The Contributors' Column

Lawrence Sullivan is a correspondent of long experience in Washington. A The distinguished actor George Arliss was awarded in 1930 the annual gold medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for good diction. Frank H. Vizetelly is the learned lexicographer of the Funk and Wagnalls publications. Gamaliel Bradford’s remarkable paper on Wilson is one of a series of studies of modern figures which tins veteran biographer is writing, William Rothenstein is Principal of the Royal College of Art, South Kensington. Sophie Tunnell is a new contributor to the Atlantic. Sylvia Townsend Warner is an English writer, justly admired for such delightful volumes as Mr. Fortune’s Maggot and The True Heart. A ‘Bird Heart’ is the second of Professor Julian Huxley’s papers on birds. William A. Croffut was a journalist whose range of acquaintance among the eminent and the picturesque figures of ids day was astonishingly wide. His recollections, under the title An American Procession, are to be published in March as an Atlantic Monthly Press volume.

The paper by Lord Dawson of Penn is derived from an address delivered at a meeting of the Canadian Club at Ottawa, August 111, 1930. ▵ A strict science would certainly classify William Beebe under the order of the Amphibia. Arthur Field, a Canadian, is a new and sympathetic contributor. A The atmosphere of Provence, as Freda C. Bond shows us, is still propitious to poetry. Howard Chandler Bobbins, formerly Dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, is now a professor in the General Theological Seminary. William Wistar Comfort is President of Haverford College. William Martin,a publicist of international reputation, is the editor of the Journal do Genève.

The transformation of Democracy, only two years ago shattered and broken by utter defeat, into a confident and aggressive party is a miracle of politics. The interpretation of its policies by the Executive Chairman of the National Committee, Mr. Shouse, and by the new Senator from Colorado, Mr. Costigan, has a large national importance. In this connection we regret the error inadvertently made in a brief announcement of Senator CostigaiTs paper in the January issue. Senator Costigan voluntarily resigned his appointment as member of the Tariff Commission and published his reasons therefor at the time.

A happy illustration of Mr. Sullivan’s paper on the fruits of our bureaucracy is contained in a pamphlet issued by the Department of Commerce designed to stimulate Christmas buying, and entitled It’s a Gift! We quote a few happy suggestions.

Footnote to ‘A Conversation in Peking.’

HELENA, MONTANA
DEAR ATLATIC,
When the delicious smile played about the features of Wu Ting in Peiping, it is quite too bad that none of the Americans, not even the missionaries, were familiar enough with church history to point out the obvious fallacy in his contention that religious tenets, as illustrated by Christianity, are but a compensation for contraries in life and ideals. That contention was plainly based on the assumption that, when Europeans were converted to Christianity, the foremost appeal to which they yielded was the ethical precepts of Jesus, especially as embodied in the Sermon on the Mount. As a matter of fact, Christianity as promulgated over Hie Roman Empire was. with some modifications by local conditions, mainly a system of religion looking specifically to the approaching end of the world and developed chiefly from Hebrew origins by the Apostle Paul, who gave it tangibility by compacting it about the life — or rather the death — of Jesus.
It would seem difficult to read the writings of the Apostle Paul without being struck forcibly by the dearth of allusions to the life and teachings of Jesus, and if it be objected that these writings are addressed to those already instructed in the Christian faith, yet there is ample in these Epistles and the Acts of the Apostles to make it clear that the preaching of Christianity did not consist, primarily of exhortations to follow the precepts quoted by Wu Ting. When the Gospels had been compiled, no doubt some knowledge of them may have become general through the Roman world, but never does the mediaeval church appear to have put these teachings conspicuously to tlie front.
Later, when the ‘Nordics’ were taken by tribes into the fold, it would be interesting to know how many of these barbarians ever so much as heard of the ethical precepts of Jesus before accepting Christianity. Following the Reformation, the translation of the Scriptures into the popular tongues, especially after the invention of printing, made these teachings more widely known than before, but even Luther and the other leading reformers placed the emphasis of their preaching quite elsewhere. While it cannot be questioned that many individuals have been profoundly affected in their lives by Jesus’ teachings, yet only a few obscure sects and some exceptional men have represented the teachings of Jesus as constituting the real core of Christianity. A famous preacher has expressed the orthodox idea succinctly by saying, ‘After all, mankind was saved not on the Mount of Olives but on Mount Calvary.'
Very truly yours,
H. H. SWAIN

