Robert Whitcomb has been engaged in newspaper work in and near New York for ten years. The loss of his job, in January 1930, started him upon his enforced tour of the country which he records in ’The New Pilgrim’s Progress.’ Charles D. Stewart is Wisconsin’s natural philosopher. Δ Like Francis Parkman. Seth K. Humphrey is a New England historian and author who has always been fascinated by the Indians of the Western plains. His latest book. Following the Prairie Frontier, which includes the exciting episode he here describes, will be published in May by the University of Minnesota Press. Robert Dean Frisbie is living the life of Rousseau’s ‘natural man’ in Tahiti. From Papeete comes a letter from him telling how he happened to write ‘The Ghost of Alexander Perks, A.B.’ He says: ‘About a year ago I was dining unwisely though well with Captain Viggo of the trading schooner Tiare, and after the liqueurs I was inspired to tell a story. I told of the ghost on Vostok Island, making up the story as I went along. From then on, Viggo gave me no peace until I wrote it down.’ Willa Cather is — well. Willa Cather.

Albert Jay Nock is an American scholar whose refuge from the U. S. A. is commonly Belgium, James Merriam Moore is a major in the Army War College at Washington. Arthur Colton is a novelist and critic, a frequent contributor to literary reviews. Frances Taylor holds an executive position in a large advertising agency. Δ Born in China, the daughter of missionary parents, Ida Pruitt is reputed to know more about the way the yellow half of the world lives than any other ‘foreigner’ in the land. She is now head of the Social Service Department of Peking I’nion Medical College. Δ A biography of A. W. Smith would be a compendium of rare adventure in the far places of the earth. After years of service in the British Army he became general manager of a vast lumber organization in Rangoon; he now makes his home near Boston. Eleanor Risley lives on the banks of the Ouachita. She knows as friends and neighbors the folk of whom she writes in ‘Drought.’ George J. Anderson is president of the great Consolidation Coal Company in New York. Horace W. Foskett is assistant treasurer of the Equitable Life Insurance Company of Iowa, where his work, lie says, has impressed him ‘with the need for a sound economic policy for this country.’

Mazo de la Roche wrote ‘Finch’s Fortune’ at her cottage in Devonshire; now that the book is finished, she is making a tour of the Continent. Those readers who missed the last issue of the Atlantic, which contained the opening installment, may ‘catch it on the run’ by glancing through the following synopsis: —

The time of the story is the present; the scene, Jalna — a large country house in Ontario, built in 1850 by Captain Philip Whiteoak. Here live Captain Whiteoak’s two surviving sons, Nicholas and Ernest, now old men, with their nephews, who are the sons of their dead brother Philip. Of these the oldest, Renny, is head of the clan — a passionate horseman and farmer about, forty years of age. He has recently married Alayne Archer, a somewhat prim and intellectual New Yorker, the divorced wife of his half brother Eden, a poet, who ran away with his sister’s nursemaid, Minny Ware, and is now in Europe. A third brother, Piers, husband of Pheasant and father of young Mooey, is Rennv’s right-hand man in the management of the estate — a difficult job, owing to the family’s rather extravagant way of living and to the fact that old Mrs. Whiteoak, instead of leaving her fortune to one of her sons, or to Renny, for the upkeep of the family as a whole, willed it to her grandson Finch, who is on the eve of his twenty-first birthday when the story opens. Finch is a sensitive musician, somewhat appalled at the riches he is about to inherit. Wakefield, a delicate and precocious boy of fourteen, is the last of the brothers. The only sister, Meg, older than Renny, is married to a neighboring farmer, Maurice Vaughan, and has one little girl.

The birthday dinner party at Jalna, with which the present installment opens, shows clearly the characteristics of the family’s various members.

Robert Whitcomb’s graphic account of his ten-month pilgrimage in search of work translates into its stark human terms one of the prices we are now paying for the late lamented ‘Coolidge prosperity.’ That such conditions as he describes can be met with in the richest country of this twentieth-century world is a fact to challenge the leadership of American business to seek some enduring remedy for the ills of our industrial civilization. It is a heartening sign of the times that business men generally are beginning to realize that theirs is the responsibility to find a solution. Two other articles in this issue, both by business men, indicate that this is so — ‘Nobody’s Business.’ by George J. Anderson, and ‘Falling Prices.’ by. Horace W. Foskett.

