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Americanization. He simply protests against a quick and highly artificial "Americanization," which, in his judgment, produces bad results in the present and prevents genuine Americanization in the future. He frankly asserts his belief that genuine Americanization is rarely, if ever, possible in the case of the foreign born, and is only partly attainable in the case of children who are foreign born. Its complete realization, he thinks, is possible only in the case of children born and reared in an entirely American environment. In other words, he thinks genuine Americanization cannot be accomplished before the third generation, and not always then.

It is well worth while to record his reasons for believing that the wholesale and hothouse methods of "Americanization," which have become a sort of patriotic religion with many, prevents genuine Americanization and promotes radicalism. He says:

It is a most curious popular misconception that peace and quietness and respect for law and order can be developed in the foreigner by suddenly and violently disturbing his mental life. Changing a man's language, upsetting his moral and social conventions, altering his inherited traditions of conduct, unsettling his ancestral faith-these are the very best means possible for making him a disbeliever in all established institutions, including those of the United States.

When a person has been brought to realize the faults, imperfections, and limitations of a traditional system of belief in religion, government, or what not, he inevitably applies his new critical attitude toward whatever system of belief is offered to him as a substitute for the one he has been encouraged to cast aside.

Most commonly the alternative system, being human, has serious faults, imperfections, and limitations of its own which are easily enough discoverable. The net result of very much conscientious missionary work in America is that the foreigner ceases to believe his traditional faith, refuses allegiance to any American substitute, and becomes an infidel, agnostic or atheist. The same thing is just as common in the realms of social, ethical, and political faith as in that of religious belief.

Respect for law and government is not a natural instinct. It is an artificial attitude

slowly built up in the individual by all sorts of direct and indirect social pressure. The breakdown of old habits of thought in any one of the great departments of social activity very rapidly affects the other phases of conduct. The whole moral life of the individual tends to become unsettled.

The "Americanization of the Foreigner" can be wisely and safely accomplished only if spread out over at least three generations, while four or five would be better. Every year less than three generations that the progress is hastened means moral and spiritual breakdown for thousands-means domestic tragedy and congested criminal calendars.

It is difficult to disagree with much of this incisive analysis and argument. There can be little doubt that much of our “Americanization" work illustrates the American weakness for panaceas and propaganda. We like neat formulæ that promise complete cures in thirty days, and we have an abiding faith in the power of propagandist "drives" to accomplish anything and everything.

Too frequently we attack the obvious rather than the fundamental aspect of a problem. This is what we have done in our zeal for Americanization. There are three important aspects of the immigration problem, the social, economic, and biological aspects. Of these the social aspect is the least fundamental, but it is upon the social aspect that we have centered the major part of our concern and effort. Social customs, beliefs, and ideals do not make good immigrants or good Americans. Good immigrants make social customs, belief, and ideals sound and safe. And the good immigrant or the good American is the logical result of biologically good stock and an economic square deal. Let us make sure that we admit only good blood to our country, then let us give such a square economic deal to that good immigrant blood that respect for and loyalty to our institutions will follow as a matter of course. This is the only sound basis for an Americanization program.

We must never forget that the radicalism of foreign born citizens is not always the result of revolutionary ideas brought from the old world; sometimes it springs from the psychological change America effects in the immigrant.

REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT IN INDIA

HE new Government of India T Act, if performance measures up to promise, will mark the beginnings of self-government in India. Ireland, Egypt, and India have long been sources of trouble in the imperial politics of Great Britain. The situation in Ireland cries aloud for constructive measures. Meanwhile, in Egypt and in India we have the beginning, although tentative and timid, of constructive policies, in Egypt the work of the Milner Commission, in India the proposal for an Indian parliament.

The proposal involved in the new Government of India Act will not satisfy the extreme nationalists, the Besants and the Gandhis. It will seem timorous and of the essence of opportunism to ardent apostles of self-determination; but it may be a step on the road to selfgovernment. For that we should be thankful.

