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only that the opposition has failed to appeal to the moral sense of the nation, and has stressed, perhaps without realization, the sinister and selfish motives in world politics.

It is a far cry from the crusading spirit of 1917-18 to the canny spirit of 1921. Will Mr. Harding and Mr. Hughes evolve a foreign policy that will appeal to the best instincts of the American people, or will they content themselves with a policy of hermit isolation that will foster the narrowly nationalistic and suicidally selfish tendencies of this moment of post-war moral slump?

approach the challenge of constructive policy they will find, I think, that the failure of Wilson was a failure in technic, not a failure in purpose. The Wilson aims were morally creative aims. They came as a sort of new birth in world politics. And once morally creative ideas are loosed in the world, they can never be recaptured or killed. They will ever after haunt, as ghosts, the council-tables of the opposition.

If Mr. Harding is to win a place in history, he must win it by attaining the aims of Mr. Wilson. He will never win it by adjourning the aims of Mr. Wilson. Mr. Wilson's successor does not need a better policy, only a better technic. A foreign policy for America that falls short of the war aims of America will be nothing short of moral apostasy. If the Hardings, the Lodges, and the Knoxes follow up their bitter protests against the manifest wrongs of the Versailles treaty with a constructive policy that makes for an increasingly decent coöperative ordering of world affairs, they will be remembered in history as men of singular moral vision and statesmanlike strategy. If they capitalize their present political advantage by adopting an

No American foreign policy can insure a new heaven and a new earth. We cannot foist Utopias upon the world. But any foreign policy that does not somehow stimulate in the American people a sense of their moral responsibility in world affairs, any foreign policy that reckons only with national safety, with never a word of national service, any foreign policy, in short, that does not in some degree make to the American people the spiritual appeal that the pronouncements of Mr. Wilson made, will be the product either of dull or of dangerous minds. Politics to-day stands sorely in need every-nation-for-itself-and-the-devilof a great moral leader. Were such a leader to appear now, in the midst of the sterile and partizan babblings about entangling alliances, I believe the American people would flock to his standard. Is it possible that, with a world half in ruins and politically leaderless, America will have nothing better to offer than a suspiciously Prussian saber-rattling and a big navy?

So far the critics of the Wilson policies have been negative; now they must be positive. And when they

take-the-hindermost foreign policy, they will be remembered in history as Benedict Arnolds to the greatest adventure ever undertaken by this nation in justification of the high political morality in which it was conceived.

What shall it profit America if she keeps clear of the whole world, but loses her own soul? Here, then, is one standard, at least, by which to test the foreign policy of the Harding administration: Does it infuse politics with a sense of international morality?

A RENAISSANCE IN CHINA

THERE is going on in China today a movement that may finally produce more profound social and political effects than any or all of the strictly social and political movements that now figure in the despatches from that ancient land. This movement is called the Renaissance, or New Thought, Movement. The phrase "New Thought" is really a misnomer when applied to the intellectual adventure in question. The movement has nothing whatever to do with the body of opinion and the attitude of mind that go by the name of "New Thought" in the United States. I use it in this connection and in passing only because it occurs frequently in the reports of foreign observers of this Chinese movement. Let us get the movement placed and then try to catch its meaning and assess its probable influence.

The National University of Peking is the largest and most important center of learning under government auspices in China. Its chancellor, Tsai Yuan-pei, is the guiding spirit of the most influential group in the intellectual life of modern China. Chinese men who were trained in American universities are, I understand, very much in power at the National University of Peking. The university has an enrollment of nearly three thousand students and a faculty of some three hundred scholars. The university turns out about twenty publications, and under its influence nearly one hundred and fifty magazines are scattered throughout China. This university is the center of the origin and activity of the Renaissance Movement.

academic. It is an assault upon the archaic style of literary writing in China. This must not be confused with the Phonetic Script Movement, which is a movement to introduce a Chinese alphabet. The Renaissance Movement represents an attempt to substitute a simple conversational style of writing for the archaic style of literary writing. At first thought this seems interesting business for professors and penmen, but hardly a movement loaded with social dynamite. But on second thought its far-reaching social implications begin to suggest themselves. It means the creation of a usable and effective medium for the propaganda of modern ideas among the Chinese people. It means in time a great increase in the Chinese reading public. It means a marked increase in the number and circulation of periodicals in China. The mere mechanical simplification of writing would do this, but add the almost missionary zeal that seems to attend this Renaissance Movement, and these results seem assured. Much that has hitherto been a sealed book to the many in China will become readable and understandable when translated into a simple conversational style of writing.

