The Contributors' Column

Friedrich Ritter (’Adam and Eve in the Galapagos’) is a genuine Robinson Crusoe of our time. Before embarking upon the strange adventures here described, he was a practising physician in Berlin. His flight from civilization is probably a result both of his philosophical studies at the University of Freiburg and of his horrible experiences in the German artillery corps during the World War.Leslie Hoston (‘A Great Shakespeare Discovery’) made his reputat ion as a literary detective extraordinary by getting at the truth of Marlowe’s death (Atlantic for June 1925). He enlarged it by finding the long-lost Shelley Letters (Atlantic for January, February, and March 1930). Now, while still in his thirties, he achieves the acme of every scholar’s ambition by bringing to light new and important facts about Shakespeare. We shall shortly publish in book form a more detailed account of his discovery, together with all the relevant documents in the ease, and as this scholarly edition will he small, we should advise early application. Florence Converse (‘Toast to Master Will’) was for many fruitful years a member of the Atlantic staff. Gertrude Carver (’Early Holiday’) lives at Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. A. Edward Newton (‘Books of One Own’) is an author of note, who for years has made a hobby of collecting first editions. His library contains one of the finest private collections in the world.

H. E. Wortham (’The Education of a Prince’) is a well-known British biographer. His last book was a study of Mustapha Kemal; his next, to appear this fall, will he Edward VII: Man and King.Captain William Outerson (‘Black Death’) is a seasoned sailor, now retired, who relives the life of his seagoing days by spinning yarns for landlubbers. Frank Jewett Mather, Jr. (‘Glimpses of Russia’), distinguished art critic, is Professor of Art and Archæology at Princeton l niversity. Simeon Strunsky (‘Jones, His Opinions and Politics’) is a member of the editorial staff of the New York Times.Edwin Rogers Embree (‘A Few Port rails in Sepia’) has spent years in the study of Negro education and racial problems. He is president of the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Arthur E. Lloyd Maunsell (‘Song of Mother Earth at Even’) has contributed poems to the leading British reviews and has published two volumes of verse: Between Two Worlds and Moods and Lyrics.Ruth Starbuck Wentworth (‘Nantucket’s First Cup of Tea’) was a thrifty and industrious housewile of Colonial New England. George E. Putnam (‘The Hardened Arteries of Business’) is an industrial economist who has traveled extensively both in old Bussia and in new.

George Frederic Nieberg (‘All in the Congressional Family’) is a former newspaper man of fifteen years’ experience, much of it acquired in W ashington. Concerning nepotism in local politics the New York Times recently sail! editorially: ‘ It is now reported that Judge Seabury and the legislative committee are inquiring curiously about the extraordinary Success of certain young men in doing business with the city. They are sons and nephews of Tammany magnates or of Democratic bosses in Brooklyn or of party loaders in the various Albany districts. . . . It may seem strange that these young men advance so quickly, but consider how the ordinary obstacles are smoothed away before them. Do they have to encounter that dreaded thing, “sales resistance"? On the contrary, the doors of all city offices fly open to them. Is it necessary for them to make long and detailed explanations of the superiority of the articles they have to sell to the city? Not at all. Their more presence, and their identification as belonging to the right family, are guarantee enough. The method has long been known in New York.’ Mr. Nieberg’s survey demonstrates conclusively that the method is also well known on the wider stage of national politics, and that Republicans and Democrats alike show no disinclination to placing their relatives upon the government pay roll. Mazo de la Roche will soon see Finch’s Fortune in book form, a sequel to Jalna and Whileoaks of Jalna.

Mr. Fosdiek is a careful man.

EDITOR.Atlantic Monthly
Dear Sir: —
In Mr. Fosdiek’s article in the August Atlantic he GIVES certain figures on which he bases his contentions as to the militant attitude of the United States in contravention of statements of three Presidents and three Secretaries of State.
Statement of Mr. Fosdiek:

This difference is equal to practically the entire, strength of the Regular Army, of which but 88,431 enlisted men are in the Continental United States, the balance being in Hawaii, Canal Zone, Philippines. Alaska, Porto Rico, and China.

This reduction in enlisted strength of the Regular Army in the last eleven years is equal to the entire strength of the Regular Army in the Continental limits of the United Stales.

