OVER against our indulgent, thoughtless days of the radio, movies, and the automobile set the admirable picture by Lucien Price, reminiscent of a village whence the gods are come down to us in the likeness of men. Mr. Price’s manuscript was longish, and in reply to our comment on the fact we were rewarded with a letter from the author some of which we should like to quote: —

And now that I have done my best to meet your necessities of publication, let me tell you my side of it.

You can see that this is no casual piece of work. My heart and soul are in it, for it seemed to me that I was making my parents live again and bringing a wider fruition to their work. No pains were too great to lavish on these pages, and I spared none. What enabled me to write it at all was that the year before my mother’s death I had the happy inspiration to ask her to write out chapters of her own, my father’s, and the family history. She went at it with huge gusto, and was one whole winter busy with it — the chapters arriving every week or two, to the immense delight of us both; and now, of course, these papers are inexpressibly sacred to me. The article is put together largely from them. You can see that when I have compressed nearly a hundred years of family and village history and given it a bearing on our national life, compression can almost go no further and becomes to me something very much like pain. I realize, of course, that I must not expect anyone else to feel the way I do about these pages; and yet I wonder, when I am giving my very best and my dearest, if an extra five minutes is too much to ask of the reader?

If as an offshoot of this paper a single green thing blooms in the desert, Mr. Price is answered. ¶It is something to contribute fresh arguments to a discussion which, according to Biblical chronologers, began in 4004 B.C., but the two professors whom we pair do the trick. Head of the Department of Architecture at McGill University, Ramsay Traquair, in his leisure, revels in a more dangerous sport than bear-baiting. James H. Leuba, Professor of Psychology at Bryn Mawr, paradoxically presents a reasoned theory of the mental inferiority of women. ¶Iowa born and raised, James Norman Hall is a veteran of ‘Kitchener’s mob,’ an ace of the Lafayette Escadrille, and a writer of promise and performance. Driven by that endurable wound, restlessness, he sailed to the South Seas, and there, with but brief excursions, he has remained for six years. On a recent visit home Captain Hall had pause to consider his experiment in expatriation. ‘Every time I come away (from Tahiti),’ he writes us, ‘the elastic tension in my tether seems to grow stronger and I am snapped back again almost before I know it.’

George Herbert Palmer, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, has been for two generations a famous teacher at Harvard University, where he was one of the stars in that firmament of philosophy which numbered William James, Royce, and Santayana. ¶In reading the essay of Sarah N. Cleghorn, a favorite Atlantic contributor, one should be reminded that there is as much malice as Alice in the immortal Wonderland. Emily James Putnam, wife of the distinguished publisher, George H. Putnam, is a prose writer of whom American readers have had many occasions to be proud. Her present story, the first of a charming series, was written last summer in Central Africa. How curious that at the same time in America another ingenious author wrote once more the story of Helen! Lest the implications from Herodotus prove too modern for our classicist, we are careful to quote literatim the translated text.

The priests, in answer to my inquiries on the subject of Helen, informed me of the following particulars. When Alexander had carried off Helen from Sparta, he took ship and sailed homeward. On his way across the Ægean a gale arose, which drove him from his course and took him down to the sea of Egypt; hence, as the wind did not abate, he was carried on to the coast, when he went ashore, landing at the Salt Pans in that mouth of the Nile which is now called the Canopic. At this place there stood upon the shore a temple, which still exists, dedicated to Herakles. If a slave runs away from his master, and taking sanctuary at this shrine gives himself up to the god and receives certain sacred marks upon his person, whosoever his master may be, he cannot lay hand on him. This law still remained unchanged to my time. Hearing, therefore, of the custom of the place, the attendants of Alexander deserted him and fled to the temple, where they sat as suppliants. While there, wishing to damage their master, they accused him to the Egyptians, narrating all the circumstances of the rape of Helen and the wrong done to Menelaus. These charges they brought, not only before the priests, but also before the warden of that mouth of the river, whose name was Thonis.

As soon as he received the intelligence, Thonis sent a message to Proteus, who was at Memphis, to this effect: ‘A stranger is arrived from Greece; he is by race a Teucrian and had done a wicked deed in the country from which he is come. Having beguiled the wife of the man whose guest he was, he carried her away with him, and much treasure also. Compelled by stress of weather, he has now put in here. Are we to let him depart as he came, or shall we seize what he has brought?’

Proteus replied: ‘Seize the man, be he who he may, that has dealt thus wickedly with his friend, and bring him before me, that I may hear what he will say for himself.’

