OUR national debate on the Volstead Act has sunk to an interchange of abuse. From a discussion of moral principles, it has degenerated to acrimony, and from acrimony to vituperation. It is the aim of the Atlantic papers, of which George W. Martin’s is a conspicuous illustration, to bring back the debate on a subject of almost unparalleled importance to a high level of sincerity and sobriety and sense. Squabbling about drinks is one thing, discussion of rights quite another. In the defense of his principles and his profession Mr. Martin, a New York lawyer and the son of E. S. Martin, familiar for his editorials in Life, has, as he says, ‘rewritten Mill’s Essay on Liberty.” ¶In this month several thousand college graduates are tackling their first jobs. What they may expect of business and what business will expect of them are foretold by Anne W. Armstrong, who holds an honorable record as an employment manager for a concern numbering some seventy-five hundred workers. ¶‘A paper of the highest importance’ does not belie the characterization given it by Mr. Winston Churchill in his brilliant World Crisis. Our older readers will remember the great political interest which followed the printing in the Atlantic of the unpublished correspondence between Mr. Asquith and Mr. Lloyd George that led to the replacement of the former by the latter. We now publish another chapter yet unknown to history, but which history must reckon with in its final estimate of Mr. Lloyd George. The Atlantic publishes the plan in Mr. Lloyd George’s own words. A. Edward Newton has built a handsome new library in his Philadelphia home where he may sit in the stimulating company of his books and plan his next pilgrimage to London. ¶In and out of school Leslie Hotson is a literary detective who finds hot adventure on a cold scent. His discovery of Christopher Marlowe’s murderer was described in the Atlantic for June 1925.

That Lord Dunsany pursues dragons in the flesh as well as in imagination may be seen in the letter which he has recently written us: —

I have been on three hunting trips . . . two to the Sahara and one to Central Africa, and I have nearly doubled my collection of heads since the war. . . . Last year I shot a python nineteen feet long. You’ll never be able to see a snake like that in a dry country.

Major-General Sir Frederick Maurice, who in 1915 was made Director of Military Operations, Imperial General Staff, and who therefore ought to know, declares that there was a ‘similarity, in their broad lines, of the problems of the American Civil War and of the Great War.’ Humbert Wolfe, an English poet whose renown has reached our shores, is Principal Assistant Secretary in the Ministry of Labor. ¶Ever since her war work with the C. R. B., Charlotte Kellogg, wife of Dr. l emon Kellogg, has been intimately concerned with Belgium. Her account of Gheel more than corroborates an Atlantic paper of a decade ago. Helen Dore Boylston, a young Bostonian whose war diary lately appeared in the Atlantic, is now living — and we trust writing — in the Albanian mountains.

Don Knowlton, a publicity expert of Cleveland, declares that the constant observation of trees has become an almost involuntary part of his daily habits. ¶Seasonably, Theodore Morrison taught English at Harvard and migrated to Europe before becoming a member of the Atlantic staff. Isabel Cooper, who paints what Mr. Beebe catches, was the official artist on the Arcturus adventure. ¶To the April AtlanticWilliam T. Foster and Waddill Catchings contributed a critical paper on ‘The Dilemma of Thrift,’ containing the essence of their book, Profits, recently published by the Pollak Foundation. In this issue these economists supplement their theory, which, since it is both novel and ‘heretical,’has drawn general fire from the orthodox camp and particularly from Harriett Bradley Fitt. Mrs. Fitt received her doctorate in economics from Columbia University.

From A Woman Resident in Russia we have received a clear and unalluring picture of free marriage and freer divorce. From England John Langdon-Davies sends us his own observation of a modern and national crisis. J. Coatman has been appointed Director of Public Information to the Government of India.

This precious daguerreotype of an American mother is best expressive of the many welcome letters that have come to us in praise of Lucien Price’s ‘Olympians in Homespun.’