In the Army Appropriation Bill, specifically appropriated therefor and included in the $446,565,735 are the expenses for Civil Government and Upkeep of the Panama Canal. Flood Control of Mississippi and Other Rivers, Cemeteries, National Parks and Monuments, Rivers anti Harbors, and other similar civil affairs operated by the Engineer Corps of the Army — $111,089,770.
Among the appropriations for military activities in the hill are certain items such as compilation of World War records, civil government of the Philippines, York town Sesquicentennial, pay of retired officers and enlisted men (practically pensions), and other similar items which cannot he considered warlike preparation, totaling $22,037,097. This, added to Rivers and Harbors, etc., makes a total of $1.33.129.867. Adding to this the original discrepancy of $13,434,265, gig a total discrepancy of $146,561,132 between Mr. Fosdiek’s statement and the actual expenditures for this year for what can be considered strictly military upkeep.
Mr. Fosdiek gives no authority for his figures — mine are taken from official reports of the Vdjutant General s Ollier and letter from Office of Naval Intelligence as to present strength: Chicago Daily News Almanac of 1931 for strength in 1921. and Bulletin No. 18 War Department. March 10, 1931. for Army Appropriation Bill. Anyone can obtain these documents and check my figures.
ALEX. M. DAVIS
Colonel, U. S. Army, Retired

Dear Colonel Day is:
Such a letter as yours deserves a careful reply. This will account for our delay in answering yours of August 15.
You object primarily to Mr. Fosdiek’s figures relating to the present strength of the Army. These figures are taken directly from the message which President Hoover sent to Congress on December 3, 1929. If you will write to the Government Printing Office you can secure this document,and on page 4 you will find the facts precisely as stated. We assume the figures used fix the Commander in Chief of the Army are accurate.
You further assert that our estimates of military costs include cost of flood control, rivers and harbors improvements, etc. In this you are mistaken. We refer you specifically to the report of the Secretary of War for 1930, and to the printed minutes of the hearings before Congressional Committees on Army and Navy appropriations. These documents can also be obtained on request from the Government Printing Office. The Armaments Year Book of the League of Nations for 1929 will also assist you in getting at the facts.
May we in conclusion ask you to give due consideration to the following sentence from President Hoover’s message to Congress: ’While the remuneration paid to our soldiers and sailors is justly at a higher rate than that of any other country in the world, and while the cost of subsistence is higher, yet the total of our expenditures is in excess of those of the most highly militarized nations of the world.
THE EDITORS

Wild asses enough at home.

Dear Atlantia, —
Heartiest, thanks to you for publishing the able article, ‘Our Foreign Policy in the LookingGlass,’ by Raymond B. Fosdiek. It is good fonts to look the truth in the face, even though it cover our national pride with shame.
But how did it come to pass that as one finishes this record of our insincerity and sham complacency the first words that greet the eye arc in the title of the next article, ‘Hunting the Wild Ass’? Why should any American ever go so far as ‘the great salt desert of Central Persia’ to find ‘the stamping ground of the wild ass’?
JOSEPH B. LYMAN
Sandwich, Mussachusells

Prohibition versus regulation.

Dear Atlantic, —
Dr. Francis G. Peabody’s criticism or the Eighteenth Amendment in your August number is of peculiar interest, coming as it does from a temperance advocate of such distinction as Dr. Peabody, He has accentuated with thorough understanding tin: principle that law to be effective must follow, not precede, the march of public opinion. His illustration of the sailor who holds the turn is most apt.
Nevertheless, he appears to accept the principle of prohibition in regard to intoxicants and cites in justification of it a number of laws, such as traffic laws, which are not really prohibitory but rather regulatory in character. He falls into the common error of confusing prohibition with regulation, when, as a matter of fact,they are at opposite poles.
He says, ‘The only end to this controversy must be the abolition of all restriction.’ He has put his linger on a fatal defect of the Eighteenth Amendment. yet he appears to regard retention of this Amendment as necessary because he fears that the alternative is no regulation at all. Dr. Peabody does not seem to realize that to prohibit is to deny the right to regulate; nor does he seem to appreciate that prohibition unenforced, because unsupported by the public conscience, amounts to an abdication by government of effective control either by the states or by the nation. Doubtless Dr. Peabody wants strict regulation, as do most of us. but this can be had only if the principle of prohibition is abandoned and the Eighteenth Amendment repealed.
Dr. Peabody’s remedy, personal self-restraint, is the suggestion of a high-minded idealist , but is impracticable because it fails to recognize the (caching of history that coercion and persuasion can never go hand in hand. So long as the coercion of the Eighteenth Amendment and its enforcing law remains, the voice of persuasion will fall upon deaf ears.
JULIAN CODMAN
Boston,Massach usetts

Temperance education in Canada.

