which thrives in quiet places. A very wicked city was once promised salvation if but ten good people could be found within her gates. Such is the power of righteousness that the welfare of thousands may be intrusted to the care of ten good men. "Who thwarts it loses and who serves it gains." A generation whose early and suggestible years could be spent in spiritual homes-not the Victorian ritual-serving home which dismissed the spiritual life with grace-beforemeat and family prayers, but the household where intelligence would take the place of compulsion, and regimentation give way to knowledge -such a generation would be provided with a dynamic for triumphant living that would surpass the best that can be accomplished by school, church and state. If America should fail, if in spite of her great promise she should plot only a sharp and ugly graph across her page in history, it will not be the work of invading armies, or the failure of government, or because her institutions fell into bad ways. The decay will come from within. The convictions, the motives, the knowledge which enable man to govern himself from within are not only the strength of the individual citizen, but they become the silent power of the nation of which he is a part. And of this power the home is the bulwark, for in childhood the pattern is set, in the home the twig is bent. There is cultivated, if at all, the moral autonomy which is the beginning and the end of life. The gravest subtle danger to any people is the ignorant home, rich or poor, where self-indulgence, waywardness, passion and instability are bred. Direct the attention of youth away from the lumber-room of its lower desire-nature to the treasurehouse of its higher nature, challenge the "divine significance" in every young heart, teach it to listen to the voice of conscience, that old-fashioned."umpire of God," potent, beneficent mainspring of right living. For youth so inspired, institutions become but ways and means to better living, not compromises with nature. Unconfused by changing codes, legal or moral, able to act from inner conviction and unselfish motivation, such a generation might be trusted to drink not only deeply but wisely of freedom from authoritarian dogma. PHYSICA HYSICAL strength, personal beauty, intellectual power and financial success-these are the four Gospel-stones on which our modern happiness seems to rest. And the advertisements of the day show us how we can have all four, with little or no trouble and at trifling expense. "Get Big Biceps in 30 Days," urges the Sandow Home Exerciser literature. "Take our Home Culture Course and Be a College Man in 10 Lessons." "Read our Pineapple Grove proposition and Make Millions," cry the Land Promoters. Thus the Excelsior school of advertising lures us upward and onward, at ten dollars per step. It isn't all quackery, either. Behind the sham façade and futile absurdity of the Health-Beauty-Millions castles erected by these advertisements, there must be a Real Presence of some kind. The desire for bigger and better lives has its ridiculous aspects, but it also demonstrates America's potential Will to Perfection-stronger and more easily attainable in this age and country than ever before. One does not decry the urge. One can only lament the haste in which the shaly foundations of the greater life are laid. 22 ONE of the happiest features of the present political campaign is the willingness of powerful men in both parties to efface personal ambition in order that their party may have a greater chance of success in November. Ritchie of Maryland, the inquisitorial Walsh of Montana, the disappointed McAdoo, and even individualistic Borah of Idaho-all prove by action and utterance that party loyalty finally overtops their desire for personal glory. In a world of scant illusion we are grateful for loyalty in any form. Ritchie, Walsh, Borah and McAdoo seem the nobler to us for voluntarily stepping aside to let the party chariot roll forward. But in the hierachy of nobilities, party loyalty will always rank below that ultimate nobility, that grave and decorous loyalty pro patria. When national welfare can be substituted for party success, and when strong men will martyr themselves for that greater loyalty, what may we not hope for in the American state? A 22 WRITER of scientific articles, referring to the geological formation of the eastern United States, suggests that either 30,000,000 or 300,000,000 years ago (he isn't quite sure which) some important structural changes were taking place along our Eastern coast. This geological coup invites a dozen observations. The first and most obvious deduction seems to be that the scientific attitude, as such, has no necessary connection with accuracy. If, on the one hand, scientists can measure the cubical contents of a gnat's lungsac, they can also toss a casual 270,000,000 years over their shoulder without a flicker of embarrassment and still retain every essential feature of the scientific mind. Imagination, not the micrometer, is the true measure of science. But by far the more remarkable achievement, quietly assumed by the geologist author, is the limitless extension of man's notion of time. Fifty years ago, there were not a dozen people who could conceive a geologic age of ten million years. It remained for Sir Charles Lyell to expand the "time walls" of the human brain. It was Lyell who gave Darwin the geologic theater in which to produce his drama of natural selection. It was Lyell who made the first scientific venture beyond the pale of Genesis, and taught men to think in terms of geologic æons. His book "Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man" is one of the most fascinating and probably the most influential single work of the past seventyfive years. ONCE 23 upon NCE more an educational Canute commands the waves, and once more the tide sends him sprawling backward in routed confusion. A certain Rich Man Kendall feels himself called to attack co-education in some of its accidental quarters; his chief thesis being that the admission of women to college corrupts the Intellectual and Moral man. If the traditional barriers of sex ignorance are ever to be broken down, and if men and women ever aspire to the condition of full companionship, then college seems to be the logical place for the fruition of this double ideal. Actually, co-education