cult to visualize the "static" theater playing the one-night stands.

Third, as to dialogue. The conventional drama considers the lines of the play invaluable in the furthering of action, the awakening of emotions or thought, and the revealing of character. It requires a certain facility in mental acrobatics to think otherwise. At any rate, here is the valuation Maeterlinck places upon dialogue in the drama:

It is not in the action but in the words that are found the beauty and greatness of tragedies that are truly beautiful and good; and this is not solely in the words that accompany and explain the action, for there must perforce be another dialogue beside the one which is superficially necessary. And, indeed, the only words that count in the play are those that at first seemed useless, for it is therein that the essence lies. Side by side with the necessary dialogue will you almost always find another dialogue that seems superfluous; but examine it carefully, and it will be brought home to you that this is the only one that the soul can listen to profoundly, for here alone is it the soul that is being addressed.

It would certainly be a diverting experience to hear Maeterlinck discuss this subtle and elusive theory of dialogue with a Broadway producer of bedroom farces. With these three points in mind, Maeterlinck's dramatic creed has been interpreted as follows: "a theme from the simplest daily life, an action where nothing happens, a dialogue where the only words of value are the meaningless ones." This has the sound of burlesque, but it describes the Maeterlinck theory of drama about as accurately as plain English can catch it.

It seems an impossible theory of actable drama, but Maeterlinck's "L'intrus" testifies to its feasibility and peculiar effectiveness, although it must be admitted that Maeterlinck has not often as fully and as actually applied his dramatic creed to dramatic construction.

Maeterlinck is one of a group of modern writers representing a healthy reaction from nineteenth-century materialism. His work throughout savors of reaction from realism to mysticism, from naturalism to supernaturalism.

His

position in modern life is, as Chesterton phrased it, the glorification of the inside of things at the expense of the outside.

AUSTRALIA'S FIFTEEN POINTS

ORDINARILY the retailing of platitudes in political and economic discussion. serves no highly valuable purpose other than to reveal the uncreative mind of the speaker or writer. In stimulating times like these, however, when every man is playing the statesman and producing his private panacea for the ills of a distempered world, popular thought falls into an unhealthy confusion in its attempt to thread its way through the medley of vagaries and values. In such times a simple statement of threadbare fundamentals may perform a needed ministry of clarification and help to restore lost perspective. Both the capitalistic and proletarian philosophies to-day stand in need of such clarification. If the mind of the man in the street were less confused about the actual meaning of the capitalistic and proletarian philosophies, the path to policy in this country would be less devious.

Following Mr. Wilson's technic in the formulation of his "Fourteen Points," Mr. W. Brooks, in his presidential address to the Employers' Federation, formulated for Australia "Fifteen Points" which he considers vital to sound social economy. He makes an unusually clear and simple statement of principles for those who are convinced that the capitalistic organization of society is fundamentally sound, workable, and just, save when perverted. The Australasian News Office of "The Christian Science Monitor" despatched the following summary of the fifteen points:

1. Under any economic or industrial system, men and women must inevitably continue to work for wages.

2. Some workers must always be paid more wages than other workers, either owing to special ability or the class of work performed.

3. No worker can continuously be paid wages that he does not earn.

4. The value of the work must be con

trolled by the salable value of the articles produced.

5. In order to promote industrial development and provide work, the nation must continue to depend upon its intellectual citizens.

6. The community or nation that develops most brain power and inventive genius will be the most prosperous, and brain must inevitably command more reward than mere manual labor.

7. The cost of living is governed by the cost of production, both in primary products and secondary manufactures.

8. Shorter hours of work must increase the cost of all articles, including food and clothing.

9. The maximum output in the hours worked will result in cheapening the article produced, as the cost of production inevitably governs the selling price.

10. Capitalism (or the accumulation of wealth) can never be abolished, for some men will always earn and save more money than other men.

11. Private enterprise involves not only the control of established businesses, but also the risking of capital and personal effort in the promotion and establishment of new industrial enterprises.

12. The community cannot expect cheap bread, meat, and other foods at the expense of the farmer and grazier.

13. The only possible way for workers to secure a substantial increase in wages, without a corresponding increase in cost of living, is by increased output.

