IN calling her article ‘ Autobiography of an Ex-Feminist,’Worth Tuttle caught up in one word the two most significant facets of her past and her present. Her history is a detailed illustration of a familiar phenomenon: the metamorphosis which often overtakes even the doctrinaire when her theories run afoul of the facts. ▵ What Hull House has been to Chicago, Henry Street Settlement has been to New York, and one cannot think of these great centres without instantly calling to mind the two rare women who, each in her own way, conceived a magnificent dream of social service and has devoted a lifetime to its realization — Jane Addams and Lillian D. Wald (’The Lean Years’). It was exactly forty years ago that Miss Wald founded the Henry Street Settlement, from the direction of which she has only recently retired. The mere listing of her wide-ranging humanitarian activities during that period takes up almost a column in Who’s Who — and the list is, we suspect, far from exhaustive. ▵ Essayist, historian, Rabelaisian, Loafer and Inviter of his Soul. Albert Jay Nock (‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’) has just returned to these shores a greater explorer than Columbus; for C. C. had the misfortune to discover our poor country, while A.J. N. was privileged to stumble upon Amenia.

Ever since the Atlantic published ‘The Stump Farm’ in 1927, we have had a continuous stream of letters from people who demanded to know the latter-day adventures of Hilda Rose. Now in two articles, of which ‘Christmas at the Ranch’ is the first, she brings down to date the true story of a twentieth-century pioneer. Once a young and ardent school-teacher in Illinois, she developed tuberculosis and went to the Rockies to recover her health. There she met and married a man much older than herself, and settled down with him on the Stump Farm. After years of valiant effort to wrest a living from stubborn soil, they pulled up stakes and, accompanied by their young son, trekked north into Canada, finally taking up a homestead in the wilds of Alberta almost within the icy girdle of the Arctic Circle. Christmas Day finds the three of them thawing out their bones about the red-hot stove in their tiny cabin. ▵ Now a young man of thirty-two, Ogden w. Heath

(’Prelude to Love’) was stricken with arthritis ten years ago and has been an invalid ever since. With characteristic cheerfulness he says:

’The horizontal mode of living is my principal occupation and diversion, varied occasionally by writing, painting, and music.’ Two earlier stories of his have appeared in the Atlantic.

Roger Burlingame (‘ The New Offensive on Capitol Hill’) served in the A. E. F. as First Lieutenant in the 308th Machine Gun Battalion, and is an active member of the American Veterans Association. Jean Batchelor (‘Intimation’) is an American poet. ▵‘The best excuse for this article (‘Seven Jobs and Five Husbands’), Donald F. Rose modestly observes, ’is that it touches a universal topic and is written by one w ho ought to know, even if he does n’t.’ One will concede that a man of forty or thereabouts whom twelve growing children call father must he an authority on many domestic problems which the rest of us somehow manage to escape. Mr. Rose is on the staff of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, and Mrs. Rose—well, one gathers that she is not numbered among the unemployed. Lord Dunsany (‘Building a Sentence’) is no amateur grammarian. Poet, novelist, playwright, he has published enough to make a small library. ▵ Most of George E. Sokolsky’s adult life has been spent in foreign lands, particularly in China, Manchuria, and Japan, where for some years he was special correspondent for the New York Times. No man living has had a better opportunity to study the vagaries of ‘Our Impromptu Diplomacy’— an opportunity which he recently improved by attending the London Conference as an unofficial observer. Readers of his last Atlantic article, ‘My Mixed Marriage,’ will be saddened to learn that Mrs. Sokolsky, a Chinese and a remarkable woman, died very suddenly in October. ▵ In ninety-nine instances out of a hundred, a first short story betrays inexperience and the slips of of unskilled hand. Not so James R. Haworth’s ‘Twig of the Family Tree.’ But there is no mystery here; a native West Virginian, he writes about the people and scenes he knows; a newspaperman on the staff of the Huntington Adverliser, he has had abundant practice with the pen. ▵ From his earlier papers one knew that Wendell Brokks Phillips was a teacher in a ‘ Hick College’; not till now (‘The Arcadian School of Cookery’) has he diselosed himself as a disciple of BrillatSavarin. Kathryn Worth (’To My Little Daughter on Christmas Eve’ ) is the wife of a Professor of English at Vanderbilt University, and a poet to whom the smell of printer’s ink is no new sensation. ▵ Seientifie research is a hobby with George W. Gray (’A Summer Vacation’), and his literary education at Harvard, together with his journalistic training in New York, prepared him to make the mysteries of the laboratory intelligible to the layman. ▵ The author of ‘ Delusion and Reality’ is a well-known writer, and a gentleman of the old school who, when he must speak in the first person, prefers to take on the cloak of anonymity. ▵ Onetime president of Heed College, William Trufant Foster (‘ Economic Consequences of the New Deal’) has been director of the Pollak foundation for Economic Research since 1920. David Cushman Coyle ( PublicWorks: A New Industry’) is a consulting engineer who, like many another member of his profession, has lately devoted much thought to the problems of our faltering economic machinery. He has designed many public structures, among them the Washington State Capitol and the Rocrich Museum in New York. He is the author of The Irrepressible Conflict: Business vs. Finance.