‘Impuris omnia . . . '

NATICK, MASSACHUSETTS
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
Apropos of the opinion of the &; hinese philosopher as reported in the November number of the Atlantic, that people tend to adopt Lhe kind of religion which emphasizes characteristics the very opposite of their own, may I say that I conduct religious exercises each week in a state institution for women whose frailties as regards sex have been the cause, in most cases, for their enforced seclusion from society. It has been an interesting thing to me that the hymn most popular with them begins, ' Purer still and purer I would be in mind.'
Very sincerely,
EEBEUT B. HOLMES

Hope for the past-minded.

SANDWICH, MASSACHUSETTS
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
Thank you, and James Norman Hall, for the stimulating protest of a ‘past-minded’ man, crying in the wilderness of desolatingprogress.’ May it help to restore balance and sanity to a too ‘futureminded’ age!
But perhaps the situation is not quite as desperate us he paints it. Is there not an instinct of equilibration in human nature — yes, in all Nature — which leads it to swing from one extreme back toward the other? Even the awful example of Henry Ford, cited as one who sincerely believes in and works for the progress of a mechanized civilization, illustrates this swing. For has not Henry Ford made the gathering and preservation of the houses, the implements, the furniture, the dances of the old times, as at the Wayside Inn at Sudbury, bis pet diversion?
Perhaps even the writer of this sane and eloquent plea for the unchanging past would admit a limit to our following I he good old ways of the good old days of our fathers. Some years ago a stranger, passing through a New Hampshire town, engaged in conversation with an elderly, lifelong resident. Questioned as to his politics: ‘ I am a Republican; my father Was a Republican before me.’ Asked concerning his religions affiliations: ‘I am a Congreyationalist; my father was a Congregationalist before me.’ Then, upon a courteous expression of interest as to his family, came the reply: “I am a bachelor; my father was a — Oh, no! He was n’t either!'
Is it not the progress of science which has made possible this devastating rush of material ‘progress’? But the dominant trend of present-day science is to emphasize ever more clearly the spiritual basis of all existence. And this progress has been made wholly by the subdual of man’s ignorance of Nature and her laws.
Even though the dyer’s hand is subdued to what it works in, the dye is not always and forever indelible, nor does the hand thereby lose its cunning. May we not entertain the hope that to-day’s mad rush in subduing the earth and possessing it — and too often being possessed by it — will, by the inevitable logic of Nature, lead to the higher, more difficult, and more rewarding quest of subduing ourselves and the possessing of the inward realm of personality and spirit? Even the many courses offered in ‘Personality’ and the ‘Psychology of Salesmanship’ (illustrated with such bewitching attractiveness in the advertising pages of the Atlantic), all employed in pushing the sale of things, vomited forth in endless streams by the Frankensteinian machines, Suggest such a possible outcome.
But will not the past-minded man, with his deeply needed message of t lie precious tilings of old which abide through all change, get a better bearing if he yields generous recognition to the value and the hopeful promise of a progress which, with a subdual of the inner man, promises to end the misery of poverty? India’s concentration upon the spiritual did not keep her from being swamped with poverty and misery.
The present pause in the mad dance of a machinemade prosperity is evidently opening the minds of many to a recognition of the great need of something more than an increasing abundance of things.
Yours sincerely,
JOSEPH B. LYMAN

Still chasing the wisp-o’-the-wisp.