I have before me as I write a letter from one of the professors in the National University of Peking. Discussing this Renaissance Movement, he suggests that it is as if an Englishspeaking people, whose entire literature had been written in Latin and Greek, should start a movement for the translation of their literature in the English of the period, putting into the hands of the masses, in a form they could understand, that which had hitherto been the exclusive property of

The Movement sounds harmlessly priests and scholars. From this move

ment, then, we may expect some Chinese Wyclif to emerge.

The secondary results of this reform of literary style are already appearing. Following up their stylistic reforms, the leaders of this Renaissance Movement have begun to apply the modern historical methods of studying history and classical literature to the study of Chinese history and literature. The principles of lower and higher criticism are being applied to the Confucian classics to test and prove the reliability or unreliability of certain portions and details of the utterances of Confucius and his disciples.

Witness a few of the results of this adventure. Three years ago, I am reliably informed, there was only one journal in China, and it was struggling along in a difficult attempt to gain an interested clientele. To-day there are nearly two hundred periodicals published in various parts of China under various auspices for various purposes, and they are all written in the conversational style of Chinese for which the leaders of the Renaissance Movement are battling. These two hundred journals, with virtual unanimity, stand for democratic ideals. There is a refreshing fearlessness in their expression of views in their traditionridden land. The contents pages of these periodicals show a range of subjects from Bolshevism to birth control, from the introduction of a single tax to such a subject as the historical study of Christological ideas before Jesus of Nazareth, the latter subject, by the way, written, not by a missionary or by a Chinese Christian, but by a nonChristian university scholar.

Some of the articles in these periodicals are merely translations, but many of them are products of original

research. Some of these periodicals bear the modern names of "Emancipation," "Reconstruction," "The New Man," "The New Woman," and "Humanity." One of the periodicals published "A Special Number on Love and Marriage," and another, “A Special Number on the Problem of Prostitution," while still another published "A Special Number on Modern Poetry." On Labor day last year one of the periodicals published a special volume of four hundred pages dedicated to the day.

Tagore, Ibsen, Hauptmann, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, and others may now be read in Chinese. It is not uncommon to see in one number of one of these modern Chinese magazines an entire play of Ibsen or Maupassant translated into an easy conversational Chinese.

These Renaissance leaders are inviting creative minds to lecture in China. John Dewey is enthusiastically received, and the National University of Peking confers upon him an honorary degree. Bertrand Russell is asked to speak, and Henri Bergson is invited to their platforms.

Here is a movement that will repay watching. In a time when the more obvious forms of leadership in politics and in industry seem to have struck a dead center, it is gratifying to know that new intellectual forces are being released in the world to create, perhaps, new leaders.

A BLACK AMBASSADOR

CHARLES GILPIN, negro actor, has made himself a sort of black ambassador to the sane America that is equally impatient with the white provokers of race hatred and the Du

Bois type of colored leadership that batters itself into passionate rhetoric against the walls of racial integrity.

Gilpin, after playing the rôle of William Curtis, the negro servant in John Drinkwater's "Abraham Lincoln" throughout its long New York run, joined the Provincetown Players to play the title rôle in Eugene O'Neill's "The Emperor Jones." It was a rôle upon which the success or failure of the play hinged, for the play is simply an evening-long monologue of an erstwhile Pullman porter who has established himself as emperor in the West Indies, carries off the duties and dignities of his self-appointed office with humor and bravado, then suddenly realizes that the ominous sound of the tom-tom means the end of his adventure, and through the remaining episodes of the play stumbles tragically to his doom, by his groans and soliloquy dramatizing all the fears, passions, and superstitions that are his as an individual negro and that rush into his mind from across the centuries and out of the jungles of Africa.