BELFAST, IRELAND
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
I have just finished reading ‘Olympians in Homespun’ in your April number, with tears in my eyes, as hundreds of other Americans may be reading it to-day. It is a complete answer to the article called ‘The Weaker Sex,’ but that, is not what has brought the tears. My own father and mother were married in 1871. My father had served throughout the war under General Lee. My mother was brought up on one of the great old plantations, attended a fashionable finishing school, read a graduation essay called ‘The Minutiæ of Life Are Its Jewels,’ made a proper debut, and was married two years after the opening of the Suez Canal, of which Walt Whitman sang in his ‘Passage to India.’
Now, with grown children of my own, I have come to live in a country only a few hours’ journey from the beautiful home of my great-grandmothers. I like to feel that I am the only descendant on this side of the ocean who invokes their watchful care.
To-day I am reminded of how that dainty and accomplished mother followed my father to California with three of us, as the wife of a country doctor. In the later seventies ours was a village of ten thousand people, with five churches and, it was said, forty saloons. During the time we were there, my mother became the ideal of all the young people of the community, and as they married and had children they named their little girls for her. She established a library dub and sent back to the old plantation library for encyclopaedias, dictionaries, books of reference, Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, and Gibbon. These books were installed in a room behind the chemist’s shop. There my mother went daily to give out the books to the young people eager to read, and there she gave advice, encouragement, and conversation with a gayety and charm I have never seen equaled in any person. She established a musical society and trained the young people who performed at the concerts, and it was the exquisite picture in the last paragraph of the ‘Olympians’ which drew tears to my eyes.
One evening, gowned in a Nile-green silk for which there had been few occasions during those long and incredibly hard years, with a white rose in her lovely fair hair ‘piled high in a corona of plaited braids, and golden lights on her radiant face,’ she took me and my five-year-old brother to a concert. I had watched her dressing with infinite joy, and we hurried away, leaving my father in charge of the three-year-old brother and the baby, both asleep.
My father had jokingly promised that he would be faithful and keep watch, but I think he must have said good-bye unwillingly when he saw his wife going off, young and radiant and smiling, to sing before the audience crowding into the ‘Opera House.’ We had seats in front, and were not the only children there in a community where every mother took care of her own brood.
How lovely she was to us as she stood above us singing those splendid arias, and I watched for the high notes with ecstasy. In the midst of the encore I saw a startled flash come into her eyes, and the gay song, ‘Il Bacio,’ was hurried to its conclusion with intent purpose. There was a stir at the back of the hall, and, turning to see what was attracting my mother’s attention and causing her such trepidation, I saw the small three-year-old brother standing in the midst of the aisle in his little crumpled white nightgown, gazing at this vision of a mother, quite rapt. Amid the applause she hurried down to him, receiving warm smiles and amused sympathy from every side, but my father, conscience-stricken and apologetic, met her there. The evening was so warm, the two small boys were so sound asleep, and the hall was so near, that he had ventured forth and was standing at the other door, also rapt, I am sure, when my little brother, who had followed him down the dusty road, had found his way into the hall. My mother was not dismayed, but lifted the small son up, wrapping her silk overskirt about him. I wore that Nile-green silk as my first party frock and it was still fresh and beautiful when ‘made over’ for a girl of seventeen.
These are our American mothers.
Yours sincerely,
MARY MORWOOD

In the midst of evidence and disputation for and against Prohibition, this parable must command attention

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA April 27, 1926
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
As we entered the Santa Clara Valley, motoring northward from Southern California last February, the distant visions of sea mists entangled in tree tops on nearer approach were transformed into pink and white sprays of exquisite blossoms. All nature smiled a welcome, and we concluded we had reached our Beulah Land. A plantation in San Jose was acquired, and we began intensive cultivation and improvement.
Then it was that the small black ants came to the fore en masse. They operated in squads and companies, in platoons and battalions, in regiments and armies, millions and millions of them, going up and down our fruit trees in close formation, in skirmish formation, single file and by fours, absorbed in the task in hand — to destroy the trees, root and branch, to pick the roses, and to herd their aphides on the green pastures of all living vegetation, milking their cows, making butter and cheese, and engaging in divers other pastoral pursuits. Girdling the tree with tanglefoot (tree gum) but whetted their voracious appetites, and they smacked their mandibles, stroked their antennae, and waded into it to the bridle rein, eating their way to the pastures beyond.
And now the recommendation of a friend that we feed them Argentine Ant Poison (arsenic and soothing syrup) has presented an effect which is a commentary on the difficulty of enforcing the Prohibition laws, disclosing that the staid, sober, dependable ant wants only the opportunity, access to the Argentine Red Eye, to stray from the paths of rectitude. The precept, ‘Go to the ant, thou sluggard,’ implies that it is incorruptible, industrious, useful, a shining example to the festive grasshopper. And yet every ant of the myriads which call this place home has been demoralized, perverted, led astray, and has degenerated into an habitual imbiber of the demon rum or its equivalent, Argentine Ant Poison, with which we have saturated sponges, placing them in covered cans, each can having several holes poked near its bottom. These portable saloons are deposited in the haunts of the impeccable, the incorruptible superman of the insect world, and, presto, he will not do another tap of work, but henceforth leans his elbow on the bar, his foot on the rail, and exchanges ribald stories as he sips his cocktail and nectar with glazing eyes and thickening voice until he is well ‘jagged,’ when he staggers home to beat his family and slaves, to abuse his cattle, to break the eggs and mix the pupæ so their own mother can’t identify them, upsetting all calculations and spilling the beans generally.
And then next day, if he survives, he swears off and goes about bolding his aching temples between trembling antennæ, never again to fall for the flowing bowl or to look on the wine when it is red. But, alas for his resolutions, on his return to the field to cultivate his crops and tend his flocks and herds, he is lured by the open saloon, the barkeeper waving to him from its cool portal, until he succumbs and dies with his boots on upon the second bibulous experience. And however we, the unregenerate, rejoice at this consummation, the end is not yet — his amazing powers of recuperation and reproduction make his elimination a slow process, and we can only hope for the best.
Yours for the extermination of the ant,
GEORGE W. PATTERSON

Disillusioning is this pretty tale of one who followed in Modestine’s footprints.