Throughout the Middle Ages the periodic plagues that swept over Europe, trailing death, desolation, and despair in their wake, were looked upon as acts of God. At last, however, the genius of medicine discovered the causes of disease and ended the terrors of the Black Death. In modern times the plagues that afflict us are these cyclical seizures of economic paralysis whose causes, still obscure, must be probed and removed. Eras of unprecedented prosperity give way to interims of world-wide depression. Machines hum merrily, turning out a superabundance of goods the like of which mankind has never seen before; then, suddenly, something happens — the wheels stop turning, mills are closed, millions are thrown out of work through no fault of their own. They are left to face starvation and cold, while — and perhaps because — warehouses arc bursting -with food, clothing, necessities of every description.

The Ancient Mariner knew the torture of ‘water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink’; the modern victim of industrialism knows the torture of poverty provoked by riches, of want induced by plenty, This paradoxposes a pressing social problem which men of light and leading will not, indeed cannot, ignore. The genius of modern business must attempt a solution. But how? The keynote of every scientific experiment is control, and the simple fact of our economic life is that the necessity of self-preservation puts pressure upon every business executive to control his own enterprise. But in the very process of trying to control their individual ventures, business men create a larger something which is beyond their immediate control—namely, the general business situation. It gets out of hand continually to roll up successive waves of feverish activity and dull stagnation. The most urgent need of the times is to learn howto harness the wild forces of collective business and flatten out the exaggerated curves of the business cycle.

The two business articles which the Atlantic publishes this month are but the forerunners of others to follow by outstanding industrialists, bankers, economists, and engineers — all looking toward a solution of this national problem.

Bureaucracy in France,

NEW YORK, N. Y.
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
You are to be commended for publishing Mr. Lawrence Sullivan’s searching articles on American bureaucracy, A letter in your April Contributors’ Column caught him up on a few minor details, but his general charge still stands. Everyone who has ever had to do business with the petty officials in any government bureau will recognize tho essential features of the picture as he has painted it. He shows that each little bureaucrat, his mental horizon bounded by departmental rules which have narrowed down from precedent to precedent, tends to become a court of last resort from which there is no appeal. It is a governmental disease, a species of dry rot that flourishes in the musty atmosphere of officialdom everywhere. Washington seems to be peculiarly subject to it, but then so is London, Paris, Berlin, Rome — even lusty Moscow. Nor is it a modern disease, as we sometimes like to think. Dickens was a hundred years ahead of Mr. Sullivan in lampooning the absurdities of the eternal ’Circumlocution Office.’
To-day the most powerful bureaucracy in the world, this side of Moscow, is probably to be found in the highly centralized government of France. Madariaga has pointed out that there is a peculiar something in the genius of each nation which forces it to express itself in a characteristic way, no matter how the external forms may change. So in France, Louis XIV is dust, but his spirit lives on forever in each petty official of the republic, who acts upon the principle, L’état c’est moi. One episode from my personal experience will illustrate how thoroughly these French bureaucrats have succeeded in complicating the citizen’s simplest relations to the state.
Several years ago I chanced to buy an automobile in Lyons. That, you will agree, is an elemental transaction — at least, so f thought until I had paid for the car and began to find out some of the things I should have to do before I could make use of it. First I had to go with the dealer to the prefecture and register the change in ownership. In my best French I swore that I, Marlowe Harris, had that, day purchased from M. Claude Arnol a Renault roadster, engine number such and such, for the sum of fifteen thousand francs in cash paid. This oath was administered by a mutilé — n brisk little clerk who had lost his right arm in the war and who, as the sequel proved, stood ready to sacrifice his left, if need be, to preserve inviolate the order of ceremonies laid down for cases like mine.
I had bought the car because I wanted to see as much of southern France as I could in a very limited time. Unfortunately, I had left my New York driving license at home and I knew that I should have to take a test. So I explained my situation to the official and told him that I should appreciate anything he could do to expedite my departure from Lyons. In precise, clipped syllables he said that everything would follow in due course and that I would please report for a driving test one week hence. He gave me a little leaflet which described in technical French all the parts of an automobile and how they function, and warned me that my test would include an oral examination upon its contents. There was nothing to do but accept the situation. The next six days I spent memorizing the cumbersome French names for all the parts of a motor car. When I reported for my driving test, I was met by no less a personage than a professor in the School of Mines. It puzzled me to see any connection between geology and automobiles, but this was quickly explained. It seems that when automobiles were invented the government decided to turn them over to the department which had the least work to do. This was the Bureau of Mines, and the arrangement has continued in force to this day. So it was that a professor from the School of Mines left his classes in the middle of the morning to drive with me through the streets of Lyons and ask me questions about the steering apparatus, the carburetor, and the brakes.
This ordeal ended, I thought I was through; as a matter of fact, I had only just begun. I was told that I must now return to the prefecture and apply for my carte blanche — the official driver’s license. This I did, and when I had filled it out and presented the professor’s report upon my test, the same little onearmed clerk said that the prefect would have to sign it and that I could call for it the next day. The following afternoon I came for it and was about to bow my way out of the office when the official stopped me. ‘You must now apply for the carte rouge, he said. So I filled out another form and was again instructed to come back the next day for the prefect’s signature.
I asked how many cards I should have to obtain and was told that there were also the carte grise, the carte bleue, the carte jaune, and several others whose colors I forget. One was an identification card, another was a permis de circulation; the precise function of the rest has long since escaped my memory, but the clerk made it clear that they were all necessary documents and that no one could operate an automobile in France without them. Could n’t I apply for them all at once and get it over with? No, I could not; they had to be applied for in proper sequence and I should have to come back an innumerable number of ‘next days for the prefect’s signature.
The prefect’s office was in the next room and I could hear him talking through the partly open door, but he might as well have been in Paris as far as I was concerned; he signed all cards at a particular hour each morning and could not be bothered with them at any other time. In desperation I again mentioned the urgency of my case and asked if something could n’t be done. No, nothing could be done; this was the regular procedure to which all French citizens had to accommodate themselves; no exceptions could be made for foreigners.
I saw that. I was doomed to spend the rest of my vacation in Lyons unless I took heroic measures, so I called upon the American consul for help. To make a long story short, he telephoned the prefect and asked him as a personal favor to do what he could for me. That was enough: I was at last able to drive off exactly two weeks from the day on which I had bought the car. My vacation was ruined, but I had the satisfaction of knowing that I had cut the red tape in half; I learned that it usually requires a month to obtain all the documents that a Frenchman must carry about his person when he is rash enough to drive an automobile. Such is bureaucracy in France. I doubt if Mr. Sullivan has discovered anything in Washington to equal it.
MARLOWE HARRIS