Thonis, on receiving these orders, arrested Alexander and stopped the departure of his ships; then, taking with him Alexander, Helen, the treasures, and also the fugitive slaves, he went up to Memphis. When all were arrived, Proteus asked Alexander who he was and whence he had come. Alexander replied by giving his descent, the name of his country, and a true account of his late voyage. Then Proteus questioned him as to how he got possession of Helen. In his reply Alexander became confused and diverged from the truth, whereon the slaves interposed, confuted his statements, and told the whole story of the crime.

Finally Proteus delivered judgment as follows: ‘Did I not regard it as a matter of the utmost consequence that no stranger driven to my country by adverse winds should ever be put to death, I would certainly have avenged the Greek by slaying thee.... I suffer thee to depart; but the woman and the treasures I shall not permit to be carried away. Here they must stay till the Greek stranger comes in person and takes them back with him. For thyself and thy companions, I command thee to begone from my land within the space of three days.’

Such is the account given by the Egyptian priests, and I am myself inclined to regard as true all that they say of Helen, from the following considerations: If Helen had been at Troy, the inhabitants would, I think, have given her up to the Greeks, whether Alexander consented to it or no. For surely neither Priam nor his family could have been so infatuated as to endanger their own persons, their children, and their city, merely that Alexander might possess Helen. The fact was that they had no Helen to deliver, and so they told the Greeks; but the Greeks would not believe what they said — divine providence, as I think, so willing that by their utter destruction it might be made evident to all men that when great wrongs are done the gods will surely visit them with great punishments.

HERODOTUS, Book II, chapters 113-115, 120

From Chicago Marjorie Lane sends us her first contribution to any magazine. Replying to our encouragement she declared: —

If ever, after seventy, I should attain to the dignity of an autobiography, I should devote a chapter to First Things in my life; and there would be the ecstatic moments of my first journey in the air, my first vision of the filets bleus at Concarneau, and my first letter of acceptance from an Editor.

Kuno Francke is Professor Emeritus and honorary curator of the Germanic Museum at Harvard University. ¶A Bostonian, Caroline Howard Gilman in 1819 married and went to live in Charleston,

S. C. For threescore years, and despite the fact that during the Civil War she had children in either camp, she proved herself a loyal and unflinching defender of the city of her adoption. ¶Among the souvenirs which Vernon Kellogg brought back from the South Seas was this satiric memory. Alan Burroughs is an executive of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. R. Clyde Ford, who loves a good story as he loves his Stevenson, followed his master’s footsteps through the Cévennes. ¶Author of several volumes of verse and instructor of English at Harvard University, Robert Hillyer is the proud owner of a woods, a meadow, and a pond at Pomfret, Connecticut. William

T. Foster and Waddill Catchings are the joint authors of Profits, a volume in the Pollak Foundation series. A prize of five thousand dollars is offered for the best adverse criticism of this book submitted to the Pollak Foundation, Newton 58, Massachusetts, before January 1, 1927. The paper on ‘The Dilemma of Thrift’ in this issue presents in a condensed but lucid version the argument for the criticism of which the prize is offered. Mr. Foster was formerly President of Reed College; Mr. Catchings is an active business man connected with a number of important enterprises.

Since the war T. H. Thomas has exchanged his majority in the American G. H. Q. at Chaumont for a quiet home at Windsor, Vermont, without impairing his interest and accuracy in foreign affairs. Evans Lewin is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and Librarian of the Royal Colonial Institute of London. ¶Of a family whose name has long been associated with Imperial affairs, Colin R. Coote was for several years a Member of Parliament.

‘Modestine’s Shoes,’ Mr. Ford’s sprightly reminiscence of R. L. Stevenson in this issue, must add emphasis to this letter. Both the tomb and the pilgrims’ way must be protected for future readers.

STANFORD UNIVERSITY, CAL.
EDITOR OF THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
DEAR SIR: —
Dr. Charles H. Gilbert, Professor of Zoölogy at Stanford University, is now in the South Seas, and he writes me from Apia, Samoa, that the trail up Mount Vaea to Stevenson’s tomb on the summit is neglected, being ‘ wholly blocked for considerable distances with down timber, and the immediate surroundings of the tomb looking forlornly unkempt. The island of Upolu is now under mandate to New Zealand, and will probably cost them a pretty penny to administer it. I fear little can be hoped from that source, and wonder whether a fund could not be raised by subscription sufficient to keep decently in order the last resting-place of a man who has enriched the lives of all who read the English tongue.’
Very truly yours,
DAVID STARR JORDAN

The Boston Globe remarked the other day that if you believe a professor writing in a literary magazine can’t start something you had better listen to the story of Professor Ripley and his Atlantic paper, ‘From Main Street to Wall Street.’ Well, it is a story worth listening to. Within a week following the publication of the January Atlantic, the great papers of the country had taken it up, and an avalanche of letters poured into this office. Within a month the Board of Governors of the New York Stock Exchange had taken actual steps to remedy the situation, and the President had summoned Professor Ripley to the White House. According to the papers, the President commended the article to the attention of every American.