HOUSTON, TEXAS
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
I have just finished reading the &; ontributors Column in the December number and feel that I must call your attention to an error on the part of one of your correspondents. ' The chemical constitution of the will-o’-the-wisp’ should be known to everyone who has had a high-school course in chemistry, for the old name, ‘marsh gas,’which is always mentioned, was given to it because ot this common occurrence. It is the same gas that causes explosions in coal mines and it is the principal constituent of ‘natural gas’ that is used for fuel. The correct name is methane, and it is composed of one atom of carbon to four atoms of hydrogen.
The rare gas niton (nowcalled radon) is the emanation from radium, and is obtained in very minute quantities in those research laboratories that are fortunate enough to possess some radium. The amount obtained is so small that all the radium in the world would only produce something like one cubic inch in a year. There is no niton in the atmosphere, because it disintegrates so rapidly that it is all converted into helium in a few days.
I was curious to know what Dr. Slosson could have said about this, so turned to the page indicated and find that your correspondent has wholly misinterpreted his sentence. He said, ‘From the heavy white salt there is continually rising a faint fire-mist like the will-o’-the-wisp over a swamp.'
Very truly yours,
KENNETH HARTLEY

That Japanese Mystery.

WASHINGTON, D. C.
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
The ‘Japanese Mystery’ referred to in the opening paragraph of Mr. Sedgwick’s article in the September Atlantic may not. after all be so mysterious. I am inclined to think it is n’t, after reading Viscount Ishii’s new book, Gaiko Yoroku, or, literally, ‘Notes on Diplomacy,’ in which be makes many interesting confessions. Remember, the book is not written for foreign consumption — it is written in Japanese for Japanese readers. Viscount Ishii, you know, was for years Japan’s chief representative in the League of Nations. He was also Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ambassador to Washington and to Paris, and is at present member of the Privy Council, the supreme advisory body to the Emperor.
Viscount Ishii tells us that the Japanese, under the old régime only half a century back, had the ‘virtue of silence inculcated on his mind. He was taught never to talk to, nor even to look at, his neighbors at dinner. ‘Imagine my consternation, writes the Viscount, ‘ when I, as a young man serving abroad for the first time, was forced to sit at a diplomatic dinner or to attend a reception where everybody seemed to be talking to everybody else!’ In Ishii ’s experience, the Japanese is about tbe poorest of linguists. Naturally, as a diplomat, be is a poor orator, a poor negotiator, a very poor ‘mixer.
‘I never felt,’ says Viscount Ishii, ‘so keenly as I did at various meetings of the League of Nations the disadvantage of my earlier social training, or rather absolute lack of it, my inability to express myself readily in English or French, and mv deficiency in the art of oratory and debating. And that was the common experience among my Japanese colleagues and associates, and even among the younger men who had much better opportunity for training, but who were nevertheless handicapped by their native inaptitude in speaking and entertaining. Many a time, at various League meetings, we felt that some of our delegation should rise and say something, but we were held back by our consciousness that we were none of us capable of making an impromptu address.’
That, I think, is almost the whole truth about the ‘Japanese Mystery’ —at least at Geneva.
K. K. KAWAKAMI

The penalties of being too quotable.

BELMONT, MASSACHUSETTS
DEAR ATLANTIC, -
I have no doubt that Florence Stevens would have given you the name of the author of the ‘lines, ‘ To Be Happy in New England,’ which she sent you, and which were published in the Atlantic for December, if she had known it. As the copyright laws are constantly violated, it is quite possible that someone is printing these lines without my name or consent. Vet a card on which they are printed over my name has been on sale in the best bookshops in Boston for many years.
Very truly yours,
REVEREND JOSEPH P. MACCARTHY

From the editor of Facts about Sugar.