The seasoning of an old salt.

DUTCH FLAT, CALIFORIA
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
Mr. Harvey Wickham, in his ‘Tags’ in the March number, says that no one ever reads Pilgrim’s Progress all the way through. I must ask your permission to contradict him.
I was ‘raised’ by a stern spinster lady who was born and brought up in New Fngland. At Christmas time I used to hang up my stocking. When I was still a very small boy my aunt told me that I was now too old to do this any longer. I have had a good many blows in my life, but I do not remember anything that so numbed me as this, for, though the contents of my stocking were never very exciting, it was always with a great deal of hope that I looked forward to emptying it. The Christmas Eve on which I went to bed under this interdict was bitterly cold. Snow lay deep upon the ground. I remember it all distinctly. Polly Dobbins, the hired girl, was afflicted with chilblains. St. Nicholas, my aunt’s pug dog, instead of sleeping on the covers at the foot of her bed, slept in it.
When I came down to breakfast that Christmas morning, 1 found beside my plate a large book. It was Pilgrim’s Progress. I read it through, and have since reread it — every word. I will not descant upon mv opinion of the book except to say that if I had been Christian I would have stayed at the Slough of Despond and caught frogs. I think Mr. Wickham owes me an apology.
BILL ADAMS

P. S. — I know that you New England people are apt to be a little sensitive about the rigors of which you are often accused, so I ought to add that these things did not happen in New, but in Old, England. Polly Dobbins was a little rosy-cheeked English girl. St. Nicholas was an English pug. Polly Dobbins made nine pounds a year and was engaged to a man named Marlin Luther Jones, who was a hedger and ditcher. She was still engaged to him when I was a lad grown and went away to sea. They had been engaged for fourteen years when Marlin Luther Jones died and was buried. This has nothing at all to do with Pilgrim’s Progress, of course — and yet, in a certain way it has. Thinking of it all reminds me of Mary Lewellyn, the old Welsh woman who came in to help with the washing and was always so very kind to me. She was a widow woman and wore a high Welsh bonnet. She and her man had been engaged for twenty-two years before they were married. Soon afterwards her man died. Their one son died on a battlefield years before I was born. On the night before I went away to sea Mary Lewellyn told me to kneel, and as I knelt down before her she gave me her blessing. Long afterwards, when I was a man grown and came in from sea, I used to go to her little cottage to visit her. I kissed her old, wrinkled, brown cheek.

