YOURS FOR A BETTER WORLD

...in the same it is conceivable that all objective performance Could be executed better by some automaton than by a living organism, and in idea this substitution by something better can extend to the whole of man...

...Though earnest in their intention, they were not without a gentle, humorous skepticism as to the outcome of their undertaking...

...But regardless of the views expressed and the conclusions drawn the method of reasoning strikes me more and more as one of the most important lessons we have to learn today...

...and they themselves suggested that perhaps, while they were wandering over the earth, another and more discerning spirit might find the goal of their quest quietly meditating in the back yard of some Kansas farm...

...led me to purchase the book and read it on my return to Munich...

...And yet I am glad I went...

...I have read this book, and the more I think of it, the more timely a thing I think it is...

...They were enroute to the Orient after a sojourn in Italy, and a course of study at Count Keyserling's School of Wisdom in Germany...

...A letter has just come to the Books of the Month department of the magazine which reminds me of that stimulating talk in Vienna five years ago, and reveals a geographically removed, but spiritually close companion of my two wandering friends...

...Disillusioned by the war, and the peace, as to the efficacy of old diplomatic machinery, or the easy devices of too simple revolutionary or reform formulas, for the constructive solution of complex international problems, these two had set forth, like the students of the middle ages, to wander from country to country, gleaning the best that each race and land might offer, valiantly hoping to bring back a more profound understanding of economic and racial problems which might ultimately be put to constructive use in their own country and thus indirectly prove of service to other countries...

...It is, in fact, of such tremendous proportions and present moment that I think that almost any magazine might well devote a series of reviews, made up largely of quotations...

...The spiral of historical evolution has led upon a heightened level to a reinstitution of slavery...

...He and his friend had set off on a journey around the world in search of wisdom, directing their travels wherever they felt they might find great teachers...

...What Rabind-ranath Tagore says is all too true...

...it was not a pleasant undertaking...

...human flesh and the human soul have nowhere been so cheap as in the modem West...

...The writer is from California, and signs himself, "Yours for a better world...

...In this country diversified races and traditions were being confronted by highly organized industry...

...In fact we must learn this method of approaching this new world we are suddenly being introduced to...

...It is a fact that progressive evolution tends towards two opposite aims: that of the automaton and that of God...

...It has an index but a poor one...

...For they regarded the United States as the great industrial experiment station of the world's laboratory...

...So little time is lost that a pig is despatched in some twenty minutes from life into a sausage...

...A few moments' conversa- tion revealed, however, that he had renounced his project of entering on a diplomatic career, having decided that the conditions of success in this field were incompatible with his convictions On international problems...

...In token of my appreciation of this California writer's reminder that this book is now available to English readers, may I add that Mr...

...I have already done this to a certain extent and I intend enclosing herewith a few passages which I have copied and you can judge for yourselves...

...but she embodies undoubtedly not only the labor ideal of every employer (one should think of the Taylor system...

...The Reward of Toil.—"Yes," said the tall man, "I have had many disappointments, but none stands out like the one that came to me when I was a boy...

...My meditations on the futility and ineffectualness of individual virtue and effort in the face of national or international catastrophe were suddenly interrupted by the greetings of two young Americans, one of whom I had last seen in Paris where his brilliant endowment had won him a scholarship for diplomatic studies...

...As I read Keyserling's extremely interesting book and pondered on his repeated and suggestive comparisons of Eastern and Western standards of value, I felt that if these two young students were at all representative of the youth of Europe and my own country, there was distinct hope that the future would master the machinery of industrialism and ultimately bring it into the service of more abundant and harmonious life...

...It is one of the only books I have felt a real need of having and marking all to pieces...

...Their enthusiasm for this school and for "The Travel Diary of A Philosopher," * which Count Keyserling had recently published in German...

...There is not time to ask his permission, but by guarding his anonymity under this term of common fellowship, I think I may take the liberty of quoting from his letter, and thus permit LA FOLLETTE'S subscribers to exchange book readers' notes with one another: "When Glenn Frank was still editor of the 'Century,' he devoted one entire editorial to the discussion of a certain book, 'The Travel Diary of a Philosopher,' by Herman Keyserling...

...and we must take soundings of life as this book does or else we will be swamped...

...it is Halady, the heroine of 'Eve Future,' the visionary fiction of Villiers de L'Isle-Adam...

...From the writer's enclosed extracts I have made the following abridged selections, which I hope may suggest to the readers something of Keyserling's individual and interesting method of utilzing the objective facts of travel as instruments of philosophical interpretation and comparison: 'Chicago...

...Harcourt, Brace and Company, publishers...

...Halady, the ideal automaton, will hardly ever be created...

...No civilization has ever adopted so deprecatory an attitude towards the whole of creation as ours has done, exclusively intent as it is upon profit...

...But it would be horrible if this kind of perfection should henceforth be regarded as the ideal of human development...

...Is not artificial man the ideal aim of the evolution which has attained its temporary zenith in the butchers of Chicago...

...Not as a piece of literature necessarily, or even as a specimen of one hundred per cent collect reasoning...

...I will hardly ever see machinery functioning with greater perfection...

...in these stockyards the extreme conceivable limit of the exploitation of men and time seems to be attained...

...and the path which is symbolized in the stockyards leads directly to the former...

...At the time I wondered how many young American citizens would be concerned with the questions and ideas which were preoccupying these two students...

...If performance is to mean everything and the soul nothing, then undoubtedly a perfect artificial man stands above the natural one...

...Travel Diary of A Philosopher," by Count Herman Keyserling, two volumes, price $10...

...I had crawled under a tent to see the circus, and I discovered it was a revival meeting...

...The stockyards are a terrifying instructive image of what seems wrong in the aims of modern civilization...

...Here mass machine production and its possible values for human life were on trial...

...one must read the book and mark it and go back to it again and pick out the parts suitable for this purpose or that...

...but also the personal ideal of many a modern man who considers himself to be free...

...Boston Transcript...

...They both emphatically assured me that they were not exceptional among the groups who had recently gathered from different countries for the Youth Movement conference which had brought my two fellow countrymen to Austria...

...Yours For a Better World : By Fola LaFollette FIVE YEARS ago this summer, at the period of the greatest depression of the Austrian currency, I was wandering aimlessly through the beautiful streets of Vienna, overwhelmed by the human suffering and misery that were everywhere evident...

...Exactly," said the tall man...

...Some terrible shock that fixt itself indelibly in your memory, I suppose...

...Man is judged once more in accordance with his performance alone, once more he has only a market value, and this is true not only of compulsory labourers, but it applies to everyone, for there are no free men in the Greek sense any longer...

...Such an artificial product has once been conceived...

...I do not think that you have reviewed this book as yet, and I think you ought to do so...

...And it contains a message for almost all classes of people—American farmers, railroad men, business men, politicians, churchmen, idealists, workers, educators, psychologists, historians, naturalists...

...I have spent weeks studying this book and it is one of the few things I have ever read outside of the Bible that I could spend so much time on to advantage...

...Frank regarded the author so highly as to say among other things that "Keyserling may turn out to be a John the Baptist to a new Western civilization...

...If we abandon ourselves completely to the logic of this evolutionary tendency, then intellect, as it becomes unfolded, will strip mankind of its soul proportionately...

...I paid a visit to the slaughter house...

...Helmholtz used to say that he would show the optician to the door who made him so imperfect an apparatus as the lens of the human eye...