NEW YORK, N. Y.
DEAR ATLANTIC, -
In connection with Professor Wickers article, ‘Sympathy and Sugar,’ in the December Atlantic, there is one point to which I should like to call attention in the interest of historical accuracy. While I agree most heartily with the main thesis of Professor Wicker, that Cuba is deserving of special consideration from the United States, I think that a survey of past relations between the two countries will show that such special consideration has not been lacking.
On the commercial side, for example, there is no question that the preferred position granted to Cuba’s chief product, sugar, in the American market was directly responsible for the growth of Cuban sugar production from roundly 1,000,000 tons in 1903 to 3,500,000 tons at the end of the World War. Cuba’s willingness during the war period to sell her sugar at a moderate price is likewise deserving of recognition as an important contribution to the success of the Allied cause.
The statement has been made repeatedly that the overexpansion of &t; uban sugar production, which has brought ruinously low prices to producers not only in the Island Republic but in other parts of the world as well, was due to war-time stimulation of the industry. Apparently Professor Wicker accepts this claim. An examination of crop records will show, however, that while Cuban production reached 1,000,000 long tons in the crop year 1918-19 it remained near that figure until 1923-24. It was in 1924-25 that a jump of more than 1,000,000 tons took place in the Cuban output, bringing it above 5,000,000 tons. That increase was the result of cane plantings made in 1923 and 1924, five years after the close of the World War and at a time when the European beet sugar industry was rapidly recovering its pre-war position.
Professor Wicker suggests that the American market should be thrown open to Cuban sugar without restriction, but he does not make any suggestion as to what is to be done with the hundreds of thousands of Americans in the continental United States, in Hawaii, and in Porto Rico who would be driven out of business and ruined by such action. Regardless of the right, or wrong of tariffs, the men engaged in the domestic sugar industry have invested their labor and their fortunes in it under a policy maintained by the American government for more than a generation. Their numbers and their investments are equal to those represented by sugar production in Cuba. Not even the Cubans themselves have the hardihood to ask for the destruction of this segment of tire American business structure in order to make things easier for themselves.
Very truly yours,
E. W. MAYO

African education.

MOUNT SILINDA, SOUTHERN RHODESIA
SOUTH AFRICA
DEAR ATLANTIC, -
Greetings from pur Southern Rhodesia home, where you always occupy a conspicuous place on our library table; not, i hasten to assure you, because we wish to appear ’ highbrow’ to occasional visitors, but because we really enjoy you and look forward to your coining.
Mr. Huxley’s article in the August Atlantic was of great interest. I congratulate the Atlantic on its sensitiveness to the current breezes which blow throughout the world. The development of the indigenous races of Africa is surely no mere summer afternoon’s zephyr.

Indeed, African government officials and missionaries, not to mention others, are awakening to the tremendous opportunity which confronts them. Opportunity and problem, for native development is by no means so easy as an official newcomer made out who expected to solve the native problem in three months. The most recent reports would indicate that the same gentleman is still wrestling with this easy problem.
As Mr. Huxley so finely points out, the future of the whole country depends upon the sort of education which the native is given; far more, no doubt, than upon the number of white settlers who may enter the country. The right sort of settler is always an asset, but in the nature of the case the country is preponderantly black. Contented, disciplined, self-respecting, cultured natives will be invaluable to the country as producers as well as consumers. And without doubt the time is coming when they will take their place in the life and culture of the world.
However, ‘Education can never achieve . . . an East African culture . . . unless it is successful in making the native prosperous. So asserts Mr. Huxley. Indeed, culture and prosperity seem to be inseparable twins. One of the most important needs of native life is economic: to lift the native above the very barren and narrow level upon which he now lives. So restricted is his wealth that not a few present taxation schedules, as low as they are, are outstripping his earning power, Surely this is not the way to wholesome development.
Native education, further, must be more effectively adapted to present living. The native must be trained for a fuller and richer life in his present environment. None the less, I cannot agree with those who say that the culture of civilized peoples inut natural to the native and so should be kept from him. Culture, certainly, is not the possession solely of a particular racial group. The native should be given as much of the culture of Europeans or of other people as he can assimilate. At the same time every elfort must be made to create within him a genuine appreciation of t he best in his own life. The natives who will create this ‘East African culture’ of which Mr. Huxley speaks are those who have had enough ot the world’s culture to know what culture means. Emphatically the native must be educated to live at his best in the situation where he finds himself. Improvement must come along the lines of his present life. If the old sanctions of tribal religion and law are broken down, they must lie replaced by new and adequate ones more consistent with modern science and life.
Such new sanctions, again, will depend upon proper character education. Missions and governments must seek whole-heartedly to coöperate in this phase of native education. Obviously governments will not seek to specify the kind of religion to be taught, but they should encourage in every possible way thoroughly up-to-date curriculums and methods. Missions, in turn, ought to strive as never before to relate all religious instruction to actual life conditions. Then, as Air. Huxley qualifies the future, if we can attain such ideals, we may produce a superior type of education in Africa.
Very sincerely yours,
JEAN MAMST

Praise where praise is due.

