EDITORIALS

...Health to Sell" is an account of splendid endeavor, effectively directed, to the end that the Great White Destroyer may be driven from a state...

...Nineteen hundred and fourteen years have developed not "peace on earth, good will to men," but protected engines of warfare wherewith brother may slay brother on a vaster and more terrible scale...

...And progress rides on accumulated protests...

...A Fundamental Problem SAID Governor O'Neal of Alabama at the Governors' Conference: "There has been an alarming increase of tenant farmers during the last deeade, as shown by the last census...

...Wisconsin Plays" A LITTLE book of especial note has ap-" peared...

...Necessarily such plays must be simple for our life is simple...

...Wisconsin which was one of the first states to find herself politically and socially should be one of the first to find herself in a literary and artistic sense...

...For the thing that first strikes one in these plays and in the work of those who present the plays is simplicity...

...But perhaps it was ordained that the rule of iron be destroyed before the rule of love may enter in...

...Praise AFTER several days' personal inspection of Wisconsin's government departments, Governor David I. Walsh of Massachusetts made this comment: "About the best state government, in the union is that of Wisconsin...

...Nevada, with the largest percentage of* floating population in the Union...

...It is especially gratifying that relief for Belgium is being contributed in the United States without regard to any bias there may be among people as to the warring nations...

...People in suffrage states appear not to be frightened of the bogey "women in politics...

...Here is a case of a San Francisco earthquake, a Galves-ton flood, a Ludlow massacre, on a vaster and more terrible scale...

...It has been done in the spirit of Wisconsin, and with the desire to give some tribute to the life of the state...

...There has always been a disposition to treat the stage as a mystery, and the worker on the stage as some strange kind of mortal...

...Disaster never fails to stir our sympathies and loosen our purse strings...

...Wyoming, New Zealand, and Australia, places where the god men worshipped was not the "God of Things as They Are...

...Out of it may emerge the beginnings of world-wide democracy—the true democracy which must assuredly be the foundation of peace and amity...

...Adams has done more, perhaps, than any other individual in this country to expose and put the curse on the terrible patent medicine fraud...

...All the plays have been written, presented, acted, and managed without compensation...

...Is our very existence to be made wholly dependent upon the will of some remote baron...

...Therefore it was a labor of love not only on the part of the authors, but also on the part of the scores who helped in other ways...

...These 1,694 holders own 105,600,000 acres, more than two and one-half times the land area of the six New England states...

...There are in these days many writers who are striving to do better things, and even to represent in drama form, the backgrounds of a province or a state...

...Dickinson, and "Glory of the Morning" by William Ellery Leonard...

...Dickinson builds an effective drama around the tense moment during which a husband aAvaits the result of the operation which is being performed on his wife in the next room...

...Two New States- -- Solid West By ANNA CADOGAN ETZ AGAIN the suffrage tide comes in...

...If one is overcome with that view of the stage he will not find much satisfaction in the Wisconsin Plays...

...To Mr...

...What has been demanded was an organization that would provide an outlet for the imaginative work of authors, in order that what they do should not be los.t before it had had a hearing...

...There are some circumstances in the manner in which the plays have been brought out that are worthy^ of attention...

...Absentee landlordism is annually becoming more and more a menace to our agricultural progress and gradually sapping the foundation of rural prosperit3r...

...It would have been a juicy morsel for the "antis," there is no doubt about it...

...It is high time to grapple in deadly earnest with this problem...

...And the announcement that Uncle Sam's Industrial Relations Commission has taken hold of it in a large way is encouraging...

...Relief THE response in this country to the appeal for aid for the stricken Belgians is characteristically generous and wholehearted...

...A Noble Fight WHEN Samuel Hopkins Adams "takes his pen in hand," one may expect something worth while...

...And he declared that he had found in Texas the seeds already grown of the greatest land monopoly in the world, with all of the sinister aspects of the ancient feudal domains of Europe, including the 'practical serfdom of the residents...

...This is the opinion of the county judge before whom youthful offenders are taken.— The Living Church...

