtered by what may be called the Morals...
...Monarchism, republicanism, and all other public questions are and have long been subservient to the private ambitions and interests of a small class of politicians, who are perhaps no worse than their fellows in other countries...
...that Mr...
...We have been assured by one of its chief executives that the Anti-saloon League is of divine origin...
...One hears of an ancient German cabinet maker, resident of a large American city, whose chief joy in life is the periodic inspection of allegedly colonial furniture, exhibited in the local museum, which he made with his own hands in his own workshop...
...A few weeks ago, Senator Fess accused Senator Norris, Courtesy in w^° was cri^zmS Mr...
...It will be busy and teach industry...
...Hughes's nomination to the Chief Justiceship, to oppose Mr...
...King George is no exception to the rule...
...The result has been to stress more and more in practice the prison's function of detaining and punishing, and less and less its function of rehabilitating—a result which both these experts regard as unnecessarily stupid and altogether tragic...
...Curtis...
...that segregation is impossible, and hence that each prison is nothing more than a "boarding house for crooks...
...also, that "a howling rabble of really respectable people" should "burn down the houses where the luxury takes its true Latin sense of luxuria...
...He notes that Mr...
...IT IS an amusing lesson in manners which Mr...
...Alger's words, "the program of modern penology is a mysterious formula for mollycoddling malefactors...
...For works of art are aesthetic relics just as fully as pieces of period furniture are social relics, or objects associated with holy men, religious relics...
...TOR several years Spain has been politically the simmering kettle of Europe...
...The same thing was said, in effect, by Mr...
...and he philosophically reminds himself that "God does not disdain the strangest or the humblest instruments...
...There have been a few more "incidents...
...The English have always been lovers of the race-track, and the vast majority of the population has at one time or another indulged in the thrill of moderate betting...
...This time again it has been the University students who have been the centre of trouble...
...Eliot's reaction from "progress" is so extreme that "he has come to have something like a suspicion of every sort of freedom...
...John Heywood, a writer whose loyalty to Catholicism no sane person could question, held up for scorn the Pardoner with his jawbone of an ass with which Cain slew Abel and his box of bees which stung the first woman as she left the Garden of Eden...
...r OR a brief space Carthage has again known its old glory...
...it was a mere accident which betrayed them...
...The decision is another step along the road recommended by many opponents of prohibition— namely, the tightening up of enforcement so much as to make the repeal of the amendment inevitable because of outraged public opinion...
...We revolt at forgeries...
...that their dimly lighted cell blocks still have the ventilation and sanitation that prevailed 114 years ago...
...historic forgeries we laugh at...
...Bates, we judge, might be speaking for both of the ideal prison of the future: "It will not be an asylum or place of amusement or a dungeon...
...DECADE after decade, the fame of Oberammergau renews itself...
...and Oberammergau remains one of the spiritual and inspirational marvels of our time...
...Longworth, of , H being out of order, according to the the riouse jegerson manual of amenities...
...Wickersham, the chairman of President Hoover's law enforcement commission, in the course of his address to the American Law Institute...
...Hoover has made his southern gesture, Mr...
...religious forgeries revolt us...
...Often in these semiofficial symbolical gestures one can recognize essential differences in national temperament...
...Hoover's conservatism more successfully by enlisting enough support against a man with none of Mr...
...Justice Sanford than Judge Parker could have been...
...The reason is surely that the village has maintained intact the spirit needed for enacting a drama of so august a character...
...But those who came to pay homage to the King of Kings, unlike Tertullian, did not lack temples even if the Holy Sacrifice must be offered beneath the palms which now wave above the excavated ruins of Carthage...
...Curtis eases Mr...
...Of the rev , action among the younger leaders to0U ward "Victorian etiquette, distance and decency" he says: "It is not what I expected...
...Officially we disapprove of gambling...
...This applies equally well to an American President, who is expected to start the World's Series, to go fishing or hunting, to do a thousand other things for which he may have no personal inclination but which endear him to the people...
...As to the second, we suggest that those really in search of concrete information, even those who think they already have a good deal of it, read Mr...
...One cause of the reactionary spirit noted has been those excesses and absurdities of extreme humanitarian theory which active and absorbed workers like Mr...
...Spanish politics are perfectly unpredictable, and yet they are relatively simple, because they are almost completely divorced from the life of the people...
...Eliot, Mr...
...oPEAKING before the International Congress on Mental Hygiene, Mr...
...that the Sitwells's move toward Victorian standards is artistic as much as human...
...Alger agree that the present rigors—the lengthened sentences, the increasingly severe definitions of felony—are reactions from a more liberal period which produced the juvenile court, the parole and the indeterminate sentence...
...We in America do not bet in the same spirit...
...Artistic forgeries we will not pay for...
...The enforcement agencies are reported to be attempting to form this decision into grist for their mill, and they are said to believe that it will drive the home-brew supply houses out of business...