The details of the new Government of India Act have been carried in the daily and weekly press. Here it is perhaps sufficient to say that the act involves the creation of an Indian parliament that shall consist of a nominated senate and a largely elected legislative assembly. Something over two thirds of the assembly is to be made up of native representatives, duly elected. By this device the natives, it is asserted, will be associated with the Central Government. It is asserted by the proponents of the act that under it the responsibility of native ministers to the assembly will be gradually increased. But this is not very definitely stated in the act. The most that can be said is that it is implied.

Under this act, the first president of the legislative assembly will be an Englishman, chosen by the Government. He will have the delicate and important task of acting as guide and moderator for the Indian members of the assembly. He will have to act as a sort of liaison officer between them and the officials. The formulation and interpretation of the assembly's rules of procedure will rest very largely with him. His task is a challenge that any public-spirited Englishman might well covet the privilege of answering, for it is a task which, if well done and not unduly hampered by home

politics, will involve the beginnings of self-government in India.

It is pleasant to note that the man chosen for this post is not a crusted Tory. Mr. A. F. Whyte, the man selected, is known to American students of world politics as one of the brilliant and liberal editors of "The New Europe." Those who met and talked with him when he was in this country some months ago remember him as a man whose faith in parliamentary government is abiding, a man of sanely liberal outlook, not a man who represents the outworn and warbreeding ideals of imperialism. His record as a member of the British Parliament gives us something of a basis for confidence in his new service in India. It will be remembered that, while in Parliament, he gave unstinted support to the famous budget of 1909, to the Irish Home Rule Act, and the Parliament Act, for which the Asquith ministry made such a strong fight.

It is, of course, easy to be critical of the very short distance all this goes on the road toward self-government in India, particularly if one's memory is permitted to linger on the many stern measures that have been taken by the Government in its past relations with the natives. But it is always helpful to get the other man's point of view. It is worth while, therefore, to suggest what the defenders of the present Indian proposal think of the situation. The arguments against any greater grant of Indian participation in the Government of India lie in their minds somewhat as follows:

The real India is a much greater and a different India than the educated, city-dwelling India that many dogmatic critics of British policy in India have in mind when they make their criticisms. India is a vast country with a population about three times as large as the population of the United States. This population speaks about one hundred and fifty different languages, and is further split into conflicting elements by the wide-spread and rigid system of castes. There is not, the defenders of the present program contend, more than five million natives fitted for, or interested in, any share in the government— five million out of a total population of

three hundred million. If full self-government were granted now, they claim that it would mean turning the country over to the small Brahmin class, which would probably make still harder the lot of the many million low-caste peasants.

Of course this sort of argument can be overdone. Even in England and in the United States a distressingly small element of the population really dictate the politics of the country. This will always be true in any country. But in India the existence of the caste system does lend a validity to the argument it would not have when applied to most countries. As a boy cannot learn to swim without getting into the water, so, in the long run, a people cannot master the arts of democracy unless given the privilege of practising democracy and running all the risk of bad mistakes involved. Sooner or later this must be recognized by every government in its dealings with subject peoples who cherish ambitions of selfgovernment. Meanwhile we may be thankful for these first faint signs of liberal policies in imperial politics, and hope that the following statement from the Montagu-Chelmsford Report on the Indian scheme may be kept in mind. The statement reads: "The hope of avoiding mischief in such transitional schemes lies in facing the fact that they are temporary expedients for training purposes, provided the goal is not merely kept in sight, but made attainable, not by agitation, but by the operation of the machinery inherent in the scheme itself."

WILL AMERICA BUILD HER PARTHENON?

HAT great body of thinkers classified under the name of medievalists are given to twitting the modern man with the fact that, with all his boasted progress, he has been unable to build an Acropolis or erect a Notre Dame, Amiens, Rheims, or Chartres cathedral. The generosity of an American millionaire and the vision of an American sculptor may yet take that taunt from the lips of the medievalists. That is, if George Barnard's dream of a war memorial, on a spot of

land now owned by John D. Rockefeller, comes true.