PARIS
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
I too have followed the tracks of Modestine’s shoes from Florac to Pont de Montvert, and like Mr. Ford, in the April Atlantic, I have seen the Spanish chestnuts like herded elephants on the slopes above the Tarn; like him I have slaked my thirst at the village inn and conversed with the indigenous, but unlike him I collected no Stevensoniana. Not a vestige, not. a memory, much less fragments of Modestine’s personal wardrobe. To be sure, I talked not with the blacksmith but with the publican, and perhaps the latter, notwithstanding the reputation of his profession for a liberal attitude toward the truth, felt that Mr. Ford’s smith had already attained heights that lay beyond him.
I was at Florac, and I engaged a small and inexpensive car, of a make not. unknown to fame. We set out along Stevenson’s rattling stony river, though owing to certain peculiarities of our vehicle the rattling of the stream had to be taken on trust. But it looked rattling. The driver seemed to have reasons of his own for getting the job over as quickly as possible, and once out of Florac we shot into the bays of shadow and out again into the promontories of light, heedless of the possibility that death might be lurking just around any of the numerous corners. I mentioned this to him, but he replied that at that hour and that season no other vehicle might, would, could, or should be seen on the road from Florac to Pont de Montvert. In spite of this assurance I would gladly have exchanged the car for Modestine, whose lack of speed, her most distinguishing characteristic, seemed to me just then a very desirable quality in a conveyance. But we reached the village without a wreck.
We stopped in the tiny place, where the Archpriest was dragged to receive his fifty stabs from the Camisards, and where a few days later Esprit Séguier was burned for the deed. I stayed our progress here while I looked about me. ‘Du Chayla’s house,’ says Stevenson, ‘still stands, with a new roof, beside one of the bridges of the town; and if you are curious you may see the terrace-garden into which he dropped.’ I was and I did. There was no mistaking the house, though the roof is not now so new as it was in 1878. I came back to my chauffeur, and together we sought the inn for refreshment. At the iron table on the terrace we were hospitably joined by our host.
‘That, doubtless,’ I asked my driver, pointing to the house by the bridge, ‘is the house of Du Chayla? ’
But the metropolitan from Florac denied all knowledge of the dwellers in so insignificant a spot as Pont de Montvert.
I turned to the publican. According to Stevenson the spirit of Séguier goes marching on, and the very children of the Cévennes are nourished on the story of the Camisards.
‘That, doubtless, is the house of Du Chayla?’
There was a brief colloquy in Provençal, which I was unable to follow. Then our host looked at me, hesitating: —
‘This Monsieur Du — this gentleman of whom you speak, has he been living long in Pont de Montvert?’
WALTER PEIRCE

It is appropriate to receive from the edge of the desert this early manifestation of Colonel Lawrence’s genius.

MONASTERY OF ST. CATHERINE
SINAI PENINSULA
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
It was in the desert behind Tor that I read the March Atlantic containing the splendid article by my friend Edmund Candler about my friend Lawrence of the Hejaz. Can one adequately describe the pleasure of reading the Atlantic amid such surroundings? It is useless to try.
In one phrase it seems to me Candler is unfair to Lawrence and to his own highly enlightening account. He speaks of an ‘entirely unexpected genius for handling men’ which bobbed up in Lawrence the guerilla. But in Lawrence the archæologist, at Carchemish, where I first knew him in 1913, there was evident a decided genius for handling his freedom-loving Kurds and Arabs. Both Lawrence and C. Leonard Woolley, late of Ur of the Chaldees, showed such uncanny skill in organizing and directing desert men as threw the methods of the Bagdad Railway builders into unfavorable contrast. Lawrence could handle men then, and however unexpected his genius may have been to those who did not realize how essential his ‘ touch with the Bedou ’ was, it could never have been imexpected to those who saw him bringing Hittite art to light beside the Euphrates.
MAYNARD OWEN WILLIAMS

This stalwart declaration of how one woman faces life must encourage others, both strong and weak.