...Apparently their copies and forgeries were indistinguishable from originals...
...The present government set itself the task of restoring the normal functioning of party government after a tedious As to Prisons dictatorship which had destroyed party organizations...
...It 64 THE COMMONWEAL May 21, 1930 will be clean and teach cleanliness...
...Concrete recommendations, concrete information of the kind which these authorities have mastered, will dispel it...
...The gathering took on new poignancy from the fact that it was linked with a glorious and hallowed history...
...Hoover's southern victory of 1928...
...Bates do not always see...
...Occasionally everything seems to work for the best, even in politics...
...and the Supreme Court has ruled that the sale of containers designed for illegal beverages constitutes a violation of the law...
...Up the hill of Byrsa where the crusaders of Saint Louis walked where Saints AuThirteenth gustine and Cyprian preached and the Eucharistic holy martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas, Congress Saturnius, Saturus, Revocatus and Decondulus were buried, streamed thousands of the faithful to the Basilica of the Many Tombs...
...The Vice-President thereupon ruled that, manual or no manual, there was plenty of precedent for a senator's criticizing a House member, and that Senator Norris might proceed...
...Chesterton wanted was that "the ordinary, old-fashioned, obstinate people" should "rise and bash in the heads of the inhuman prigs whose ideal is a sort of prophetic infanticide...
...For ourselves, we are willing to believe that the Speaker is really devoted to the precedents of comity which it took him eight typewritten pages to cite...
...Apparently a nominee, suitable judicially as well as politically, was not available...
...Other Eucharistic Congresses may be noted for their tremendous attendance...
...Hughes's popular respect and fame...
...The work of Alois Lang as Christus has attracted enthusiastic attention, all the more noteworthy because of the effectiveness with which Anton Lang impersonated the Saviour...
...the Methodist Church has very properly rebuked Bishop Cannon for his political activities...
...the Congress of Carthage will be famed for that happy quality of the Church which turns to the past to illuminate the present...
...What is virtually a new production (since the more important roles have been assigned to actors not prominent in 1922) will afford those who have already been at Oberammergau opportunities for comparison...
...Chesterton's synonym for modernism...
...George W. Alger, a member of Governor Roosevelt's new parole commission and one of the state's authorities on prison conditions...
...Upon this last occasion for a manifestation of popular regard, the London press unanimously congratulated the King upon that punctilious observance of his position as a constitutional monarch which he has always manifested...
...But anything is a relief from the desolate dulness of the Bright Young Thing...
...Every few months she threatens to boil over, but succeeds only Spain in spilling a few drops, which go up in a Bubbles Over momentary sizzling and much steam...
...The occasion was the Thirteenth Eucharistic Congress...
...PROHIBITION continues to hold public attention more continuously than any other question...
...Habits of frugality, prayer and mutual forbearance are cultivated in the interest of the sacred spectacle which, every ten years, focuses the world's attention upon a little group of peasant folk who would otherwise be obscure among the obscure...
...and that the need for "adequate machinery, wisely selected industries and half-way intelligent management" is so dire that, even allowing for the peculiar problems of prison labor, "the results obtained compared with what might reasonably be expected are almost incredibly bad...
...Longworth) he must wait to get elected to the Senate before he can spring it...
...1 HEIR statements have a practical bearing on the near future...
...Sanford Bates, superintendent of federal prisons, traced the prison rebellions of the last year to society's growing stringency in regard to the criminal...
...It is also the chief burden of a paper in the current Atlantic Monthly, The Revolt of the Convicts, by Mr...
...Some consider it Mr...
...With incredibly subtle appropriateness, King George celebrated his anniversary by going to the races and by betting a one pound note on a horse...
...When finally the question of political power comes to a showdown, we shall know who has been cleverest...
...CHESTERTON'S comment on the revolt against modernity, in the New York Times Magazine, is not the first to be made, but it is the Reactionary freshest and most telling...
...What Mr...
...In view of the large numbers who have commented with pleasure on this magnanimous rebuke—everyone seems to enjoy it, in fact, except Mr...
...New York's $38,000,000 prison appropriation, the federal $10,000,000 prison-building plan, make it necessary to decide whether the state and the nation are going on as at present, or are ready to try actively liberal policies once more...
...Huxley and the Sitwells...
...Hoover had done his best for southern Republicanism, and quite justifiably proceeded to nominate a far less attackable northern candidate—a man of conservative leanings, but of an eminently judicial mind, as was demonstrated by the part he played in bringing to justice the Republican recreants in the recent oil scandals...
...These two swindlers were so clever that they even succeeded in selling some of their forgeries to the Millet Museum at Barbizon...
...They will learn that Auburn was built in 1816, when Madison was President, that Sing Sing dates from 1825 and Dannemora from 1840...
...Many art forgeries and antique factories have been exposed...
Vol. 12 • May 1930 • No. 3