His acting proved an artistic triumph. The Drama League planned its annual dinner in honor of the ten persons who had contributed most to dramatic art during the year. Voting had hardly begun before it was evident that Charles Gilpin would be among the ten artists chosen. Then some one put through the suggestion that Gilpin would not be invited to the dinner even if he were chosen by vote. Immediately, the leading artists of the theater protested. Gilpin was finally invited. He asserts that his first impulse was to decline the invitation, but that later he realized that his declination would be unfair to the

men and women who had generously refused to permit the color line to be drawn in art. Accordingly, he planned to drop in to the dinner for a few moments only, thank his friends, and depart. As every one knows, his appearance was the sensation of the evening.

But all this is stale news. I have rehearsed it only to get the setting for the point of this editorial. Gilpin did not seize upon the occasion to give vent to a Du Bois diatribe against the color line in social relations. On the contrary, he made a simple and sound statement that contains much wisdom, needed just now in our consideration of the problem of color in America. He said, in commenting upon the occasion:

I like to keep the foot-lights between me and the public. I don't go in much for sociality or hobnobbing. . . . I have my own little circle of friends and I love them. I live quietly up in Harlem (in the negro quarter) where I belong. . ... I am really a race man-a negro, and proud of being one, proud of the progress the negroes have made in the time and with the opportunity they have had. If I can give any one pleasure with my acting I am very happy.

...

This was a speech that would have delighted Booker T. Washington's heart. He liked to think that the negro race would slowly build up a body of negro citizens who would make slow, but sure, conquest of prejudice not by propaganda, but by the silent power of good workmanship and social usefulness. If the negro was charged with incompetence on the farm and in the home, then the way to refute that charge was by training negroes at Tuskegee Institute to be skilled agriculturists and competent citizens.

"The real thing," Washington once said, "is n't to be done by talking and agitation. It's a matter of lives. The only answer to it all is for colored men to be patient, to make themselves competent, to do good work, to live well, to give no occasion against us."

It is in this spirit that Charles Gilpin is one of the black ambassadors, bringing the appeal of negro usefulness and attainment to the decency and sense of fair play that we like to think characterize America.

THE NEXT GREAT BIOGRAPHY

BIOGRAPHY is a reviving art. That is to say, the last few years have seen a revival of interest in the writing and reading of biographies. Among the successes of the last few publishing seasons certain biographies and autobiographies come readily to mind. Emerson suggested that institutions are but the lengthened shadows of men, and for that reason biography will always remain one of the most direct roads to the heart of the great periods and the great problems of history.

There is one biography that is sadly needed now-a biography of Jesus of Nazareth. This suggestion may not reveal its point readily in view of the fact that our book-shelves are crowded with innumerable volumes that purport to tell the story of the life and public activity of the Nazarene. But there is, I believe, an urgent social reason why another "Life" of this central figure of history should be written.

Through several centuries Christianity worked its way over a Jericho road that was infested with philo

sophical and theological thieves who seemed bent upon filching from it social power and human appeal. In these latter days we have been rediscovering Christianity by the grace of modern scholarship. We are beginning to see the tremendous social implications as well as the always emphasized personal aspect of Christianity. But the rank and file of laymen have not read and will not read the writings of even such readable religious writers as Walter Rauschenbusch and Francis G. Peabody, not to mention other and later writers. mean laymen will not as a rule be attracted to such a formidable title as Mr. Mr. Rauschenbusch's "Christianity and The Social Crisis," for instance.

I

It would be difficult to estimate the effect upon American religion, American business, and American politics if some properly equipped writer should produce in a produce in a manner that would intrigue the interest of the vast army of readers a fresh biography of Jesus of Nazareth that would take advantage of all the work which has been done by scholars in recovering the social half of Christianity that was for many centuries lost by men who saw, or refused to see, other than the personal and other-worldly half of Christianity. Thousands would read such a biography who will never touch the existing modern volumes of religious history and theology. Such a biography should carefully discard the vocabulary that has been used in the past. The writer should take an oath that he will forego the use of any term that will involuntarily call forth preconceived notions.

Because no one has written such a book, because only the inklings of this relatively new literature about the

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