It is interesting to listen to Mr. Barnard as he describes to an interested listener this dream. It is hardly accurate to discuss this dream as a war memorial, for it goes far beyond the memorializing of any event, even as colossal an event as the Great War. It is nothing short of a bronze summary of American life, a marble definition of the exalted vision that led us into battle. To the many readers who may not have the privilege of visiting Mr. Barnard in his studio, or of sailing up the Hudson or motoring northward along the New Jersey shoreline to view the proposed site of this American Parthenon, and to those whose daily newspapers have not given to this plan the full treatment accorded it in the New York press, the most matterof-fact recital of its details may prove interesting.

Mr.

First of all, the memorial may be said to have grown from the soil of the proposed site. It could hardly be conceived elsewhere. At the northwestern corner of Manhattan is Fort Washington Point. It has been called God's Thumb. Barnard insists that, as a site for a memorial of American life and its part in the war, it is incomparable save to the hill upon which the Parthenon stands. This site is on the Fort Washington Heights estate of John D. Rockefeller, who has offered to give the land to the city of New York. The promontory as seen from the New Jersey shore-line or as sailing up the Hudson is impressive. Mr. Barnard would undo the drainage work that has been done at the base and let the waters of the river again flow full against the bluff. The hill now slopes to the river; he would cut it to a nearly vertical wall. He would have artificial cascades as draperies for this wall, and cut paths in the side of the wall so that the observer would find himself at times behind this shimmering drapery of water.

As the foundation of his memorial, he would lay a marble platform over the northern half of the plateau, about nine hundred by seven hundred and fifty feet.

He would station the four horsemen of the Apocalypse-War, Famine, Fever, and Desolation-at the four cor

ners of this platform, each emerging from a black granite niche.

"And what do you symbolize by this?" asks a guest.

"That war is terrible from whatever angle it is viewed," Mr. Barnard responds.

At the center of this marble platform Mr. Barnard would erect a granite wall, elliptical in form, forty-two feet high and a thousand feet in circumference. It is on this wall that the sculptor would fling his bronze summary of American life, his marble definition of the vision that sustains us in peace and inspired us in war. He would work out his conception in two tiers of figures. The lower tier of figures would be in bronze, the upper tier in white marble. One half of the upper and one half of the lower tiers would depict America at work, the other half America at war. In each half the bronze figures of the lower tier would depict the acts of work or war, while the white marble figures in the tier above them would suggest the vision that inspires or inspired the act immediately below.

At the northern end of this elliptical wall, Mr. Barnard would place the Arch of Immortality; at the southern end, the Arch of Nations United by Peace.

In the detailed working out of these two arches, a wealth of suggestive allegory teems from Mr. Barnard's mind, so profusely, indeed, that it is difficult to transmit it to paper. But the outstanding feature of the conception is the great epic of American life and aspiration which is planned for the two sides of the elliptical wall which is to be the central feature of the scheme.

Mr. Barnard flings his proposal as a challenge to all American sculptors saying that he is not concerned that he shall do the work of this memorial, that it might well be vast collaboration of the artistic genius of America. If a hundred American sculptors could collaborate in the creation of such a memorial, it would still more effectively symbolize America to herself and to the world.

Greater conceptions may spring from the brains of other sculptors, but of one thing we are certain-our war memorials should be interpretations of the American soul, not travesties upon it.

DEFEATING THE OIL FAMINE

COME months

ago, in these Scolumns, the international as

pects of the oil question were discussed. In that discussion it was pointed out that in the United States the consumption of oil is exceeding the production of oil and that our potential supply is inadequate. The far-reaching plans of England for the control of foreign oil-fields were discussed in detail. Several tentative suggestions regarding an American oil policy were made. The basic suggestion was that the United States should whole-heartedly collaborate with other nations in the working out of a genuine economic internationalism under which such basic supplies as oil might be more and more administered in the interest of the whole world. Also the obvious suggestions were recorded that we wisely conserve our present and potential supply of oil; that we do all we can, consistent with decent international relations, to secure access to, if not control of, certain foreign oil-fields; and that we set our scientists at the task of finding new sources of oil that we may tap when our supply from wells is exhausted. The last suggestion was, of course, not new. Scientists, at the behest of commercial interests and under subsidy from the Government, have long been conducting something of a still hunt for new oil sources. Progress in this search is heartening news.