A deserved tribute.

Dear Atlantic. — It must be a great satisfaction to publish such a perfect bit of writing as ‘Old Harry by Josephine W. Johnson in your October issue.
If Thomas Hardy were still alive and the story were described to him with the suggestion that he would enjoy reading it, one feels he would repeat his classic remark: ‘I’m afraid its perfect realism would make me sad.‘
MABIE AVERY WOLCOTT
LitchfieldConnectiend

Rosebuds

Ironical Late let us ponder upon
By thinking of Roses, Hilda and Don.
Donald’s a father, a dozen-times dad.
And troubles he’s got more than any man s had:
The big, had wolf camps in front of his door.
And twelve small mouths keep him chronic’ly poor.
In land a near pauper, in children so rich
That when he surveys ‘em he knows not who’s which,
No farmer he, having offspring to aid him;
His state is precisely what pa-hood has made him.
And so, all alone, Donald scribbles and hacks
To provide them with victuals and clothes for their backs.
And sighs for the things that he needs to reprieve him —
Seven jobs and live, husbands to come and relieve him.
But Hilda, with her everything is reversed:
In land, for example, she’s bountifully cursed.
And a Hose of her species blooms once and is done.
Site has only Daddy and Hoy — that ’s her son.
So the three of them struggle from morning till night
To cultivate acres that stretch out of sight:
With so much to do and with so few to do it,
They’ve no other course but, to buckle down to it
And wish all the while that with brothers and cousins

Their numbers too could be counted in dozens.

Such are the tricks of inscrutable Fate.
A Practical Joker early and late,
Playing the part of the Cosmic Clown
By mixing our destinies upside down.
And that ’s how if happens by chance or design
That Hosebuds bloom sometimes upon the wrong vine.

Left-handed animals.

MR. CHARLES D. STEWART Care of the Atlantic Monthly
Dear Sir:
I read and reread your very interesting article on snakes in the October issue of the Atlantic.
A few of us older men were discussing a lot of rather foolish things a short timeago, among them whether snakes always coiled in one direction. I wrote to the Field Museum about this, but the assistant curator was unable to give me any information.
Another one of our questions was whether will animals were right-handed or left-handed; that is, whether a hear could cuff you equally well with one paw as with the other. The animal keeper at Lincoln Park said that all these creatures were ambidextrous, but that he had noticed that as a usual thing monkeys carried their young with the right arm. GEORGE J. POPE Chicago, Illinois

MR. GEORGE J. POPE Chicago, Illinois
Dear Sir:
It would be easy enough to determine whether snakes make a practice of coiling one way, right or left; but, while I have had snakes under observation for months or years at a time, I did not happen to observe them with that detail in mind.
You possibly know that a snake coils sometimes with his head sticking up in the middle of the coil and sometimes with his head on the outer part, where his tail would otherwise be. The former is the resting position and the latter is the position for striking. If you will coil a rope neatly and closely on the floor, and them take hold of the inner end and pull it out while your foot resls firmly on the outer end, you will find that the rope cannot possibly he straightened, but will have kinks in it. If a snake were to strike at you while his head was in the middle of such a coil he would not make a success of it, for the reason that his head would turn over and over and spoil his aim.
At present, the last snake I owned is somewhere out in the orchard or wooels. I had to let him go because a prolonged dry spell sent all the fishing worms down too deep to dig; and so it was not convenient, for me to get thee usual live: food tor him —a snake refusing to touch meat that doe’s not move. Of course I could get fishing worms by the electrical method, driving down an iron rod into the ground and connecting it with the house electrical current, a procedure: that invariably causes them to come hurrying out on the surface. Some of our most hopeless fishermen will go that far; but for scientific purpose’s it is heller to let a snake go during a worm famine and then pick up another when you need him. Now as to your second question: Are animals right-handed or left-handed? That most admirable of animals, the household cat, which remains nevertheless essentially a wild animal, could most readily answer your question. Except in the monkey or ape tribe, no animal use’s its front paws so much for purposes of manipulation — so much in the way of hands. When a cat has eaten he will invariably wash his face; and he will wash it on all sides and top and bottom with the licking and stroking of one paw —not both, He really washes his face on his furry wrist, and when the wrist is examined in the sunlight it will be found to have fine transverse stripes. I have observed this on both black cats and Maltese. Now, which hand does a cat wash his face with — the right or left, or now one and now the other? I cannot answer this question because my black cat is now out in the orchard or the tall grass hoping that a mouse or rabbit will come along his way. But the generation of cat lovers, a most refined and discriminating class of people, could easily make observations on this head and determine the question Forever, If I were put it, I would say that my Maltese cat, and his successor the black cat. washed their face’s with the right hand; but this is only my impression and not a definite observation.
I note with particular interest that the animal keeper at Lincoln Park is of the opinion that animals are ambidextrous. This is the question you should have put to the authorities at the Field Museum, and it should have been referred to some specialist in evolution. It would be a most pregnant question; and yet I have never seen it touched upon in article’s on the ape and evolution.
As you possibly know, the speech centres of right-handed people are in the left side of the brain. There are three convolutions which serve for the seeing, hearing, and uttering of words. But in left-handed people the speech centres lie in three corresponding convolutions on the right side of the brain. If a child is left-handed and is compelled to use the right hand, the speech centre will move over and reestablish itself on the other side of brain. The convolutions are there, on both sides, but only one of them is used, a fact determined by injuries to the brain and by observing people with right-or left-sided paralysis. And so we have been taught in regent years that if a child is left-handed he should not be interfered with, as this causes confusion in the brain that is not desirable.
Anatomists find that in the chimpanzee and higher apes the convolutions which serve man for speech are present in the brain; in fact, the whole brain is a counlerpart of the human organ. But, as we know, the apes do not speak at least not in the human sense of using language. Now, as the speech centre and the use of the hand are so closely related, a shift in the one causing a shift in the other, it would be interesting to know whether the ape tribe have any pronounced rtght-handedness. Are they that close to the human faculty of speech? I have just been reading an authoritative article on the evolution of the brain, by G. Elliot Smith, of the University of London; and I have read some closely considered articles on the human side of apes. But I have newer seen this most interesting question toughed upon.
CHARLES D. STEWART
Hart ford, Wisconsin