14. Men and women in a free country cannot be prevented from saving money and acquiring property.

15. Without hope of profit there would be less industrial development, less employment, lower wages, and higher cost of living.

Mr. Brooks is, of course, as dogmatic in his statements as a Middle Ages theologian, but he cannot be accused of beating about the bush. He was driven to this frank confession of faith by his survey of the great losses involved in the strikes and other labor difficulties, inspired, to no slight degree, by the proletarian philosophy which he attempts to counter with his statement of principles. Roughly estimated, Australia has lost during the last six years $25,000,000 in wages and $50,000,000 in pro

duction, as the result of strikes. Here and there his statement cries aloud for critical examination, but such criticism is not the purpose of this editorial. These fifteen points are simply recorded as a faithful and fairly accurate statement of one point of view. It will be interesting in some later issue to present an equally sincere and succinct statement of the proletarian creed. If each of the major schools of political and economic thought would honestly state their contentions categorically, as Mr. Brooks has done, the average citizen could follow political and economic discussion with greater satisfaction and could, perhaps, more easily judge between will-o'-the-wisp fancies and sound social principles.

SUICIDE AND FREEDOM

By coincidence there came to the writer's desk in the same mail two documents dealing with the gruesome problem of suicide. One was a report from the Save-a-Life League, an organization for the prevention of suicide; the other, an article on "Freedom's Reality and Delusions" by Father Nicholas Velimirović, bishop of the most ancient diocese of the Orthodox Church in Serbia. The first was a report of results, the second a comment upon causes. The fact that deaths from suicide have increased by leaps and bounds since the end of the war raises the question whether there are deeper social reasons behind the increase than merely individual aberrations.

The report of the Save-a-Life League reveals certain interesting facts regarding the increase in suicide. During last year there were 5121 deaths from suicide in the United States. 3212 men took their lives, as against 1909 women. It is estimated that unreported cases of suicide might bring the total to 20,000. Suicide among women is on the increase. The ratio of a few years ago, of one woman in four suicides, has increased to one woman in three suicides. This is doubtless due to the increasing participation of women in the rough-andtumble life of business and politics. Over 100 returned soldiers committed suicide. Among professional men sui

cide is commonest among lawyers and rarest among newspaper editors. Even the proverbial poverty of the editor seems not to lessen his love of life. Analysis of the ages of the suicides shows the oldest suicide of the year to have been one hundred years of age, the youngest a child of four. Peculiar pathos is added to the record by the fact that 477 children took their lives during the year. Many of these child suicides were the result of neglect, mistreatment, or misunderstanding in home and school. The statistics of the report substantiate the conclusions of the psychiatrist that suicides, paradoxical as it may seem, are more frequent in summer than in winter, in fair weather than in foul, in peace than in war, in prosperity than in penury.

Suicides have doubled in Vienna since the signing of the armistice, and the suicide statistics of Germany, Russia, and the near East have mounted high. In the liberated countries on the Continent, suicide has become alarmingly common. It is this strangely coincident increase of suicide, with the increase of freedom in these countries, that leads the Serbian bishop to his inquiry into the deeper meanings of the discontent and despair that drive free men to selfdestruction. "It is now a year since the enslaved nations of Europe got their freedom. Are not they happy now?" he asks, and goes on to say, "Some observers might say yes, but the frightful increase in the number of suicides in the liberated countries is the loudest proof of the contrary, and besides suicides there have been endless troubles rooted in deep dissatisfaction." In an effort to determine why those who were before dissatisfied with their oppressors are now dissatisfied with their own people and with themselves, he makes an interesting and illuminating analysis of the reality and delusions of freedom. His diagnosis of delusions is particularly incisive.