For some months fugitive items have appeared in the daily press suggesting the great possibilities of securing oil from certain American shale deposits. This is probably the new oil source that will make possible a defeat of the oft prophesied oil famine. The outlook for the oil shale industry has been treated in great detail in trade and technical journals and in the published studies in economic geology carried on by the United States Geological Survey, but the general public has had little access to the mass of interesting information that clusters about this development that may mark a new epoch in the industrial history of the

United States.

Those of us who do not regularly read technical journals and government bulletins are, therefore, grateful to Dr. Victor

C. Alderson, president of the Colorado School of Mines, for his fact-filled and fascinating volume on "The Oil Shale Industry." This is the first American treatment of the subject in a form available to the general reader. The volume is packed with information of special interest to the technical chemist and engineer, but this information is imbedded in a matrix of description and statistics that effectively emphasize our dangerously inadequate oil supplies and the most hopeful means of avoiding an oil famine.

To begin with, it is doubtful that existing oil-wells can produce enough petroleum to meet existing demands. It is equally doubtful that enough new oil-fields will be discovered and exploited to meet the future demands for petroleum that will increase daily. In a very real sense the industrial and military life of the United States rest upon petroleum. We know the extent to which our navy, our merchant marine, and many of our industrial plants will depend upon fuel oil in the future. If aircraft becomes commercially profitable in mail, express, and passenger service, an added demand will be made upon our oil resources. Every extension in the use of farm tractors means an added tax on our oil supply. Steamers will make increasing use of fuel oil. The good-roads movement will mean the use of a vast amount of oil in road-building. Dr. Alderson wisely states the case as follows:

A common sense view seems to be that first, our supply of petroleum from wells is not meeting the country-wide demand and that the limit of production is approaching; second, the supply of petroleum from wells can be maintained only by the discovery of new extensive pools; third, there is little likelihood that new pools like the Mid-Continental, or California, will be discovered because the entire country has already been explored; fourth, that the only great national reservoir that can be absolutely depended upon to supply oil is our enormous deposits of shale.

Now, what is shale, where is it to be found, how is oil obtained from it, and what are its possibilities as a new oil source? Many laymen confuse oil shale with oil sand, thinking of it as a soft, stony mass oozing oil. There is no oil,

as such, in oil shale. Oil shale is a mud or clay deposit, usually of a dark color save where weathering processes have turned it to a lighter color. A thin piece of oil shale, if rich with potential oil, is combustible, burning with a sooty flame. When broken, a piece of oil shale may give off a petroleum odor. Oil is secured from such shale by heating the shale in a closed container, or by the process of destructive distillation. This means that in the future we shall mine oil, as we mine coal, instead of pumping it, as we pump water.

The United States is unusually fortunate in rich shale deposits. These shalebeds are located in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, Montana, Texas, and California to the west, and in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia to the east. Elsewhere shale-beds are to be found in Canada, Scotland, France, parts of South Africa and Australasia, Italy, Spain, Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Turkey, and England. If all these fields were fully exploited, it might lessen the urge toward that "oil imperialism" which may prove a disturbing factor in international relations. But we are interested primarily in the amount of oil resources we may count upon in our own shale-beds.

There is bound to be a good element of guessing even in the estimates of the experts. But certain hints from Dr. Alderson are interesting. He estimates that the shale-beds of Colorado alone contain something under thirty-nine billion tons of shale, if the thickness of the seam of oil shale is figured at ten feet. But he states that it is conservative to reckon on thirty feet of workable shale. Multiplying his thirty-nine billion tons by three, and then, in order to eliminate all recklessness from the estimate, dividing the amount by two, we have, to use his exact figures, 58,080,000,000 tons. A ton of shale is supposed to yield, as an average, one barrel of oil. Alderson estimates, therefore, that one hundred plants, treating two thousand tons of shale daily, would require eight hundred years in which to exhaust the shale-beds of Colorado alone. This should reduce the fear of unemployment a little. A few eight-hundred-year tasks in prospect should hearten us.

Dr.

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