...Is the earth we live on to pass entirely into the possession of a few overlords...

...There is a further significance in the fact that the work was frankly undertaken as Wisconsin work...

...Sometimes people have accused the producers of being too crude...

...I obtained many suggestions from Wisconsin that will help Massachusetts if I am able to carry them out...

...but on the contrary are disposed to give women a direct participation in their government...

...We in the United States who are blessed with peace may gather about our Christmas firesides with profound thankfulness, though moved to sadness by thoughts of our bleeding and dying brothers across the water...

...Suffragists may put in time railing at the liquor interests—with perhaps four of the equal suffrage states voting in state wide prohibition it is presumable that the liquor interests are not keen for woman suffrage—but the arch foe of votes for women is, by all odds, that same social inertia that kept the Chinese for thousands of years moving gingerly about for fear of stepping on the graves of ancestors...

...In the election last month the proposal to abolish capital punishment was voted down...

...It may be that men, in proportion to their distance from home and its refinements, prize it and ungrudgingly give to the homemaker any right or privilege she asks for...

...For good measure, California voters sent Mrs...

...They might be pathetic but they could never be altogether tragic, for there is in the state a strong optimism that is willing to look ugly facts in the face and still trust to the future...

...We are confident that what Mr...

...Whether he does* so or not, the action of Warden Sims will still go abroad as a sharp protest against the barbaric idea of taking human lives under sanction of law...

...The killing of convicts under the auspices of the state may continue...

...You will be repaid for reading it...

...This war may prove to be the expiring convulsions of Mars...

...The state takes better care of the individual than any other state...

...Nebraska, the Dakotas, Missouri, and Ohio register at the pells their satisfaction with a government of men and by men and—thp suffragists maintain—for men...

...One of the truly significant features of the Governors' conference at Madison was the praise given by the visiting executives to the spirit' and manner in which Wisconsin's government is made to serve the interests of ALL the people...

...Nevada, entirely surrounded by equal suffrage states, formed a very irritating blot on the suffrage map...

...We are unusually fortunate, therefore, in having his story about the work of the Wisconsin Anti-Tuberculosis Association that is printed in this magazine, on page eight...

...If suffrage had lost in Nevada, the hearthstones of the anti-suffragists would have been cold and deserted while these gallant ladies pilgrimed over the land pouring into the ears of the populace that the men of Nevada saw the menace of equal suffrage face to face and would have none of it...

...And Mr...

...The contribution of Mr...

...Shall we not all resolve to keep uppermost in our consciousness, throughout the days to come, Christ's message of peace...

...Whereupon Governor Hunt, who had stayed the hanging of eleven condemned men pending the outcome of the election, said the murderers must go to the gallows...

...A merry Christmas to Every Reader of La Follette's Magazine Consider this from the United States Commissioner of Corporations' recent report on timber land holdings: "The main fact shown is that 1,694 timber owners hold in fee ONE-TWENTIETH of the land area of the entire United States from the Canadian to the Mexican border...

...In fact there has been no possibility of securing anything other than a chance to work out of the production of the plays...

...Now Warden Sims of the state penitentiary announces that he will resign rather than be the executioner of the men who are scheduled to be the victims of a "wholesale hanging bee" on December 19...

...But are we to have no thought for the destitute at home...

...These plays represent one phase of the work of the Wisconsin Dramatic Society—an organization which under the direction of Professor Thomas H. Dickinson of the University of Wisconsin has busied itself not only with the composition and criticism of plays and the training of unprofessional actors but also with the more difficult tasks pertaining to the creation of an audience—all by way of developing community Spirit and community self-expression through the drama...

...Again we find mining states giving votes to women, and agricultural and industrial states refusing it...

...These Wisconsin plays constitute one step toward the expression of the life and history and spirit of the state in the form of dramatic art...

...So while Nevada has less than a hundred thousand people and only three electoral Votes, the suffrage map needed it more than it needed Ohio with its millions of people and more than a score of Congressmen...