He points out that the oppressed invariably proceed under the fatal misconception that their oppressors are free men, and that consequently when they themselves get freedom they tend to ape their former oppressors. Newly liberated peoples may not use exactly the same oppressive methods as their former

oppressors, but they will use them in disguised forms. They get a new technic of tyranny through accumulated wealth, cliques, parties, secret societies, banks, and newspapers. The so-called free nations have escaped the sufferings inflicted by one open oppressor, but instead they are suffering "from a hundred oppressors, milder perhaps when taken separately, but when put all together weighing upon their shoulders with just the same weight." Throughout his analysis, Bishop Velimirović rings the changes upon the universal tendency of the oppressed to imitate their former oppressors as soon as technical freedom is won. For this reason most wars of emancipation do not result in freedom; tyranny simply changes its disguise and adopts new methods. The fruits of freedom turn bitter, and deep despair follows high hope. All this is true, he asserts, not of the newly liberated countries only, but more or less of all the nations on the Continent. For keen insight, it would be difficult to improve upon this comment:

Of nothing is so much talked in Europe as of freedom and organization. A free man does not talk much of freedom, just as a wellfed person does not talk of food. But the unfree man talks constantly of freedom, as a hungry man talks of bread, and the divided, the divorced, the dismembered, talk most of what they are not-organism, organization. The want of real freedom has made freedom the principal object of talk, writing, and struggle in Europe during the past century. .. Whenever on the European continent there is talk of organization, of emancipation, go to the root of it and you will see that what is meant is partly self-assertion and partly tyranny over others less organized and less emancipated. Whenever selfish motives lie at the root of a "struggle for freedom," freedom comes as disguised tyranny, and brings disappointment and delusion. And honest but ignorant men, in their bewilderment and disappointment, turn to ideas of suicide.

After thus pricking the hollow bauble of supposed freedom, he proceeds with a trenchant analysis of the reality of freedom which Europe must attain if she is to achieve sanity, health, and happiness. He says:

There are three kinds of freedom: Freedom from the brute forces of nature, freedom from oppressive men, and freedom from one's self. The first freedom is achieved through science and force, the second through politics and force, the third through religion without force.

In defeating nature men feel disappointed with the freedom they gain. For in struggling against the brute forces of nature, men themselves imbibe Nature's unscrupulous methods. . . . Endless wars and mutual struggles ensue. For the liberated men . . . dealt with each other in their victorious state as they saw Nature dealing with them before it was subdued.

The second kind of freedom is the freedom of nations from the oppressive nations, of men from the oppressive men. What the struggle for this kind of freedom means is well-known from the recent experiences of the world war. Its results . . . are similar to the results following the struggle of men against the tyranny of natural forces. In this stage men feel disappointed, just as in the first stage of freedom. Freedom is making them neither free nor happy. Hence-suicide!

The last kind of freedom is yet to be achieved. It is the freedom from one's self. Very few have climbed to this freedom. . . . To get rid of self means to stop an inward war, a war of contradictory desires, which are crying for an outward expression--for an outward war. For whatever we have in ourselves, be it war or peace, be it despotism or freedom, we are pushed irresistibly to project it into the outer world. . . . Real freedom is not a thing to be made or constructed by external means, but it is a thing to be slowly cultivated and painfully grown. . . . This inner freedom . . . is supernatural, supernational, supereconomic, superpolitical, superartistic; but it illumines nature, makes nationalism nobler, settles easily economic strife, gives solidity to politics, and sweetness and harmony to art.

He concludes with the warning that a Europe set free geographically, politically, and economically, will be a technical delusion, a castle in the air, as before the war, unless through a genuine spiritual rebirth Europe gains a new vision and a new realization of freedom. Only by such rebirth, he contends, can Europe avoid being plunged into the

greatest misery known in history, as a result either of new invaders or internal disintegration. He asserts that Europe is now attempting the impossible task of combining materialism in science, epicureanism in conduct, and freedom. These will not blend.

Certain readers may dismiss all this emphasis upon the "intangibles" of the present world situation because it comes from a bishop; it may be set down as the involuntary emphasis of the ecclesiastical mind upon the spiritual factor in affairs. It is, of course, a religionist's appeal to the politicians and economists, And, frankly, had it appeared in a church paper, it probably would not have compelled comment in these columns as it has. To the writer, the significant thing was that it appeared not in the religious press, but as the leading article in a recent issue of "The New Europe," an English journal devoted to Realpolitik. Its appearance in this secular journal is evidence of the fact that students of world politics realize that the war has brought about in Europe a dangerous chaos of spiritual, moral, and intellectual values. In fact, the plea of the bishop could be paralleled from many secular pens. Listen, for instance, to these lines from the London "Saturday Review."