DUTCH FLAT, CALIFORNIA
DEAR ATLANTIC, -
Would you he so kind as to express to Captain George H. Grant my keen appreciation of a whale of a good yarn in his story, ‘A Ship Goes Down.’ I’m something of a sailor, myself, having rounded the Horn seven times under square sail. I have been in steam, too. I abominate steam, but that does n’t matter. From the point, of view of a seafaring man. Captain Grant’s yarn is as good as anything Conrad ever wrote. There is less wordiness to it, and there is more sco.
With best wishes,
BILL ADAMS

THE SALLYPORT

It is curious what loads one human being to feel superior to another. Property, virtue, vice, genius, dullness hardly a namable quality has failed to contribute to some man’s contempt of his neighbor. An uneducated mechanic is capable quite ingenuously of believing himself superior to a brilliant .statesman, if the mechanic has his bread and beer and the statesman his senate. T here is a kind of Yahoo complex that leads those infected by it to rush into a group and scream derision at anyone whom they cannot explain to themselves, who appears different from their own society. It will be remembered that the Yahoos, when they saw Gulliver, liked nothing better than to scramble into a tree and try to font him as he passed beneath. It was an act of contempt, Gulliver was really the superior being, but the Yahoos felt superior, and took what according to their nature was the appropriate way to show it.

It is Iconoclast’s impression (possibly wrong) that Wilson was a victim of some of this Yahoo complex. It seems to me that no great man in recent, history is now so generally patronized as he. Alive, he was feared and hated: now that he is dead, it is safe to patronize him. Part of his unpopularity is due, of course, to his laboring in a field where Americans exhibit the curious anger and irascibility of the ignorant and the unwilling: the field of social and international advancement. Americans like a business president: the adulation poured on Coolidge in contrast with the general hostility or indifference toward the memory of Wilson is a measure of the country’s dislike and distrust of the social leader. Yet the country has not farted well of late by its business presidents; it may be that in time it will come to see the value of social leadership. Certainly it is a deep and tragic fault in American character that we pay so little regard to the leader whose first concern is the quality &;if civilization, and that we only feel safe to entrust ourselves to the leader whose horizon is hounded by business. It is one more evidence of the lack of rich personal life, the absence of respect and understanding of it, by which our social and æsthetic progress is retarded.

I do not accuse Mr. Bradford of patronizing Wilson: his article is a sincere and penetrating attempt by a most accomplished student to lay bare the springs of a great and enigmatic mind. None of us can ever pierce the springs of another’s thoughts, feel as another feels, know as another knows in his inmost, stream of being. That all Mr. Bradford says of Wilson is true would be hard to deny. But from the most discerning statement about, a man to the living current of his own thoughts is an immeasurable gap. More than likely this fact quite as much as any supposed modesty has led great men from time to time to express the wish that no biography of them should ever be written.

The worst patronage which the memory of Wilson receives is that of his own party. Jn platforms and campaign speeches, he figures flamboyantly as ’the martyred President’: but as for espousing that for which he was martyred, what Democratic leader would dream of it, for fear that his own political crucifixion would promptly follow? No. the Democratic Party contents itself with urging on an iudilferent public that we owe to Wilson the Federal Reserve lcgislat ion, hoping thereby to persuade an obtuse electorate that the Democrats can safely be entrusted with the nation’s business. The great objects for which he fought, both political parties are careful to avoid mentioning in association with his memory, lest the odium of his name attach to a good cause. Or shall we say that the heirs of his enemies are content to advance piecemeal toward his programme if they themselves receive the credit for it, while the heirs of his own party still walk in the shadow of his defeat? However this may be, when statesmen meet to sign treaties of naval limitation or international goodwill, the name of Wilson is not mentioned in the ceremonies. It is not hinted that, had the guidance of the country been in other hands, the whole face of civilization might not now be averted from war and striving toward peace; that it he had not led the opinion of his age and sought to provide it with political organs of expression, what was good in it might welt have been dispersed and destroyed, and it might never have come to be united on one point at least, the condemnation of war and the search for some more humane way of international life.