I beg your pardon for wandering like this. Please excuse an old sailor, who has read every last word of Pilgrim’s Progress — no, not every last word, for the road is not yet done. Perhaps, after all, Mr. Wickham is right in a manner of speaking.

' Death on an Atoll.'

WILMETTE, ILLINOIS
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
This letter will serve to register my profound disapproval of the policy of your magazine in publishing a story such as ‘ Death on an Atoll’ in which the plot is based upon the tragic experience of a degenerate. It is generally known, of course, that such unfortunate persons do exist, but it would appear that there are sufficient, wholesome and natural plots of much greater genuine interest that can be used. I am no Puritan and hold no brief for those who would eliminate all realism from writing, but I do believe that it is unfortunate for a publication of the standing of the Atlantic Monthly to publish a story of this character.
GRANT CHANDLER

DEAR ATLANTIC, —
As a psychiatrist, I was immensely interested in James Norman Hall’s story, ‘Death on an Atoll,’ in the March issue. I have met with this baffling problem in a professional way many times, and have always been saddened by the tragedy of the individual case because of the present hopelessness of a remedy or even partial relief. In the case of a highminded, sensitive person, the solution has always seemed to me the austere life of the ascetic, verily a mortification of the flesh. That this might be more perfectly accomplished by a voluntary isolation, a taking up of the existence of a hermit, had never occurred to me ill connection with such tragedies. Mr. Hall’s treatment of the situation so fully accords with my opinion of the ideal attitude of a Stoic philosopher (perhaps difficult or impossible to the ordinary person) that I want to tell you and Mr. Hall of my appreciation of your excellent presentation of such a theme.
R. B. W.

Coddling our ‘infant industries.

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
In his article on ‘Our Tariff Swaddling Clothes,’ in March. Mr. Knollenberg omitted to mention one of the effects of our high tariff which cannot fail to impress every American woman when she goes into the market for certain kinds of goods. I refer to the undeserved advantage given by the tariff to the American maker of goods which are better made abroad than here. Because his market is guaranteed to him, the American manufacturer does not need to keep up to date, to make his product interesting and attractive; he is not obliged to bring it up to the standard of the rest of the world. Originality, good taste, accuracy, all are superfluous to the man who knows he can always sell what he makes even if it is far inferior to the foreign product, so long as his government is ready to impose a fine on all who buy the foreign product,
If I wish to buy good black pins I must ask for Kirby Beard s, as my grandmother did. If I wish to have scissors that will continue to cut, or a brush with bristles that will not soften at once, I must buy those of foreign make. My chief quarrel with the tariff framers is that they make it unnecessary for American manufacturers to improve their methods, to work up to the European standard, which of course they could do. We do indeed keep our ‘infant industries’ in swaddling bands long after they have grown up; so they become timid or lazy and refuse to face competition and stand on their own merits. The great majority of housewives in this country are people of very moderate means and must think carefully of prices when they select curtains, chintzes, linens, wall papers, china ware. Every woman of taste knows that when she goes shopping for her household furnishings and picks out a pretty, clear, artistic design it will inevitably prove to be imported and twice the price of the vague, muddy, uninteresting stuff she is obliged to buy. Why should the American wall-paper manufacturer bother to employ designers with taste when he knows he can sell oceans of stupidly decorated paper.? The other day I asked for white pique, and when I exclaimed at the price I was told that it was imported. Apparently American cotton manufacturers will not trouble to make piqué, but insist that we buy something else that they do make, or pay for our willful ness.
It is strange that we should deliberately make it impossible for the great majority of ourselves to possess the desirable things which even the moderately well-off of other countries may freely enjoy. It is strange that we should continue to accept the ugly and the shoddy and the carelessly made, when our manufacturers could, if they would, supply us with wares quite as acceptable as those we get from abroad.
ALICE HAMILTON, M.D.