PHŒNIX, ARIZONA To the Editor of the Atlantic,
DEAR SIR, —
I read with deep interest ‘Leaves from a Secret Journal,’ ‘Good-night, All,’ and the letters that followed in the March number. I agree with E. E. C. Valuations of life change and compensation follows. I cannot walk; I cannot sit up; I must remain on my right side in order to breathe. To turn over is an adventure. I have been in this condition for over eight years, and I too have seen many doctors, including specialists in heart and lung troubles. They hold out no hope for my recovery. I must face life. Death may be far in the future. To meet this situation is my concern. So far I have been helped by two things — work and prayer. Fortunately I have the free use of my hands and my eyesight is fairly good; and I was taught to pray at my mother’s knee. Prayer is a mind-saving habit with me. I do not ponder or speculate or question why. I know in Whom I have believed.
Very truly yours,
B. M. K.

Here, and for the benefit of Mr. Calkins and all advertisers, is an elemental principle which is practised, alas, on every American roadside.

WASSAIC, N. Y.
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
I wonder if Mr. E. E. Calkins ever heard this ditty: —

The man who has something good to sell
And goes and whispers it down a well
Is n’t half so likely to collar the dollars
As he who climbs a tree and Hollers!

I s’pose he has — but maybe he has n’t! You might ask him!
Yours truly,
ONE WHO ENJOYS YE ATLANTIC

A Short Course for Prospective Grandmothers.

ST. PETERSBURG, FLA.
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
I finished Mr. Leuba’s article on ‘ The Weaker Sex,’ shut the April Atlantic, and went to bed. His closing words, ' Though childbearing should fall completely under the ban of polite fashion, to the admirable enrichment of women’s leisure, this article would still stand,’ tickled me with their just and delicate satire. Is that why I dreamed this dream?
I seemed to have gone over to the university where my daughter was doing graduate work (as she really is) and found myself waiting for her in a large hall, beside a table strewed with pamphlets. A lively little old lady who saw me glancing at them explained: ’They are synopses of the Short Courses; there is a good one on Housekeeping for Women over Sixty.’ Apparently she had sized me up.
‘Perhaps that is the course you are taking yourself?’ I ventured.
‘Oh no,’ she laughed, ‘mine is on Fitting In Nicely and Not Being a Nuisance. It is an interesting course,’ she assured me with great sprightliness. ‘And useful,’ she added with a little sigh.
I had been watching a young man at the far end of the long hall. He looked like one of my daughter’s classmates whom I had seen with her frequently of late. He was a tall, athletic-looking chap, but he had just put the finishing touches to an elaborate structure of building blocks and was now hanging on the wall behind it long strips of white with verses on them in bright pink lettering. ' What in the world is that young man doing?’ I asked her.
‘He is placing his exhibits,’ she informed me. ‘They form part of his examination in the Short Course he is taking. Those are original Mother Goose rhymes, composed by himself. They say they are very clever.’
‘But is n’t he to receive his Ph.D. in Modern Political Science this June?’ I objected.
‘Oh yes,’ she admitted eagerly, ‘he is a brilliant student. They predict great things of him. But this is an extra — a Short Course on Baby Tending. A great many of the young men take that now, especially if they have any idea of getting married, you see.’
I saw. Suddenly I seemed to remember, as if it had been perfectly familiar to me, but had temporarily slipped out of my mind, the compromise that had been effected several years ago, in an attempt to keep up the human race. It was a sort of ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ (and ladies’) entered into by the men and women of all civilized countries, that if women would bear a certain number of children and nourish them by the proper mammalian method during the first year of their existence they were thereafter to be entirely free from any responsibility in regard to them. This was called ‘Dividing the Handicap.’ At least, that is all I could remember when I waked up, but in my dream the term used was more sonorous and more scientific, I am sure.
Again I looked at the young man, with still greater interest. I hoped my surmises were correct. All at once I felt that I must look up a certain Short Course for myself, and I began to rummage hastily among the pamphlets; but already the surroundings were getting blurry and resolving themselves into bedclothes and windows. I never shall read the synopsis of a Short Course for Prospective Grandmothers.
The above is a real dream, told as well as I can put it into words.
MRS. J. H, ARNOLD

More than once in these columns we have printed communications regarding the axiomatic immunity from male attention which any young lady may secure by carrying an Atlantic under her arm. We are sorry to say that the practice is not universally successful. A lady from Philadelphia writes us: —

May I say that the U. S. Navy is not even afraid of your magazine, as I was accosted twice by sailors when I was strolling around City Hall in Philadelphia recently, even though I had the latest copy of the Atlantic tucked firmly under my arm. I was merely admiring the statuary and inscriptions while waiting for a train, but it is so unusual to observe anything of that sort in Philadelphia that I soon had a small crowd at my heels, trying to discover what I was looking at.

The most modest of measures.

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
Dinner was over in the boarding house, and as the diners left the room one woman said to another, ‘Come on, let’s get the Atlantic and hang our skirts.’ That had to be explained, and these astonishing young women said that if they made their skirts come just to the top of the Atlantic when up on end they were just the right distance from the floor! So doth your usefulness increase! F. O. N.