Dear Atlantic, —
I have read with great interest the article by Francis G. Peabody entitled ‘Law and SelfControl.’ It appeals to me very much. A sentence in the last paragraph, ‘ Education is the essential prerequisite, of legislation,’ encourages me to believe that you may be interested in an actual working programme of temperance instruction which fins been carried out in the Province of Manitoba under my direction during the past five years. Our programme is called the Independent Temperance Education Cooperative, and it has been designed to function mainly through the public schools. Through the children we reach the homes in every community. Under the auspices of the regular school authorities we deliver addresses, distribute literature, and devise follow-up lessons by the teachers — all calculated to instruct the children in the evils of drink and the benefits or abstinence. For five years I have been supervising this programme as Director of Temperance Instruction for the schools of Manitoba, as an official of the Department of Education. The entire budget has been met by the Department. Not a cent of voluntary contribution has been sought or accepted.
In extending the programme into other provinces or into the States, we work, of course, under whatever auspices we can get, always aiming, however, to get the programme finally accepted by the government, in Canada we think that education is a necessary factor in carrying out a policy of governmental control, if that policy is to mean somet hing more than just the sale of liquor by the government. In the States it would seem that a government which prohibits is under even greater obligation to teach youth the reasons for prohibition than with us, where the government merely ‘ permits.’
W. D. BAYLEY
Winnipeg, Manitoba

The universal scapegoat.

Dear Atlantic, —
My colleague in Columbia, Thomas T. Bead, the mining engineer, has an article on ‘Our Mediaeval Minds’ in your August number. As t read it I could not help wondering where Mr. Bead got, his mental picture of the mediæval mind, which, ‘although it, had come to know a great deal about the nature of the physical world, still believed in magic and therefore attributed to physical things qualities and powers we now know they cannot possess.’ With what astonishment such a description of their mental processes would have been greeted by Augustine and Erigena and Aquinas and Bernard and Abelard and such magic-mongers!
To my mind this article is, despite its real worth in other respects, chiefly remarkable as an example of a conlemporary tendency to lay all blame for things people do not happen to like, in human thought or art ion. on the shoulders of the thinkers of the Middle Ages, although in fact these things may have originated with Plato, Aristotle, John Dewey, Mary Baker Eddy, Thomas Jelferson, Moses, or Jim the Oyslerman. I suppose that this is inevitable as long us our educators train people to believe that history and thought took a holiday from 500 Lo 1500 A.D. Terra incognita est terra fantastica!
BERNARD IDDINGS BELL
St. Stephen’s College, Columbia University
New York City

China still in the Middle Ages.

Dear Atlantic, —
Perhaps this extract from a letter from China may serve as a fool note to Mr. Read’s able article:
‘ It’s rather surprising to run so often across the Middle Ages in China. I had thought of them as belonging to Europe and Walter Scott; but several times I have seen men carrying hooded hawks through the streets of Pekin, and in Nankin people were weaving things on hand looms — silks, velvets, brocades — of the most intricate patterns. It took one straight hack to the Middle Ages, the (so-called) golden age of craft smanship. . . . Having observed the thing in actual process, it. seems to me that, however excellent the fabric produced, the worker is no better and not so well off as in our era of machines, He works from a set pattern from which he never deviates in the smallest degree, and which, from doing it over and over again, he, has assimilated to such a point that he has himself become a machine. He works alone in his little house, so he has none of the society which makes mill life rather jolly, and very often his bed stands beside his loom. We of the Alachine Age — the wicked, inhuman Machine Age call that “sweating” and try to put a stop to it.’
M. A. ABBOTT
Concord, Massachusetts

‘Heating the Rules.’

Dear Atlantic, —
In ‘Sportsmanship in the Rough’ Mr. Alfred F. Loomis makes a real contribution to a very complicated question — if in nothing more than in casting doubt upon our usual definitions of ’amateur’ and ‘professional.’
The difficulty with rules in sports arises from failure to appraise two opposite requirements. In order for a sporting competition to be popular, each contestant must, be assured of an opportunity to win. Consequently the rules have the burden of reducing the contestants to a basis of equality. Once this has been done, interest in equalily ceases; each contestant is then interested only in the inequalities which may make it possible for him to win. This gives rise to a new game, which might be called ‘ Beating the Rules.’ If the rules represent the best effort of all the contestants to define a basis of equality, and any sportsman finds a way within those rules of acquiring an advantage, be is entitled to the benefits thereof.
Mr. Loomis’s suggestion that we drop the term ‘amateur’ for all sports that take place before a public gathering is well worth further thought not , however, because the amateurism of the players is open to question, hut because the distinction is one of false importance. II any distinction is called for, it should be that between a closed game for beginners, played purely for enjoyment and with no thought of making comparison with similar play elsewhere, and an open game for more experienced contestants, where everyone frankly competes to be top man and rules serve merely to ensure comparable conditions.
BRUNO BECKHARD
Flushing, Long Island

A reformer reformed.