...The significance of the publication of Wisconsin Plays lies not only in the fact that these plays have been written in the name of a state but in the fact that they were produced, and in the special circumstances of their production...

...Miss Gale is represented by her "Friendship Village" types in a simple, moving—yet humorous—episode...

...And the plays are unprofessional...

...The investigation of landlordism in Texas this month should prove enlightening...

...But these writers are helpless unless their plays can come to production, and this is often difficult...

...The popular sale of these provides the ammunition wherewith to fight consumption...

...PUBLIC PLAYGROUNDS in La Crosse, Wis., are estimated to have decreased juvenile delinquency at least fifty per cent, during the three years they have been in operation...

...One remarked: "It is the most remarkable public service plant I have seen...

...But be it as it may, freedom for women struck first root far from the custom-bound centers of civilization...

...Helen Ring Robinson in Colorado-now has company as a result of the last election...

...Montana, said to be the "wettest" of states: both are added to the suffrage map...

...If these plays mean anything they mean that the stage belongs to all the people and the more the theater limits itself to " folks," as Miss Gale would say, the better it will be for the theater...

...If you will but glance at the map of your country you will understand why the suffragists are very well pleased at the result of the election which gave them the states of Nevada and Montana...

...Pressure is being brought to bear upon the governor through petitions, personal pleas and press comments to reprieve the men...

...Francis Munds was elected to the Arizona senate...

...The fact that these plays represent this movement, that all of them have been presented in the Middle West, and that some of them have entered into the life of the state makes the book more significant than it would be without this background of production...

...Adams belongs a lion's share of the credit for the passage of the Pure Food and Drugs act —under which the consumer today gets a measure (though a woefully inadequate measure) of protection against food adulterators and poisoners...

...Then notice on the map how Montana dovetails in between equal suffrage Idaho, and Wyoming, the first state to give the vote to its women, and you will understand why the suffragists are so busy rejoicing over the solid equal suffrage West that they are willing to wait a few years for the East to come into the fold of democracy...

...Meanwhile, you may do a real service to yourself, your neighbors and your state, by turning over what pennies you can spare for the Red Cross stamps...

...A Sharp Protest THE death sentence still holds in Arizona...

...Charles W. Holman, editor of the University of Wisconsin Press Bureau, who went to Texas to make a survey of the land problem for the Federal Commission on Industrial Relations, said: "I believe that the land problem is acquiring such tremendous importance that within ten years it will be the issue upon which presidents will be elected and defeated...

...It is a noble fight...

...It is splendid thus to relieve those innocent and worthy folks made desolate by War, but does not humanity call just as loudly for the succor of those .countless beings in our own country who daily are being crushed by unbridled Industry ? * * * A Share in Law Making THE one lone woman state senator—Mrs...

...Leonard, in musical prose, dealing with the tragic conclusion of a marriage between an Indian woman and a Frenchman of noble birth, bears out his reputation as a poet of high distinction...

...Estelle L. Lindsey of Los Angeles to the state assembly...

...Adams has written will appeal to you and enlist your support...

...But at any rate here is a start and it is altogether a worthy and a truthful one...

...It may be that frontier life forcing men and women, as it does, to a common struggle against nature, brings home to men the injustice .of withholding from women any political right when the burdens of life are so plenteously thrust upon her...

...This is especially true when he takes up the matter of the public health...

...It is Wisconsin Plays (Huebech), containing three one-act dramas, "The Neighbors" by Zona Gale, "In Hospital" by Thomas...

...They certainly haven't tried to play upon any of the tricks of the stage or to give the impression that the stage is a holy of holies not to be touched save by the sophisticated...

...In time to come Wisconsin will go much further in finding themes for dramatic treatment, and greater pla^s will perhaps be written...

...And I suppose as a consequence there is more interest in government among the people of the state than there is anywhere else...

...They represent a movement which has been going on for a long time, and now is reaching some proportions for the people to take their theater back into their own hands...

...Even if the state appears not to care, he does not want human blood on his hands...

...That optimism is of the material of American life, and any art however simple that pretends to typify that life must show a smile at the corners of the mouth...