Magna est veritas.

Dear Atlantic, —
I have found a little stanza of Coventry Patmore which puts me just in my proper place. Here it is: — Here, in this little Bay.
Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
Where, twice a day,
The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,
Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,
I sit me down.
For want of me the world’s course will not fail;
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great, and shall prevail.
When none cares whether it prevail or not.
REVEREND RUSSELL, WILBUR Notre Dame de Lourdes Church
St. Louis, Missouri

Shakespeare in sock and buskin.

Dear Atlantic,—
Anent that quotation which was not from Hamlet but from Shakespeare, here is another bit of conversation that took place in that same town of Oxford. North Carolina.
We were leaving the Opera House after witnessing one of the Avon hard’s masterpieces. ‘That is not Shakespeare as I have read him,’ I remarked.
No,’ replied my companion, ‘it was a dramatized version.’
FRANCIS B. HAYS
New York City

Further consequences of the New Deal.

(EDITOR’S Note:— While this issue was on the press, Mr. William Trufant Foster sent us several new paragraphs to supplement his article. ‘Economic Consequences of the New Deal.’ We are glad to be able to print them here.)

Another consequence of the New Deal will be the discovery that we cannot bring about farreaching changes for the common good without a Supreme Economic Council and a National Economic Plan. At present we appear to have neither. There is confusion of councils and clashing of plans. Various agencies are working excitedly at cross-purposes.

Federal hank examiners, for example, are insisting on greater liquidity of banks, while the President is insisting on an expansion of bank loans, which means loss liquidity. One branch of the government is endeavoring to increase the prices of what the farmer sells, while another branch is more than offsetting the farmer’s gains by increasing the prices of what he buys. Again, certain brandies of the government are providing the farmer with agricultural education, money loans, and more irrigated land, all designed to

increase his crops, while another branch is offering to pay him a lot of money it he will reduce his crops.

Then there is the conflict between Federal Reserve operations and the Securities Act. line aims to create excess bank reserves which will force the use of more hank credit in business; the other all but chokes the channel through which the excess reserves might flow into business. And here is stilll another conflict characteristic of many others: just as it becomes dear that one of the best ways of avoiding harmful issues of printed, money is to bring about increased turnover of bank deposits, the government imposes a tax on bank deposits.

Finally, there is a conflict which may prove more serious than any other. The whole N.R. A. programme depends for its success on increased private profits, but one of the objectives of the N.R.A., we are told, is decreased private profits.

The adoption of a National Economic Plan is essential if we are to prevent another major depression. As yet we have no such plan, but only an assortment of contradictory expedients. Even if we recover, prosperity will breed another depression unless we adopt measures of control far more effective than any yet assumed under the N.R.A.

Among the measures which we are likely to try is control of the volume of bank credit by collective action in place of reliance on the initiative of indiv idual banks. We are likely also for the first time to make a stable commodity price level the main goal of our monetary policy. In addition, we shall adopt various means of sustaining the purchasing power of consumers, including most of the following: guaranteed bank deposits, compulsory employment insurance and adequate labor exchanges, compulsory group health insurance and group practice of medicine, old-age pensions, more effective provisions for the compensation of injured workers and for their rehabilitation and retraining, reduction of the volume of debts on installment selling by means of compulsory truth-telling about interest rales charged on deferred payments, and a minimum of education for all future citizens of the United States guaranteed by the Federal Government.

More important still, for the purpose of enabling consumption to keep pace with production, we shall lake measures to prevent those forms of over-saving which certainly were among the causes of the present depression. Among the most obvious of these measures are higher income taxes on the higher brackets, higher taxes on large inheritances, and excess profits faxes. All these taxes, levied according to capacity to pay, need not weaken the profit incentive to productive activities. Indeed, they can be so used as to strengthen the probability of profils over a period of years.

WILLIAM TRUFANT FOSTER