I

HAVE often amused myself by trying to imagine a daily newspaper which gave all of its head-lines to happenings that really meant something to the future of the community or of the world. Such a policy would doubtless mean quick journalistic suicide for the newspaper adopting it, but the attempt to visualize such a newspaper is an easy and effective method for weighing relative values. Let me illustrate what I mean.

Yesterday, as I started home from my office, I tucked into my bag a copy of the late afternoon edition of one of the most popular evening newspapers of New York City and a copy of the October issue of "The Hibbert Journal." I read both after dinner, and soon found myself trying to recast the front page of the newspaper in terms of "real values" instead of "news values." This is what started me on this arm-chair adventure.

There were seventeen head-lines on the front page of the newspaper. Twelve of the seventeen were:

1. "6 Girls Called To Accuse Vetter Victim."

2. "Dictaphone Trap For Mrs. Rothenberg."

3. "Six Girls Accuse Storey."

4. "3 Burglar Suspects Held In Atlantic City."

5. "5 Indicted In Tucker Marriage." 6. "Girl Student Assists College Fund Drive By Shining Shoes."

7. "50 Phone Girls Calm In Fire." 8. "Judge Says Intoxicated Driver Transports Rum."

9. "Dictaphone In Strange Mystery."

10. "Bandit Gang Caught After One Is Slain."

11. "Noted Portrait Painter In Washington To Talk To Women." 12. "Fire Enlivens Misses Gerry Dinner.”

The five other head-lines were devoted to three bits of news: the fact that Henry Ford had declared that he would support Calvin Coolidge for President in the 1924 campaign; the fact that Bishop Manning would probably not insist upon a trial of Dr. Leighton Parks and other Modernists for heresy; and the fact that women might be admitted to membership in the Republican Club.

After reading the first fifteen pages of "The Hibbert Journal," I thought that if this newspaper had been concerned to play up the really significant news of the hour, it would have deleted the first three head-lines I have listed above, and would have used the space to herald in blazing capitals the news that "Hereafter L. P. Jacks Will

Write For Each Issue Of The Hibbert Journal A Philosophical Editorial Essay On Some Problem Suggested By The March Of Events." Now, I do not say that the unlettered millions would have been thrilled by such a head-line. I do not seriously suggest that the editor should really have run such a head-line. I speak of it as a possible head-line in a popular newspaper only in order to dramatize the fact that this announcement symbolizes something that is far more important to the man in the street than any one or all of the things noted in the seventeen head-lines.

This sounds, I know, as if I were merely playing with words and purposely talking in riddles. What possible significance for Bill Jones and John Smith can there be in the fact that even as brilliant a philosopher as L. P. Jacks is going to write a few editorial essays on current affairs for a high-brow quarterly? Of course the mere fact that Mr. Jacks will write four good editorials on current affairs each year has in itself little or no significance for the man in the street. Bill Jones and John Smith are not subscribers to "The Hibbert Journal." They will probably never know that Mr. Jacks has said things that go to the very roots of the business and the politics that control their lives, unless some space writer filches the ideas from the sober columns of "The Hibbert Journal," dresses them in homely calico, and parades them in the columns of the two-penny press. Why, then, is this announcement news of primary importance to the man in the street? Solely because it symbolizes the return of the philosopher to a job he gave up along about the middle of the nineteenth century.

The house of civilization in which the Bill Joneses and the John Smiths live is tumbling down about their heads because the philosopher, for the last seventy-five years, has not been furnishing to business men, politicians, preachers, educators, and scientists sound and saving general ideas about life and society which can knit all their separate plans and purposes together into harmony and save mankind from the death dance of conflicting interests which to-day is giving us wars, revolutions, sterile politics, anemic education, and argumentative religion. Dr. Jacks, philosopher extraordinary, writing on current affairs is a happy sign that philosophy may return to its original social job, which was and is just as essential to the daily welfare of Bill Jones and John Smith as the raising of wheat by Kansas farmers, the making of shoes by Massachusetts workmen, or the digging of coal by West-Virginia miners.

This is too vital an issue to leave in the form of a glittering generality. What was this job the philosopher ran away from about the middle of the nineteenth century? And what is there in our current life that suggests that we need him back on the job?

It is, I admit, a little difficult to interest the busy modern man in any discussion of the market value of philosophers. He is convinced that, by the most generous estimate, the philosopher is worth exactly nothing as a factor in the practical affairs of business and politics. For a long time, and not wholly without reason, the "practical" man has sneered or at best smiled at the philosopher as a harmless, spectacled, shiny-coated, carpetslippered gentleman who on a low income manages to get a certain

personal satisfaction out of a metaphysical web-spinning that has about as much vital relation to life and business and politics as Mah-Jongg has to the League of Nations. But there was a time when philosophers were quoted at a high market value because they were doing a socially necessary job.

Before the middle of the nineteenth century the philosopher furnished the raw materials for popular thought. He flung out the broad conceptions that actually dominated the business, the politics, the religion, and the social life of his time.

Speaking of the social function of the philosopher, Albert Schweitzer, in his "The Decay and The Restoration of Civilization," says that "Every age lives in the consciousness of what has been provided for it by the thinkers under whose influence it stands. Plato was wrong in holding that the philosophers of a State should also be its governors. Their supremacy is a different and a higher one.

They are the officers of the general staff who sit in the background thinking out, with more or less clearness of vision, the details of the battle which is to be fought. Those who play their part in the public eye are the subordinate officers who, for their variously sized units, convert the general directions of the staff into orders of the day.

Those who command [business men, politicians, preachers, educators, and other practical men] can only carry out what is already the thought of the age. They do not build the instrument on which they have to play, but are merely given a seat at it. Nor do they compose the piece they have to play; it is simply put before them, and they cannot alter

it; they can only reproduce it with more or less skill and success."