Dear Atlantic, —
Oliver McKee’s article on the direct primary (August Atlantic) seems to he the most complete, accurate, and dispassionate diagnosis of a distressing and menacing situation that has yet been written. And in no other publication would it have carried such conviction as in the Atlantic. Having had something to do with establishing the direct primary, the writer has observed the resulting dangerous dilution of official responsibility and has been regret fully forced to I he conclusion that he lent aid and comfort to the poisoners of wells.
The complaisance with which the party organization has effaced itself and lighted the candles upon its own coffin may be of some significance, but if a party honestly cares to protect itself against demagogic interlopers and unworthy hearers of its banner il would seem that it might do so by resuming its function of platform building. This function has been unnecessarily and too easily relinquished, and parly individuality and backbone have disappeared along with it. A sharp definition of what a party stands for is the only safe assurance of part y perpetuity. Surely a party has not only the right hut the obligation to specify the issues which a candidate shall support if he solicits votes in the party’s name.
With such a definition made in advance of the primaries, the self-nominator seeking a place on the ticket would have to declare his agreement with the platform in order to come before the people as a Republican, Democrat, or whatever. Otherwise he would have to take chances on weakening his position by ignoring or dally rejecting the platform, which he would hardly do, since primary contenders are on their own, and when it comes to the political form sheet they incline to a rabbit-like timidity.
Through the direct primary system of self-nomination. party designations have become so cheap and common that they mean little or nothing except in connection with the Presidency, The winner of a nomination is accorded free rein in prescribing the platform, and the twaddle and tripe emanating from this source tend to estrange the public still further from any regard whatever for a parly name. The degree to which voters do not attend the polls may be regarded as a close index of the number of them possessing an intelligence that can be insulted.
Parties can exert a real influence if they so desire. If they do not somehow do it, they are open to the suspicion that certain strong factors within them prefer to have things as they are and that the parly designation has become a mere camouflage. Meantime the most tragic and truthful pictures of our national legislature seem, to the writer at least, to be those drawn by Mr. McKee and Will lingers.
W. A. FRISBIE
Minneapolis, Minnesota

On the threshold of thirty.

Dear Atlantic, —
I have read and reread the article ‘Hallway in the June issue of the Altantic Monthly, and I become increasingly indignant — in fact, Irishly irate. I believe the man is mentally unhealthy! I just celebrated my thirtieth birthday and I feel as though I were just beginning life. I can’t see why he should n’t feel the same. Evidently he also is conscious of at last understanding life, but instead of being jubilant over the fact. as I am, he seems to bemoan. Apparently he is in the possession of youth and vigor, ambition and a future, a background of eomforts and culture, and the dawning perspective and comprehension of his new adulthood. Why shouldn’t these blessings bring him a sense of power and dreams of things to accomplish, instead of a sense of senility Is he going to make a wake of the times slow pacing through the next thirty years? Surely he knows that time is not a matter of tickings of a manmade mechanism, but of experience. Why, any of us can live a century of agony in five minutes, or an ecstasy of just a breath of time may burn up weeks or months.
I am fully conscious of the world’s altitude toward the age of thirty. None more so than I, for I am a woman, and the work! is much harsher to the woman of thirty than to the man of the same age. But in the world’s altitude I resent only two things: an expectancy of dignity to which the world thinks it is entitled, and the disgusting belief that, being a single woman, I am yearning for a man, any man! Phis rather fellers natural behavior with any member of the world’s male delectubles. But I have learned logo my way grinning and unregarding.
I believe that adulthood brings as radical a mental and psychological change as adolescence. I know that life to me in the last years has been very much like looking through the kaleidoscopes of my childhood. All the pretty, separate pieces areal last falling into a pattern; I see humanity, history, nature, art, science, humor, and emotion as a whole which is lovable, good, and going somewhere under wise guidance.
Greatest of all privileges, I am free. The last illusion is gone. I have faced I ruth in every issue of life, flinching or unflinching, and shall never fear it again. I know that love is the greatest thing, but I know that steady love of himumity. not of its constantly changing components, is the desideratum, not the mad instincts and the agonized misunderstandings of youth. I have no religion. I want none. My faith in the destiny of this life which we all help infinitesimally to develop is too big for expression at this stage of my own growth. I am not moral, as the world explains that term. I have a creed of my own personal conduct. I wish to be as direct and clean us a wind on the sea; I wish to understand this pageant of which I am a part, to know how to keep in step, and to discipline my sell to do so. I wish to be loyal to the very best of every thing and to seek deeply into the heart and soul of everything before I decide what its best is. I wish to be busy, because there is so much to sense and enjoy and appreciate before I die that any wasted time is cruelty to myself. I wish to make the most of the new aptitudes, this new and greater facility for acquiring skills and knowledge, which have come with this new intellectual and spiritual growth. I wish to remember always that I am human and never become instead a culturist, a doer, or a student.
I am poor; them and rehem my dresses as skirts go up or down, and bleach them white when the colors fade. But I am rich; I am thirty, and free and understanding of life. Pity the poor man who is thirty. but thinking sixty.
There, I feel better!
BRENDA GLASS
Fernandina, Florida

Prize contest annoucement.