The coming years will be bleak, in respect of all the generous and gracious things which are the products of leisure and of minds not wholly taken up by the necessity to live by bread alone. For a generation the world will have to concentrate upon material problems. . . . The tragedy of the great war . . . is that it should have killed almost everything which the best of our soldiers died to preserve, and that it should have raised more problems than it has solved. . . . We would sacrifice a dozen cathedrals (as Rheims the loss of which has been so much lamented) to preserve what the war has destroyed in England. . . . we would readily surrender our ten best cathedrals to be battered by the artillery of Hindenburg as ransom. Surely it would be better to lose Westminster Abbey than never again to have anybody worthy to be buried there.

Our own secular press has likewise seconded the bishop's appeal. Lothrop Stoddard, whose realistic studies of world

politics appear frequently in THE CENTURY, surely a student little given to the sentimentalities, has reminded us that "at the beginning of the late war we heard much of its morally regenerative effects, but as the terrible holocaust went on, year after year, far-sighted moralists warned against a fatal drain of Europe's idealistic forces akin to that suffered by the Greek world during the Peloponnesian War, and which might break the thin crust of European civilization built up since the Middle Ages." The relation of suicide to freedom, it seems, takes on a wider aspect than that revealed in the total number of men and women who take their own lives. The suicide of civilization may be brought about by a persistent travesty of freedom on the part of "liberated" peoples who do little more than deck despotism in a new garb.

TWO IDEAS ABOUT RUSSIA

HE would be a brave man indeed who would prophesy anything respecting Russia. Mr. Wells may remind us that prophecy is no longer the trick of the soothsayer, but rather the result of careful reasoning from cause to effect, but there has certainly been more of the soothsayer than of the scientist in the bulk of discussion about Russia. This editorial purposes no prophecy; simply an interpretation of two points of view respecting the attitude of the rest of the world toward soviet Russia. At the moment of writing there are numerous indications that diplomatic recognition of soviet Russia may become a reality before these comments reach the reader, but at this distance it is impossible to write with a conviction of certainty.

It is perhaps unnecessary to go into detail regarding these indications, because they will doubtless either become accomplished fact or the Russian situation will again prove its fertility in surprises before this statement reaches the newsstands. It is necessary, however, as background for an examination of the two points of view to be discussed, to state these items.

In England, just now, there are persistent rumors that Lloyd George will

propos to the Allied premiers recognition of soviet Russia. These rumors, it is true, run side by side with official and semi-official statements that maintain the drastic disapproval of Bolshevism that has all along informed Allied policy or lack of policy. It is a favorite trick of governments, however, to release rumors in advance of a statement of policy in order to feel out public sentiment, and while this sounding of sentiment is going on, the government maintains its old policy with the accustomed gestures. This may be the case in England.

It seems that by a process of elimination of successive policies toward Russia, the Allies are drifting toward peace with Lenine. At the outset, the Allied governments faced a hopeless puzzle in the determination of a Russian policy. Their liberal, labor, and radical elements were against war on Russia; their conservative elements were against peace with Russia. With their hands tied by these two elements, unable either to make peace or to wage war decisively, the Allied governments muddled along with an indecisive policy, aiding border states against the Bolshevists and abetting Kolchack, Denikin, and Yudenitch. There was much whistling in the dark over this policy, to keep up Allied courage. We were treated to doctored news of fictitious successes of these leaders. But that policy has played out. Kolchack, Denikin, and Yudenitch have been clearly beaten by Lenine, and the Allied governments can no longer wage war against Russia under the euphonious name of a cordon sanitaire; they face the plain alternatives of peace or war. If it is to be war, they face the possibility of hopelessly splitting their own countries over the matter. The Allied premiers know the little enthusiasm, indeed the great antagonism, that any attempt to wage war against Russia on a big scale would evoke.

If England does not make peace with Lenine, she must fight him in the open. In the event of such a war, England would be obliged to provide against the ultimate possibility of Bolshevist attacks upon her outlying empire, Persia, Afghanistan, Mesopotamia, Egypt, India. The possibilities of such a war