Perhaps I am deceived about the degree to which Wilson is patronized, but it always seems to me that the public attitude toward him is nicely expressed in Mr. Mencken s green-covered organ of occasionally usclnl mockery. There President. Wilson becomes Dr. Wilson, with tho delicately combined suggestion that ‘Dr.’ may stand lor Ph.D. or may imply a brown leather bag of nostrums for the world’s ills. This literary superciliousness is the reflex of the equal sense of superiority which the man in the street ieels at the mention of Wilson. Scholars and historians, of course, know better; I am speaking only of that elusive and perhaps valueless quantity, popular fame.

But popular fame is not altogether without value. There is a kind of public conscience, whatever the cynic may say, indicated by large movements of feeling and thought among men. Some day the public conscience will rouse itself. and pay to Wilson the tribute which is his due and which he has never yet received. The footing up of a man’s value in popular esteem may well be a just although it is not a scientific process; it must proceed from a large sense ot his effect on the world’s course, and a not too scrupulous regard ior Ins faults. I he present footing up of Wilson rests almost wholly on his faults: but some day the world will turn about and decide to weigh him by his virtues. Then the shadow that he easts from Valhalla, stately and tragic, will loom across the lesser shades in its true perspective.

The habit of patronizing Wilson is the more invidious because it never would have been possible except for his failure. Failure is the head and front of his offending, and to taunt a man who has gone down fighting to defeat is not a gentleman’s act. It may entitle him to be condemned, but not to be patronized. Moreover. Wilson’s blunders and defects have been so long and so plainly exposed that little credit attaches to anyone for being able to point them out, and still less for counting himself superior to them. The blunders and defects, and their crucial part in the defeat of his projects, no one now will deny. But they have weighed overmuch in the estimate of his life. We forget the strength of his influence, the majesty of his view of the world. One by one the points that he was forced to abandon or to compromise are fulfilled without mention of his name; and while hard necessity, bitter antagonism, bad counsel, or personal blindness I rust rated Ins plans whlie he lived, the purposes with which he inspired uncounted thousands of people have reshaped a great part, of public life, and launched the world on a new phase of history. This is the main fact about him, and for it the public will some day reverse its judgment.

Political life the world must have. Economic life is exalted above every other consideration to-day, but however close the rapprochement. becomes between economies and the state, political life and political organs will in some sense be necessary. There must always be public expenditures, debts, laws, and functions. Nations in some form will continue to exist, and with the growing unity of the world, international lift’ will become not a policy but a fact. And so it is even now. But international life also requires political organs, first to prevent war. the major foe of civilization, and ultimately to extend to the whole world those measures of social progress that are now mainly national. This country cannot forever avoid this plain conclusion and its consequences. But it is to Wilson that we owe the immense impetus which the idea of international life and of a universal League of Nations has gained. The United States has left it to others to support this idea, and they have struggled to do so against t he difficulty and uncertainty of our abstention. Eventually we shall cease elaborately walking round the obvious means of peaceful international life, the plain way to disarmament and to social progress. Lesson by lesson, in economics as in politics, we are learning that we cannot be a law to ourselves. When the hour finally strikes and the long bitterly resisted truth is at last accepted, we shall find ourselves trying to catch up with the self-interest -we might have advanced, and joining as a laggard the company we might have led. That will be Wilson’s hour, when his shade in limbo may be appeased for the wrongs he suffered from others, as it has doubtless already made absolution for the wrongs he did himself. Perhaps then his name will be heard again on the lips of leaders who know on what side the debt really lies.

THE OFFICE ICONOCLAST