Many well-known promoters and managers raised their voices on the other side, but the accumulating tendency to divorce industrial control from financial responsibility, as shown by Professor Ripley, has touched public sensibility, and at this writing everything points to immediate change in a dangerous practice.

Dr. Dublin’s paper on Birth Control touched a twitching nerve. Here is an effective letter that calls for a dissemination of knowledge which it is as yet impossible to broadcast.

ELIZABETH, NEW JERSEY
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
My pen is feeble, but my convictions are strong on the subject of Birth Control, so I must perforce take up the former as a weapon in behalf of the latter.
Mr. Louis I. Dublin, who wrote ‘The Fallacious Propaganda for Birth Control’ in the February Atlantic, can sweep me down like a blade of grass before a lawn-mower when it conies to statistics, but I know from the experience of four years’ living and working in the shadow of the teeming tenements of New York’s East Side, as a visiting nurse and social-service worker, what a boon intelligently given knowledge of birth control could be to so many exhausted mothers, old women of thirty and thirtyfive years. One such I have vividly in mind. Could Filomena, the oldest of the family, speak you might hear this explanation from her lips: —
‘Yes, our baby died. He was so sick. He breathed fast and got all blue and died. My mother cried like anything and prayed to Saint Rita and the Holy Virgin. Then they dressed him in a new white dress, with candles all about, and pictures of the saints. I wonder why the baby came if he must die so soon and make my mother sick and sad. When Tony came, my mother she sings sometimes and takes us to the park. But soon Luigi came, then little Joe, and now last month the baby. My mother cough so much. She goes a long time to the clinic doctor and he tells her to spit in a paper to burn up. I think she has too much clothes to wash. Always the tub full, That makes her cough, and we never go to the park any more. The clinic nurse said a funny thing to the doctor one day my mother had been there. She said the baby should never have come. I wonder why. Are not all babies sent from God?’
Yours very truly,
H. PERLEE BOUTON

When to ‘say when.’

CHURCH OF THE ANNUNCIATION PHILADELPHIA, PA.
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
I have just read, with deep interest, the two articles in the February issue — ‘Prohibition without Propaganda’ and ‘The Question of Personal Liberty.’
I have long had a plan that I feel would cover the situation as nearly to perfection as is possible in this age. The Volstead Act should be interpreted according to what is intoxicating to each individual. This would mean that we would go back to pre-Eighteenth Amendment drinks— hard, medium, and soft. But the point would be here: just as in ‘the good old days’ the saloonkeeper must have a license to sell, under this plan the drinker would also be compelled to have a license to drink. Also, hard drinks could only be sold by the bottle and could not be consumed on the premises. The drinker would take out a license each year — at a cost; the license would be a small card upon which the picture of the person holding the license would appear, similar to railroad passes. No dealer could sell a drink of wine or beer, or a bottle of hard drink, unless the person presented his license. If a person were arrested for intoxication, his license would be stamped; three such arrests would mean the loss of his license; the loss of the license for three years in succession would bar him from obtaining another drinking-license for another three years. Of course licenses would be misused, etc., etc., etc. But the point is, each person would have the privilege in this ‘free country’ of proving to himself and to the world just what was an intoxicating liquor to him.
Of course the plan is rough, but it could be made workable, I believe. No one would have his liberty restrained until his liberty interfered with that of another.
Yours truly,
(REVEREND) CARL I. SHOEMAKER

Like water through a sieve,

NASSAU, B. I., January 29
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
Feeling that at last the United States would be able to enforce the Prohibition law, great was the shock, upon reaching Nassau, to find half the town huge warehouses full of whiskey, ‘waiting to go to the United States,’ and spoken of in the most matter-of-fact way. The owner of a small launch said, ‘I have been running rum into Charleston Harbor, but my engine is not as fast as it was, so now I turn to pleasure parties.’ The steamer for Jamaica was twenty-four hours late sailing, as they had 15,000 cases to unload. The previous trip they had 25,000 cases. Another steamer anchored near, unloading the same amount. With liquor cheap and to be bought anywhere, there is no drunkenness in Nassau. But what of Prohibition for the United States?
E. P. L.

The doubts raised by ‘ The Modernist’s Quest for God ‘ have stirred many replies. This Unitarian minister makes an interesting distinction between earned and inherited religion in a letter we are unfortunately obliged to abridge.