is no longer an experiment, but merely an extension of the healthy public school system which educates boys and girls together. Fortunately or unfortunately, the monastic notion of education has given way to a newer conception of the school-a conception in which woman figures as a natural and necessary half. Finally, co-education is not a problem in morals, but in pedagogy. Bare knees must be regarded not as lures to immorality (they no longer function as such, anyway) but as normal conditions under which contemporary education proceeds. If it can be proved by exhaustive and rigidly controlled tests that the presence of women impairs the scholarship of men, or the other way around, then it will be time to build separate colleges for men and women. Psychology has not yet proved the point. In the meantime it is terribly fuddy-duddy of Mr. Kendall to deplore a relationship that brings men and women into wholesome, stimulating contact with each other. NDER the caption "Roller Coaster Journalism" Mr. Silas Bent attacks the sensationalism of the tabloid newspaper, not so much for its effect on millions of readers, but for the influence it has exerted upon the legitimate press of the country. It is true that few newspapers have been able to ignore the tabloid challenge, and even the greatest of our news-distributing agencies have been shaken by the rams of tabloid competition. As the tabloid circulation mounts to conflagratory millions, the old-line papers, in an attempt to share the profits of the new journalism, shake out flags scarcely less yellow than their yellow compeers'. All of which may be viewed without indignation or self-righteousness. Perhaps newsprint, formerly the only instrument for the dissemination of world-intelligence, has seen the mene, mene, tekel, upharsin of contemporary change written upon the wall, and is calling for madder music, stronger wine, to douse the fearful suspicion that its hour has passed. What for example could be staler than to-morrow morning's newspaper account of a prizefight or political convention one has already received over the radio? Combine radio and television into a gigantic device for recording and reproducing world news the moment it happensand even the picturized tabloid is doomed as a pallid, antiquarian method of keeping abreast of the times. AMERI 22 MERICA'S competitive instinct takes weird forms. Witness the freak contests that have claimed our attention during the past year: A "Bunion Derby," or transcontinental foot-race, with a first prize of $25,000; a marathon dance in which the winning couple jigged and gyrated for over four hundred hours; fifty flagpole-sitting contests, usually won by girls who ate nothing but pie while they held down their flagpole perches for weeks at a stretch. And who can keep track of the numberless non-stop, chained-tothe-wheel automobile races, the egg-eating contests, the continuous golf matches, the long-distance fiddling orgies, each dizzier and less justifiable than the last? It will be asked, "Has no other nation ever engaged in competitions manifestly absurd?" Well, there were the stone-throwing contests of the Scandinavians, the tourneys of Arthurian England, the mead-drinking bouts of the Nibelungs. Other races have piped, wrestled and danced violently, but never so pointlessly as ourselves. Spontaneity and some relation to reality always featured the competitive tourneys of other days. Prowess at stone-throwing or bear-killing might very easily save a man's life; drinking till one fell stupefied under a mead-bench might be a natural reaction to a month of hard campaigning. But when there are no bears to kill, or battles to be fought—what happens? Why, there still remain records to be broken! And it is this record-breaking passion (a strange mixture of hero-worship, publicity-hunting, and bizarre artifice) that leads us into the monstrous exhibitionism of the non-stop jig and six-day bicycle race. ANDIDLY now, are the women of the United States satisfied with CAN the accomplishments of their sex at the recent nominating conventions? After the welter of sob-sister and feature-article stuff has been scraped away, what honest residue remains? Perhaps the able generalship of Mrs. Willebrandt in the Credentials Committee, the simple dignity of Nellie Tayloe Ross's seconding speech, and the tactical skill of Sarah Schuyler Butler in remaining a machine Republican when all her instincts pull her toward an individualistic liberalism-perhaps these steadying performances justify women's political hope in themselves. But many women delegates may believe that they were disgustingly patronized and pityingly cajoled by the men, and that as yet no independence has been claimed, or results accomplished, by the woman in politics. Nearly a decade has elapsed since the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment. Isn't there one clear-voiced woman who will speak without fear or fluffiness on the political record of her sex? 22 Tand Mechanical College went back to an 800, acre farm that ◄HIRTEEN years ago a graduate of the Mississippi Agricultural yielded only cotton, and a sadly impoverished yield of that. The young graduate, having new-fangled notions about agriculture, introduced the 4-C system, which means that he raised cattle, cotton, corn and clover on the same farm. During the past ten years he has increased his yield of cotton one hundred per cent, enlarged and improved his herd of cattle (profitable in itself) and has given his soil the benefit of a perfect rotation of crops. The 4-C system is typical of the superb training that thousands of American youths are obtaining at State agricultural colleges. Patiently, steadily, these colleges have changed the farm-psychology of a nation. No longer are farmers intolerant of "theory" emanating from laboratory schools. No longer are they scornful of the improved methods by which the young scientific farmer doubles and trebles the product of any given farm. Men who till the soil have come to realize that a solid basis of science, some actual experience, and the usual need of common sense, is an unbeatable combination in agriculture as in everything else. Incidentally, the Mississippi farmer, whose name happens to be Ransom Aldrich, deserves tall words of credit for demonstrating to cotton-growers the possibilities of the 4-C system. |