Architecture as ‘beauty in use.'

STONY HILL, JAMAICA
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
Mr. Chester Henry Jones’s article in the January issue, entitled ‘Architecture Astray,’ should form a much-needed corrective to the popular slavish adherence to ‘period’ architecture. But the author’s desire to emphasize the essential utility of architecture has resulted in his neglecting, if he does not deny, the æsthetic nature of that art from which it is indissoluble.
With the exception of the non-creative revival of earlier forms removed from their proper spheres, which have been with us like the poor ever since the Renaissance, and of which perhaps the most horrible examples are to be found in the ‘castellated Gothic mansions of rural England, it is an undoubted fact that the basic principle underlying every style of architecture has been utilitarian. But that is not to say that this view was, in the minds of the builders, divorced from the idea of beauty. The function of the Greek column, for example, was purely utilitarian, but its evolution wholly æsthetic. Changing the ratio of diameter to height, as from the Doric to the Ionic forms, and the increasing elaboration of the capital, added nothing to the usefulness of the column itself. The same considerations apply largely to Gothic architecture.
Except for its neglect of beauty, Mr. Jones’s article is wholly salutary. For three centuries architecture has been possessed of the demon of imitation. With the new instruments of steel and concrete, this age may hope to accomplish its exorcism.
P. DONNELLY

In defense of the King’s English.

LONDON, ENGLAND
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
I have just read in your February number a lamentable article entitled A Matter of Pronunciation,’ by Mr. Frank H. Vizetelly. Your contributor, so we are informed, is ‘the learned lexicographer of the Funk and Wagnalls publications,’ but his incontestable qualifications for that task do not entitle him to misinform your readers on the subject of the pronunciation by Englishmen of their own language. May I point out to the learned professor — and, by your courtesy, Sir, to the readers of the Atlantic Monthly — that we have a standard for the pronunciation of the English language? It is that which is the common usage of well-bred, cultured (not ‘cultchah’ed’) Englishmen and Englishwomen. We do not speak of a ‘lectchah,’ nor do we say ‘Oo noo’ instead of ‘Oh, no.’ Where can the professor have wandered during his visits to London?
I learn with interest, and for the first time, that ‘the best people of England to-day talk with a cockney voice’! Really, the readers of the Atlantic Monthly cannot be expected to swallow so absurd a statement, when, for the price of a dollar or less, they can hear Mr. Ronald Colman or Mr. Fred Kerr speak, in faultless fashion, the pure English of the well-bred Englishman.
Yours faithfully,
HARGRAVE STANDEN, COLONEL

On the authority of Punch.

NORTHAMPTON, MASSACHUSETTS
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
If any of your readers who are familiar with London were deceived by Mr. Vizetelly’s statement that a famous thoroughfare in that city is not pronounced ‘Pell Mel!,’ let me restore their faith by citing a stanza which was printed in Punch, February 18, 1931:
As I was lately crossing where it needs the stoutest nerve
To dodge the streams of traffic that so sinuously swerve
At the bottom of Haymarket, I stumbled and I fell. But struggled to my feet and reached the pavement of Pall Mall.
ROBERT WITHINGTON

Doctors’ bills again.

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
DEAR ATLANTIC, —
We are all interested in hospital costs. &; osts such as Dr. Belknap mentions in his December letter may be available to people in small towns, but are certainly far below what we have to pay here, and I have always understood that we pay less than people in large cities in the East, though we all pay far more than one would in Canada.
I have just had an operation in an excellent hospital, under the auspices of the Episcopal Church, which charges less than many’ other hospitals in town. My room, as cheap as any, was $50 a week; the operating-room charge was $20; surgical dressings and medicines added considerably to my bill. I had a local anæsthetic, so was spared a fee of from $15 to $50. I also did without a special nurse. Had I required special attention, I should have had to have three nurses at a total of $18 a day; no nurse is allowed to work more than eight hours in this hospital. I came home with a practical nurse at $5 a day. Trained nurses charge from $7 a day up for private duty, and for contagious diseases may ask as much as $12 a day.
Knowing I am a middle-aged woman, alone in the world, with a small income, the surgeon charged $250 for what is considered a very slight operation. Very truly yours,
ROMAINE L. POINDEXTER