If, as Dr. Schweitzer suggests, the thinkers of any given period produce worthy general ideas, and if these ideas pass into popular thought as the soil in which business men, politicians, preachers, and educators can plant their separate policies, then that period is a period of progress. If the thinkers fall down on the job, then decadence sets in.

Now, the tragedy is that about the middle of the nineteenth century the philosopher abdicated his job as a thinker on current issues. Philosophy since then has exerted a smaller and smaller influence on popular thought. Before then philosophy was, in Dr. Schweitzer's phrase, "an active worker producing universal convictions about civilization." Since then philosophy has become, with certain happy exceptions among recent philosophers, a sifter of the results of the sciences, a historian of her own past, and a sleepy pilot of civilization. Philosophy has been so busy talking about the results of the various sciences that she has for a good many years done little thinking on the fundamental problems that underlie business, politics, religion, and education. She has spent so much time writing the history of her own past efforts that she has stood before a spiritually hungry world crying for bread with little in her hands save shelf-worn and second-hand hypotheses. The philosopher has dozed in his watch-tower and slept on his beat while civilization has been drifting into ruthless wars, wasteful revolutions, and pointless politics.

Even the most casual reading of the morning paper day after day suggests that the most practical public problem

of our time is to bring the philosopher back to his job on the "general staff" of public affairs. We have speculated upon and tried many methods of government. The one method that has not lately been given a fair trial is government by thought.

Government by talk has plainly broken down. This is the burden of Dr. Jacks's first editorial. We have, he says, drifted into the habit of "attaching more importance to what is said by speaking persons than to what is done by working persons.' Eloquence has been exalted above workmanship. We are guilty, he says, of "honoring fine speech in public above good workmanship in private." Freedom of speech, press, assembly, and instruction is imperative in any safely and decently run government. It pulls discontent into the open, it educates the masses, it trains the millions for intelligent coöperation with real leadership, but it simply does not produce the great ideas and fruitful conceptions without which politics becomes a mere log-rolling between conflicting interests, and civilization dries up at its source. Free discussion gives the masses self-respect and enables them to hold a check over the vagaries of irresponsible thinkers and selfish autocrats, and though they may now and then abuse this power, the net result is good. But the more democratic an age becomes, the more rein it gives to free discussion, the more it needs a "general staff" of thinkers in the background.

Certainly government by compromise has broken down. Why is it that to-day we are apparently incapable of producing a creative foreign policy? Partizan politics aside, one of the primary reasons is, I think, that we

have been trying to get a policy that would "satisfy" fifty-seven different varieties of interests and demands. We begin our thought about foreign policy and world peace plans by listing all the special interests of France, Germany, England, the succession states of central Europe, Russia, the Balkans, Japan, and other nations, the long agenda of unfinished business left by the peace conference, the tangle of personal and party interests in the Senate, and then trying to devise a plan that will "satisfy" all these interests. Of course we throw up our hands and mark time while the world burns! And until somebody somewhere sometime opens the eyes of the world to the broad general truths about where civilization is drifting and why it is drifting and what its goal must be, we shall stick to our futile log-rolling politics. This is the job of the philosopher.

And government by scientists and specialists is probably as barren a hope as the two methods I have just mentioned. Scientists and specialists are giving us the raw materials of a new and more realistic politics, but it may be doubted that they are the men to shape these materials into the new house of civilization. The specialist pays a heavy price for his specialism. Some of the most hollow talk about political, social, and religious problems comes from distinguished specialists. Our hope must be pinned to a new sort of philosopher who knows enough about the essential social contributions of the sciences to enable him to play ring-master to the specialists, bringing them into a contact that makes each fertilize the social mind of the other, and welding them all into a fighting fraternity for the common good.

R

ATHER more than any previous book by Robert Frost, "New Hampshire" (Holt) contains evidences of a poetical variety with which this poet is rarely credited. The title-poem is very nearly argument; "The Witch of Coös" is a shuddering little drama, even in its form; there are stories, character-studies, lyrics, poems the Greeks would have called epigrams, and poems the Americans will call allegories. If "Paul's Wife" is founded upon the myth of Paul Bunyan, "The Grindstone" is founded upon the experience of any boy who has ever turned the handle while some man rode upon the stone with ax or scythe till the arm at the handle was numb and rebellious. Being so nearly argument, "New Hampshire" does not show its author at his best, though as a piece of avowed autobiography it explains a good deal. He is better in the sympathetic pictures of "The Runaway," which has no larger a hero than a colt frightened by his first snow, or in "Good-Bye and Keep Cold," in which a farmer leaves his orchard in the fall with the hope that no dangerous warmth will disturb its hibernation. Perhaps Mr. Frost is at his actual best in "A Star in a Stone-Boat," a poem of extraordinary significance and beauty in both its conception and its execution:

"Never tell me that not one star of all That slip from heaven at night and softly fall

Has been picked up with stones to build a wall."

The image is of a kind to waken all Mr. Frost's most articulate emotions: his realistic interest in such handicrafts as wall-building; his sense of irony, that a fiery meteor should come to so plain a use; his desire to know a whole world even though a small one. The meteor is not, it is true, a planet,

but

"Such as it is, it promises the prize Of the one world complete in any size That I am like to compass, fool or

wise."

In this poem, as in the others in the new collection, Mr. Frost speaks in his intensely personal tone, certainly varied, if not perhaps deepened, during the seven years since he has published a book of his verse.

Thomas Hardy, of course, is as inveterately himself in all his poems as any man alive, but "The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall" (Macmillan) seems dim after "The Dynasts." Something of this quality it may owe to the fact that he has reduced the ancient story to the dimensions of "a play for mummers," and so has somewhat "thinned" the lan