CONCORD, N. H.
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
The writer of ‘The Modernist’s Quest for God’ in the February Atlantic, and doubtless ‘thousands like’ him, are confused and baffled by the tendency in religious thought and practice popularly called ‘ Modernism.’ He has made the interesting discovery that ‘ more than it (Modernism) realizes, it is living on its inherited capital — the stored-up memories and affections that gather about a traditional faith and the art and poetry of Christianity.’ This statement is doubtless true; but is it not also quite as true of the more conventional forms of Christianity? In the world of spiritual values as in the world of material values it is an extraordinarily difficult thing to cut loose from and to live independently of inherited capital. It is not a serious criticism of Modernism nor is it a serious criticism of Fundamentalism to declare that it is living on its inherited capital of spiritual and moral values. It is to be taken for granted.
Religion, with its literature, its traditions, its symbolism, its meetinghouses and cathedrals, its saints and martyrs, has given us a priceless ‘inherited capital.’ Some of it is of doubtful value. Some of it is treasure-trove, rich in the wisdom of the ages. But this capital, thus inherited, is not personal but social in character. As a citizen of the United States I have inherited vast social wealth. I live in the richest nation in the world, so I am told. That assures me many advantages in life — provided I meet the demands upon which such advantages may be enjoyed. My coal bill, my grocery bill, my subscription to the Atlantic, I cannot pay for by drawing a check on this vast inherited capital. I must have gained a title to capital which I may call my own in order to pay these personal obligations of life. Until I have earned that capital I cannot enter into the heritage of the vast social capital in the midst of which I live. Likewise I cannot draw a check on the inherited capital of Christianity for the purpose of meeting my own personal needs of faith and conduct. I must earn for myself by my own efforts some spiritual capital that becomes my own. Only upon this capital may I draw a check in time of need. My account of spiritual faith and wisdom may be very modest and humble, but it is the only account that I have earned a right to draw a check on. But, having earned that modest account by my own travail and pain, the doorway of understanding, the ‘inherited capital’ of Christianity, has been opened.
In this New World we must build our shelters and our cathedrals of faith in life’s values. The rugged people that developed a civilization among these New England hills did not wait for some great soul to tell them that they were laying the foundations for a great republic. They built their log cabins, made their clearings, blazed trails through the forests, and earned by hard labor the title to their homesteads.
In the world of religion we are building our houses of faith in a new intellectual environment. We need not the triumphal utterance of the great leader so much as we need the well-earned title of faith and wisdom gained by men and women who naturally and spontaneously like the life of pioneer dangers and hardships. We cannot depend entirely upon our ‘inherited capital.’ We cannot live entirely independent of it. We are bound in our generation, as all generations before us have been bound, to create our own spiritual capital, suited to our time and our problems.
(REVEREND) EARL DAVIS

Riding one’s hobby to business.

NOROTON, CONN.
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
I have talked with several business men concerning ‘My Secret Sin,’ which appeared in the Contributors’ Club of your January number. We are so completely unanimous that this letter really represents a community report, although I write individually.
It is true that the American business man is not too deeply versed in the æsthetic, and that he does not habitually wear upon his sleeve his love of beauty. It is also true that any man’s hobby is likely to be a subject for good-natured jest among his associates, but there is hardly a trace of truth in the thought that a business man loses any standing among his associates by loving beauty, and by announcing the fact to the whole world.
I have been an office worker, salesman, salesmanager, and finally the head of a successful business. My hobbies are trees, and art scrapbooks, although I bow to few in fondness for flowers and for clouds. I have never made any secret of these outside interests. I have never seen any business group or business situation in which they could not be displayed without awkwardness or detriment. In fact, discussion of hobbies frequently creates an atmosphere in which it is very easy to do business. I recall one House Conference in which everybody was giving talks that might have appeared in Success, or System, and when my turn came I read a fortyminute paper on Ruskin’s Modern Painters. I believe everybody in the concern thought the better of me afterward. I recall that the president asked me to take his wife and daughter through the Metropolitan Museum. (No, I did not marry the daughter; I had five children already.)
Like the Secret Sinner, I know where arbutus grows. It happens to be over one hundred miles away, and it happens to call for a tramp of four miles from a country railroad station. I go there each year, accompanied by one or two business acquaintances. We do not hide our arbutus in a newspaper. We display it on our desks. This was as true when I was an office worker as it is to-day.
I have as my week-end guest the president of a big concern. His hobby is birds, and he is the author of two bird-books. A man is usually at his best in discussing the things that he loves. He tells me that many an employee has first come to his attention as a man of promise through the discussion of the very topics which the Secret Sinner so carefully avoids. Let him take courage and be himself.
Yours sincerely,
W. W. DREW